Guild Wars 2

Theorycrafting a build during break at work, here’s what I came up with:

Concept:
An attempt to redefine necromancer “attrition” through a hard-to-kill retaliation-stacking build (while still having enough power without being completely worthless).

Result:
Didn’t quite go through as planned, due to trait layout. Ended up with 6/0/6/0/2 minions, tough decisions made to try to minimize weakness to conditions. That being said, respectable retaliation duration per cooldown can be attained:

4 seconds on 10s cd
13.5 seconds (2x 6.75s applications) on 20s cd
4+ seconds on 15 second cd (via Axe 3)
5.5 seconds on 30s cd (25% via runes)

In addition, 27.5k hp and 2.8k armor have been achieved while simultaneously achieving 2.3k power.

Constructive feedback is appreciated!

Forget SoS on MM. A black balloon will give more damage. MM is durable and has sustain if you trait it and you were almost there. MM is one build fairly straight forward with a couple of options.

Optimize MM, then add retal, if it makes sense.

Just mentioning you can also get retaliation from blasting Well of Power or Well of Blood, and it is applied to all your minions.

Mhm MM must be either fully traited or not at all. You are missing vampiric master and vampiric traits…so you are gonna be tanky cause soldier, but sustained only through blood fiend, and you also lack minion cooldowns. Minion damage will also suck (no training of the master or vampiric master), and so will your direct damage cause axe+soldier amulet. So you have bad damage, great tankiness but if you eat a big burst you cant recover, and mediocre lf regen cause no points in Soul Reaping.. the runes are bad as well. All that for retaliation?

To make retal work, you should see where you can get the biggest uptime from it=spiteful spirit. So id go for a shroud dancer build (Near to death+enfeebling blood are key traits), so you can keep a relatively good uptime upon entering ds.
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fRAQNAW4Yjk00UbPNG3wejidBRyB3gKQUZo+62sA-TZhFwAAOCAw3fAxDAIxFBYaZAA

I don’t get what the point of this build is. Axe 3 + Spiteful Spirit is more than enough retal for any purposes. If you want attrition you don’t need to look much further than standard minion builds with clerics.

Thanks all for the feedback, brutal as ever

@Pelo Your link is what I was going for, just didn’t click for some reason during the build. I’ll try it next time I’m able to log in.

That being said, I ran the build semi as-is, with TotM instead of Signet mastery, and alternating WoP/Locust in place of plague sig, since Deathly Swarm and Putrid Mark were enough to handle any incoming damage.

Did notice that Spiteful Vigor only grants Retal upon saccing the Blood Fiend (ie, using a #6 slot skill that grants health). In the theorycraft, I was wanting to run it because I was assuming it would function the same as Lyssa runes and Flesh Golem (activate on summon & on charge). I was running Sanct runes because of the additional Retal proc and vitality buff.

The goal of the initial build was to keep perma-retal and to melt targets by any means necessary, which ended up being a blend of retal damage, minion attacks/death nova and whatever damage I pushed out from condis, attacks, etc. As sorry as the initial build was, it was able to 2v1 / 3v1 vs some of the more rapid-fire classes (rangers, thieves, and the like).

So was this supposed to be a pvp build….. pretty sure even as a pure zerk just dagger autoing would melt this even with all the retal.

Right… Reflexive damage is much more fun for me, though (it harkens back to the Spiteful Spirit – Insidious Parasite or Price of Failure – Reckless Haste combo days of GW1).

If SoV stole health upon being hit, I’d be in heaven. There’s something about letting opponents kill themselves that’s appealing, and it’s my play style.

None of the higher end necro community likes the build, I get it. The goal was to keep perma-retaliation and with the traits I was pouring in to maximize it, it ended up being a minion build. The bad/tough decisions made were to minimize the major weakness I saw, which were conditions. I’ll think twice before asking for feedback in the future.

well did you want feedback or did you want people to tell you that you are very pretty?

Retaliation on a necro is nor terribly important. The profession is durable enough to take a few ranged hits. More important is to close the gap and start the slow melting process.

@NeXeD: Why not both? lol

On a more serious note, the goal of the thread was to get ideas of how to make the build better . Simple as that. After lurking and posting on the necro forums for a while, I had thought we all were above build trashing.

@Anchoku: I realize we are durable. The purpose of the build was to soak damage & let enemies retaliate themselves to death.

The feedback I was looking for did arrive in Pelo’s post. Sorry for the thread necro, loose ends and all.

Based on the wiki formula and Power of 2332 in your original build, you would inflict 373 dmg for each hit you take.

So, retaliation could possibly boost your total DPS by approx 5-20%, depending on what you think you could output for DPS, and how often you get hit.

So I look at it that the build offers some (variable) DPS boost, and perhaps that is the difference between winning and losing some fights?

Just musing out loud…

The only time I even notice I am taking retaliation damage is on a glass thief against a guardian. Otherwise it is a pretty weak boon