Guild Wars 2

Old Man Voice

Back when the game went live I was playing my thief and warrior and the necros were all complaining about the nerfs from beta. I didn’t try a necro in beta so had no idea what was going on. One of the devs responded to the effect that the key to playing a necro was to use Death Shroud.

This got me intrigued. What is this Death Shroud? I had rarely seen it since in fact almost no one used it.

I played spvp heavily from the start to mess with builds, worked in a necro and he wound up being my first 80. Along with all the other min-maxing everyone tries I’ve worked on maxing Death Shroud right from the start. What a long road this turned out to be – months later I finally have a build that I like. This is obviously a PVP build – I don’t care about kitten PVE.

What is Death Shroud?

I’ll try to keep it simple and will probably fail because DS is not really that simple. Death Shroud can be thought of as a separate weapon set with a separate health pool (that needs to be charged in combat and includes nearby deaths) with the huge utility that it can absorb spike damage, that is if you take damage that exceeds your life force Death Shroud just ends and you go back to your normal health pool. A main point is that it is a separate set of skills including the powerful aoe Life Transfer that should be rotated in on cooldown, hopefully also timed to absorb spike damage ie. 100blades, 100nades, thief.

What is a Death Shroud build?

For me the idea is to have a build that allows me to have Death Shroud available as much as possible and have it be effective which means some kind of power build.

Min-maxing a Death Shroud build

Death Shroud damage is from power/crit so is more effective with a complementary power build.

There are too many Death Shroud traits, most all good, and too many in the Soul Reaping line. This meant a lot of trial and error to get to this build.

After playing many 30/30/x/x/x builds it was painfully obvious that none of them were quite good enough. Glass cannon, not enough life force, and using only dagger and/or axe for mainhand is limiting and overall these builds simply cannot keep up with other class PVT builds if you discount well builds.

Generating life force to always have some on tap wound up being the most important aspect of a DS build for me. Death Shroud is available enough without traiting Near to Death.

With only DS skills 2-4 being really useful there is generally no reason to stay in Death Shroud after using them other than continuing to soak up especially spike damage. If possible then you keep your DS stints limited to save life force and to allow it and the skills to recycle. This means you don’t really need the Vital Persistence trait (life force drains 25% slower). It’s actually better to have consistent life force generation than the bigger life force pool.

After giving up on 30/30/x/x/x and realizing that life force was painful to acquire via any other method, I gave in and went for Soul Marks – 3% life force when marks are triggered. This of course also means Greater Marks would be highly desired. This was the key turning point for me having a Death Shroud build I liked and I am so comfortable with staff after all the necro play that it’s easy to take advantage of what it does well even in a power build.

Adding in the obvious Path of Midnight (DS skills recharge 15% faster) this leaves 40
points. I went 30 Power to get Close to Death and 10 in Curses mostly to boost precision.

The Curses skill to take was obviously Reaper’s Precision to add even more Life Force generation.

In the end I went axe/focus although dagger is ok too and Spiteful Talisman to help the focus leaving just the Master level Spite skill. I currently use Spiteful Spirit to go with the DS theme but the might generation ones are tempting too.

Death Dancer Build

Spite: II, V, XII
Curses: V
Death Magic: II
Blood Magic: None
Soul Reaping: III, X

sPVP Crit/Gear: With Eagle runes, Superior Force Sigils and Berserker Amulet – 47% Crit, 48% Crit Damage.

The Play

Make no mistake – it’s still a glassy build hence the “Dancer”. A sublime reason for picking axe over dagger is that Life Transfer also has a range of 600. It is important to maintain this range with Life Transfer to avoid interrupts, circle strafing works well, and running around with the axe will keep the range fresh in your mind. As per above – rotate skills. Drop your marks on something then axe it up to get your life force started and you should have it available anytime after that. For group play try Well of Blood and Staff 4 for your aoe retaliation combo.

-I would go 30 SR instead of 10 in curses. +5% damage and both GM SR traits is better than bleed procs and the life force on crit trait is fairly lackluster. Plus having a bigger LF pool is very good for high LF generation skills since it indirectly makes those skill gain more LF per hit since everything is percentage-based.

-I would also recommend knight’s amulet. Your LF pool scales with vit and it makes the build far far less glassy. In fact, I would consider it more of a sustain build at that point.

-I would take unyielding blast. Life blast hits hard in power build, and is one of the main reasons you go for a high LF-generation build in the first place.

-Ogre runes also add a lot more DPS than eagle runes do. Plus the rock dog is another source for more LF

-Both Axe and Dagger are viable, but if you take Axe I would recommend the Axe Training trait instead of close to death.

I’ve only been down 30 SR as a secondary to conditions, but it seems really weird to play any kind of DS dancing build without having it at 5 sec recharge. Would seem ideal for cleaning a condition, and keeping fury and retaliation up.

Pendragon.8735:

I’ve only been down 30 SR as a secondary to conditions, but it seems really weird to play any kind of DS dancing build without having it at 5 sec recharge. Would seem ideal for cleaning a condition, and keeping fury and retaliation up.

Yeah I find 5s recharge trait pretty crucial for a DS build since you’re going to build LF so fast a 10s recharge is too slow to take advantage of it.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fQAQNAW4djMaV7ZbibM8JAJFPfdkijVm6B8sjOA;TsAg0CnoqxUjoGbNuak1sEZAyuAA
This is my next build that I plan on testing for mainly a DS build. The talents focus on survivability while making sure to generate huge amounts of life force in order to dance in and out of Death Shroud.

While outside of DS I picked dagger/focus and staff for the power/precision build play, and the spectral talents are there to keep me alive. With +20% boon duration, Last Grasp, and Spectral Attunement I will have huge amounts of uptime for protection while regaining life force to once again go into DS.

This is still a work in progress, and I am still debating between Berserker and Knight amulets. I hope others will also try this out and give me some good feedback!

Thanks for the comments. I’ve played quite a few DS builds over the past months before I settled on this one. Some more:

I didn’t specifically say it but the Eagle runes and Zerker amulet are to stay close to 50% crit chance and 50% crit damage. You will be cutting your damage using anything else.

The 10 in curses is more for the 100 precision than the skill. If I could put 15 in Curses for the Fury with Death Shroud skill I would. This is the best offensive DS skill that I couldn’t fit in.

Have you all actually used Near to Death (5s DS recharge?). When you do you’ll find DS is up faster than you can cycle through your 2 weapon sets and unless you have a lot of life force generation it’ll be even more pointless. DS is just not good enough to skip your other skills for in an offense based build. Don’t forget that there is a bug/feature that prematurely resets DS cooldown also. After many 30 SR builds to get Near to Death, I like it, but it was the first DS ability to be cut. The high life force pool and Near to Death is much better suited to defensive builds.

About Life Blast. The main 2 reasons to use DS are damage absorb and Life Transfer. Dark Path is sloooow and unreliable, Doom is easy to use but a 1s fear without Terror does pretty much nothing in the grand scheme of things. After many builds trying to max Life Blast (usually 30/30/x/x/x) my conclusion is again that it is an ok filler if I need the range, but my time is better spent getting back to marks and Axe 2 or dagger so that I can use Life Transfer again when it’s up. With this build it still does ok damage when I do use it.

Axe Training vs. Close to Death. No contest in this case because a main purpose of this build is to leverage Life Transfer and some Life Blasts.

Kindran – your build will have the same problem most necro builds have. Simply not enough damage. Golf clap for the last to die usually goes to necro though if that’s what you want.

I hope none of that was insulting, I do like the feedback. As we know from our beloved devs necros are solid because they have many build options, none of which are overpowered. This is not good and I’ve been reaching for necro builds that can put up some offensive pressure. Condition is still the easiest way to go for necros for this but power builds have the opportunity to and should leverage more out of DS.

I believe that if you have axe training it still affects your DS damage as long as you had the axe equipped when you entered DS. Then again this may have changed with making DS more of a transformation with no weapons, but last I was aware axe training affected DS damage.

-1% crit damage is a lot more DPS than 10 precision as long as you have a decent crit rate (which your build has). Plus the +5% dmg while > 50% LF adds a lot of damage as well. Bottom line your DPS is higher with 10 in SR than in curses, plus you got a larger LF pool.

-Same with Ogre. Higher DPS with Ogre. Plug your stats in a DPS calculator to see for yourself.

-If you use Axe then I agree Near Death isn’t as needed because your LF generation isn’t as high as Dagger. Near Death is mostly for defensive purposes so I don’t know what you are trying to say about weapon skill rotations/cooldowns. But what is this DS CD reset bug you are talking about?

-I’m not sure why you think Life Transfer is so awesome. It’s a nice AoE/LF generation skill in a power build sure but the DPS isn’t all that great. DS is primarily a defensive skill, but to not leverage the power of Life Blast in a high LF generation build is a waste. Life Blast is our higher DPS ranged auto-attack we have.

-Because Staff cooldowns are so long outside of the #2 skill you spend a lot of time in Axe if you use Axe, so I like Axe Training. Axe 2 is your biggest damage skill for axe and Axe Training reduces the cooldown and adds 15% damage to all axe skills. Close to Death synergizes much better with Dagger since it combos so well with things like Wells and such but you’re likely not going to use your damage Wells with an Axe. I actually like to run hybrid with Axe since Axe’s fast rate of attack procs a lot of bleeds.