Guild Wars 2

Build link (copy and paste it into your address bar): http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=;083Z;1kHkI0p37IkJ0;9;4T99-J16A5;01;328-aJG4;2gk1Agk1A7Fv
Video link (Rampager amulet): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRFn-YTEMDM
Another video (Carrion amulet): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oodYN5uBSiU

I’ve been messing around with the basic Terror build and stumbled onto the build linked above. It trades some of the condition damage in the usual Terror build for 2-second fear durations and pretty good single target direct damage through Axe. Personally I’d rather have the extra CC time than big bleed ticks. All in all I think the utility this build offers makes it a bit better than the condition-damage-only build.

The build works with either Rampager or Carrion amulet. Rampager has more direct damage, whereas Carrion has more condition damage and health. I think the best choice is Rampager amulet + Carrion jewel so that’s what I recommend in the build link.

Things you can change around depending on preference:
Sigils: Earth, Geomancy, Corruption, Force
Runes: Nightmare or Necromancer
Utilities: Rez Signet and/or Epidemic for higher-level games
Offhand: Focus or Dagger
Spite traits: Spiteful Talisman, Spiteful Spirit, Spiteful Marks, Chill of Death

Have fun and melt faces!

Look pretty interesting and could quite well work, I would have to test it to confirm. All I can suggest is switch hydromancy to minor corruption or bloodlust and put a force sigil or something on focus. Chance on crit and swap sigils share a cooldown. Also not sure if this is for pve or tpvp. If it’s a pvp build I would suggest getting rid of well of darkness for rez sig and changing fear of death to path of midnight.

The video’s finally done processing. And thanks for the tips, Khalifa!

After testing this in pvp I have to say it’s fun and the damage is really good. The problem lies in the builds surivability which is almost non existant. That being said I was solo queing tournies so I could see this being somewhat effective in a premade scenario. Props for the build though the damage is awesome.

Edit: Builds pretty awesome with a premade

I was planning on making a 30/10/10/0/20 build myself. (cant see ur link as im on my phone) axe/focus and staff. was interested in trying this in ramgager armor and possibly rabbid trinkets for toughness. I may go full rampager though.
I will check your video later and will try this myself too in hot join.
do you think this would work in WvW too? with 40% condition duration food. 140% fear duration.

Bull Zooker.1672:

I was planning on making a 30/10/10/0/20 build myself. (cant see ur link as im on my phone) axe/focus and staff. was interested in trying this in ramgager armor and possibly rabbid trinkets for toughness. I may go full rampager though.
I will check your video later and will try this myself too in hot join.
do you think this would work in WvW too? with 40% condition duration food. 140% fear duration.

That’s the build, good job

Extra condition duration is capped at 100%. So using the 40% condition duration food wouldn’t extend your fears any longer. However, it would still affect your bleeds, vulnerability, cripples, etc, so I’d say it’s probably still worth using. Heck, if you were okay with 1.9s fears instead of 2s fears (still very likely to get 2 damage ticks) you could just swap out the Master of Terror trait for something else.

Hi, i really like the concept around the build and got some questions.

Terror seems to be really inconsistent when i test it on dummys. For the most part it ticks only once and sometimes, especially when i got some bleeds on the dummy it ticks twice.
I tried to find the sweet spot and used 10, 20 and 30 points in spite maybe this messed something up? (i used nightmare runes and master of terror in all 3)

Another question: what’s your opinion on using carrion amulett and maybe combining it with geomancy sigils?

Bellamy.9860:

Hi, i really like the concept around the build and got some questions.

Terror seems to be really inconsistent when i test it on dummys. For the most part it ticks only once and sometimes, especially when i got some bleeds on the dummy it ticks twice.
I tried to find the sweet spot and used 10, 20 and 30 points in spite maybe this messed something up? (i used nightmare runes and master of terror in all 3)

Another question: what’s your opinion on using carrion amulett and maybe combining it with geomancy sigils?

Nightmare runes + master of terror will give you two ticks of terror it’s hard to see sometimes but it is there. As for using carrion amulet I would not suggest it. It lowers your crit to about 8% or so I believe and makes going power not worth it if you never crit.

Damage ticks work like so. If there are no conditions on the target, the first condition placed starts a timer that ticks once per second. Every tick, all of the DoT conditions on the target will tick for damage. So, say you have +50% bleed duration:

1) You apply a bleed: timer starts.
2) .7 seconds later, you apply a Barbed Precision bleed, which will last 1.5 seconds.
3) .3 seconds later, the timer from step 1 ticks, and both bleeds do damage.
4) 1 second later, the timer from step 1 ticks again. However, both bleeds will still tick because the 1.5 second bleed has not expired yet!
5) .2 seconds later, the barbed precision bleed expires.

If you improve your condition duration you are basically increasing the chances that you will get extra damage ticks on your barbed precision and terror ticks. If you have 100% bonus fear duration you should get both ticks every time.

(EDIT: THIS PARAGRAPH IS WRONG) Carrion amulet would sort of cripple the build since it doesn’t give any power. If you are using the carrion amulet you may as well just use scepter instead of Axe imo. You’d probably still have decent damage it just wouldn’t be optimal.

The geomancy sigil works great, I swapped hydromancy for it based on Khalifa’s suggestion. I’m planning on updating the post with that soonish.

Carrion is the one with power/vit/condi if i remember correctly. So you would get more power out of it then you currently get but lose pretty much all the crit chance.

And thanks for the condition damage explanation

Ooo, you’re right! I saw Carrion but thought you meant Rabid for some reason. Hmm…well, I haven’t tried it, but IIRC carrion doesn’t have any crit chance on it, so it would still weaken that aspect of the build – way less direct damage and less Barbed Precision procs. I will experiment with it just to be sure.

What am I missing here? I see 90% condi duration, not 100%.

30% Spite
10% Runes
50% Master of Terror
——-
90% Fear duration increase

The fourth Nightmare rune set bonus gives 16%, not 6% as stated in the tooltip. 4% + 16% = 20% from runes.

wow, what a huge tooltip error. Thanks so much man.

Also, given the Spinal Shivers update, I’d think about replacing Spite VII with Spite X.

Alright, so I gave Carrion amulet a try. And I like it. Direct damage is noticeably lower. With Rampagers I was able to get 3k+ on the Axe 2 channel consistently, with Carrion it is pretty difficult. Also the marks, a/f skills, and death shroud stuff rarely crits. The direct damage is still decent because of the extra power on Carrion, but going from around 50% crit chance to 9% crit chance definitely lowers it. However, with Carrion you have about 3k more health, about 20 more damage per bleed tick, and fears will tick for over 1200 with a few stacks on the sigil. So…it evens out? Kind of? At this point I’m not too sure which is better.

I added a video of a match I played with the Carrion amulet, some good fights in there. Maybe sometime this week it will finish processing (edit: done!). Also I updated the build link in the OP, changing Fear of Death to Path of Midnight and changing around the sigils a bit. I changed out Epidemic for BiP, which makes it more a dueling build, but added a note in the OP that in tournaments taking other utilities would work better.

Unfortunately the condition duration on nightmare runes are currently bugged. Whether you consider that a good thing (since it will eventually get fixed and your build will be even better!) or a bad thing (cuz broken stuff sucks!) I leave up to you to decide.

Oh that sucks. At least the build still works without it. Hopefully they fix it soon…

Xynn.2748:

Also, given the Spinal Shivers update, I’d think about replacing Spite VII with Spite X.

I missed this somehow. Not sure if it’s worth the loss of mark damage. Might work better with the Rampager trinket rather than Carrion cause the marks will be critting a fair amount so they will still do good damage even with the 10% loss. Will be testing this tonight.

I genuinely feel like Axe/Focus is holding this build back. With either amulet Scepter is going to do more damage overall(by far) and I can’t see any build working properly without Deathly Swarm for condition wiping.

I’m also pretty skeptical on whether or not Rampager’s would be a big damage increase over Carrion.

And try using Sigils of Battle. They rock on necro. As long as you make sure staff is equipped before you DS, the auto-attack with the extra might should be absolutely bananas.

I have been using 30/10/10/0/20 in spvp today with axe focus and staff. i found that I took 50% fear duration trait and rune of the necro. giving me 100% fear duration with 30 in spite. I used a rampager amulet and a sigil of energy on each weapon set (a waste maybe but I love the extra mobility as im switching weapons constantly) and a sigil of earth on axe generally getting 4-5 bleeds per ghastly claws.

I was very successful with this build and came top of the leader board 3 times out of the 5 matches I played earlier.

has anyone else enjoyed using this set up?

I can attest that this build does indeed work in high level tPvP given the current tPvP meta filled with high toughness/low HP classes (COUGH ELES COUGH) where burst condition builds reign supreme. Combo’ing Death Shroud fear with Ghastly Claws pumps out a nice little burst.

My personal preferences/adjustments:
-Rampager Amulet with Sigil of Earth on weapons, which will pump out a lot of bleed procs.

-As the Runes of Nightmare condition duration bonus is currently bugged, I’ve switched it out with Runes of Melandru. It gives me a very noticeable bump in survivability (extra toughness + condi/stun duration reduction), which the build lacks.

-While I like the Focus for power dagger builds since the fast vulnerability stacking and boon strips supplement the burst of dagger auto-attacks so well, I don’t feel it’s needed for this type of build. The build is decidedly a ranged build, and you already slot Corrupt Boon. I opted for off-hand dagger, the merits of which I’m sure everybody is already aware of from playing conditionmancers. Also the focus cooldown reduction trait causes spinal shivers to not receive the extra damage from stripping boons currently. I’m using the retaliation on DS trait instead, giving yourself some pretty high retaliation uptime combined with Axe 3.

-Lich still hits pretty hard with this build and is certainly a viable elite with this build, especially if you have a mesmer in your group with time warp.

I tried the Melandru and Necromancer runes and I liked them a lot. I like Melandru less because they provide defenses only, whereas Necromancer runes provide both defense and offense to the build.

I also tried dagger offhand instead of focus and liked that a lot, too. I opted for two Sigils of Force just to get my Axe damage higher. I think a Force/Earth on Axe/Dagger and then Corruption on Staff would work really nice too.

Updated the OP again and have decided to name this build the Facemelter after WoW’s shadow priests. It’s the term that came to mind after I watched two different elementalists attempt to burst me tonight, then stagger around under the weight of the conditions, fears, and Axe to the face, unable to do much. Feels good mang

I won a 2v1 against a glass thief and a staff ele the other night, the thiefs opener got me to about 3k health xand then I manged to kill both of them. was bizarre and an awesome “Yes this build is awesome” moment

I was under the impression the x2 force sigils won’t stack.

War Mourner.5168:

I was under the impression the x2 force sigils won’t stack.

Last time I tested they did not stack.

Also lettuce I think you are doing your build a great injustice by not using sigils of earth. It does a lot more damage than force even if force sigils did stack.

I use earth on my axe and considering using the precision stacking sigil on off hand to reach something close to 65% crit chance from the current 53% im rolling with. Therefore more bleed procs and as a consequence I get 1 less dodge from the usual energy sigil I run in off hand :-( but I think the damage will compensate.

Just tested Spiteful Talisman and it still appears to be bugged, at least in PVE.

Although the Focus4 tooltip drops from 18 to 14 sec CD, the actual CD is still 18 sec.

Focus5 CD does drop correctly from 20 to 16 sec.

Edit: I did not test to see if the range increases (900 to 1200) actually worked or not.

spiteful talisman does increase the range to 1200. I have tested this extensively in pvp and wvw

Skyro.3108:

War Mourner.5168:

I was under the impression the x2 force sigils won’t stack.

Last time I tested they did not stack.

I did some tests with various amounts of force sigils and it looked to me like they did stack. That could have just been the occasional crit messing things up though. I will test some more.

Skyro.3108:

Also lettuce I think you are doing your build a great injustice by not using sigils of earth. It does a lot more damage than force even if force sigils did stack.

Point taken…5% extra damage on an Axe 2 channel is like 150-200 extra damage, which is just two bleed ticks.

If you don’t like sigil of earth you can also give sigil of blood a try. It doesn’t scale with power and always deals around 450 dmg, ignores armor and heals for the same amount. Also it only has 2 sec internal cd.
Earth on the other hand deals around 100-200 more damage. (anyone knows the internal cd?)

Bull Zooker.1672:

spiteful talisman does increase the range to 1200. I have tested this extensively in pvp and wvw

Only on focus #5. Spiteful Talisman (II) basically works entirely for #5, while leaving the range and cooldown unaffected on focus #4. Thats generally ok for me since its the main feature to get ranged on, but if it takes away the patch buffs (as mentioned in a post above) that would stink.

Bellamy.9860:

If you don’t like sigil of earth you can also give sigil of blood a try. It doesn’t scale with power and always deals around 450 dmg, ignores armor and heals for the same amount. Also it only has 2 sec internal cd.
Earth on the other hand deals around 100-200 more damage. (anyone knows the internal cd?)

IIRC sigil of blood has a 5s cooldown (tooltip is wrong).

lettuce your link is bad!! it won’t let me go see the build. Btw, I haven’t seen you around to harrass you in game in a few weeks. We need to do another all-Necro pve and dungeon events coming soon. I am almost done with the website which should free me up to start hosting again.

Have you tried using these terror builds in pve? Fear is a great control tool, and it works on bosses.

Bas.7406:

lettuce your link is bad!! it won’t let me go see the build.

The build link is good. You just need to copy/paste the link text to a new browser window, as he mentioned. ANet won’t allow external links to URLs with semicolons in them.

Heya Bas, I’d love to do another PvE/Dungeon event. Hit me up if you see me on.

I haven’t tried this build in PvE yet. I’m most of the way toward a full set of Rabid gear, but I stopped working toward it once I found this build in sPvP. Now I’m taking a look at what I already have and figuring out a way to mix it with Carrion stuff. Probably by this weekend I’ll have a set put together.

Hi,

I really like the idea, but I don’t think it will melt faces of some really decent players in higher-end tournaments.

Still a nice build idea and a refreshment from usual and boring builds necro players tend to advertise.

Regarding current meta and skill level I’m used to experience (r40+) power build with lots of snares and new focus boon removal looks a bit more effective in my view. As I say though, it’s my own opinion.

lettuce I use rampagers armor and rabbid trinkets in pve with necro runes. its awesome.
and thanks for the tip on spiteful talisman, I only use 4 at close range to stack lots of vulnerability so I guess I missed that.

p.s. im not sure where the ‘face melter’ comes from ha

One last bump from me. I updated the build link again with the sigil set I’m currently using. I’m pretty confident I can call it the final version, personal preference tweaks notwithstanding. Thanks for the support guys, have fun out there!