Guild Wars 2

Is there a place to get the recipe for the launch codes, or do you just Discover It?

you have to loot the recipe from SE dungeon. good luck :P~

just like looting recipe for nightmare coil from TA (fyi its a PTV exotic ring)

Well that sounds exciting, would it be viable to just use the Rare Soldier stuff, or should i go exotic Knight til I get exotic Soldier? I’m just trying to set up a route to go to start gearing up for this new build.

best alternative is invader’s earrings. or just use emerald earrings if you’re really desperate for exotics in your gear.

never ever settle for rares.

just get level 79 exotics they are like -1 stat difference than 80s

hush, that’s a dirty secret. (how embarassing would it be to be geared in nothing but level 79 exotics)

Updated the post to include my newest trait setup.. couldn’t live without warhorn/spec walk perma swifting.

+2455 power (w/ all items listed above + 300 from spite and 916 base)

In your new trait set up you only have 150 into spite.

Hello,

Seems to be a nice build, maybe the one i looked for, BUT …
i have a coupele of questions:

1) do you know, that this build is nearly impossible becaus of fractals ascended RNG-Gear?
2) as non nativ english palyer i do not understad many of you abbreviations.
3) missing some explanation to the items.

So:
Royal Signet of Doric - RNG-Ascended Ring at chest from level 10 daily bonus chest

Lost Seal of Usoku - RNG-Ascended Ring at chest from level 10 daily bonus chest

Koss on Koss - Created at Mystic Forge

Emerald Pendant - Created at Mystic Forge

Shukov’s Launch Codes - Where can one get the recipe?

Invader’s Earrings – ??? No such item in the GW2DB. (no Invader and no Invaders too)

Sorrows Embrace/ Ascalonian Catacombs/ Invaders/ HotW gear – What do you mean? Some part of those sets or one full set, like full Invaders Acolyte … ?

Invader Weapons (Or PTV Fractal Weapons) * Ideal setup: Invader Dagger x2 + Invader Staff
Invader*s* Dagger
Invader*s* Staff

Wahat are “PTV Fractal Weapons”? Fractal Weapons (like Fractal -Ascended- Rings) are not in the game at the moment, so said by ANet.

Last question: have you ever been able to play this build inc. the gear you listed?

Regads
S.

The Launch codes is a random recipe drop off of the bosses in SE.

Invaders earrings are armor bought in WvW with WvW tokens.

SE, AC, Invaders, And HotW all have gear for tokens which are PVT

Im not sure about fractal weapons, but you can get the Weapons with PVT at the previously mentioned dungeons, and WvW tokens.

I myself havent played in the full gear yet, but I assume Sheo has. But that would be for them to answer.

Hugo the Great.1426:

which are PVT (Power/Tough/Vit)

Ahhh!!! :-)

tbh, ascended gear isn’t that hard to obtain.. it took me 2+ weeks to get the SE gear, and probably going to take me about 4-5 days only to get the ascended trinks.

im currently just missing the ascended pieces and a couple weapons. and im sitting on 3k armor and 28k hp right now.

Sheobix.8796:

im currently just missing the ascended pieces and a couple weapons. and im sitting on 3k armor and 28k hp right now.

What are your pre-weapon-sigil-stacking stats for that set gear level?

i don’t use sigils… im confused by your question

Sheobix.8796:

i don’t use sigils… im confused by your question

I should have read the updated updated updated thread. Sorry.

Sheobix.8796:

tbh, ascended gear isn’t that hard to obtain..

It is hard to obtain, see this (written after a disconnect 10 min. ago)
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Need-an-ETA-for-disconnect-patch/first#post966847

but that is an another diskussion. ;-)

even with dc rates, obtaining the loot by farming l10 fractals is easy.

Do you still use crests on the soldier on everything?

A note on backpacks:

Bowyer’s Delight

And

Prototype Fractal Capacitor

Offer the same stats as

Koss on Koss

Bowyer’s Delight offers an offensive infusion slot over Koss’s defensive and also a different skin, while the Capacitor (which also offers a different skin and can be crafted to have either an offfensive or defensive infusion slot) doesn’t require any materials or ectos to be crafted, you can get all of the recipe ingredients by doing fractals.

I’m already aware of the alternative Ascended pieces. But really… a necro with a quiver? lolwut? I listed Koss on koss because its the most logical choice, thematically.

But thank you for listing them, some players may have some materials for alternatives which can be really helpful if you’re short on time/materials and dont want to grind out the koss item.

Sheobix.8796:

even with dc rates, obtaining the loot by farming l10 fractals is easy.

Two notes:
1)
I have read many postings in the forums where people telling how frustrating it is, not to own a single ring after the 20th and more runs or have a couple of rings with the wrong stats.

Plese do not misunderstand me, i’m very impressed with the work and effort you have done for this build and i love it. Actually i would love it, but i’m missing the weapons and some of the jewellery.

So at the bginning i was looking what i could do to bring my build as close to the perfect prototype as possible.

I came the conclusion, this build is a long term goal for many many players.

One way to get this build is: time and the luck-factor.
Farming one of the instances and fractals for Armour and jewellery and farming WvW for badgets for weapons (i never saw a rare/exotic PVT weapon in the fractals yet) and jewellery.

As other players and you too mentioned, the armour could be the easiest to obtain. (For example how i got it (i allready had a full Grenth-Set) 3 of the Grenth-Set, 1 from AC and 2 from HotW). So for the less passionate player it is a mix of carma-vendor and some dongon-runs. Not really a grind.
——-

The other way is: money and a bit of time.
Eliminate the luck-factor: one would need a lot of money to buy the two nightmare-coils and much more money to build the emerald-pendant and money again for the back-piece (if not running fractals day & nighty for fractal relicts)

What still remain: the weapons and earrings. Either 1.584 budgets (2 earrings, one staff and two one-hand weapons) or 140.450 carma if one accept the rare version, or a mix of both.

Neither the first nor the second way is a short term goal. Maybe you are willing to clarify this in your OP?

2)
One could experiment with Triforge Pendant and the Superior Rune of Divinity

You got +100 on each of your stats and 17% critical damage. Of cours you will lose some of the PVT compared to 7xCrest of the Soldier (6 on armour and 1 on the emerald pendat)

To be accurate: you will lose 130 Power, 62 Vitality, 62 Toughness. But win: 100 Precision, 100 Healing and at least 40 Condition Damage (not sure if the rune is working for Condition Damage too) and the 17% crtical damage.

PS: just for the math: if you use buff-food, eat whatever you eat before you consume the SSS. After eating an Omnom Bread (100 vit 70 toughness) i got +4 power too. Don’t ask me why.

I have kept an eye closely to this thread for a while now, and have enjoyed your updates along the way Sheobix. Im a necro for life, so this class is very important to me and I have invested all of my playtime into my necro. I fully geared out a conditionmancer and spent most of my playtime dropping mass AoE and conditions. This in its own right is fun, but I found what I lacked was the ability to showcase my prefered style of play which is 1v1, 2v2, 3v3 fighting in WvW. Playing conditionmancer felt like all stars had to align just perfect for condition stacking, and even then they only got cleansed away.

I have tweaked aspects of your build, and have since gotten my full exotic set of power, vit, toughness gear. I’ll tell you this is what I dreamed of playing when I chose the Necro. I appreciate your theorycraft, insight, and all the others who have added their input to this thread. I destroy theives, send guardians running, and can outlast any class in the game without suffering in the DPS department. Necro needs a lot of fixes, but this style of play has really opened my mind to the versatility of the Necro. Its only goign to get better from here.

Also glad that I made the switch over before ascended gear fully comes out so I can invest my hard won tokens on some PVT gear at the next level.

1 more question:
your build version 3.2 uses 15/0/25/20/10
The real issue I have with this build is that you put 15 into spite and got the minor trait %5 of power is a bonus to healing. How does this help your build other than the exta power from stats. The healing doesnt scale your siphon health or life transfer from what I understand. I personally tweaked it and kept just 10 in Spite line, and put the 15 in Soul Reaping for Last Gasp. This minor trait has saved my butt and mitigated tons of dps from burst and given me a buffer to get my heal off or pop into death shroud. Its also pretty important because it helps tons with LF filling back up and its like having a free bonus utility that synergies well with this build. Whats your thoughts?

PS: Will you drop spectral mastery and maybe use Path of Midnight and run with Sig of Locust when they buff it to 25% run speed?
Best regards!

@duckcheeps

thank you so much for supporting the build and playing it! Its a real solid setup that took a lot of time and talking to many different people about the mechanics of GW2 as a whole, not just about the necro.

As for your main leading question, the healing power in spite15 is actually a huge benefit. since the power in this build when fully buffed tops out at just over 2400, you’re looking at a +120 to healing power from one trait alone. on top of the +200 in blood magic, we’re looking at a solid +320 total from all sources. This emulates an ADDITIONAL set of gear with a minor bonus in healing power. So how i pulled it off was by focusing on making spite15 my minimal pullback line in terms of how many points i could take out of it, and pump as much power into my build (while neglecting precision and crit dmg as planned) I basically have a full PTV set + Healing Power.

The Healing power is a passive gain from the power, and really shows the usefulness of tying together our trait lines to compliment one another.

320 to healing may not seem like much. but because our main healing skill is a Base(how many conditions you have on you) heal which is extremely unique to the necro class, (And i’ve actually made a precursor build to this juggermancer which I did not publish or speak of) that tested my theory of only needing ~300 healing power to really feel like you have significant gain from skill6.

Healing power not only scales the flat number (6-8k initial heal) but it also scales the number which heals per condition.

to clarify:

our base heal w/o healing power is 5240+(724*conditions)

with my healing power, my current Consume heals for (i have 344 HealPower)

5584+(758*conditions)

with 6 conditions on me, that’s a difference of 10132-9584= 548

given that i always cycle out DS (with practice) so that i can use Consume after exiting, i can use it 3-4 times in a 1v1 or 1v2.

that’s a 2k hp gain give or take ~500 if i miss a cast, and if anyone reading this has played games like D&D where Damage Reduction> Ablative armor mitigation, 2k hp in this game could mean an extra 4 or 12 seconds of life.

w/o the passive healing power trait, i lose 50 power, and i lose that +1k benefit over an unbuffed consume.

not to mention the healing power increases my regen on staff2 as well. That’s a plus.

in the end, i still swap around traits if i decide to do something in the day.. like dungeons or wvw.

@sheobix
I will play around with that 5 points between soul reaping and spite to see what feels best. Your logic and research makes a ton of sense. Again, I would love to keep updates to this thread as u learn more, and I’ll continue to post my findings.

As I’m posting this, I just finished solo’ing a bunker specced engineer and glass cannon ranger in WvW with this spec. One of the biggest highlights of my whole time playing GW2! They could have been terrible, but the fight lasted over 2 minutes and gave me chills. Cheers man. Keep it up!

Hi,

I recently got my necro till 80 and tried this build, but i feel being pretty weak. I’m really hard to kill, no doubt about this, i solo’d 6 veteran yesterday and thief can’t take me down without spending 2-3 min.

But my dmg looks bad. Against a lvl 80 doe (the ones just outside of Valley in EB in WvW), i do 300-500-800 with my auto-attack from dagger.

I don’t have a full exotic setup yet. I’ve full exo armor PVT with crest soldier, full rare invader earring, ring and amulet also with crest soldier. My weapon are PVT rare, no sigil yet.

My stats are :
power : 2,160
presicion : 917
toughness : 1,900
vitality : 1,774

attack : 2,993
crit : 4%
armor : 2,820
health : 26,952

Am i supposed to do that kind of dmg ? I don’t expect to do 5k+, but it takes a very long times to kill something. Is it because of my incomplete gear ?

Thanks !

Okamy.8235:

But my dmg looks bad. Against a lvl 80 doe (the ones just outside of Valley in EB in WvW), i do 300-500-800 with my auto-attack from dagger.

I don’t have a full exotic setup yet. I’ve full exo armor PVT with crest soldier, full rare invader earring, ring and amulet also with crest soldier. My weapon are PVT rare, no sigil yet.

My stats are :
power : 2,160
presicion : 917
toughness : 1,900
vitality : 1,774

attack : 2,993
crit : 4%
armor : 2,820
health : 26,952

Am i supposed to do that kind of dmg ? I don’t expect to do 5k+, but it takes a very long times to kill something. Is it because of my incomplete gear ?

The damage is appropiate to that stats. You lose power due to the rare versus the exotic jewellery and you lose weapon attack and power too for the same reason (use crest soldier for the weapons too). What is you back-piece? Maybe you lose power there too and you “should” use the described buff-food.
With more exotics you can get approx. 300-500 more to your attack.

@okamy
as sitael said, you’ll probably get near the 3400 attack power range once you get a couple more sources of power and some food buffs to cover you while you get better gear. I hit for 700-1100-1300 usually and only 60% more if i crit.

If you’re trying to roll with the “big dogs” try using lich more judiciously, because it raises your crit chance to the ~50% range and you can dish out some DPS in that manner. make sure to cast jagged horrors before you exit lich, they act as PvE mob distractors and for additional bleed/annoyance factors to a player.

the reason why i run PVT vs. Berserkers is because if you’re going 1v1 w/ berserkers.. you can land maybe three chains until you down. that’s not intelligent play for me, nor is it challenging.. its autoattack win like a glass cannon thief.

other than that, that means you could deal maybe.. oh.. 15-25k damage until your hp is a wisp of smoke. with ptv gear, you can outlast and outdmg that pool by far just by time alone… and tank 1v2 or 1v3 (if they are weaker) on top of that. To me, that makes PTV exo > Berserker Exo

Thanks for your replies. I’ll try to get some piece of exotics ASAP.
I’ll also do my best to learn how to play the class, i’m very new to necro and i really feel i’m far from master it.

I’m still trying to add some more burst to this build while keeping almost the same numbers.

What sigils would you recommend? I’m stuck right now with a rare Warhorn with Sigil of Air, and even with 4% crit with that many fast attacks I still see it proc a lot, and for high numbers (1,4k on average).

I’m wondering if Fire/Crest on dagger/Warhorn and Bloodlust on staff would be good, or just plainly stick to the master plan and gain 40P/28T/28V?

When I calculate the stats out for this gear I don’t get the same stats. For example I only get 1901 toughness instead of 2153, What am I missing?

1901 from gear + 250 from Death magic should do the trick.

Sheobix.8796:

the reason why i run PVT vs. Berserkers is because if you’re going 1v1 w/ berserkers.. you can land maybe three chains until you down. that’s not intelligent play for me, nor is it challenging.. its autoattack win like a glass cannon thief.

other than that, that means you could deal maybe.. oh.. 15-25k damage until your hp is a wisp of smoke. with ptv gear, you can outlast and outdmg that pool by far just by time alone… and tank 1v2 or 1v3 (if they are weaker) on top of that. To me, that makes PTV exo > Berserker Exo

WvW is about knowing what fights to pick regardless of what gear you are wearing. I run berserker dagger builds all the time in WvW and I am deadly efficient in taking down stragglers or people that only slightly overextend from the safety of their group. Much more efficiently than a build with only sustained damage can. I supposed I’d say Berserker > Soldier for that reason alone, but I won’t, because there were be situations where Soldier will outshine Berserker. Its just needless to say, if you don’t have the hp, don’t tank? There’s no guarantee that you’ll be downed after 1 or 2 chains using berserker gear, or once you’ve dealt 15-25k damage, like you’ve stated, thats simply not true.

Panhauramix.2784:

1901 from gear + 250 from Death magic should do the trick.

I already addded that in not sure what else it could be.

So far I have the following:

72 for chest
48 leggings
24 boots, gloves and shoulders
32 helm
110 from accessories
138 from rings
79 from amulet
17 for back slot
128 from weapons
84 from 6 soldier crests for each armour piece
250 for death magic and 916 base

Total: 1941

I think there is probably something wrong with my accessories/amulet calc, or maybe what is in my weapons. Any clues?

Where is this build stacking up against other DPS builds/professions going around? I get this might not be a DPS build, but just curious.

Threkki.5271:

I already addded that in not sure what else it could be.

So far I have the following:

72 for chest
48 leggings
24 boots, gloves and shoulders
32 helm
110 from accessories
138 from rings
79 from amulet
17 for back slot
128 from weapons
84 from 6 soldier crests for each armour piece
250 for death magic and 916 base

Total: 1941

I think there is probably something wrong with my accessories/amulet calc, or maybe what is in my weapons. Any clues?

Something is wrong. You sure you have exotic and not only rare PVT armour?
There is my:

45 Head
34 Shoulder
101 Chest
34 Hand
34 Foot
67 Leg
—-
128 Staff or 2x 64 for two one-hand (not PVT gear)
—-
90 Amulet
134 (2×67 Ring)
32 Back
55 Earring – not PVT gear
25 Earring – not PVT gear
—-
220 soldier crests (11×20: 6 armour, 2 ring, 1 amulet, 1 earring, 1 staff)
Are you sure, you are using this one: Crest of the Soldier . from six you should get 120 and not 84)
—-
916 Base
200 Trait
58,65 Trait (+5% from 1173 Toughtness Trait Death Magic —> Deadly Strength (the 25 point skill)

Total:
2165 (actually it should be 2173,65 but the game show me 2165, i have no idea where the 8,65 is gone).

Attack: 3276

With more PVT gear (higher toughtness) the power and so the attack should be higher too.

Hey, been running this build now (pretty close to the stats, though I don’t have any ascended gear). I like it, I think it is a great build and I think it stretched the bounds of what we can do. In wvw, I only run this now, because the survivability is great.

I have two complaints, and they are not huge.

One, Power. I have managed (with 25 bloodlust stacks, and a beserker staff) to get my attack up to 3950 or so. However, I am not seeing huge huge gains in dmg, and see more when it comes from crit and crit dmg.

Do you ever think about adjusting to bring crit %/dmg up a bit? I know it is at the cost of some survivability. Too bad there are no percision, toughness, vitality sets, or I would balance and drop my power to up my crit chance a bit. Even some Crit %, vitality, toughness gear hahahah.

Second one, I miss conditions sometimes. It makes me sad that to be this survivable, I need to leave behind the one mechanic that is supposed to be ours. I have done the hybrid build, to get power up with condition dmg, but you can only get your power to 1800, with about 1200 conditions, and 1300 vit/toughness. just not as survivable, and 1/2 our damage is just insta cleared with heal, or removal.

These are just notes, not really complaints. Maybe just trying to get your guys’ thoughts.

Thanks

Why do people think in terms of stats instead of thinking about builds…
Anyone can wreck your “immobile fortress” with half the stats and a better optimized build….
Jesus…

try this one for instance..
http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=;0_-30GKlHVI0F43KkJ0;9;5T9J9;118A1;027-2;0U-F4aJG6jwmAjwmA2ZZ

Been following this thread for some time now. I gathered all the equipment I could and got pretty near the OP stats. To be honest, it doesn’t work for me. Yes, I am very much more durable and yet I still feel that I am not contributing enough to my guild’s group other than run in and take some flak fire for the team. Killing things is painfully slow.

I am not a friend of glas cannon builds, but mixing up the gear a little bit should bring more diversity and contribution. I will try to switch out the jewelry for berserkers while maintaining armor with soldier crests. With some tweaking of the food and oil instead of sharpening stone, it should be possible to up the damage significantly while maintaining durability (which does not only come from stats anyway).

Reacting.6180:

Why do people think in terms of stats instead of thinking about builds…
Anyone can wreck your “immobile fortress” with half the stats and a better optimized build….
Jesus…

try this one for instance..
http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=;0_-30GKlHVI0F43KkJ0;9;5T9J9;118A1;027-2;0U-F4aJG6jwmAjwmA2ZZ

If you had bothered to read the thread before posting your wildly inaccurate and absurd statement you would have seen this build is optimized for WvW / PvE (not sPVP / tPVP).

Posting a half-baked sPVP condition build (i.e. all the stats wrapped up into the amulet and jewel) is beyond unhelpful. If you think your build is so kitten fantastic post it in the appropriate place not in a thread for sharing info entirely about a WvW power build.

Sheobix: thanks for all your hard work, tireless responses and patience.

kKagari.6804:

Sheobix.8796:

the reason why i run PVT vs. Berserkers is because if you’re going 1v1 w/ berserkers.. you can land maybe three chains until you down. that’s not intelligent play for me, nor is it challenging.. its autoattack win like a glass cannon thief.

other than that, that means you could deal maybe.. oh.. 15-25k damage until your hp is a wisp of smoke. with ptv gear, you can outlast and outdmg that pool by far just by time alone… and tank 1v2 or 1v3 (if they are weaker) on top of that. To me, that makes PTV exo > Berserker Exo

WvW is about knowing what fights to pick regardless of what gear you are wearing. I run berserker dagger builds all the time in WvW and I am deadly efficient in taking down stragglers or people that only slightly overextend from the safety of their group. Much more efficiently than a build with only sustained damage can. I supposed I’d say Berserker > Soldier for that reason alone, but I won’t, because there were be situations where Soldier will outshine Berserker. Its just needless to say, if you don’t have the hp, don’t tank? There’s no guarantee that you’ll be downed after 1 or 2 chains using berserker gear, or once you’ve dealt 15-25k damage, like you’ve stated, thats simply not true.

i agree with your point. berserkers vs. soldiers is very situational. They are both some of the strongest sets in the game, imo.

Gryph.8237:

Hey, been running this build now (pretty close to the stats, though I don’t have any ascended gear). I like it, I think it is a great build and I think it stretched the bounds of what we can do. In wvw, I only run this now, because the survivability is great.

I have two complaints, and they are not huge.

One, Power. I have managed (with 25 bloodlust stacks, and a beserker staff) to get my attack up to 3950 or so. However, I am not seeing huge huge gains in dmg, and see more when it comes from crit and crit dmg.

Do you ever think about adjusting to bring crit %/dmg up a bit? I know it is at the cost of some survivability. Too bad there are no percision, toughness, vitality sets, or I would balance and drop my power to up my crit chance a bit. Even some Crit %, vitality, toughness gear hahahah.

Second one, I miss conditions sometimes. It makes me sad that to be this survivable, I need to leave behind the one mechanic that is supposed to be ours. I have done the hybrid build, to get power up with condition dmg, but you can only get your power to 1800, with about 1200 conditions, and 1300 vit/toughness. just not as survivable, and 1/2 our damage is just insta cleared with heal, or removal.

These are just notes, not really complaints. Maybe just trying to get your guys’ thoughts.

Thanks

what you can do is slot in Berserker Jewels in your accessories and some ruby orbs in the armor. remember, if you use orbs/jems instead of soldier crests, you have something like 280/200/200 bonuses-ish to play with.

if you want a more offensive build, drop vitality in your gear. knight’s gear (power/tough/prec with major in toughness— covers drop in vitality) and pump either berserker jewels or rampager jewels. If you go rampagers, you open up your build to use more conditions as well as power.

the vitality from full soldier’s is only like.. 5-6k hp which is covered if you do full knight’s gear. the trade up is more precision and you could gain another +280 precision from rampager jewels/orbs and another 300 is you drop spite and soul reaping and fill in curses. that would roughly be an equal and clean change between vitality numbers => precision numbers

you’d also gain more toughness from knight’s gear. so yay to that. you’d probably get into the 3300+ armor range.

it’s a good cousin. as i said, playing with knight’s as a base and then fusing in another 2nd set upgrade components really will make your build unique.

If you want to see where the high stacked power (3.5k-3.9k attack) you can pop lich and use that. I don’t focus on crits in my build because it is 100% covered while in lich mode, which is my primary “temp-glass cannon except not glass at all” mode.

Reacting.6180:

Why do people think in terms of stats instead of thinking about builds…
Anyone can wreck your “immobile fortress” with half the stats and a better optimized build….
Jesus…

try this one for instance..
http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=;0_-30GKlHVI0F43KkJ0;9;5T9J9;118A1;027-2;0U-F4aJG6jwmAjwmA2ZZ

although i sense this is a troll attempt, you need to understand some things.

first, this is a strong build for Wvw>dungeons>pve>pvp. It can be tweaked for competitive fast-down play in PvP because it lacks the stat numbers available in PvE gear. by about half.

second, i did extremely rigorous testing with this build, including in PvP. I used the following scenarios:

1v1 against a bunker/healing Guardian (guild mate who is a strong pvper)
1v2 vs. a thief and an engineer
1v3 vs. three DPS classes (mixes of mes, war, rang, GS guard, gcan thieves) to see how long i can hold out and see if i can down one or two opponents.

1v1, this build (with soldier amulet only, no runes) was able to fight a perfect stalemate with the guardian. Neither builds could kill each other. The hard part was waiting for their cleanse and using lich and wells to eat them. i always got him to 10% or less, but they managed to bubble up to 100%, and for me it was likewise. Except, I was able to stay above 90% and use DS exclusively to take his damage.

1v2, against two weaker builds (this was a test for common outnumber encounters)
I was able to down the engineer first, AoE trap and killed the Thief, and finished the engineer and nearly the thief until their autoattacks took me down. i finished the thief in downed state. (it is harder to generate LF w/o using auto attacks and no damage to convert to LF w/ spectral utils) nevertheless, I was able to take both down solo without too much focus.

1v3 – this is the hardest test, and some of the most varied results come from these battles. The different mixes of groups i tested against really changed how to play/survive/attack. In a 3v1, the stacked group focuses more on DPS and throws defense to the wind in most cases, including my target which makes it easier for me to take my target down. (its a race against the clock, how well i can hit defensive skills and still maintain my gaps and damage) But most of the time, i could down one opponent while interrupting the whole group regularly with judicious use of DS3, staff fear, and tricky moves with spectral walk. (WoD or WoC was also helpful in some tests— mainly ripping might to give me mroe time)

i honestly think this is a good build for team play. even with only an amulet and no runes, it performed well. in WvW and dungeons, it scales to become an even better performing build.

As for your link, that build is trash. you have very little synergy between traits and suggested strengths, and the gear choice is poor. (you can’t get your toughness high enough in PvP for the undead runes to matter)

UPDATE! http://www.guildhead.com/skill-calc#mzVMcm9cmTCxomTCxo0xpf0cobMVV
with the new update, we’re looking at a total revamp to the build.
I’m thinking of cutting and pasting the old build so others can still choose to use it as a base, but the new build should be:

0/30/25/15/0 w/ power-synergetic traits in curses, same setup in death, and crit-vamp trait in blood. new food buff will be omnom ghosts.

scepter/focus or dagger/focus will be the main set. PTV gear, Emerald Trinkets, and Rampager jewels/orbs in the accessories (this is my first off the fly mental mockup, please discuss this setup)

the focus is dropping the perma-swiftness for sig of the locust (25% is good, and it adds an AoE leech pop) which free up 10+ trait points, and when i reviewed the spite line, i discovered that with more precision, i could drop the passive heal converter minor in spite as well as the might-blast major and the weak initial minor. -150 power, +300 condition and precision. good trade off.

with knight’s accesories, we gain more Toughness to offset less base power and slightly less health, and gain a precursor bonus to precision. (+ 255 + 300 precision from base trinks and traits at this point mentally)

this opens up more crit-based play (bleeds and heal procs) and increases our DPS curve dramatically. the grandmaster trait in curses (weakness proc) imo in duels is one of the strongest. especially vs. glass cannons or other similar PTV based class builds that don’t focus on crits.

another bonus, more condition manipulation opens up, and bleeds will seek its way as an equal primary source of DPS. This will compliment playstyles that weave in and out of melee range, letting the player either stack bleeds or dish out power damage.

the reasons why i drop warhorn at this point is because bosses have been patched and defiant no longer has the daze/fear hole, i can no longer interrupt key movements in dungeons with it. also, the pbAoE on horn5 as well as the perma-swiftness option is no longer as useful with the new buff to locust sig. so i picked up the focus for some chills and regen.

Utilities will be tight, and that is the one horrid crux of the new patch. Gluttony still is not a valid build point, and with most of the underwater buffs, condition/underwater play will become a stronger feature in all the classes.

Utils: S.Walk(stunbreak and some swiftness, swappable trait in curses line), BiP(tying together condition and power play 10 might buff, and being our premiere Bleed source), and either locust sig for WvW (passive run bonus and AoE leech) or epi/well (like WoP, WoD, or WoC) elite is plague. lich still maintains its fantastic crit-enabled burst capabilities, but the new build will make plague an even competitor… and more useful elite from a tactical standpoint.

the stat calculations for this more hybrid-y build is:

1839 power, w/ weapon = 2950 attack rating unbuffed (3300 flat w/ BiP running)
+ 474 condition damage unbuffed = 824 with BiP running… + 110 + 14 (MTC buff) = 948 cdamage
49% crit rate (52% w/ omnom ghost) improves procs and crits
23.4k HP (offset by vampiric traits and buffs, active hp regain is improved)
1748*1.05 (death25 trait) = 1969 + 920 = 2889 armor unbuffed

the build gains a better trait selection and more engaging playstyle (weaving between power output and Bleed stacking from range)

this is the first calculation pass w/o perfect gear prospecting.

Ok so just to cover it all…
1) PTV armor
2) Emerald trink, knights earrings/rings with rampager orbs
3) staff and dagger/focus or scept/focus

Ok so stick with soldier crests in ptv armor and weapons, or switching that out with ramp orbs?

will switch out crests with ramp orbs.

For bosses, swap out withering for either reaper’s or targettable wells if you plan to use them (unlikely).

isnt the signet still only 10%? the buff says 10% even though the tool tip says 25 and it really didnt feel the same as it doesn’t when i run around on my thief with signet of shadows on