Guild Wars 2

I recently rolled a necro and I’m enjoying her quite a bit, but I’m wondering what the best life steal/dagger-dagger build is… or if I should really be going dagger/dagger at all. Unfortunately I absolutely cannot stand the sound the staff makes, and I don’t want to turn all my sound off just for that. What traits should I be focusing in? Equipment/runes/etc?

I will mostly be doing dungeons and PvE content.

Any advice?

dagger offhand is more of a condition weapon, the warhorn or focus tend to work better with the dagger mainhand.
Omnomberry pies (or their lower level equivalents if you’re not 80 yet) with a decent crit chance will give you far better life steal then anything you can get from traits.
And yes, necro’s have lots of annoying sounds. especially the staff.

I’d go dagger/focus, focus 4 gives you regen and single target you can stack 12 hits of vulnerability. Spinal Shivers is amazing in pvp applications and if you want/need swiftness, just keep warhorn in your bags to swap out while OOC. Id focus more on crit in a siphon build since vampiric traits dont scale with heal power.

tehdirtyfivethirty.3507:

I’d go dagger/focus, focus 4 gives you regen and single target you can stack 12 hits of vulnerability. Spinal Shivers is amazing in pvp applications and if you want/need swiftness, just keep warhorn in your bags to swap out while OOC. Id focus more on crit in a siphon build since vampiric traits dont scale with heal power.

Everything this guy said.

And get over the Staff sounds (I think they’re awesome), because marks are just awesome.

I have a necro that uses a life steal and have been fairly successful with it in WvWvW and PvE. I don’t have a lot of experience in s/tPvP, so I don’t know how applicable the following is to that mode.

The main trait for a dagger lifesteal build to get is Blood II – Bloodthirst. The lifesteal on every hit from the minor trait in Blood is a little underwhelming, but it can make a difference, and with 20 in Blood you can take the Vampiric Precision or Vampiric Master if you want to continue the lifesteal theme. Mark of Blood is also quite good and can get you a lot of extra regeneration. Vampiric traits alone aren’t enough to base a build around, but they are useful to increase your staying power, and you can always change the traits you’re using if the situation calls for something else (e. g. faster Wells).

Since you don’t steal a lot of life other than from Dagger 2, if you want to use lifesteal, it’s best to increase the value of the life you do take by building up Toughness on gear and/or with Death Magic. If you really build up Toughness you’re likely dealing with a lower crit %, which diminishes the value of Vampiric Precision, but I’ve had a better experience with Mark of Evasion anyway.

Also note that the Vampiric occurs on every individual strike of channeled attacks, so Axe 2 can act like a miniheal, and Dagger 2 is buffed up a little more too.

I haven’t experimented with Runes or food buffs since I’m both poor and a poor cook, so I can’t speak to their effectiveness or lack thereof. If anyone here has experimented with them, I’d be interested in knowing how the % Heal on Critical works with Vampiric Precision trait. Do they stack, proc separately, or what?

I also am interested in this kind of a build. Life tap/steal melee classes were always my favorites in other games (Shadowknight, Reaver in Daoc, etc) and the Necro seems to be the only class with that option.

Dont discount minions and vampiric master either in this regard. A whole compliment of them can get you a continuous stream of health on top of your melee attacks. Assuming you can get them to attack…

if i get all minions to attack the same target in a hotjoin — oh man, i dont need siphon.

So does anyone have an actual build for this play style?

I played a life steal build, i love it

http://www.guildhead.com/skill-calc#mzVMMm9cmaRFMmaRFM0fGGfmMVMVc

With the signet of locust your run always with 25% this is great

I use for this build a full knight armor with 5 peace of rune of the fighter and 1 rune with +25 power, and on my staff i use the sigill to stack power. I use the omnom buff food that gives you 66% chance on crit to steal life, and Master Maintenance Oil

My acc are berserker, earrings are with vita

My stats are
Attack 3700
Toug 1500
Hp 21000
Preci 58 %
Crit dmg 41%

And i love it, hughe crits in ds 4

Since they buffed run speed, and kinda took a lot of the fun out of guardian self heal builds, I wondering if this is viable too.

Can dagger necros pour on the damage/crit/toughness traits and tank like guardians?

Here is my life steal build,
http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/?fQEQNBIhZakRrSPTTZjePBMpwbujeg8yMTpYd2B;T0Ag0CnosyYlwKrVOrkWt+YYxBjXFzRA, use Omnomberry pie for 66% chance of 350 life steal x 2 = 700 cause you benefit from your bloodthirst (Siphoning health is 50% more effective). It is a 1 sec cooldown, your sigil of blood heals you for 450 each (33% on a critical) it is a 2sec cooldown. You can also put two sigils of blood instead of one and an accuracy one. Your vampiric traits gives you around 120 hp sec. So basically if you attack a person with 2 sigils of blood and an Omnomberry pie, you do around 1000hp/sec.

If you want lifesteal in a dagger build you want to go high crit, high power. So the traits can be quite flexible but you want 15 points in blood magic for vampiric precision. The rest of your trait points should be divided into spite and soul reaping and maybe a little bit into curses. Just go through the traits and think about what works together for what you want to do. It might not be perfect but you will quickly learn what you can change to improve the build.

I would give you the zerker build i used with life steal. But i’ve changed the traits around so much theres not much point. Ive gone back to completely avoiding blood magic again as its not as strong as it should be.

And as mentioned above duel daggers is completely pointless in pve. PvP its fine because it provides condition transfer with your power build. But for PvE warhorn is the best choice. Focus is also an option. But I tend to use that in my second weapon set with the axe.

I am currently playing with a D/D syphon build 10/20/0/30/10. Knights gear. Primarily focusing on mitigation through stacking weakness to maximize the effectiveness of the syphons. Also have syphon sigils and syphon food for an extra punch.

I’ve enjoyed the weakness of off hand dagger and dagger 4 allows me to immediately dump the self weakness inflicted from corrosive cloud.

Still leveling it but so far it has been fairly effective in PvE. It also has a slightly buffed up DS.

davesee.2038:

Here is my life steal build,
http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/?fQEQNBIhZakRrSPTTZjePBMpwbujeg8yMTpYd2B;T0Ag0CnosyYlwKrVOrkWt+YYxBjXFzRA, use Omnomberry pie for 66% chance of 350 life steal x 2 = 700 cause you benefit from your bloodthirst (Siphoning health is 50% more effective).

Bloodthirst won’t effect the food.

spoj.9672:

If you want lifesteal in a dagger build you want to go high crit, high power. So the traits can be quite flexible but you want 15 points in blood magic for vampiric precision.

Not sure I agree with this. You need a very high crit rate to make vampiric precision be more effective than the bonus healing from bloodthirst on vampiric, and that’s before you take into account Life Siphon or Signet of the Locust (if you decide to use the active frequently) or even life leech (downed state).

I wrote a post about it here.

I don’t disagree with taking just 15 points in blood magic, but you should get bloodthirst, not vampiric precision.

Softspoken.2410:

spoj.9672:

If you want lifesteal in a dagger build you want to go high crit, high power. So the traits can be quite flexible but you want 15 points in blood magic for vampiric precision.

Not sure I agree with this. You need a very high crit rate to make vampiric precision be more effective than the bonus healing from bloodthirst on vampiric, and that’s before you take into account Life Siphon or Signet of the Locust (if you decide to use the active frequently) or even life leech (downed state).

I wrote a post about it here.

I don’t disagree with taking just 15 points in blood magic, but you should get bloodthirst, not vampiric precision.

With 50% crit rate you get more damage and more healing out of it. The numbers suggest only 1/2 hits will crit but in reality almost every attack crits especially if you get fury from curses or a warrior in the group. Bloodthirst doesnt increase the damage tick from lifesteal just boosts the healing you get per tick. But a crit with vampiric precision heals you for the normal hit + the crit lifesteal. Which is more even if you dont crit 100% of the time. But obviously you need about 50% crit rate. Also Wells + locust swarm can crit and provide a huge amount of healing over a short duration in a zerker build.

And in response to the post you linked. Im not concerned with life siphon. I rarely use that in a fight as its poor damage and has enough healing without bloodthirst. But i can understand you’re point if your focusing more on sustained survivability rather than damage dealing with a little sustain to help.

I primarily pve with a couple buddies. They always run a glass build so I tank as a necro. My favorite build is 30/0/10/30/0…focusing on siphon/Wells traits. Its great to be able to siphon/heal for 20-25k in roughly 10 seconds if things line up right. I really think people underrate the Wells siphon when a group of baddies are around.
Message me if interested and I can go in a lot of depth. Lets just say I easily match the healing from my guardian (both ah and cleric builds).

Gonna copy-paste this from another thread. This is the necro build I’m running atm, focused on wells for protection and lifestealing for healing. Extremely tanky with pretty decent damage:
http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/necromancer/?5.2|8.1g.h15.g.1g.h1|7.1g.h8.d.1g.hz|1n.7a.1n.7a.1n.7a.1n.7a.1n.7a.1n.7k|1g.67.1g.67.1g.67.1g.67.1g.67.2s.0|0.u28c.a4.u258.0|54.7|3t.4d.4b.4c.4g|e
Here you go!
Basically the idea is to lifesteal out of every hit and crit possible, while maximizing your defense with toughness (I know many say vitality is better for necro’s DS, but I honestly don’t like it that much as a mechanic so I built for toughness). Since you don’t need much more extra vitality cuz necros already have a ton, having a lot of defense and tons of micro healings seemed more effective to me.
Wells are used both for offensive purposes such as suffering and corruption (I usually use this one for the damage output, not for the corruption itself) and for defensive with darkness. I usually use well of power for helping out the party on dungeons, and corruption for messing up with guardians on pvp. You will have to change your wells depending on where you’re playing.
When on PvE I might use the racial skill Battle roar from charrs (2 might, 6 secs of fury) over well of darkness if I don’t really care getting hit by weak mobs.
Armor will provide you the toughness you need to be tanky, while zerker trinkets (exotic or ascended if you can) and weapons will boost up your damage quite a bit. Mesmer runes will also increase your damage, tho the 33% daze duration from the 6th rune was useless for me so I put on some extra precision.
Traits are pretty much self explanatory. Protection on well summon is a really good add. And increased warhorn CD means more locust swarm ticks, means more life-steal. Also one of the best interrupts in the game IMO.
Flesh golem seems the best elite option. Decent HP even while not traited, decent CD, decent damage and decent IA. Also the charge skill can be really OP against champions if they’re close to a wall. Removes all their defiant stacks. Thrice. Also a good mass interrupt too.

So far this is the tankiest build I’ve run on any class, it even seems to surpass my guardian, so I’m happy with how it came along.