Guild Wars 2

Lets just say I really wanted to be a vampiric necromancer (minus the melee range/dagger) and I ran axe/focus with 20(ii, viii)/20(v, x)/0/20(ii, v)/10(iv)
Im running both exotic assassin stats on axe and focus. Superior sigil of perception on the focus and Superior Sigil of Blood on the axe. My food is Omnomberry Ghost and Potent Master Maintenace Oil.
My gear/runes are full exotic assassin with 4 runes of vampirism (don’t judge me) and 2 assassin crests.

actually I’ll just link it instead… :P http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fQAQRAnd4YjMaF7VbabMcKiJFczbQKcftiUgMlRVAeA-jgyAYuASRAJMAJyioxWOHiWXIsqJMdJgedR1e8ioVLFg5CjA-e

yeah it’s weird to have runes of vampirism, but why not? it’s a pretty glassy build but i really want to run an axe siphon build because even though dagger does more dps, but why land a crit and steal health in melee when u can do it with range :o :P

Suggestions to it to make it better/more survivable with life steal/crit? or should I just drop it entirely and roll something else? XD

It can be done with axe/focus, but the real reason most vampiric based builds rely more on dagger is because of it’s fast and consistent attack speed means more crits, more hits, and therefore more siphons overall and more healing. When doubled with warhorn you get pretty respectable siphons from the sheer amount of hits overall. If you really insist on using axe, use it as your weapon swap set. And there’s nothing wrong with using vamp runes for a siphon build, but I’ve found them to be pretty “meh” when using them. The life steal doesn’t proc nearly as much as you’d need it to and I’m not sure if they ever fixed it or not but the mist form was pretty buggy. As far as your gear it looks ok, and assassins would be an ok setup to run with a vamp build I suppose, but for your trinkets you might want to change things around a little. I’d run knights with valk jewels and a soldiers backpiece. That’s just my 2 cents. It might lower your base crit chance a tad, but remember you can just flash DS for fury and get all the crit chance you need to reliably proc siphons.

I was thinking something like this:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fQAQRBHbhG2IjW6e1m2GDniYSB38GkC3XrIFITZUFgHA-jQzAYuBRTRAJMAUIICBcisIaslzho1FCreBTXCoOXUtHHwdwoVLFg5CjA-e

that’s pretty solid, Nay n thanks

It seems to me, the foundation of a vampiric build is toughness to protect the HP pool thereby maximizing the impact of every point siphoned. Because of this, I think the problem with these proposed builds is that they’re extremely brittle. Dagger is a point blank weapon. You’ll have to go toe-to-toe with an enemy and without proper toughness, you’ll probably lose HP faster than you can siphon it.

IMO, siphon traits tend to work best in zerg builds where the number of enemies allows for maximum siphon procs (like Nay said, WH can be a siphon monster). I’m not sure if they’ll be effective in 1v1 situations just because you won’t be able to hit enough.

I’ve done several 1v1’s with a vamp build and did really well. It wasn’t exactly like the ones we listed here, but it was still a vamp one. Yes it was a bit harder, but it held it’s own. It does hit it’s effectiveness cap a lot sooner than other builds I will admit that. Especially against meathead hammerstun spambots.