Q:
(edited by DeathenShada.6397)
Necromancer Utilities
A:
In a small scale PvP, such as hot joins or tournaments, condition builds are the most popular. I find those boring though, so I’ve been experimenting with some power builds. I’ll refrain from giving an exact build because I’m far from an expert on the matter myself. What I can do is offer two lines of though I’ve been considering myself.
1.) “Well bombing.” It’s a term you’ll see dropped around on the forums every so often. Basically the idea is to trap your enemies inside the radius of Well of Suffering. The other wells are helpful too, but Well of Suffering deals huge amounts of damage if you can keep an enemy in there. Mainhand dagger is the best way to do this, since the number 3 skill is an immobilize. Other options include weakness (helps keep a target from rolling out of the well), cripple (slows them, causing them to possibly suffer an extra tick of damage), chill (see cripple), and fear (fear an enemy into a wall/rock and drop the well on them). Your traits here will go 30 into Spite for Close to Death. 20 points have to go into Blood for Ritual Mastery. After that it depends on what other utilities you are bringing. One interesting option that I haven’t tried yet might be to put the remaining 20 into Curses. You could probably stack up a decent number of bleeds from the dagger auto attack. I haven’t seen many people do that though. The standard gear choice would be the Soldier’s Amulet. If you do put points in Curses then you will want the one that gives both Power and Condition Damage, but you’ll be a bit more squishy due to a lack of toughness.
2.) Axe/DS build. This one crops up on the boards from time to time, but is quite uncommon. That’s mostly because the Axe can be a problematic weapon in PvP. If you can learn to regularly hit your target with Axe #2 then this build might actually work pretty well. If you want to try it out I’d suggest going 30/0/0/10/30. You’d want to have Foot in the Grave in Soul Reaping for stability OR Near to Death for faster DS. Whichever suits you better. Soul Marks would be a huge help to gaining LF, and since Life Blast would actually be a great ranged option in this build I would take Unyielding Blast. For Spite, I’d take Spiteful Spirit, Spiteful Marks, and Axe Training. Blood Magic would give you Mark of Evasion for an extra mark. For gear you could go the tanky route and pick Soldier’s Amulet. You could also pick up Precision from the Knight’s Amulet. It would give you a big boost to damage at the cost of losing survivability. I see retaliation being a big part of this type of build, just because it would be a great source of added damage.
Wells with Vampiric Rituals would probably be better. Avoid Signet of the Locust, as it’s currently bugged. The +50% Siphon Trait actually makes Locust steal less health than default.
Everything I’ve seen has Signet of the Locust work correctly with the siphon trait.
I haven’t heard of the problem with Signet of the Locust either, but I prefer Spectral Walk. It’s actually faster for the speed bonus and is nearly permanent with the cd reduction trait.
I assume this is for PvE? Vampiric traits don’t really work that well in PvP. For a PvE build I’d say you’re putting too much into Soul Reaping. You could try something more like this:
http://tinyurl.com/VampNecroExample
I haven’t really done much with vampiric stuff, but I’d imagine that build would work pretty well. You’ll want Power, Precision, and Toughness in your gear. Toughness is stronger than Vitality for you because reducing the incoming damage increases the relative effectiveness of your healing. I don’t think you’ll get to a point that your precision is “good enough.” I say that because the Sigil of Blood only has a 30% chance to trigger on a crit. Your precision needs to be pretty high to maximize the effect of Sigil of Blood.
Try the build out and tailor it to your personal tastes. Again, I can’t emphasize strongly enough that I don’t suggest using this as a PvP build if that’s your plan. I can’t speak for WvW, but in sPvP this sort of build will get crushed all the time.
Morvian thanks for your answer, I actually was sorta thinking about using it for PvP, what would be a good alternative then?
For a better idea this is the exact build I’m using I was planning on using knights gear
(edited by DeathenShada.6397)