Guild Wars 2

Hey so I’ve been looking for a different build to play with in sPvP. I was just looking for the general trait loadout for a build where you just go into deathshroud for weakness and stability and fury and that stuff. Any help would be appreciated.

If I recall correctly, several people tried to make it work, but the loss in that Life Force health buffer was too great in comparison to thew few gains you get from high boon uptime. If we had better defensive flashes, such as Protection, or if flashing triggered on swap sigils, we might be in business, but currently, it is what it is.

The available flashing traits are:
Spite: Spiteful Spirit
Curses: Enfeeble, Furious Demise
Death: Shrouded Removal,
Blood: Deathly Invigoration (+ Vampiric Precision in 10 slot w/Furious Demise)
Reaping: Near to Death, Foot in the Grave

Unfortunately, you can’t spec for all of the flash traits together as they require a total of 85 points. I think the big trade off here is between Spiteful Spirit, Shrouded Removal, Furious Demise, Deathly Invigoration and Foot in the Grave.

So your most basic build will be 0/15/0/0/30, with obvious traits. This gives you a few choices:
10 points in Spite, gives you 3s of Retal
10 points in Death Magic, gives you 1 condition removed
20 points in Death Magic, gives you 10s of 3 stacks of Vulnerability
20 points in Blood Magic gives you some healing

The actual loadout you end up with depends on if you want a more offensive setup, or defensive. I actually like going a somewhat hybrid setup with this (I ran a dancer build a long time ago to guard home). But basically you want to figure out what kind of playstyle you want, then use the traits to support it. You get 25 points leftover after the basic build to let you do whatever you want, or you can drop the Crit chance and have 30 left over. There is quite a bit of customization.

One thing I’d highly suggest though, no matter what, is picking up some kind of defense that doesn’t rely on DS. Siphoning, healing, soldier gear, whatever it takes, but you really don’t want to be doing this in a Carrion/Zerker build.

Edit: this build actually is workable, but I guarantee its the most difficult kind of build we have access to, by far.

Well i will not say that a ds dancing build will not work, but i tried some ds dancing builds not long ago and i always felt kitten in comparison to the standard mm,condi and power builds. I even felt better with siphon/bunker builds, simple for the fact that having ds on cd and being out of dodges did me often get killed.
If i had to give some ideas i would go more in the direction of a bunker build (soldiers amulett, defensive runes etc…)
But if you find one that works i would like to try it…

1) many “on DS” traits have been nerfed either directly or indirectly in a way they are not useful at all, or they weren’t very useful to begin with.
2) you cannot have all “on DS” traits at once with any meaningful build, you can take couple or even few traits to support your build, just do not rely on them too much, because of point 1.

- Fury on DS gives nice bonus for crit builds, also nice if you use on crit sigils or traits with lower crit %
- Retal on DS is way too short to be useful but sometimes you don’t have much better choices for spite 10. Retal dmg is meh.
- AoE heal when exiting DS is not really useful but you might want to use it while stacking other heals.
- Stability on DS needs way too much soul reaping to be worth going for specifically. You have other ways to go around lack of stability in most cases.
- Enfeeble on DS is not very useful anymore but you can pick it if you don’t have anything better to do with curses 10. (Hahhah situtational weakness for 2s my fluffy kitten and only condinecros care about bleed stacks)

http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=;0437-0-kHFJ084gJ;9;79JO-E4;039-18;21;0JwW0U;1cV19cV195ke

Here’s the build I’ve been playing with in pvp, its focused on DS uptime and countering burst with retaliation. I’ve 2v1’d in this build its very powerfull if played correctly. Immobilize people in WoS and enter deathshroud for some insanely fast vulnerability stacking all while spamming lifeblast as well as countering damage taken with retaliation.
Enjoy!

Actually, all of the on DS traits become very significant with the reduced CDs.

43% Stability uptime
43% Retaliation uptime
71% Fury uptime
87 HP/s (with 0 healing power)
29% Weakness uptime
86% Bleeding uptime (1 bleed)
1 condition removed per 7 seconds
143% Vulnerability uptime, 3 stacks

Some of that is relatively weak considering the cost, but a lot of it is actually very strong. The best part is that it gives a lot of flexibility, because depending on your build, you end up built with a lot of mixed offensive and defensive stats and traits. A defensive build with this will still have fairly good crit chance/damage, an offensive build with this still has massive stability uptime/decent healing.

But I’d generally suggest not taking all the traits. Try to find a little balance.