Guild Wars 2

So I have a build I like to use, and I understand it’s not meta, and that’s just fine with me.

However, I would like some feedback as I’m having trouble deciding on a couple of skills.

Essentially, I’m taking most of the vampiric traits, but supplimenting it with a couple minion and shroud traits. This is what I have:

Blood Magic (III, VI, VIII)
Death Magic (II, IV, IX)
Soul Reaping (III, V, VII)

For stats i’m running clerics, as the damage portion of life siphon is based off power, and the healing based off healing power. I’m running runes of vampirism because, you know, vampires

For sigils I’m running Superior Leaching and Superior Life: I want to increase the healing portion of life stealing.

For one weapon set I’m running D/D, other set I’m running Scepter and.. havent decided on, but I’m leaning towards Warhorn for the swiftness.

For utilities I’m taking bone minions and bone fiend. More attacks, more life siphon. plus some more condi removals.

So here is where I’m running into a bit more uncertainty.

First, the offhand for scepter. I’m leaning towards warhorn for swiftness, as I said, but that depends on the third utility. I’m considering shadow fiend for roaming and wurm for conquest. But, I also considered signet of the locust, for the 25% speed plus more life siphon. If I do that, I won’t need the warhorn. but I think the minion would be a better choice. Yet, I haven’t QUITE decided for sure.

Second, the healing skill. If you look at my traits I do have some group support built in. If I take blood fiend I think that will help me more directly, but if It take signet of vampirism then I think that would help groups a bit more.

Finally, the elite: Flesh Golem, to continue with the minion’s aid, or lich, which is just darned fun, gives me a second source of stability, and even with the nerf still hits hard.

Right now i’m leaning towards the vampirism signet for heal and the shadow fiend/flesh wurm over signet of the locust, thus taking the warhorn for the scepter offhand. I can be convinced otherwise though. As for the elite, I’m much more torn between the two.

So, ignoring “its not a meta build and sucks” lol, which one of my options I’ve outlined above would be the best combo for my build?

Yep, running something really similar and its awesome. I dont need spite, running the deathmagic and blood magic with soul reaping is great!

I use wurm and Fleshgolem from time to time in conquest. But the spectral armor is great for getting alot of life force really fast so often I will run that.

I have played necro for years, I don’t need builds done for me as I know what I personally need to survive and do decent damage. I always build myself to counter all classes not do just one thing.

I watch my opponents and counterplay them. Sometimes it works sometimes not. But all that matters is that I am effective.

Currently I’m running full zerker in PvE. Spite, Blood and Soul reaping. Wells are the selection I’ve chosen because of they hit more targets and the elite is Lich. Pretty standard stuff really. I’d defiantly take warhorn if i were you. And if you insist on using off hand dagger I’d suggest using it with an Axe and the warhorn with your mainhand dagger. Having the warhorn as an option to add extra life steal is nice especially with melee range focus. And if you need some spacing the axe is your most frequent hitting weapon to provide life stealing more often. The Offhand Dagger with that lets to you get the bonus 25% movement speed no matter which weapon you choose so that’s a nice touch.

I wouldn’t call that optimal but, it could be quite fun. Try out wells see what you think. I’ve found them extremely fun. so, give it a go.

I tried my build against a couple burst thieves in 1v1 wvw. Both ran after a small amount of combat. It was great, I kept healing, every time they tried to burst me down, they couldnt keep up heh

Lily.1935:

Currently I’m running full zerker in PvE. Spite, Blood and Soul reaping. Wells are the selection I’ve chosen because of they hit more targets and the elite is Lich. Pretty standard stuff really. I’d defiantly take warhorn if i were you. And if you insist on using off hand dagger I’d suggest using it with an Axe and the warhorn with your mainhand dagger. Having the warhorn as an option to add extra life steal is nice especially with melee range focus. And if you need some spacing the axe is your most frequent hitting weapon to provide life stealing more often. The Offhand Dagger with that lets to you get the bonus 25% movement speed no matter which weapon you choose so that’s a nice touch.

I wouldn’t call that optimal but, it could be quite fun. Try out wells see what you think. I’ve found them extremely fun. so, give it a go.

I actually considered swapping the offhand, going warhorn with mainhand dagger and offhand dagger with scepter.

The reason why I wanted the dagger is the ability to clear off more conditions, as well as it has more bleed stacking. When coupled with the scepter, which I should have considered in the first place, puts all my bleeding in one set, for triggering Blood Bond, and dagger’s #5 doesnt recharge fast enough to help the bleed blood bond trigger with mainhand dagger.

Honestly, I dont NEED any specific offhand. I am open to any of them. What I want is mainhand dagger, in part for skill #2, more vampiric, and it heals over 200 per pulse, and it has 9 pulses.

I wanted scepter for the bleed for Blood Bond.

So that leaves what I need for offhand; warhorn for swiftness, and therefore focus, or dagger? If you hvae a good argument for focus instead, I’m all ears!

I’m beginning to lean towards flesh golem over lich; it adds even more of my various minion trait goodies I have slotted. But Lich is just so fun!

After those two thief encounters I’m very happy with signet of vampirism for my healing skill now.

Have you noticed much difference using healing power with siphons? The scaling is pretty awful and if that’s your primary source of healing (outside your healing spell) I’m not sure it’d be worth it. Before the patch I used Knight armor (Toughness > Power/Precision) with some Zerker mixed in but Vampiric Precision is gone so I’m not sure what to replace my Precision with, if anything.

The damage portion of siphons has slightly better scaling than the heals with power + our multi-hitting abilities are all power based (Dagger 2, Axe 2, Warhorn 5, Focus 4, Wells) which are fantastic with siphoning so I prefer a more power heavy build with those weapons pairing the Axe with the Focus. I don’t see much reason to use condition weapons without condition power other than for Blood 3 which can be activated other ways.

Healing skill is situational, like most skills. CC if you need to remove conditions (also good default heal), SoV in groups because you can’t consume all the stacks by yourself, Blood Fiend with pet traits and if you don’t need CC.

For the elite, meh, I’m a Sylvari so I’m just using the guardian spirit thing. I don’t care for any of em with a Vampiric build though Flesh Golem is probably best, especially if you use pet traits.

I’ve ran a similar vampire build for ages.
For PvE it is highly tanky even in full damage gear. sPvP with a knight’s ammy and giving the minions boon removal.

D/D for the weakness and condi removal or D/W for the extra hits and cripple. Sigil of Blood and stacking power or precision in PvE, Blood+x for PvP. It was designed to tear tanks down and did the job really well, until the minions stopped doing anything. Waiting to see if minions are competent before trying it again, many of the traits were changed and all the things that went in to that update so it will be different now. Biggest issue is no more boon removal.

The old build in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqJmSLcsybY&index=90&list=PLGKyy8lfX_UWhFaFg8qfZk9W7U_YqfzLO

the best vampire builds these days include parasitic contagion and epidemic together with blood magic. If you can get a bunch of bleeds on enemies you’ll get a truck load of HP.

Morfedel.4165:

I actually considered swapping the offhand, going warhorn with mainhand dagger and offhand dagger with scepter.

The reason why I wanted the dagger is the ability to clear off more conditions, as well as it has more bleed stacking. When coupled with the scepter, which I should have considered in the first place, puts all my bleeding in one set, for triggering Blood Bond, and dagger’s #5 doesnt recharge fast enough to help the bleed blood bond trigger with mainhand dagger.

Honestly, I dont NEED any specific offhand. I am open to any of them. What I want is mainhand dagger, in part for skill #2, more vampiric, and it heals over 200 per pulse, and it has 9 pulses.

I wanted scepter for the bleed for Blood Bond.

So that leaves what I need for offhand; warhorn for swiftness, and therefore focus, or dagger? If you hvae a good argument for focus instead, I’m all ears!

I’m beginning to lean towards flesh golem over lich; it adds even more of my various minion trait goodies I have slotted. But Lich is just so fun!

After those two thief encounters I’m very happy with signet of vampirism for my healing skill now.

I see you want the trigger from the signet. I personally would still rather take the dagger trait in order to get the 25% movement speed and 33% recharge reduction with dagger skills to make your immobilize and life steal more frequent. And if you do use a dagger with your second weapon it helps there as well. The Life stealing from the bleed shouldn’t really matter too much but honestly its entirely up to you. Since I’m In PvE most the time I rely heavily on the ability to have AoE, so Dagger/warhorn and staff are prefered with wells. Since minions don’t last too long. In pvp I can see what you’re getting at.

Fhenrir.5297:

the best vampire builds these days include parasitic contagion and epidemic together with blood magic. If you can get a bunch of bleeds on enemies you’ll get a truck load of HP.

The problem is this parasitic contagion doesn’t scale with healing power, it scales with condition damage. I want a parasitic contagion build to work so bad, but since it doesn’t and as Tulzscha said the scaling of siphons isn’t that great I don’t know if it will work.

I tried running running Curses: II, II, II, Blood: II, III, III, and Death Magic: II, II, II and while it was tanky as kitten I don’t feel I was as effective as full condi with spite, curses, and signets. I was using epidemic, well of corruption and plague signet with settlers signet and undead runes.

I will say this though, you could survive almost any opening burst. Send those guardian burns right back at them. But as far as healing went it was the regen from mark of blood that seemed to pull all the weight getting me back to 100%.

I’d love for someone to find a workable parasitic build. Because the idea of feeling like a Burning Crusade warlock just spamming siphon life again would feel great.

I’ve been doing a vampiric build since before the changes. I like wells for my utilities and staff + dagger/horn for my weapons.

Wells trigger a lot of siphons. Each well can siphon up to 25 times and of course the grandmaster trait gives them an extra siphon.

I like staff because the AoE and piercing ends up triggering a lot of siphons.

Dagger/Horn because when you do Locust Swarm and autoattack you will get a ton of siphons in a short period of time, especially if you stack some wells first.

Other than that I don’t have much to say. Those are the most important things to know about using siphons imo.

DrArmature.4619:

The problem is this parasitic contagion doesn’t scale with healing power, it scales with condition damage. I want a parasitic contagion build to work so bad, but since it doesn’t and as Tulzscha said the scaling of siphons isn’t that great I don’t know if it will work.

Actually that does not matter at all.

The real secret to builds like this is to realize that healing power is terrible for any type of build that focuses on healing yourself.

The true stat to buff your personal sustain is toughness. Healing power is incredibly weak. The ratios on things are too low.

Khristophoros.7194:

DrArmature.4619:

The problem is this parasitic contagion doesn’t scale with healing power, it scales with condition damage. I want a parasitic contagion build to work so bad, but since it doesn’t and as Tulzscha said the scaling of siphons isn’t that great I don’t know if it will work.

Actually that does not matter at all.

The real secret to builds like this is to realize that healing power is terrible for any type of build that focuses on healing yourself.

The true stat to buff your personal sustain is toughness. Healing power is incredibly weak. The ratios on things are too low.

So you’d suggest rabid? and perhaps undead runes?

Khristophoros.7194:

DrArmature.4619:

The problem is this parasitic contagion doesn’t scale with healing power, it scales with condition damage. I want a parasitic contagion build to work so bad, but since it doesn’t and as Tulzscha said the scaling of siphons isn’t that great I don’t know if it will work.

Actually that does not matter at all.

The real secret to builds like this is to realize that healing power is terrible for any type of build that focuses on healing yourself.

The true stat to buff your personal sustain is toughness. Healing power is incredibly weak. The ratios on things are too low.

Sort of true. Although group heals are designed to benefit most from Healing Power scaling, self healing over time skills/traits do become quite effective with more Healing Power as well. This creates potent sustain in combination with lots of toughness and siphons.

So Regeneration, Unholy Sanctuary, Edit: Signet of Locust /Edit, Blood Bond/SoV’s Active and SoV’s passive, pretty much in combination, are the real reasons to go Healing Power for self sustain. That doesn’t leave a lot of room for Parasitic Contagion/Curses, but the healing is less “conditional” (hehe).

Basically you’re right though. It’s terrible to build Healing Power for the sole purpose of buffing Siphons alone.

The Siphons are just complimentary in such builds and shouldn’t really be built around stat wise at all, unless other parts of your build demand it.

The thing about Parasitic Contagion now is that it’s not possible to take it and the increased condi duration (Lingering Curse) when using wand.

DrArmature.4619:

Khristophoros.7194:

DrArmature.4619:

The problem is this parasitic contagion doesn’t scale with healing power, it scales with condition damage. I want a parasitic contagion build to work so bad, but since it doesn’t and as Tulzscha said the scaling of siphons isn’t that great I don’t know if it will work.

Actually that does not matter at all.

The real secret to builds like this is to realize that healing power is terrible for any type of build that focuses on healing yourself.

The true stat to buff your personal sustain is toughness. Healing power is incredibly weak. The ratios on things are too low.

So you’d suggest rabid? and perhaps undead runes?

I actually use a power build with high toughness so I can only guess what would be best for a condition build. But probably yes.

DrArmature.4619:

Khristophoros.7194:

DrArmature.4619:

The problem is this parasitic contagion doesn’t scale with healing power, it scales with condition damage. I want a parasitic contagion build to work so bad, but since it doesn’t and as Tulzscha said the scaling of siphons isn’t that great I don’t know if it will work.

Actually that does not matter at all.

The real secret to builds like this is to realize that healing power is terrible for any type of build that focuses on healing yourself.

The true stat to buff your personal sustain is toughness. Healing power is incredibly weak. The ratios on things are too low.

Sort of true. Although group heals are designed to benefit most from Healing Power scaling, self healing over time skills/traits do become quite effective with more Healing Power as well. This creates potent sustain in combination with lots of toughness and siphons.

So Regeneration, Unholy Sanctuary, Edit: Signet of Locust /Edit, Blood Bond/SoV’s Active and SoV’s passive, pretty much in combination, are the real reasons to go Healing Power for self sustain. That doesn’t leave a lot of room for Parasitic Contagion/Curses, but the healing is less “conditional” (hehe).

Basically you’re right though. It’s terrible to build Healing Power for the sole purpose of buffing Siphons alone.

The Siphons are just complimentary in such builds and shouldn’t really be built around stat wise at all, unless other parts of your build demand it.

I did some math when I was looking into which stats I wanted for my build and I found that you need a really high amount of toughness before healing power becomes worth taking at all. This was true for every healing source I looked at.

I have a lot of healing sources in my build but it doesn’t make healing power any better because if you add up all the heals, the total base amount is still a lot higher than the total healing power ratio. Like you said, healing power is good for support builds that heal allies.

edit: Also Last Rites provides a crazy amount of healing power which means you need even more toughness before it becomes optimal to invest in healing power.

Aro.8275:

The thing about Parasitic Contagion now is that it’s not possible to take it and the increased condi duration (Lingering Curse) when using wand.

Making the 2x condi duration only affect Scepter skills made the choice a lot easier. You don’t really need the extra duration on scepter. Especially if you use a Staff+Scepter/Dagger rotation with MoE + Geomancy procs in melee range (which sustain builds can do).

Balekai.6083:

Aro.8275:

The thing about Parasitic Contagion now is that it’s not possible to take it and the increased condi duration (Lingering Curse) when using wand.

Making the 2x condi duration only affect Scepter skills made the choice a lot easier. You don’t really need the extra duration on scepter. Especially if you use a Staff+Scepter/Dagger rotation with MoE + Geomancy procs in melee range (which sustain builds can do).

Maybe more for PvE and probably WvW. Scepter has really good sustained conditions with a high duration, nowhere near a flanking ranger camping shortbow. The tradeoff there is less poison.
sPvP the loss of 30% duration really hurts. Plus no consumables to offset anything.

Though this is all based on my limited play time of a condi nec. Basically avoided it until recently ^.^

I don’t think siphons seem to have much synergy with a condi build anyway. The way to get tons of individual hits to proc tons of siphons involves the stuff I mentioned above. Wells, Dagger, Warhorn, and Staff. You could also go for Axe for a similar effect.

Morfedel.4165:

I tried my build against a couple burst thieves in 1v1 wvw. Both ran after a small amount of combat. It was great, I kept healing, every time they tried to burst me down, they couldnt keep up heh

Uh, but if you cant kill them, and you cant run, whats the point of being tanky? You are basically a sitting duck waiting for a hunter with a big enough gun to come and shoot you down….

DrArmature.4619:

Fhenrir.5297:

the best vampire builds these days include parasitic contagion and epidemic together with blood magic. If you can get a bunch of bleeds on enemies you’ll get a truck load of HP.

The problem is this parasitic contagion doesn’t scale with healing power, it scales with condition damage. I want a parasitic contagion build to work so bad, but since it doesn’t and as Tulzscha said the scaling of siphons isn’t that great I don’t know if it will work.

I tried running running Curses: II, II, II, Blood: II, III, III, and Death Magic: II, II, II and while it was tanky as kitten I don’t feel I was as effective as full condi with spite, curses, and signets. I was using epidemic, well of corruption and plague signet with settlers signet and undead runes.

I will say this though, you could survive almost any opening burst. Send those guardian burns right back at them. But as far as healing went it was the regen from mark of blood that seemed to pull all the weight getting me back to 100%.

I’d love for someone to find a workable parasitic build. Because the idea of feeling like a Burning Crusade warlock just spamming siphon life again would feel great.

I would try a scepter/dagger condi necro with apothecary armor maybe. Not the best condi dps, but fair enough and the siphon + parasitic would be fine i think. The toughness in it gives some survive too. With BiP, epidemic with well of blood and well of sufering/corruption could be fun for boon convert ans siphon and protection.

Lily.1935:

Morfedel.4165:

I actually considered swapping the offhand, going warhorn with mainhand dagger and offhand dagger with scepter.

The reason why I wanted the dagger is the ability to clear off more conditions, as well as it has more bleed stacking. When coupled with the scepter, which I should have considered in the first place, puts all my bleeding in one set, for triggering Blood Bond, and dagger’s #5 doesnt recharge fast enough to help the bleed blood bond trigger with mainhand dagger.

Honestly, I dont NEED any specific offhand. I am open to any of them. What I want is mainhand dagger, in part for skill #2, more vampiric, and it heals over 200 per pulse, and it has 9 pulses.

I wanted scepter for the bleed for Blood Bond.

So that leaves what I need for offhand; warhorn for swiftness, and therefore focus, or dagger? If you hvae a good argument for focus instead, I’m all ears!

I’m beginning to lean towards flesh golem over lich; it adds even more of my various minion trait goodies I have slotted. But Lich is just so fun!

After those two thief encounters I’m very happy with signet of vampirism for my healing skill now.

I see you want the trigger from the signet. I personally would still rather take the dagger trait in order to get the 25% movement speed and 33% recharge reduction with dagger skills to make your immobilize and life steal more frequent. And if you do use a dagger with your second weapon it helps there as well. The Life stealing from the bleed shouldn’t really matter too much but honestly its entirely up to you. Since I’m In PvE most the time I rely heavily on the ability to have AoE, so Dagger/warhorn and staff are prefered with wells. Since minions don’t last too long. In pvp I can see what you’re getting at.

The minions work ok in roaming, but in zergs you’re right, they die fast. I will progably have to go with a vampiric wells build for zerging and such.

Aenesthesia.1697:

Morfedel.4165:

I tried my build against a couple burst thieves in 1v1 wvw. Both ran after a small amount of combat. It was great, I kept healing, every time they tried to burst me down, they couldnt keep up heh

Uh, but if you cant kill them, and you cant run, whats the point of being tanky? You are basically a sitting duck waiting for a hunter with a big enough gun to come and shoot you down….

A necro can’t catch a thief who is losing and decides t o IA out of there, for instance, so there is no point; unless the thief decides to fight to the bitter end, there’s nothing you can do if they run.

But if they run, I still won – I just didn’t kill him.

for those that can’t run like that, its another story. Some classes can’t get away fast enough, or think they can get you. Frankly, I’ve only lost one duel since I posted this – not that I went out dueling a lot. I won the rest, either by killing them or their running. I think thats a good enough result.

Sorry for coming late to the discussion. I have a (hopefully) simple question, though:

Wells or minions?

I’ve been having success with both, but I find that, if I can’t down an opponent quickly enough with wells, I’m in a pretty bad spot for the ~30 second cool down before my next well bomb. On the other hand, minion AI sometimes goes completely haywire and they stop attacking (even if they do keep taking conditions off of me, which is nice). Does anyone have advice for which build is more suitable and in what scenarios?

Etaoin.4362:

Sorry for coming late to the discussion. I have a (hopefully) simple question, though:

Wells or minions?

I’ve been having success with both, but I find that, if I can’t down an opponent quickly enough with wells, I’m in a pretty bad spot for the ~30 second cool down before my next well bomb. On the other hand, minion AI sometimes goes completely haywire and they stop attacking (even if they do keep taking conditions off of me, which is nice). Does anyone have advice for which build is more suitable and in what scenarios?

IMHO, minions are better in battles where they wont take a ton of damage fast. small groups, that kind of thing; they will die fast in zergs, which is where wells would shine.

Thanks, Morfedel!