Rune choice for Viper Reaper
Earth. You’ll proc bleeds on mobs more, and the extra duration is often wasted. Better more stacks of bleed over a few stacks with long duration.
Earth proc’s as a chance on a critical hit so mind your precision. Viper’s has enough precision, as do sinister and rabid. Carrion and dire do not.
Look at condition duration, too. Replacing agony with earth is an easy choice. That is why rune of thorns is popular in bleed-capped Viper’s builds.
Pizza and toxic focusing crystals are assumed, too. The bleed duration cap is typically first priority but using all of the general duration buffs available will leave just enough room for sigil of earth to increase your bleed stack. There is also torment for condition damage or blood for healing as alternatives.
(edited by Anchoku.8142)
If you run meta food, Sigil of Malice, Barbed Precision, and almost-full Viper’s (excluding the backpiece), you’ll have 100.4% bleed duration (80.4% everything else). So you can easily swap out the Sigil of Agony. Edit: Actually, if you ran all Viper’s except the helm, you get even less stat wastage… 80.2% condition duration
Sigil of Geomancy is the alternative to Earth… it depends how you play as to which is better. I personally don’t swap weapons or go into shroud often enough, so I use Earth. Run Decimate Defenses and your crit chance is 100% with Fury.
(edited by onevstheworld.2419)
Power builds swap weapons more frequently because condition builds are encouraged to camp sceptre auto attack for maximum bleed stacks.
Necromancer has a very narrow play style for condition damage. The only real variety is choosing between utilities.
Where are you running said build though? Unless you’re going raiding, there’s no point running meta food.
For non raids (mostly t4 fractals) I run full viper + agony/earth sigil and thorn runes which comes to 42.2% condi duration (82.2% bleed, 87.2% poison) so I can run cheap Wvw provision food to cap bleed (and a bit overcap poison).
Then for raids I have an alt sceptre with malice sigil and my legendary backpiece switches to sinister allowing for meta food that goes 0.5% overcap for bleed.
Surrender and serve me in life, or die and slave for me in death.
I run Agony/Earth with Geomancy on my Warhorn.
Geomancy does more damage against targeting dummies, or fights where you can stay in melee range so long as you swap weapons/flash reaper shroud on cooldown, but I don’t really think that’s realistic in a lot of the t4’s or raid fights, so I just run Earth and swap to WH if I find myself in melee range for the geo proc.
I run Agony/Earth with Geomancy on my Warhorn.
Geomancy does more damage against targeting dummies, or fights where you can stay in melee range so long as you swap weapons/flash reaper shroud on cooldown, but I don’t really think that’s realistic in a lot of the t4’s or raid fights, so I just run Earth and swap to WH if I find myself in melee range for the geo proc.
That’s why I don’t run geomancy. Just because on paper it is better, doesn’t mean it is in a realistic fighting environment.
Surrender and serve me in life, or die and slave for me in death.
Then for raids I have an alt sceptre with malice sigil and my legendary backpiece switches to sinister allowing for meta food that goes 0.5% overcap for bleed.
In terms of min-maxing for raids, shouldn’t you be using Carrion instead of Sinister backpiece? With full-minus-1 Viper’s, DD and Fury, your crit chance is also overcapped so the precision isn’t needed.