Guild Wars 2

It does work, but comparing it to a lot of our other stronger builds, it’s currently not worth using outside of general pve. It doesn’t scale with healing power so currently, there’s only so good you can get with it. The minion health siphons are much better, especially if you use bloodthirst. If you add that with your own siphons and life steal foods, it’s a pretty robust build and would probably even stand up in some dungeons fairy well. I know I made a really fun hybrid build that also utilized siphons, but it easily gets overshadowed by other builds and isn’t viable at all in pvp.

Nay of the Ether.8913:

It does work, but comparing it to a lot of our other stronger builds, it’s currently not worth using outside of general pve. It doesn’t scale with healing power so currently, there’s only so good you can get with it. The minion health siphons are much better, especially if you use bloodthirst. If you add that with your own siphons and life steal foods, it’s a pretty robust build and would probably even stand up in some dungeons fairy well. I know I made a really fun hybrid build that also utilized siphons, but it easily gets overshadowed by other builds and isn’t viable at all in pvp.

it definitely IS viable in pvp. Some people seem to find the life siphons lackluster, and they can be, but when paired with the right traits and runes, it can be very effective for sustaining yourself. You won’t be out healing damage necessarily, but that isn’t really the point. It’s to negate damage. Bloodthirsty trait and vampiric rituals can be extremely good for holding a point in pvp. Especially when there’s two or more people on it. Popping well of power and corruption or something at the same time on a point can easily turn the tide of a fight while keeping yourself alive.

Leaching 35 health on a crit at the cost of 20 trait points when focused by multiple people isnt going to help. It seems to me that ArenaNet had to keep the numbers low because of PvE. It does far more good when you can hit a ton of mobs and never eat a stun and have near 100% uptime on your target. But that just doesnt happen in PvP, with our lack of stability and chasing options and such. Only the minion leech one feels like its actually worth something, but then i’d still put it at a duel build at best. They could use a ton of work in scaling, even from power for all i care, and pvp/pve split.

It’s nice, but I wouldn’t base a build on it.

From a pure investment vs returns point of view, life stealing isn’t worth it.
Killing stuff faster then it can kill you will grant you much more survivability in the long-run.

It adds up in a long fight. With Bloodthirst, even if you attack only 25 times in a fight, you will have dealt and drained around 1000 damage, for a total net value of 2000. That’s pretty competitive with what a lot of traits will give you in a combat. I would take Mark of Evasion over either the crits siphoning, or making them both 50% stronger though.

These traits probably deserve to be a little better and get slightly boosted, even so I find them underrated, especially in WvW and PVE. In sPVP maybe they are seen as less valuable as combats are more about burst and focusing down in short stretches. Thus the cooldown type traits can come into play more than other scenarios.

In my opinion, effective life siphoning in GW2 is as much about how you play as it is what traits you choose, what armor you wear, what weapons you equip, your trinkets, runes, sigils, etc.

You could equip and trait two necros identically with regards to life siphoning; one will excel with the build and the other won’t. Why? Because it’s as much a mindset and preferred combat style as it is about equipment and stats. For it to work, you have to process many hits against as many opponents as you can in the shortest amount of time (again, in my opinion).

What this means in practice is diving into the middle of a mob of enemies (either in PvE or WvWvW; I’m not including sPvP in this discussion, even though I’ve used my build to good effect there, as well), dropping wells and marks, swapping weapons, activating Locust Swarm, and slicing away with your dagger as fast as you can. That’s when you can see some crazy siphoning that can pretty much keep up with the damage you’re taking.

Likewise, you have to cultivate a keen sense of when you’re about to run out of sources of rapid multiple hits that fuel your siphons. Then it’s time to retreat to the backline to kite and heal up before returning to the fray.

If being a shock-troop meleeist doesn’t appeal to you, then life siphoning is probably not going to work very well for you. It’s just not effective if your approach is to stand at a distance and plink away at opponents. The amount of life siphoned is just too little on a per target basis if only attacking a single opponent – slowly – from range. You need to be very aggressive with the build, comfortable with watching your health dip and rise faster than a rollercoaster while standing your ground, and confident in your ability to rapidly cast your skills at the right time and in the right sequence while fighting in the center of a mob.

It has the potential for great survivability; but in a counter-intuitive way because of the need to throw yourself at your opponent in order to use them as the source of your life siphons. Master it, though, and it can be very rewarding Especially when you see opponents freeze for a split second because a “squishy” caster class is charging headlong into them and they don’t know what to make of it.

Softspoken.2410:

It’s nice, but I wouldn’t base a build on it.

This is more or less what I was getting at, you can add it in to other builds and it works out ok, adds some survivability, but you won’t really be able to base a build solely around it, not for pvp anyway. In pve you can make it work pretty good because you have access to buff foods that also steal life and helps to finish off the build. In pvp you can’t do that.

I used it in conjunction with a beserker build and it works pretty good. I needed to go into the blood line anyway for well recharge so I just took the siphoning traits too.

I’m also using sigil of blood + mixed berry food. Siphon on hit and siphon on crit are seperate siphons that happen together. That with sigil proc, food procs and life siphon from dagger 2 and you get a 3-5k heal from a single attack. It’s also good support for those moments when you go toe to toe with someone in a well bomb. Of course Life siphons have more value if you have high armor to ‘protect’ it. I don’t, but don’t care, every 1 hp is 1 hp I can use. A tank necro with minions can be really hard to kill because of siphoning.

“have access to buff foods that also steal life and helps to finish off the build. In Spvp you can’t do that.”

fixed that for you. Wvw has life steal food.

One day when our Siphon trait will work with DS (by “healing” our LifeForce or Health) I’ll take it again. Right now you lose a lot of potential healing and a full Trait line if you need to go in DS while you just popped your wells/things that siphon/etc.

This is what turns me off from the trait. And it’s a shame because it can be a real good damage dealer with rapid attack. Those ticks adds up quite fast.

Lifestealing is fine for open world pve (especially when combined with lifesteal food), but it’s not reliable in s/tPVP. There’s too much burst/damage that comes in. As others have said, you’re better off going with other traits for more utility/damage.

I run it all out with full hp, full DS, and full crit chance with knight’s gear. It does matter. I have a ton of success in spvp with my build.

The secret is you still dodge and use DS to avoid damage and don’t expect siphon to carry you through facetanking (although this is great for thieves and warriors, and other necros sometimes) and you are immensely survivable. The other secret is stacking crit chance and blood sigils. Lastly, necros are probably the easiest kill out there with our weaknesses against CC so you must stack defense especially if you want to melee and siphon and come up with alternate ways to burst damage than brainlessly stacking our terrible power line.

It should still heal us through DS though because others can be healed in their invulnerability forms and DS turns off our whole siphon trait line which means we are fighting our own mechanic as well as the player – bad design.

Life stealing is mediocre at best in PVE. I’ve tried it, but you have to risk a lot to get that close to an enemy. The main reason to avoid life siphon builds is simply the buggyness of it all. Life stealing minions are useless with the current state of minion ai (they stand around doing nothing). And targeting is very unreliable, causing the game to often use life siphon on a target that is out of range, while your intended target is standing right in front of you.

That’s why I’m currently sticking to marks combined with a fear build. At least the marks will always hit their target. And with ground-targeted wells you have even more aoe to throw around, and it will never miss.

You can run life stealing in most dungeons, except fractals since ranged attacks mostly win there.

It works, using dagger its a high DPS build also, it could be better?

The answer is yes. A-Net, fix healing scaling puh-lease.