Guild Wars 2

I feel like there is potential here….the synergy with deathshroud/unholy sanctuary is pretty cool.

Is there a viable build that utilizes this mechanic?

I still have a set of vampiric armor lurking around, somwhere, but do not use it. I built it back when there were rumors Anet would boost the vampiric traits in Blood Magic but could not get any sort of life steal build to have enough of an advantage to counter having to put points into BM. Food like omnomberry pies or ghosts does much better and actually encourages a power/crit build. It is kind of disappointing how every other profession can have far greater life steal than Necromancer just through food and their own vampire runes. Even the mobs in Orr have far more powerful life steals than DS’s totally non-healing Life Transfer.

Parasitic Contagion seems to be a more powerful heal than all of Necromancer’s life steals and the rune combined but I do not have the numbers to back it up. Perhaps others can chime in here.

Edit: One other thing that bugs me about Necromancer’s totally lame vampiric traits is that they do not seem to equal the dps lost for moving trait points from other lines to fill Blood Magic. Maybe a developer could show us the math on how populating vampiric skills in BM yields the same damage over time as a berserker build because the healing aspect is worthless and group utility is awful.

Jelzouki.4128:

the synergy with deathshroud/unholy sanctuary is pretty cool.

What synergy?

If you have conditions on you, mist form will pretty much kill you when you hit 20% HP because you won’t be able to do anything about it. Bad idea.

flow.6043:

Jelzouki.4128:

the synergy with deathshroud/unholy sanctuary is pretty cool.

What synergy?

You can enter death shroud during the Vampire rune’s mist form, giving you a few seconds of invulnerable death shroud.

witcher.3197:

If you have conditions on you, mist form will pretty much kill you when you hit 20% HP because you won’t be able to do anything about it. Bad idea.

You can still go into deathshroud while in mist form, or if its on cooldown and the trait unholy sanctuary will put you in deathshroud, and if you’re spec’d into it, you can remove one condition upon entering ds.