Hey all.
I’ve decided to redo my old Deathtickle build (Deathtickles – THE RETICKLING) as a result of various things changing in the meta etc. regards retal and other stuff.
It’s not a surprising build, nor is it going to be revolutionary for most folks here. You’ve seen 30/x/x/x/30 before, so feel free not to contribute if your only comment is “OMG TOTALLY SEEN THIS MONTHS AGO”.
Deathtickles Mk II
I still use Rune of Vampirism even though it’s glitchy and requires me to strip every time. Mist form is a godsend – quite often it’ll proc and bridge me to my next DS cooldown, and in WvW or instances there’s generally a lot of LF floating around so it works very well.
You know the process – drop wells or cast focus 4, hit DS and blast away. I’m not going to pretend there’s much finesse to this process, and if you prefer you can use dagger (with Chill of Death) instead of axe; it’s a lot better for rooting your opponent. If you’re going to try and root and wellbomb, try and tease their condition cleanses out ASAP.
Soul Marks is interchangeable with DS cooldown in my opinion. A lot of people repeatedly state that DS cooldown isn’t worth it – all I know is it’s a lot more common for me to get into DS from mistform when I have the DS cooldown. Your call.
In terms of gear, I’ve tried to strike a balance between ‘zerker and knights and soldier. I may swap some of my ascended gear which is PVT/Knights for the pow/prec/crit dam gear, but at the moment I think I’m in a good place regards survivability.
Focus 4 is an insane ability, and the 1200 range chill/boon strip from focus 5 is both a potent source of damage and a great way to stop runners or reduce the efficacy of boon-reliant classes. In instances, I swap for the might generating trait, but in WvW I think higher LF gen coupled with long range boon stripping is far more useful.
You can, with wells in DS, strip a keep wall of everyone on it. I tend to drop a single well, hit DS and Life Transfer (not long before they stop that from damaging through walls chaps), which will normally average 2k per WoS tick and 4-6k from LT.
Some obvious questions:
1) Why didn’t you go for 50% crit with 50% DS crit?
Because there’s an invisible cap (at 100% crit you can still not crit), and because I wanted to retain some survivability.
2) LOL, axe? Really?
Yeah. Axe with axe training DS DPS is similar to staff DS DPS, so whichever weapon I have out I’m putting on the hurt.
3) You said you didn’t like staff!
It’s better now the marks are larger, and though I sometimes run A/F & D/W I do tend towards A/F and staff these days. Putrid Mark might’ve been nerfed, but the damage is solid and having a ranged cleanse/transfer is great.
Anyway, if you like it, feel free to use it. The more Deathtickles we see on the field, the better!
