While AOE is very important in PvE, it’s not everything. Most of the difficult encounters in PvE boil down to boss fights, where single-target DPS plays a huge role. Given that, it’s important to have good single-target DPS for those situations. (It’s also worth pointing out that in many of the AOE situations you guys are referencing, you could go in with any build and succeed because build doesn’t really matter. In my opinion, it’s a lot better to optimize for the situations in which a build does actually matter, such as boss fights, than situations in which the most important issue is tagging mobs, such as the Clockwork Chaos events.)
With that said, here are some points to consider:
In single-target fights, the 900 DPS from burning is huge. To put it in perspective, it’s about 24 percent of the DPS typically obtained through a full bleed stack. Put another way, it’s six bleed stacks. Adding six bleed stacks to your single-target rotation is huge. It’s the biggest single-target DPS gain in all the trait trees. It obviously won’t be as beneficial in AOE situations because epidemic can spread the burning applied by teammates, but, like I said earlier, AOE situations aren’t everything. (Keep in mind that burning is prioritized based on the source’s condition damage. If a power guardian is stacking burning, a condition necromancer’s burning will tick first. So even if you see burning on a single target, that doesn’t mean the maximum potential is being obtained from that condition.)
Terror is a decent DPS gain. It’s easily the biggest DPS gain in Curses. There are some AOE situations where you want to keep mobs clumped up, but there are two solutions to those moments: Don’t fear or, better yet, use a snare — immobilize, chill or cripple — before fearing. Either way, in single-target encounters there’s no doubt that terror is absolutely worth it, especially since the fear won’t actually fear when a boss has defiant.
The self-healing is absolutely useless in PvE because it’s just not necessary and much worse than the other options. If you want more DPS, go Spite. If you want to support, get the well traits that grant protection and lower well cooldowns so you can heal teammates and grant them some survivability. Even if you don’t want either of those things, you really shouldn’t need that much self-healing in PvE situations unless you’re carelessly running into mobs or getting hit by mechanics. In that case, the only advice I can give is to improve your play and learn to avoid damage; not only will that boost your survivability, but it will boost your DPS by letting you maximize DPS uptime and pick up traits that actually increase damage.
I also think Nemesis is slightly undervaluing power in the video. It’s obviously not the ideal stat for condition necromancers, but the 200 power he’s not picking up is about 15 percent less direct damage. That’s not huge because of how poorly scepter and dagger scale with power, but it does make an impact.
I’m not trying to belittle or speak down to anyone here, but most of PvE is a math problem. In the case of this video, it unfortunately gets the math problem wrong. Some of the concepts Nemesis discusses, such as cleverly using Epidemic, are good and helpful, but a lot of the video is frankly misleading and mathematically unfounded.
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… people like you make me proud