Guild Wars 2

Is there any build that focuses around the major traits that affect entering Death Shroud? I feel like you could make a really strong build by using the Grandmaster trait that makes Death Shroud recharge 50% faster, and you could keep switching in and out of Death Shroud to use those traits. I don’t know, it’s just an idea.

People often refer to the idea as “Shroud-dancing”. While it can leverage a couple nice boons, it’s important to remember that you can’t really do anything with your Death Shroud as long as you’re double-tapping it every five seconds. You can’t tank damage as easily, and staying in it long enough to use the attacks (besides Doom) will hurt your uptime on boons. Now those choices could still be worth the cost in a battle situation, but I always found it frustrating to play since I never felt like I was at Maximum Effectiveness.

It definitely has some power though. Fury can be pretty strong, and that minor trait is about the only source of fury a Necromancer has.

Yes there are builds around Near to Death. Basically what you do is flash DS whenever you can afford to for boons and other things you get from flashing it. But these builds are very hard to play, because every 5 seconds you need to make the decision of whether you can actually use DS right now (or if you need to save it for a few seconds), and if you can whether you can get right back out and attack or if you need to stay in to tank damage.

That said, the permanent fury uptime, high retaliation uptime, and few other benefits you can give yourself are really strong if you can manage running the build. Its a very easy way to have a highly offensive build without losing all your defense.

Here’s the build I’m running: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fQEQNBIhZakRLUPcTTjfPBIp4ZrnUwd3UPcf9zB-w

(Power/Toughness/Vitality gear)

I find it highly effective in WvW zerg fights, small fights, and it does quite well in 1v1 situations, too. This build is very Death Shroud centric. I favor the stability grandmaster trait, over the DS cool-down reduction (I rarely find myself wanting to enter DS when it isn’t ready).

You can spend a lot of time in DS with that big Life Force pool, even while soaking up considerable damage, and popping off all of your skills. I think a very underrated trait is Unyielding Blast. It basically turns Life Blast into an AoE. Typically, I will run into a blob of people, pop Life Transfer, then target someone in the rear of the enemy group. At this point, you can start your Life Blast, and watch the numbers, and stacks of vulnerability, fly.

Ye you can use a Shroud-dancing like build, but to be honest doesn’t work as good as other class’ build with buff sustain. You can try it, but even if on paper is good don’t expect any OP way to fight… it could be boring and frustating

You would be an easy kill for the new fotm boon stealing thieves. They’d eat your buffs and turn them against you and if you didn’t DS you basically lose your damage sponge. At least that’s what I think of when it comes to anything boon related.

That build is really stupidly OP. I hate how long Anet lets these things run-a-muck.

I find the traits for DS dancing a bit too spread out. I tried many build (remove cond, retal, fury, heal when exit, weakeing something) yet I couldn’t find one that was good for me.

Yet like Bhawb said, you can lose a lot by DS dancing at the wrong time.

Didn’t find a build that worked for me.

Wait so why are people trying to make a alternate form of the necro a weaker ele attunement swap?

Because it works.