Guild Wars 2

I wanna hear from anyone who doesn’t run Vital Persistence in PvP, and their thoughts on why/how they can get by without it. Does anyone skip Soul Reaping altogether?

One of my friends has an interesting shout build with death/spite, but I haven’t been able to try it out.

Personally for me it feels like with the builds I make and theorycraft I’d be going into soul reaping anyway, and since I’ve pretty much replaced spectral armor with rise in most builds, spectral mastery doesn’t do anything, and terror master isn’t worth it even with terror, since if I try to make a marauder build, death perception makes a lot of sense and I arguably don’t get anything valuable from blood/curse/death (since I dont use wells/corruptions/minions besides rise), or dhuumfire for condi etc.

It also makes sense because its synergistic with reaper. Most of us take reaper soley for reaper shroud and maybe some of the shouts. Pairing it with soul reaping maximizes our ability to use reaper shroud to its fullest, since there would be little point to running reaper without trying to be in shroud as long as possible.

And finally, as we all know, I find spite to be also quite mandatory in pvp right now. You can get away with curses if you run wanderer amulet and you can get away with death magic if you run soldiers, and you honestly can’t really get away with blood magic. Part of this is due to all of the might and vuln that are unconditionally good in any build, even if you don’t trait signets. The other part of it is that things like blighter’s boon were nerfed to only be worth it with spite. So why would you go for unholy sanctuary or blood magic vampire crap for health gain in shroud when blighter’s boon gives you more of it while being able to hit insanely hard with might stacks? Blood magic doesn’t offer enough on its own and death magic will never provide anything more than extra damage mitigation, so theres no point to them.

Anyway those are my thoughts on the complete stagnation of our trait diversity and the woes of the core class.

Not that i would ever run a mm build but I am pretty sure MM builds work just fine without soul reaping (e.g. deathmagic, bloodmagic and reaper). They are also the only builds that run bloodmagic and deathmagic without being bad.

For non mm builds i would suppose you could run a curses, soulreaping reaper build with terror and the extra 50% fear duration trait with a wanders or a viper amulet.

For other builds vp is mandatory. But i think it comes more down to the fact that soul reaping is such a better line then the other lines and the alternative major traits to vp are for more specialized builds (spectral or terror).

I often run it just for the Cooldown reduction on shroud skills. It is a very overlooked facet of the trait. IT becomes particularly powerful/required if you run Speed of Shadows. Without Vital Persistence everything is still on cooldown when you pop back into shroud.

I haven’t pvp’d much since HOT, but I didn’t run it in some builds in favor of Spectral Mastery. Extra LF gen made up for it. I typically was just using shroud for soaking damage, breaking stuns(pairs nicely with Speed of Shadows) and sometimes for boon stripping with POC.

MM shouldn’t run it anymore, before Reaper it was a tossup between Spite or Soul Reaping for your third line, depending on how you liked to play, but at this point Reaper (and more importantly Reaper Shroud and Rise!) just out performs it in every way.

However, I want to argue against the idea that VP is mandatory overall. What actually happens that causes nearly every build to take it is that:

1. Most trait lines are pretty bad, generally speaking. Only Spite, Soul Reaping, and Reaper are always good in every build and worth looking at. Curses is very specific to condi, Blood Magic is pretty much only used by MM, and Death Magic is fairly specific to MM and tanky shroud builds. This leads to point 2
2. You almost always take Soul Reaping. It was one of our best lines for a long time, and it still is. Wouldn’t really matter if VP was there or not, you’d still go Soul Reaping. And since you’re already in Soul Reaping, we get the final issue
3. VP has no competition. Even if it was bad, the vast majority of builds don’t care about the fear trait at all (its just barely better than totally worthless), and a lot of builds don’t use spectrals (on top of the fact that the spectral trait doesn’t work properly on SWall) because they aren’t really worth the slot.

So you end up not taking VP because its mandatory for all Necros period, but because why not. In fact, most people use VP and then constantly cite situations (like burst) that are completely irrelevant to VP’s strength. Its also a bit overloaded having both CDR on Shroud and passive shroud increase, but by no means mandatory as a trait overall; its just a strong trait in a common line that has no competition.

Best tries where by spectral mastey when running wall/armor. Eventually I decided against it, VP was just slightly better in that case.

@bhawb, What’s wrong with spectral wall with the spectral traits?

Dreaming serpent.5197:

@bhawb, What’s wrong with spectral wall with the spectral traits?

Doesn’t properly increase duration. Every other spectral skill has all its effects increased by 50% (boons on armor/walk, chill duration on grasp), but SWall only has its duration of the wall increased, the protection and fear both stay the same. Of course the skill is generally mediocre, but that fix plus the protection duration refreshing, maybe touching up the fear or wall thickness would make the skill interesting because of the protection synergy with SWall/SA.

Bhawb.7408:

MM shouldn’t run it anymore, before Reaper it was a tossup between Spite or Soul Reaping for your third line, depending on how you liked to play, but at this point Reaper (and more importantly Reaper Shroud and Rise!) just out performs it in every way.

However, I want to argue against the idea that VP is mandatory overall. What actually happens that causes nearly every build to take it is that:

1. Most trait lines are pretty bad, generally speaking. Only Spite, Soul Reaping, and Reaper are always good in every build and worth looking at. Curses is very specific to condi, Blood Magic is pretty much only used by MM, and Death Magic is fairly specific to MM and tanky shroud builds. This leads to point 2
2. You almost always take Soul Reaping. It was one of our best lines for a long time, and it still is. Wouldn’t really matter if VP was there or not, you’d still go Soul Reaping. And since you’re already in Soul Reaping, we get the final issue
3. VP has no competition. Even if it was bad, the vast majority of builds don’t care about the fear trait at all (its just barely better than totally worthless), and a lot of builds don’t use spectrals (on top of the fact that the spectral trait doesn’t work properly on SWall) because they aren’t really worth the slot.

So you end up not taking VP because its mandatory for all Necros period, but because why not. In fact, most people use VP and then constantly cite situations (like burst) that are completely irrelevant to VP’s strength. Its also a bit overloaded having both CDR on Shroud and passive shroud increase, but by no means mandatory as a trait overall; its just a strong trait in a common line that has no competition.

I mostly agree with it, although I would like to add the fact to address how important Soul Reaping is for necromancers in terms of general life force control. If you look at it from a PvP point of view, you will see that all three minor traits have a direct impact on our life force control (from generating more LF to having a larger LF pool), while most traits you will pick will either allow you generate more life force (Soul Marks, Spectral Mastery) or to have less LF drain (Vital Persistance). This is something I would like to see changed in the future by allowing us to gain life force on different ways through traits of the other traitlines, of which Blighter’s Boon in the Reaper traitline is the best example.

Bhawb.7408:

Dreaming serpent.5197:

@bhawb, What’s wrong with spectral wall with the spectral traits?

Doesn’t properly increase duration. Every other spectral skill has all its effects increased by 50% (boons on armor/walk, chill duration on grasp), but SWall only has its duration of the wall increased, the protection and fear both stay the same. Of course the skill is generally mediocre, but that fix plus the protection duration refreshing, maybe touching up the fear or wall thickness would make the skill interesting because of the protection synergy with SWall/SA.

There’s a pretty fun combo with locust swarm, drop the spectral wall on top of someone rs 3 rs4, pretty funny when you cause almost every condi at once people panic. The cooldown is way too high though and it’s very hard to get someone with it.

i took fear of death over VP cuz im playing rabid/carrion terrormancer, I’m didnt buy HoT, and condi seems like the only effective thing right now :p
i dont feel the difference in survviabilty tbh

Bluewizard.2694:

This is something I would like to see changed in the future by allowing us to gain life force on different ways through traits of the other traitlines, of which Blighter’s Boon in the Reaper traitline is the best example.

The issue there is that Soul Reaping makes sense to be our “life force line”, and it doesn’t make much sense to get LF (except from a trait here and there, like Blighter’s Boon) elsewhere. This wouldn’t be an issue if our life force gain was sufficient though, and that’s the problem, we don’t really have sufficient LF gain baseline. Condi runs into this in a big way, but a lot of our LF skills suck, and spectrals/weapons are holding this back in a big way. If those were fixed though, and maybe a LF trait in Death Magic, we’d be fine.

I’m using a spectral condition build with Wall, Armor, and Walk on my bar. I’m using spectral mastery over VP. I really doubt it’s optimal but it’s so fun that I really don’t care.

You get crazy protection uptime, can get up to 10 seconds from Wall and then another 9 seconds from Armor.
You can pop Swalk right before going into shroud and be nearly invulnerable for 12 seconds.
Spectral wall becomes an amazing utility skill when you add up the ridiculous Fear+chill damage, the protection, the life force, and the fact that it’s an 8 second ethereal combo field (amazing for condi) You can also pull people into it with grasp

Spectral grasp becomes a viable skill with the crazy LF gain and chill duration

Soul Reaping is so insanely good for PvP. You can run without VP IF you run dagger + the spectral mastery and spectral utilities for LF regen. Perhaps a shout build could work too

If youre running a meta hybrid/condition build with scepter and signets though I think you need VP

I’ve had some good success with a marauders + spectral mastery + spectral utilities

I’m currently using this on my Necro. Had about 12 matches with it and it performed really really well… and it doesn’t use VP.
(reminiscent of the old Terrormancer – 100% fear duration cuz why not?)

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vRAQNBmWDbkjGKvxibwvG4vxSwgFXEXiRRqrwU4XFl0CANAA-TJxHABdXGAo9HA4JA87FBAA

Corrupt boon is just insane here… with all the stability going around. Two sec fear on down can be nice too, most people die from it… and the down-state fear is 4 secs xD

I think VP is amazing because it makes you a lot more tanky and your skills are recharged almost every time you go into DS, but I’m not sure how necessary it is. Without it… I feel like there’s less DS and you can feel it deplete faster, but it’s not all too bad. You can be fine with Spectral Mastery with 2+ spectral skills (not to mention SWalk becomes godly with Spectral Mastery), and so far it seems to be okay in the build I’m using above… but there’s no denying VP is amazing.

Edit: the build had dagger for some reason O___O

Only alternative is warhorn trait and unholy martyr.
The question is then, which build can afford to go into blood?

Minions ofc.
I had a working condi burst one pre hot, but even that one was clearly better once i dropped terror and master of terror, for vita pers and master of corruption.

VP and just whole soul line is a unavoidable must