WvW condition build question
staff/scepter
30/20/0/0/20
30 for dhumfire, chill to the grave, and whatever tier 1 u wish
20 for terror, hemophilia
20 for fear when downed, master of fear
rune: necromancer’s rune
use koi cake or veggie pizzas and you will have 4 sec fears
That’s a terror build. Which I already know and use, and was not what I was asking about. My question was the effectiveness of the blood magic traits for life siphoning in a condition build.
If they are not that effective I will put the 20 pts into spite.
(edited by Shinigami Curse.5940)
Personally, I don’t bother with siphoning. It heals for so little it doesn’t really feel worth it.
I put those twenty points into Soul Reaping instead to benefit from Cooldown reduction on DS skills (moar slorpslorp bag-tagging!), last Gasp and Master of Terror (because I do run terror).
If you’re not interested in Terror, you can pick up soul marks here which is pretty helpful.
Nemain/Kali Darru [FUN]
What I find though is most traits in soul reaping and spite are aimed at power and damage. The condition duration from spite is nice, but none of the traits increase condition abilities. DS itself is more for power, every time I am in it I am losing bleeding I could be stacking with scepter. Torments is just bleeding essentially so not worth going into DS for it. Skill 2 is ok, and 3 for fear for control, but its not overly synergistic with a pure condition build.
Although blood magic which vampiric traits isn’t very condition orientated, I can justify it with the high crit rate from fury in DS making it more viable to pop quickly, burst and get out of it. Do vampire skills take the health from the target at the same rate it heals you?
The siphon traits are far better for PvE, they are not good against burst. If you are standing on a tower edge just firing into a crowd, or puttering around the edges of a zerg vs zerg, the siphoning can add up to some nice little sustain, especially on staff where each mark target is going to heal you.
But in any situation you are bursted from 1v1, up to 1v5 or so, siphoning has real questionable value, esp for condition builds that dont have the fast attacks of dagger or axe. If you are getting knocked down, stunned, punted around, it means you aren’t attacking and thus you aren’t siphoning much.
If you have a free rein situation where you can keep attacking through your rotation the siphon traits together are worth about 1000-1500 health every 15 seconds maybe. It’s pretty laughable compared to something like old Ele healing builds or what Guardians can do. They do add about the same amount of damage, which isn’t too bad, but just as sustain its not much.
In Blood Magic I would take Mark of Evasion over one of the Siphon traits. Since you have 20 points in Death, that’s around an 850 health regeneration every 10 seconds, when you get enemies to trigger that Mark. More healing than the Siphon, and more damage too from the Bleeds.
(edited by Pendragon.8735)
Torments is just bleeding essentially so not worth going into DS for it. Skill 2 is ok, and 3 for fear for control, but its not overly synergistic with a pure condition build.
DS is your survival tool, gap closer and crowd control.
Torment does quite a bit of damage in condition build, but that’s not why you go in DS.
What you want to use DS 5 for is the root at the END of the channel, you can use this offensively and defensively.
DS 4 is wonderful for tagging and keeps your DS up longer if you need to extract yourself from a zerg in WvW (combine this with 5 to damage and root pursuers)
DS 3 is less useful if you’re not running Terror (I don’t know why you don’t want to tbh, Terror synergizes extremely well with condition builds) but still decent to get troublesome people off your case.
DS 2 is… unreliable but can be amazing situationally.
Last Gasp trait is an absolutely lifesaver in wub.
I feel the soul reaping traits you can get for 20pts far outweight the poor healing you get from Blood. Siphoning does NOT heal you equally to the damage you deal at all.
Nemain/Kali Darru [FUN]
staff/scepter
30/20/0/0/20
30 for dhumfire, chill to the grave, and whatever tier 1 u wish
20 for terror, hemophilia
20 for fear when downed, master of fearrune: necromancer’s rune
use koi cake or veggie pizzas and you will have 4 sec fears
30% fear duration from spite tree, 50% from master of terror, 20 % fear duration from necromancer runes, and 40% from veggie pizza = 140% = bad advice…
You can only get 100%, so any excess is just bad. This means that koi cake/veggie pizza is wasted on fears (still works on the other conditions though).
You can only get 100%, so any excess is just bad. This means that koi cake/veggie pizza is wasted on fears (still works on the other conditions though).
I wouldn’t take the runes that would be overkill, but as far as Spite, 40% food and Master of Terror, still valuable to hit 100% and the over budget is not always wasted, as it will add back in if you are facing enemies with condition reducing food or runes.
DS is your survival tool, gap closer and crowd
This is my point. The only time I want to be in DS in my condition build is in a panic survival situation, if I need some slight crowd control, and when I swap to my staff and spam my marks leaving 5-6 seconds before I can swap back to scepter. If I am on swap CD from scepter then the auto attack is way more useful than DS because of lingering curse stacking bleeds. So I don’t need the life force pool gains and I don’t need DS CD reduction.
Terror is a condition and obviously works in condition builds, but I don’t want spectral wall, and that leaves staf skill 5, and DS 3 for terror. But that puts me back into DS which I don’t want to be and staf skill 5 has long CD. Lastly the stat buff from soul reaping isn’t useful either.
My power is super low with full rabid, so bonus damage to nothing is still nothing. The way I see it is vampiric is like a condition (armor ignoring and not reliant on power). It flows with my high crit build better. The 200 vitality and healing power added also work with the build for just tanking and spamming conditions.
Traiting for terror feels like a waste for all of the 3-4 extra seconds I get out of 2 skills. It’s not like terror isn’t useful enough as a stun skill without traiting for it. I am just not feeling the synergy for traiting in soul reaping. I could trade the curses major for terror over corruption cd though.