Warriors and Dervishes

Well, I vanquished Silverwood today with a team of 3 warriors. I ran a Build that focused on Cultist’s Fervor [elite], Order of Pain, Dark Fury, and Blood Bond with PvE skills, regen, and condition removal to round it out. My warriors were as follows:

Goren – Hammer Warrior

Earth Shaker [elite], Crushing Blow, Hammer Bash, Bull’s Strike, Flail, Enraging Charge, “For Great Justice!”, and a rez.

Koss – Axe Warrior

Warrior’s Endurance [elite], Cyclone Chop, Power Attack, Distracting Blow, Dismember, Executioner’s Strike, Flail, and a rez.

Jora – Sword Warrior

Hundred Blades [elite], Deadly Riposte, Riposte, Sun and Moon Slash, Steelfang Slash, “To The Limit!”, “For Great Justice!”, and a rez.

The warrior gang and me in my blood magic getup.

I have to say, I liked the builds, but they weren’t terribly effective in this situation. Silverwood is full of centaurs and mostly centaur warriors. Spells work great against warriors, not other warriors. In addition, I had to do a whole lot of targeting with these heroes since, as you might expect, they all wanted to rush in and attack the nearest target. This was great if that target needed a good butt whooping, but in most cases it allowed bad guys to approach the monk and me and cut us down in short order.

I got the rhythm down of sending Goren after the guys who came after me or after the meddlesome casters, letting knockdown do it’s job. Jora engaged the warriors one on one and had pretty high survivability with her riposte and blocking abilities. Koss pulled double duty with groups and all around damage dealing. Halfway through I wished I’d have brought more crippling capabilities.

It took twice as long as I expected to vanquish this area due to crappy healing/support (my fault) and bad pulls. Also, I may have been watching television at the time.

All in all I was happy with these warriors, but I think they are better to supplement a group that has some strong healing rather than as a fighting force by themselves. Maybe when we are able to outfit our entire parties with heroes I’ll group them with healing heroes and see how well they do.

As for dervishes, well, everything was going well until the dervish update. I had all 3 of my dervishes ready to go with builds from PvX wiki and watched them get cut down in HM since they were no longer balanced. I’m currently doing my research on the new update and will reskill my dervs and prolly reequip them as well. We’ll see what comes of them when I take them out into Mamnoon Lagoon and Sage Lands later on.

Swaddle Me in my Death Shroud

I have to say I am surprised a bit by what I’ve seen and read about the necromancer in GW2. I’ve posted a bunch on GW2Guru about my thoughts, though most of my posts were speculation before the profession was revealed at Gamescom. I was hoping for some sort of unique mechanic associated with the gathering of souls and speculated about a soul battery based on some sort of energy gained for slaying baddies that could be used to affect spells.

Yeah, we got something like that alright.

I appreciate the concept of the Death Shroud, especially regarding both the updated mechanics of death in GW2 and the general lore associated with necromancers. As a unique profession mechanic, I’m still not sold. I am a big fan of versatility and, from what I’ve seen about the death shroud, you’ve got 4 skills and a limited amount of time to use them, and it’s unclear whether these give you an advantage in combat. Sure, it’s pretty cool and I like how it looks in the demos, but after the novelty of “ooh, that’s cool looking” wears off, I’m not so sure I’ll see much benefit in using it in battle. This is, of course, me speaking out my butt since I haven’t personally played the demo and I know there’s a good chance that the final version will be different from what was presented at Gamescom. But hey, what’s a blog without opinions?

What I do like about the death shroud is that it also plays the role of the necromancer’s downed skills. It makes sense that, of all the professions, necromancers would be most proficient when they are dieing. This is where I see a clear advantage for the death shroud. Warriors have “Throw Rock,” but necromancers have “Doom.” If nothing else, the downed skills for the necro sound like the necromancer is in control.

I see a lot of returning skills that I like. I’m also appreciative of the return of minions and I hope that necros a) get a few more to play with both in quality and quantity, and b) get a flesh golem equivalent in GW2. I’d like 10-12, personally, and the demos showed 6-7. As for blood magic, a big thank you to ANet for resurrecting that wonderful, if underused and misunderstood, attribute line. It gets a lot more use in GW2 and appears to be tied to daggers (hooray for logic!). I’m also a fan of the fact that necros get to use axes. Because really, what’s more menacing than a creepy guy carrying an axe?

Death magic appears to be strewn throughout the skill lineup without specifically saying it is death magic. Curses are, well, I’m not sure where. There’s a big debate about curses and hexes in general on the GW2Guru forums. I’m not sure how curses will play out in GW2. I guess we’ll have to wait and see. I’m happy to report that wells are returning and I’m curious about “marks.” Mark of Blood and Reaper’s Mark are two reported skills that use this mechanic. I hope we’ll learn more about this tomorrow in the official reveal on the GW2 website.

All that being said, I’m gonna roll a necro. At this point, I’m 99% sure that my necro will not be Belzan. I’ve come to this decision for a number of reasons including character lore and personal interest in other professions (and possible professions). People change a lot in 250 years…

Blood Build

I’ve been playing around with a build lately that I really enjoy. It is based around Vampiric Spirit.

Air of Superiority (Asura) Vamp Spirit, Vamp Gaze, Angorodon’s Gaze, Blood of the Aggressor, Foul Feast, Optional (I use Sig. Lost Souls, Well of Blood or a condition transfer skill for this spot), Rez.

It works out pretty well. I wear armor with Purity, Recovery and Restoration runes (decrease condition durations). This, a condition transfer skill (like Plague Sending) and the 20% chance of Air of Superiority removing all of my conditions allows me to keep energy up (Angorodon’s Gaze) and remove conditions from the party.

The 4 Life Steal skills are the main damage sources. I’ll assume you know how to point and click Additionally, Vampiric Spirit provides nice regen to offset any degen you suffer from hexes or, more importantly, the conditions you are pulling from your allies.

It doesn’t kick out a lot of damage, but the damage is consistent. You handle most of your own healing and take some of the pressure off of the monk with condition removal. It’s a fun build to play. I vanquished a couple of areas using it the other day.

Enjoy.

Huge Update

There was a huge update today in GW. Lots of skill revamping and, in my opinion, some nice changes.

Ursan finally got the nerfbat hard. As an elite form with a 60 sec downtime, it pretty much made all of the 5-man Ursan builds useless. I guess people are going to have to do things the old fashioned way by using balanced builds (or gimmick builds).

I’m sure the changes to UW also helped to nerf ecto farming there even more (though I don’t farm that area, so I really can’t say how it was affected).

The following changes affect me, and therefore I’ll discuss them a bit more at length:

• Life Transfer: decreased recharge to 20 seconds. Functionality changed to: “Also hexes foes adjacent to target (6..12 second). Causes -3..8 Health degeneration. You have +3..8 Health regeneration.”
• Order of Undeath: increased recharge to 15; decreased Energy cost to 5. Functionality changed to: “All but one of your minions die. If that minion is non-Elite, it deals +5..30 more damage, has +5..20 Health regeneration, and attacks 33% faster (20 seconds).”
• Pain of Disenchantment: decreased casting time to 1 second; increased recharge time to 15 seconds. Functionality changed to: “Target foe loses 1..3 enchantments. Removal effect: that foe and all adjacent foes lose 10..100 Health.”
• Vampiric Spirit: functionality changed to: “Steal 5..50 Health from target foe. You have +5..10 Health regeneration (10 seconds).”

I’m very happy about Life Transfer. I enjoy the AoE nature of this skill and it is now considered the elite version of Suffering, rather than the elite version of Life Siphon. Spread the Degen around!

I’m very upset about Order of Undeath. Rather than it’s very effective previous use of dealing X extra damage (like the other Orders skills) for each minion and dealing you health damage, this new version gives you one weak berserking minion. It doesn’t add any armor to the minion (who is very likely to be below 20th level) and the regen barely counters the degen of the minion. You waste an elite that requires a second animate skill, when you can just as easily take a Flesh Golem. The damage output is comparable and you can enchant and put weapon skills on the Golem.

Pain of Disenchantment. This looks like fun. An elite enchant removal skill that also deals AoE. It’ll go great with Defile/Desecrate for quick AoE damage and enchant removal. I’m looking forward to playing with this skill.

While it does mess up one of my fun builds whereby I am an AoE life sucker…. I kind of like this version of Vampy Spirit better. It works well on a bar with other life steals and adds regen (a saccer’s best friend next to low max health). I’m looking forward to dusting off my old Medusa build to play with this one.

Other than these skills, the PvE skills I usually use haven’t changed much. Most of them received boons and the ones that were nerfed were only slightly so. Most of the PvE skills that received boons got them on the lower end of things, which doesn’t affect me since I’m r8 or better in all of those titles. It is nice for people who aren’t whoring for titles (like me) so they can have a higher benefit at lower ranks in the titles.

That is it for now I guess. More updates as I mess around with these changes. Feel free to post your comments as well.

-Belzan

Medusa Update

Not one day after I post my build (the one I’m really enjoying) does ANet go and change the pivotal skill. No longer does Angorodon’s Gaze steal lots of health and make for an excellent spike when echoed. Here is the change:

Angorodon’s Gaze: decreased Energy cost to 5; decreased Health stolen to 10..40; decreased Energy gained to 1..9.

It is now effectively free to cast this spell and it will often return energy, however, it does not do as well with the steal/damage. In addition, it isn’t viable to echo this skill as much as before. Still it is nice to have on the bar.

Side note: If you’re ok with the “up-close-and-personal” Blood Mage, then this skill now works well in conjunction with Vampiric Spirit as the life steal is increased and you are still essentially casting the spell for free. Likewise, this has better cooperation with the many condition transferring skills since you’re going to be a conditions magnet anyway.

*off to do more playtesting*

Medusa

I call this build “Medusa” because of all of the Gaze attacks. Posted below is the build as I’m currently running it. I’ve included attribute levels and equipment as well (so you can try it out yourself). Following shortly thereafter are alternative skills and their usefulness.

The Medusa is a blood magic build based on spamming life stealing spells. This version is focused on doing so from spell range, rather than “up close and personal” as some of the other blood builds. This tactic is frequently used by E/Me to copy Fireball and is commonly knows as an Echo Chain.