34 replies to this topic

[AnteiUF]

Xenomortis, on 07 April 2013 - 07:39 PM, said:

Why do you want +100% bleed duration?
Is there some extra benefit that I'm missing, or is that the goal in itself?

I ask because the obvious change I'd make to this trait setup is to knock back Spite to 10 and put 30 into Soul Reaping for the 'Near to Death' trait (-50% DS recharge) for potentially 100% Fury uptime.
Hell, I might even suggest cutting the Spite spec completely (I am uninterested in the Might from the slow-as-hell Life Blast) and going 10 into Blood (or Death, but the traits are less useful). Of course, if you don't have any survivability issues, then you might as well keep the Spite spec.

What you suggest sounds like it will end up too muddled to be ineffective, and clearly the point of the OP's build is missed.  (To your credit you did ask why!)

Here is a quote from the OP in a different post (http://www.guildwars...on-field-guide/) just focusing on the +100% bleed duration:

Quote

A figure of +100% bleed duration comes with a few key benefits. The first and most obvious one is that it doubles your bleed duration, which doubles your bleed damage (if the bleed ticks for its full duration). Bleeding only does damage once every full second, so a 5-second bleed does damage 5 times. If you increase the duration to 5 1/2 seconds, the bleed still only does damage 5 times.

If you were to increase your bleed duration by 50%, that 5 second bleed becomes a 7 1/2 second bleed. But because of how bleeding works, it does damage only 7 times. You would have to increase bleeding duration by 60% to get the duration up to 8 seconds for that extra tick. Since bleeds have different default durations, the only increase that you can be sure will never leave you with a fractional time on your bleeds is +100%.

+100% bleed duration is also the only way to get a 1-second bleed to tick multiple times. Specifically, the 1-second bleed granted by the minor trait Barbed Precision. Depending on your gear, you should have between 50 and 70% crit chance. 66% of those crits will trigger Barbed Precision, which now ticks twice per application, doubling its damage.

You can imagine that in rampager's gear and autoattacking with a dagger (or axe 2) how this last paragraph helps things to really add up.

Edited by AnteiUF, 08 April 2013 - 06:07 PM.

[Xenomortis]

My suggestion in a nutshell is to go 10 Spite and 30 SR; I don't see how that's "muddled". The rest was just ramblings.
But the point on 100% Bleed duration is taken.

So you get an extra pip from the Bleed on crit by going 15 Spite, which you lose dropping it to 10.
You'll also lose a pip from other sources of bleeding; the Scepter auto-attacks (including Poison, you drop one pip every attack) and Grasping Dead.
Crude approximation; you lose 100 damage (more if you're fully decked out) on each of these attacks and with a Sigil of Earth and the Curses trait, you lose another 100 damage on approximately every other crit.

So I guess the question I should ask myself is: how much do I gain from 100% fury uptime vs 50% fury uptime and how much easier is it to survive with the shorter DS cooldown?
I don't have an answer right now.

Edited by Xenomortis, 08 April 2013 - 06:20 PM.

[Melloyellow1]

Thanks for making this guide first of all. But its missing for me the most important bit of information which is the rotation. I just got a necro to 80 recently and figuring out an optimal rotation was harder than I thought with this build (which is almost the same as what I had put together myself).

With this build unlike others prof/builds you aren't swapping between weapons or attunement to use that one or two big attacks where the basic attack sort of is just a filler or only used after buffing/debuff until you can unleash the damage again. With this you want to use your auto attack on scepter and axe resepctively. I'm sure its worth using off-cooldown enfeebling blood, grasping dead, and even reaper's touch, but how do you balance the bleed from scepter and vuln stacking from axe? One is going to be more worth than the other. (Sorry if I ignored the dagger as a primary but I see no room for a single target melee weapon in a glass cannon build that uses death shroud offensively, but maybe thats just me and the type of dungeons/encounters I run.)

Over all it basically confirms everything I had already theory crafted about this type of build before getting my necro to 80 and I appreciate the time and effort I know you probably put into making this but it raises a lot of questions for me perhaps you know the answers from your testing/play time with this build.

Questions:

1. Does unholy feast have any place in a rotation, single target or group? I assume no in single target and yes in group, but how many does a group have to have to make it worth it? also assuming you start the encounter in axe, otherwise should you actually weapon swap out of scepter just to use feast in an AoE situation? losing out on all the potential bleed damage spread from epidemic.

2. Are ghastly claws and feast of corruption worth using when death shroud is maxed?

3. How many boons would it take for the enemy have to make spinal shivers dps viable? If its viable at all for dps purposes that is.

4. How high in bleeds and/or vuln stacks should you hope to achiev before going into deathly shroud? or is deathly shroud a dps increase regardless of those two conditions?

5. Which weapon should we look to start with when deathly shroud is too low to begin (again assuming DS is the dps priority). Keep in mind that starting with axe builds vuln which bleeds dont benefit from.

Just a few questions that came to mind at first and probably some others I forgot while writing this out. But mostly I would just like to know how your basic rotation starts out in fights for both single target and AoE ( also solo and grouped) for maximum damage.

First time ever posting on this site, thanks a bunch in advance.

[AnteiUF]

Xenomortis, on 08 April 2013 - 06:20 PM, said:

My suggestion in a nutshell is to go 10 Spite and 30 SR; I don't see how that's "muddled". The rest was just ramblings.

Haha, well the ramblings were the muddled part I was referring to!  I just meant that the stat points might be too spread out for them to really accomplish anything.

By cutting the spite points you're just neutering the build (losing condition duration), in which case you should use a different build (and hence gear differently).  I'm not sure that anybody claimed this to be the "best dps" build, I personally just thought that it was a cool idea that really plays well off of the different aspects of the necro class.  

It seems to me to be hard to really compute exact numbers for these builds, but as you suggested by lowering the bleed duration sub-100% you're losing at the minimum (maybe more) ~100 damage for each of many attacks and the majority of crits.  One thing that's generally true is that crit rate suffers diminishing returns (regardless of the intention of the designers), where things like power and condition damage will not (unless they're actually forced to have DR by the designers.).  The first post in the following link explains what I mean by crit rate and DR.  This is true across all games (WoW, SWTOR, whatever) and is just a fact of binomial probability.

http://www.guildwars...rate-is-enough/

My point being that in a rampager setup one is already at 60+% crit, so going to 80 might not add very much dps, while dropping multiple ticks of bleeds constantly will certainly significantly lower one's dps.  I have no idea though, maybe swapping gear to gain +crit damage would help with the innate DR of crit chance, but then we're well out of the territory of this +100% bleed build.

Edited by AnteiUF, 09 April 2013 - 01:49 PM.

[Switchback]

Been awhile since I checked into this topic, but I want to add a comment in for those considering a bleed build, and should be of value to any conditionmancer.

Quote

+100% bleed duration is also the only way to get a 1-second bleed to tick multiple times. Specifically, the 1-second bleed granted by the minor trait . Depending on your gear, you should have between 50 and 70% crit chance. 66% of those crits will trigger Barbed Precision, which now ticks twice per application, doubling its damage.

After some testing done by others, and I double checked and found this to be true, you do not actually need +100% duration to get Barbed Precision to tick a 2nd time, nor for say a 5 second bleed to tick 10 times. It is rather more random, and can happen with less.

Only on the very first application of any condition would this be necessary. As the way condition damage works, once the first damaging condition is on an opponent, it starts a timer of when condition damage will tick, and all furthering conditions then must adapt and hold to that same timer. Think of a combat length as in segments like that are on ruler, and lets say the first bleed is applied at 1.5 seconds into the combat, the first tick will happen at 2.5 seconds, then 3.5 seconds, etc. So if we then use a second bleeding ability (say Barbed Precision) and it lands at 3.0 seconds into the combat, it will first tick at 3.5 seconds, then again at 4.5 seconds, etc. Following the exact same time segments set by the first bleed. Therefore, if you have only +50% duration, you would get two ticks in this scenario - because at 1.5 seconds length Barbed Precision, it is enough for it to cross 2 tick points, due to that it started counting halfway past the last tick.

What this means for the bleeder build is that 90% duration is not really way worse than 100%. Outside of the first bleed which will set the timer for all conditions, 90% is like it should be, only 10% less effective than 100%.

Terror damage which ticks off Fear works the exact same way, and that is why sometimes Fear will tick twice on damage even if you have less than +100% Fear duration.

To give an example, if your bleeds do 100 damge per tick, and you get 10 Barbed Precision proc's in a combat, at +100% Duration, you should expect 2000 damage from those procs. While at +90% duration you should expect 1900 damage (roughly on average). 80% to be 1800 damage, etc on down.

The way they have done this system is actually quite fair and means that extra duration is not wasted, or an 'all or nothing' propistion if you just fall short of hitting some magic number like +100%.

I hope this was not too confusing and is understandable. And perhaps helpful.

Edited by Switchback, 30 April 2013 - 12:05 PM.