OChunx

Reverse Ghost, on 27 February 2013 - 09:26 PM, said:

I can see a skilled player pulling this off, and making this playstyle better than just staying on staff the whole time. The marks of blood, though, need to hit all your minions and landed at least twice consecutively, before allowing for a safe weapon swap to axe / focus, which might be hard to pull off. After the patch, I'm not sure if jagged horrors are even able to be maintained now, but swapping guarantees that you won't be able to since you might end up with more than 5 targets for mark of blood, that is, if you were able to maintain multiple jagged horrors in the first place at all. Obviously, the only reason to swap is if you are facing a veteran or champion as trash mobs will usually die within the time you use 2-3 marks of blood and staff's other skills are still superior in the case of fighting multiple mobs.

I'm thinking that the amount of stats you sacrifice is mostly negligible for the extra duration, but I guess that's probably the biggest downside I can see to using the runes instead of the orbs: the loss of about 140 stats with 90 being healing power. Even if you don't switch to axe, the regen duration is still useful in case you miss some marks of blood so you really aren't making a sacrifice at all in order to set up the conditions to more effectively switch to axe. In addition, the recent axe buffs also make the weapon more attractive.

So in conclusion, I'd say go for it. If swapping means you can't effectively maintain regen on your minions, then just don't swap and you won't be any worse off for having the runes over the orbs. If you are able to swap effectively, then I'd say veterans (maybe champions) will be falling a lot faster. I'd be curious in your testing for this. Right now, the build in this guide lacks any effective utilization of the second weapon set. If axe / focus would provide a notable improvement, then it may be worthy to be main-barred, and there would be a  tighter build and a lot less stuff in the "variant" sections. At least at this point, I'm reluctant to say axe / focus will make any big difference but feel free to prove me wrong.

EDIT: When using axe / focus, would a cleric's set be a better choice? Clerics would provide a great boost to axe / focus while giving a moderate boost to staff damage. Apothecary would give a great boost to staff damage, but none at all to axe / focus. Given that staff is still going to be used the majority of the time, it seems smarter just to stick with apothecary and use the axe solely for the vulnerability stacking aspects of it, and then switching back to staff as soon as weapon swap is off cooldown.

Thorfinnr, on 26 February 2013 - 07:34 PM, said:

Looks great. For me, the only vital parts are getting the right trait line and having healing power. Clerics over apothecary won't make a huge difference on the jewelry. That being said, today's patch increased Passion flower drop rates and added new affixes for ascended gear to the laurel merchant. I suspect the price of apothecary jewelry to go down soon, though I haven't checked yet what new affixes were added. Can anyone confirm if apothecary is or isn't there?

Stellar, on 22 February 2013 - 01:54 PM, said:

I just went and tested out the axe in the PvP area, and I was honestly surprised at how much better it is at stacking conditions than I remembered. I would say taking axe/focus is a completely viable idea, as it provides increased minion damage and can heal them. Although dagger/dagger would probably outdamage axe/focus in the long run even with the vulnerability stacks, you can certainly burst 15+ vulnerability stacks in the short run, which is good.

The only thing I would argue against though, is the reasoning for using the axe/focus. We do not want to use the axe/focus (and trait for it by giving up our staff traits) simply because it does more single target damage. The main flaw is that with axe/focus, there's no way to maintain your minions and they'll quickly die off in battle or early in the next one because of a lack of healing. We use staff because it not only actively supports our minions, but also because it is the necro's only source of AoE. The minions themselves already do great single target damage, what the build lacks is the AoE. By all means, take axe/focus as your secondary set, but I would highly recommend against getting rid of staff traits and using axe/focus as your main set.

That being said, I think axe/focus would actually work very well in the minion bomber build that Thorfinnr was experimenting with, since in that build the minions don't need to survive (even then, staff is required for its AoE). I also forgot about Mark of Evasion and see that as a viable variant as a Blood Magic trait. I'll also update the guide to include comments on axe/focus as well, although only as a secondary set.

All-in-all. Staff is still used 95% of the time, but for those 5% of the time that you don't need to heal minions or for whatever reason you want to switch, axe/focus seems like a cool choice.

Thorfinnr, on 21 February 2013 - 08:35 PM, said:

I suppose so, staff mastery (or greater marks as well) would work and it follows the right logic. However, I'm not sure of the viability of going a full minion bomber simply because of those horrendous cooldowns on the minions combined with the terrible damage. In fact, as far as I know, death nova doesn't even do any damage; it just poisons the location where the minion exploded for 3 seconds, which may or may not even hit the target. Death nova does combo well with bone minions though since it provides a AoE poison combo field for them, as well as flesh wurm since you can also manually kill him.

Thorfinnr, on 18 February 2013 - 09:43 PM, said:

I don't see why your changes would mess up anything. Looks good to me. Only thing is the two charges do not stack, only the first charge from whatever weapon u killed with will work and the other will have no effect. Losing the sigil of life is fine and won't impact your survivability, only the minions. After the most recent patch however, healing power has been noticeably weakened when you're down scaled, making every HEaling power point more valuable, though thAts just my experience.

But then again, with death nova you don't even need healing gear. Just use the rabid set and use the Minion Master trait.