In today’s spine-tingling installment of Grenth’s Grog, Sardu dives headfirst into the pros and cons of a build wholly focused on ground targeted area attacks. The playstyle of a Focused Rituals necro is far more active than many other build concepts, but offers an extremely high degree of control over the battlefield than those that focus primarily on single target attacks.
Read on to see how staff, scepter, wells, and Lich Form can be combined to make one of the more interesting team support builds available to necromancers.
I’m Doing Wells, Thanks
Another of the many necromancer skill lines that I’ve been eyeballing quite intently for a long time now, I decided it’s high time I shared some of my findings on the awesome power of Wells. With the right traits, necros using a combined build focused on marks and wells has the power to control the field of battle like no other profession in the game.
For today’s experiment, our test subject will be using a build that focuses almost wholly on Wells for utility skills, and any traits that specifically support that skill type. We’ll also be adding in the variable of using a staff for Marks to see what happens when you combine the two skill types.
Warning: This conceptual necro build can be one of the most difficult to master. If you’re a skill spammer or have a tendency towards lame WoW style PvP jousting, this combat style probably isn’t for you. But if you are a control freak who wants to become the ultimate master of AoE and manipulation of your surroundings, read on.
Oh, and don’t forget to put your safety goggles on!
Experiment Phase One: The Concept
The concept here is to create a build that focuses almost wholly on ground-targeted abilities. This can be easily achieved through a combination of staff as your primary weapon, scepter / dagger as your secondary set, wells in your healing and utility slots, and Lich Form for your elite skill.
Why would you want to create a build that’s almost wholly focused on ground-targeted AoE (GTAoE) and foregoes nearly all direct damage in the process?
The short answer here is control.
It’s deeply engrained in our gamer brains that you don’t stand in fire, and you certainly don’t ever want to stand within GW2’s red circles of doom. We instinctively dodge out of the way when we see these things, but what happens when those damned circles are planted right where we need to be?
Before we go any further, please be aware that this concept is wholly intended to fulfill a support role. While its primary use is structured PvP, it can also be highly beneficial in the massive meta-events in PvE, world v. world, or even for certain dungeon boss encounters. The one thing it’s not so great for is solo play, and that absolutely applies to trying to be a lone gunman in sPvP. You are factoring in team composition and roles when creating builds for sPvP, right?
Experiment Phase Two: Skills and Traits
By now you should be well versed in the necro’s weapon skills, so let’s begin by taking a closer look at our friendly neighborhood Wells. A thing to focus on here is that you only have 3 utility slots, but 4 different wells to choose from. For this experiment we’ll be assuming you’re using Well of Blood for your healing skill, but let’s start there with our quick rundown.
Well of Blood
Conjure a well of blood to heal nearby allies
At the end of the day, this is really the only necro heal worth keeping on your bar outside of general PvE even if you’re not planning on playing a nutty build wholly focused on GTAoE. For starters, it heals more than any other option thanks to the 10 second regen. Secondly, it also heals allies and has a very strong supporting trait (Ritual of Life) for revives. Lastly, Focused Rituals can make this heal even more beneficial to your group without you having to ride around on your teammate’s shoulders Master Blaster style for them to benefit.
From here you’re going to need to make a few major choices. These include:
- Which three Wells should you slot?
- Should you focus traits primarily on marks, wells, or a combination of both?
- Are you mainly interested in supporting allies, damaging enemies, or self-preservation?
The answers to those three questions are largely symbiotic in that the answer to one will help dictate what the answer to the other two should be. In other words, if you’re mainly interested in supporting allies, that helps you determine which traits to focus on and which specific wells are going to be most beneficial.
Speaking of the available wells, the current lineup includes:
- Well of Corruption - Transforms boons on foes into conditions every two seconds
- Well of Darkness – Target area pulses, blinding foes with each pulse every two seconds
- Well of Power – Transform conditions on allies into boons every two seconds
- Well of Suffering – Damage foes and inflict weakness every two seconds
Without factoring in traits, some universal elements to be aware of with wells include:
- 60 second recharge time
- 8 second duration
- Creates an AoE with a radius of 240
- Are considered a Point Blank Area of Effect (PBAoE) centered on the caster
- Creates a Dark combo field
Pretty much all of that is good stuff, apart from maybe the 60 second recharge. Thankfully, that can be improved with the Ritual Mastery trait which reduces well recharges by 20%, or down to 48 seconds. Traits really are at the heart of taking the all-in approach with wells, so let’s take a look at where you’ll want to consider spending your points.
The three lines you’ll want to focus on are Curses, Death Magic and Blood Magic. The traits associated with wells in each line are listed below, along with one or two that pair exceedingly well with wells, even if the tooltip doesn’t explicitly state that’s the case.
Curses:
- Pitch Black – When you Blind a target, you also apply confusion (pair with Well of Darkness)
- Focused Rituals – Wells become ground targeted
Death Magic:
- Ritual of Protection – Wells apply protection when cast
Blood Magic:
- Ritual of Life – Create a Well of Blood whenever you revive an ally
- Ritual Mastery – Well recharges are reduced by 20%
- Vampiric Rituals – Wells also siphon health
As you can see, focusing your traits on wells will see you spending your points in three specific lines: Curses, Death Magic, and Blood Magic. These same lines also neatly tie in with some of the traits that have a direct impact on your weapon skills, assuming you’re aiming to increase the effectiveness of Marks to stick with the overarching build concept.
You’ll have to make a few choices here between which will give you the most bang for your virtual buck, but assuming you’re sticking with the same three trait lines you’ll also want to consider some of the following from the Death Magic line:
- Greater Marks – Increases the area of marks
- Fateful Marks – Marks are unblockable
- Staff Mastery – Staff skills recharge 15% faster
Don’t forget that you can play around with the awesome build tool over at GW2Build.com to get a feel for not only where to spend your trait points, but which accessories and runes you may want to consider using as well.
Experiment Variable: Lich Form
I’m only going to briefly touch on Lich Form here, but I’m factoring it into the Focused Rituals necro concept based on the fact that it adds some additional GTAoE skills into the mix. I’m not saying it’s necessarily the absolute best choice, but I’ll just reiterate that for our experiment we’re mainly interested in the core concept and playstyle if offers.
Preliminary Findings
I’ve only spent a limited amount of time experimenting with this particular build concept so far, but will likely continue to refine it a bit more this week during the stress test, and again for the next BWE. The biggest things to note thus far include that it is easily one of the most active builds I’ve used in that you’ll be weaving together skills from both weapon sets and your utilities quite a bit more than many other necro builds out there.
Let me put it another way. Before factoring in Death Shroud skills (Dark Path can be great for chilling enemies to keep them within the radius of Wells), out of your 14 available skills this build will grant you a total of 10 ground-targeted abilities, with Lich Form adding a couple more.
I’m also going to reiterate that this build is by no means intended to be that killer DPS build that sees you landing the most killing blows in sPvP. Instead, it will offer a ton of team support and soften up enemies to let your DPS focused allies get in and do their thing. Given the sheer volume of GTAoE involved, this concept can be particularly effective at capture points in sPvP, but can also shine in WvW in certain situations.
If any of you have experimented along the same lines, I’d love to hear your findings as well. And if you haven’t yet, give it a whirl during the stress test this week, and then be sure to let me know what you think of the Focused Rituals necro concept.
Comments
That's quite a write up Sardu. As you know, I am not much for the caster types but the more you write up and share, the more interested I become. Always have enjoyed your writing style anyhow for the most part.
Its a simple world for complicated people
It may be worth noting that putrid mark (staff skill) counts as a blast for the purposes of cross profession combo's which pairs with the dark/light field created by wells (it used to be that 3 of the 5 staff skills that did this). Staff skill one also counts as a projectile and can create combo's also. In any form of group play all those fields (5 of them as there is one on the staff) will help your team mates generate lots of cross profession combo's and this scales with the size of the group. I had a lot of fun with this in BW2 running a support necro - lots of synergies in a staff/well build. It seemed to really shine in keep defense, point control when not running solo and DE's (even though I didn't have enough trait points to pimp my wells out in pve). What you won't see are big numbers and lots of killing blows, what you will see is all your group taking much less damage, regaining health and being more effective in combat while the enemy seems much less effective (aoe blind, weakness, freeze and protection = a lot of damage mitigation). Everything seems just that little bit easier in PVE - an "oil in the gears of a bigger machine" build for group fights.
With only 3 wells, you can have 50% uptime, if you decide to use well of blood as well then your uptime of wells is roughly 70%, that means 70% of the time you have life steals and if you can use your staff skills in the down time of the wells you can have almost 100% AoE control over a small area. I tried a similar build and could hold clock tower against 3 foes without any problems for 60- 90 seconds just waiting on my dps friends to come help down them. With focus on condition damage, I think people may be surprised with the damage that can be put out. I focused on condition damage and health in my build and had a huge health pool with enough damage to where I could down someone 1v1 or 1v2 if the fight went on for long enough. The AoE is the same size as the point so its makes it easier to defend the points. I used plague because it focuses more on AoE support than Lich, you are a moving cloud of blind/confusion and weakness, giving your teammates the upperhand in any fight. That is also why I think that plague actually fits into a wells support build better.
Sardu I just want to point out again you seem to skip over plague form entirely. While the plague form offers point blank aoe instead of gtaoe, the control it offers is amazing, as well as not outwardly advertising the fact that you've swapped over to an ultimate as much as lich form does.
I agree with this. The build is really interesting, and while the post does say Lich Form was selected for thematic purposes, I feel like it's the least appealing option of the three.
Plague Form gives you incredible mobile control, and also a spammable AoE blind - which will get you much more mileage out of the trait that applies confusion on blind. It's also just a really powerful elite in general.
Conversely, I think Flesh Golem might be an interesting choice; the whole idea of having so many GTAoEs is to disrupt players movement, which makes everything else they want to focus on in battle harder. Having a tough, damaging pet seems like a great complement there. A common response to being chased by a tough NPC is to kite it, which means they'll have something specifically encouraging them to run around even more across the battlefield, which plays right into the strategy of being distracting and punishing by turning the battle into a magical minefield.
I have personally experimented with a variant of this which I called the "Ultimate Point Defense" build while using it in sPvP.
http://www.gw2build.com/builds/simulator.php#1.5.7.4.0.18.0.0.0.0.106.11...
This is a staff + axe/focus variation with WoB, WoD, WoS, and Spectral Armor as the healing and utility skills.
The key is making sure you haven't completely pulled your own teeth by taking an amulet that gives you a strong boost to Power. Both weapon sets I prefer deal direct damage with their #1 skill attacks, so I favored Power over condition damage. I did not die... I killed many opponents... Cap points I took stayed in my possession for as long as I wanted them to... my teams won.
A lower level variant of that is what I took into my PUG runs through the Ascalonian Catacombs dungeon in BW2 with much success. (I didn't have access to Lich Form so I used the Flesh Golem minion instead.) My playstyle tends towards "aggressive" and close range regardless of the weapons I'm using. Placing wells close to the mobs (where I am usually) allowed my teammates to be taking advantage of the combo fields with great regularity. This also allowed me to be the primary focus of the mobs' attention usually and with superior health and healing skills, not to mention the "ace in the sleeve" that is the Death Shroud mechanic for our profession, I was able to keep groups moving through the dungeon fairly well. Completed it in explorable mode 4 times, plus an extremely smooth run through the story mode (compared to what I've seen in Youtube videos anyway...)
Providing life steals to any allies using combo finisher projectile attacks (basically any bow or firearm profession for sure, ie; ranger, warrior, engineer, thief... and most of the others have "some" means of doing them also) makes for a LOT of incidental healing with no additional effort on anyone's part over the course of one of those dungeon runs. And, of course, with the staff equipped you're taking advantage of them too.
(oh... and popping Lich Form in sPvP when you already have close to 30k health to start with will really f*** up your opponent's head!)
I tried a group friendly conditions build in sPvP, but as I am not in a 'guild' or playing sPvP with a regular group I had to PuG it, and my experience was that I got swarmed and owned quickly. I think I must just be a crappy player, because I've never won against 2 or more players with this type of build. I'd love to see some more sPvP videos from you guys with commentary on what/how/why you are doing what you are doing, so as to help out in this area. Then again, maybe I just don't have the quick thinking reaction time to play sPvP.
Getting "reflex" familiar with your build helps quite a bit, and so does going into the match with a gameplan firmly in mind.
For instance; "knowing" that in the event that 2 or more opponents show up I'm going to execute skills x, y, and z - in that order means I don't have to evaluate the situation, or make up my mind about what I should do in the heat of the moment.
The biggest epiphany for me personally in PvP was when I realized that the vast majority of my attribute points were going to be coming from the amulet - which freed me up to select trait lines for purposes other than "just covering all my bases." I could go with a full "defensive" build with the trait lines, and then still insert considerable offensive punch with the amulet and jewel.
Selecting your weapons and traits around your preferred play style, and with a cohesive plan in mind definitely makes a significant difference.
The number one mistake I see most folks make (who are struggling with PvP) is that they make their choices of weapons and traits thinking ONLY about what they are going to do to their opponents. I design my character around what my opponents are going to try to do to me, and how I can counter that. It's a personal preference, but being "durable" suits my particular play style, and allows me to face superior numbers of opponents with the calm assurance that I'm going to have a say in the outcome.
At this point in time, the general level of understanding of the game's mechanics among the player population is somewhat low, and folks are still just "getting used to the basics" and not really executing any well tested strategies or tactics. That will likely stay the case for an extended period of time for the random PUG style sPvP. In those conditions, it's relatively easy to dominate as an individual player.
Once the game launches, and actual tournament play WITH REAL TEAMS of players begins, I expect my "superman routine" won't hold up nearly as well... heh. Yes, I've faced down 3 v 1, but those 3 weren't communicating in Vent/teamspeak/mumble and they didn't have coordinated tactics.
Conversely, once I'm able to practice with a regular partner... well, we will see...
Worth noting that with this build you can hold off any group of enemies in one place for quite a long time. You`re probably holding off 30% to 50% of the enemy team by yourself...
Also, I`ve invested in runes, two of the lich, amalu (?) and another one that, when combined, expanded the duration of all conditions by 20%. That gives quite a punch in the conclusions enemy players will make with the situation.
Ths build is lots of fun... for those who don`t want to dominate alone. Think Chaosmancer, you got it!