Curse

Riotgear · Aug 16, 2006, 06:55 AM // 06:55

I've been kicking this around for a while and I think I've struck gold. It kind of started as an anti-toucher build, but wound up getting gradually rounded off until it turned into this extremely effective setup:

Water Magic: 11+1+3
Energy Storage: 10+1
Domination Magic: 10

Ether Prodigy, Ice/Teinai's Prison, Deep Freeze, Blurred Vision, Shatter Enchantment, Complicate, Arcane Echo, Diversion

The purpose of the build is pure offensive support. That is, it deals almost no damage on its own, instead focusing on either taking key players out of the fight, or turning the tide of battle at opportune moments. It works extremely well against touch rangers, assassins, warriors, monks, spikers, and provides at least basic utility against practically anything.

There are three basic uses: First, slowing melee attackers to an absolute crawl to prevent them from doing anything. Second, ensuring players trying to get away wind up dead. Water hexes prevent them from escaping, shatter enchantment and complicate prevent the vast majority of self-heal abilities from executing properly.

Third, diversion spam. Arcane echo can be used to repeatedly apply diversion, a combination that provides some interesting properties:
- Timed properly, it provides only two 1-second breaks over the course of 35 seconds where diversion is not in effect. Anyone who chooses to wait out diversion will be waiting a very long time.
- It resists skill sacrificing and misfires extremely well due to the constant reapplication.
- Since most people who are familiar with diversion don't expect it to be repeated, they'll often have an important skill promptly knocked out by the echoed cast.

Shortfalls: Ranger interrupts and disrupting chop/stab own it. The only defense it has is Blurred Vision, which gives you a 50% chance to not get floored during the extremely long cast times. Mesmers own it (unless they're targetting someone else, in which case, they don't really know how to handle diversion spam either). Holy Veil REALLY owns it.

The prettier version on GuildWiki.

So, comments, suggestions?