Curse

jesh · Sep 08, 2005, 06:01 PM // 18:01

Okay... originally I had thought I was going to do something like this:

Spiteful spirit
Mark of pain
Archane echo
Signet of midnight
Epidemic
Spirit shackles
Enfeebling blood
Shadow of fear

Then I realized that's two elites! Rawr!

So yeah.. Now I was thinking of something more like this, but I don't know how effective it would be.

Spiteful spirit
Mark of pain
Archane echo
Distortion
Spirit Shackles
Enfeebling blood
Shadow of fear
Illusion of weakness/Unholy feast

I don't know how this would work for hardcore farming.. but maybe..?
I might end up switching to N/W for some yummy tactics ness, but I don't know yet. The downside of that would be I miss out on archane echo. ;_;
Ah well, tell me what you all think.

ak347 · Sep 08, 2005, 06:14 PM // 18:14

First, mark of pain only useful if ur physically attacking them....
Second, if you're going solo (as stated in title), you need health and energy management. Think blood renewal and some mesmer inspiration skills (a la channeling, etherlord, power block, inspired hex, etc...)
Alot of your skills are mana heavy and take a long time to cast. You need to remember that you're going to be alone, so you're going to need fast, effective spells.
Personally, I think there are only 2 opportunities for Necro soloing - a death minion build and a N/Mo with protection spells (there are just too many heavy hitters out there, you need protection especially with low armor). Maybe a N/E bloody earth character would work (cool name eh?). Anyways, glad to see you're thinking about character building with a tough choice (necros very hard to work with most of the time). Have lots of fun, necros are great.

Spura · Sep 08, 2005, 06:50 PM // 18:50

Quote:

Originally Posted by ak347

some mesmer inspiration skills (a la channeling, etherlord, power block, inspired hex, etc...)

Power block is domination, and etherlord is crap.

Carinae · Sep 08, 2005, 07:43 PM // 19:43

Quote:

Originally Posted by ak347

Maybe a N/E bloody earth character would work (cool name eh?).

I'm an N/E and I can't imagine soloing without changing to N/Mo. What spells are you envisioning?

ak347 · Sep 08, 2005, 07:58 PM // 19:58

@Spura - Yes, i dont like etherlord either, but it works for some. I forgot the name of the 5 mana mesmer inspiration interrupt (power drain?).
Anyways, @Carinae:
I posted a N/Mo sacrificial protector - prot spirit, blood renewal, dark aura, touch of agony, dark pact, barbed signet + plague touch (optional), mending (controversial, i found it helped), and either Offering of Blood or Aura of the Lich. Either elite has its benifits. This is a 55 hp build (ascalon city -50 hp item, 5 sup runes, sword of enchanting). Most points in blood (especially to get the +6 pips on renewal), points in death for dark aura, and at least 15 second Protective spirit ( i think 8 points in?). Basically works almost like monk soloer, cept it does MAJOR spike damage (praying that u don't get shatter enchanted), but there are a few drawbacks (mana drains fast - u need some soul reaping, mesmers kill your enchants = instagib). A good long term build would be a death minion necro, but I dont find that as interesting.

Edit: for a N/E i would think probably a death minion tanking setup with earth magic (WaM, WaE, Armor of Earth) or water (WaH), along with verata spells. To get your minions started, you'd need an earth attack (thinking stone daggers, earthquake, maybe even obsidian flame), and for energy management carry glyph of energy or offering of blood (though it would suck without blood magic), and invest a couple points in soul reaping. A E/N would have the benefit of using ether prodigy (more useful than renewal in this case i think).

jesh · Sep 08, 2005, 08:24 PM // 20:24

lol, I think he meant Power Leak.
I am very aware of mark of pain being physical only, but I use a henge of denravi energy +5 sword anyway.

If you would actually look at the list of skills that I have there, you'll see that I'll be taking very very little damage if I can pull it off. The curses are longer casting, but I'd use the according focus to hopefully speed things up.

Saying that a n/mo with protection or a minionater are the only ways to go is a little more than narrow minded, if you ask me.

I don't know if you know what those skills do, but if I archane echo spiteful spirit and start activating mark of pain, that's at least 100dps. Well, to all but one target. That is not shabby at all. Then I'd distort, lay down spirit shackles to negate the energy loss, and use enfeebling blood / shadow of fear to make the damage that I actually recieve tiny, and in small amounts. If I managed to do all that, I don't think that I'd have a problem with only illusion of weakness/unholy feast for a heal.

However.. I think it could be more easily done on a n/w.

Spiteful Spirit
Mark of Pain
Bonetti's Defense
Shield stance
Disciplined stance
Balanced stance
Defensive stance
Watch Yourself

Keep a stance up for the whole fight, cast Spiteful and Mark when you're in Disciplined or Shield Stance. Use Bonetti's when you're low on energy. Might throw Healing Signet in there somewhere? I wouldn't know where, though. Flurry would be nice, but that it's a stance, and there are more useful ones to be had.

Carinae · Sep 08, 2005, 09:00 PM // 21:00

Quote:

Originally Posted by ak347

@Carinae:
I posted a N/Mo sacrificial protector - prot spirit, blood renewal, dark aura, touch of agony, dark pact, barbed signet + plague touch (optional), mending (controversial, i found it helped), and either Offering of Blood or Aura of the Lich. Either elite has its benifits. This is a 55 hp build (ascalon city -50 hp item, 5 sup runes, sword of enchanting). Most points in blood (especially to get the +6 pips on renewal), points in death for dark aura, and at least 15 second Protective spirit ( i think 8 points in?). Basically works almost like monk soloer, cept it does MAJOR spike damage (praying that u don't get shatter enchanted), but there are a few drawbacks (mana drains fast - u need some soul reaping, mesmers kill your enchants = instagib).

I have run this build (or something really really close) but find it is a major pain to maintain all the defenses AND keep an offense going.

Keeping AotL, PS, Blood Renewal and DA active is tough. They take a lot of mana to maintain. Plus you need to spread attribute points over four magics: Blood, Death, Protection and Soul Reaping.

But, yes, it can be done, for a while at least.

I don't want to hijack the thread though, so...

Concerning the N/E build: One aataxe would eat your minions and then eat you, so this CAN'T be for a UW soloer, although it might work for a normal farming soloing build.

jesh · Sep 08, 2005, 09:02 PM // 21:02

I think it's beyond everything mostly to solo the uw now. The only things that come to mind are a w/e and a power mesmer. So yeah, just talking about regular farming.

ak347 · Sep 09, 2005, 01:03 PM // 13:03

Yeah, Guess i didn't think too hard about your build jesh, i see what you mean.
Anyways, I don't think you'd need spirit shackles. Mark of pain might work i'll admit. Though i still think you're going to be low on energy. It might indeed be better with warrior, because flurry+mark of pain+ bonettis would keep you alive and dealing good dmg.
O, and yea, never to solo UW
Never

lol

Silmor · Sep 09, 2005, 03:21 PM // 15:21

The main problem with a N/Me farming build is the large amount of spells you need to cast to 'set up' your kills, and the lack of scalable spells that let you deal with large groups in the same manner as with small groups. I've been doing some research on mountain troll farming for a N/Me, here's a quick rundown of my experiences so far:

Blood Magic
Blood Renewal: a good way to get yourself killed. Avoid this (unless you're using an Aura of the Lich type of build).

Life Siphon: decent to keep yourself alive at first (although the required 12 attribute points for 3 pips of regen can be taxing on a build), but the associated energy cost is brutally impractical.

Demonic Flesh: nice as precast, with some investment into blood magic this increases your health buffer for most of the fight. If it runs out before the trolls are dead however you're typically screwed, and that's why it's not a great choice.

Life Transfer: long recharge makes this a waste of your elite.

Signet of Agony: I thought about using this to plague touch bleeding to the target troll, then use Virulence to stack on disease, poison and weakness, then to Epidemic it to the rest of the pack. But all these steps make it too clunky to be practical, and don't leave much room for self-preservation.

Unholy Feast: a decent panic button for when you're on low health, but the long recharge means you can only rely on it once. On top of that it's rather expensive, which can cut into your options for a second application of weakening.

Curses
Enfeebling Blood: very nice, but you typically won't succeed in killing the mob before it runs out, and reapplying it is very dangerous with the health sacrifice.

Enfeeble: Combined with Epidemic it's the safe version of Enfeebling Blood, but slightly slower, more costly energy-wise and taking up another skill slot.

Mark of Pain: a lovely and fast killing device, and very scalable. Not sure if they're still obtainable from anywhere, but a +5 energy zealous sword of defense is the perfect tool to be triggering it, and with the high setup energy cost, you'll probably be needing a +12e/+15e/-1regen off-hand focus anyway, so it fits.

Shadow of Fear: excellent skill to cut incoming damage in half, but goes somewhat against the effectiveness of Spiteful Spirit in the sense that they'll damage themselves at half the rate as well. Since farming is all about speed in the end, that might not be desireable. Works as an excellent hex to power Feast of Corruption though, and as long as you don't use Spiteful Spirit (and I believe you shouldn't), this skill is simply awesome.

Insidious Parasite: with enfeebled trolls and with physical resistance up, this does a somewhat decent job of keeping your health from dropping too fast throughout an encounter, and considering Mark of Pain will drop everything you're not hitting much faster than your target, it won't create issues with one target dropping faster than the rest. Drawbacks are high cost and general inefficiency at keeping you alive.

Parasitic Bond: cheap and fast to cast, but rather unreliable (since regardless of your casts there's a 20 second window in which you simply won't be healed by it) and tricky to wield. You'll want to be casting a few of these when first engaging, but you have so many other skills to cast at that moment that Parasitic Bond becomes impractical.

Spiteful Spirit: Looks really good on paper, but with the slow attack rate of the trolls it's not going to be as effective as you want it to be, especially not if you used Shadow of Fear to cut their attack speed in half. Mark of Pain alone can take care of the scalable offense, so skip this one, and definitely don't start arcane echo'ing it, you simply won't have the energy for it.

Feast of Corruption: damage and scalable self-heal in one, this one is definitely interesting. Combined with Shadow of Fear you can use this when your health gets low to instantly get back up to full health in larger groups, but the 20s recharge aspect on it can turn it into a panic button that won't save you in the end.

Desecrate Enchantments: mediocre and expensive area damage, not worth the skill slot I think.

Suffering: slow and expensive area damage, similarly not worth the skill slot.

Death Magic
Aura of the Lich/Dark Aura: using this means you're going to be stuck with a sacrificial build, high death magic, high blood magic and use 1/4th cost sacrifices to kill. Haven't tried this yet, might do so once I've found the best way through Curses, which is more interesting to play with. I'll skip the related skills for this reason.

The rest in Death Magic is either not very scalable or isn't interesting until trolls start dying.

Soul Reaping
Invest your leftovers in this. It'll give you a nice bit of energy to take out the target troll when Mark of Pain drops the rest. During combat it's not going to help you one bit.

Domination Magic
I don't believe this offers any interesting scalable options: chaos storm is the only useful area effect, and the damage output is not worth the energy or attribute investment.

Illusion Magic
Sympathetic Visage: a nice way to avoid getting your skills disrupting chop'ed, and it also reduces incoming damage from Mighty Blow. But since you can't afford to spec heavily into illusion magic, the recharge will cause a large window when it'll be down, which makes Soothing Images more attractive; on a sidenote, this skill works nicely against tactics fanatics such as Tengu Elite, since they'll simply drain their own energy.

Soothing Images: a more solid solution against disrupting chop and other adrenal nastiness, since you can cast it back to back. The energy cost can become an issue at the second casting however.

Distortion: 75% dodge sounds pretty nice on paper, but a secondary mesmer will be facing 1 energy loss at each evade minimum, and that's after heavy spec'ing into illusion magic [edited for accuracy, thanks Cymmina]. Against larger groups this means you can kiss your energy goodbye, so it pretty much fails as a defensive farming tool - on top of that you'll want Physical Resistance as your stance anyway.

Fevered Dreams: it's typically easier to use Virulence to spread conditions around, the window this skill offers is to short to compensate for taking up your elite.

Inspiration Magic
Physical Resistance: halves incoming damage, can be comfortably precast even at moderate inspiration magic, just doesn't combo with distortion which isn't a good solution anyway, so go for it.

Channeling: helps to keep energy levels up throughout the fight, and can easily be precast. It doesn't scale well in the sense that although you'll have plenty of energy in large groups but can't rely on this for small encounters, but considering the latter is usually much more forgiving anyway, this isn't a real problem. Definitely something to consider if you have the spot free.

Unlinked
Signet of Midnight: your only decent chance at blinding (we'll skip Ineptitude since as far as blinding options go, it loses out to this one), but a very nice one at that. There's two ways to spread the blindness to your foes: you can either use Epidemic (which lets you slip in Enfeeble for both weakness and blind, but this might be overkill), but that still leaves you blind as well, and you typically want to be hitting your Mark of Pain, which would require you to Plague Touch it to your target: too complicated. The second way to spread it is easier: combine this with Plague Sending, to cure yourself of blindness and spread the blindness around at the same time. This just incurs a health hit from sacrifice, but considering the entire pack will be blinded from that point forward, that's not such a bad thing.

Arcane Echo: too slow and energy-heavy to consider in my opinion.

Echo: haven't found a good combination to validate taking this over one of the other elites for this kind of work.

As far as equipment is concerned, it's pretty straight-forward:
- Either get Scar armour for added energy, or get Necrotic/Tormentor for 16% damage reduction, get a facial scar to pump whatever your focused attribute is.
- If you're working with Mark of Pain, try to obtain a +5 energy sword with defensive upgrade. Zealous is optional, it can get inefficient since you're spending a lot of time casting spells on top of slashing. Any regular sword will do otherwise; if you're not working with Mark of Pain, go for a +5 energy wand.
- As focus I'd recommend a +12e/+15e/-1regen focus to increase your energy pool. I found a regular +12e/20/20 focus doesn't give enough energy buffer to set up for encounters.

jesh · Sep 09, 2005, 04:48 PM // 16:48

Signet of Midnight+Plague Sending is pretty dang smart. Thanks for taking the time to write all that up, but you aren't going to stop me from experimenting. I'll never give up my archane echo. Muahahaha.

Silmor · Sep 09, 2005, 07:21 PM // 19:21

I'm still experimenting myself (and enjoying it quite a bit), and I didn't intend to discourage experimenting - that's also why I just posted my findings on the skills, I'm not happy enough with the combinations I've found so far to post anything more conclusive, perhaps they can help someone smarter piece together something brilliant.

About Arcane Echo, I just noticed time and time again that I didn't have the energy or the time to be arcane echo'ing anything when there were 12 trolls hammering on me, and I can't see an elite worth arcane echo'ing (Feast of Corruption is about the only one I'd try) but I wouldn't mind being proven wrong on it one bit.

Cymmina · Sep 09, 2005, 07:27 PM // 19:27

Quote:

Then I'd distort, lay down spirit shackles to negate the energy loss

Spirit Shackles doesn't actually give you energy. It causes your target to lose energy, that's it. Maybe you're thinking of Spirit of Failure.

Your build must be tailor made for whatever you are soloing. Blindness isn't going to do much good if your target is a mage.

I solo lvl 20 warrior mobs as my Me/N, but you should be able to do it with a N/Me no problem (must have 12 illusion, 10 inspiration). My build is equally effective with small and large groups.

Spiteful Spirit
Spirit of Failure
Price of Failure
Distortion
Parasitic Bond
Illusion of Weakness
Enfeebling Blood
Sympathetic Visage

I only use Enfeebling Blood if I have 4+ targets attacking me at once. My weapon is a +4 AR sword and a 5% faster recharge or casting (all skills) focus with 12 energy.

Quote:

Distortion: 75% dodge sounds pretty nice on paper, but a secondary mesmer will be facing 2 energy loss at each evade minimum

How do you figure? You can get 1 energy loss with 12 illusion magic. Oh and I tested Distortion against Physical Resistance. I took roughly half the damage with PR compared to a ~75% evasion rate with Distortion (you actually get hit less than 75% of the time once both Failure curses are up, giving 25% chance to miss for each curse). Even with -2 energy per evade, you will gain 2 energy each time Distortion is fired because Spirit of Failure fires *any* time the target fails to hit you.

You don't really need all that energy, either. I ran this build with 39 energy (42 now that I've purchased different armor). By the time you get Spirit/Price of Failure and Parastic Bond on everything around you (takes time, which is why Illusion of Weakness is there to give you a buffer), you will have full health and full energy and can keep the pattern of casting those 3 curses (plus Spiteful Spirit tossed in whenever) long after you run out of guys, provided you don't bite off more than you can chew in the beginning.

Silmor · Sep 09, 2005, 08:06 PM // 20:06

Quote:

Originally Posted by Cymmina

How do you figure? You can get 1 energy loss with 12 illusion magic. Oh and I tested Distortion against Physical Resistance. I took roughly half the damage with PR compared to a ~75% evasion rate with Distortion (you actually get hit less than 75% of the time once both Failure curses are up, giving 25% chance to miss for each curse). Even with -2 energy per evade, you will gain 2 energy each time Distortion is fired because Spirit of Failure fires *any* time the target fails to hit you.

Ah right, I forgot I was playing around with possibly lower values, because a 12 attribute investment for a secondary mesmer isn't something to take lightly. But even at 1 energy loss per evade, I was looking for something that can deal with up to 12 targets hitting you at once. Getting Spirit of Failure on all of the targets is not an option then, nor is half or even just three of the targets, and Channeling becomes a better bet for it, but it's still not very hot. Something like Signet of Midnight/Plague Sending is still a lot more attractive, at 90% evade for 15 seconds, at the cost of 10 energy and 10% health and no need for any attribute investment (seems to work dandy with 0 curses). On top of that you can still combine it with both weakness and Physical Resistance if there's still too much incoming damage, but I believe builds quickly become too defensive then.

I'm not sure what you were targeting, but around the level 24 mountain trolls you have a very small window to disable their damage output or you die. Taking 3 or 4 at a time isn't a problem, most builds are sufficient to deal with those, but I was hoping to come up with an elegant, reliable solution to quickly dispatch large groups of mountain trolls to optimize the use of experience scrolls and time spent ingame.

jesh · Sep 10, 2005, 05:10 AM // 05:10

Quote:

Originally Posted by Cymmina

Spirit Shackles doesn't actually give you energy. It causes your target to lose energy, that's it. Maybe you're thinking of Spirit of Failure.

Yeah, oops.

I was thinking of using it with no illusion, it still gives 1 energy, and that's breaking even with Distortion.. however, on large mobs, that isn't an option, as Silmor said. Signet of midnight kind of takes up an elite though. Hm....

I think I'll switch to ne/w and report on how that goes. It seems like making some use of mark of pain is worth the while, and tactics has no end to survivability as an attribute line.