First build -- Reap what you sow

I am just getting started with Guild Wars and playing a Dervish. I wanted to run my build plans by all of you with a lot more experience to see how you would change things up.

Here's what I was planning:

Primary: Dervish
Secondary: ?

Mysticism: 11
Scythe Mastery: 11
Earth Prayers: 8

Skill combinations

PvE: Survivable melee
Avatar of Balthazar - +40 armor, +33% IMS, Holy damage
Eternal Aura - Maintain avatar
Aura of Thorns - Cripple nearby foes; inflict bleeding on nearby foes
Armor of Sanctity - Weakness on nearby foes; reduce damage
Aura Slicer - Bonus damage; Inflict bleeding if foe or you are enchanted
Mystic corruption - extend conditions by up to 50%
Reap Impurities - Bonus damage; Heal for each foe hit that is under a condition
Heart of fury* - +33% IAS

*Alternatives: Aura of Holy Might, Crippling strike, zealous sweep or ermite's zeal (if energy is a problem), Staggering force (to switch to earth damage)

It's pretty simple, but if anyone has ideas on how to make this build better at what it is intended to be (heavy melee), or options for a secondary profession or to swap skills out that would make it flexible to other situations, please share. : )

Give up on Mysticism and use a Zealous Vow variant similar to this. Mystic Twister, By Ural's Hammer, Ebon Battle Standard of Honor, Fear Me, etc.

If you want to be useful in HM, listen to Cuilan, until the Derv update graces us, its the best and only good build for effective Derving

blah blah blah

Quote: Originally Posted by Astraeos I am just getting started with Guild Wars and playing a Dervish. I wanted to run my build plans by all of you with a lot more experience to see how you would change things up.

Here's what I was planning:

Primary: Dervish
Secondary: ?

Mysticism: 11
Scythe Mastery: 11
Earth Prayers: 8

Skill combinations

PvE: Survivable melee
Avatar of Balthazar - +40 armor, +33% IMS, Holy damage
Eternal Aura - Maintain avatar
Aura of Thorns - Cripple nearby foes; inflict bleeding on nearby foes
Armor of Sanctity - Weakness on nearby foes; reduce damage
Aura Slicer - Bonus damage; Inflict bleeding if foe or you are enchanted
Mystic corruption - extend conditions by up to 50%
Reap Impurities - Bonus damage; Heal for each foe hit that is under a condition
Heart of fury* - +33% IAS

*Alternatives: Aura of Holy Might, Crippling strike, zealous sweep or ermite's zeal (if energy is a problem), Staggering force (to switch to earth damage)

It's pretty simple, but if anyone has ideas on how to make this build better at what it is intended to be (heavy melee), or options for a secondary profession or to swap skills out that would make it flexible to other situations, please share. : ) Conditions, by and large deal low damage (even when spread to multiple foes), lengthening the condition duration won't remedy this (Mystic Corruption ). Conditions kill slowly, as a frontliner you kill quickly, this makes condition running counter intuitive, as you are devoting your resources to kill slowly (and when it comes to attrition, monsters will generally win especially in HM.

Reap Impurities is unnecessary as it deals less damage overall then Victorious Sweep (napkin math provided) and the heal is largely unnecessary; you made a dervish, ergo you have Nightfall, ergo you have heroes, just give your heroes heals and support you, it allows the player to bring more powerful damage skills instead of wasting attributes and skills on unnecessary defenses.

Both Vic Sweep and Reap scale uniformly with scythe mastery.
Victorious Sweep - 5e +damage, 4 recharge
Reap Impurities - 10e +damage, 8 recharge

Basically, you will get more victorious sweeps off then you will reaps for the same amount of energy. (I wouldn't even recommend VS for HM anyway)

Avatar of Balthazar - I don't get why people pick this skill up, I understand you look like a BAMF but all it does (at the cost of a PvE skill to maintain it to boot) is extra movement and +40 armor. at 6 Earth Prayers, Conviction gives you 24 armor MAINTAINABLE (as a stance) and so long as your enchanted, you get 50% block as well. By far and large the running bonus is sooooo unnecessary that you might as well invest in a damage dealing avatar if you must run one. Armor of Sanctity is a further waste of resources since your alrdy a tank, you don't need the aoe point blank weakness (and a curse necro / secondary curse necro profession hero can apply AOE weakness easily with Enfeebling Blood)

Aura of Thorns is more of a PvP skill, and it needs an enchant ripping skill to really perform well anyway (that is, to cover the AOE cripple with bleeding). The AOE cripple is unneeded with proper positioning. Since you mentioned Aura Slicer, I am assuming you have EOTN, grab YMLAD! (You Move Like a Dwarf!) its not AOE, but the damage is instant, it knocks the target down, and it inflicts cripple. With Weakness applied, melee enemies will hit for miniscule amounts of damage anyway. Its the casters you ought to worry about if anything (and that can be remedied with a proper hero set up)

Aura Slicer - just a bad skill, you can do better with almost any other scythe attack .

Heart of Fury is decent, but not maintainable (you cannot count on it). I would use it until you try Zealous Vow + Mystic Sweep + Eremite Attack

Your Attribute combination will vary, but the general rule of thumb is to max out scythe mastery with either 12+1+X where X= 1, 2 or 3 (largely irrelevant take the major / superior runes though since skill bonuses after 12 for weapon attributes suffer from diminishing returns at level 20).

For a secondary, I recommend Warrior, Wild Blow eats annoying block stances, and SY! (Save Yourselves!) provides unparalleled party defense.

Final Thoughts -

You seem to be thinking that it is up to the player character to keep the player character alive. GW is a team game, as a frontliner, invest in damage dealing, since melee is Over Powered at the moment. You have heroes, invest in heroes that keep you alive with prots and heals (and spells that strengthen you also work since you are going to be the prime damage dealer). You'll find your team will be much more efficient that way.

As mentioned, dervs have shit energy, but u could build ur team around to get around the issue w/o resorting to zealous vow. I personally like to play lyssa's sin for energy pool and the +dmg. I like to build my monks with cheap short duration enchants to fuel my attacks, a smiter with soh would be ideal actually. You gotta micromanage quite a bit though.

I have played a Derv for quite some time now, and I use exactly what cuilan suggests, just the skills are in a different order. So yeah, make sure you have good heros and use that

Aura of Holy Might and Asuran Scan is a MUST have if your using a Scythe, so whatever you do, add that. If Mysticism and Avatar of Balthazar get a buff, it may be worth using, but we will have to wait until the skill update to find out. For now, it just looks cool.

Another option with that build is to change Aura of Holy Might for Ebon standard of Honor, gives u and ur party a dmg boost. Esp. usefull if u use minions

Thanks for all of the feedback. Learning a lot about planning a build just from the comments here.

But I'm also a stubborn s.o.b. ; )

I like the zealous warrior... clearly better than the build I put together, and I'm sure I'll end up using it. But the mysticism skills are what drew me to the dervish in the first place, so I'd like to find some builds that are useful through that attribute.

With that in mind, how does something like this work?

Scythe Mastery 12
Wind Prayers 10 (need to get it to 12)
Mysticism 8

Avatar of Dwayna (heals 39 and removes a hex for every skill used)
Eternal Aura
Attacker's insight (reduces energy cost by 17 for next 3 attack skills)
Ermite's Attack (5 energy, 4 recharge)
Mystic Sweep (5 energy, 4 recharge)
Zealous Sweep (5 energy, 10 recharge, gain 3 energy for each hit)
Aura of Holy Might
Asuran Scan

I suppose the avatar is expendable here, and may be replaced by another elite. But I think it synergizes well with the attack spamming (constant heals and hex removal). The energy cost of that attack spamming is reduced greatly by attacker's insight, and partially fuels itself (through zealous sweep).

It doesn't have any attack speed bonuses, and it doesn't inflict conditions. But it seems like it would be a fairly survivable dps build (i.e., pretty heavy damager that allows party healers some space to focus on others).

Better?

I've used this build extensively: http://gw.gamependium.com/tools/builds/show/7062

IMO it rivals the ZV ones listed here, the dmg output is stunning.

I would drop the ranger attribute to 6 and only keep Victorious Sweep, NRA, and CA.

Quote: Originally Posted by Astraeos

Thanks for all of the feedback. Learning a lot about planning a build just from the comments here.

But I'm also a stubborn s.o.b. ; )

I like the zealous warrior... clearly better than the build I put together, and I'm sure I'll end up using it. But the mysticism skills are what drew me to the dervish in the first place, so I'd like to find some builds that are useful through that attribute.

With that in mind, how does something like this work?

Scythe Mastery 12
Wind Prayers 10 (need to get it to 12)
Mysticism 8

Avatar of Dwayna (heals 39 and removes a hex for every skill used)
Eternal Aura
Attacker's insight (reduces energy cost by 17 for next 3 attack skills)
Ermite's Attack (5 energy, 4 recharge)
Mystic Sweep (5 energy, 4 recharge)
Zealous Sweep (5 energy, 10 recharge, gain 3 energy for each hit)
Aura of Holy Might
Asuran Scan

I suppose the avatar is expendable here, and may be replaced by another elite. But I think it synergizes well with the attack spamming (constant heals and hex removal). The energy cost of that attack spamming is reduced greatly by attacker's insight, and partially fuels itself (through zealous sweep).

It doesn't have any attack speed bonuses, and it doesn't inflict conditions. But it seems like it would be a fairly survivable dps build (i.e., pretty heavy damager that allows party healers some space to focus on others).

Better? Avatar of Dwayna is only useful for hex heavy areas. In absence of heavy hex application, AoD is effectively just a cute lil dervish with female monk emotes.

Bring conviction, and if your dead set on bringing dead weight defense skills, Armor of Sanctity is probably the most potent out of all of them.

If you MUST sport an avatar, go Grenth, at least that avatar choice ups your damage (and hey, it also provides self healing in the form of life steal)

If you wanna bring Attacker's Insight, consider Lyssa's Assault. Attacker's Insight is good when used with expensive attack skills, and for what it does, Lyssa's Assault takes the cake (it will also be more readily available and its energy gain is easier to accomplish then zealous sweep since mobs aren't stupid enough to bunch up every single time.