Wounding Strike: Good, Bad or Meh ?

While your on the subject of fragility I have used it on a hero build and it sounds good on paper and only is if you micro it on a hero, which I never liked doing with skills like frag but yes WS is a rather nice tear down attack combo and as you explained if your prepared to micro fragility then would be rather nice additional damage. And I use it with a FD+fragility mesmer, just run into a mob pinging your target and your hero will actually cast FD and fragility first. As you reach the mob he's done casting and you rape face. But I agree, if the mob doesn't even ball slightly it's kinda annoying.

Yes its cool that you have infinite enchantments, but you are limited by how fast you can activate the teardowns: pious fury 10s, twin moon 7adr, weary strike now 6 adr. You're forgetting about Pious Assault.

Make sure you have Dark Fury + FGJ up, if you can hit 2 enemies (=8 adren per swing) then you have the fastest attack rate in the game (infinite double strike from TMS + 25% IAS) combined with the strongest weapon in the game (Scythe + Buffs). So long as you have DF+FGJ+TMS I can't see how you can really go wrong with your PR build, and most of the rest of the build should be pretty obvious shoe-ins anyway.

If you have problems handling mobs that most likely means your other teammates needs to support more. I feel gimped when not running 2 rits with 2x copies of SW just for me (one rit branches off to smite and also maintains SoH). Bringing Reap Impurities + Withering Aura instead of a SW spammer is something I've recently warmed up to, mostly because unlike SW RI will also perform decently against single enemies and when FGJ is down its very useful to alternate between it and TMS. I can see the potential of continual double strike. However, Dark fury forces me to bring a hero spec'd into blood. Unless its a BiP (which I don't use), i need to get to 5 blood in order for it to be useful. Not to mention, the constant 17% drain on the hero every 5 seconds just for the benefit of ONE character...me. As far as a team build goes, i can see this detracting from overall effectiveness. I also did not factor Dark Fury into my build. In such a case, WS can also spam Reap and SY much more frequently.

FGJ is a great skill, but is only up for 20s out of 45. For those 25 seconds, it sits on your bar doing nothing.

I think you also lose hidden DPS when your flash enchantments do no damage on their own, rather than a pulse + aftereffect (damage and burn for example).

1. Just to be clear, the massive damage output comes from spamming TMS. Your condition for spamming TMS is pretty narrow. 2 targets, dark Fury and FGJ all at once.

FGJ is active less than half the time.

Dark Fury, imho, is a waste of a skill and weakens your team effort when used for buffing ONE PERSON. Blood magic is by far the weakest necro branch in terms of damage output. You really want to sacrifice one hero just to give one person a little more damage? My opinion : a whole mesmer bar > Dark fury Necro

I agree with the comments above however about SoH and other meele buffs if they can be put into the team.

I was just comparing the two raw bars against each other.

@Chthon, You're forgetting the advantage of drunken master's +33 ias vs Hfury's +25%; its about 12% more scythe damage.

ZR deals armor ignoring holy damage in your calculation.

What cannot be accurately measured by our statistics however, is the advantage of applying deep wound instantly at the beginning of the fight. Since it is covered by burning, bleeding and (likely) weakness, the result is an instant -20% health loss AND -20% healing effectiveness. I think PR deep wound is easier to get rid of than WS, don't you agree?

EDIT: this is Fun !

I think that build was the rage before they nerfed Asuran Scan. Still interesting as is, but I wonder which enchantments you feed to WS. You're basically stuck with 5E ones, since you dont get the benefit of mysticism. And the 5 E ones kinda suck, imho.

you could replace "YAAW" with armor of sanctity. Does the same thing +damage reduction until you strip it. I feed with conviction and aura of thorns. Both are 5e 10rc enchants. As you say, it gets energy intensive with 10e enchants but conviction removes 2 conditions easily/fast and aof is there for the cripple to trigger FD. It might not be the most effective, but it blows stuff up+easy perma daze and its way funnier than jagged, fox, db spam.

Regarding YAWW, I thought about taking armor of sanctity but didn't like it. It has casting time making me stop attacking, I have to be close to the mobs and it has a longer coolddown.

It's a well accepted fact that physicals are pretty poor all on their own, it's only through buffs that physicals reigns supreme. The best physical builds ALL are constructed around local maxima in their means of hitting multiple times in order to maximize the buff effectiveness. I think its also pretty accepted that Hero AI for meele is just BAD. Why would I replace mesmers/necros with warriors/dervishes? Having them buffed is nice, but if they stand there doing nothing it's a waste.

That said, I experimented last night with a N/Mo for curses and SoH. worked pretty well.

I've also thought about replacing AoHM with something that would give more damage, like sand shards, but I usually loathe to spec into a branch for just one skill, and I don't know that it would significantly increase damage over AoHM.

So this thread has raised some interesting points. I think since this weekend is a Kurzick/Luxon double pointer, I will take turns running both builds and compare them in terms of speed/effectiveness in doing Vq