Build Review #1
Originally Published by Sausaletus Rex
Welcome to the inaugural Build Review. In the past I've offered to play-test builds for people and to relate my experiences both to help them in specific and others in general. The current state I find myself in, however, precludes me from providing that service as much as I'd like to continue. I simply cannot play-test and relate the results to anyone outside of the test. However, it's my belief that knowledge is most valuable when shared and that the more people benefit from a particular insight the better. So, while I can't share the direct experience and particular details of how a particular build works anymore what I can do is to share my knowledge of how a build works in general. After all, I've followed, I've considered, I've played the game for months at this point. I've talked strategy, I've tried strategy, I've developed and refined strategies over and over, analyzing and criticizing a build has become second nature to me. So, what I shall do is to regularly select a particular build that captures my fancy and to provide the sort of in-depth evaluation of it that I feel is going to benefit both the creator of that build in particular along with the conceptual details of what makes that build fail or succeed that will benefit others. In short, while I'll detail what a particular build is doing well or poorly, I'll also discuss the why. And that why is really what interests me and probably should interest the rest of you as well. This game is ever changing and ever shifting, a particular set of attributes and skills that works today probably won't work as well down the road. Not without understanding how to change and adapt that build to the circumstances of the day. And that's where knowing why a build works becomes important. It's not enough to know that, say, Flare does 30 damage at an attribute level of 9 for 5 energy every second what's really going to allow people to use that skill effectively is know why that's a poor skill indeed compared to another choice. So, I present the first in what's hopefully a long running series of explorations into not the craft of making a build but the art.
And for my first build I've selected this little gem by Scaphism that we've been kicking around. It's an intriguing take on two interesting subjects : the support character and the monkless team.
Often overlooked, support characters can be the decisive factor in a battle with ease. They’re odd creatures because unlike a healer or a damage dealer or even a character devoted to disruption they’re much more subtle. Acting directly on a target is usually the last thing they’re thinking of, rather their goal is to somehow make some aspect of their team better or some aspect of the other team’s worse. And they do so indirectly. Consider the best known example of a support character, the BiPer. A character whose sole purpose is to sit around and increase the energy regeneration of other characters on their team. The reason the do so is more regeneration leads to more energy, which leads to more spell casting, letting their team’s spell casters be that much better. Without a BiP those casters are going to run dry on energy real fast and their team’s going to be much worse off. Worse to the point where they’re not going to win, usually, as the team’s been constructed around the fundamental fact that their casters will be receiving that regular boost to their energy pools but all that BiPer does to be that much of a lynch pin is to stand there and BiP. Support characters, then, are those uninterested in glory – they’ll never deliver the killing blow or the desperation heal – but those who are willing to sacrifice everything to make sure their team wins. What they do is to make other characters better, as simple and profound as that. But support characters are intimately tied into the makeup of the rest of their team. A BiPer won’t be as good on a team of Warriors as on a team of Elementalists, after all. To make a character better you first have to understand what you’re making better, you’re playing to strength and weaknesses of another build by either multiplying an advantage or by compensating for a disadvantage. Necromancers, such as Scaphism’s Necromancer/Warrior tend to make excellent support characters because of the many ways they can insidiously and subtly influence the outcome of events in a battle. They have the hexes to make characters hit slower or weaker or heal less and at the same time they have hexes to let their allies hit faster or harder as well as a host of other options.
And support characters can become very important in the so-called “monkless” team. That’s a team where rather than trying to load up as many Monks as possible – most teams now run with three or even more healers and you can’t play much of a healer if you’re not playing a Monk – the team instead tries to get by with as few Monks as possible. Often, defensive skills and healing skills are distributed around the team instead of concentrated in a few Monks making it harder for an opponent to remove the team’s defense by eliminating just a few characters. It’s not necessarily going without healers, although some do indeed follow that route, so much a it is going “healing light” rather than the normal two or three “healing heavy” team strategy. The idea being that by not including so many healers it opens up another slot or two for characters to deal more damage or wreck more havoc with disruption. It’s an aggressive strategy that relies on being able to defeat the other side, to overwhelm their healing and defenses, before they can do enough damage themselves. The concerns of healing and defense are in having just enough to be able to survive long enough to kill the other team rather than enough to survive any conflict.
Where support characters figure into that is in making up for the lack of a healer. Either by decreasing the amount of time it takes for the team to successfully attack someone or by increasing the amount of time it takes for them to be successfully attacked. A supporting character facing a team of melee characters can give their monkless team the edge by simply slowing the attack rates of those melee heavies. That means they’ll be doing less damage overall meaning that healing goes a bit further meaning that the light healing of a monkless team won’t buckle as easily giving the monkless team just a few seconds more of a character dealing damage or disruption or whatever else. And that might give their team enough of an edge to finish off one or two characters. And by the time one or two opponents are dead, the monkless team starts to gain an overwhelming advantage as they begin to steamroll downhill. So, a support character in a monkless team fills in the gap left by removing a Monk – that of giving their team an opportunity to win – but does so not by protecting them from harm with heals but in some other, less direct way.
Anyhow, here’s the build :
Professions: Necromancer / Warrior
This is the most recent version, and as you might guess, Scaphism’s still winnowing it all down. The version before this was a 12 Blood, 12 Tactics, 3 Soul Reaping version where the skills Barbs, Weaken Armor, and Mark of Pain were absent. As Scaphism said, this character has two jobs in a fight, “1) Spam OoV. 2) Stay alive.” And the first iteration of certainly did that.
But my response was, “Alright, you can spam OoV, what else can you do?”. Even as a support character, that’s no excuse to be standing around waiting most of the time, which is all Scaphism had the first version of this character doing. That’s time wasted, after all, and Guild Wars is a game that’s all about making the most of your time. Especially in a monkless setup where the whole point of divesting your team of the healer in order to free up those eight skill slots to maximize something other than healing a plan that involves your character standing around is a plan with a glaring weakness. You’ve risked everything on your one, single strategy succeeding so if it doesn’t, to be blunt, you’re well and truly screwed. One-trick pony builds, then, are poor strategies in conception because while they might work spectacularly they’ll also fail spectacularly when they run up against the proper counter. That reason is why you don’t tend to see skills that rely on the exact combination and precision casting of all eight of your skills, there’s simply too much room for someone to throw a monkey wrench into your schemes and cause your whole strategy to collapse by preventing you from casting, say, that third or fourth skill in your chain. Here, for example, Scaphism is counting on his team being able to take advantage of Order of Vampire but in order to steal that health with OoV they’ll need to deal some physical damage - weapon damage, in so many words – and there are several readily available counters for that. While no one out there can torpedo OoV by removing it the way they could an enchantment or a ritual (In theory, anyway, I can’t imagine anyone would carry around the current Unnatural signet but if the game ever got to the point where it was the proper use of rituals that was the dominant strategy, I’d wager people would start to try, we’re just not at that point so ritual removal is possible but rare.) but if they can prevent its effects they’ve effectively done the same.
So, when planning your strategy it’s important to consider just what out there might stop your strategy so that you can plan for it or attempt to out counter the counter. Whittle down your trick - your strategy that you’d consider good enough to devote yourself to – to the bone and figure out just what is essential and what’s redundant. If it takes you five skills to accomplish what you want, could you do it in only four? How much of your skill bar is going to be tied up and just how much do you have left over to accomplish that elusive “something else”? And that’s what I advised Scaphism to look for originally. For more skills that could be used while waiting for OoV to recharge as well as skills to use when OoV becomes a poor play. In short, what else this character could do to give its team an advantage?
Scaphism’s solution is to turn to Curses and add in some hexes that can further devastate those targets of melee that are going to suffer from OoV – according to Scaphism, the best party for this character is going to be one with several Warriors so making those Warriors hit that much harder makes Scaphism that much better - as well as one of the most important roles of a Necromancer in the current environment, that of enchantment removal. He rebalances his attributes, having figured that 11 in Blood is the rank at which his blood spells will be the most effective at the lowest cost. He won’t sacrifice as much and will get pretty much the same results from his skills. The extra attribute points get shuffled into Curses while Soul Reaping becomes a dump stat – an attribute he’s just stashing his extra AP in – as it’s a nice bonus but hardly going to dominate. With the addition of some attribute runes and a facial scar, Scaphism can set all three of his important attributes to high levels and has enough for a decent score in Soul Reaping besides.
That much Tactics makes for a good stance as well as the ability to carry a shield for yet more defense, so this character should be able to survive incidental combat, although as with any monkless team being focused is a problem. Healing Signet, too, provides a bit of survivability being a no energy decent heal. And while staying out of the fray and alive, Scaphism will be recasting OoV as many times as possible. It’s an excellent skill, one well worth the elite slot, but only in the right circumstances. It serves a double purpose as it’s a health stealing skill, just like Life Siphon or Vampire Touch, taking extra health from a target and transferring it to an ally. So it adds damage and provides a good bit of healing. In a party optimized to take advantage of that – as with Scaphism’s theoretical party of a gang of Warriors - it can really shine, making the abilities of the team more deadly while also providing some much needed defense. And once someone dies, Scaphism’s exploiting their corpse for a Well of Blood to provide yet more of that regenerative defense typically known as healing. In the meantime, the character will be following targets, stripping enchantments and hexing away, softening a target and further making those melee hits that much more deadly. Mark of Pain will be better if Scaphism expects to run into large crowds of enemies while Weaken Armor and Barbs are better against single targets, especially those targets that are well armored.
Combining Order of the Vampire with Order of Pain makes for a lot of damage, however, they both cost a lot of energy and a lot of health to run constantly. As this is going to be a team that’s light on healing, Scaphism might be better off to just use the one and leave the other behind but if a healer can be spared to watch over this character it’s not a bad idea. Another stance or a shout like “Watch Yourself!” makes for a more hardy character that can survive longer. Riposte is an interesting choice for a stance as unlike most stances it’s adrenal. It’s probably a bad fit here as getting into melee is something this character won’t want to do not to mention the fact that it’s only good against one target for one hit making it ineffective for heavy focused fire. And Life Siphon provides decent healing as well as some incidental damage to a target. They’re all good skills to slot into a build with some open slots depending on the situation and they all serve the goal of making a character that’s going to aid the big bad damage dealing heavies on its team to do a better job at putting a target away.
However, there’s still not much concession to what happens when a target is protected against melee. An opponent’s Monks will be able to set up Healing Seed, Amity, and Pacifism faster than this character can remove those enchantments. Rangers can Pin Down or otherwise snare several Warriors to prevent them from closing. Necromancers and Mesmers and Elementalists can toss around hexes, wards, and other spells that will make Scaphism’s team less likely to hit in melee. What does this character do then? As far as I can tell the answer is “stand around and wait until it gets an opportunity or dies” and that’s not an answer I like. Don’t get me wrong, I like the basic idea and I think the execution is strong and, granted, if his character is built to run in a team of people dedicated to physical damage anyone out to prevent physical damage is going to give that team fits in the first place. But, I think there’s still room in this character to include more of “something else” and an else that includes an answer for when that melee team is in trouble. Hexes from Curses to deal with spell casters like Malaise or Suffering or something to reduce the other side’s melee characters to ineffectuality like Enfeebling Blood or Shadow of Fear. Or perhaps some damage from Blood such as Barbed Signet or Dark Pact. Awaken the Blood also offers some intriguing possibilities for a build centered around Curses and Blood Magic although the increased sacrifices might be a bit too much to bear. Also, for better versatility on a team with more casters, this character could dump Order of Vampire, pick up Order of Pain, and take Blood is Power as its elite.
It’s a solid start but it’s a character that’s still too narrow, too focused on a single, easily counterable strategy. Somewhere in his eight slots, Scaphism needs to consider the possibility of that strategy failing because it’s a certainty his enemies are. But it’s an interesting way to fit a character to a particular environment. However, it’s too wrapped up in the advantages and disadvantages of that particular environment to the exclusion of others.
Feel free to comment on this essay and its concept as well as Scaphism's build here in our forums.
And for my first build I've selected this little gem by Scaphism that we've been kicking around. It's an intriguing take on two interesting subjects : the support character and the monkless team.
Often overlooked, support characters can be the decisive factor in a battle with ease. They’re odd creatures because unlike a healer or a damage dealer or even a character devoted to disruption they’re much more subtle. Acting directly on a target is usually the last thing they’re thinking of, rather their goal is to somehow make some aspect of their team better or some aspect of the other team’s worse. And they do so indirectly. Consider the best known example of a support character, the BiPer. A character whose sole purpose is to sit around and increase the energy regeneration of other characters on their team. The reason the do so is more regeneration leads to more energy, which leads to more spell casting, letting their team’s spell casters be that much better. Without a BiP those casters are going to run dry on energy real fast and their team’s going to be much worse off. Worse to the point where they’re not going to win, usually, as the team’s been constructed around the fundamental fact that their casters will be receiving that regular boost to their energy pools but all that BiPer does to be that much of a lynch pin is to stand there and BiP. Support characters, then, are those uninterested in glory – they’ll never deliver the killing blow or the desperation heal – but those who are willing to sacrifice everything to make sure their team wins. What they do is to make other characters better, as simple and profound as that. But support characters are intimately tied into the makeup of the rest of their team. A BiPer won’t be as good on a team of Warriors as on a team of Elementalists, after all. To make a character better you first have to understand what you’re making better, you’re playing to strength and weaknesses of another build by either multiplying an advantage or by compensating for a disadvantage. Necromancers, such as Scaphism’s Necromancer/Warrior tend to make excellent support characters because of the many ways they can insidiously and subtly influence the outcome of events in a battle. They have the hexes to make characters hit slower or weaker or heal less and at the same time they have hexes to let their allies hit faster or harder as well as a host of other options.
And support characters can become very important in the so-called “monkless” team. That’s a team where rather than trying to load up as many Monks as possible – most teams now run with three or even more healers and you can’t play much of a healer if you’re not playing a Monk – the team instead tries to get by with as few Monks as possible. Often, defensive skills and healing skills are distributed around the team instead of concentrated in a few Monks making it harder for an opponent to remove the team’s defense by eliminating just a few characters. It’s not necessarily going without healers, although some do indeed follow that route, so much a it is going “healing light” rather than the normal two or three “healing heavy” team strategy. The idea being that by not including so many healers it opens up another slot or two for characters to deal more damage or wreck more havoc with disruption. It’s an aggressive strategy that relies on being able to defeat the other side, to overwhelm their healing and defenses, before they can do enough damage themselves. The concerns of healing and defense are in having just enough to be able to survive long enough to kill the other team rather than enough to survive any conflict.
Where support characters figure into that is in making up for the lack of a healer. Either by decreasing the amount of time it takes for the team to successfully attack someone or by increasing the amount of time it takes for them to be successfully attacked. A supporting character facing a team of melee characters can give their monkless team the edge by simply slowing the attack rates of those melee heavies. That means they’ll be doing less damage overall meaning that healing goes a bit further meaning that the light healing of a monkless team won’t buckle as easily giving the monkless team just a few seconds more of a character dealing damage or disruption or whatever else. And that might give their team enough of an edge to finish off one or two characters. And by the time one or two opponents are dead, the monkless team starts to gain an overwhelming advantage as they begin to steamroll downhill. So, a support character in a monkless team fills in the gap left by removing a Monk – that of giving their team an opportunity to win – but does so not by protecting them from harm with heals but in some other, less direct way.
Anyhow, here’s the build :
Professions: Necromancer / Warrior
Attributes | Skills | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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This is the most recent version, and as you might guess, Scaphism’s still winnowing it all down. The version before this was a 12 Blood, 12 Tactics, 3 Soul Reaping version where the skills Barbs, Weaken Armor, and Mark of Pain were absent. As Scaphism said, this character has two jobs in a fight, “1) Spam OoV. 2) Stay alive.” And the first iteration of certainly did that.
But my response was, “Alright, you can spam OoV, what else can you do?”. Even as a support character, that’s no excuse to be standing around waiting most of the time, which is all Scaphism had the first version of this character doing. That’s time wasted, after all, and Guild Wars is a game that’s all about making the most of your time. Especially in a monkless setup where the whole point of divesting your team of the healer in order to free up those eight skill slots to maximize something other than healing a plan that involves your character standing around is a plan with a glaring weakness. You’ve risked everything on your one, single strategy succeeding so if it doesn’t, to be blunt, you’re well and truly screwed. One-trick pony builds, then, are poor strategies in conception because while they might work spectacularly they’ll also fail spectacularly when they run up against the proper counter. That reason is why you don’t tend to see skills that rely on the exact combination and precision casting of all eight of your skills, there’s simply too much room for someone to throw a monkey wrench into your schemes and cause your whole strategy to collapse by preventing you from casting, say, that third or fourth skill in your chain. Here, for example, Scaphism is counting on his team being able to take advantage of Order of Vampire but in order to steal that health with OoV they’ll need to deal some physical damage - weapon damage, in so many words – and there are several readily available counters for that. While no one out there can torpedo OoV by removing it the way they could an enchantment or a ritual (In theory, anyway, I can’t imagine anyone would carry around the current Unnatural signet but if the game ever got to the point where it was the proper use of rituals that was the dominant strategy, I’d wager people would start to try, we’re just not at that point so ritual removal is possible but rare.) but if they can prevent its effects they’ve effectively done the same.
So, when planning your strategy it’s important to consider just what out there might stop your strategy so that you can plan for it or attempt to out counter the counter. Whittle down your trick - your strategy that you’d consider good enough to devote yourself to – to the bone and figure out just what is essential and what’s redundant. If it takes you five skills to accomplish what you want, could you do it in only four? How much of your skill bar is going to be tied up and just how much do you have left over to accomplish that elusive “something else”? And that’s what I advised Scaphism to look for originally. For more skills that could be used while waiting for OoV to recharge as well as skills to use when OoV becomes a poor play. In short, what else this character could do to give its team an advantage?
Scaphism’s solution is to turn to Curses and add in some hexes that can further devastate those targets of melee that are going to suffer from OoV – according to Scaphism, the best party for this character is going to be one with several Warriors so making those Warriors hit that much harder makes Scaphism that much better - as well as one of the most important roles of a Necromancer in the current environment, that of enchantment removal. He rebalances his attributes, having figured that 11 in Blood is the rank at which his blood spells will be the most effective at the lowest cost. He won’t sacrifice as much and will get pretty much the same results from his skills. The extra attribute points get shuffled into Curses while Soul Reaping becomes a dump stat – an attribute he’s just stashing his extra AP in – as it’s a nice bonus but hardly going to dominate. With the addition of some attribute runes and a facial scar, Scaphism can set all three of his important attributes to high levels and has enough for a decent score in Soul Reaping besides.
That much Tactics makes for a good stance as well as the ability to carry a shield for yet more defense, so this character should be able to survive incidental combat, although as with any monkless team being focused is a problem. Healing Signet, too, provides a bit of survivability being a no energy decent heal. And while staying out of the fray and alive, Scaphism will be recasting OoV as many times as possible. It’s an excellent skill, one well worth the elite slot, but only in the right circumstances. It serves a double purpose as it’s a health stealing skill, just like Life Siphon or Vampire Touch, taking extra health from a target and transferring it to an ally. So it adds damage and provides a good bit of healing. In a party optimized to take advantage of that – as with Scaphism’s theoretical party of a gang of Warriors - it can really shine, making the abilities of the team more deadly while also providing some much needed defense. And once someone dies, Scaphism’s exploiting their corpse for a Well of Blood to provide yet more of that regenerative defense typically known as healing. In the meantime, the character will be following targets, stripping enchantments and hexing away, softening a target and further making those melee hits that much more deadly. Mark of Pain will be better if Scaphism expects to run into large crowds of enemies while Weaken Armor and Barbs are better against single targets, especially those targets that are well armored.
Combining Order of the Vampire with Order of Pain makes for a lot of damage, however, they both cost a lot of energy and a lot of health to run constantly. As this is going to be a team that’s light on healing, Scaphism might be better off to just use the one and leave the other behind but if a healer can be spared to watch over this character it’s not a bad idea. Another stance or a shout like “Watch Yourself!” makes for a more hardy character that can survive longer. Riposte is an interesting choice for a stance as unlike most stances it’s adrenal. It’s probably a bad fit here as getting into melee is something this character won’t want to do not to mention the fact that it’s only good against one target for one hit making it ineffective for heavy focused fire. And Life Siphon provides decent healing as well as some incidental damage to a target. They’re all good skills to slot into a build with some open slots depending on the situation and they all serve the goal of making a character that’s going to aid the big bad damage dealing heavies on its team to do a better job at putting a target away.
However, there’s still not much concession to what happens when a target is protected against melee. An opponent’s Monks will be able to set up Healing Seed, Amity, and Pacifism faster than this character can remove those enchantments. Rangers can Pin Down or otherwise snare several Warriors to prevent them from closing. Necromancers and Mesmers and Elementalists can toss around hexes, wards, and other spells that will make Scaphism’s team less likely to hit in melee. What does this character do then? As far as I can tell the answer is “stand around and wait until it gets an opportunity or dies” and that’s not an answer I like. Don’t get me wrong, I like the basic idea and I think the execution is strong and, granted, if his character is built to run in a team of people dedicated to physical damage anyone out to prevent physical damage is going to give that team fits in the first place. But, I think there’s still room in this character to include more of “something else” and an else that includes an answer for when that melee team is in trouble. Hexes from Curses to deal with spell casters like Malaise or Suffering or something to reduce the other side’s melee characters to ineffectuality like Enfeebling Blood or Shadow of Fear. Or perhaps some damage from Blood such as Barbed Signet or Dark Pact. Awaken the Blood also offers some intriguing possibilities for a build centered around Curses and Blood Magic although the increased sacrifices might be a bit too much to bear. Also, for better versatility on a team with more casters, this character could dump Order of Vampire, pick up Order of Pain, and take Blood is Power as its elite.
It’s a solid start but it’s a character that’s still too narrow, too focused on a single, easily counterable strategy. Somewhere in his eight slots, Scaphism needs to consider the possibility of that strategy failing because it’s a certainty his enemies are. But it’s an interesting way to fit a character to a particular environment. However, it’s too wrapped up in the advantages and disadvantages of that particular environment to the exclusion of others.
Feel free to comment on this essay and its concept as well as Scaphism's build here in our forums.
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