Locus Fury + Orders & Dark Fury

[drekmonger]

Let's look at this guy:

Assassin/Warrior
Critical Strikes: 13 (11+2)
Dagger Mastery: 12 (11+1)
Deadly Arts: 4 (3+1)
Tactics: 8

- Locusts' Fury [Elite] (Critical Strikes)
- Dash (Assassin None)
- Flurry (Warrior other)
- "Fear Me!" (Tactics)
- Disrupting Stab (Dagger Mastery)
- Entangling Asp (Deadly Arts)
- Spirit Walk (--for fast escapes back to homebase)
- Resurrection Signet ()

He's already pretty good at spamming Fear Me with Locus's Fury and Flurry, and has a little bit of disruption mixed in. But let's say there's a couple of friendly necros spamming Dark Fury and both of the Orders.

With Dark Fury active, our assassin can use "Fear Me" every time he makes a dual hit. Every 2/3s of a second, he has a 44% chance dual striking and therefore getting the 4 adrenline for "Fear Me"--draining 3 energy from all nearby foes. So long as he isn't blinded or dealing with a stance, "Fear Me" will (at most) be charged every 1.32 seconds.

With Order of Pain and Order of Vampire active, the assassin is triggering orders every 2/3s of a second, 44% of the time with a dual strike doubling his damage. If the orders necro can keep both orders up constantly (not hard so long as he's getting outside heals and soulreaping away from enemy mesmers), a single assassin will be dealing an insane DPS. (and a little bit of healing from Order of the Vampire)


And so, the HA build I'd like to try to run during the March beta:
4 As/War "Fear Me" spammers, each on a different target.
1 N/E with corpse control, rigor, enchant removal, gale, and windborn
1 N/Mo Mayrt/Dark Fury with other misc heals. Only need a Blood of 6 to make Dark Fury work.
1 N/Mo Orders Necro, with back up healing
1 Rit/Mo with Pain and Healing sprits to set up a base for the Necros to hide in and the Assassins to escape back to with Spirit Walk.

[roguebanshee]

1 N/Mo Mayrt/Dark Fury with other misc heals. Only need a Blood of 6 to make Dark Fury work.
Dark Fury doesn't need anything in Blood to make it work at max efficiency (even though it's a Blood Magic spell), at least according to the ingame information. It may be better to make this a Mo/N with that in mind.

[Ubermancer]

It has a 50% failure chance below 5 Blood.

And thats a great build! I will definatly try a W/A or A/W "Fear Me!" spammer.

Just remember kids, E-Denial does NOT work in pve!

[Patccmoi]

It's pretty nice i gotta say.

Not too sure if i'd trade it for our current Tactics Warriors (Fear Me! spammers basically, in GvG we run 3 Fear Me! spammer at -4E with permanent Dark Fury, we have 2 axes (1 with Charge!, 1 with Evis) and 1 Hundred Blades sword cause Hundred is just crazy with Dark Fury, 2 adjacent people and it's 8 strikes of adrenaline), but the dual hits can certainly help. The downside is that you lose a lot of tanking compared to a warrior, and only 3E per Fear Me! instead of 4.

A Martyr/Dark Fury will never work if you want to keep it up.

I don't know how much you ran Dark Fury (and to confirm, it absolutely requires 5 blood. They just forgot it in the description), but it's extremely energy/health intensive to keep up. If you want to keep it up the same way an Order Necro keeps it up (i.e. really not up often overall, more for spiking), it can be ok. But otherwise, it took us a long time to find a good build that can maintain Dark Fury 100% of the time (unless shutdowned ofc), be health-sufficient (doesn't need any healing from anyone else) AND use other useful stuff, Dark Fury being just 1 skill on a fully useful skill bar. Don't want to give the build away cause i never saw anyone else able to maintain Dark Fury with a useful caster yet, but the best we found was a E/N just to give you a tip.

I'm not sure i like your full build overall (i don't think your 4 A/W can tank nearly enough to take on something like a warrior heavy build that isn't shutdowned by EDenial and to survive long enough to kill people through Aegis and Ward vs Melee), but the A/W build in itself seems to have lots of potential.

[drekmonger]

Dark Fury doesn't need anything in Blood to make it work at max efficiency (even though it's a Blood Magic spell), at least according to the ingame information. It may be better to make this a Mo/N with that in mind.

As mentioned by others, there's an undocumented failure on dark fury. And I'm working off of my experience running Dark Fury as an iway orders necro--soulreaping is great form of energy managment that a mo/n just doesn't get.

Re: survivability of the assassins, maybe Critical Defenses should be subbed in instead of Spirit Walk. As I had orginally imagined the build working, the assassins have high hitpoints from wearing nothing cept minor runes, the higher armor from the +15 armor when attacking suit, and can teleport back to the Ritalist's base of spirits when in trouble.

[Ubermancer]

Only need a Blood of 6 to make Dark Fury work.

=P its 5 Blood.

4 = phailure chance, 5 = gravy

[roguebanshee]

Don't want to give the build away cause i never saw anyone else able to maintain Dark Fury with a useful caster yet, but the best we found was a E/N just to give you a tip.
An E/N can keep DF running constantly with Ether Prodigy, Blood Renewal and Aura of Restoration. AoR isn't strictly necessary but recommended.

This leaves 3(4) skill slots open.