Blind Dervish Farmer

I was thinking of another build to use for farming for my Dervish, as I've tried a few others and found that either the dmg was too slow or there were too many enchants with different timings to keep up with (at least for my style). I also tried experimenting with [skill=text]Ebon Dust Aura[/skill] which got me thinking of using blindness to my advantage. After a little bit of research (and some ideas from Guildwiki), I came up with this build:

Class: Dervish / Mesmer

Attributes:
Mysticism: 8+2
Wind Prayers: 8
Earth Prayers: 12+4
Inspiration Magic: 7

[card]Signet of Midnight[/card][card]Spirit of Failure[/card][card]Epidemic[/card][card]Whirling Charge[/card][card]Heart of Fury[/card][card]Armor of Sanctity[/card][card]Sand Shards[/card][card]Mystic Regeneration[/card]

EDIT: Since the graphics aren't pulling correctly I added the Text version of these skills below:
[skill=text]Signet of Midnight[/skill]
[skill=text]Spirit of Failure[/skill]
[skill=text]Epidemic[/skill]
[skill=text]Whirling Charge[/skill]
[skill=text]Heart of Fury[/skill]
[skill=text]Armor of Sanctity[/skill]
[skill=text]Sand Shards[/skill]
[skill=text]Mystic Regeneration[/skill]

The key skills to this build are Signet of Midnight, which has a 15 sec recharge and duration, so you could stay permanently blind, Spirit of Failure (for energy management), and Sand Shards (for massive AoE damage). The other skills can be swapped in an out, as they either increase damage (via attack speed) or increase defense (via healing or dmg reduction). Epidemic should also help with the defense as well. My best guess is that this delivers about 20-25 armor-ignoring dps x (up to 3 scythe targets) per target in AoE range. This is only an assumption since I haven't been able to test this quite yet, as Signet of Midnight can only get capped at Perdition Rock, and my Dervish had never ventured far into Tyria. Right now I'm at Thunderhead keep, so I'm hoping I can cap this skill tonight and try this out.

Has anyone tried this out before? I know there was a similar Sand Shards D/A build that got nerfed a few months ago, but I don't know if this has been tried. Comments are welcome as this is my first build post and I am still quite the n00b when it comes to designing new builds.

Ebon Dust Aura + Epidemic instead of SoM and Shards.

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Well, like mentioned, I can't test this yet (need to cap SoM first).

Here's my quick and dirty calc of the max damage potential:

scythe's attack once per 1.75 secs => 0.57 attacks per sec x (1 + .33 HoF + .25 WC) = .902 attacks per sec

Miss rate should be 90-100% - Blindness is 90% by itself plus the additional 25% caused by spirit of failure plus any additional penalty of having 0 in scythe mastery - I'll assume 100% for the sake of simplicity.

.902 attacks per second * 100% miss rate * 3 targets missed * 26 AoE dmg per target => roughly 70 AoE armor-ignoring dmg per second. This is not quite as brutal as Spiteful Spirit, but close, and is more than 5 times as brutal than burning.

I'm hoping to get to test it tonight once I plow through Thunderhead later tonight.

I tried this on mountain trolls and it works reasonably well. I swapped out my two attack speed skills (it ended up being way too much to manage) and replaced them with:
[skill]Conviction[/skill]
[skill]Veil of Thorns[/skill]

Which was nice because it meant that I no longer needed any wind prayers.
My new Attributes were:
Inspiration: 10
Earth Prayers: 12+4
Mysticism: 8

In my experimenting I did notice that the 26 dmg did not appear to stack (so if you missed two targets next to each other with the scythe, you only did 26 dmg to each, not 26 to both. This brings dps down to 20ish per sec, which is still respectable, but noticably slow. The Aura of Thorns + Armor of Sanctity defense was fairly nice, but this felt to me to be two intensive and slow for good solo build. Could be nice to solo some bosses with, however, and the dmg is respectable enough to be the core of a decent PvE build. Oddly enough Melonni was able to solo better than I could with this build, albeit her damage was a little slower. I'm just not as quick as she is refreshing all of my defensive skillz

Sand Shards used to trigger flee back when it worked with assassin attacks. I'm not sure how flee works with the recent changes, but mobs will definitely not stay put.

You could run a build as D/W with 12 in axe,bringing cyclone axe,still using ebon dust aura and getting yourself a chor's axe.Since Ebon dust lasts longer than its recharge and cyclone having a 4 sec recharge i think it is,u could probably find yourself some places to farm using a pretty much perma blind on your targets if they are balled up,would just have to mess with agro some!

lol wat the hell are u talking about with 12 axe mastery, hes blinded remember? lol

secondly, he needs to be blinded to miss....

back to the subject, channeling would work a lot better, no casting time on each foe and

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The idea was posted during the Nightfall Preview Weekend, an hour after the D/A sand shards nerf...

Sorry about the rez, but how was this nurfed? It still looks like it can work well.

IIRC, Sand Shards was nerfed pretty hard after some D/A's abused it in HA with a bunch of dagger attacks that they missed the requirement for.

Sand Shards does pathetic damage, now.

Pathetic damage now? As far as I see it, being a dervish you swing at 3 targets every 1.7 something seconds and do about 70 that way. Use Twin Moon Sweep every 6 seconds that does 140 dmg to everyone around you. Now some math.

Every 10 seconds.
10/1.75=5.7 or 6 (Scythe attacks 6 times every 10 seconds)
6*3=18 (3 targets)
18*25=450 (Earth prayers at 15)
6*25=150 (An extra 6 attacks using Twin Moon Sweep twice(
450+150=600 (Total)

Now, saying that that hits all adjacent foes, 600 damage is good in my opinion. Anything i am doing wrong?

I believe it is said in the 5th post that the damage from attacking multiple targets with the same swing does not stack on sand shards.

its alrite in pve, -- u might want 2 drop spirtof failure. kinda useless

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