something to rival SS

ok, so ive been playing around on GW for a long time now, since prophecies in fact and ive found nothing that works as well in PvE as SS or MM. ive been trying to find a new build to play but so far most of them have been either boring or just plain suck. well, i think ive finally made one that is pretty good.

Curses: 12+3+1
Soul Reaping: 12+1


Suffering
Feast of Corruption [e]
Necrosis (or Soul Barbs)
Barbs
Mark of Pain
Signet of Lost Souls
Well of Ruin or Well of Darkness (optional)
Rez

the idea here is to be able to blam a big group of enemies with a lot of force, just like SS. the difference here is that you are not relying on the enemy to kill itself.

you basically start off by casting Suffering to hex a bunch of enemies at once and then hit them with FoC to get things going. after that you load up your foes with Barbs and MoP. SoLS when you get low on energy and pretty much just spam Necrosis. the wells are optional because i find myself not needing them much since groups tend to fall fairly quickly.

this build works the best when accompanied by a MM, lots of little hits being amped up by Barbs and MoP. ;p

for items, i use The Stonereaper. the half casting and skill recharge chances are nice since FoC has a fairly big recharge and the +1 Curses chance gets you some nice damage out of it.

if you didnt want to bring along another MM you could just equip yourself with Bone Minions and move a few points into death magic. this would reduce the damage output of the build but you would have room in your party for another healer, tank or whatever.

Give it a try and let me know what you think or suggest changes, im pretty open to trying things different. ^_^

Use [skill]Icy Veins[/skill]. Shorter recharge than FoC (5s vs 20s) and it functions as a hex for Necrosis spam to kill the target quickly and trigger the AoE damage.
FoC is kind of a broken skill really, very lengthy recharge and average damage at best.

But if you really want to use FoC then take [wiki]Glyph of Swiftness[/wiki]. As long as you don't use projectile spells it will reduce skill recharge by 25% so FoC is 15s instead of 20s, and Necrosis can be spammed more often.

The build suggested is so slow it's hopeless in terms of dps vs mobs.

Icy Veins is only good against low level monsters, the damage is weak for an elemental damage spell; it's a useless base in high-level PvE.

There are death magic builds using Icy Veins, Necrosis, Rotting Flesh, Rising Bile and Putrid Bile. Sometimes Putrid Explosion if there are corpses.

This is a pretty generic Curses build, not bad. But FoC and Suffering do not do that much damage. FoC's recharge is too long and it has less utility and raw power than SS in general PvE.

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FoC got the nerfbat over a year ago. Before that a fun thing to do was take a bunch of necros with FoC(some ran AEcho and/or AMimicry too) and a gear tank(yes this was that long ago) and drop a Suffering on the mobs as they all swamped the tank. Repeated FoCs simply wasted entire groups in a matter of seconds.
FoC was used by a few guilds in GvG when Ritualists first came out and someone(EW I think) won a tourny with it....well raped a tourney with it would be a better description perhaps. The nerfbat flew viscously after that. I remember beating Te with that build and getting compliments but every other high rank guild screamed imba shit. Of course now that the spirit SR engine has been removed I would really like to see FoC made viable again but I really doubt it. FoC used to be a fun skill that was balanced(imo only I guess) and is still an interesting Elite but, SS is the standard now and for good reason.
Play with FoC though, SS only gets old and boring I agree. But there's no doubting that it is king of the PvE necro world(again imo).
GL and HF....but most importantly...have fun.

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Yeah, it's pretty sad that there is no real spammable Necro spell for high dps output. Mark of pain is better than Spiteful Spirit, but it triggers an AoE scatter, so blah. It's sad to me that this profession gets smacked every time we discover a way to be a formidable opponant in PvP.