Necro Sacrifice skills

I have been running a sacrifice/dark aura necro monk for the last two beta weekends. I am not suggesting that the old system be brought back; it made no sense. However, I feel that the new system is a bit harsh.

Touch of Agony, dark pact, and blood renewal all cost way too much in sacrifice with little return. In addition, there isn't any real way to hedge against the loss. You get no gain from incresing your HP with demonic flesh or other buffs (in fact they cause you to sac more health per cast easily leading to a less desireable result in the case of a short cool down like BiP or dark pact). At 480 health blood renewal was just barely breaking even. The initial sacrifice was so great that the skill could really only be used to trigger dark aura in the initial attack...any later and there was a good chance I would kill myself or at least give my opponent an opportunity to one shot me.

The only skill that seems to help is aura of the lich. Using the aura works very well. however, the sacrifice is so high on some of the skills that aura of the lich is pretty much required. Meaning...if you want a sacrifice based build your tied to having aura of the lich as your elite and Aura is not without its own drawbacks.

Unfortunately, I don't really have an answer. Since the damage done by these spells ignores armor, and the cool down is so short, the necro can do quite a bit of damage over a short burst. However, the burst is so short it seems to do little other than leaving the necro with reduced life, and a very angry enemy.

Anyone else have any experience or feedback on this?

I have a build that works and it uses dark aura, but to get good returns on sacrifises, I use 3 superior runes. Superior death, blood and vigor. That makes me have 380 HP and 15 death and 16 blood. At 16 blood I do 51 with dark pact and 61 with touch of agony, for a sacrifise of 38. Dark aura does 50 and I lose 20. I also use soul feast for a quick 280 HP heal after I kill someone and death nova so I take someone with me when I die. My elite is either Life Transfer or better soul leech. Before I head into the fray I use soul leech on a monk or mesmer. 84 HP life steal keeps me up and running at my low HP and low sacrifises, while doing additional damage to my target, bringing it down faster.

I am wandering if you went Monk primary and Necro secondary, would Devine Healing take a little bit of the bite out of sacrifices?

Necro primary. If I went monk primary I wouldn't be able to use necro runes.

Spura. Good thinking. A bit rough on the pocket book, but a good solution. That sort of solution makes much more sense than the old system where the sacrifice worked better with less skill invested.

Kyraith I wouldn't go monk primary for a couple of reasons (besides wanting Necro runes to improve the build). One you really don't want to be targetted with this build; you do enough damage to yourself already. Two, the casting cost on touch of agony and dark pact are so small, that soul reaping really helps.

Thanks for the response Spura.

Spura, I understand your idea of using runes to increase the attributes and lowering the hp to minimize the sacrifices since it is based on percentage now. But won't you have problem if you are being focus fired since your hp is only 380? I am thinking that it is kinda risky running around on the frontline using touch of agony when you have that kind of hp.

I was using a mild variant of the sacrificing necro using only dark pact, barbed signet, and life transfer. Obviously it does not do as much damage as your build above, but on the other hand I did not have any problem staying alive nor put as much strain on the monks to keep me alive.

Your opnion?

Low HP is more of an unintedned consequence of superior runes.
10% is 10% regardless of full HP. Of course 480 is still better than 380 if you take non % based damage. But I just wanted to get as much kick as possible out of my 10% and that is why I pumped blood so high. Of course you can go for minor runes. Netting 13 death and 14 blood but that would mean you get 530 HP.

Then you will sacrifise
53(10%)+18(dark aura)=71 HP = 13.4%
to do
45(dark pact)+44(dark aura)=89
or
55(touch of agony)+44(dark aura)=99
damage

Compared to 15/16 setup
38(10%)+20(dark aura)=58 HP = 15.3%
to do
51(dark pact)+50(dark aura)=101
or
61(touch of agony)+50(dark aura)=111
damage

I played this a lot in arena. And it depends really on how much and who picks on you. If you get a mesmer on you then it is game over for you. If I get tank train then I try to use dark pact, touch of agony, signet of agony, dark pact then exploding in death nova.

Ah I see. Your build would probably be better used in the arena than mine.

Originally I was trying dark aura, dark pact, touch of agony, and barbed signet in the tomb and found that I was not able to survive under focus fire. That is why I changed my build and used life transfer and barbed signet mainly and only used the dark pact if the enemy is almost dead.

But since my build does long range damage, the low hp caused by using the runes probably will not be a big problem anyway. In that case it makes sense to pump the attributes to get more damage out of the skills.

I use aura to do point blank damage in a small radius. Of course this build doesn't survive focus fire. But then again with death nova you can usually take someone out before then can kill you.