Dark Aura build

I've seen several people posting Dark Aura builds, but none of them are quite like the one I came up with, so I wanted to post it for you pros to critique. I put Aura of the Lich in mine to reduce the amount of damage and life I have to sacrifice by half and double the effectivness of my life stealing and regen abilities while leaving my damage output level the same. My biggest concern was with energy, so I looked at all the options from all the diffrent classes and channeling looked like it would be the most useful, but I'm open to suggestions.

Blood: 12 (+4)
Death: 11 (+3)
Soul Reaping: 6 (+whatever)
Inspiration: 2

E Aura of the Lich
Dark Pact
Dark Aura
Touch of Agony
Vampiric Gaze
Life Siphon
Putrid Explosion
Channel


I know jacking up my attributes will drasticly lower my health, but with Aura of the Lich on, the difference between 480 and 380 goes from 100 to 50, which isn't that big of a deal. Plus, that's less health I have to sacrifice whilst doing the same amount of damage. Putrid Explosion is just there because I figured if I was jacking up Death Magic so high, then why not? I could easily replace it with something else, though. I chose Vampiric Gaze over Vampiric Touch since they lowered the casting time to 1 and it's range. That'll let me hang back and just nuke with Death Pact and heal with the Gaze if I don't want to run into the crowd or can't for some reason.

Did they change aura of the lich to halve sacrifices? I haven't touched it in the longest time but it didn't when I tested it.

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I didn't know about the aftercast thing and someone on another forum pointed out that by the time you can do anything after casting dark pact, dark pact has almost refreshed, so touch of agony becomes redundant. I decided to drop it for ether feast for more healing. I then began thinking that since I won't be using a touch based attack anymore, then perhaps I should just drop dark aura and all the other death spells to save points and just hang back and nuke like a son of a bitch with dark pact while using vampiric gaze, life siphon, and ether feast to heal myself. I could then take Offering of Blood as my elite to help with energy. I could dump more points into Inspiration and take some more mesmer skills or perhaps put points into curses. The damage from dark aura is incredibly sweet, but it also means I have to run right up to a target, which was justifiable when I was planning on using touch of agony and vampiric touch, but since they reduced the cast time of vampiric gaze I decided to use it instead of touch and now I've decided to drop touch of agony. Would dark aura still be worth the risk of jumping into the fray, or would it be best to drop the whole death line and just hang back and blast people from a safer distance?

I just saw Energy Drain and it would make a much better elite than Offering of Blood if I were seconding mesmer, which I'm leaning towards right now.

From what I've read very recently, +3 runes are -100 health and +2 -50, with +1 still be 0 health mod. So, you'll have 280 hp total instead of 480. That seems like a big sacrifice. If you're going PvP you could easily be killed with a few spells. If you're going for death aura or whatever it's called and moving into close range you could easily get eaten alive by a warrior decided to beat on you because you're a caster and foolishly wandered close.

I personally need to test out how much I'm getting hit and choose my runes accordingly, currently my build is planned for all +1 runes.

I'm an experienced Necro with a Dark Aura build myself, and I find there is alot of confusion about this build, first off if you know how to play your cards right you don't "kill yourself" as people think you would, I will explain.. My build looks like this..

Aura of the Lich
Dark Aura
Touch of Agony
Dark Pact
Life Siphon
Blood Renewal
Well of Blood
Res Signet/Demonic Flesh

Now to explain why I choose these skills, Aura of the Lich halves all damage and healing and sacrafices, however health regen stays the same so you should focus on that as your main source of healing, that's where Life Siphon and Blood Renewal come in, Blood Renewal by itself sucks, but using after Aura of the Lich and Dark Aura you now only sacrifice 17% hp instead of 33%, and you hurt all adjacent foes while healing nicely, while only taking half damage. Then spam Touch of Agony and Dark Pact (That now only sacrifice 5% HP instead of 10%) and watch the enemies fall to the floor Once you kill your target (which happens quickly with this build) use Well of Blood for you and your teammates to regen HP, and repeat.

As you can see with the right skills this "Suicial Necro" is not actaully suicidal at all. Depending on the situation you can even take out Res Signet and put in Demonic Flesh just to have more HP and hurt all adjacent foes when you use it. Good luck to anyone using this fun build and feel free to PM me in game with any questions

Alright, my Necro, Doctor Tardis, has evolved over the last few months. He started as a N/E, which I found to be a waste of my time. Once I got "Virulence", he became a N/W, partly because I gave people 4 different conditions in 2 seconds, and partly because Necros look so dang cool holding a chaos axe. However, when Dark Bond was fixed (it didn't reduce damage even when your minions were dead anymore), My necro could no longer tank, so I had to find a new build. The answer was, of course, Dark Aura.

My build (N/Mo):

Aura of the Lich
Dark Aura
Touch of Agony
Dark Pact
Life Siphon
Blood Renewal
Healing Breeze
Rebirth/Rez Sig

Blood: 14
Death: 10
Soul R: 4
Healing: 9
HP: 540 EP:47 (with items and stuff)

So you all understand how this works. The trick is that its way better to have Health Regeneration than anything with Aura of the Lich. This way you are self sufficient, you dont need people to die before you are effective, and you are doing 90/80 damage about every second and a half for 5 EP each (and 35 to everyone else around you). And if I ever get bored of this build (which i wont), I could always become a minion master, (which everyone thinks I am already, being an N/Mo... so they all are pretty surprised when they start taking massive damage in the begining of the fight).

using dark aura and not getting into the mix just isn't going to be as productive as it should be. Dark Aura does damage to adjacent foes as well as the target every time you sacrifice health. at 16 death your dark aura will do over 50 damage every time you sacrifice. so by getting into a group of foes and spaming dark pact and touch of agony, dark pact doing 55dmg and TOA doing 45(with blood around 13) add 50 damage from dark aura to foe and adjacent foes.......
you'll be handing 110dmg, 95dmg every couple of seconds to some poor sucker and a few of his friends.

16 death
13 blood
everything else in soul reaping

aura of the lich
dark aura
blood renewal(sacrifice health also)
touch of agony
dark pact
consume corpse(moves you to the corpse and gives you health and evergy)
res

well of blood would be ok. or you could still use vamp gaze.....

this is mine... i love it, personally.

AotL
dark aura
blood renewal
touch of agony
dark pact
barbed sig!!!
death nova!!! (if you are going to die... might as well take them with you)
res sig

I found that Healing Breeze that Boottspurr suggested works pretty well, since it works twice as fast with AotL on. Consume corpse looks like a good idea too, to quickly get back energy and health. Death Nova as Doleo suggested is also a good choice. I tried a variation of this with a monk primary once with contemplation of purity. I didn't work that well, since CoP removes all enchantments, so you had to recast them all, but it was pretty funny removing all conditions, hexes and going back to full life in an instant

If you're using this build for farming in PvE, I suggest Signet of Agony and Plague sending to hurt all adjacent enemies and give them all bleeding as well.

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