Bleed and Poison combination

Quote: Sharpen Daggers - Enchantment Spell
For 10...30 seconds, all of your critical hits cause bleeding for 5...13 seconds. Combined with...

Quote:

Apply Poison - Preparation For 24 seconds, enemies struck by your physical attacks become poisoned for 3-13 seconds. Now, obviously there would be some problems with a combination like this. One is energy. The 15 cost of Apply Poison is pretty hefty, even with a slight boost from armor. Two is needing to get criticals from Sharpen Daggers to cause bleeding. This means you're not always guaranteed to stack the degen. Three is the preparation time required...a total of 4 seconds. I don't exactly have a build built on this idea, and I haven't worked out most of the details, as well, but I figured I'd throw this combination out and see what you guys think. I'm none too sold on the idea yet, either, but perhaps it'll be more attractive within a build for it.

Well, if you use an R/A you'll never have energy issues.

Apply Poison + Jagged Strike, woul work better for the dual degen effect.

but why would you want to add +4 degen to 1 target that you have to run up too? There are a lot better things you could do with the energy and extra skill slot, its like having apply poison on a warrior, except you dont have really bad energy issues if your R/A. If you want to spread poison and bleeding, simply use cripple shot+apply poison and hunters shot.

Or set things up for one colossaly evil blow? Something like this:

Critical 11 (15)
Dagger 8 (9)
Deadly 9 (10)
Wilderness Survival 8

Black Lotus Strike
Critical Strike
Sharpen Daggers
Apply Poison
Impale
Siphon Speed
Viper's Defense
ReSiggy/Death's Charge

Pocket spike. Hit your Sharpen, then Apply, then Impale, then slam a Black Lotus home to recharge the Energy you'll need for a now-brutal Critical Strike. Get +7 degen, dual criticals, and a nice juicy damage bonus from Impale all in one strike. Siphon Speed for additional Hexy fun, VD and ReSiggy for the usual reasons. Something like this could lay a serious hurt on someone if played and timed properly. Would be tough without an ingoing teleport, which is why ye should take Death's Charge over ReSig if ye can, but if ye can pull off the full blast, it'll definitely level some hurt.

Quote: Originally Posted by zoozoc

I wonder...to augment the spike damage even further, what about Siphon Strength in place of Siphon Speed? This is all dependent on if we get a damage increase, rather than a critical hit rate increase from Siphon Strength, of course. In the GWG descriptions it's +33% to our crit hit rate against that foe, but hopefully in-game it's better damage output versus that foe.

What about Sleeping Wound as the Elite?

Also worth considering is Twisting Fangs. That'd be scary I think. And possibly swap Viper's Defense for Critical Eye (I love this skill so much).

Sharpen-->Apply-->Impale-->Black Lotus-->Twisting Fangs

If there's a way to squeeze in Critical Eye there, I'm thinking in-between Apply and Impale, then your chances of snagging criticals on both Black Lotus and Twisting Fangs greatly increase.

Let's see...that'd be +7 degen, spike damage from Impale on top of the dual attack damage of Twisting Fangs, in addition to the Deep Wound, then depending on what we'd feel like doing, Sleeping Wound for an extra 2 degen or Moebius Strike for extra damage and if they're below 50% health, attack skill recharge.

Degen is not the same as spiking, since the damage in incremental rather than immediate. Therefore it's fairly easy to heal through. The idea behind spiking is to frontload a ton of damage, ideally so fast that the target will die before his monks can heal him. That's simply not going to happen with degen.

That's not to say that degen is worthless. It does raise your dps and apply pressure to the enemy. However, calling a condition stack a "spike" is erroneous.

Should I point out that this combination works just aswell when using a bow ? (Yes, Sharpen Daggers is somewhat of a misnomer.)

Actually, I used Apply Poison a lot during the FPE, but as I was usually using Jagged Strike as my lead attack (cheap, fast recharge), Sharpen was usually obsolete. One combo I briefly tried was to take Sharpen Daggers + Apply Poison (and of course Critical Eye), and then have just Palm Strike{E} + Death Blossom as my attack 'chain'. You can quickly switch between targets causing nice degen, then land Palm + Death Blossom every 12 seconds on the most central target doing nice AoE Damage.

This is of course PvE only, and I'll admit I didn't try it long enough to perfect it or judge it against other options, but the fact it leaves you with plenty of skill bar for stances, healing and even traps if you wanted makes it an interesting alternative to the strangely popular huge attack chain builds.

Effigy, I'm not really calling degen a spike, though. This idea is more a spike+degen than anything else. Granted, it's a mini-spike of sorts, but Impale+Twisting Fangs with a lead double degen from Jagged Strike+Apply Poison might be pretty nasty regardless of being a mini-spike.