Ridiculous Build...

I call him... the EQUALIZER!

Anyway.. I've thrown this together tonight, for no good reason other than sheer curiousity to see what you guys think.

Necromancer/Monk

Attributes:

Soul Reaping - 10
Blood Magic - 11
Protection Prayers - 10

Skills:

Blood Ritual
Blood Renewal
Well of Blood
Demonic Flesh
Life Bond
Protective Spirit (or Resurrect, depending)
Awaken the Blood
Grenth's Balance {E}


Ok, the basic idea behind this build is to willingly lower your health to as low as you can safely go and then cast Grenth's Balance on the enemy monk or whoever you wish. I'm not 100% sure how Grenth's Balance works, but I'd like to think that it matched your enemies health with your own... unfortunatly, I think that it just finds the average of the two... which, depending on how low you can actually get your health, could still be deadly.

This is how I think you could play this build. Let's assume we're starting at a base of 480 health (be warned, I'm gonna TRY and break out some math here, lol... I'm not BAD at math, I just don't know if this'll be accurate):

1) We'll start out by casting Awaken the Blood, which puts our Blood Magic @ 12 now... also allowing us to sacrifice 150% of any sacrifice we make, speeding this process up. Remember, we don't want to KILL outselves, so we have to watch out. Carrying a Monk Secondary could bring unwanted attention, so we'll have to be wary of any threats incoming.

2) Now we'll throw the Demonic Flesh in there, sacrificing 107 health (effectively 161, rounded up) thanks to AtB. That leaves us with 319 left to work with (in optimal conditions).

3) Now is as good a time as any to cast Blood Ritual on anyone who needs some Energy renewal. Casting it costs us 71 health (@ lvl 12 Blood) or 107 with AtB. Leaving our total at 212. Hopefully our team monk knows NOT to heal us, or else this is all being canceled. As for our Energy, I think we're doing ok. AtB only costs 10 Energy, and Demonic Flesh, only 5. Blood Ritual put us back another 10, but hopefully someone has died by now so we get that back... if not, we're still recharging on our own and we still have like 30 seconds left before... because it get's tricky now.

4) Ok, now this is where the danger comes into play. We're sitting, give or take, 212 health. Our next spell is a choice. We either cast Protective Spirit, which should prevent us from actually dying (receiving no more than 10% damage from anything, if I read it correctly)... giving us a 17 second immortality while we have to cast Blood Renewal, costing us another 141 health or 212, rounded up. This is why we hopefully have gained a little health... or else we'd commit suicide.

5) We now have to act fast. We are now given a +3 Life Regen, and that's bad for us. But we also have to find the energy to cast Grenth's Balance. I'm pretty sure the Necromancer can get 42 energy max... so it *Might* be possible to do this. The trick is to get your health as absolutely low as possible before you cast Grenth's.

I'm thinking that Grenth's works like this (Your Health+Foe's Health)/(2) = Total Health for the Both of You. Hopefully it's a bit more potent than that, but it's unlikely. Because even if you got your health to something like 2 and the enemy was say, at 300... that's (2+300)/(2) = 151 health for both of you... but then once Blood Renewal ends, you gain 141 health again... putting you at 292. When you think about it, we'd almost swap health entirely(only under these exact conditions)...

How you finish off your enemy... well, you don't, lol. You leave that for someone else...

The Life Bond is just another way of lowering your health by helping a team-mate. Well of Blood is just another healing spell... and that's about it.

Who knows if this build is even the right way to go about doing this... might be funny in the Arena or something... but it's probably easier to just play normally and never heal yourself until you need to... and do so by using Grenth's Balance.

Either way, the best way, that I can see, to make use of Grenth's Balance is to use Blood Renewal right before it, so that you gain it all back and more.

Or is Grenth's just doomed to the dust-bin?

Infuse Health
Description: Lose 50% your current health. Target other ally is healed for 100-129% of the amount you lost.
Energy Cost: 10
Casting Time: 1
Recharge Time: 0
Skill Type: Spell
Linked Attribute: Healing Prayers


Would that make it better/faster? With AtB you'd sacrifice 360 (240+120) hp's on 10 nrg, and healing your teammate for 240-310 hp's, and be left with 120 hp's. Or instead of AtB just chain cast Infuse 2-3 times.

Chiron's Balance
Description: Health is equalized between you and target enemy.
Energy Cost: 15
Casting Time: 1
Recharge Time: 60
Skill Type: Spell
Linked Attribute: Non-Linked (N)

If you had an even amount of teammates using this build, you could heal players who've just casted Chiron's Balance up to full health within seconds, and then you'd be ready to cast CB on a different target. If you had 2 or 4 teammates doing this with decent coordination it'd definitely be effective lol.

Chiron's Balance does work like you expect, and not as you'd want it to. It takes the sum of the life totals and divides by two. So if you're at 1 hp, and the targeted player is at 480, you'll each be sitting at 240 afterwards(I'm not sure where the extra 1 health goes if you're at an odd number). It won't take your opponent down to your current health total, or anything like that.

I could see this combination working with just a couple skills- use infuse health to drop your life by 1/2. Maybe use Blood Ritual on a friendly caster, then use Blood Renewal- you'll be rather low on life at this point, so use Chiron's. This gives you 4 extra skills that you can use to finish off the person once you've taken them to 1/2 life, or to help support your team so that they can finish him off. Maybe look into throwing in something like Order of Pain to increase your teammates damages, or even something like Vampiric Touch to help heal you and hurt the enemy after using Grenth's.

I thought of a similar build myself and came to one conclusion: it's not a good idea. First off you're purposely lowering your health down to the 5-20 area. Two sword attacks or one Power Shot and you're dead. Then your team's down 8 to 7. Same could happen from a Firestorm or any AoE for that matter.

Now assuming you manage to survive and can actually slap on Grenth's Balance. You did an approxiamte 200 net damage to the ennemy for a cost of over 20 energy depending on how you managed to lower your health. Furthermore, Grenth's has a very nasty recharge time. You'll only be able to do it every 60 seconds. Now look at what you can do for those 50 seconds of downtime: not much. You don't have real expert skills in there that could aid your team. You'd be better off an Ele/Mes spam casting Water Trident. An Elmo would be more appreciated by your teammates for sure.

This build could perhaps be better if you'd bring along Arcane Echo but even then, your energy consumption would be way too high for your damage output/DPS.

Yeah, Grenth's Balance is really just effective against creatures that has a lot more hp than yourself, for example the Guild Lord. SoW had the right idea and they used it well.

Grenth's Balance + Illusion of Weakness = Happy time

That build sucks. First of all, if you try to do this to me I'll drop your 200 HP in 2 seconds(not kidding). And you are rising a likewise death from necro's like mine, elementalists, final thrust just so you can do 240 damage after using 5 or so skills?

Also if someone triggers corpse explosion near you, or does anything AoE that could even target someone else you go kaboom.

Hmm.. well you did say it was ridiculous... maybe under the right conditions you could pull it off.. but you are asking for headaches with it. someone could pop you before you get the whole order off

Alright, I've worked on a new and improved ridiculous Build. Based on this new idea I had, we begin:

Character Combo: Elementalist/Warrior

Attributes:

Energy Storage: 10
Earth Magic : 11
Tactics: 9

Skills:

Crystal Wave
Armour of Earth
Aftershock (replaceable)
Glyph of Lesser Energy
Kinetic Armour (replaceable)
Aura of Restoration
Fear Me
Balthazar's Spirit (Monk skill, using Charm, takes up Elite slot)


Alright, the basic strategy of this build is really, really stupid... first you cast Balthazar's Spirit on yourself. Now whenever you take damage, you will gain adrenaline and energy (probably not a lot of energy though). Either way, we have to put ourselves in the line of fire now. I would think that if you try to follow anyone who's been targeted by AoE spells... find a way to get hurt a little, but don't die, lol.

Ok, now that we're gaining some adrenaline, position yourself near some enemies (more than 1, preferably) and use the Fear Me skill, robbing them of energy. That's the basic idea I had with this build. Actually, to tell you the truth, I just wanted to use Balthazar's Spirit with a Warrior Secondary build and not a Monk Primary. :P

Anyway, the other Elementalist Skills are for your protection and PBAoE attack spells. I like Crystal Wave, mostly because it ignores armour. However, you're undoing any negative conditions that have been placed on your enemies by your team... so it's up to you. Aftershock is a cheap and powerful spell as well.

Again, this build would most likely NEVER work, but I found it interesting to throw together in the short time that I did.

Another idea, just use an expert necklace to learn the Grenth's Balance and not being a necromancer at all.

Then again, I don't quite remember if you can do that with elite skills =P

(people should consider the expert necklace with general skills of each class into their build, where you don't need an attribute to make it good... example, ressurect from the monk)

I expected to see Unnatural Signet used! Damn you, I demand my money back!