18 Mar 2005 at 16:47 - 5
I'm no expert at cross examining these builds, touching up is far harder than building from scratch. But I'll give it a go from what comes into my head at the moment, heres a few things to consider...
Range
Phoenix and Inferno are both close range spells. Usually I don't see these effectively harnessed except in the case of War/Ele builds, having a phoenix to the face is hard to swallow indeed. But as it stands, being primary ele and secondary necro you're going to want to stand away from the front lines. This means that Phoenix will do 75 damage max. Thats not so hot. In fact...it also means that two out of three of your Area of Effect spells don't really do their job as large AoE nukes. Even if you run smack bang into the middle of the enemy, you are going to do a maximum of 366 damage with your 3 AoE nukes...thats not going to kill anyone. I dare say...after they stand there and take the damage...they're going to have their sadistic ways with you.
Energy
Since you simply want to run in and do tons of damage to everything around you...lets see what this is going to cost you in terms of energy.
Rodgort's Invocation 25
Phoenix 15
Inferno 10
In addition to this...you have Immolate 10 energy and Mind Burn which is 10 energy plus another 10 for exhaustion.
This boils down to 50 energy (45 with fire attunement) for 366 points of damage. ASSUMING you run into the enemy camp and stand right in the middle. If you're fighting just one person and use ALL your ele skills (ie. The damaging ones) thats erm...80 energy (69 with fire attunement) for 509 damage to one guy. OH NOES!!!!11. This means two things.
1) you can't kill 1 guy
2) you've got no energy
This wouldn't be THAT bad if you were a long range nuker. Just run in circles for a bit. But since you can only whip out 509 damage at very close range...It means that basically you've gone on a suicide run where you've killed nobody.
Healing
I assume you picked those necro skills for their healing purposes? They're certainly not the most damaging necro skills, nor do they particularly compliment your ele style. This makes sense, because looking at your ele skills you want to run in and nuke away, you're going to need healing after you're done, lets look at what you have.
Vampire's Gaze- average 6.5 health per second
Life Siphon- average 3 health per second
...that means if you cast them both, the only healing you're going to get is an average of 9.5 a second. Lets put this in perspective, I'd say that most builds do 50 damage per second using skills, thats a conservative estimate. 9.5 healing for you also means 9.5 health degeneration for the enemy. For a DoT spell its ok I suppose, but since you seem to want to operate on the front lines...thats not much damage to be giving out.
Analysis
It seems to me that the build is trying to do too many things, and those things are against the nature of the classes. The pimary ele should be standing at the back nuking, or using earth magic to bolster your team during actual combat. With your chosen skills, this is simply not the case. Also you have too many skills that want to do the same thing, for example inferno and phoenix would be used in the same situation. This means that both the classes and the skills are dischordant with the applications. I'd say what you are trying to achieve here (deal out big damage in a short time in melee) would be better done by simply a Warrior/Monk or a Warrior/Ele.
I'd say review this build, of course...if all you want to do is Roleplay...theres no need for any of the above critique, do whatever feels right. But for PvP I'd say you should take another look at the build, starting with the basic question: WHAT DO YOU WANT TO ACHIEVE
You cannot be uber 1337 in guild wars, no matter how skilled or fast you are, you cannot take down a team on your own. This pushes us to streamline our builds, its fustrating sometimes but I have to admit that it is more efficient and better to do one thing really well. Things like Anti-caster Anti-healing Front Line Melee Nuker etc.
