Harbinger build questions

[Xanhawk.3806]

I did not get to play around with Harbinger as much as I liked and didn't get to test out anything but the gear given to us and a few of the new skills.  I did like most of that I did get to do, but I'm wondering how far people got into testing ideas with Harbinger during the beta.  

Wanted to know how good Plaguedoctor's would be on Harbinger, if not that great, if there were better choices? 

After reading about the Runes of Torment, I was wondering how well they'd be with Harbinger with it's auto inflicting Torment coupled with Plaguedoctor's gear as a main method of self sustain?

Were there any builds for Condi Harbinger that provided decent/good survivability?  I primarily play Solo so a full glasscannon build wouldn't help me in some fights, so I am fine with a hit against my damage.

Saw how Vitality interacts with new Blight Mechanic and other stats through traits and wondered if there were any builds to capitalize on vitality?

Are there any discussion or videos on testing overworld or WvW builds?  (I'm at work atm so I can't do any extensive research on my own until much later.)

Planning on gathering some gear and jumping between Harbinger and my current Power Reaper build from time to time.

Edited September 7, 2021 by Xanhawk.3806

[Fueki.4753]

Since you automatically heal using your Life Force (if you are not in Shroud), I don't think additional Vitality is all that necessary for a Harmbinger.

You can use the trait Eternal Life in Soul Reaping to refill your Life Force and thus have a constant stream of healing out of Shroud.

And then there also is Vital Persistence in Soul Reaping that further increases your Vitality and healing.

Also, with the amount of Torment that Harmbinger applies, the Runes of Torment should heal sufficiently with.

 

Thus, I'd rather go with Trailblazer gear, if I have problems surviving in Viper.

[XECOR.2814]

trailblazer or cele would be best bet with staff,pistol/wh or off dagger. Blood SR Harbinger for sustain and Curses SR Harb for more aggressive. HealSkill will be consume or new one, walk and wurm are fixed, 3rd slot is open according to your playstyle. Elite will be new one. Anything other than things i mentioned will be subpar.
If you are not building for vitality on harbinger, you are free kill even for npc.

[ArtimisTau.7902]

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?PSCFosFaYZosUmKbl1iH1VW8F-zRRYkhO8GH+lRXpQHVg3DA-e

 

I'm personally leaning toward something like this. It's what I tested during the beta and it has crazy good damage and self sustain. I soloed most of the champion Hero Points in Auric Basin with no problem. You can camp in Shroud and full blight and still have 16k health. It is short 1% on torment duration though.

[Fueki.4753]

31 minutes ago, XECOR.2814 said:

If you are not building for vitality on harbinger, you are free kill even for npc.

That heavily depends on how Blight will be balanced in the end if if people consider is worth to go for maximum stacks.

But even with maximum stacks, Harmbinger has slightly less health (only about 200 HP difference) while having much better passive sustain than Elementalists and Thieves. Given that Thieves and Elementalists are doing just fine in most PvE content, Harmbinger should not have significant problems.

Edited September 8, 2021 by Fueki.4753

[XECOR.2814]

12 minutes ago, Fueki.4753 said:

That heavily depends on how Blight will be balanced in the end if if people consider is worth to go for maximum stacks.

But even with maximum stacks, Harmbinger has slightly less health (only about 200 HP difference) while having much better passive sustain than Elementalists and Thieves. Given that Thieves and Elementalists are doing just fine in most PvE content, Harmbinger should not have significant problems.

op is asking for wvw and i commented in relevance to that.

[Lan Deathrider.5910]

1: The healing is based off of your CURRENT maximum LF pool (5% of you LF as HP, please correct me if I am wrong on the exact conversion rate).

2: This means that Blight will reduce your LF pool and your healing while out of shroud.

3: Your LF pool is 69% of your HP pool (with Soul Battery this is increased by 20% to 82.8% of your HP pool)

4: This all means that the more HP you have, the more LF you have, and the more healing you have, to the point that the passive regen becomes better healing than the pulsing heal skills on other classes (like Troll Unguent)

 

Edit: Confirmed that so far the LF -> HP healing is in equal amounts. So that means at a 46,015 HP build (yes, you can get that high), your passive healing will be 1,905 HP/sec. And you can build it such that you never run out of LF...

Edited September 8, 2021 by Lan Deathrider.5910

[Fueki.4753]

16 minutes ago, XECOR.2814 said:

op is asking for wvw and i commented in relevance to that.

OP is asking for "overworld or WvW".

That aside, WvW also has lots of PvE content, none of which should be any problem to glass cannon Harmbingers.

Edited September 8, 2021 by Fueki.4753

[Xanhawk.3806]

Thanks for the info everyone!  

4 hours ago, Fueki.4753 said:

Since you automatically heal using your Life Force (if you are not in Shroud), I don't think additional Vitality is all that necessary for a Harmbinger.

You can use the trait Eternal Life in Soul Reaping to refill your Life Force and thus have a constant stream of healing out of Shroud.

And then there also is Vital Persistence in Soul Reaping that further increases your Vitality and healing.

Also, with the amount of Torment that Harmbinger applies, the Runes of Torment should heal sufficiently with.

 

Thus, I'd rather go with Trailblazer gear, if I have problems surviving in Viper.

2 hours ago, XECOR.2814 said:

trailblazer or cele would be best bet with staff,pistol/wh or off dagger. Blood SR Harbinger for sustain and Curses SR Harb for more aggressive. HealSkill will be consume or new one, walk and wurm are fixed, 3rd slot is open according to your playstyle. Elite will be new one. Anything other than things i mentioned will be subpar.
If you are not building for vitality on harbinger, you are free kill even for npc.

I will gladly look into Trailblazer's.  I had it in my head to avoid Toughness because I sometimes play with a couple of friends and heard that Toughness makes me more likely to be attacked by what we are fighting if I had the most, but I was looking for a more solo survival build so I really shouldn't have discounted it.

1 hour ago, ArtimisTau.7902 said:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?PSCFosFaYZosUmKbl1iH1VW8F-zRRYkhO8GH+lRXpQHVg3DA-e

 

I'm personally leaning toward something like this. It's what I tested during the beta and it has crazy good damage and self sustain. I soloed most of the champion Hero Points in Auric Basin with no problem. You can camp in Shroud and full blight and still have 16k health. It is short 1% on torment duration though.

This looks fun.  If I can get the ascended gear, that missing 1% really won't be an issue.

1 hour ago, Lan Deathrider.5910 said:

1: The healing is based off of your CURRENT maximum LF pool (5% of you LF as HP, please correct me if I am wrong on the exact conversion rate).

2: This means that Blight will reduce your LF pool and your healing while out of shroud.

3: Your LF pool is 69% of your HP pool (with Soul Battery this is increased by 20% to 82.8% of your HP pool)

4: This all means that the more HP you have, the more LF you have, and the more healing you have, to the point that the passive regen becomes better healing than the pulsing heal skills on other classes (like Troll Unguent)

 

Edit: Confirmed that so far the LF -> HP healing is in equal amounts. So that means at a 46,015 HP build (yes, you can get that high), your passive healing will be 1,905 HP/sec. And you can build it such that you never run out of LF...

Thank you for this info.  I did not know how LF on Harbinger worked with the regen and it working with Vitality on top of the other traits that could possibly work with Vitality pushes some ideas that I'll look into.  What would you recommend to have nearly endless LF generation in terms of traits/specializations?

[Lan Deathrider.5910]

4 minutes ago, Xanhawk.3806 said:

Thanks for the info everyone!  

I will gladly look into Trailblazer's.  I had it in my head to avoid Toughness because I sometimes play with a couple of friends and heard that Toughness makes me more likely to be attacked by what we are fighting if I had the most, but I was looking for a more solo survival build so I really shouldn't have discounted it.

This looks fun.  If I can get the ascended gear, that missing 1% really won't be an issue.

Thank you for this info.  I did not know how LF on Harbinger worked with the regen and it working with Vitality on top of the other traits that could possibly work with Vitality pushes some ideas that I'll look into.  What would you recommend to have nearly endless LF generation in terms of traits/specializations?

Eternal Life is 3% LF/second up to the threshold (20% in WvW/PvP, 66% in PvE).

Signet of Undeath is 4% LF/3s or 1.4=1.33% LF/sec.

After that you need 0.66% LF/sec generation, Weeping Shot is 1.5% LF/sec untraited it all 6 shots hit a target. Not to mention things dying give you LF.

The kicker is that you would have to avoid Blight like the plague.

[KrHome.1920]

Vitality will be as critical for harbinger as for every other necro build. Your regeneration value is tied to your life force pool , which is tied to your health, which is tied to your vitality. On top of that the less health, the more punishing blight will be. Non vita harbingers will be free kills in WvW (and PvP). We've seen that in the beta already: the spec scales exceptionally well with vita (and 10% HP runes).

 

For PvE all that matters is damage and since harbinger's PvE dps build is ranged (pistol 1, 2 and shroud 1, 2 spam), there is no need to waste damage for vita.

[Drarnor Kunoram.5180]

I did some tests on the out of shroud regen during the beta.

 

The out of shroud drain is actually 3%/second, meaning Eternal Life will keep your life force steady on its own.

 

Blight does reduce your maximum life force pool, and thus will decrease your regeneration.

 

The health gained is equal to the life force drained and does not scale at all with Healing Power.  It DOES, however, get increased by incoming healing increases like Vital Persistence and Runes of Earth.

 

It is treated as a regeneration effect, so Blood Bank/Runes of Sanctuary will not give you barrier.

[Nimon.7840]

I think we gotta wait.

 

Anet got a lot of feedback and imo they have a lot of work to do on harbinger.

 

For example the whole upper traitline that focusses around power - is basically useless because Necro lacks power weapons.

 

I only used the middle one for stability on my roaming/duelling builds. I didn't care for the ferocity increase.

[Zhaid Zhem.6508]

👍

They may rework most of traits and elixirs; I hope they'll do because most of them are poorly designed and balanced.

[Drarnor Kunoram.5180]

Yeah, I am definitely hoping that ANet does a heavy pass on utilities and traits.  Pistol and Shroud require very minor changes, I think.

[Wintermute.5408]

5 hours ago, Drarnor Kunoram.5180 said:

Yeah, I am definitely hoping that ANet does a heavy pass on utilities and traits.  Pistol and Shroud require very minor changes, I think.

I'd still like their own animations for mobility skills. Hell, even while ripping daredevil - why the bounding dodger, and not unhindered combatant animation? Would have been so much cooler.

[Asum.4960]

16 hours ago, Wintermute.5408 said:

I'd still like their own animations for mobility skills. Hell, even while ripping daredevil - why the bounding dodger, and not unhindered combatant animation? Would have been so much cooler.

I believe it's Vault, although they are very similar if not the same. In any case, I already didn't like those animations on Daredevil and thought them over the top "acrobatic". 

 

But keep in mind height gains on movement skills very much so come with gameplay implications, and swapping it for an Unhindered Combatant type movement skill would actually be a fairly sizeable nerf to Harbinger's toolkit, taking out pretty much the one advantage/unique benefit (aside from inflated Beta DPS and lacklustre Boon support) Harbinger has over Reaper and Scourge - being able to finally do terrain skips on Necro with Voracious Arc (such as the Uncategorized Fractal skip). 

 

That said, I do agree the animation itself very much does not fit Necro at all and wish they had given it a more menacing, less acrobatic, high leap/air glide/levitation forward.

 

21 hours ago, Drarnor Kunoram.5180 said:

Yeah, I am definitely hoping that ANet does a heavy pass on utilities and traits.  Pistol and Shroud require very minor changes, I think.

 

I was honestly more bored of Pistol after 3 days than Scepter after 9 years, because it's just 3 samey tab target shoot skills. 

I really wish they at least had given it an AA to interact with as well as some sort of ground target or aimed cone etc. - something to actually make it feel like a modern and more engaging to use weapon. 

As is, it just feels like a (even for it's time boring) 2012 designed weapon (Engie Pistol) with 2021 numbers.

Edited September 11, 2021 by Asum.4960

[Spellman.4719]

During the Elite Specialization "BETA" event I was running with this BUILD:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?PSBBoitjlFwAZVMNGJWqX1xfA-zRJYmxfZkbK0RF49FIc9wD-e
and I was really impressed by it. I does look & sound squishy but actually
I was able to deal solo with every single "HoT" hero point - including "Avatar of Balthazar" & "Mushroom Queen".
Also, with this particular build I was able to reach almost 44,5K DPS on the "GOLEM", which for sure will be nerfed. 

[LucianDK.8615]

On 9/11/2021 at 6:34 PM, Bloodbury.6827 said:

During the Elite Specialization "BETA" event I was running with this BUILD:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?PSBBoitjlFwAZVMNGJWqX1xfA-zRJYmxfZkbK0RF49FIc9wD-e
and I was really impressed by it. I does look & sound squishy but actually
I was able to deal solo with every single "HoT" hero point - including "Avatar of Balthazar" & "Mushroom Queen".
Also, with this particular build I was able to reach almost 44,5K DPS on the "GOLEM", which for sure will be nerfed. 

Seems to me its the torment runes that makes the build work.