Bah, you made this thread while I was writing up the epic response in the other one. I'll have to copy and paste it here.
I Spvp'd the entire 4 hours for the stress test today. They made a quite a few changes to the Necro, most of which were positive. The only nerf off-hand I remember is that they lowered the 100% bleed on crit down to 66%. But that didn't really matter with what I was running.
I did make changes to my normal build because of the changes to the Necro. I removed the 10 points from Death Magic, and invested 5 into Curses (25 Total) as they changed Target the Weak to increase all damage by 2% per condition on the enemy. I also invested 5 points into Soul Reaping (25 Total) as they changed Strength of Undeath to be +5% damage as long as you have over 50% Life Force.
I actually used the runes and amulets listed above this time, and they worked quite well. Stacking two of the three types of runes for the +45% bleed duration does actually work. And I found that to be invaluable for pvp.
Also Mark of Evasion is a must have in my book. The free Mark of Blood pops up where you roll to, meaning you can roll into a player and it pops the double bleed on him. Loved it. The mark does only last about 3 seconds before fading away, and only one can be out at a time with a short cooldown before you could dodge and drop another one. The act of dodging drops the Mark, you don't have to actually successfully dodge an attack.
Finally, I was very happy with the auto crit upon switching to Axe. Ghastly Claws appeared to be buffed, now you launch a twirling axe that does big damage over 8 hits. And it crits every time if you use the auto crit rune. It would do around 4K damage when it crit and all attacks hit. I had roughly 2k Power, which was glorious when using Life Blast and Lich Form. The basic attack in Lich Form was hitting around 2k, my Life Blasts fluctuated but were almost always over 1k and with the piercing trait, it was always fun to target someone across the battlefied and light up everyone in the way.
I really enjoyed the build, felt powerful, and felt like I could play the condition game or go nuke happy and put out good damage. Most of the time, I stuck with Scepter/Dagger and stacked bleeds. This involved always kiting players and dodging. I normally kept up around 10-12 bleeds. I generally ranked at the top of my pvp matches, usually over 200 points per round, which is solid. A lot of that is just knowing to fight on nodes and how to use the terrain to your advantage. I also was able to solo kill Svintir and Chiefton with this build using pretty much the same evasive tactics. The last note is that I had a few 1v1 opportunites against other Necros. I annihilated the Minion Master Necro every time, though he might just not have been good. Almost every other Necro I saw was staff oriented, those were pretty easy as well. AoE'ing killed the MM's pets and he was cake. The Staff necro's just didn't have an answer for stacking bleeds and then pounding them with Life Blast and the Axe. They were pretty much always condition-mancers, which are easy to neutralize between Consume Conditions and Deathly Swarm. I did not see another Necro using the axe.
If I'm critiquing my build, the only area I might tinker with is the 10 points in Spite. Moving the points to max out Curses and Soul Reaping instead. Increasing the length of the Scepter conditions is very enticing as is making DeathShroud un-CCable, which drove me nuts this time around. I'll have to test this out at launch, I'm really hoping for one more stress test.
Anyway, to conclude, I was happy with the Necro changes. Nothing too major, but they did make going deep into the Curses and Soul Reaping tree much more appealing. Deathshroud remains too easy to be bursted out of, especially with all the warriors running around, so stacking vitality is definitely key.
Any other Necros have thoughts from the stress test? Would love to hear them.
