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Hey, new build I put together this evening. Haven't taken it into real combat yet, but a few tests over in the Isle of the Nameless suggest that the energy should be sustainable.

Critical Condition A/N



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1. Seeping Wound
2. Black Spider Strike
3. Twisting Fangs
4. Malicious Strike
5. Critical Agility (PvE)
6. Critical Defenses
7. Critical Eye
8. Necrosis (PvE)

Unusually for me, this build is designed around overwhelming with degen rather than outright damage. The three 'critical' skills should be used shortly before battle, and kept up. The IAS from Agility helps keep your energy up and the enchants maintained, while Defenses and the armour buff from Agility should make you a bit tougher to kill. Start a fight by targeting your foe with Seeping Wound, which won't do anything by itself but provides a hex for Black Spider Strike. Seeping Wound and poison from the spider strike are now providing -8 degen to your target. Twisting Fang finishes off the combo by doing decent damage and inflicting both Bleeding and Deep Wound. That's -11 degen (capped at 10, naturally) and of course some nice deep woundage. Malicious Strike is used after the combo and helps to keep up Agility and Defenses if you're not critting enough naturally, plus it has an effective cost of 1 energy and does decent damage so use it when you can. Necrosis provides spammable and powerful armour-ignoring damage as long as you use it after the attack combo.

As far as equipment goes, I went with a sup dagger mastery and minor critical strikes, but it's a bit flexible. Just make sure you have at least 13 in critical strikes, and a reasonably high dagger mastery. A vigor rune of course, for the other rune slots you're probably best served with extra energy. Radiant insignias are recommended, you'll need a decent max energy supply to support the initial cost before you start hitting back. For reference it seemed to be working okay with 35 max energy. The build uses skills from both Factions and Nightfall, so make sure you've got both of those. It's also making use of two sunspear PvE skills, but it's not all that hard to get at least a moderate rank in that title. Weapon choice is up to you, I was using Daggers of Xuekao but I don't think the build is too reliant around any particular mods.

Although I haven't playtested this much yet, my guess is that it's going to be overkill in a lot of easier situations. The dagger combo has quite a slow recharge (10s for SW, 12s for BSS, 15s for TF), meaning that you can't run from enemy to enemy rapidly wiping them out with this. Similarly your build pretty much relies upon using the attack combo or already attacking something that has conditions inflicted on it, or else Malicious Strike and Necrosis won't work. The damage is heavy enough that lower-armoured opponents will probably die before you have much of a chance to make full use of the damage-dealing capabilities of the build. Perhaps this would be better reserved for areas with physically tough enemies, or Hard Mode. By the time they're suffering from -10 degen and Deep Wounded, I don't suppose there's many enemies that could stand up to repeated uses of Necrosis. Might work well against bosses, just watch out for the reduced condition and hex duration. Watch out for enemies that are immune to the conditions you're using, I believe non-fleshy creatures would nerf things pretty badly (knocks out all the degen, you'd only be left with Deep Wound). Once again this build doesn't have any self-healing, but seeing as it should be fairly resilient and isn't shadow stepping I feel this is fair enough, just stay within range of your monks. Weaknesses would be any of the usual anti-melee spells, blocking, particularly heavy condition removal (purge conditions, for example). I guess hex removal could leave you with -7 degen, but it's not too likely that hexes are going to be removed before you hit with Black Spider Strike, so it shouldn't be too likely to break your combo.

There's various alterations that could be made of course, but I'll probably leave that up to you guys to suggest as this has taken me a while to write up already. I'm not 100% satisfied with it yet, but it seemed worth posting to get some opinions.