Heal Scourge

May 2023

Hybrid Heal Scourge is a variant of Heal Scourge that trades some defensive support for significantly increased damage. This build still has very strong revivial power from Blood Magic, such as Transfusion and Ritual of Life, however because this build does not take Soul Reaping it’s much more reliant on careful cooldown and resource management and has the additional component of a DPS rotation which must be executed well to be worth the sacrifice of defensive utility.

Damage Mitigation

The key damage mitigation tools are Sand Cascade and Sandstorm Shroud. They both apply solid barrier to up to 12 targets (3 per shade and 3 around you). Try to make sure you have at least 2 of your three Manifest Sand Shade placed where your squad is at all times so you affect your entire team. Manifest Sand Shade is an important part of your rotation so you’ll be using it very frequently, try to keep an eye on other targets you want to attack with shade abilities or allies away from the group who need support and manage your shade charges accordingly. Recognise when your group will have to move and don’t waste shades right before that happens.

This build also has good condition cleanse from Nefarious Favor.  As a bonus Nefarious Favor converts the condition removed into a boon making it especially good at dealing with Immobilize, Slow and Chilled as they’ll convert to Resistance, Quickness and Alacrity respectively.

Downstate Management

What makes heal scourge so unstoppable is downstate management and revive power.

Transfusion pulls nearby downed players towards the scourge when casting Garish Pillar this allows you to quickly revive multiple targets and get them out of bad situations. It also pulses a strong healing and revival effect for a long duration with a very short cooldown. You should be careful when using this as your main objective is to save players from fully dying. It generates surprisingly good sustained healing when used consistently but there is a small downtime between casts so make sure you’ll always have it ready if players start falling over.

After players have been grouped up you can then quickly revive them using Ritual of Life or Well of Blood depending on your cooldowns. Don’t waste Well of Blood unless you really need to as you have more control over it than the passive from Ritual of Life.

Signet of Undeath is a very powerful tool to revive players from range. After using it be careful with your life force as losing the passive will significantly reduce your life force generation which means you can’t spam abilities as much. Signet of Undeath costs health to use but if you apply barrier before using it you can absorb the damage!

DPS Rotation

The rotation for this build is very similar to DPS scourge and revolves around maintaining 3 Manifest Sand Shade up as often as possible which grants additional expertise from Sand Sage, chaining weapon skills together as smoothly as possible while not cancelling autoattacks, and combining Blood Is Power with Sandstorm Shroud to activate Plague Sending and transfer the self applied conditions from Blood Is Power and Master of Corruption for extra damage.

The transferred conditions from Blood Is Power are just as powerful as the bleeding directly applied by the ability, always try to transfer them when you can, activating shroud just before Blood Is Power finishes casting should guarantee the transfer.

This build doesn’t run soul reaping for Dhuumfire but you still have Demonic Lore from the scourge traitline. This means you want to apply torment at least every 3 seconds to get the extra burning, all of your shade skills including Manifest Sand Shade will apply a stack of torment so use Nefarious Favor frequently as a filler between your other torment abilities to activate Demonic Lore.

All of your abilities are ranged, this means that you should always be able to attack! Careful positioning and maintaining DPS uptime is key to getting value out of the damage hybrid scourge can deliver (and regular condition scourge for that matter!).

Scourge is one of the best specializations in the game when it comes to handling multiple targets.

• Epidemic is excellent for attacking numerous foes
• Your shade abilities will hit around your character and all of your shades too, this means you can place Manifest Sand Shade on multiple targets and hit them all.
  • Make sure you place shades before using Sandstorm Shroud if you want to hit far away targets as unlike Desert Shroud it won’t activate on shades placed during it’s duration.

Key Mechanics

Shade skills can be activated at any time, while casting another ability, reviving and even while crowd controlled. This mechanic is one of the things that makes scourge broken and should always be utilized; it allows you unprecedented flexibility and responsiveness when dealing with combat situations allowing you to revive players and continue to support yourself and the team at the same time!

Something that is very important to remember is that shade skills have a 0.5 second delay before they activate so bear that in mind when using them to mitigate damage. The area barrier from Herald of Sorrow applies 3.5 seconds after activation. This makes it a bit difficult to use correctly as you’ll have to predict when damage is coming in, however the 5 second duration of barrier makes it simple once you get used to the activation time.

You can precast Well of Blood and Transfusion before players or even you go downstate to self revive! (Transfusion even stays active while you are downed)

Dodge rolling will apply Regeneration to nearby allies from Mark of Evasion, this is very useful if your subgroup has no good source of Regeneration

The downstate pull from Transfusion can potentially affect the same targets twice over it’s duration. There is a 5 second internal cooldown on teleporting a downed ally. You can use this to keep grouping up downed allies in situations where players are downed far apart from each other or if the group is totally crumbling.

Sandstorm Shroud and Devouring Darkness corrupt boons on multiple targets, they are both part of your rotation but remember their utility and delay them if you’ll need to deal with booned up foes. Similarly, because Sandstorm Shroud is also a very strong defensive support ability delay using it to apply barrier to your team if you know a lot of damage is incoming.

The biggest mistake you can make is dying yourself. Know how to survive!

• Sandstorm Shroud initially applies high barrier to yourself
• Vampiric generates a lot of sustain while attacking, especially when hitting multiple targets
• Well of Blood and Ritual of Life significantly heal you when activating and also have an area pulse healing effect
• Transfusion heals you as well as other allies.

Crowd Control

• Oppressive Collapse
• Wail of Doom
• Garish Pillar
• Spectral Grasp
  • This skill can target up to 5 enemies in a very large radius. If you activate it inside an enemies hitbox, all of the projectiles fired by this skill (up to five) will hit the target who’s  hitbox you are inside leading to up to 750 defiance bar damage! This makes it an extremely powerful tool for destroying defiance bars on encounters with multiple entities (untargetable entities also count!)
• Summon Flesh Golem
  • Massive crowd control ability that can hit multiple times as the golem charges through enemies or into a wall. One of the best crowd control abilities in the game thanks to it’s short cooldown and high defiance break value. Taking this skill will be a significant DPS loss.

Utility Skills

This build has one utility slot that can be changed freely, further modifications after that can somewhat impair the builds ability to function well. This is the order you should replace your utilities.

1. Epidemic doesn’t do anything on single target encounters so swap this for whatever you need the most
2. Signet of Undeath – avoid replacing this as it will significantly reduce your life force generation meaning you can’t use as many shade abilities
3. Blood Is Power – avoid replacing this as it will be a very heavy DPS loss

Necromancer has some excellent abilities to handle multiple different mechanics and situations, here are the best ones!
Trail of Anguish is a short cooldown stunbreak and also applies stability. It doesn’t have a target cap either so you can give a stack of stability to your entire squad. Very useful in any fight where you’ll encounter crowd control.

Corrosive Poison Cloud destroys projectiles for a long duration and has a short cooldown, very powerful for reducing damage on fights where projectiles are common.

Well of Corruption corrupts boons in an area for a few seconds, take this if you are facing enemies that consistently apply boons. A special usage of this is ignoring the pulsing stability on Qadim while attempting to break the defiance bar, because the well pulses a corrupt this mostly negates the stability similar to Winds of Disenchantment. If you need consistent single target boon removal take Corrupt Boon.

Well of Power is excellent for removing even more conditions, and because it’s a pulsing effect you can precast it before conditions are about to be applied. Use this in fights with extreme condition pressure.

Well of Darkness blinds and chills targets in an area allowing you to shut down non boss enemies, very powerful when dealing with swarms of foes.

Summon Flesh Wurm and Spectral Walk are excellent options for mobility and both also allow you to almost be in two places at the same time. You can place down the wurm and teleport to it whenever you want or just use it as a teleport with a short cast time. Spectral Walk grants a lot of swiftness and can be reactivated to return to the place you activated it first, this makes it perfect for kiting enemies that chase you.

Summon Bone Minions is a niche utility option as it provides some added synergy with other necromancers, detonating the minions will grant all necromancers in your squad life force allowing them to use more shroud abilities for more damage or utility.

Alternative Gearing

The default for this setup is plaguedoctor gear with Superior Rune of Tormenting but celestial gear with Superior Rune of the Nightmare is superior damage and survivability. However because celestial gear has toughness attached to it you shouldn’t use that setup in toughness tanked fights unless your tank has more toughness. It’s fine to play celestial everywhere else though.