Great Cursed Staff Solo PvP Build

Overview

Weapon: Cursed Staff

Focus: Range DPS

Mode: Open World

Strengths

• High Sustained Damage
• Easy to Play

Weaknesses

• Low Self-healing

This build is up to date for the November 6, 2024 Horizons Patch #1.

Overview

This Elder's Great Cursed Staff focuses on kiting enemies and burning them down through the use of Vile Curse. It performs very well against melee enemies that have no reliable way of catching you and it does a great job at dealing with different scenarios. The gameplay of the build remains quite straightforward once you've memorised the rotation and how you should play so even new players could have an easy time playing this as the build also happens to be quite cheap too.

Equipment

Main Hand Weapon

Elder's Great Cursed Staff

Head

Elder's Hunter Hood

Alternatives ⇅

Cape

Elder's Caerleon Cape

Armor

Elder's Assassin Jacket

Shoes

Elder's Soldier Boots

Potion

Major Gigantify Potion

Food

Beef Sandwich

Keep in mind: Gear shown in this build is meant as a reference. Choosing the correct tier of gear is very tricky as there are many variables. Some of them being your budget, your spec and minimum Item Power requirements of your guild if used for ZvZ.

You should always check prices based on IP of the items. For example, a masterpiece quality 4.3 Elder's Cryptcandle could be cheaper while providing roughly the same IP as an 8.0.

Usage

Elder's Cursed Staff

Vile Curse — A single target curse bolt that applies a charge on the target every time it hits. While the dot damage is good and the main way you are going to burn down enemy health bars as it stacks to 4 times.

Desecrate — This is your main CC ability and the way you can lock down a target and keep kiting. It creates an AOE explosion and roots targets while also applying a charge like using Vile Curse but most importantly it lets you free cast Area of Decay on top of the unlucky enemy caught in it.

Area of Decay — You want to mostly use this ability after you manage to land a Desecrate as it allows you to channel the whole skill and do maximum damage without your enemy walking away from it. Keep in mind that this also applies charges of Vile Curse with each damage tick.

Bane — Perfect for your constant auto-attacking between casts of Vile Curse.

Elder's Assassin Jacket

Ambush — This ability offers you much needed stealth to help a lot with resetting fights and repositioning during fights. You can also use this to wait for cooldowns while your enemy HP is slowly going down under your curses. It also increases your damage with every moment spent in stealth and increases the damage of all your abilities once you come out of stealth.

Balanced Mind — This is your only relevant choice as it increases your flat damage and its good to have.

Elder's Hunter Hood

Retaliate — A valuable defensive option, Retaliate increases your damage resistance for a short duration while also reflecting 85% of incoming damage back to the attacker. Use this in order to reflect high damaging spells like Spinning Blades, Death Curse or Pyroblast. With experience you will be able to tell what other spells would be good to use this against but there is a long list.

Balanced Mind — You want to choose this passive for the raw damage increase.

Elder's Soldier Boots

Rejuvenating Sprint — This is a good run that regenerates your HP and is on a rather short cooldown too. You can also use Wanderlust if you want a run with a longer duration making it easier for you to kite.

Toughness — This defensive option is preferred over Authority as the 5% CC duration increase doesn't do enough.

Elder's Caerleon Cape

Opportunist — While the Caerleon Cape doesn't see much use in other builds, it works perfectly with the Great Cursed Staff due to it's high reliance on the first ability. It will automatically reset your Vile Curse whenever it is off cooldown allowing you to cast the ability twice and it helps with keeping the dots on your target.

Rotations

Kiting & DPS ↴

• You should try to start every fight by casting Vile Curse twice with the help of Opportunist while you move to keep out of enemy's damage. Next, use Desecrate and follow up with Area of Decay and full channel it for maximum damage. Once thats done, you want to kite and keep at range until your cooldowns come back, throwing Vile Curse to keep the stacks up when you have the chance.

Consumables

Major Gigantify Potion — This is one of your main defensives and helps you minimize damage taken when and if you get caught. Once you pop this, feel free to spam Vile Curse in order to deal damage while they cannot do much to you during the duration of the potion.

Beef Sandwich — You should use this to increase your max HP and outsustain fights but you can also use Roast Pork to heal yourself while in combat.