Harbinger - Quickness Support Condi DPS
The community gave this build a rating, making it top-tier: Great
Focused on: Condition damage and Support
Designed for: Raids and Fractals
Expansions required:
Overview
A condition boon support build for Harbinger that provides permanent 
Quickness and optionally some 
Might and 
Fury too. Unlike other Necromancer specialisations, its shroud offers no defence, and it uses Elixirs to lower its own maximum health to provide boons and gain higher damage. This makes it very much a glass cannon, and while its weapon skills are all ranged, it needs to be in melee for so it can feel very squishy. Fortunately, you are not denied healing while in shroud.
It has a slow ramp-up of damage and focuses mostly on 
Torment, so it prefers long-phased, stationary encounters. It provides very high 
Vulnerability uptime and a good amount of CC.
As a Necromancer, it has a lot of valuable utility options, though it must trade damage or boons to bring them.
Skill Bar
Weapon Variants
- You could bring a Warhorn on your Scepter set for extra CC, life force generation and a tiny bit of healing.
- If the rotation is performed correctly, this won't be a DPS loss.
Skill Variants
- With you can maintain permanent Fury and ~13 stacks of Might, but it could be swapped out for other skills if different utility is needed.
Template Code
Specializations
Equipment
Ritualist
Ritualist
Ritualist
Ritualist
Ritualist
Ritualist
Viper
Viper
Viper
Viper
Viper
Viper
Viper
Viper
Viper
x6
x15
x3
- This setup provides ~28% boon duration (without a Jade Bot) which is enough to maintain Quickness getting only 4 ticks of per shroud loop.
- You can swap in extra
Viper stats pieces to lower your boon duration as low as 18% if you do a longer shroud loop that gets 5 ticks of .
Consumables
Food:
- or ascended versions
Utility:
Usage
Rotation
The rotation assumes use of and , but could be replaced with if it is deemed more valuable. See the General Tips section if you are not running 3 elixirs.
Opener
- - We want to cast plaguelands early so that the
Poison expires before you enter shroud. If it doesn't you will transfer the Poison instead of the 
Bleeding, leading to a loss of DPS. - Throw , and at your feet to quickly build Blight stacks.
- and
Weapon Swap- - We cast this just before shroud so that the self-conditions are immediately transferred via
Shroud Loop
- until is off cooldown
- until is off cooldown
Pistol-to-Scepter Loop
- , and , if available - if you used either of the last two skills, immediately transfer your conditions to your target with
- , and - make sure to aim them at your allies
- Weapon Swap
- and
- Repeat the Shroud Loop, then when you exit proceed to the Scepter-to-Pistol Loop below
Scepter-to-Pistol Loop
- and
- Weapon Swap
- , and , if available - if you used either of the last two skills, immediately transfer your conditions to your target with
- , and - make sure to aim them at your allies
- Repeat the Shroud Loop, then when you exit proceed to the Pistol-to-Scepter Loop
Longer Shroud Loop
By slightly re-ordering skills you can stay in shroud an extra ~second, which is sufficient to get an extra tick of . Use instead of the regular shroud loop if running lower boon duration.
- until is nearly off cooldown
- until is off cooldown
Utility
CC
- - if running Warhorn
General Tips
- When running three elixirs, the rotation above is not sustainable (you use more life force than you gain each loop). Many encounters have extra sources of life force gain, or are short enough that you don't run out of life force, but if you need to you can adjust in the following ways:
- Using during step 4 or 6 of the shroud loop gains you the equivalent of ~2 more seconds in shroud, and so is a DPS increase if you would otherwise be forced out.
- Swapping out for an extra source of life force (or utility) will make the rotation much easier. However, as you won't have the Blight stacks needed to consume for extra damage, you will need to skip one use of in the Shroud Loop.
- Though the rotation will still be unsustainable, the extra vitality from higher tiers of Jade Bot Power Cores make you take a lot longer to run out.
- Both and have aftercasts that can be easily cancelled by using any other skill. If you are following the rotation, the aftercast of should always be cancelled by , but you should manually use or after rather than wait for autoattacks to take over.
- Try to finish the second attack of before using another skill.
- and are only worth using if you are above the Blight threshold for each skill (10 and 5 respectively). If for some reason you are not at high enough Blight, skip these skills.
- Leaving Harbinger Shroud during the cast of can cancel some of the hits, so be careful not to leave too early.
- Most of your weapon skill cooldowns are longer than your loop, meaning that you can pretty much cast them in any order, with a few exceptions:
- You want to cast twice each time you end up on Pistol. Delaying the first use will therefore delay your entire rotation so it should always be used first.
- is a fairly low priority skill, and this means that its effective cooldown is slightly longer than your loop, causing it to drift backwards in the rotation. This shouldn't be a problem if you're good at pressing it off cooldown, but if you're a little slow it can end up delaying your rotation (or need to be skipped). You can offset this by prioritising it over and Scepter skills.
- If is not available at the expected point in the rotation, but comes off cooldown before entering shroud, you can use it alongside at step 8.
- Performed correctly, you should never need to autoattack on Scepter, and only occasionally on Pistol while waiting for cooldowns.
- If you have downtime during an encounter where is not needed, you can repeatedly enter and immediately exit it to build up life force via .
Ratings
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