Siphon Souls has been complained about as a general use skill - the cooldown is much too high when you’re constantly surrounded by high-mobile enemies who can swarm the player while SS is on cooldown. I’d like to bring up another point about this skill: its use as a Bleeding skill. 22/12 Blood Boil is exceptional, giving a massive OA shred and over 300+ Bleeding per second. However, the mods for this skill have a complete anti-synergy with what the other skill bonuses suggest.
Packla’s Visage: Clearly designed for Bleeding SS + Phantasmal Blades, but PB Reaper is much, much better as Vitality spam blades, which ruins the entire point of the Bleeding component.
Bloodrender: Firstly, lol at the points in Oleron’s Rage. Secondly, it speaks volumes when Vitality Savagery is done better as a Trickster where the Nightblade class has no Vitality RR to speak of. Casting Devouring Swarm and Siphon Souls with no Cast Speed sounds awful.
Howl of the Wendigo: Clearly designed for the Valguur’s Set, but again, no casting speed for both the above + Storm Totem on either the weapon nor the gloves.
Guillotine: There is absolutely no reason to use this when the Korvan Celestial Halberd exists. Mythical Leviathan also completely outclasses it as a Physical item, so the Soldier bonuses may as well not exist.
Bolvar’s Pendant: One of the best items out there for Vitality/Bleeding Oppressors, but there’s practically no synergy between Siphon Souls and Vire’s Might, so the potential of this item is wasted.
Lagoth’Ak’s Bloodbinding: Both Devouring Swarm and Siphon Souls are secondary skills to promote a primary skill. And yet, there’s no primary skill in any of the items that give +points to these skills. Probably meant to be used with Valguur’s as well, since Storm Totem is light on node investment.
Normally, I’d provide a Grimtools link to demonstrate the issues at hand, but the equipment is so anti-synergy I can’t even think of a proper base to work off of.
- Using SS for Cadence and Blade Arc are already sorely outclassed, as I mentioned above.
- Savagery? Ritualist suffers sorely from lack of stats, plus it’s also outclassed by Bloodrager’s set as that’s the premier Savagery set.
- Blood Knight’s is possible, especially with Counter Strike providing good Bleeding, but why play Blood Knight Death Knight when Blade Arc DK >>> Blood Knight?
- Cold + Bleeding? We’ve already seen how bad that is through Korba’s Set, no sense trying to make something worse as a Necro.
The only thing I can think of is adding Bleeding mods to Bone Harvest so that Bleeding Necro can have multiple sources of bleed, while also using Soul Harvest buffs to increase the flat damage that makes it a viable Vitality/Bleeding hybrid. I would potentially replace the MoT modifier in Guillotine with a Bone Harvest mod.
Either that or find a way to mix Physical Vire’s Might and Siphon Souls. Though why try that when multiple, more superior options already exist (like Vitality EoR Oppressor or Vitality RF guns or Physical RF Oppressor)
