There are three key parts of your arsenal that you need to keep in mind whilst in a fight:
- Shade uptime.
- Punishment skills ( and /).
- The / skill combination.
- If you continue to maintain these, you can use the rest of your abilities off cooldown with the above skill prioritization in mind. Furthermore, without a formal rotation you are "punished" less for retaining skills that are needed for a given situation, for instance like saving for CC.
Shades:
- With the amount of expertise/condition duration you get from your build, you need to maintain two shades to ensure your conditions exceed 100% bonus duration. As such, a major part of playing
Scourge is maintaining two shades as much as possbile.
- After the recent
Alacrity changes, this is more difficult to do due to the expected amount of time spent with two shades (10 seconds, half of the total duration of 1 shade) no longer synchronizing with the recharge rate for Shade charges (12 seconds with
Alacrity). This leads to one of two outcomes (with perfect
Alacrity/Shade placement timing):
- After 120 seconds in a fight of creating a new shade as the oldest one expires you run out of shades to cast, leading to a drop from 2 shades up at all times to 1.
- You create a new shade everytime you return to 2 charges of , leading to a downtime where you only have 1 shade for 4 seconds out of every 12, leading to a 1.6 shade uptime average over the course of a fight.
- To deal with this, you can either maintain 2 shades at all times and use key parts of encounters to recharge your shades (parts like the charged soul phase at Goreseval or the 50% phase at Xera); or you can account for the loss of expertise on average overall by utilizing additional .
Punishment Skills:
- Somewhat directly linked to Shade usage, you should aim to always have a Punishment skill up when you need to place a new shade to ensure you procc on each placed shade. As such, avoid using your punishment skills unless your team requires the barrier from or in the case of fights like Souless Horror need your secondary Punishment skill.
- -> Combo.
- With Dagger removed from the build,
Scourge uses the Curses minor trait
to transfer the self-inflicted conditions from to a target without having to wait for a length transfer via that is vulnerable to allies cleansing the conditions from you before they transfer.
- While and have slighlty different cooldowns allow them both to come off cooldown before using either.
- Finally, be aware that
will potentially transfer the less harmful self-inflicted conditions from /, so be sure to avoid using these immediately before using the / combo.
Trail of Anguish vs Shadow Fiend:
- These two skills are remarkebly close in damage output, and as such the decision to take either depends on what is required on an encounter by encounter basis.
- pulls slighlty ahead in potential damage, but only if you can utilize how it works properly. If you begin casting whilst on top of a target, move off of the target and then move back on them you will apply double the "effect" of (it also works this way for applying extra
Swiftness/
Stability to allies). As such, you want to use when you are able to constantly be in melee range and also can pull off the stacking effect. Additionally, also offers the utility benefits of a stun break, and
Stability/
Swiftness for allies. Finally, should an encounter have a boon corrupt mechanic you should never run due to the
Stability it offers being prone to corruption into fear.
- is slightly behind in damage potential, but only if you're in melee all the time. Should you take on a role that requires you stay at range for a singificant period of time (circle team at VG, Kiter at Sabetha, etc.) will pull ahead in damage potential. Note that this is partly due to not being able to hit with from range, but also due to granting extra Life Force; which in turn translates into being able to use more shroud skills to procc .
- Of course, if you don't need to take for an encounter you would just take both.