Life Force is used to spawn your and it is used for any of the shade skills.

You gain Life Force through the death of enemies or allies that surround you. You can also gain Life Force through a selection of different skills:

• - 8.75% Life Force, additional 1% Life Force per condition (Max 5) and an additional 2% Life Force per enemy.
• - 3.25% Life Force per enemy.
• - 11% Life Force
• - 4.4% Life Force every three seconds.

Life Force

Your Life Force reduces for every sand shade skill that you use.

You have two traits that help you with Life Force generation and size:

• increases the amount of Life Force you gain from skills by 10%.
• increases your maximum Life Force pool by 20%.

Life Force issues are reduced on encounters with adds or split phases. These breaks or adds will help you top up your Life Force.

Minions are specific to the Necromancer class and can have a few uses in the Condition Scourge build.

Minions have high base health and will not easily die, unless specifically targeted by an enemy.

Once a minion is summoned, you will gain access to a secondary skill. This skill will vary depending on which minion was summoned.

You will encounter three minions with the Condition Scourge builds:

• is a utility skill that deals physical damage. The secondary skill for this minion is . This skill will grant you 11% Life Force and will not destroy your minion.
• are a utility skill that cause minor physical damage. They can be detonated with to grant you a decent amount of Life Force to all Necromancers in range.
• is an elite skill that deals fairly high physical damage and inflicts Cripple. The secondary skill for this minion is . This skill deals 232 Breakbar damage.

has three charges with a eight second Cooldown for a new charge. Each lasts 20 seconds and will give you a bonus 5% Condition Duration and 5% Boon Duration per shade. Using will trigger and . Always use a punishment skill before placing your to get the benefits from .

Shade skills only affect one ally/enemy per cast. If an ally/enemy is close to multiple shades it will not receive damage/buffs multiple times.

will convert a single condition on allies into a boon.

will grant Barrier to allies that are close to any shades.

will give Fear to enemies your shades.

will give you Barrier and pulse Torment around your shades for seven pulses.

With the amount of Condition Duration you get from your build, you need to maintain three to ensure your conditions exceed 100% bonus duration.

As such, a major part of playing Condition Scourge is maintaining three shades as much as possible.

Somewhat directly linked to usage, you should aim to always have a punishment skill up when you need to place a new shade to ensure you trigger on each placed shade. As such, avoid using your punishment skills unless your team requires the Barrier from .

These are all the punishment skills that you will likely see:

Barrier can be considered as a second health bar. The Barrier that you produce will be displayed as a yellow number above your health value. Regardless of how much Barrier you apply, it will dissipate after five seconds. Barrier is also capped at 50% of the recipients health.

Here are your sources of Barrier:

Try to avoid cancelling casts for your important combo skills:

• Punishment Skills to trigger
• to transfer the two self inflicted conditions, Bleeding and Torment to your target with .

Combo:

• Condition Scourge uses the Curses minor trait to transfer the self-inflicted conditions from to a target.
• While and have slightly different Cooldowns, allow them both to come off Cooldown before using either.

provides you with a decent heal and gives Barrier to your subgroup. It will also corrupt any boons on nearby foes into Torment and Cripple. is your highest DPS heal but offers much more team support and overall value.

applies four stacks of Bleeding to your target, two stacks of Bleeding to you and two stacks of Torment to you. These self-conditions can be instantly transferred to your target by triggering the trait .

can be used to resurrect a squad member, at range and it also helps you maintain high levels of Life Force which lets you spam your shade skills more!

is taken for the Life Force you can gain by using . This allows you to spam your shade skills more.

provides a large amount of pulsing conditions. It also applies Bleeding and Poison to you due to .

If you are with multiple Condition Scourges , you should drop and take . The additional Life Force to both Condition Scourges, from the explosion of , out-weights the gain of Life Force from .

is by far your strongest utility. You will always take over , except for single target encounters.

can be used and instantly exploded with when you can only auto attack. This utility is used when you have multiple Condition Scourges.

can be taken if you already have enough Life Force due to large amounts of adds or you are at an encounter, like Dhuum, where you minions can get destroyed by certain mechanics. If this is the case then you can take over .

can be taken when projectile destruction is required. This is extremely useful for encounters like Soulless Horror and Cardinal Sabir.

can be taken at a moderate DPS loss in exchange for a large amount of CC depending on hitbox size.

causes your critical hits to give Bleeding and that your Bleeding has a 20% longer duration.

causes you to transfer two conditions with your next attack when you enter . This is used to transfer the self-inflicted conditions from .

gives you + 180 Precision which will help push you towards 100% Critical Chance.

reduces the Cooldown on your and . It also causes your Corruption skills to give you conditions which can then be transferred via .

gives you a massive 20% Critical Chance, if you assume an average of 10 conditions. It also converts a percentage of your Precision into Condition Damage.

is a game changer. This trait changes your Scepter Skill #3 into . It also causes you to have increased Condition Damage while on your Scepter set. Finally, any conditions that are applied by your Scepter skills have 50% more Condition Duration. provides more Life Force than if there are multiple enemies around.

increases the amount of Life Force you get by 10%. This is an amazing trait that will help you to survive the boss auras that tick away at your Life Force.

causes your sand shade skills to have a lower Cooldown. This will allow you to spam them more freely.

causes you to do 10% more damage for 10 seconds when you enter or leave .

increases your Life Force by 20%. This will help you maintain high Life Force.

causes you to give Burning whenever you use . If you have a shade placed and use any shade skill it will trigger . This trait has a one second Cooldown when playing with the Scourge Trait Line and will not constantly trigger with the pulses from .

reduces the Cooldown of your Torch skills and gives you additional Condition Duration based on your Condition Damage.

causes you to gain 5% Condition Duration and 5% Boon Duration per shade.

causes your punishment skills to have reduced Cooldown and for your to cause Burning when used after a punishment skill.

causes your Torment to do additional damage and to also cause Burning. Check the section below on "Boons & Conditions" to see your sources of Torment.

Death Magic can prove useful at certain encounters, specifically those with adds in Wing 1 and Wing 2. This is because only works on adds that grant exp when killed. This means that it will be worth taking Death Magic on the following encounters:

• Sabetha
• Slothasor

Death Magic also provides a lot of condition transfers thanks to . This will make Death Magic useful at even more encounters:

• Matthias
• Xera
• Soulless Horror
• Twin Largos

Swap out Soul Reaping for Death Magic and take the following traits:

Death's Carapace

Toughness

If you are struggling for Life Force or are the only Condition Scourge you should take instead of .

Should you ever need to run , keep in mind it is a 10 - 15% dps loss on average.

Running for the personal survivability will result in a 15% dps loss on average.

You provide permanent Bleeding through , , , , , and .

You provide permanent Burning from , , , , and .

You provide permanent Poison from , and . You can also provide Poison through .

You provide permanent Torment from , , , , , and . You can also provide Torment by corrupting boons with and .

You provide roughly 40% Chill uptime from and .

You provide roughly 70% Cripple uptime through and . You can also provide Cripple by corrupting boons with and .

You provide roughly 50% Blind uptime through and .

You provide roughly 50% Weakness uptime through and .

You can provide 10 - 12 stacks of Vulnerability through and .

You provide minor amounts of Fear through .

You can provide Might to your subgroup through and .

You can provide Swiftness and Stability to your subgroup through .

You gain personal Fury when entering due to .

• = 200 Breakbar damage.
• = 200 Breakbar damage.
• = 232 Breakbar damage.

is useful here both to put conditions on most of the Seekers and to help keep them off of the group. The Seekers constant presence means that they are perfect targets for .

Be sure to take advantage of any Seekers that are close to the group to gain additional Life Force from hitting them with .

Also keep in mind that when the Seekers reset, they “die”, so you will constantly be getting Life Force throughout the fight. Spam those shroud skills accordingly!

Shades can be effectively placed here to help Fear away the Seekers before they get too close with . This assumes that you don't have a Druid to use .

You can use for damage mitigation but keep in mind that the Cooldown is too long to barrier every green. If you have enough Life Force you can use as well.

off of the Blue Guardian as soon as the Green Guardian is in range.

Be sure to utilize Fear from and the Knockdown from to help speed up breaking the guardians.

You can also take Warhorn as your other offhand, so you don't need to waste Life Force by using .

is effective for dealing with the Spirits that Gorseval summons after he uses , the Charged Souls during the split phase (to spread around extra damage and additional Chilled and Immobilize) and the Spectral Orbs that spawn around the fight area.

can be taken instead of and is a great way to provide Stability for your subgroup for if your Power Boon Chronomancers fail to do the job.

Be aware that if you get hit by the “egg” attack, , all of your active minions will immediately die, so be careful.

If your group’s DPS is fine but is lacking in CC, you can swap out for .

Try to place your on nearby Spectral Orbs that can’t quite reach to help out your team with orb clearing.

Try to use or , if you have enough Life Force, before his retaliation phase if your breaks are not instantaneous to help mitigate the damage.

Sabetha returns once you phase a champion to 25%. Use on the champion to essentially “Epi bounce” with yourself.

You will be in charge of kiting. Make use of to kill the adds but only after they've thrown a Sapper Bomb..

When kiting, try to make sure you’re the one kicking bombs. If you’re having issues with Swiftness and mobility in general AND your team has enough Vulnerability output you can swap out for for almost permanent Swiftness.

If you are doing cannons you will need to remind the Druid to take over as kiter. The following combo can be used to kill the cannons:

• combo for when you go up
• Trigger as much as possible with your other shroud abilities.

You can use as an extra safety net to deal with the Fear after the Breakbar Phases.

While you can use to deal with the Slublings that spawn, be VERY careful that you do not accidentally on to the player slubling.

Keep in mind will only bounce to 5 targets and only the 5 closest targets to Slothasor will be affected. To Clarify - If there are 5 enemy Slublings closer to Slothasor than the player Slubling you can without having to worry.

Be sure to place where your Power Boon Chronomancers plan to pull Slublings to be able to DPS them down easily, should you be unable to use at the time.

Should you be doing mushrooms, keep in mind that your minions will die, so try to do either the first or the last mushroom to avoid this being an issue (that or just don’t use any minions).

While not impossible to hit, can be tricky to make use of in its entirety here; if you’re having problems swap it out for for a more consistent (though smaller) level of damage as well as better CC.

Spam . Win Life.

By running here, you can use it to grab aggro of the Snipers at the start of the encounter so you can bring them to the door for “door strat”.

• Stand in the blindspot in the corner between the stairs and the ledge, target the snipers and spam auto attack.
• Your Flesh Golem will run over to the sniper and hit it, thereby getting it to aggro on you.
• This can also be done with other Necromancer minions, and or would be more efficient due to them having a ranged attack.
• These utilities are, however, less efficient than running other more beneficial utility skills for the rest of the encounter.

Spam to Pull in bandits.

If you are struggling during the Downpour phase then you could swap in to help with Stability uptime.

Keep in mind that as of the recent changes, cleansing Chilled from allies gives them Alacrity!

You can place on any outlying Icy Patch to kill it with

You can place barrier on allies that are about to be sacrificed to give them an even larger health bonus whilst transformed. This is because barrier will dynamically change depending on your maximum health, so a minor barrier can increase enormously once a player “transforms” into the sacrifice and “gains” their 100k HP.

bouncing is very effective for applying conditions from the Warg to the surrounding White Mantle.

Condition Scourge can also permanently Cripple the Back Warg by utilizing the passive effect of should you require a backup person to deal with them.

During the attuned phantasm phases of the Escort fight, if you the phantasm you are NOT attuned to it will still transfer conditions to the one you are attuned to for a one-man bounce.

Spam to Pull in the White Mantle. If you're worried about Fear, you can drop and take .

You can use on the first of the two “pre-event” islands and have it back up in time for the start of the fight proper. You will only cast once per phase, so if it is not back up in time it is not an issue.

Note: Barrier mitigates the insta-kill from the pre-event pressure pads.

can be used to clear shards during the second phase.

Be careful using here. While it is extremely useful for shard clear, if you cast it on mobs standing in shards they will become fully buffed. Much like Xera all adds standing in shards have their conditions converted into boons, so please use with caution.

Keep in mind that the white mantle that spawn in via the orb are "there" but Invulnerable and will eat projectiles.

You can take to provide Stability so you can avoid having to go to the circles. You should drop for .

can be taken to destroy the projectiles from ! This may help with squad survivability.

Your barriers can be handy in an emergency; for instance if players with go to the same green circle as the rest of the group.

Since the majority of your rotation can be done from range and you are fairly defensible with your barriers, consider intentionally taking to make life easier for your more melee oriented allies.

Using here makes dealing with the Jade Scouts and Soldiers a very safe affair. Be sure to time it to get the best ratio of earliest possible cast to most targets hit. Also be aware that the bounce window is very small, so be sure to communicate accordingly.

You can make use of your to further apply damage to the Jade Scouts. Use this to damage the furthest Jade Scouts, as the center two will be killed by .

To elaborate on good timing for , assuming Mursaat Overseer is kept very slightly off center you will be able to hit three of the Jade Scouts at any given time. Typically you will have five strategic casts of in an optimal scenario.

Note: This assumes little to no movement of Mursaat Overseer at all

• When the Jade Scouts approach your group for the first time, cast just before the Jade Scouts cross the line between the first and second row of panels.
• Cast again as the northernmost Jade Scout is about to cross the line between the second and third row of panels.
• Cast for a third time as the first Jade Soldier (created by the southernmost Jade Scout) approaches the group. This is not applicable if your group dedicates DPS to deal with it.
• Cast for a forth time as the center two Jade Scouts become active again.
• Cast for a fifth time as the northernmost Jade Scout becomes active again.

Use when Jade Soldiers come to the group to clear Slow off your squad members. If you have the spare Life Force you can use to alleviate any incoming damage pressure.

You can take advantage of the Prides, Greeds and “fake” Sauls here for bouncing. Just keep in mind that pretty much everything in this fight can “eat” projectiles. The hand AoEs, the black oil AoEs, even the statues on the outside of the area can be targeted by despite not being “valid” targets.

Be sure to place your accordingly to help kill the Prides as they approach Saul.

You can take Warhorn on your offhand set if your team is really slacking on CC. You can also swap out for if you still need more!

Use to help reduce the pressure from the Wurms.

bouncing is a vital skill to have here and requires impeccable timing due to the small window that the Tormented Dead and Flesh Wurms stay alive after being hit by it.

If your group is using knockout strat for the Tormented Dead, try to use as soon as it is parallel to the group to both ensure it hits and also to give time for your allies to reposition to knock it away and off the platform.

Unless you’re doing the Challenge Mote, has little to no use here.

You can also take to make it easier to deal with and . If you take you can bait out by standing inside Dhuum’s hitbox. As it leaves a portal behind you can near instantly be in and out of the group to break the shackles allowing the other player to continue DPS.

can be helpful for ensuring Torment stacks are removed from your allies during . In the event an ally is hit by the fissures attack and are feared off in a random direction, you can “rescue” them by placing a shade on them and cleansing the Fear.

also means you can afford to be out of position before due to being able to cleanse the Torment off of yourself.

Take if you have no one else to deal with the boon strip after . Swap out for if this is the case. will end up being worth more due to the frequent mechanics that will force you to move away from Dhuum.

During the final 10% try to stack up shades on your group to provide some extra barrier to allies before moving out of the bubble to “push the buttons”. Dhuum will still take damage during the final 10%, even when he is untargetable.

Should you be kiting, you can use to help mitigate the damage from the bombs, . You can also use a combination of Scepter auto attacks and Shade placement to grab aggro from the Messengers without a problem.

If you’re having issues with Swiftness whilst kiting and your team has enough Vulnerability output, you can swap out the Soul Reaping trait for . This as well as will provide near permanent Swiftness.

Kenut will gain boons when it hits a squad member with . You can take , instead of , to deal with this and also use to finish clearing all of its boons.

During the final 50%, when the team splits, you will want to go to Kenut as it moves a lot. This help your Torment to tick for more.

Take Warhorn if you're lacking CC. If you still need more CC then you can take instead of .

Use to remove conditions if your party members are hit by a water twister.

You can use and to provide Barrier to your subgroup if they are taking too much ticking damage from . This will only occur on the final platform.

Use to stop the Lava Elementals from reaching Qadim.

Spread out your so you can cover more of the Lava Elemental spawns.

If you have to clear Lava Elementals for a second time in one phase you can use to Fear the Magma Elementals. This will stop them from protecting the Lava Elementals.

Take Warhorn offhand if you need more CC.

Use to help remove Retaliation from the Pyre during the split phase.

You can use on the Destroyer to help cleave the adds. Just be a little bit careful as it might kill the lamp.

You can use between the Matriarch and the Patriarch if they are on platforms next to each other.

Use and when you are jumping from platform to platform during the final phase. This will help mitigate some of the incoming damage.

You can drop or for if you feel that more CC is required.

Use in the final 60% - 0% phase. This will help you with some projectile destruction and reduce incoming pressure.

When using your combo, make sure you don't have any pre-existing conditions. The adds during the final phase can frequently apply conditions to you. If you see that you have conditions on yourself, you can spam to remove them.

Help break the adds during the split phase with and .

Use and to help provide some CC during the large, uncoordinated Breakbar Phase.

Don't waste any Cooldowns during the Breakbar Phase as they Barrier that Sabir has will void your damage.

Use and after you have broken the Breakbar. This will help prevent any squad member from going Down to the following AoEs.

Make sure you bring a Warhorn in your offset to help with CC.

combined with either or will break a Anomaly’s Breakbar. All of these skills are ranged with low Cooldowns making you a great candidate to break them.

Try to use before Qadim the P’s Knockbacks to make sure nobody gets pushed into the fire.

You can bring to assist with the Anomaly's and Qadim the P’s Breakbars. Every hit of ’s charge should land on Qadim the P due to the nature of his hitbox.

You should drop Soul Reaping for Blood Magic. Blood Magic allows you to sustain yourself via and keep the extreme DPS gain of .

You will need to take Focus to be able to keep up with the Life Force costs of pressing and off Cooldown. will supply you with ample Life Force.

Make sure to not move during the cast of or the skill will cancel itself.

cannot reach the boss while kiting, do not step out of your Pylon to land it. Losing the boss debuff/self buffs, even momentarily, is a DPS loss.

During the last phase you can use: , , , and to boonstrip Qadim the P.