Heya,
As the title says, guys. I’m at best an average tank, with ilvl 232 messing in m+ below level 9, because i have sometimes problems with surviving. But necrotic is a damn thing, that keeps me away from tanking. What talents to pick, how to play around this crap to not die? Thanks in advance for help.
You kite. When your necrotic stacks get too high (say, around 20, it starts to get rough to heal), you jump away, and leg it until the stacks fall off.
Being a Kyrian, you can also use your Phial to clear them, and play Kleia as your soulbind with the Ascendant Phial trait. That way, every time you pop phial, you’re immune to Necrotic for the next 8 seconds.
Also if you play the Fiery Brand build make sure to keep pulls sizeable so it can spread - if you pull bigger then 5 mobs at a time you should switch to Spirit bomb build, which is great for taking snap aggro and get some good early heals in.
Then for kiting make sure you have arrangements set up before you start the dungeon so your party knows who does what and when.
Personally I stay in spirit bomb build, but I do play Kleia as Anccelyn suggested. Kiting isn’t so hard if you have just one other class to help you (preferrably hunter/mage/rogue). If you play with unslowable mobs (like from NW) - then ask another taunt class to help you with those pesky constructs in the Ziggurat.
There’s no reason to play spirit bomb as a Kyrian. Elysian decree is all the snap aggro you’ll ever need, and on 5+ mob trash packs, the CD is down to less than 30 seconds with Mikanikos.
Fiery brand build (talents 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 2, 1) with the fiery soul legendary is best for survival.
Definitely this, although I tend to wait until 30 - 40 to kite, depending on how my health is. Your health is going to continue to drop with a lot of stacks, even when the mobs aren’t hitting you, so you have to account for that happening until the stacks drop and you’re able to take healing again.
Personally, I prefer Mikanikos. He has a trait where your phial will be automatically used if you drop below 35% health, even if it’s already on CD. This means, on a particularly nasty pull, you can use one phial to clear stacks at 40 - 50% HP, and they will clear again if you drop back down to 35%. It means you can stay in, and keep doing damage for longer.
Plus you get the massive CD reduction on elysian decree on packs of mobs, which gives you a big increase in damage and helps to kill them faster, meaning you get less necrotic stacks.
Oh! I did not know that it triggers even if the Phial is on CD! That’s huge, and indeed makes Mikanikos much stronger than Kleia. Thanks!
Mikanikos doesn’t use your vial if it’s on CD - unless it just recently broke and got bugged (99% sure that isn’t the case though).
Spirit Bomb is always a good play as VDH - not only does it do tons of damage it also greatly helps you heal. Fiery Brand is only better for survival if you pull small groups of high HP mobs so the brand gets to spread. Otherwise stuff is dead - in Necrotic weeks you usually don’t stay in long enough to make any use of fiery brand anyway.
They must have changed it since I mained VDH, then. I’ll confess that I haven’t had to use it that way for a long time because I haven’t tanked anything much over 15.
The healing from spirit bomb is minimal (equivalent to 10% leech, assuming 100% uptime on all mobs). It’s mostly taken for increased dps and snap threat by DH tanks who don’t play Kyrian. As I already mentioned, Kyrian DH tanks don’t need the extra dps and snap threat.
Fiery brand enables you to stay in longer (you cast it with meta up or spikes running so it has time to spread before the other defensive drops off), which means you’re able to hold the mobs in one place for longer and enable the dps to do damage more effectively. The overall dps loss from kiting mobs out of the dps ground AOE, and from forcing melee to chase after them, is far greater than anything you gain from playing spirit bomb.
I see a tank’s role as 3 things, in order of priority:
In a balanced group, tank damage is relatively low compared to dps, so the biggest gain comes from facilitating dps rather than doing damage yourself.
Well you said you didn’t main VDH for a long time - but I tell you, Spirit Bomb is insane for both damage and healing. If you pull large numbers of mobs Spirit Bomb alone does 3k HPS and 30k DPS.
In most keys I do Spirit Bomb is easily a 2k dps increase - and the healing it generates allow you to facetank large pulls, which is impossible to replicate with Fiery Brand. But if you pull one pack at a time then yea definitely go with Fiery Brand.
Spirit bomb scales insanely well with larger pulls - but on necrotic after a couple of stacks, then yea the healing is gone 
There’s the OP’s answer, then.
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