Guild Wars 2

Recently I have been playing around with necro, which I haven’t played that much before, and I noticed that with a power build Lich form auto attack does about 5-6,000 damage from long range that can be traited to pierce. If you time your transformation right you can take out the whole enemy team in a large team fight.

Deathshroud is no slouch either – with a short cd fear and auto attack doing 2-5,000 ranged damage. If you aren’t getting focused it also seems to last for ages.

Has it always been like that? When I last played necro (about 18 months ago) deathshroud seemed to be consumed really quickly and I don’t recall Lich doing that much damage.

Yasha.5963:

Recently I have been playing around with necro, which I haven’t played that much before, and I noticed that with a power build Lich form auto attack does about 5-6,000 damage from long range that can be traited to pierce. If you time your transformation right you can take out the whole enemy team in a large team fight.

True, but it is not that easy.
Usually you are the first to be targeted, right after turning into Lich Form or even before.
Experienced players will never stand still and take all the damage on their back – they will dodge, cc you, do anything that reflects projectiles or use environment composition (walls, stairs, etc) to hide.

Yasha.5963:

Deathshroud is no slouch either – with a short cd fear and auto attack doing 2-5,000 ranged damage. If you aren’t getting focused it also seems to last for ages.

Yes, it is nice, if you manage to stay out of focus. Have to mention that you need to fill up the Life Force pool to turn into Death Shroud. It is not always easy, because you need to get into fight to fill it up and while doing, it’s hard to be not targeted.

Yasha.5963:

Has it always been like that? When I last played necro (about 18 months ago) deathshroud seemed to be consumed really quickly and I don’t recall Lich doing that much damage.

Necromancers were improved once in past. Now it seems more balanced, but all the newbies will complain that it is too powerful – because they don’t know that most of the damage can be avoided and that such a power necromancer is very “sensitive”.

Yasha.5963:

Recently I have been playing around with necro, which I haven’t played that much before, and I noticed that with a power build Lich form auto attack does about 5-6,000 damage from long range that can be traited to pierce. If you time your transformation right you can take out the whole enemy team in a large team fight.

Deathshroud is no slouch either – with a short cd fear and auto attack doing 2-5,000 ranged damage. If you aren’t getting focused it also seems to last for ages.

Has it always been like that? When I last played necro (about 18 months ago) deathshroud seemed to be consumed really quickly and I don’t recall Lich doing that much damage.

No, it wasn’t like that. I don’t exactly remember when, but they buffed the overall damage of Life Blast some time ago and made Vital Persistance to be 50% not 25%.

Power Necromancer is a strong tool, but has many flaws. Yes, Lich is a major teamfight cooldown and when used right, can completly shut down the enemy, but that’s said, it’s 180 second cooldown and it won’t occur every team fight. It also eats your Wurm. And as mentioned, can be countered pretty easily.

Speaking of Auto Attack damage – Life Blast hits quite decently, but it isn’t so great. It’s cast time is 1,5 second, so the overall DPS is lower than many of other professions’ autos with zerk amulet. Because it’s so slow and requires facing it’s very, very, very vulnerable to any blinds, blocks and is easy to evade. Heck, you can run through the Necro and it won’t fire off.
Besides, I see many Necromancers trying to use it as the main source of damage. They just sit and spam it over and over on one target. It’s a filler, people. Filler when there’s a lot of AoE in melee range, filler when you’re kiting, filler when you wait for your skills to come up, filler when you soak damage in Shroud.

Main source of Power Necro’s damage are, sadly, procs and burst rotation including Dagger+Axe for example followed after by Shroud and LB maybe.

Also, to point out – Life Blast requires Unyielding trait to pierce, but Lich’s auto has it by default.