Guild Wars 2

Hi, I’m not sure if this is where this should be or not but here goes. I am wanting to make a new character strictly for WvW. It will either be a staff Ele or a Necro. What are the pros and cons of using either of these in WvW? Thank you in advance for any information. Have a great day/night.

Depends really on how you like to play. If you can give us some details on that it would help a lot.
Examples:

Roaming vs. Zerging vs. Coordinated Guild play
Range vs close combat
Ranged vs. DPS

Those examples are pretty basic and don’t in any way represent all the things you can do. Either way, I would suggest leveling each one up to 20-30 before jumping in or you might not find it very enjoyable.

Personally, I play a Necro and love it but I also really enjoy the Staff ele it’s just harder for me to play with all the attunement switching (comp isn’t fast enough to keep up in WvW).

i play necro and i LOVE IT. I have played it for 800+ hours. In Zergs necro is best with toooons of AOE. Every single staff skill is AOE aswell as wells for utility. But they lack moblity, so escaping is very hard, so therefor not that good for roaming

After I had made the post and thought about I realized I had left some stuff out lol.

@ Insane: For now, mainly it will be with a Zerg. Eventually I would like to get people in my guild interested in WvW so we can make some small teams to go out and flip camps etc. I prefer ranged and both the Ele and Necro would mainly be using staff. I found out a long time ago I’m better at a distance than in melee range of anyone. I have both a Necro and an Ele to level 41 right now in PvE and I love playing both of them. I just don’t know which one would be more beneficial in WvW. With the Ele I know I can gve boons and such, but then with the Necro I can try to do some crowd control. And that is why I’m wondering what everyone’s opinion on the two are.

@ Homonavn: Just curious as to what kind of build you run? Condition damage? Do you use minions? Or is it more Zerker? My Necro currently is going for a condition build.

Thank you both for your replies.

I have never played necro, so I won’t comment there, but have played primarily ele so here are some notes:

Staff ele
Pros:
- Tons of combo fields
- Good amount of aoe damage skills, especially in seige offense/defense situations
- Great team support through aoe CC and heals (you have 4 aoe heals: staff water 3, staff water 5, swapping to water does a small player-based aoe-heal and condi-cleanse, and dodge-roll in water with evasive arcana gives you a player-based AOE heal)
- Good self-combo potential
- Good boon support, keeping uptime on team regen, protection, swiftness, and might through your attunement swapping
- Can also spec to support condition cleanses through your heals
- Often in dungeons I feel like the most effective member of my team as I can do some damage and support them a lot

Cons:
- You cannot solo-roam with staff, your effectiveness scales with the size of your party
- You have very poor single-target damage
- Sometimes you feel like just a buff-bot as you spend most of your time supporting and setting up the opponent for damage and much less time actually dishing out the hurt

I will say that going with ele also gives you some versatility, as you can go X/D and roam rather effectively solo or with a small group. With D/D ele, I have solo’d supply camps rather easily by using your earth pet (there are videos online explaining how). The focus also gives some crucial support skills in dungeons vs. ranged enemies.

I like doing both roaming with X/D and zerging with the staff, and feel rather effective at both. I will say that, from what I understand, necros are slightly more effective in zergs as some of their abilities skirt the 5-player aoe limit, and their condis are out of control right now.

In a nutshell:

Necro: AoE raw Dmg, zone Denial/Pressure and some CC. Can pack strong condition dmg (don’t really pay offs due to insane cond removal of zergs and the lack of actual timeframe to apply decent stacks of conds in incs).

Ele: Support, CC/AoE denial and some Dmg. Mostly support/power (but don’t expect to do much dmg, actually it isn’t worth the tradeoff – better stay tanky support/CC).

(both in zerg play. both staff)

zidane.5194:

After I had made the post and thought about I realized I had left some stuff out lol.

@ Insane: For now, mainly it will be with a Zerg. Eventually I would like to get people in my guild interested in WvW so we can make some small teams to go out and flip camps etc. I prefer ranged and both the Ele and Necro would mainly be using staff. I found out a long time ago I’m better at a distance than in melee range of anyone. I have both a Necro and an Ele to level 41 right now in PvE and I love playing both of them. I just don’t know which one would be more beneficial in WvW. With the Ele I know I can gve boons and such, but then with the Necro I can try to do some crowd control. And that is why I’m wondering what everyone’s opinion on the two are.

@ Homonavn: Just curious as to what kind of build you run? Condition damage? Do you use minions? Or is it more Zerker? My Necro currently is going for a condition build.

Thank you both for your replies.

I usual run 10/10/25/25/0. I put 10 curses because i NEED wells use ground targeting while in zergs. The rest is just because i love survivability. I use PVT gear and staff… Thats the main parts really, and i get some pretty insane life siphon and AOE damage

Thanks for all the feed back. I think I will try the necro first and if I don’t like it I can always go for the Ele later.