Guild Wars 2

Please share you story here. Might as well start a thread about it so far any. Hope it we are kept in groups and not sidelined Hopefully….Q,Q Well this is day 1 so lets wait and see.

My overall experience so far is decent but so I only feel like we are better as a tank in general if one isnt presence in the group. Dps experience Good for the most part as a power necro when pair with other teammates but mobility really does rear its ugly head when you need it the most. if anyone find a good power build or condt build it would proabbly help me or someone else out there looking. Happy raiding and pray Meta don’t force us out of a group.

condi dmg is required, necro deals more dmg than engie against moving targets, so no reason not to bring nec

Yea but the general fear a lot of necros might experience later down line is the meta stuff for fast runs because too many people have gotten used too it from all the dungeon running., especially when it comes down to Pugs. We’ll wait and see.

Don’t power nercos destroy targets under 50% hp? If bosses take a long time to burn I don’t see why they wouldn’t be desired. If the raids are actually difficult they will also have an easier time surviving than other melee oriented DPS roles IMO

For what its worth, in recent months I haven’t gotten a single “Do you have any other classes?” in pug groups lately, which is encouraging.

Hopefully speed-clear raids are something mostly reserved for high end guilds because of the difficulty, and that most people would be concerning themselves and be satisfied with getting the encounters down at all in a pug group.

I didn’t planned on doing raids so soon… i wanted to let the dust settle and people get their builds and strategies sorted out, however a friend invited me and i accepted.

At the first boss i ended up tanking at one point, while doing 5K bleeds… + poison & burst-stacking poison which ticks for 5K at it’s best + 10 stacks of perma torment… + 2 minion damage… and… i was most of the time full HP without support.

So you guys can imagine that i’m extremely satisfied with my first necromancer experience in raids.

Well my first experience was learning how to play condi engi. Which was a lot of fun. But very confusing when trying to learn a new encounter and a new class at the same time.

Ill probably be trying condi necro tomorrow though. Because then i can switch between both builds easily. I do expect necro to be one of the safest classes to play while people are still learning the encounter. But once optimisation starts happening it might drop off.

Bleeding tank transfusion will be my raid build. I do not think I will use the Reaper line for the first run.

Need to dust off Krait runes.

I’ve been playing a condi necro and been having a blast, only downside so far is that fear doesn’t affect the breakbars on the first boss/adds

I saw someone in map chat asking for anyone but a Necro for their raid pug… because they already had 5 Necros.

Blaine Tog.8304:

I saw someone in map chat asking for anyone but a Necro for their raid pug… because they already had 5 Necros.

For some reason, I’m okay with this

Just beat it with guild, had 2 Reapers in the party. He was running SR with dhuum and I was blood with wells.

We were both doing the lightning field, the main reason being that since you have to stand still, the class has to be able to facetank damage. Our Chrono kept dying so I swapped in and did lighting duty. With death’s charge and signet of locust, mobility wasn’t that big of an issue.

I spend a surprising amount of time with axe because I was on lighting duty, but damage wasn’t that bad since I can Reaper shroud in and melee if weapon swap is on cd. Honestly not that much to say since a lot of it comes down to player skill and able to do the mechanics instead of professions. I mostly had to remember how to keep the dps rotation down while making sure I am not stuck in axe when I can melee.

Glad to hear people are having a good experience. Here’s hoping ANet provides rewarding mechanical difficulty instead of the player base relying on speed-runs as a replacement to end-game to content.

Reporting a bit on boss 2.

Boss has a phrase where he will spawn 4 adds and slowly walk toward it. If any of the adds touch the boss then the raid wipes. The adds are ONLY affected by chill, cripple, immobilize. Reaper is actually pretty good for this one since we puke out cripple and chill with some immobilize

Vydahr.4285:

Blaine Tog.8304:

I saw someone in map chat asking for anyone but a Necro for their raid pug… because they already had 5 Necros.

For some reason, I’m okay with this

Yup. I was gonna chew the guy’s ear off until someone else asked why and he let us know.

Warscythes.9307:

Reporting a bit on boss 2.

Boss has a phrase where he will spawn 4 adds and slowly walk toward it. If any of the adds touch the boss then the raid wipes. The adds are ONLY affected by chill, cripple, immobilize. Reaper is actually pretty good for this one since we puke out cripple and chill with some immobilize

This sounds very similar to a scenario I was imagining back during the BWEs that could make a Necromancer useful to an encounter.

Thanks for reporting mechanics back, I’ll be really curious to hear how each boss pans out.

Warscythes.9307:

Reporting a bit on boss 2.

Boss has a phrase where he will spawn 4 adds and slowly walk toward it. If any of the adds touch the boss then the raid wipes. The adds are ONLY affected by chill, cripple, immobilize. Reaper is actually pretty good for this one since we puke out cripple and chill with some immobilize

nice!

fyi other than in the beta teh red orbs at the vale guardian are now suspectible to fear

I have been running a necrotank build running valk armor and captain trinkets its been working pretty well unless we got a pug that was full toughness and didn’t know how to deal with the agro. I used dagger/war horn for the force gain and stayed in shroud as much as possible.

Took my reaper into a raid last night. We had 2 reapers, both condi.

After the raid I think I might actually drop reaper and pick up blood again. The main bonus of reaper is RS and damaging chill. I spent most of the fight ranged since I was on circle duty, so RS was pretty much a bust, and the extra healing from blood was sorely missed since we didn’t have a druid.

In fact since I am ranged I might even go spite/curses/blood so I can self might, strip boons, and maintain my dps.

Our group was lacking DPS, so we hit the enrage timer at ~25%. Our group really needed more utility to boost damage and healing, so I may end up being asked to run a support dps tempest tonight, but we’ll see what happens.

Edit: It should be noted that my dps as a full ascended viper reaper PALED in comparison to the viper’s engineer we had in our group. During the split phase we swapped with one of us on green and one of us on red between attempts. The red boss died ~40% faster when the Engineer was on him compared to when I was on him.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Edit: It should be noted that my dps as a full ascended viper reaper PALED in comparison to the viper’s engineer we had in our group. During the split phase we swapped with one of us on green and one of us on red between attempts. The red boss died ~40% faster when the Engineer was on him compared to when I was on him.

Did the green boss die ~40% slower? Were there other DPSers on these bosses? How did they perform on the red boss the second time around? How did they perform on the green boss the second time around?

I did not get online last night but have noticed Reaper has lower average dps than several other professions. It is certainly not OP.

Yeah condi reaper is quite low dps. But you should have very little issues maintaining the damage. So when you split you might be slower to kill red if you take condi reaper instead of a condi engi. But for the rest of the fight its a lot more up in the air. I know i was far too unfamiliar with engi to consistently maintain good damage on the main boss but on condi necro i doubt ill have much of a problem.

Cogbyrn.7283:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Edit: It should be noted that my dps as a full ascended viper reaper PALED in comparison to the viper’s engineer we had in our group. During the split phase we swapped with one of us on green and one of us on red between attempts. The red boss died ~40% faster when the Engineer was on him compared to when I was on him.

Did the green boss die ~40% slower? Were there other DPSers on these bosses? How did they perform on the red boss the second time around? How did they perform on the green boss the second time around?

We had 4 people on the green boss, 4 on the blue boss and 2 on the red boss. With 2 condition engineers on the red boss it died just as fast as the green and blue bosses.

When I switched to the red boss and the engineer switched to the green boss the green boss died about 10 seconds sooner than the blue boss, and 15 seconds faster than the red boss.

We only did it that once since it was so much worse. In a 1 minute fight I do ~8k dps. The engineer was clearly doing much better, though I don’t think he was using a dps meter so I don’t know what his exact dps was.

Edit: as another side note. Fear currently does NOT work on the break bars of the raid bosses. You need to frequently and quickly CC the bosses and necro/reaper is completely useless at this without fear working.

Classes honestly does not matter as much as player skill.

Our group when we beat it had

1 Cleric/Nomad Guardian Tank
2 Burnzerkers
1 Cleric Druid
2 Zerker reapers
1 Chronomancer
2 Revs, 1 zerker and 1 condi/Ventari
1 Dragon Hunter dps
we basically brought our main character and equipped whichever gear is necessary.

Our dps is definitely a bit lower than optimal groups since we killed it about 10-15 seconds into the enrage timer but the upside is that we have a lot more leeway if we screw up the lighting since we had a lot more heals and everybody is fairly durable with few exceptions. There was no wipe in p1 or p2 because one person got ported and everybody goes down from lighting strike. I don’t doubt condi engineers do more condi damage than condi reapers, they are not on top of the condi class for no reason. but is never as much as a big deal as you might think.

For example Rev is suppose to be the top power dps but I am pretty sure I outdps our power rev because he has to take staff for cc break and sword for dps which means he has 0 range dps. I however can take axe for range dps and sacrifice basically nothing for it. Practical plays is a lot different from theoretical dps.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Edit: as another side note. Fear currently does NOT work on the break bars of the raid bosses. You need to frequently and quickly CC the bosses and necro/reaper is completely useless at this without fear working.

I don’t think that’s true but I can’t remember since is hard to tell when 10 people are trying to CC break at the exact same time. I did fine during the split phrase though which is the only time I can tell.

As Reaper, you have golem/shroud 5/warhorn 4/GS 5, even if fear is not working you are definitely not useless in ccing without it. Most of the time I can get maybe 2 skills off before the cc bar breaks.

I feel a bit out of place.

The moment i realzied that other Professions like the Tempest does so much more Zerker DPS than me. He hits like AoE 6k 2-3 times in a freaking second. Condition the same. Engineers does maybe the same bleed/poison dmg … + freaking +8k burning. okay he hasnt torment or chill … but thats only 1k anyway.

I hope the second boss literally require Reapers chill. Otherwise i see no reason to pick a Reaper … And Necros seems dead anyaways …

Out of curiosity, can you swap in new players in the middle of the raid, or does it lock your group until you leave? Are there boss lockouts for raids for any period of time?

I imagine we’re pretty great to have around for break-bars, especially Reapers with all the Chill to the Bone and Shroud 5, plus the fears.

Lobo.1296:

I imagine we’re pretty great to have around for break-bars, especially Reapers with all the Chill to the Bone and Shroud 5, plus the fears.

Flesh Golem > Chill to the Bone for break-bars.

Warscythes.9307:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Edit: as another side note. Fear currently does NOT work on the break bars of the raid bosses. You need to frequently and quickly CC the bosses and necro/reaper is completely useless at this without fear working.

I don’t think that’s true but I can’t remember since is hard to tell when 10 people are trying to CC break at the exact same time. I did fine during the split phrase though which is the only time I can tell.

As Reaper, you have golem/shroud 5/warhorn 4/GS 5, even if fear is not working you are definitely not useless in ccing without it. Most of the time I can get maybe 2 skills off before the cc bar breaks.

It was more of an issue with the smaller ones where there was only 2-3 people per boss so you need to CC fast and hard.

Was golem useful for the raid? did the seekers kill it? I was using CttB, but golem may be better if it can stay alive.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Warscythes.9307:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Edit: as another side note. Fear currently does NOT work on the break bars of the raid bosses. You need to frequently and quickly CC the bosses and necro/reaper is completely useless at this without fear working.

I don’t think that’s true but I can’t remember since is hard to tell when 10 people are trying to CC break at the exact same time. I did fine during the split phrase though which is the only time I can tell.

As Reaper, you have golem/shroud 5/warhorn 4/GS 5, even if fear is not working you are definitely not useless in ccing without it. Most of the time I can get maybe 2 skills off before the cc bar breaks.

It was more of an issue with the smaller ones where there was only 2-3 people per boss so you need to CC fast and hard.

Was golem useful for the raid? did the seekers kill it? I was using CttB, but golem may be better if it can stay alive.

Golem is better in pretty every way compared to chilled to the bone when you are trying to breakbar. Golem charge + warhorn daze take off 75-85% of the bar alone in the split phrase. I was doing green and we were 2 reapers and a dh. The green one dies instantly when we both golem charge and one of us GS5. The 95% reduction means it never dies. Hell I was running blood fiend too just because it gives a tiny bit of extra dps and it died maybe once in the entire fight,

Shouldnt heal be signet since its a 12k heal for others?

Best condi build I’ve found is focused on dhuumfire with reapers onslaught. Spite soulreaping and reaper, take augury of death so your heal shout recharges in 12 seconds at max targets. Plus rise halves your damage taken. Use runes of balthazar, sigil of smoldering and sigil of bursting. With carrion stats you can hit 5200 burning per tic with truffle steaks. Haven’t tried with trailblazer yet but will be once I get home. Should be even more damage thanks to condition duration stats, plus you’ll be the tankiest dps in the group.

Flumek.9043:

Shouldnt heal be signet since its a 12k heal for others?

It would be better dps than blood fiend if you use it on CD. But blood fiend is fire and forget, you use it and it acts like a healing signet that does damage. Is also a bit difficult to fit in the dps rotation while moving around and trying not to cancel other casts by accident.

I suppose I might use it in the future once I get the whole thing down, but fiend is just easier to use at this point.

In raids, I felt in no way crucial to the party, but I also didn’t feel like I was holding it back. I did what i could with boon strips until we got a mesmer into the group and then I focused on doing out right condi damage. We plan to try more strats soon involving blinds to take less damage, so i can help with that with plage, well, gs, but so could a thief or an ele. Essentially: other classes can do as well or better, but necro’s arnt totally useless as of now. They bring condi damage, which appears to be much better than zerker damage in raids. They bring useful things like blinds and boon strips. Running blood magic and taking the grand master that ports downed players has saved a lot of lives since i can pull downed players out of AOE’s. Simple things like that to make yourself useful help the raid out.

As for some other points that were made in the thread.

Flesh golem can take a chunk out of a break bar. So can condi warriors, mesmers, engineers, eles… Taking down a break bar is something every and all classes can and should do, we are not unique in this, it is a simple necessity.

I much prefer the signet heal to the other heals because it helps the group and everyone is taking a lot of damage pretty constantly. Anything to help is nice.

I think the best condi build ive found isnt a dhummfire necro, its a basic scepter necro with corruptions, but thats obviously more preference thananything.

Cogbyrn.7283:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Edit: It should be noted that my dps as a full ascended viper reaper PALED in comparison to the viper’s engineer we had in our group. During the split phase we swapped with one of us on green and one of us on red between attempts. The red boss died ~40% faster when the Engineer was on him compared to when I was on him.

Did the green boss die ~40% slower? Were there other DPSers on these bosses? How did they perform on the red boss the second time around? How did they perform on the green boss the second time around?

Only because red boss stand still and engi’s skills are positioning dependent. In actual vale boss fight you should be outdpsing it by far.

As a Viper’s necro, on a whim I ended up trying “Rise” as a utility to see if it worked on the sparks (It does), and combined with the jagged horrors from lich form…holy kitten. Paired with Blood Magic’s minion siphoning, I had insane health regen. I highly recommend it and plan on trying it as tank tonight. I think lich form is the way to go, even if you only use the jagged horrors. The bleeds they provided throughout the fight, not to mention modest hits + siphon damage they dealt throughout the fight is probably more substantial than I could be bothered to notice. I was using Blood/SR/Reaper. I was pretty regularly keeping up 600-1000 torments, 2-3k+ bleeds and poisons, and 2-4k burns. (All of those often exceeded those ranges, but often dropped below them too)

I loved seeing my mini-minion army run over to blue/green after we finished red. It kinda cluttered the place at times, tbh!

Mega Skeleton.8259:

As a Viper’s necro, on a whim I ended up trying “Rise” as a utility to see if it worked on the sparks (It does), and combined with the jagged horrors from lich form…holy kitten. Paired with Blood Magic’s minion siphoning, I had insane health regen. I highly recommend it and plan on trying it as tank tonight. I think lich form is the way to go, even if you only use the jagged horrors. The bleeds they provided throughout the fight, not to mention modest hits + siphon damage they dealt throughout the fight is probably more substantial than I could be bothered to notice. I was using Blood/SR/Reaper. I was pretty regularly keeping up 600-1000 torments, 2-3k+ bleeds/poisons, and 2-4k burns. (All of those often exceeded those ranges, but often dropped below them too)

I’ve been going dagger on vale guardian as a zerk reaper and I find the siphon health (dagger skill 2) very helpful in restoring lost health. I run Spite/SoulReaping/Reaper so if I swap one with blood that would increase, but I’d lose gaining might or vulnerability with shroud skill 1.

For Vale Guardian, I played the anchor with a DM/BM/Reaper setup (Yes I feel dirty for dropping Spite, but since we were still practicing the content it helped us getting through better than dropping BM for DM) and we killed it with 37s left on the timer, even though the run wasn’t exactly the smoothest. Utilities were Blood Fiend/Rise/WoC/WoS/Flesh Golem. Lich would be worth a shot I guess, although you’re going to give up something to hurt breakbars on demand.

I’m uploading the kill right now, however I might hold off posting it for a bit (even though I personally don’t think it’s necessary, but I have no idea about the progress of other guilds and yeah.) If anyone wants to see it though because they’re curious or whatever, I can send it to you/post it here once we feel like we should post it.

NovaanVerdiano.6174:

For Vale Guardian, I played the anchor with a DM/BM/Reaper setup (Yes I feel dirty for dropping Spite, but since we were still practicing the content it helped us getting through better than dropping BM for DM) and we killed it with 37s left on the timer, even though the run wasn’t exactly the smoothest. Utilities were Blood Fiend/Rise/WoC/WoS/Flesh Golem. Lich would be worth a shot I guess, although you’re going to give up something to hurt breakbars on demand.

I’m uploading the kill right now, however I might hold off posting it for a bit (even though I personally don’t think it’s necessary, but I have no idea about the progress of other guilds and yeah.) If anyone wants to see it though because they’re curious or whatever, I can send it to you/post it here once we feel like we should post it.

Looking foward watch this.

I am annoyed at fear not working on the split guys breakbars though. It seems to work fine on the boss, at least. I wonder why that is. The invuln, maybe?

Okay my leader decided to go ahead and post the video because there’s probably enough Vale Guardian kills by now:

With how stationary a necro can keep the boss engis are in a much better position for condi damage. But who cares because necro can dps while tanking.

Have to say i found it quite fun tanking on necro today in the few attempts i had with another group.

i felt a bit out of place.

They told me to go condi, and stay mele, not going to the green wells (while reaper is so good to reach them and tank the damage…)

so i used the sinister set with the reaper dhuumfire. I was told to go red with two engies. It turned out the red boss was dying first, by a big margin, so i swapped the scepter/dagger for axe/warhorn for more direct damage and lifeforce regeneration.

I think we are much better with the boss that has to be debuffed. We have so much potential for that.

In the end, we weren’t even close to beating the boss. We were underperforming (people getting teleported) so not enough damage and ended up wiping sooner or later.

but it was fun. next time i’ll probably try ele, i’ve seen videos with the tempest doing some crazy damage.

NovaanVerdiano.6174:

Okay my leader decided to go ahead and post the video because there’s probably enough Vale Guardian kills by now:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxI1yYV5igY

I really enjoyed watch you tank as reaper. Tbh you did a better job than others classes in others videos i watched.

Lynnie.7213:

NovaanVerdiano.6174:

Okay my leader decided to go ahead and post the video because there’s probably enough Vale Guardian kills by now:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxI1yYV5igY

I really enjoyed watch you tank as reaper. Tbh you did a better job than others classes in others videos i watched.

Glad you liked it as much, but I see many things that could still be improved by a lot. It wasn’t a horrible run by far, though.

NovaanVerdiano.6174:

Lynnie.7213:

NovaanVerdiano.6174:

Okay my leader decided to go ahead and post the video because there’s probably enough Vale Guardian kills by now:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxI1yYV5igY

I really enjoyed watch you tank as reaper. Tbh you did a better job than others classes in others videos i watched.

Glad you liked it as much, but I see many things that could still be improved by a lot. It wasn’t a horrible run by far, though.

What’s your build? Looks like reaper MM from the skills. Are you using viper or sinister?

I did my first raid today and they told me to switch to condi. Man my damage was weak and I felt like I couldn’t be supported to the team. Is there a build I can follow for raiding? I run full berserker armor and great sword. For condition I was using staff and scepter/dagger with rabid armor and srunes of undead.

Relle.4873:

NovaanVerdiano.6174:

Lynnie.7213:

NovaanVerdiano.6174:

Okay my leader decided to go ahead and post the video because there’s probably enough Vale Guardian kills by now:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxI1yYV5igY

I really enjoyed watch you tank as reaper. Tbh you did a better job than others classes in others videos i watched.

Glad you liked it as much, but I see many things that could still be improved by a lot. It wasn’t a horrible run by far, though.

What’s your build? Looks like reaper MM from the skills. Are you using viper or sinister?

http://puu.sh/lqDGj.jpg
It’s complete overkill, everyone’s gonna tell you that, but since the content is new, all of us were running glass-gear (most other party comps had a few people with more defensively laid out gear from what I heard, but I can’t confirm any of that) and we had people who were tired as hell, we decided to roll a bit safer on that and… yeah, as you can see in the video it was pretty faceroll for me (despite the fact that I might be one of those tired as hell people). Most squads aren’t going for insane kill times anytime soon either, so if you want to just clear the raid, this will do and you shouldn’t have any issues staying alive and keeping aggro.

As for gear, I’m not a fan of condition specs on necro at all and it wouldn’t synergize with my skills in the first place; I ran full berserker with Scholar Runes.

I should probably edit this into the video description once I can be kitten d to do so. lol

Thanks, I’m going to give this a shot, if my guild leader will let me. If nothing else, it’ll be awesome for fractals. That said, I’m going to be a bit of a cheap-kitten and keep using my strength runes rather than buy scholar.