Guild Wars 2

Hello! So you picked up the Necromancer. Maybe you had the idea that by creating a Necromancer, you would become a minion-spawning, death seeping, ghoulish baddie of evil, am I correct? Well, good thing is, those are all true things of Guild Wars 2’s Necromancer.

While you play through your first 15 levels on your own, you might discover yourself re-setting your trait points often, trying to find a good build for your specific playstyle and needs. This is completely normal. The problem few run into though, is the crippled “I haven’t figured out how to work my utilities and weapon skills” issue.

The part about playing a necromancer that might frustrate many new players is the adaptation to the new non-trinity mmo structure. How to balance your death dealing superstar between Damage, Survivability, and Support? The key is the unique 4-ability score standard: Power, Precision, Toughness, and Vitality.

How does one adapt to the new non-trinity structure? by using all parts in compliment to each other: the 4-ability system, weapon skills, weapon swapping (available from level 7), utility skills, healing capability, gear, runes/sigils/gems, supportive crafting, traits, and combat boons and conditions; All must be combined together to form the magnum opus of your MMO career within Guild Wars 2.

-TOC-

• The Four Ability Scores: Power, Precision, Toughness, Vitality
• Weapon Skills of your choosing
• Utility Skills
• Healing yourself and why it is so important
• Gear selection, upgrades, and Crafting
• Trait selection, Conditions, Boons, and how you play

The Four Ability Scores: Power, Precision, Toughness, Vitality.
Each attribute compliments a certain part of playing your character. It’s not all about numbers! These four attributes will change how you play your Necromancer.
Power: Increases Attack
Precision: Increases Critical Hit Chance
Toughness: Increases Defense
Vitality: Increases maximum health

Keep in mind that gear begins with single attribute bonuses, and then progresses with two attribute bonuses per piece of equipment. Properly planning which four of these attributes you wish to focus on will effect which traits you should pick to utilize those numbers.

Take a look at the Necromancer Trait List.

For example, if you were to choose to focus on Power and Precision, you would most benefit from the Curses and Spite tree for the +Power, +Precision, +Condition Damage, and +Condition Duration. You would most like then build your Skill slot utilities and weapon choices with many Condition-heavy skills such as Bleed skills found in the Staff toolset, combined with slotted Signets/Wells. Going full damage is never really recommended in this game, though, because everyone has to be able to heal themselves, deal damage, and take damage without being unbalanced.

A key combination that majority of players will agree on is a good balance between Toughness, Power, and Vitality. Precision gear is hard to find or craft without kittening other attributes early on, and on top of that, the Necromancer does not benefit so much from critical hits as much as other professions do. At the end of this guide, I will post my Vampiric Power/Healing Power build to help clarify what this balance can look like. Remember, there are many ways to build a Necromancer, but no way is the best way. Build to your strengths in a way that covers your weaknesses.

Weapon Skills of your Choosing
Each type of weapon has a combination of effects designed to make the player (you) attack and defend in a certain way. Take a look at the skill effects and choose which ones utilize your attribute scores, your traits, and to cover your weaknesses.

Example: In the given Vampiric build, I use a combination of Dagger+Focus and Staff. Why did I choose this?
Here are the following benefits from using the Dagger+Focus:

• Siphoning Health (Healing)
• DPS (Skill 1.)
• Ranged Immobilizing Skill

• Ranged Bouncing Regeneration/Bouncing Bleed
• Ranged Chill(Kiting/dodging tool)

Scenario: Immobilize fleeing mob, close gap, and start auto-DPS. Apply chill, dodge backwards to maintain health, siphon health back to full. Repeat between Siphoning and utilities (such as wells/signets/minions) and swapping to alternative weapon while on cooldown.

This sort of gameplay allows the player to maintain health, apply consistent DPS, and control their selected mob with chills and dodging placement.

Here are the following benefits from the Staff:

• 4 out of 5 are AoE attacks, auto attack is ranged/kite-friendly
• Bleed+Regen<<crucial skill!
• AoE chill
• AoE Self-condition Transferral <<second crucial skill later on in levels!
• AoE Fear

Scenario: Chill, auto attack, kite backwards, bleed+regen to apply DoT and healing, fear, drop wells, finish with conditions/high damage skill.

In tandem, using these two weapons for myself has proven to be great because their cool-downs are in tune with each other. I tend to run through my dagger skills, and when my health hits 65-70% I swap to staff, bleed and regen, drop all the AoE skills, and swap back to dagger for Ranged Regen skill+Siphon again. wash, rinse, repeat. I always have a skill regenerating my health active. That is my focus.

Utility Skills
Much of what I’ll put in this section has to do with your own personal freedom of choice and whatever tickles your fancy. Utilities are all useful in their own way and in my mind they mostly change your pace of attacking. No, you cannot reset skill points. You can, though, get more than enough skill points in the game and unlock all of them. Instead of screwing up your selection and then regretting it, though, I would recommend you go visit the Mists through the PvP tab in your Hero window. It will allow you to play around with a level 80 version of your character with everything unlocked. Take advantage of this mechanic!

Healing yourself and why it is so important
By the time you hit level 35 and hit your first dungeon (The Ascalonian Catacombs) You will probably realize that you are dying quite a bit and that perhaps running headfirst into things isn’t the best for your current life insurance plan. Being able to kill things quickly is great and all, but not being alive to do so is a shame. The way this new non-trinity system works is that everyone has to contribute some level of healing, DPS, and damage-mitigation. Don’t let yourself fall victim to old-MMO habits of “he has aggro, let me nuke it now. buttonmash”

Make sure your character can handle any position! As a healing-centered player I would brazenly suggest picking up the Signet of Undeath skill to help out at the time you hit your first dungeon. Figuring out when to dodge, heal yourself, revive allies, and “bubble up” is just as important as knowing when to strike. plan your traits, skills, and healing ability accordingly.

Gear selection, upgrades, and Crafting
If you took a look at the Necromancer page on the GW2 wiki, you would see some recommended crafting disciplines listed to help support your equipment holes and attribute-boosting needs. For Necromancer I picked Weaponsmithing (Daggers/Axes) and Tailoring(Light Armor). You can also double into Artificing for staves, but I found purchasing one off the AH sufficed.
Craft/Buy a weapon that has attribute bonuses that benefit your traits and skills.

Example: For Vampirism based Necromancers, I picked up a Dagger with +Power and +Healing Power.

+Healing power directly benefits your regen skill, healing skill, and siphoning amount. +Power directly benefits all of your damage scores.

When it came to choosing armor to craft/buy, I did the same: +power/ +healing power.
Take a look at the Tailoring Recipes and see which insignia bonuses work best for you.

By the time you have all your gear picked out, you might notice that there is an “Unused Upgrade” slot on your items.

For Weapons, there are Sigils.

For Armor, there are Runes.

Starting with weapons, choosing a Sigil that most compliments your build center (for mine it is self-healing and high weapon damage) I would choose a sigil of Blood, Life, or Bloodlust.

Bloodlust allows me to stack 25 stacks of a +5 power buff which equals +125 power when loaded.

Life allows the same, but allows 25 stacks of +7 Healing power. In total, +175 healing power. (But there is no Minor sigil available for low level gear currently. Sorry.)

Blood allows 10% chance of life steal on critical. With a precision/power/healing power build, this can be beneficial.

I chose bloodlust for quicker leveling.

Choosing Runes for your armor set is a different story though. Starting with minor runes, we start off with a 2-piece completion bonus per pair of runes. How does this work?

You have 6 pieces of armor. Head, Epaulets, Tunic, Gloves, Leggings, and Boots. Minor runes allow a two-set bonus, so get 3 pairs of runes of your choosing. Hopefully you pick three pairs that complement each other.

My choices for vampirism were all minor runes of Vampirism, The Lich, and Dwayna.

With 2 of each of those set into the slots in my armor, I was able to gain the following:

• +10 power
• +2% lifesteal on hit
• +10 Vitality
• +10% condition duration
• +10 healing
• +10% regeneration duration

These bonuses are very much worth the 9 silver i paid for them in total. Take a look at the wiki link referenced in bold above to help research and choose which ones you need.

Trait selection, Conditions, Boons, and how you play
Luckily, resetting your traits is inexpensive for the most part. I found myself resetting 4 times a day in my first 15 levels on my Necromancer. What kind of combination makes you tick? To get an idea of how you wish to go about keeping yourself alive while killing things, you should probably take a look at each of the inital 5-point trait bonuses (adept level initial perk) listed here.

Pay attention to the stat and attribute bonuses listed at the head of each trait line. when you max out that trait tier to full adept (10 points in that trait line) you will get either a +100/ +10% bonus to those things listed at the head. this is a significant bonus that only gets bigger as you progress to the next mastery levels. Don’t throw them away! Use those bonuses to your advantage and build your Necromancer around them.

The following build is the current build I use:
The Necrovamper

I began putting points into Blood Magic, then Spite, then Curses.

Here are some images of the build:

Screenshot 1 Hero panel, main attributes

Screenshot 2 Traits

Screenshot 3 Skills taken

If anyone has questions, or would like to see more/less information in a section, regards to how any part was written, or would like to help improve this post, please post replies. If needed, pm me if you wish to add a written block.
Feedback appreciated!

I know there are some fantastic videos created by Nemesis, linked here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/Necromancer-tutorials/221328

but some people wanted a careful-read type guide so I went ahead and took the time to do so.

Nice intro to the Necro. Wish I’d had this when I first started out!

Hope that you know that you are leading people into a death trap of AC since 99% of our traits and vampiric skills dont scale with healing power(nor normal power what would be the even more obvious choice since vampiric does indicate more damage – more you steal).

Resetting trait points often in the first 15 levels?
What?

So let me get this straight: You use Minor Runes because they allow a 2 Set Bonus? You are aware that 2 of the Superior Runes Each would get you basically the same Boni, but much better?
Ok you are only lvl 33, but why teh kitten would you think of writing something for that lvl range? You can basically play every thing at that level and still be able to clear all content you are 2-5 levels underleveld for with ease as a necromancer. And i don’t intend to hate on nemesis, but most of his guides are ratehr unaffective builds and full of mistakes.

I don’t really advocate for my build being the best one in any way, or being the safest. I simply broke down the important mechanics of the GW2 system so that new players would have an idea what they were dealing with. I fully understand that superior runes gives better bonuses. (Minor<Major<Superior) But from levels 1-38 only minor runes will be available. (Hence why it is most effective to go with three pairs of minors). At level 39, major runes become available and thus the effectivity does as well. I strongly suggest players to play with their own builds and gear, this is only a tool to understand those parts.

I just noticed some people not being able to understand people’s copy+paste build information like noted here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/The-Mr-Freeze-Build-SPvP-Video-Fun-CC-Damage-Build/275630

And I thought it would be nice to have some sort of breakdown on the parts of “builds”

P.S I think it is appropriate to realize that not every single player is a level 80-capped toon. There are hundreds of new players all the time looking to learn and to share information.

Andele.1306:

Hope that you know that you are leading people into a death trap of AC since 99% of our traits and vampiric skills dont scale with healing power(nor normal power what would be the even more obvious choice since vampiric does indicate more damage – more you steal).

I’ve actually run AC with multiple builds (And I have the gold to craft myself full set of rare gear for each build); a conditionmancer(bleeding), a Minionmaster+Kiter, and An altered version of my vampiric based necro. Each do well in their own respects, and the conditionmancer did the best in the sense of pulling conditions off of allies and allowing the team to survive much longer, but my vamp proved to be hard to kill since I swapped out all the gear/traits to support power/toughness instead of power/healing power.

Healing power does improve the following boons: Regeneration, Consume Conditions/Well of blood. With dagger+focus/Staff, you end up with two regen skills (ranged focus #4 and staff bleed #2) and utility cooldowns that fit very snugly between the short cooldown of each of those. I use the power/healing power focused vamp build for standard PvE— NOT for AC.

With the healing power instead of toughness in regular PvE, it is easier to dodge+siphon than bunker up and siphon like in AC. I wish I had a recording of me taking on a constant line of 16 basilisks (chain-pulled and without EVER entering DS) with the vamp build. It simply is able to go on forever with relative ease if you know how to dodge billions of immobilize-rays.

Otherwise, I tweaked it and went power/toughness on gear and such to take less damage in AC to compensate for the lack of healing scaling which you noted.

The Boz.2038:

Resetting trait points often in the first 15 levels?
What?

+50 to any one of the attributes given from the first five points into a tree (plus the adept perk) can really skew the balance of a toon in the first fifteen levels. I began playing the necromancer trying to choose between +power, +vitality/ +healing, and the +precision tree. at level 15, resetting traits is like 16 copper so I tried to play around with it a lot to see what worked best.

Lol its like a smooth talking salesman trying to sell you the “best vacuum ever!!!”

Sheobix.8796 – Id rather see you fight 5 risen krait (or skelk if you are low level) since basilisks, ettin and a ton of other mobs all have nice taunts out of that you dont even have to dodge, just walk out, either way dont try to sell necros if guardians straight up do more condition damage just with 1 condition than our whole arsenal with same gear while healing for more just via traits.

I’m not trying to sell bs, and i’m not here to brag about my build. it would be helpful if people actually asked questions about parts of the OP.
Also, my current build at level 38 drops 8k from well of suffering, 3k from well of corruption, another 5.6k from life siphon dagger #2, all in the course of 11 seconds. that’s 1.5k damage per second which is nothing to scoff at since siphon with blood magic traits regenerates roughly 35ish percent of the health bar, and with two regeneration skills on fast cd on top of that, its a solid pve build.

Is it just me, or do i sense some flaming? I didn’t write a post like this to try brainwashing people into making clones of my build, the intention was to help people out. I used the build i play (since obviously I relate to it the easiest) as examples.

Andele.1306:

Sheobix.8796 – Id rather see you fight 5 risen krait (or skelk if you are low level) since basilisks, ettin and a ton of other mobs all have nice taunts out of that you dont even have to dodge, just walk out, either way dont try to sell necros if guardians straight up do more condition damage just with 1 condition than our whole arsenal with same gear while healing for more just via traits.

Skelk are actually easy to combat with, since i usually just lay staff #2, #3, #5 to bleed+regen, freeze, and fear them back and kite as they shadow walk into the mark boundary. then its just a matter of dropping wells, siphoning the lowest one, and finishing up the rest with dagger dps, DS siphon, or swap back to staff to repeat CD’s.

Doing 3-4 basilisks at a time is actually much harder since they drop a 1.5 second LoS immobilize ray and a melee stun. With a bunch of those, its like Milla Kovovich in Resident Evil trying to avoid the laser corridor.

Uhh… stun break, stealth is much harder to predict than a bunch of self cc mobs, still fight 5 risen krait (when you get to the 48~ 54 personal story) with their lovely anchors, pulling is so much fun then show how good a life siphon build works~ (as a 80 necro who did all the basic story modes and a nice chunk of explorables, ill just say, you will respec to either full crit if you want physical or knight/carrion hybrid build that pretty much a weakness stacker as soon as you get to the slightly less brain dead npcs)

if you have points in spite, you could just slot out well of darkness for near-immunity for the duration and use the Dark Armor trait to gain toughness during life siphon. But yes, I agree its pretty much a given that i’ll build a precision based model of my necro when i get later on in levels. (As the op suggested, early-level precision building is not fun, gear wise and trait wise. its just a little too scarce until lv55+)

I know that the healing and siphoning abilities don’t happily scale with the levels but from levels 10-40 it has been really fantastic. nearly button-mashable easy.

almost forgot, using the signet to break stun has a long cooldown. Taking on 3-4 basilisks will guarantee chain stuns.

Your build seems pretty in line with my one. However, I am using full berserker’s gear will 30/20/0/20/0 which is a decent power/pres/health(wells) build.

At level 80, I am doing 4-6k with well of corruption and 4-5k with life siphon.

How did you get 5k with life siphon at 36? Please share. It’s stronger than 100B at that level and would kill the competition in pvp, please share.

At level 38 I crafted full rare gear (wool) with +power and +vitality bonuses. then i got the bonuses on my weapons, and as well on my trinkets full set. All my gear is lv35 rare craft gear. (good gear, but not like WOW THATS GODLY) then I’m using a minor sigil of bloodlust ( + 125 power full stacks) which makes my life siphon hit for 629 x9 = 5661 damage. True stuff. My well of suffering does 1635 x5 = 8175 and corruption follows similar scaling. etc. All my gear basically adds +power and +vitality which allows me to fill a big Health pool with my regen skills and siphoning. (works really well actually, can usually kill 6-9 mobs at once without dipping below 50% hp… and when i get low i just double backflip and kite for a couple seconds and chain my heals together which bubbles me back up)

Also, my build is updated. Its now 10 spite, 10 blood, 10 death with the traits: Bloodthirst, Dark Armor, Spiteful Spirit. (the main change is that i dropped focusing in healing power, 1 point in healing power = .125 healing in regeneration) and focused on vitality instead. I would have used power/toughness if it existed, but it does not. So i use Dark Armor (+400 toughness while channeling) to gain that extra defense while siphoning, which is literally 60% of the duration of my battles in PvE.

Mate you did your maths wrong. It’s 629(x9) which means 629 total. And it’s 1635(x5) which is 1635 total.

I have exotic gear, berserkers, so even with crit, I still don’t do that much.

BTW if you didn’t catch on, healing power doesn’t help vamp.

Sheobix.8796 – the x(number) means it does a total of that damage over the amount of ticks, not that much damage pre tick…

i know healing power doesn’t help vamp. it helps regen. (focus4 staff2) and I must have been confused because I’ve seen my life siphon tick for 400/600s without full pres gear. But the x multiplier in the tooltip makes sense now, thanks

I’ve not played my Necro in two months and was unhappy with it when I did play. Still I felt like I was missing some information and was more willing to chalk the problem up to my own misunderstanding of the class than the class itself being broken. Now I have a level 80 Elementalist, a 50 Guardian and yesterday (after reading Sheobix’s comments) I started playing my necro again. One thing I did was go to the Mists (the pvp area) to test certain skills, and weapons. I chose the scepter/warhorn build and the staff. I leveled to level 27 and went to Gendarrin Fields. I found that I had great power (specced 10 pts in Spite, 4 in Curses and 3 in Blood Magic). All my armor is Condition damage and Precision.

Following Sheobix’s advice I was able to solo a level 27 Champion I don’t mean the Veteran, but the Champion (the one with crossed swords through his portrait) which usually takes a 5 or more person group to bring down. Then just to make sure I wasn’t just lucky, I pulled 15 of the other centaurs running around, including 3 Veterans. Killed them all easily and never went below 1/2 health.
I very much appreciate low level builds as most level 80 builds fail to mention what points were put where/weapons used/armor used pre level 80.

Thanks Sheobix so much for your guide. I have only one question. In another thread you mentioned a Juggermancer build thread. I cannot seem to locate it. Would you be so kind as to post a link to it?

Very cool guide, and very helpful to the total newbie.