Guild Wars 2

I would like to preface that just because you hopped onto a necromancer one day and started to pub it up in hot join 8v8 and hot a high score does not qualify you to comment on them or their viability. The very nature of necromancers as an AOE class makes it easy to rack up high scores in SPvP without actually being a strong contributer. The build you prefer, I assure you, is NOT something the rest of the community has accidentally overlooked and you have not stumbled on the silver bullet spec, please stop posting these as if you are our savior.

That said.

I’ve been playing MMOs a long time and was very active in learning the ins and outs of classes in many such as World of Warcraft (yes hate me as you will the games classes were very fine tuned and very well understood by the community). I understand the tendencies communities have towards persecution bias, where they think their class is the worst because they can’t kill everything all the time, and I am quite certain this is NOT the case with Necromancers, especially in SPvP where we have the luxury of playing every class with equal gear and level.

I can easily say without a doubt that whatever my necro can do, whatever I spec them toward, or try to focus into, I can find another class that will do it stronger – unless it’s something unique to necros which isn’t particularly useful like spreading conditions to a large group of people so they can then remove them and proceed to role over us with their higher sustained non-condition based damage.

First off, we’ll start with what necros are best at – conditions. What makes us so great is that we have them tied to our Scepter, and we have abilities to return conditions to our enemy. There are several problems with this scenario.

The most obvious being that most other classes have a way to shed, or in some cases, return conditions to us. Others being bugs in our abilities that return them. On top of that is that creating a build around conditions requires us to make some sketchy, dijointed trait choices. Obviously we would take Curses as our primary condition tree as it gives us damage, directly via the stat, and duration via the increased bleed and scepter condition traits. (I will not name traits by name as I for one memorize them by what they do, not what they are called, and this makes it easy for both those like me and those who are new to necros.)

Next we have to choose a secondary tree.

Spite is tempting for the condition duration, however often anyone that pays attention to their conditions will notice, a long duration simply increases the chance that your condition will be cut short when the enemy’s removal mechanic comes off cooldown. The ideal situation would be to have short, powerful conditions and couple that with either raw power damage or survivability. Spite gives us the power damage, but leaves us extremely squishy.
The problem with an all-in offensive glass cannon necro build is unlike virtually every other class who can build full glass cannon and get away with it we have none of the things that makes this viable. These are as follow:

A- “Outs”, as they are often referred to, these are hard survivability abilities that allow us to escape, avoid, or heavily mitigate enemy damage long enough to escape their direct focus. These would be things like Thieves’ stealth, Ele vapor form. A quick way to diffuse a train on us. You might say ‘death shroud’ to which I would chortle as death shroud is still just an additional health pool and without appopriate mitigation they will simply eat all that HP up very quickly and you’ll be back to your normal HP bar.

B- Hard CC. This is similar to outs but more offensive than defensive. Things like warrior’s AOE fear shout, Guardian’s knockback bubble.
The closest things we have are the staff fear, which is tied to a weapon unfortunately making us bound to that weapon as an escape. At a mere 1s fear, it’s also pretty laughable.

C- Scarey burst damage. This would be like warrior’s 100b + quickness, when you go to train him and he uses this, you’re forced to be defensive or else face plant on the ground. We don’t have such potential.

Because of this we rely 100% on defensive mitigation to keep us alive, that is hitpoints, toughness and protection when we can get it. You could argue we rely on life siphon as well, to which I would chortle and remark at how guardian healing would like to have a word with you, which I will discuss later when I address more class comparisons.

To be continued due to length restrictions…

Now back to looking at how I’d build that condi build. So Spite is an option in terms of pure damage, yes, but as I have defined in the above it’s not exactly a great choice because you will be trained and you will die unless your gear is explicitly built to make up for the weaknesses of your traits.

So the other common choice most people roll with is Soul Reaping. Lets put aside how RIDICULOUSLY bugged this trait tree is for a second, not the least of which is the 5 pointer Gluttony. This turns us into a crit + conditionmancer. The problem with this lies in that you’re taking a large portion of your traits toward critical damage meaning you need sufficient critical chance to back that damage up. Too much of one without the other is not as strong a choice as a blend. In SPvP the precision from curses alone brings us to 18% crit, this is very low. Less than 1 in 5 attacks being a critical. Remember, our conditions DO NOT critical, for those new to game mechanics, so we’d be gearing to beef up the weak part of our dps, our non condition damage, through RNG reduction scaling, basically bringing our crit up to where it’s smoother and more reliable to stack more bleeds. This sounds good until you look at that at 50% crit which is about the max you can hope to run in SPvP you’re still at a 60% chance PER CRIT to cause a SMALL bleed, so that’s 1 in 3 hits causing a bleed, at best.

The other traits from Soul Reaping are generally forgettable except, imo, the very last two, 5 seconds off DS re-use timer and stability, but imo one or the other should be accessible in the next tier down because one is weak without the other. While it has traits like 3% life force on mark trigger, reduced cooldowns on spectral skills and DS skills I still feel like we lack the traits in this tree to both make DS DESIRABLE and to make it chargable in a reasonable timeframe in SPvP in this trait tree.

Death magic is way too minion focused. Toughness is great because it synergizes with our already high base HP pool, and boon duration is great for our might stacking builds and protection, but I feel the trait options for anything but a minion build under this tree are very lackluster. The protection on wells is short, the staff traits are amazing, but I don’t WANT them under a defensive tree I want them available to an offensive build favoring staves to begin with! Currently we must place 20 points in Spite, 20 points in Death and 20 points in Soul Reaping to aquire all the staff-centric abilities. While the intention of this may have been to make the staff useful to many builds, I feel it just means we’ve spread the ability to make staff a powerful mainstay weapon accross too many areas and it will always fill the role of a backup / utility weapon only. That’s ignoring the fact that its auto attack is TERRIBLE.

Blood magic is only good for wells, our Deathshroud healing support build (also wells). Sipohning life is a joke. If you want to be a defensive, self-healing class, guardian is your calling. Our siphoning will never scale in any meaningful amount to make us feel like vampiric life-stealing walls. Not to mention poison gets thrown around in this game like crazy which is 33% healing reduction, and is easier applied than removed, yes even by necros with their multiple ways to remove it, which frankly if you’re an all-in anti-condition build with 30 blood magic, you aren’t doing much of anything else.

I find this quite often the misconception new necros have. They build really tanky and think it’s great how long they live, but don’t realize that they end up just being ignored and dying last because they didn’t bring anything meaningful to their team, where a guardian can provide bonuses like aoe retaliation, regeneration and also remove conditions while being hard to kill. If you aren’t supplementing your tankiness with useful damage or support YOU ARE JUST A SPECTATOR.

So that’s my gripe on condition builds, on top of the fact that it PVE / WVW it makes you useless for things like attacking walls or graveling burrows etc. because you can’t apply conditions or crit them.

To be continued…

Now on to our power builds. If you think necros shouldn’t have power builds YOU ARE WRONG please LEAVE.

Why is it necessary for necromancers to have a power build?
1- because everyone else is allowed to, why should there be a bias against necros?
2- as previously stated, some situations don’t favor condition builds
3- as previously stated conditions are currently too easy to shed and take too long to stack in SPvP and I think it’s a large part of how we suffer. We don’t have access to any kind of burst application of conditions like a hot-quickness to stack up bleeds quickly in a burn-down situation. Until things like this are resolved I believe a power-build alternative is necessary for our viability in SPvP.

1. thing wrong with our power build is the weapons!
   Axe is awful, there’s no way around it, the damage is pathetic. 2.25 second channel that caps out at roughly what a thief in equivalent items does in an auto attack. Are you kitten me?

Dagger does comparable auto attack damage to other strong melee classes, but does not cleave, its 2 is a joke 3 is -okay- but honeslty making it do meaningful damage couldn’t hurt. The major divide between us and other power classes is their 2+ abilities also do meaningful damage on top of their utility.

Greatsword warriors have TWO gap closers, a ranged snare, and a channeled high-output ability that scales with quickness, all of which hit really hard.
Thieves have a built in dodge, an execute type ability, a ranged AOE slow and a stealth.
Eles have AOE and ranged cleave on their daggers on top of high sustained damage.
We get NONE OF THE ABOVE.

The excuse is that our power weapons are a means to generate life force to use DS for burst. HAH. DS burst is equally low, and the builds we need to make it do actual damage leave us too squishy to use daggers or axe with its laughable ‘range’ effectively.

People KNOW that axe necros do low damage and thus attacking them is low personal risk and if you switch to dagger they’ll kite you to death. Warhorn only gives a 1s cripple and only once your in range of them, they need only wait our your 3 then open a gap on you and this game is not about 1v1, you’ll be chasing them through a group battle more often than not. There’s no reason for Axe to be so low damage and no reason our dagger can’t cleave, or be granted a magic range booster or some luxury only we are for some reason forbade.

When comparing our condition builds directly to other classes I can stack bleeds equally good on a warrior or a thief. A warrior brings with it more survivability and hard CC while a thief brings lots of avoidance and stealth. I can make a caltrops + death blossom build that will stack bleeds as fast as a necro while being nearly unhittable.

We are hardly the masters of condition application, only the ‘masters’ of self-condition management and removal. That is ALL we are good at, and considering necros are the primary condition using class, we are basically our own worst enemies. Necros counter necros, and everything else counters us by simply not relying on conditions to be effective, and pooping on us with burst damage.

Necromancers strength isn’t conditions :/ Engineers can stack more conditions much quicker and effectively then we can. (Vulnerability, Bleeding and Burning without even caring to first off lol)

Exactly, we have no strength. The fact that we are equally weak at everything gives us the illusion of being a jack-of-all trades.

Can’t agree with you more on the “please stop posting these as if you are our savior.” part, and I also agree with this in general. The only thing is that I use staff as my main. :/ Not great, but I feel it does something more than the other weapons, for me. Good post +1.

The staff is the middleman of our jack-of-all-trades arsenal, as support is about all we’re good for. We can apply regen, which is nice, and transfer condis, which is about the main this it’s useful for, on top of penetrating and generating soul force on hit and being our only 1200 ranged weapon, it’s a pity on fights that demand that range due to range cheese exploits in dungeons we’re stuck doing such garbage damage. It’s also amazing how many bosses don’t even trigger marks at all, and by amazing I mean kittening absurd.

My main gripe with this class, as well as other scholar/magic type classes… Aren’t the caster classes supposed to cast stuff… why are we using melee weapons and more to the point required to be up close and personal. I never once played a game where the casters were close quarter combatants. I do understand that it can be plausable, but seriously, our hardest damage should be from range and weapons like staff, scepter, and focus. I know that is a matter of opinion, but the whole change up of how the caster classes are played in this game feels like the reinvention of the wheel… like, why would you fix something that isn’t broke kind of deal.

Im sure there are those who will understand the point i am trying to make. As for everything else I totally agree with as well. I just would mainly like to feel more like a caster type. If I wanted close quarters there is a theif warrior and guardian I could roll.

Whenever I think of the problems that plague this class, the song that goes “everything you can do, I can do betterrrrrr” resounds in my head. But I still love my necro, and hope the bugs and problems get fixed, even if they don’t want to ever buff us. Just fix the bugs thats all.

@ Red

I don’t mind the melee, actually. I think it is unique. That said, I kind of wish the Necro could be spec’d as follows:

Dagger/Offhand: tank build. The damage is there so it doesn’t need to be buffed (since this is a tank build I mean). The only thing that would need improved is life steal (as that would be the unique way we would tank).

Axe/Offhand: Power build. Damage needs to go way up. The range is good for power risk/reward, especially since the axe is the fastest way to charge up LF.

Scepter/Offhand: As is.

Staff: Backup (anyone else annoyed we have one real back up option?)

DS should somehow be made viable for all 3. Damage mitigation for all 3, but something more. This could be done via a passive trait or something in the relevant line… not sure.

Also, you touched on it, but I would like to overtly say it: Our traits are a mess and are not very fun to pick from. I feel like I am forced to choose from things I need. On my thief I feel like I get to pick from things I want.

Necros aren’t meant to deal the highest Condition damage.
That’s like having one Profession be THE Power damage Profession.

Necromancer have the same health as Warriors despite focusing mostly on fighting at range.
Marks, Wells, Minions, Cripples and Chills all affect how opponents move, be in PvE or PvP.
Great for battlefield control. (Or meant to be anyway, heh.)

As for damage look at Warrior, Thief and Necromancer.
Warriors deal rather high damage, with some burst.

Thieves deal super high burst damage but then their damage falls very low until they get initiative for a second strike.

Necromancer’s damage is meant to start off slow, but then get higher and higher over time.
Don’t believe me?
Scepter: More bleed stacks the more damage.
Staff: Bleeds, Poison. (On support side Regen, also better over time)
Axe: More Vulnerability stacks the higher the damage. (Condi duration on Spite to help)

If Life Stealing worked properly Dagger would be all about tanking thanks to massive Life Stealing and Life Force generation.
Once it’s actually fixed and buffed we might actually be able to take a Warrior’s or Guardian’s role in Dungeons.

Other than the Cripples and all that Necromancer also has a specialty.
They can mess around with conditions and boons of others.

Don’t mistake this for a fanboy post though.
I followed GW2 for a very long time before it was released.
I’m just saying how Necromancer was MEANT to work from everything I’ve read.

In reality many of the ideas are just flawed.
Run of the mill monsters die so fast in zergfests that Necros just don’t even get looting rights with their slow-to-start damage.

Life Force is just messed up much like Soul Reaping was in GW1.
Sometimes there’s tons of death everywhere and you get so much Life Force that it goes from 0 to 100% in 5 seconds after you exit Death Shroud.
(I’m not exaggerating, by the way.)

Other times you can’t even get it up to 10% before get bursted down by something or someone.
Yeah. Great. …

I love everyone above me in this thread.

/agreed

OP that was a fantastic kittening post there sir.

I kinda want to tell you to xpost to general and get some exposure, but i don’t want to tell people to do things that will get them infracted.

Keep up the good posting!

LastDay.3524:

Life Force is just messed up much like Soul Reaping was in GW1.
Sometimes there’s tons of death everywhere and you get so much Life Force that it goes from 0 to 100% in 5 seconds after you exit Death Shroud.
(I’m not exaggerating, by the way.)

This actually bothers me a lot. I can’t help but shake the feeling that life force generation on skills is the way it is because they balanced around large zergs in pve/pvp giving a ton of life force outside of skills.

Yeah, they should really just remove that feature and keep it more of a fluff thing than an actual combat mechanic.

LastDay.3524:

Necromancer’s damage is meant to start off slow, but then get higher and higher over time..

It might be meant to work that way, and indeed in other games, pressure (or dot) classes have succeeded in this, but I find that it often does not work like that for Necro’s – unless you are fighting a badly played or specced opponent.

I find that at the end of a fight (PvP of course) its often me that is out of gas, as the opponent has removed a lot of conditions or simply outlasted them and/or ‘reset’ the fight with cc or other interrupting skills that halt your pressure, but then they still have their burst coming off cooldown while you have to start all over building conditions, which is far from ideal when both combatants are low on health.

And simply extending condition duration is no cure for this, because they are too easy to remove. Or do so little damage over time, that many defensive builds can simply heal through them.

Compounding this problem, whenever you go into DS for defense, your pressure begins to dry up.

There should be a PENALTY to removing Necro conditions, like instant burst damage when one is removed. Or at least a trait for this. It would not be as much damage as if the condition ran its course, but at least something to make up for that the opponent has just often removed a full rotation of your attacks – before they have even done 20% of their intended damage.

Another thing that would help remedy this problem of how to finish low health opponents – without reloading a bunch of conditions – is having one burst finisher of some type. Perhaps only useable at 20% health or less for the enemy. Feast of Corruption should be this ability, but the amount of damage it gains from conditions is a joke.

Other condition damage related issues: (very pertinent to Necromancers)
+Too much condition removal available.
+Too much Vitality stacking instead of Toughness in the meta game.

Though the class was a great idea – the way it is presented is pretty poor. When classes can pump out more Conditions and have fear that last longer then ours it gets very annoying.

Also dont see why Thief that use steal on us get a Fear that last longer then the very skill they stole from us does it really makes no sense

Then you get into the fact of just how many classes have SO much condition removal what would be nice is if we had a skill that could rather then just turn there boons into conditions would be able to STEAL there boons as well – maybe tie it into Plague Signet – the active part -

Transfer all conditions on yourself to the target and steal all their boons

I think Vitality is a bit to strong for some of the classes as well. I defo think we should have a “burst” option – maybe something that will “explode” all our conditions on the target and do say 75% of all its potential damage in one go would be nice – the Scepter skill that is MEANT to do more damage for the more conditions on the target needs a BIG buff as well as currently its pretty poor – should do say 100 damage per a stack of a condition with maybe a trait to increase it by 50% or something

I came to the realization today that cepter/dagger may be our biggest non-staff AOE source. There is scepter #2 and both the off-hand dagger skills providing some kind of AOE. Sure, there is axe #3. But we can drop scepter #2 faster, is is not PBAOE, and it hurts for more is the bleed is not removed (axe #3 relies on the enemy beating on you). MH dagger has no AOE, and both focus and warhorn have one (the the warhorn one being a silly long cooldown PBAOE).

I pretty much agree with OP on almost all points. I would like to point out though, that while you’re correct that Necros can’t compare to other professions in terms of condition stacking, no other profession can manipulate conditions / boons as well as we do: Epidemic, Corrupt Boon, Plague Signet, Putrid Mark, Deathly Swarm, Well of Corruption, Consume Conditions…

I personally like the idea of not necessarily being the fastest stacker, but being becoming increasingly dangerous the more conditions are flying around the battlefield, even if they are directed towards you.

Necro’s absolutely are better at condition stacking that most, if not all, professions. We lack burning and confusion, and are very limited in immobilization — but every other condition is readily available on most builds, and most of these conditions we apply have longer durations and shorter cooldowns than other professions.

And that is just on weapon skills and before you consider the many options we have with WoP, WoC, Epidemic, and Corrupt Boon.

I think condition builds would actually be in a good spot but you cant begin to get a real sense of balance when half the necro skills are bugged in some way.

Non-condition builds are just a joke right now, necro power builds are supposed to use the axe or dagger MH, both of which suck for the reasons stated above. I assume we are supposed to be able to life steal tank from looking at the abilities and where they are on the trait line but ANet must be high if they think 25! per hit is going to be meaningful in the face of burst from other classes that can hit for >10k in a few seconds.

Necros and to a lesser extent Rangers are just BAD right now. There is 0 reason to play either class and the meta is essentially a 6 class game.

@displacedTitan this thread doesn’t seem to be sPvP specific

And that touches on something of a festering issue. What works in sPVP may not work in tPVP, never mind WvW or PVE. Hell, even open world PVE and dungeon PVE requires different considerations.

+1.
Also, I’d like to completely agree on one point. I’m getting sick and tired of all the Theif/Mesmer/Guardian/Warrior who are rolling alt necros posting “Have you guys tried this build?” “I’m loving my necro!” Or “Wait, does X skill work?”. Idk bro read the kittenin bug thread, oh and nahhh the necro community with thousands of hours drilled into this class hasn’t tried that build yet (as they link a condition or bunker build) +rolls eyes

I hope they fix us soon, until then my necros shelved and made me quit the game (I only like necro )

Edit: random underlining I can’t get rid of? Even their forums are buggy…

The ‘random underlining’ isn’t a bug. Its you using the “+” button, which is a way to create underlining on the forum.

I can personally say that I have stumbled upon the holy grail of Axe Power builds and the secret is Tribrid. So please keep asking for buffs. I will only become even more powerful than I already am! MuAHAHAHAHA!

It doesn’t help that we are VERY limited with multiple types of conditions. We basically only have access to bleeds. NO access to burns, and limited access to poison. Yes sceptre auto attack has a poison, but it is very low duration. Our only other poison option I can think of is Corrosive Poison Cloud if you actually choose it for some reason, and staff 3.

Right off the top of my head an engineer with P/P, NOT counting their weapon kits or utilities have access to SIX different conditions:

1. Auto attack has bleed
2. has poison
3. has a bouncing blind AND confusion
4. has burning
5. an aoe immobilize and cripple

Not to mention all their pistol abilities are on a very short cooldown (all15s except #5, 30s), even shorter with only a TEN point trait that lowers the cooldown on all of their weapons. In one rotation they can stack a ridiculous amount of conditions, PLUS a 60s utility for quickness (48s with another, you guessed it, 10 points trait), and piercing pistol bullets you can unload conditions stupidly fast.

This is the first class that popped into my hear for comparison as I JUST made a new engineer and was blown away by the amazing trait choices, and utility. EVERY trait is good, and some of the best ones are a measly 10 points. They can have permanent swiftness and vigor, three different weapon kits if they want for a total of 4 weapon sets – as much as an elementalist, but actually more abilities because the f1-f4 change depending on the utilities, adding basically an extra 4 utilities.

Sorry, but Elementalists cannot play glass cannon either.

One of my issues is that minion mastering is so sub par compared to other necromancer builds, and the fact that the death magic tree focuses so much on us that it causes a discrepancy with necros who prefer to run other specs.

Great compilation! I agree with just about everything you said and thought I’d add my own little list of gripes:

Multiple necromancers in a group are detrimental, due to condition stacking limitations.
Minions are a joke; their damage doesn’t scale properly, you can’t direct them easily and they die incredibly fast.
Plagues skill range and duration are too short.
Lich Form should be renamed ‘Turtle Form’.
Wells are too small and don’t last long enough (considering their CD length).

Hopefully the necromancer will get a nice overhaul sometime soon.

I have to say, that I agree with all that the OP said. Most of the problems I have encountered with necros was after I started playing other classes. Perhaps I can explain quickly.

First, I never saw any huge differences in damage, protection, healing/vampric when selecting the appropriate trait skills that are essentially giving them a boost. I noticed some difference with condition damage lasting longer which allowed me to get a few more stacks; conversely these did not really up my utility or dmg protential significantly. Thus, when I select some traits, i see marginal differences at best. I have tried multiple builds, and you have to go to an extreme to notice differences and it is usually with a massive sacrifice.

In contrast, I have a thief (level 80) and have recently begun playing a guardian. On my thief, there are so many viable/useful builds that allow you to be more survivable, and do decent damage, or do HUGE damage and less survivable (though I find I can still get out of sticky situations even when im a glass cannon). With regard to the guardian, my god, I am survivable (even with this low health), I am VERY useful to a group (I am running a hammer spec) and I see conditions melting off of my teammates every 3rd hit, aside from the healing, etc. Trait skill drastically improve my game play, and I see noticeable changes depending on what traits I have selected.

With the necro, I just don’t see it. I feel forced into a hybrid/condition build in WvW (I tried the dagger/focus or dagger/dagger power build and had fun, but I was way less useful, and melee range in zerg vs zerg battle is.. well poop. (I am not referring to pve; in pve i feel builds matter way less). My traits boost me slightly (i see jumps in ticks on condition damage for sure, yeah) but they are not huge, and are erased so fast, its ridiculous.

IDK, I guess I just notice necro problems when im playing other chars, and I am a kitten good necro imo. I will run through rotations, etc, and bust my kitten and still feel only mediocre. I get on my guardian, and im mowing through people, or I feel like im a huge asset to my team/side. I go thief, and I am dropping people, moving to the next, dropping them, bugging out, going back in, dropping one, backing out.

Oh, and another thing, on Guardians, if you build one certain way, you can take any combo of traits, and you have a semi unique build and all traits synergize. granted some trait combos work better depending on what you want. However, I feel with necro, if i want to build condition, i end up taking a trait line that does not help me at all for condition damage, and usually ends up being less than optimal.

Sorry for the negative post, I just feel for our community. In comparison to the other classes, I just think we are weak, and cannot stand our ground.

instantcoffee.1785:

Spite is tempting for the condition duration, however often anyone that pays attention to their conditions will notice, a long duration simply increases the chance that your condition will be cut short when the enemy’s removal mechanic comes off cooldown. The ideal situation would be to have short, powerful conditions and couple that with either raw power damage or survivability. Spite gives us the power damage, but leaves us extremely squishy.

Anet could swap Boon Duration from Death Magic with Condition Duration from Spite. That would go some ways towards sanitizing the Condition builds. Outside of the Condition Duration and apart from the Might yielding traits there aren’t any Minor or Major traits in Spite which helps conditions.