Guild Wars 2

I’ve recently started playing my 80 Necro again and experimented ALOT with builds.
I realized once again, that instead of 12, or at least 9 decent traits to pick from, each traitline had about 7 to 5 decent traits for any build.

So I made a list of them and thought of some Improvements. This does not include any bugfixes though.

• Spite
  Parastitic Bond:This seems fine, but letting it be affected by Bloodthirst would be great.

• Curses
  Chilling Darkness: other than Chillbuilds, this has barely any apliability. One Second is barely enough to activate a skill.
  Reapers Precision: Probably the weakest Trait for Necromancers. Instead of the weak chance for a weak effect, the effect should either be stronger or the chance higher. Instead it could say “You have a 33% chance to gain 1% life force for every condition on the target on critical hits.”
  Focussed Rituals: I don’t get why this is in curses. We already have Well-Traits in Death magic and Blood Magic, why do we need another 20 points in a Tree that in no other way is connected to Wells? Only Well of Corruption and Suffering can critically hit and only Well of Corruption CAN inflict damaging Conditions. This should be swapped with something more useful.
  Withering Precision: Why is THIS a GrandMaster Curses trait? It has nothing to do with damaging conditions and in order to make it work properly you’d need some hefty Condition Duration extra. Instead this should either inflict a Damaging condition (maybe even Fear if we already have Terror) or read “25% chance to steal a Boon and transfer a Condition on critical hits.” This would make Life Transfer very usefull for its high Critchance if combined with Furious Demise.

• Death Magic
  Reanimator: We Necros just love to hate this Rat, don’t we. For someone who is NOT going into DM for the Minions, but for the Staff or maybe even the Wells or JUST the Toughness, this is a major turnoff. Replace it with something useful for most builds. “Grant Retaliation to Allies when an Allie goes down/dies” Perfect for Teamplayers an Minion Masters. Many people also suggest replacing it with Dark Armor.
  Protection of the Horde: This is a bit of a tough one. 20 points in, we can assume someone takes an interest in Minions, but I suggest it to be swapped with Deadly Strength and upped to 30 Toughness.
  Minion Master: It should apply to both Minion and Command.
  Shourded Removal: This could be swapped with Focussed Rituals, considering Curses already has Precision and lots of “When entering Deahtshroud” it is prime material for a DS Dancer Build.

• Blood Magic, a.k.a. the 20-Point Wonder, is our best build, no complaints here.

• Soul Reaping, same as with Blood Magic, a very solid Traitline, although sometimes seems to lack a bit of stuff for other builds, especially Condition based builds.

These are my current thoughts on most traits. It maddens me, that many Traits seem to not work for their respective traitlines or not support any synergies. At other times it seems, while most classes have very sharply defined roles for traitlines, the Necro’s synergies seem to be too spread out (for example staff being all over the place). I haven’t tried all possible builds yet, I use the most common and “standard” builds, while specialized builds, like ‘Ice Queen’ or ‘Terrorizer’ all have special needs, that could be upset by seemingly minor changes.
Any thoughts or improvements?

I wish the demented rodent thing would at least stop bleeding to death. Isn’t there a limit to like 8 of them anyway, with a 30 second cooldown on reanimator? If anything so much as stepped on it, you’d never get two up at the same time anyway, but at least that one might have more than two meagre attacks in it before it keels over. And if you did manage to accumulate all 8 of them, well… so what? They’re marginally more dangerous than white creatures… it’d just give you something funny to look at.

LameFox.6349:

I wish the demented rodent thing would at least stop bleeding to death. Isn’t there a limit to like 8 of them anyway, with a 30 second cooldown on reanimator? If anything so much as stepped on it, you’d never get two up at the same time anyway, but at least that one might have more than two meagre attacks in it before it keels over. And if you did manage to accumulate all 8 of them, well… so what? They’re marginally more dangerous than white creatures… it’d just give you something funny to look at.

Currently it’s the only way for condition damage to pay off for Minion Necros, maybe a trait that would instead add Conditions to all Minions?

I mean the self-bleeding on it. It’s never actually survived long enough that I considered it for a viable source of damage.

MMs just don’t build condition damage, simple as that.

Either they need to remove the CD (or lower it significantly), so that its actually possible to have a small group of them, or they need to remove its degeneration. Atm, it gives a minor boost in damage (whatever 2 attacks + bleeds are), and 20 toughness (if 15 into death magic), then dies off. If you have 30 into death magic, they become at least somewhat useful because they throw up a poison field. It’d just be nice for what could be a decent adept trait to get some usefulness.

They just dont build Condition Damage because they have no synergies.
Poison is already easy upholdable for Condition Necros with Scepter or Poison Cloud, so the GM trait does nothing for them, really. SO either they are useful or removed and replaced with something else.
What’s kindof ironic also is that the Staff upgrades are most usefull for Conditionmancer,s because it allows them to spam Mark of Blood for a great ammount of bleeding on many targets.

The GM trait does, actually. Anyone can benefit from your enemy having 33% reduced healing in a fight, it can completely gimp their survivability. And no condition necro should be going 30 into death magic, at least I couldn’t see why when there are much better traits, staff or not.

I have no problem with Reanimator other than the fact that they bleed to death. In my condition build I get 20 toughness per active minion which works well with runes of the undead to give me more condition damage. I feel like they shouldn’t bleed to death because of how insufferably weak they are. Drop one aoe and they’ll all die anyway. If they got rid of that I think the trait would be great.