Guild Wars 2

Are there any viable builds out there that don’t require staff as a weapon choice? After playing to 80 I really do not like using that staff, combined with ground targeting on wells it is a pain for me to manage, especially at close range, and it just doesn’t feel satisfying.

I really like scepter/dagger combo for primary, but since axe is so grossly underpowered (wish I had figured that one out prior to lvl60 when I switched to scepter) and the range on dagger is so short I can’t really figure out how to mix it up. I was considering a high tough/vit well build with scepter/dagger and dagger/warhorn. That way I can have good abilities at long range, but still be able to do something in melee with dagger skills and swarm and pop into DS for AoE and snare. Another idea was something similar, but going condition heavy with signets and epidemic to have multiple ways of spreading conditions.

Any thoughts?

nothing forces you to use staff if you want so.. but in www specially staff is very handy to have, but of course not must to have.

I’d spend a few hours in a lowbie area trying to get the hang of quickly and precisely laying down marks. The staff is nearly essential for all builds.

I hate the staff. attack 1 is way to slow. laying down marks and wishing some one will trigger them is not my style of game play.

Staff is there for the fear, condition transfer, a reliable heal and a bit for the chil+poison*weakness and if DS focused for life force generation, but in general a much stronger dps setup is ScepterM DaggerOff and second setup Axe/DaggerM Focus/WarhornOff.

Meh, once I hit 80 on my ranger I’ll probably play my necro a bit more. I’ll try to work a condition or well build around scepter+dagger and dagger+warhorn/focus.

I really wish we could get a buff to the axe so it is actually viable. I liked it when I was using axe/focus, but the DPS is just WAY to low to make it worthwhile especially since it really doesn’t stack conditions. Feast needs a substantial boost, 2 needs to cleave, and all the attacks either need to bleed or have their damage buffed to put them on par with the dagger and scepter. Because at present axe just isn’t worth using. Personally if axe applied vulnerability or bleeds reliably it would make it much more desirable.

I run with a well spec (Which probably doesn’t help your ground targetting issues) however I don’t use staff. My Dungeon running build is as follows:
(I can’t find a working build calc at the moment for a link)

Traits:
30 curses: II, IV, XI – Increased bleed duration, wells use ground targetting, scepter skill conditions last longer
10 Death: IV – Wells apply protection
30 Blood: VI, VIII, XII – Life transfer heals allies, Wells recharge faster, Wells siphon health.

Main Weapons – Septer/Dagger
Swap – Axe/Focus

Heal – Consume Conditions
Utility:
Well of Suffering
Well of Darkness
Well of Power
Elite – Flesh Golem

This build provides a ton of group support and fairly decent DPS (Not counting inanimate objects like hell blossoms)

With your wells you can lock down groups of enemies with blinds, add weakness, and strip conditions off your teammates when needed.

If you need a quick group health top-up, Use Deathshroud 4 (Life transfer). The heal is actually pretty decent (Approx 240 × 9 over 3 seconds to your group). You don’t have to hit enemies with life transfer for the heal portion to work.

Fights start with Axe/Focus to add vulnerability and chilled, then swap to Scepter/Dagger to get the bleeds going. On large group pulls I will hit the group with well of darkness out of the gate to minimize incoming damage until the group is able to get some conditions stacked.

You have 3 ways of removing conditions from your self, so you can effectively tank 3-4 mobs without too much issue. Dagger 4 transfers up to 3 conditions to your enemy, Heal removes all conditions, and Well of power strips a condition every 5 seconds.

Wells also apply protection which helps reduce incoming damage to the group.

Suprisingly, this build is also pretty effective in sPVP when capping or holding a point as you can really mess with people for a long time. I can typically hold off about 4 people for 10-20 seconds which is usually enough time for reinforcements to arrive. I would swap out well of suffering for well of corruption to convert enemy boons into conditions. Highly effective against warriors and guardians.

I use the Golem as my elite basically as a DoT. it does pretty decent damage to a single target, and the charge is a great knockdown or interrupt when needed. Sometimes I’ll pop the golem simply to interrupt something even though I know it will die about 3 seconds later.

My only issue with this build is that it doesn’t generate a lot of life force unless you’re up against a pack of mobs, and that bleeds specifically don’t work against doors / walls / blossoms etc so you’re going to take a while to down anything like that on your own.

Yeah that is similar to what I was thinking. But I was going to go dagger instead of axe for second set and Plague for elite. That way I can lock down an area for the maximum amount of time with Wells and Plague, and swap to dagger at close range if need be. With high tough/vit I should be able to last the full duration on Plague before popping DS for the AoE.

Probably going to put this on the back burner until I get my Ranger to 80 since I’m going to have to rebuild by Necro’s whole armor set. My current gear is glass cannon condition/prec/crit%, which I am not at all fond of.

I use 2 builds in sPvP that wreck

Scepter/Dagger epidemic conditions. The point is to throw out AOE conditions along with blood is power and any conditions I have from the plague signet and then lulz with epidemic. I usually manage to apply 15+ stacks of bleed on 3-6 people and it does a lot with carrion.

Axe/Focus DS/vunerability. Build mainly focuses on stacking vunerability and using DS a lot. Use vunerability wall and well (people don’t pay attention and they walk through the wall a bunch and get 25 stacks easy) Then just use DS whenever you feel fit. Also not lich form is INCREDIBLY BROKEN in a crit damage build. You can spam your 1 for 4k crits every second. Auto aimed and even if the target runs out of the way they still get damaged unless they evade.

I just started messing around with dagger/focus for close range and sceptor/dagger for long range. Put 10 points in spite for the additional sceptor range.

Dagger/focus gets you a freeze and immobilize to keep an enemy in range for dagger #1, and a vulnerability to increase dps on our best direct dps skill, then siphon which os decent damage and regen.

Sceptor/Dagger gets you 2 good ranged aoe skills, 1 cripples which is nice, then you get a multi target blind, and a lifeforce generator.

The 2 weapon combos seem to work well together, in pve I’m able to take on 4 monsters 3-4 levels above me including a veteran, I use this build in conjunction with all pet slots.

JonasV.4209:

Yeah that is similar to what I was thinking. But I was going to go dagger instead of axe for second set and Plague for elite. That way I can lock down an area for the maximum amount of time with Wells and Plague, and swap to dagger at close range if need be. With high tough/vit I should be able to last the full duration on Plague before popping DS for the AoE.

Probably going to put this on the back burner until I get my Ranger to 80 since I’m going to have to rebuild by Necro’s whole armor set. My current gear is glass cannon condition/prec/crit%, which I am not at all fond of.

I tend to swap out elite and utility skills pretty regularly, and will go Dagger/Dagger, or Dagger/Focus in my secondary if I know the mobs don’t have a short range AE that will kill me. Max range fights obviously I put on a staff, but i switch it back as soon as possible. Staff 1 has LOS issues, marks are too small, recast is too long, and not everything triggers them.

Depending on the pull, I"ll swap well of suffering for: Spectral Grasp, Spectral Wall, Epidemic etc. I pretty much always have Well of Darkness and Well of Power on my hotbar because they are invaluable when you need to reduce damage or help get conditions off your group-mates.

What stats should I be stacking for that type of Well build? I just got my Ranger to 80 and have a ton of silk that I can use to craft a decent set of rares for my Necro. I know Condition isn’t great for Well, so what is the best bet? Does Power effect Wells or only Prec/Crit%?

I was thinking of something along the line of mixing Prec, Vit and/or Tough, and Crit%, but if Power boost Wells I should probably mix in some Power there too.

It’s hard to make an argument against not taking staff in any set up, its auto attack scales ok with power for power builds, it also has a nice Mark of Blood for condition builds.

Reaper’s Mark is an interrupt effect you’d find really lacking from most sets while Putrid Mark’s utility pretty much cements the whole thing, our other complete cleanse outside of consume conditions. You could pick up staff just for that ability really.

Chillblains is an extremely potent snare, one of our best really. So when you look at the whole package staff has to offer, you’d be hard pressed to not take it as a secondary swap (most do that).

Eileithia.5246:

I run with a well spec (Which probably doesn’t help your ground targetting issues) however I don’t use staff. My Dungeon running build is as follows:
(I can’t find a working build calc at the moment for a link)

Traits:
30 curses: II, IV, XI – Increased bleed duration, wells use ground targetting, scepter skill conditions last longer
10 Death: IV – Wells apply protection
30 Blood: VI, VIII, XII – Life transfer heals allies, Wells recharge faster, Wells siphon health.

Main Weapons – Septer/Dagger
Swap – Axe/Focus

Heal – Consume Conditions
Utility:
Well of Suffering
Well of Darkness
Well of Power
Elite – Flesh Golem

This build provides a ton of group support and fairly decent DPS (Not counting inanimate objects like hell blossoms)

With your wells you can lock down groups of enemies with blinds, add weakness, and strip conditions off your teammates when needed.

If you need a quick group health top-up, Use Deathshroud 4 (Life transfer). The heal is actually pretty decent (Approx 240 × 9 over 3 seconds to your group). You don’t have to hit enemies with life transfer for the heal portion to work.

Fights start with Axe/Focus to add vulnerability and chilled, then swap to Scepter/Dagger to get the bleeds going. On large group pulls I will hit the group with well of darkness out of the gate to minimize incoming damage until the group is able to get some conditions stacked.

You have 3 ways of removing conditions from your self, so you can effectively tank 3-4 mobs without too much issue. Dagger 4 transfers up to 3 conditions to your enemy, Heal removes all conditions, and Well of power strips a condition every 5 seconds.

Wells also apply protection which helps reduce incoming damage to the group.

Suprisingly, this build is also pretty effective in sPVP when capping or holding a point as you can really mess with people for a long time. I can typically hold off about 4 people for 10-20 seconds which is usually enough time for reinforcements to arrive. I would swap out well of suffering for well of corruption to convert enemy boons into conditions. Highly effective against warriors and guardians.

I use the Golem as my elite basically as a DoT. it does pretty decent damage to a single target, and the charge is a great knockdown or interrupt when needed. Sometimes I’ll pop the golem simply to interrupt something even though I know it will die about 3 seconds later.

My only issue with this build is that it doesn’t generate a lot of life force unless you’re up against a pack of mobs, and that bleeds specifically don’t work against doors / walls / blossoms etc so you’re going to take a while to down anything like that on your own.

How is your damage without any power? I am looking for a dungeon build, I play a power Crit wells build with daggers now that doesn’t do bad, but I would really like to try the blood line, but without any points in spite how is your damage looking? I think I would have to try and work 15 points in the death shroud trait line (mind blank on the name) for the spectral armor at 50% that’s a great ability.

dagger/warhorn is ridiculously useful for keeping your enemies still for a couple of seconds while you release hell.

You use dagger3 first to immobilise them and then strafe around them/kite around them to attack. Or use your dagger2 to siphon health and do a ton of damage. when they come at you, use warhorn4 daze, activate warhorn5, drop all your wells (my build has DS activating fury, retaliate and dagger5 skill so i use that) and then strafe again and attack with dagger. It works very well for me in 1v1 encounters and I combine it with marks for 1v2 but it’s harder.

Problem is we don’t have enough weapons for there to be a reason to not use staff.

If you’re running conditions, it should be staff and sceptre/x. Nothing else is any good for conditions.

If you’re running power, it should be staff and axe/x or dagger/x. Scepter is no good for power. There’s also no real reason to run both axe/x and dagger/x on swap due to the similar nature of the weapons.

Thus we’re left with staff being needed in all builds. Necro needs another 1200 range 2h weapon imo (like how Mesmer has staff being more condition focused and greatsword being more power focused, but both usable in both kinds of builds and both 1200 range weps).

Minion of Vey.4398:

Problem is we don’t have enough weapons for there to be a reason to not use staff.

If you’re running conditions, it should be staff and sceptre/x. Nothing else is any good for conditions.

If you’re running power, it should be staff and axe/x or dagger/x. Scepter is no good for power. There’s also no real reason to run both axe/x and dagger/x on swap due to the similar nature of the weapons.

Thus we’re left with staff being needed in all builds. Necro needs another 1200 range 2h weapon imo (like how Mesmer has staff being more condition focused and greatsword being more power focused, but both usable in both kinds of builds and both 1200 range weps).

What this guy says is absolutely right. No matter what build you run, a staff is always useful because it is the only 1200 range weapon we have and it has a combination of power (1,4) and condition (2,3) as well as a utility(5)

I have been running Dagger/WH + Axe/dagger or focus for a couple days now……come check it out on my stream! Its really powerfull. Im experimenting with several different builds atm….I dont miss the staff at all. Problem with staff is you lack a channeled ability so it cuts off your dps when you switch to it.

http://www.twitch.tv/ellisdx3

Completely agree with Minion of Vrey, no idea why I can’t quote anyone.
A power 1200 range weapon with a cc on it (like the staff fear) would be a great addition, I don’t mind the staff but its only because I have no other options…

Anyone else really annoyed with the loud pig grunt from Necrotic Grasp? (Staff 1 skill)

I found this very instructive, I am very pleased with the Hybrid Build that Iamoneandiamlegion highlights in his video.

I don’t use a staff and feel a lot more versatile.

BlueprintLFE.2358:

How is your damage without any power? I am looking for a dungeon build, I play a power Crit wells build with daggers now that doesn’t do bad, but I would really like to try the blood line, but without any points in spite how is your damage looking? I think I would have to try and work 15 points in the death shroud trait line (mind blank on the name) for the spectral armor at 50% that’s a great ability.

I run with a full set of Rampager’s gear which has +power +precision +condition. I’ve slotted 6 superior runes of the undead which give me toughness and condition damage. and my accessories are all Emerald with power, precision, toughness. My main weapons are Scepter and Dagger, and I run with those about 90% of the time.

Well builds aren’t really focused on DPS, they’re more for support and messing with your enemies. There’s only really one well that is focused on damage, which is well of suffering. All of them do an OK amount of damage, but it’s the secondary effects/boons/heals which make you shine in a dungeon. In a dungeon group, my job is helping keep conditions off my teammates, doing damage, and giving protection and healing (via DS4) when it’s needed.

If I was going for a pure direct damage build I would build it around minions, or corruptions, and focus more on power/prec using daggers with an axe switch.