Guild Wars 2

Been asking around in player help forum and I’ve gotten mixed reviews and comments about Necromancers. A lot are saying Necromancers are bad, some say people just don’t know how to use Necromancers and some also say Necromancers are overpowered.

So here are my questions…

1. Are necromancers worth getting to level 80? So far I’m having fun leveling my Necromancer but I just don’t want to spend so much time getting to 80 and then learning that the class isn’t good in PvE and PvP.

2. If Necromancers are bad why hasn’t Arenanet done anything about it? It’s been months since the release of Guild Wars 2. Is it because Guild Wars 2 is Free-to-play?

1- We have our issues like every other class for pve/pvp environments and people often just want things to see big numbers instantly so thieves and warriors are played often because of that, necro is mostly smaller numbers over time and do require you to know the class alittle better. If you want look into power builds or well bombing builds if you want big numbers quickly instead of over time or hybrid and condition builds if you like over time damage.

2- Major issues are alot of traits are just not good, or are in horrible positions in the tree like closer to death and axe training being grand master traits. Most necros will take closer to death trait, not all but most will because closer to death affects all power based damage (not conditions like bleed, burns,etc) while axe just affect axe. Alot of us also dislike the reanimator trait being forced on anyone going down the toughness line and giving us a almost worthless dead rat which we cannot control and at one time made a number of fights harder or had a chance to make harder like Lupi from Arah. Also at one time soul reaping gave no bonus to life force and that took months for them to fix which really annoyed me and i am sure others while some probably never knew it didnt work. The ai for our minions is still broken for the most part because they wont attack on there own and in this game sometimes you just dont have those few seconds to use the minion skills to force them to attack. They also used to run off and attack whatever they wanted but that has been fixed.

I know i typed alot for the second question but really it is not that bad, Anet is just slow at fixing things and like little changes so not to change the meta game to much at a time.

None of the professions is BAD. If you define your playstyle, farm the right gear and spec into the right traits, you will get a powerful build. So far, i have tried all the possible necro builds, and every single one is good in its own way, even the minion master. I think that most people go wrong when using Death Shorud. DS is not a "OH kitten I WILL DIE, I AM POPPING DS " skill.

OK , this is purely based on opinion but

1) my Necromancer is my best character in Dungeons. Wells , Marks , Corruption (epidemic). I can support like a Guardian , remove conditions , and inflict conditions ( like spreading 25 stacks of Bleed to all foes. Who else can do that ? No idea yet.

2) My necromancer is my best PVP character so far and the one that gave me my first Tournament Win. I am not a PVP born player , but having a 43% wins with necro compared to Thief and Mesmer means that i’m good with this class , and against good opponents , i have skills that make me dangerous if i want to.

Ofc it is maybe the skill and love for this class ( haven’t played GW 1 )

There aren’t a lot of crucial bugs compared on how we started. and last patch wasn’t really much beneficial , but it did have zero nerfs so that is sth.

2 examples is Blood Fiend and Spectral Walk , they started as mediocre , got reworked and became far better. We do get beneficial changes , just not in the same frequency as other classes like warriors elementalists mesmers etc.

We aren’t bad at all , but we aren’t a burst class , As Anet said , we are an attrition class , we wear down the enemy through a complex and skillful combo of abilities. We are one of the last profession to die in party situations ( provided we have our cards ready to play).

It takes skil lto be a good necro , and unfortunately many impatient people who have other predetermined view of this class think we are bad , not of their expectations , but that is wrong , they had the wrong expectations fro mthe beginning.

To close this small wall , no we aren’t the super class , we have minions that do not respond well , we have traits in wrong places , and we have only 1-2 builds which compete to others. Bugs in the class are few and most are located in the tooltips aka wrong info on our skills.

With some careful rework , we will be ok. I don’t know when this will happen from Anet , but have faith in this profession. Do not let others who aren’t designed for this class discourage you from trying , who knows , maybe it will be the class for you , or maybe not. You choose

Happy gaming

1) Yes, it is worth leveling to 80. If you’re having fun with it now, then it only gets better, not worse, with levels. As you look around this forum, you’ll see alot of different build threads. There are alot of different ways to play a viable necro, which also shows that necro is not a one-trick pony.

2) There have been some bug fixes along the way. The stickied buglist is out-of-date. The current buglist is in this thread:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/Necromancer-Bug-Compilation-Mk-II/first#post1269319

As to why bugs haven’t been addressed sooner, that’s a broader question, which relates to all professions, artwork (e.g., clipping, tearing, etc.) and gameplay (e.g., broken events). They’ve seemingly and consistently put more effort into content updates than bug fixes. Each new content update usually also adds some bugs, so its a puzzle to me what their overall priorities, testing methods, Q/A, and quality philosophy are.

tbh key factor is do you have fun whit it… go play it to lvl 30-35 and see

I like my necro and will be always my main tho he is not that strong as other classes
it’s not bad profession tho some skills are still broken and some traits could use polishing for more synergy
and nobody knows why bugs haven’t been fixed but I believe they will eventually I’m in no hurry…

I am by far not a power player. I could care less about builds and high numbers, so my opinion will be worthless to a lot of people.

I started a Necro when I first picked up the game back in November. This has been one of the most enjoyable classes I have played in any MMO. I got my Necro to 20, decided that I wanted to make sure what class I really wanted to play to 80 and tried other classes. I tried Ele’s, Ranger’s, Mesmer… Nothing was as fun, or I guess intuitive, as the Necro, and I kept going back to it. My Necro is 72 at the moment and still fun to play.

As a parrot of other people here, if you are having fun with the Necro, to me that is all that really matters in a game. Don’t let others tell you that any class is crap and that you should be playing another one. GW2 is all about all classes being viable, and from what I have seen it is pretty accurate.

Minions are borked, some traits are shonky and DS needs to be tweaked, but most classes have these types of teething issues. The class is fun though, and with a solid build you can melt faces like everyone else.

@Vagelis.9562 You cannot support like a guardian at all, you dont give boons to teammates nor protect em with stuff like wall of reflection, stability, aegis and the actual stuff you can do to bosses they are pretty much immune to.

The god things

Epidemic, very nice skill and have its moments but not as ofen as one would like. <- wish it was instant cast.

Spectral walk have a fun ability to work as a parachute.

possible the best 1on1 character with full LF but worst mobility making enemy escape easy.
Good options to deal with conditions.

The bad

No cleave options.
Condition dmg in general still suffers from alot of things.
No proper teleport / leap
No aegis
No block
No vigor
Minion ai still horrible
Minions dont scale with any stat.
Lifesyphon dont scale or barely scale from stats.
In general necro have long cast time long cooldowns.
Elite skills take control away from the user aswell as desummon minions, except golem which suffers from the bad ai.
Wells are nice but suffers from the long cd.
Being in death shroud you cannot be healed, rendering alot of things useless, regen, ally heals, lifesyphon, also cancels spectral skills for some reason.
Only stabiliy option last 3sec and cost 30 soul reaping points and 1 grandmaster trait.

However the class is fairly balanced but from my pov have the worst class mechanic.

The myth about the class being difficult to play isnt true and i got no idea why people keep saying so.

1. Dpends on what you like to play, conditionmancer is pretty good atm.

2. I dont think ANET knows what to do with the class since the core class mechanic gives us alot more hp than others and having access to some of the things they do could easily push us over the top. They did say necro needed some love then nerfed it.

Putting it kinda short, rolling a Necro is a trade of specialization for control and utility.
Pretty much every other class does something that necro does way better (e.g. Warrior or Thief bleed builds, Mesmer pvp zone control and minions, Guardians with damage negation and sheer team support), except for direct aoe burst healing (Well of Blood+Life Transfusion+DS Invigoration combine into a pretty massive aoe heal), with that said the benefits of a Necro are that he can do all of it at least ok (if i had to scale it would be about 4/10) while other classes are lucky if they can do more than 3 things good no matter the spec.

@wiazabi.2549 – noone ever said necro is hard to play, but it sure is the hardest to play at max potential, unlike the mesmers with a vertical learning curve but medium skill ceiling, necros got a valley learning curve but the skill ceiling is just a tad lower than the Everest since of DS timing and pretty high cooldowns of all builds in comparison to 99% of other class builds.

imho necro is currently a pile of crap because of bugs.
It gets fixed veeeery slowly atm,with some major skills beeing the reason half the builds you will go with will be useless.
Spectral grasp beeing one of those skills that could had been nice to work with but all it does atm is makeing you waste a utility slot
Next is a bad reward issue with conditions and healing/buff skills,you can heal an entire zerg that gets its rear kicked but you wont get ANY reward for it.
Save yourself from the frustration the rest of us endure for months now and make a necromancer only after they fix it.

If you are aiming at PvP there is a lot of disappointment and a lot of hard work waiting for you.

Few things you need to know about necro in the current PvP environment:

1. You will be the primary target especially in the beginning of the match. This wouldn’t be a problem in itself, but necro has no strong defensive ability outside of the plague form so if the enemy team decides to focus you, your role changes from spreading conditions, corrupting boons and interrupting targets to trying to stay alive and kiting around.
2. All you will do is use Staff + Scepter/Dagger in all of two viable and safe builds necro has.
3. You have kitten mobility and close to none stability so effective roaming is out of discussion.
4. You will be the worst 1v1 profession in game considering the Conquest mode.
5. You will get gibbed many, many times.
6. Ele is better and more fun.

Just came back… I just want to say thank you all for replying. I’ve decided to level my Necromancer to level 80 since I just love the idea of being a Necromancer and I’m having fun leveling