Guild Wars 2

I have been working on getting my ascended armor crafted and I actually have everything sitting in the bank to craft my chestpiece as I type this. I even have an ascended insignia with selectable stat choices from a drop, so actually I could craft two pieces right now, but I have a problem, I can’t seem to decide what to craft. I bought Aurora Rampager with Balthazar runes armor before I I had heard about meta zerk. I gravitated towards condition builds, power being secondary to toughness and condition. Basically I dislike dying and I leveled solo, so I didn’t have anyone pushing me to do anything else.

I went today and bought myself a second set of Aurora, this time with Berserker. I already invested in ascended berserker trinkets so I could do fractals with a team. I like the speed of all that power. I feel like I am cutting through enemies like a hot knife through butter comparatively speaking, but I have to watch my health much more closely. I am not going down, but I have yet to go to HoT wearing it.

So the gist of this is, what sort of armor is a nice compromise between full on glass cannon and something that only gives condi damage? Has anyone went hybrid with ascended? I know I can change the stats on the gear if I need to, but I didn’t want to have to do that so soon after I make it. It just seems a much bigger commitment than karma armor, and I want to get it right.

I have 4 ascended sets: the main is an hybrid Viper that I use for both lower fractals and open world and dungeons, a Rabid that I use for higher level fractals (which I will transmute to Trailblazer when available), a Cavalier/Zerk/Knight for WvW and fun in PvE and a full Zerk that I don’t use anymore.

Hybrid with Viper is great. I suggest to find your favourite playstyle, test it with exotics and then go for ascended. However, especially with condition builds, the difference between exotic and ascended is huge.

I have two ascended sets of gear for my necro. My main set is full berserker that I use for open world PvE, Fractals and WvW. My 2nd set is a viper’s set that I use for conditions in raids.

Condi is good fun, but it’s more reliant on food buffs to be effective. On low fractals I’d definitely take zerk over condi because of how slow the dps buildup is compared to how fast things die. I feel like the place condi really stands out though is raids, so if you want to do raids as a necro condi can be a good choice.

If you decide to go condi you should definitely avoid rampager stats. You lose condi damage compared to other sets, and you get an excessive amount of precision. We have plenty of other ways to get crit chance in our traits.

If you’re planning to do raids also make sure not to take any gear with toughness on it unless you’re going to be the tank (and even then only 1 or 2 rings should suffice).

Vipers is the best choice for a condition build at the moment because it has extra condition duration and relatively high power and a moderate amount of precision in addition to fairly high condi damage.

That being said, a viper’s condi set is a lot more specialised than a zerker set, while zerker is a strong allround set that you can have good success with in every aspect of the game.

Zerk was my first ascended set and I don’t regret it.

I have 3 sets. The 3 general options – direct damage, condition and tank sets. I am aiming for 3 sets of each type light, medium and heavy. This will allow me to play almost all professions and most of the builds. I also have healing set for ele. Working on druid set.
My point is, all this sets can be used by different professions

I main power and went with power/vit/ferocity (valkyrie I believe it is) this way I can focus everything else on other needed stats

Just get Berserker and Viper, Berserker if you’re going to do all kinds of content, Viper imo if you’re putting your main focus as Nec on raids.

I got full Zerker for Open World PvE and just made my Viper armour for Condi raiding (and Husks on TTW)

At first, I recommend building a set of Carrion armor, but that’s because those are the cheapest to build while still being okay to use. Stat-swap from there, especially if you want to go Viper’s.

Then again, I used this trick because Zealot’s gear (which I use for Power) is horrendously expensive to get the recipes for.

If you are looking for a good hybrid gear you are in luck.

Decimate Defenses give you a huge amount of critical chance. In a decent group you should have perma fury and 25 stack of vulnerability which will give you a base critical chance of 74% with zero precision on you. In that situation you only need 546 precision to reach 100%. You can drop that even more if you take into account Banner of Discpline, Spotter, food, etc.

So you can make a mix of Zerker and Valkyrie depending on what you expect to see usually when you fight, without losing any dps at all.

As for condition build. Viper and Sinister will be superior, but Rabid isn’t that much far behind, while giving you enough toughness to have a lot of survivability.

Tbh, I wouldn’t waste gold on ascended if I was to craft Rabid. Why bother with all the gold to craft a non optimal ascended gear set. Exotic will do the job at a lower price. For Valkyrie it’s debatable. In a optimal group, Zerker will be useless, so Valkyrie would be better. But Zerker will be better in solo or in bad group where you don’t have perma Vulnerability, banners and Fury.

I have 3 1/3 sets of (mostly) ascended gear on my Necro at the moment.

• A general purpose Berserker’s set for open world, story stuff and pug groups
• A Viper’s set for raiding mostly (asc. Rabid back piece and exotic Viper’s rings/accessories because RNG loot is a b*tch)
• A Valk/Zerk set with Furious Maintenance Oil for maximum deepzzz in well organized groups (only used it at VG so far when we had too many condi players)
• A set of Cavalier’s trinkets to swap in for holding aggro at VG/Gorseval

I really hope I don’t have to add another set anytime soon, because right now, including food to complement different builds, all of this eats up ~50 inventory slots permanently (see below =P).

My guild is into raids. I have never played a raid, and I am just starting fractals. I began the game in September. Basically it sounds like I need to get a different karma set and play it around for awhile and see what feels good. I think a trip to HoT in the most challenging parts of the game in full Berserker is in order to see how easily I go down.

I really like the idea of spreading conditions around for a team, but I don’t want to design an ascended set just for that.

When it comes to expense I can afford to make the armor that I want, the only thing holding me back is time gates and knowledge, and it looks like I have plenty to think about. Thanks everyone, I am going to go read more and play more and make more spools of silk weaving thread while I make up my mind.