Guild Wars 2

Mind you I have a full healing/toughness/power going on with my lv 80 exotic sets, and I run staff with scepter/dagger mostly focusing on marks and wells. 0/20/20/30/0. I see a lot of talk about superior runes of water, monk and dwayna. Which should I go for and why?

Why are you using Scepter with full power? I went for “Tahlkora’s” which is Vitality, Healing and Condition damage in PvE.

Monk has a great 6pc bonus and a lot of support specs run that or a mix with Water for some extra fat boon duration.

Seeing as we completely lack in the boons department focusing mainly on the negative side of things (conditions), I went for Rune of the Flock hoping the blind from the bird would work with Chilling Darkness. It of course, does not but nevertheless is still a solid rune set for +Healing.

We have buffs of a sort, but it’s true not as many as other professions.

Water, Monk and Dwayna are the best options, you’ve heard right. Personally I use Dwayna for the extra Regenerations and Regeneration duration, since the main boon I apply by far is Mark of Blood’s Regeneration – this now heals for me for 1,840 over 6.5 secs and has a 4.75 second cooldown and an increased mark size.

Monk and Dwanya give 5% less Regeneration duratio in order to give all your other boons 15% duration too. However, our only other boons are either applied from self-only skills (Spectral Armor’s Protection, Spectral Walk, the warhorn’s swiftness ability) or from Spectral Wall and Well of Power.

Spectral Wall seems quite popular on these forums, although I’ve yet to see another necromancer actually use it ingame – the protection is obviously nice, but you have to run out of it and back in a fair way to pick up another lot of it once the first wears off, and you’ll only ever get the one hit of protection from it in any moving fight too. All in all, I’m not a fan – it pales when you compare it to say… any of a Guardian’s group protection. The duration also makes the 15% boost hard to notice.

As for Well of Power, this is a very useful skill in my opinion but I’m unsure if it increases the duration of these boons. What Well of Power does, if you don’t know, is turn conditions on you and allies into boons. I’m not sure if it carries the duration of them over when converted, or caluclates it seperately. If it is a seperate calculation with our boon duration taken into account, Monk or Water could be useful for it.

Anyway, as said I prefer Dwayna because of how often I have Regeneration on myself (90% of most fights) but any of them are a good choice. One final thing to note is Necromancers also get boons through certain traits, in particular ones from entering Deathshroud – but these are so short the 15% isn’t even worth noting.

Not even worth noting….

Except when you include another 30% from trait points and then you can pretty much keep fury or retaliation up full time with the right talents.

I’m having a lot of fun with Dwayna as well running a 0/30/10/30/0 spec focusing on staff and wells and high healing and condition dmg (gossamer carrion set, which is the vit/power/cnd dmg). I’d like to try it with the cleric’s set I made too…and would love to be able to piece together a shaman’s set for it (tough/heal/cnd dmg). The regen is great stacked with all the life siphoning going on from the wells + mark of blood and being able to cast my healing well anywhere, not just with me at the center (trait talent for wells using ground targetting).

I wouldn’t discount the grenth runes either. I’m currently using superior hydromancy on my weapons so I get a 3 sec freeze whenever I switch and it helps moving out of CQC trouble if someone gets at me. It’s proven pretty useful. I’m definitely going to try at some point to see how it works stacking those two weapon runes of hydromancy, plus a full set of grenth’s runes on armor, plus the trait talent that applies a chill whenever you blind people, particulalry with the well that AOE blinds. Something just tells me that all the messing with peoples’ cooldowns might actually be pretty effective (and annoying for them).

If you’re planning to run dungeons, 3 Monk and 3 Water is the best by far. With your gear and build you can pretty much tank almost everything when your wells are down, help remove tons of pressure from very large group of mobs, mini boss, boss and everyone will start begging you to run dungeons with them.

Skills: Well of Blood, Well of Suffering, Well of Corruption, Well of Darkness, Plague/Lich for boss.

Traits: Blood – Ritual of Life, Ritual Mastery, Vampiric Rituals. Death – Ritual Protection, Staff Mastery. Curses – Chilling Darkness [I prefer taking 10 points off Blood and putting it to Curses for the ground targeted Wells]

The reason for 3 Monks and 3 Water is for the 30% boon duration for the 3s protection when you cast Wells on yourself or on your teammates. You get an extra .9 sec of protection from each Wells for a total of almost 16 seconds of protection. Not to mention the extra 3s from a potential Well of Blood for ressing a teammate. You can just basically stand still and tank a large group of mobs regening health faster than damage you take, after your aoe heals wear off, stall in DS or Plague spamming #2 and by the time it wears off rinse and repeat with weapon skills here and there. I’ve done this in half MF gear and I still felt godly.

I use 6 Grove runes. I liked Dwayna as well, but I found it kind of superfluous since I didn’t need help keeping regeneration up anyway; Grove on the other hand helps with protection up time (also applied to allies via the Ritual of Protection trait). The 6 rune bonus is sweet when it procs at the right time (it’s the same root as the ranger elite Entangle), though it definitely procs off enemies hitting you, not you hitting them.

Monk seems decent enough, but protection when hit will result in more effective HP than a small heal whenever it’s truly needed, and I prefer Grove’s 6 rune bonus over Monk’s. Obviously +15% boon duration is better than +15% protection duration, but since the only boons I apply are protection, regeneration, and swiftness, it’s of little consideration.

I’m not a fan of the condition removal when hit from Water, since it’s randomly with a 30sec cooldown, though the 6 rune bonus seems pretty sweet.