Guild Wars 2

I just started playing today and started a Necromancer. I’ve been playing WoW for the past 8 years or so and needed something new. So far I love this game but there is quite the learning curve. What I’m wondering is what is a good high dps necro build to start? What stats and weapons should I use? Thanks in advance for any help and I’m excited to start this new addiction.

Think of necro as balance druid back in vanilla. But if you are dead set on it…
There are some solid guides by nemesis around etc. Ehem… actually they are stickied so don’t even need to look. And there are no real high dps necro builds because necro dps is cabbage in most situations and in very rare situations its mediocre.

Dual daggers, 5 minion skills. For solo levelling necro dps is ridiculously high, especially once you get a golem. You can solo most champs from level ~10 with a kiting set like scepter/dagger, but it generally takes longer than it’s worth.

Minion AI has its drawbacks, but you’ll figure out how to use them effectively anyway.

wait till you hit max level then your love for the game dies and all you time spent is sent to junk

I played Druid and Warlock a lot in WoW, and I think you’ll like Necro. You’ll notice a lot of cool improvements in this game versus WoW.

Steel yourself to ignore the high negativity in the Necro forums: it has the highest complaint factor of all the forums, as far as I can tell.

I just hit 80 with my Necro and love it. At this point I’m mainly D/D (dagger main hand, dagger offhand) and Staff, but early on I liked S/F (scepter and focus) and Staff. Pet AI can be wonky, in particular melee pets sometimes stand around and don’t fight apparently because they can’t find a path to your target. So I’d not recommend a build that’s heavy minions, but some people make it work.

Oh, one tip I totally missed and felt stupid later: once you level a bit you will begin to get Trait points to put into your trait lines. Once you have 10 points in a line, you can choose a trait skill. You can’t change how many points you have in a trait line without respec’ing, but you can change which trait skill you pick as long as you’re out of combat. That can be VERY useful, and pretty much everyone but me realized it, but just in case you don’t.

Also, this game rewards moving a lot. Grinding in one spot doesn’t get you nearly as much XP as moving from place to place and doing lots of stuff.

Yeah ignore the whining. The complaints about underpowered necros hit a crescendo right around the time when every top tpvp team on NA ran a necro. Of course you’d never see the whiners in paid queues so they had no idea that good teams were running necros or what those necros were doing. Some people will never figure this class out.