Guild Wars 2

I was running Arah explorable path 3 tonight with a pug group and we were all noticing how all the enemies were hard focusing me. According to everything I’ve heard and read (my group had similar theories) was that mobs generally focused the person doing the most damage. Later on in the dungeon, while someone was going to the bathroom, we started comparing stats. Note: we were all lvl 80 with full exotic gear.

I literally had the highest stats in almost everything but power and was 100 short of being the top on armor. My group had 2 rangers 2 necros and a guardian. I had the highest hp, toughness, condition damage, almost highest armor, and still had, if sources can be trusted, amazing damage.

Necros are extremely durable, don’t be afraid to stack the hell out of you toughness and vitality. If you still have good condition damage, the damage you deal will be immense. This is especially true for dungeons, we might not pave through single low armor mobs, but vs extremely tough enemies, condition damage isn’t reduced. I deal 114 base damage a tick on my bleed, my poison ticks are usually around 300 (harder to tell cause of the bleed numbers). With might stacks and vulnerability provided by my allies I have hit 130 a tick on bleed before in a dungeon. That’s a massive amount of damage if you can maintain your stacks properly.

To add to our durability we have death shroud. While speccing into it blows, its still extremely useful to tank a few shots from a boss when you are out of energy to dodge, it actually saved me 10+ times tonight from certain death. I only use it to emergency tank, wait on my heal skill, or to use the aoe to tag mobs in events. Other than those options its fairly useless in a condition build.

I’m not sure why everyone whines so much about their necromancer, I kill mobs faster than my guardian and can aggro 5 or 6 with ease, even with veterans mixed in.

Thanks for the encouragement. I’m still leveling but I seem to do quite well compared to other classes in PVE (although if comparing 1-on-1 kills, other classes are admittedly sometimes faster at it). Can you share your build?

Finally some scholar love, all I ever hear are that Necros are rubbish or my mesmer is UP or OP aha nice

Most people don’t have many problems with necros specifically from a PvE perspective once you learn the few tricks. The issues are with condition damage in general and it just happens to hit the necros hardest.
Bleed cap limit
Poor scaling of condition damage (your bleeds get a whole 5% of your condition damage)
Inability to do anything against objects kitten graveling burrows)
General poor group synergy from conditions. The only buff/debuff that affects condition damage is might. No benefit from fury, quickness, vulnerability, traits/nourishment that increase damage by a % have little to no use to a conditionmancer.

The only real issue i have with my necro directly can be seen here
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0ApbbAUHZTALUdFpCZ3B4azZGZkpBMk0wRFBmNVdMN1E&output=html
We have the least (and worst) combo generators/finishers of any class….

I love playing necromancer. I thought I’d play as a minion master, but ended up using condition damage instead. It’s no problem to aggro a handful of baddies and take them on together.

The only problem I’m finding is in the big dynamic events. In a big group the bleeds stay at 25 and I’m only doing a small portion of the damage I’m used to. (I can sustain 12 or more bleeds alone, no problem.)

That said, there’s plenty of other content for me right now (Dungeons, WvWvW, sPvP, personal story) in which I do my share.

EDIT: I forgot to say — I love that there’s a durable spell-casting class. It’s like it was made for me.

Kinda true, but instead of going for condition damage, going for power is usually more benefitial, yes, your conditions might stuffer under it, but its around 40~ damage you lose out, that is one of the reasons why Burning forcused guardians are so strong, conditions do nice damage without additional Cond Damage so you can focus on other offensive aspects.

OP Please share more, like your stats and build!!!

Spec full glass cannon and watch how little our reward is vs risk compared to any other (besides ele) class is. You had a decent pug and know how to play in dungeons. Congrats, we are still broken/bugged and besides doing aoe blinds so my group can push forward in wvwvw I don’t feel like I’m doing much else >.>

Onedoesnotsimply.5740:

Spec full glass cannon and watch how little our reward is vs risk compared to any other (besides ele) class is. You had a decent pug and know how to play in dungeons. Congrats, we are still broken/bugged and besides doing aoe blinds so my group can push forward in wvwvw I don’t feel like I’m doing much else >.>

Sorry, but glass cannon D/D ele has the best risk/reward ratio of all classes.

The necro is def fun to play, but there are quite a few things that need to be fixed and or improved upon. Lets not delude ourselves here.

yeah iono i try to stay away from conditions build, im level 75 now and i made it all this way using a power /toughness/ vitality, with staff + dual daggers. in pve my minions kick butt and take lot of damage with the minion traits and also deal decent damage….when i go into dungeons and wvw, i use wells, and change my traits to sync with the wells which works quite good. in dungeons im usually the last person alive, and i have plenty of people thank me for joining thier party because i was such a good asset to the team.

We have a ton of health and Deathshroud, so being a glass cannon in this class is not really possible. An elementalist, a thief…they can be glass cannons with their low health pool. You won’t ever really be glass…or a cannon, as a Necromancer. That is by design.

I am really enjoying my Dagger/Warhorn necromancer. I’ve died once, even though I rush in to ridiculous numbers of baddies confident that I am going to tank them. If it doesn’t work out, I sprint for 30 seconds out of there.

@Cempa

My build changes a lot, but I usually run 0/30/30/10/0, sometimes swapping the final 10 in death for 10 in spite when soloing things. My armor is full Khilbron’s with full Superior Rune of the Undead, stats being focused on condition damage with toughness and precision. I use similar stats on all my accessories though I haven’t found exotic accessories with these stats.

I almost always run Epidemic on my utility bar, sometimes swapping it out for single target focused skills if I’m going against a tough boss with no spawns. From there I usually run Well of Darkness as it fits my playstyle of aggroing and kiting multiple mobs, with this I run Well of Suffering or Radiation Field for more AoE damage. Some niche skills would be Signet of the Locust (I rarely run this, but its very useful in AC exp vs graveling mobs), Spectral grab (for pulling single mobs into your group in tough dungeons), and Signet of Undeath (vs bosses that your group is wiping against).

I’d say experiment around, the next build I’m going to work on will be more of an axe support styled build for dungeons that I run with another condition class. I’ll focus on stacking vulnerability and using defensive wells for my teammates. Probably going to look into getting Power/Toughness/Vitality gear for that build.

Edit: And for healing I run Consume Conditions 90% of the time. I will rarely switch to Well of Blood if I’m having an easy time surviving and my party is dying a lot, but otherwise I find Consume Conditions to be a much strong heal.

Pretty sure this is not the case, as I also tend to pull focus from mobs pretty hard whenever I run dungeons — and I’m a support built necro and definitely am not getting aggro from my damage.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Aggro

The aggro table of a hostile NPC changes dynamically depending on a number of factors, in order of importance:

- closest target to them
- who is dealing damage
- top damage dealers
- who is using a shield
- others (see Notes below)

I found that to be the only reasonable declaration.

I wasn’t using a shield and I wasn’t the closest target. The Giganticus Lupicus hard focused me until I died every single time. Even if he was focusing an ally while I was running back from a waypoint, after a few attacks he would be back to chasing me.