Guild Wars 2

Hi everyone,
it may be a dumb question, but I’m pretty new to my Necro-twink, which I want to play mainly in WvW and some dungeons. I use a Condition-build (0/30/20/20/0). Is it better to use Carrion- (CondDmg>Pow/Vit) or Rabid-gear (CondDmg>Prec/Tough)?
Thanks for any help!

Rabid as Necro already has a high base value of HP between 18-19K at level 80 without gear so toughness and condition damage are your friend precision may seem pointless without power however in a condition build where some traits rely on a crit for extra bleeds etc and on say sigil of earth it speaks for itself.

Pure Condition build for necro benefits way more from Precision than Power, so Carrion got a wasted stat right at the start.

Sigil of earth + minor trait causing bleeding on hits.
Take rabid mate, you get close to 20k HP anyway, and rabid gives you up around 2800/2900 armour to go with it.

Maybe mix in full rabid armour/trinkets with carrion weapons if you want.

Ok, the answer seems clear… ;-) Thank you all for your help! I actually overlooked, that some traits / sigils rely on the crits, so rabid all the way.

Please allow me to ask another question: If I go full-rabid-gear, which runes would you recommend. 6x undead or a mixture?

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/Carrion-or-rabid-for-survivability/

Clearly rabid is the more aggressive option if you are using it with the sigil of earth.
Survivability especially in wvw is better with carrion. You’ll have lots of conditions on you when you’re fighting other players and toughness doesn’t help you at all with that.

I love running 6x undead, but some people mix runes of the krait and something else that both increase bleed duration. You can also pick runes of the nightmare.

Conditionmancer are one of the best profession to remove/transfer conditions though, that’s why Rabid is #1 in WvW for full condition spec. Vitality will not help one bit to reduce the burst some classes can bring to you.

Now if you’re talking about an hybrid spec, Carrion would be one of the best choice for a non-glass canon hybrid that priorize condition damage. I still prefer Rampager though for my hybrid spec, with a mix of Cavalier to emphasize more on Power.

@Volbit: Some people prefer 6x Undead for max condition damage, I prefer 100% condition on bleed (2x Lyssa, 2x Krait, 2x Afflicted or Centaur). All about your style of play.

personally im running x6 ruin of the Necromancer for the added fear duration.

Panhauramix.2784:

Vitality will not help one bit to reduce the burst some classes can bring to you.

Ok, check this out:

The exact same build (0-30-20-20-0) with runes of the undead. All I changed are the stats on the weapon, armor and trikets.

Carrion
http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/necromancer/?5.0|6.1h.0|0.0.0.0.0.0|1h.719.1h.719.1h.719.1h.719.1h.719.1h.719|2x.0.2x.0.3x.0.2x.0.3x.0.1h.62|0.u000.k00.k00.0|0.0|0.0.0.0.4g|e

Rabid
http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/necromancer/?5.0|6.1b.0|0.0.0.0.0.0|1b.719.1b.719.1b.719.1b.719.1b.719.1b.719|2w.0.2w.0.3w.0.2w.0.3w.0.2w.0|0.u000.k00.k00.0|0.0|0.0.0.0.0|e

Carrion:
Armor 2427
Health 26712
Effective Health (EHP) 35310
Damage Reduction 24.35%

Rabid:
Armor 2814
Health 20372
Effective Health (EHP) 31224
Damage Reduction 34.75%

So yeah… if I want to survive longer I’ll take the extra ~6,3k hp (or +31% health) instead of a 10% direct damage reduction. And let’s not forget that death shroud scales with vitality.
As I said, the only advantage that rabid has over carrion is a higher crit chance.

Ooops… sorry, this would be the correct link:
http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/necromancer/?5.0|6.1h.0|0.0.0.0.0.0|1h.719.1h.719.1h.719.1h.719.1h.719.1h.719|1h.62.1h.62.1h.62.1h.62.1h.62.1h.62|0.u000.k00.k00.0|0.0|0.0.0.0.4g|e

So it’s
Armor 2086
Health 27352
Effective Health (EHP) 31076
Damage Reduction 11.98%
for carrion.

Well, the EHP is now about the same as rabid. Imo pure carrion is still the better option for survivability.
But bottom line: save your laurels for those new cond-dmg/toughness/vit/precision trinkets that I selected in the “fake” carrion link xD

I see your point, but your trinket are Rabid (I know I know, no Ascended Carrion yet.) Change that for Exotic Carrion Trinket, and you lose 12-13% more damage reduction.

My point was Full Rabid vs Full Carrion, Rabid wins hands down for survivability and at the same time you have more chance to proc additional bleeds. Also if you aim for best condition damage, the toughness of Rabid gives even more power to Undead Rune and other +6% toughness conversion.

Your build right now ressembles my hybrid build, except you focus on Condition damage more while I focus on Power. This is not a focus on Full condition build, even though I’m sure it performs well.

Yeah, sorry about that, I noticed my mistake too late. But as you can see the pure carrion gives even more health (+7k). I wouldn’t call this an obvious win for rabid, seeing how your life force pool gets a lot bigger too. Plus: conditions don’t hurt as much, even if necros are good at cleansing them.

I tend to use Carrion Armor and Rampager trinkets.
With 30 points in Curses you can reach 45-50% Crit chance which is enough, really.
From what I’ve read Power is more effective than Precision in most builds, provided that your crit chance isn’t minimal (~30% or less).

Thing is I tend to run it with Dagger/Dagger or Dagger/Focus + Staff.
For a build using Scepter and focusing entirely on conditions Rabid is better.

Just don’t complain when you try to bleed an AC Burrow to death.
(Or actually, maybe you SHOULD complain about it… in a constructive manner.)

Yeah we may just have differents experiences in WvW. Conditions are the least of my worries, so more vitality doesn’t help me there. 20% more damage reduction helps me a lot more to survive bursty classes and siege’s fire, and Crit brings faster bleed stacks that is = to my “burst”.

If one day they get a Condition Damage/Vit/Toughness I might try it, but something tells me Rabid will still outclass it.

Lastly, DS is only 60% of our health, so adding 7k just gives you ~2100 more in DS. Not that big of a deal for the big loss of DPS. My condition build is normally 0/30/20/0/20 though, so the 20% more life force and Protection at 50% helps there too.

I would love to see both builds under fire and see which would survive more, but I dont have any carrion yet

I have been running Flow’s Staff+Corruption build which uses a full set of carrion gear and find it effective in both dungeons and WvW. The amount of extra “effective power” you get from carrion over rabid is major…my marks hit like a truck and have good condition damage on top of that…killing a defender faster more than makes up for the loss of EHP

Argh more conflicting opinion. I may just do Rabid gear and weapon and full Carrion accessories when I gear my Necro soon and split the difference hehe.

Hoooooly shiiiiiat!! Someone is using my build xD
That is epic man! *fistbump *
I wasn’t sure if anyone even tried it since noone left any comments. ^^

I might even upload a video soon with some interesting wvw action, some duels against top players from other servers ’n stuff…

Anyway.. I just wanted to say:
With my build you don’t need that much precision because the staff doesn’t hit as often. So carrion makes much more sense anyway. However, I have been mixing it up with some soldier trinkets since the ascended stuff came out. And now instead of earrings I chose those new ascended unnamed/rabid accessories.
But before that pure carrion worked just as fine, I also mention that in my build discription.

In my experience Precision gives me more damage than Power over time, due to Sigil of Earth and Barbed Precision procs, that is if you have extended condition duration, which you should if we are discussing condition builds.

Power will favor the staff and Precision will favor the Scepter/Dagger, but even with more Power staff isn’t really a DPS weapon you just sit on for long periods.

Hi everyone,
I’ve been playing rabid almost since the game is out.I was ok with it.
Then i saw Gibbly playing his necro with carrion and decided to try it ,seeing that this great necro was using it.
I will never go back to rabid.
Go in PvP and go and kill some golems with rabid then with carrion.You will notice first that the damage done by a hit with carrion is equal to the damage done by a critical hit with rabid which means that it is as if you were doing only critical hits with a rabid amulet (—> 100% critical chance with a rabid amulet).Of course,you also do critics with carrion which are much more powerfull than those done with rabid.
The bleeding that proc on critical hits can be from the trait (1s) or the earth sigil so about 1/2 times the bleed that will proc on a critical hit will last 1s or about 6 or 7 s which means with 50% chance of critical hits that 1/6 hit will proc one 1s bleed and 1/6 hit will proc a 6s bleed.Supposing you do 114 damage /tick,in 6 hit,your proc bleeds will do 1112 damage or around 165 more damage /hit.This 165 more damage /hit doesn’t equal the damaged gained on blanked hit with carrion over rabid.And remember that you still do critical hits with carrion,criticals i don’t even need to take in consideration to see that carrion produce a much greater dps than rabid even if rabid proc bleeds (which carrion do too).
Second argument for carrion: you kill faster because you have more dps even without having to wait for the proc bleeds to do damages(damages which anyway will be inferior to these done with carrion).
Third thing: you can destroy objects much more faster with carrion (thank you to power).
You will survive a burst much more easily with carrion because even if toughness may bring you more Ehp (some say that it is better with carrion but i personnaly didn’t calculate it so let’s suppose that rabid is better),these extra Ehp are useless if you are bursted and don’t have the time to heal and geting quick into death shroud with carrion is much more usefull since DS ’s life bar scales with HP.
So personnaly,i will stick to carrion….The choice is yours.I just wanted to give my opinion since like many people do,i,for long, have thought that rabid was the best of the best for necros and totally changed my mind
Now,if you plan to do only dungeons,why not rabid…But against players:carrion.

I must admit I feel exactly the same.
I got full rabid for my necro in wvw… even went as far as to get some rabid style ascended pieces.
Then I tried carrion – in pvp initially.

I am sold – carrion all the way for me from now on… now I just need to change all my gear

I’m going to speak from an sPVP perspective. Basically it comes down to vitality vs toughness, but if you are using rabid you need to use sigil of earth then as well to actually somewhat make some use out of your precision, the on crit traits in curses are actually quite lacking and suit dagger auto attack best.

I prefer sigils of geomancy for the 3 stacks of bleed to enemies around me on weapon swap so there is no point for me to use a rabid amulet.

WWW might be different though since I do not know if you want to go into melee range to proc the geomancy sigils. If you would preffer to keep your distance then go with rabid + sigil of earth.

Also precision is a crit chance stat, core word is chance you do not have control over it. Power on the other hand is a flat damage bonus and geomancy sigils are also controllable reliable 3 bleed stacks for 7 seconds with some direct damage as well. Toughness may be better vs direct damage but vitality works vs both condi and direct damage.

i was torn between carrion and rabid too…

I tried both in spvp and carrion always seemed better for me.

And then i made some calculations on a spreadsheet taking into consideration attack speed, sigil of earth (with 2s internal cd), barbed precision and i also assumed different rotations (eg spam only scepter 1 or spam scepter 1 and use 2 on cd etc),but always runes of the undead on armor and always the same build. All on a target with 2600 armor assuming no cleanses are made.

Long story short… rabid is better for dps than carrion on a targets with high armor by about 5-6%.
BUT the lower the armor the less obvious the difference. Perhaps at low armor targets carrion does the same dps as rabid… i dont know for certain.

Also as mentioned before carrion has other benefits…

If u plan do lots of PvE i d say go rabid if u dont mind the extra agro due to high toughness. If u plan to do lots of WvW i d suggest carrion with some rabid parts to get a respectable crit chance (30% seems fine to me).

Anyway its an old post but since its brought back on the first page i though i d share my opinion…

Hi again,
I did a mistake in my previous post…
I didn’t take in consideration that both the bleeding from the trait and the one from sigil of earth could proc on the same hit.
So (i won’t do the maths here since it is a little bit longer than before),if you use only the 1 of the scepter,the dps will be about the same with carrion and rabid on a very tough enemy (as Enferian said it ) but higher than rabid in the other case.But if you use something else than the 1 of the scepter with a higher basic damage,the damage will be better with carrion since the higher the basic damage is,the more it will be scaled with carrion.
Gibbly says that rabid and carrion produces about the overall same damage output.But if the proc bleedings are cleansed (only mobs don’t cleanse) or if the 25 bleeding stacks are reached,carrion will be much better(and still faster,and better to resist burst etc…).