Guild Wars 2

I can’t help but feel totally helpless in ZvZ battle.

I’m currently in full ascended gear. Dire Armor, Rabid Weapons / Trinkets.

This is my current build. Recommendations for better ZvZ gameplay?

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fRAQNArYWjc0UebvNG3wfbighSyW4DiuBCgzlytIKA-T1hHABFp8Lo9HA4JAso6PBcKAOTfAUKBDAgAMzysMnZgje0je0je0m5Mn5Mn5MLFAMLrA-w

For Necro, you probably will want to switch to a power wells build for ZvZ battles. I know it is frustrating when you already have your ascended condi gear, and condi is great for roaming and small fights. But ripping apart enemy zergs is just too good, and so much fun for those larger fights, you’ll probably want to get yourself some exotic berzerker gear and switch up your skills and traits.

Join in your commanders voice channel and listen for the call for full bomb/wells etc.
Or if you don’t have voice, wait for a push from either group and drop everything in the enemy front-line. Drop into death shroud to boost your wells crit chance right up, and hit life-transfer and spam piercing life blasts for plenty of high dps. Time your boon strips so that you are ripping stability off them just as the zerg CC hits (ele static field, melee hammers etc.).

The Metabattle build is a good starting point for power wells necro, try both builds that are there and experiment with your own changes. I personally like the wells recharge for smaller groups, or groups with a weak front-line, switching to the full power meta for larger or front-heavy groups.

Of course, if you really want to stay condi for ZvZ, I would aim to fill a role of soft-CC. That is, don’t worry too much about condition damage, but maximise the amount of chill, cripple and immobilise that you can put out.

Something like this, perhaps?

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fRAQNArdWjc0UebvNe3wfjicBRyetgKQkdyQZ2wA-T1hHABFp8Lo9HA4JAso6PBcKAOTfAUKBDAgAMzysMnZgje0je0je0m5Mn5Mn5MLFAMLrA-w

Key points:

• Focus has excellent chill duration with spinal shivers
• If you do land a good soft-CC (like a long duration chill), use epidemic to spread it around
• Use chilling darkness to trigger chills from bleeds. This has good synergy with scepter/staff low CD skills, sigil of geomancy, and plague. It is pretty low duration, but your runes and food buffs gets it up to some nice numbers.
• Greater marks to punch through the front liners aegis effects
• Path of midnight for tainted shackles, dark path, doom CD

I’d suggest playing with utilities a bit too. Perhaps spectral grasp for plucking someone into your group, and applying lots of your long duration soft-CC to give them little chance to escape alive? You might find you have good synergy with a snipe team.

Since you are effectively filling a support role with this build, signet of undeath might be suitable too. Listen to your voice channel to hear the call for ‘banners’, signet of undeath fills the same role.

In general, I would recommend that whatever route you go for (power, condi damage or soft-cc condi/support), you tone down some of your survival traits and utilities. While roaming calls for plenty of mobility and stun breaks these are less necessary in a zerg fight. Positioning tends to be far more important that survival skills, and death shroud is often enough to get you out of a stick situation.

Tor.1365:

Of course, if you really want to stay condi for ZvZ, I would aim to fill a role of soft-CC. That is, don’t worry too much about condition damage, but maximise the amount of chill, cripple and immobilise that you can put out.

Something like this, perhaps?

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fRAQNArdWjc0UebvNe3wfjicBRyetgKQkdyQZ2wA-T1hHABFp8Lo9HA4JAso6PBcKAOTfAUKBDAgAMzysMnZgje0je0je0m5Mn5Mn5MLFAMLrA-w

Key points:

• Focus has excellent chill duration with spinal shivers
• If you do land a good soft-CC (like a long duration chill), use epidemic to spread it around
• Use chilling darkness to trigger chills from bleeds. This has good synergy with scepter/staff low CD skills, sigil of geomancy, and plague. It is pretty low duration, but your runes and food buffs gets it up to some nice numbers.
• Greater marks to punch through the front liners aegis effects
• Path of midnight for tainted shackles, dark path, doom CD

I’d suggest playing with utilities a bit too. Perhaps spectral grasp for plucking someone into your group, and applying lots of your long duration soft-CC to give them little chance to escape alive? You might find you have good synergy with a snipe team.

Since you are effectively filling a support role with this build, signet of undeath might be suitable too. Listen to your voice channel to hear the call for ‘banners’, signet of undeath fills the same role.

In general, I would recommend that whatever route you go for (power, condi damage or soft-cc condi/support), you tone down some of your survival traits and utilities. While roaming calls for plenty of mobility and stun breaks these are less necessary in a zerg fight. Positioning tends to be far more important that survival skills, and death shroud is often enough to get you out of a stick situation.

Chilling darkness procs on blinds not bleeds so synergizes with plague and well of darkness. Also the thing about focussing on support role with soft CC is that you can still do that with a power build and you would still be doing more damage that a condi support build. You also will probably have the +30% condi duration by going into the top trait line that would also help your power based damage.

I like doubling up Radiation Field with Corrosive Poison cloud as an Asuran, with Spectral Wall as the third utility. Works nicely with high condi duration.

Tor.1365:

For Necro, you probably will want to switch to a power wells build for ZvZ battles.

I really want to find a condi build that work work ZvZ. I dropped too much gold in ascended gear to switch…

:/

Aeniklast.9283:

Tor.1365:

For Necro, you probably will want to switch to a power wells build for ZvZ battles.

I really want to find a condi build that work work ZvZ. I dropped too much gold in ascended gear to switch…

:/

Just curious but haven’t you seen people have been saying to use power for over 2 years? I’m pretty sure I’ve seen your name on the forums so I don’t think your new. At this point it may be your own fault you spent all that time gold and effort on gear that won’t work for the game type you wanted to play.

Aeniklast.9283:

Tor.1365:

For Necro, you probably will want to switch to a power wells build for ZvZ battles.

I really want to find a condi build that work work ZvZ. I dropped too much gold in ascended gear to switch…

:/

Lol if you’re insistent on using condi for zergs your best bet I guess is commander sniping as he pushes or acting as a gank squad and sniping backline after using spectral grasp then laying a burst rotation on them lol good luck

condi for zergs simply do not work as anet has implemented way to many group condi clears. All you need to have is 2 guardians per group, and a few eles and all your condi problems simply disappear in one button press. That is not take skill, just foresight to run condi clears and stability. I love condi builds and it’s all I really play in wvw and i even go condi glass in pve instances like the silver wastes, but it simply does not work against a well organized zerg, because not only does each player have their own condi clears, and heals, but also have the group clears and water blasting heals.

A lot of players in typical ZvZ fights blow their cooldowns in the first 15 or so seconds and AoE condi clears typically have a decently long cooldown. As a condi player, you just have to wait a bit before throwing out your cooldowns and trying to maximize the potential of your conditions in between enemy cooldown times.

Create a “condi party” in WvW with a mesmer, grenade engineers, venom share thief, and an ele and so on and try to put your boon to conditions well inside of static field. You can call target one person and focus your condition damage on them(mesmer/ necro) and epidemic, maybe. Mesmer usually helps punish condi clears with confusion which necro has trouble reliably applying.

There are ways to make condi effective, but it’s an uphill battle for sure. Just like playing a cleric ele or guardian in WVW; you’re essentially playing a different game than normal builds.

Well in a ZvZ battle there tends to be an ungodly amount of AOE condition clears so while conditions can be useful for extra pressure they will not work as well as pure power.

I would suggest using sinister. You won’t have as much survivability but you can pump out allot more damage & use wells quite well.
The extra crit can also help with some traits & sigils.

Also I would suggest trading out vital persistence for spectral mastery & weakening shroud for focused rituals, then corrupt boon for well of suffering or well of corruption.

Lastly with all this crit & power that you would gain I suggest grabbing air & fire sigils. They will give you the extra oomph you need to down enemies faster.

I’ve been directly focused by multiple spite signet necros in a single fight before and barely even noticed it. Condi is absolutely useless.

Coldtart.4785:

I’ve been directly focused by multiple spite signet necros in a single fight before and barely even noticed it. Condi is absolutely useless.

+1, had necros target me with spite, often I don’t even bother to cleanse/transfer it. I do love it though when I need a heal and some necro tag me with signet of spite…oh look, consume conditions, extra heals, thank you!

Condis are pathetically weak for ZvZ. There are cleanses everywhere, cleanses where you don’t even want to be cleansed. I understand condis can be useful in smaller scale fights, GvG for an example, or solo roaming. But ZvZ it’s very much useless.

I used to be condi quite awhile back, thought I was useful and all. But after switching to power, I never looked back. I was ashamed actually once I realized how much I was not helping in ZvZ fights as condi. Bottom line is necros fit the meta for their spike aoe damage, boon stripping, and fear wall. Blobs need us for spike damage. The zerg that often loses are the side that either don’t have many necros, or have too many condi necros as opposed to power.

If you want to be useful in a zerg, play power necro. If you want to pretend to be useful for a zerg, go ahead and roll condi

nope

Not to be an kitten or something, but condi is still very good for zerging. I’ll give you that you have to be carefull on how to pick your target. But not all zerg, in fact none of them have perfect stacking or grouping. There are always the squishies that fail to get the cleans and heals when they are too far away. And carefully picking them apart is pretty fun. I did it on my condi necro, condi ranger and condi engi.

Hello all I am looking to play a Necro in WvW but not sure how to do this I do like the axe build but do not know where to put the points and don’t know what gear to run I can make most ascended gear but not sure what to run Please help with this I am learning to play WvW and want to go farther. Thanks for any advice I am a longtime player