Guild Wars 2

After the June update announcements today, I think this might be a good approach. I would love feedback – thx!

Lots of health and toughness. Very high condition damage, but not too many conditions

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fRAQNArYWjc00UbbN+1weDA-TVyCABA8AAAUfwDnAAh2fwT1fm4IAkoSQJOEAZp8jQALWDA-w

Then specializations are curses, death magic, and blood magic.

Curses
- Chilling Darkness: Blinding a foe inflicts chill on them for 2 seconds.
- Master of Corruption: Reduces recharge of corruption skills by 33% but causes corruption skills to apply additional conditions to you when cast. (Condition applied varies per skill.) NOTE: Seems rough to take a trait for only one skill
- Parasitic Contagion: You are healed for 10% of your outgoing condition damage.

Death Magic:
- Flesh of the Master: Minions have 50% more health and grant you 20 toughness for each one you control. All your minions are destroyed if this trait is reassigned while you have active minions.
- Necromantic Corruption: Increases minion damage by 25%. Every 10 seconds your minions will take one condition from you. Minions transfer conditions when they hit with attacks (this can only occur once every 10 seconds per minion).
- Death Nova: Minions explode when they die in a cloud of poison. This effect also occurs if you are downed. When you kill a foe summon a jagged horror (this effect can only occur once every 15 seconds).

Blood Magic
- Quickening Thirst: Reduces recharge of dagger skills by 33% if used while you are over 75% health. Move 25% faster while wielding at least one dagger.
- Vampiric Presense: You and allies near you siphon health with attacks (combat only). This effect stacks with the siphoning granted by Vampiric.
- Unholy Martyr: When you first enter shroud and every 3 seconds afterwards, draw 1 condition from a nearby ally to yourself. Whenever a condition is drawn in this way gain 10% lifeforce. Fixed a bug that caused this trait to function inconsistently with multiple allies.

Bone Fiend > Shadow Fiend. Immobilize is the strongest condition in the game, easily, and arguably stronger than even stuns, plus double projectile finishers to pair with Death Nova’s fields. For sigils I’d highly recommend at least one of the life steal ones, though you could even run both, they will likely do more for you by providing a ton of extra sustain and direct damage that can’t be mitigated, though your current options certainly aren’t bad either.

For traits, I’d pick up Plague Sending, as it is a free stun break if you get lucky, plus more condition removal, and you only have 1-2 blinds in this build anyway. I’d take PoC over the corruption trait, I honestly think Blood Fiend is worth using, when you consider the nerf to CC and the amount of condition removal you can get with minions now.

I’d also consider Blood Bond, Banshee’s Wail, and Transfusion, depending on how things work out. Blood Bond should be easy for you to proc, Wail is really, really nice, and Transfusion is a big AoE heal for the minions, to keep them alive. Wail vs the Vampiric depends on if minions benefit from the healing buff or not.

Depends on if vamp present works on minions and if unholy would reabsorb conditions of minions.
Plus I always felt unholy was underwhelming and like bhawb would take transfer for the stomp denial

Thx very much!

Feels like I’ll need to mix in some more precision gear versus my pure dire setup if I want to get some of crit-based benefits.

Thx again for all the suggestions. I took all your changes and updated the build (plus found a build calculator with all the updates).

http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-30;3sHkD0s3oI-K0;9;4789;0147036248;41SW8X;1bUytbUytq-kev4rJ;33d38wc48xc58DFWF72o;572;9;9;9;9;9;2V6s5c

Putting warhorn and banhsee’s wail in makes me feel justified in going back to the perplexity runes

I swapped in some rabid armor, so health goes down a bit. But crit chance goes up to help make sure I can proc Plague Sending.

Hey eldenbri, cool build.

This may be a bit off topic but minions in general for Necromancers are a bit broken. As Brazil and Nemesis discussed through stream,

…minions are still unreliable, can’t believe we are going years into a game with minions without a minion control button. They can never get minions to act properly because you have to sometimes disengage, or engage another target…and they will never do that. It’s a choice, it’s not about AI.

I strongly agree with what they think. It’s fun in PvE when roaming around to level and farm, but it has a big downfall in PvP scenario.

But yeah, keep up with the build man. This is just me ranting about minions in general for Necromancer class and how developers should take action to make them more viable.