Guild Wars 2

So I recently made a second necro to make condi, and the current go to seems to be reaper, curse, and death. But I was wondering do you ever swap trait lines. I don’t raid yet but I understand why this would be the go to in them, with a druid healing your minions and a chronomancer giving you alacrity your minions would last longer and you’d be able to use lich form more often. But in other content when you’re not guaranteed to have even one of those things is it better to switch out a line to help make up for it?

For example I’ve been doing constructs/guardian/justiciar to get rubies for my trinkets. But most of those bosses are the only enemy you’re facing so epidemic and rise aren’t super useful. There are druids there I’m sure but my minions still don’t stay alive too well, and I can’t even remember if I’ve ever gotten more than 2s of alacrity. So is it better to swap out reaper for blood so minions can heal themselves and you can use quickening thirst to spam enfeebling blood more often, or would slotting Soul Reaping help by reducing Lich cooldown and giving you access to a burn?

If I keep the same trait set up, by the time the jade dies I’m left with maybe 1 minion and still have lich on cooldown. Was just hoping for some advice to make the build more useful for stuff like fractals/dungeons/world bosses.

I do constantly swap trait lines. just for fun and so that i don’t neglect some cool traits^^
The only traitline I’m constantly using is curses. In raids i go either
curses/deathmagic/reaper (best für dmg in optimal situations)
curses/bloodmagic/reaper (if there are no ads that can die like on VG)
curses/bloodmagic/deathmagic (if the port or sustain is needed like sloth and mat)

In open world pve I’m getting a bit annoyed by the huge ramp up time of the condis und jagged horrors. so i play mostly spite(with terror)/soulreaping(dhuumfire)/reaper and burn everything down in a reasonable time. It’s not optimal for enemies with a big health bar but much more convenient for trash since dhuumfire stacks really quick together with reapers onslaught or quickness (they don’t stack btw)

There is no good way to build for condition damage without scepter. Always trait Lingering Curse for the highest dps.

With that said, feel free to experiment with Terror and Dhuumfire for more condition dps or minions for more sustain.

Reaper is not strictly required.

Anchoku.8142:

There is no good way to build for condition damage without scepter. Always trait Lingering Curse for the highest dps.

With that said, feel free to experiment with Terror and Dhuumfire for more condition dps or minions for more sustain.

Reaper is not strictly required.

In case of playing heavily with dhuumfire, i think reaper is required for the way faster cleave AA and you can swap away lingering curse – maybe swap the whole line for spite to boost your dmg with many might stacks.

I do use Scepter, and I never considered swapping off death magic it seemed like it’d hurt more than help. You’d lose the minion hp boost and the ability for them to transfer conditions, along with the poison field which can help. And curse being the condition line seemed like it made it mandatory too. I would agree that reapers auto attack is much better with dhuumfire but you’d have to give up one of those lines. When I tried blood it was a bit rough too because the minions steal on attack is next to nothing (wiki says 50 health) I’m not all too sure it helped much.