Guild Wars 2

I apologize in advance for the extremely long post and I hope you guys can get through it.

I have been playing on my necromancer exclusively since release and this is a build I came up with after a lot of trial and error and extensive testing. It has amazing survivability while maintaining relatively high sustained damage. It also has fast LF generation and can maintain disabling conditions on enemies (Chill, Poison, Vulnerability, Weakness, Immobilize) so I figured I would share it and help my fellow necromancer community.

In PvE this build can be used to solo just about anything, in WvW it serves mostly as a roamer to capture supply camps with a small group (as small as 2) or zerg fighting.

The traits, armor, utilities, weapons, sigils and food are as follows:

http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/necromancer/?5.4|8.1n.h1h.d.1n.h2|6.1n.h1h|1n.7c.1g.7c.1n.7c.1g.7c.1n.7c.1g.7c|3v.0.2v.0.2s.0.2s.0.3s.0.2s.0|0.u4ac.a2.k25.a4|2e.1|3r.47.48.49.o|e

Notes:
*Food really comes down to personal preference now that Omnomberry Ghosts have been nerfed. Mango pies are a good and cheap alternative as is the Bowl of Orrian Truffle and Meat Stew (that 40% increase in endurance regeneration is amazing).
*As for runes, if you don’t care about bringing a little support to your team via Runes of the Pack, you can switch them for Runes of the Thief for a slightly higher damage output (since the 10% damage bonus can be pretty much maintained throughout the whole fight by just running around your enemies).
*Sigils are pretty much also optional. I use Superior Sigil of Battle mostly because I need it for one of my other builds (but it tends to work well in almost any build). Superior sigil of Leeching/Hydromancy/Energy are very solid options.
*Blood Magic V can be substituted for III (you gain permanent regeneration and another source of bleeding).
*Curses IV can be swapped for III if you are running with plague form (provides a lot of control for your group).

How to deal with problematic classes in WvW:

In WvW first of all you should almost never travel alone since necromancers from the looks of it are not meant to be played solo, they are more group oriented than most classes. If you plan on capturing camps you should at least bring 1-3 other players and avoid conflicts with significantly larger enemy groups (this is where perma-swiftness comes in handy).

A very important note, Spectral Walk should generally not be used to gain perma-swiftness (unless you need to get away from a class using their newly buffed 25% movement speed signets) as it is your only stun break. For moving around the map, you should switch it for Signet of the Locust and swap it in right before a fight (it pays to be extra aware of your surroundings).

Players also tend to severely underestimate necromancers and they usually don’t expect you to play in melee range, use this to your advantage

Thieves:

They can be generally problematic but mostly because of their annoying long lasting stealth; however they can be easily dealt with especially since most of them run a glass cannon spec. Your DS fear along with Spectral Grasp should be used mostly as an interrupt for their healing skills as well as for disabling them when they are near death to ensure they go down. You should take most of their hard hitting attacks (backstab/HS spam) with your DS life pool and mitigate it with the protection Spectral Wall provides.

Most (bad) thieves usually spam their burst along with their 3s fear (steal skill) as soon as they see you, with a little practice this can be evaded and if not you should use your break stun and widen the gap between them. Keep running around while they are in stealth to make them chase you and miss a couple of back stabs. When they are low on health (usually around 50%) they will use shadow refuge. When they do that you have 2 choices, you either cast life siphon + life transfer + spam autoattack inside the field just before this as the channel continues to hit them while in stealth and it is possible to down them if they are <50% health, the second option involves using the staff fear to make them exit the field (and gives them the revealed debuff) to prevent them from resetting the fight. Most thieves now run with dagger/pistol so you can’t deny them their stealth by dodging their Cloak and Dagger.

The warhorn interrupt (2s daze) is also a great way to finish them off when they are low on health as it prevents them from going into stealth and healing and combined with the dagger immobilize it should give you a very good window of opportunity to down them (some thieves run without a reliable way to remove immobilize and might go into stealth when you immobilize; however remember they are most likely still standing in the same spot so you should hit with your dagger in that spot and if they are still there, you should see small heals from your life steal popping up). From my experience, if they run with more defensive stats and you are solo roaming you should just “strategically retreat” towards allies. Good thieves will ALWAYS roll you so be aware of them.

Warriors:

They are also relatively easy to down since again most like to run a glass cannon build and they have little condition removals. You need to watch out for their knockdown(s) and 100b combo (even if it still lands it should not kill you, you should still try to mitigate most of their burst with your DS or through Spectral Wall). You should maintain some distance with them as they have very high sustained damage. I generally switch to staff and kill them from a range while abusing chill (from staff #3, focus skill #5, Spectral Grasp and DS skill #2. However note that pulling them towards you or teleporting towards them can be a very bad idea. So if you plan to use spectral grasp or DS #2 on warriors, run away from them immediately afterwards).

Guardians:

Some guardians are impossible to take down 1vs1; however you should almost never be alone so this should be a non-issue. They generally rely heavily on boons, you should keep removing their boons with Spinal Shivers, get vulnerability stacks on them with Reaper’s touch + Spectral Wall, disable them with your DS fear and Spectral Grasp and maintain chill on them while slowly withering down their health with your dagger auto-attack(dagger/focus combo works best against them). Using Lich Form can greatly speed up how fast you kill them (just watch out for their wall of reflection).

Mesmers:

Mesmers are a hard counter to this build in 1v1 (and many others for that matter), so they should be dealt with quickly with your group.

Some thing to watch out for is their Illusionary Leap + Blurred Frenzy + Shatter Combo, if they do manage to root you and you react fast enough staff #4 can get you out of this combo and you can then dodge INTO the clones to avoid their shatter completely. Chill is an amazing condition that can really shutdown mesmers since they lack many condition removals , USE IT.
Lich Form can also help you bring them down faster (so long as you don’t have a lot of confusion stacks on you and are not getting focused), just watch out for their projectile reflection. Time Warp can be problematic sometimes but only if they cast it at a choke point, otherwise it is relatively easy to run out of its range for its whole 10s duration. Good mesmers, like good thieves, will always mop the floor with your body, so again never engage in 1vs1 fight with them.

Rangers:

Most rangers I’ve seen in WvW are running with a shortbow and etiher a greatsword or sword/dagger, they usually try to maintain their range while DPSing you to death which should prove extremely difficult for them as you have a gap closer on a relatively low cooldown (DS skill #2) and a pull. I usually exit DS immediately after it finishes casting and proceed to kill them OR alternatively you could go into Lich Form and destroy them from a distance (900 range, also don’t underestimate the annoying minions Lich form can summon). Sword/x ranger builds should prove to be more problematic as they can easily dodge your attacks and prolong fights, it helps to know that they possess almost no CC and you can continue to chill them to screw up their rotation while kiting them.

Elementalists:

Almost every single elementalist is running D/D. Their usual opening combo is Ride the Lightning + Updraft immediately after (good eles will cast it after a short delay) + Churning Earth and lightning flash if you move out of its area. OR RTL + Updraft + Fire Field + Fire Grab + Evasive Arcana while on earth (blast finisher) + Earthquake followed by Churning Earth and lightning flash if you move out of its area. After their initial knockdown you should use Spectral Walk to get back up and get out of their churning earth, some will attempt to lightning flash on you right before it is fully charged so you should be prepared to dodge roll as soon as they do. They will cast armor of earth if you use your cc’s too often and they will always attempt to mist form away when they are low on health or getting bursted. When they switch to water attunement they usually heal ~40% of their health, the best time to burst them is after they exit water attunement. Other skills to watch out for are Fire Grab (has a pretty obvious animation) if you are burning and their earth immobilize (I believe it’s Earth #3). Chill again screws up their whole rotation and can put A LOT of pressure on them. Don’t forget to remove their boons periodically via Spinal Shivers, this should reduce their overall damage output by a great deal since it generally removes their might stacks.

D/D eles overall run with a mixture of defensive stats, offensive stats and some healing power. They always prove challenging to kill even to a party (unless you can coordinate your CC with their burst, then they can be downed easily after you make them waste their Mist Form and immobilize them right before they RTL away); however they can rarely out-heal the combined damage of your party. Elementalists overall don’t make good INITIAL focus targets because of their relatively low damage and high healing and toughness.

Engineers should provide no problems, neither should most Necromancers (sadly). Overall focus targets should be (in decreasing order of priority) Necromancers > Warriors = Rangers > Engineers > Thief = Mesmer > Elementalist > Guardian (note this only applies to WvW, tpvp is a different matter).

I’ve only skimmed through it, but a first question that comes to mind:
Any particular reason why you’re not putting more points in Soul Reaping? If you’re focussing on crits, the extra +crit dmg alone seems to be worthwhile going down this line, let alone all the other benefits. (Stat economy wise, this also seems to be one of the better ways to get +crit dmg).

I suppose you could get rid of 10 points in spite and move them to soul reaping for Last Gasp (minor trait), 10% more critical damage and life force pool and Vital Persistence/Path of Midnight/Unyielding Blasts, but I prefer to have a reduction in cooldown for the focus (Reaper’s Touch gives you 18% LF if all of its hits land and with this trait you can use it more often) plus the 10% extra condition duration. Now I am off to bed, goodnight everyone.

Edit: I think moving the 10 points from spite could be overall better for the added critical damage/higher LF pool, Last Gasp + trait of choice ( I would probably use Unyielding Blast)

This is really amazing. Tested it a few times on PVE, although I have yet to complete the gear. I could see the potential in it.

i leveled to 80 with a pure +crit build never had less than 50% crit , used Vampirism lifeleech, minion HP transfer ,Lifeleech food and lifeleech on the weapon + 10 prec x 25 sigil + focus heal

full Knight armor tough, vit , prec

PvE tanking as Necro is good if the pets work and heal you. i was able to solo +10 level MOBs all the time with dagger and capped Bonus xp all the time after level 65ish. but i did the same as ranger (even +13 levels) and thief so nothing special at all….

p.s traits 30 toughness, 30 vitality and rest precicion . think i had 2800 armor and 25k HP 56% crit and still like 2600 Attk. Mobs dropped like flies but i havent logged on since a few weeks.

@Tuccos That would be useful in PVE but not so much in WvW where minions are next to useless. In dungeons minions are also not that useful because of their low health pool (and the massive amount of high damaging AoE dungeon mobs/bosses throw at you). Also I prefer my stat distribution since I dislike using pets (mostly because of the state they are in now) and I find that faster LF generation has saved my life more often than having higher toughness/vitality. In your build there also seems to be no critical damage which would greatly decrease your damage output (excluding pets of course).

@Soulgant Great info! Thanks

After a bit of testing, I have come to the conclusion that 10 points from Death Magic or Blood Magic can be moved to Soul Reaping and use Foot in the Grave (3s stability when entering DS). You also gain the minor trait Strength of the Undead which should give you a 5% increase in damage fairly often because of your high LF generation rate. With this you gain some damage and stability at the cost of some survivability (Foot in the Grave allows you to survive CC heavy classes more easily since you only have 1 breakstun). This is a good alternative if you want to play more aggressively. I personally prefer the original build (I am biased I know).

Near to Death is another good grandmaster trait in the Soul Reaping line, it allows you access into DS more often so you can interrupt their heals/use your gap closer/proc fury (Furious Demise) without worrying too much about being stuck with DS on cooldown when you see their burst coming.

Another note, if you absolutely want to take part in the zerg in WvW(I dislike to generally), switch your axe and focus for a staff and change the following:
In Death Magic: Dark Armor (I) for Greater Marks (II),
In Blood Magic: Blood Thirst (II) for Ritual Mastery (VIII)
In Curses: Spectral Attunement (X) for Focused Rituals (IX) and Reaper’s Precision (V) for either Chilling Darkness (III) if using Well of Darkness or Toxic Landing (I).
In Soul Reaping: Spectral Mastery (IV) for Path of Midnight (III)
Also change all your utilities for wells (Well of Suffering, Well of Corruption and Well of Power/Darkness) and swap any of them for the Signet of the Locust if you need the faster movement speed.

Since I have suggested a few alternatives I figured I would post them all here since I can’t fit them into my original post.

If you want to fight in zergs change the following:
Switch your axe and focus for a staff (knight’s also, sigil of fire works great for the AoE).
Switch all of your utilites for Well of Suffering, Well of Corruption and Well of Power/Darkness/Signet of the Locust. Your elite should be Lich Form.

Your traits should be as follows:

Curses 20, Chilling Darkness (II) if using Well of Darkness (otherwise use Toxic Landing, I) and Focused Rituals (IX)
Death Magic 10, Greater Marks (II)
Blood Magic 20, Vampiric Precision (V) and Ritual Mastery (VIII)
Soul Reaping 20, Path of Midnight (III) and Unyielding Blast (VI)

If you are having trouble fighting CC heavy classes or want to be in DS more often AND want to do more damage, then change the following :

Move 10 points from Death Magic OR Blood Magic (depending on what fits your play style better) into Soul Reaping and use either Foot in the Grave (XI) if you want stability or Near to Death (XII) to be in DS more often.

Note: I think it is better to remove the 10 points from Blood Magic (you should use either Mark of Evasion or Dagger Mastery for the first trait instead of Bloodthirst) and lose Vampiric Precision (V) since with that stat distribution you are still able to change to a zerg friendly build on the fly (of course you lose access to a 20% reduction on the cooldowns of wells, but that trait is not absolutely necessary to fight in zergs) at the cost of some survivability since you now have no lifesteal (just know this makes it almost mandatory to be using life stealing foods always).

Ignore this post as the info here is outdated

Soulgant.7689:

@Tuccos That would be useful in PVE but not so much in WvW where minions are next to useless. In dungeons minions are also not that useful because of their low health pool (and the massive amount of high damaging AoE dungeon mobs/bosses throw at you). Also I prefer my stat distribution since I dislike using pets (mostly because of the state they are in now) and I find that faster LF generation has saved my life more often than having higher toughness/vitality. In your build there also seems to be no critical damage which would greatly decrease your damage output (excluding pets of course).

my build is good. i solo champions and i do great in dungeons. i am usually the last man standing in groups.

i kill level 80 mobs in 3-5 seconds and i am able to solo up to 1-8 mobs at once in Orr with ease. Dagger DPS + Focus does that.

i usually never loose more than 20% HP if ever.

while other classes fight one enemy in Orr i kill 5 at the same time…… if i want to play another build i port to WvW and retrain to something else in 5 minutes…

dont make a mystery out of the GW2 builds. This game isnt complicated enough to make a science out of it.

its made for 8+ year olds, 5 skills, 3 utils and one elite + a few traits which are easy to understand even for childs. Only Elementalist has 4 ways of gameplay but that shouldnt be a problem for a 10+ year old either.

this isnt Everquest or Anarchy Online , this is GW2 , its easy and an average veteran mmorpg player finds out the best possibilities for every situation for every class after a few hours………

this whole Necro science is a joke as simple as this class is….. same counts for all other classes in this game. Dont make a science out of a childs game….. its not complicated enough..

overall some players seem to take games like this far to serious, 1% here or 1% there and for that they do research for days and weeks as if theres nothing other important to do on this planet. at the end they have 5% more crit or 1000 more HP for days and weeks of wasted lifetime. Nerds are a growing species on this earth and it seems to continue like that for a while…..

have a nice one
andrew

@Tuccos for the record I never said your build was bad. I merely said that minions in their current state are not useful in WvW and most dungeons. Anyways thanks for all the insults, you have a great one also.

Lol someone’s mad!

I have been using a similar build for the last few days and Im liking it a lot.

I run 0/20/10/20/20, and I use dagger/dagger/staff. For wvw I use greater marks, but switch to dark armor for small skirmishes or duels.

I find that vampiric precision heals for very low amounts, so I switch it out for the 25% speed boost using dual daggers for wvw.

I also prefer dual daggers because I find the condition removal to be very valuable. I do use focus sometimes too though.

@Stx: The condition removal from the offhand dagger is nice and reliable from a close range (enemies usually don’t notice the projectile and thus never dodge it if you use the skill right in front of them). Weakness also comes in handy because of the -50% endurance regeneration (just bear in mind that most players run with some semi-reliable/reliable way to cleanse conditions, but if they don’t weakness is a very annoying condition that prevents them from dodging often).

Vampiric precision heals for 45 on critical hits, which is relatively little per hit but considering the dagger has a very fast auto-attack this can add up to a lot. Lets look at the numbers (just bear in mind this is a very crude estimate):
The dagger auto-attack chain takes ~2s to complete and hits 4 times. With a 73% critical chance (food buffs + precision stacks + Sigil of Accuracy) approximately 3 out of 4 attacks should crit. You get 83 health per critical hit from Vampiric Precision & Vampiric & Bloodthirst. Thus the combination of these 3 traits, assuming the target is not moving and/or all your attacks land without any extra delay between them, heal you on average around 143 health/second and without Vampiric Precision you get 76 health/second. It is a pretty significant difference between the two; however it ultimately comes down to your particular playstyle. I for instance prefer to play more defensively, although I can see how the the 25% increase in movement speed is awesome since it makes it extremely hard for enemies to kite you/chase you, and also makes you non-reliant on the Signet of the Locust for getting around the map.

Aftr a long night of WvW, I have come to the conclusion that I will just be switching traits constantly inbetween battles.

I pretty much always use bloodthirst, but I switch the 2nd blood trait between -20% wells cd, vampiric precision, and 25% movement speed a lot.

The main reason I value the 25% movement trait is so I can free up my mobility utility for another good one like flesh wurm or another well, but youre right, the heal on crit reallyt does add up.

I did use the focus a lot, and the main reason I like the focus is for the damage boost boon removal. Its still hard for me to give up the condition removal from dagger though.

In WvW I use staff so much that it was hard for me to test this, but I think my favorite combo is Dual dagger + Axe/focus. I got into some skirmishes at supply camps where i would stack vuln with axe auto/focus then switch to dagger immobilize/well bomb.

Anyways, thanks for the build idea, very balanced/flexible.

I do not invest in precision unless im working in procs or life stealing only because lich already bumps our critchance to 52%.

This has got to be a super low vit build.

This build has both procs (from sigils + food) and life stealing from traits. While this build only has 20722 health (more in WvW depending on the bonuses) it has little trouble staying alive because of it’s high effective health (high toughness + high health gain per second) and fast LF generation.

With Vampiric + Vampiric Precision + Bloodthirst + food buff (also lifesteal) and a 73% critical chance (food buffs + sigil +stacks), you should be gaining on average 769 hp/s (dagger auto attack chain performs 4 attacks in ~2s and life steal food has a 66% chance on crit to steal 325 health, of course assuming all 4 hits land). Then there is life siphon (hits 9 times in 3.5 seconds, each hit has a chance to crit) which can be activated every 12 seconds and should heal on average 4774 health per cast(again assuming all hits land). Not to mention the life steal from the food and traits also deals the same amount of armor ignoring damage to enemies (i.e. 769 extra damage per second from dagger autoattack). Then there is regeneration which you can get semi-reliably with the focus + minor trait in Blood Magic.

Hm, its using vampiric play to make up for low vit. The build is pretty good because you work in the curve of berserkers a little without turning into a water balloon. Its a little dicey against bunkers and control builds though, so it may feel like its spread thin. Whenever a build puts more points into soul reaping, i cross my fingers to hope holes dont appear. I like what it has to show, i dont see too many knight/berserker mashups that work but this will definitely do it. +1

I do agree that it is not that great vs some bunker builds especially bunker guardians (they are just kitten impossible to kill 1vs1, except for a select few classes with insane bursts). I generally also dislike using Soul Reaping, but surprisingly it has pretty good synergy with this build because of the faster LF buildup from gluttony (as minor as it may be) and Last Gasp (Spectral Armor when at 50% health, 60s cd) not to mention the reduction in cd for Spectral abilities and vulnerability stacking via Life Blast. Anyways, thanks for the feedback. Have a happy new years.

P.S. This build in my experience is not that great in sPvP because you can’t get this combination of stats (hence the PvE/WvW tag).

I made a few changes to the build for anyone still interested.

We appreciate the work you are doing even if you do hate minions ;P. I am actually working on a recording of me with my minions in wvwvw killing all sorts of baddies. Granted the players aren’t very good, but it’s hilarious how I can fight a 1 v 2 and live easily while forcing them to play hide and go seek.

I like power builds, but feel that when running in a small group or solo it’s pretty difficult to do what you need to do in order to survive. I will read through the rest of your post later, and if you want we can try and get you on our podcast one day to talk about wvwvw and the powermancer.

Oh I love minions, but as of now they aren’t great (or very versatile) so I am holding off from them until they get some kind of balance. And I agree with you that power necro builds lack the survivability other classes have without having to invest heavily into defensive stats, but from personal experience I think that necromancers aren’t really the go to class anyways for solo roaming in WvW. I believe we shine in group fights though.

Also the podcast thing sounds good but I might be too shy for that. I’d be very interested in watching your video though, I always love watching other professions get rolled by necromancers.

EDITED: Clarity