Guild Wars 2

Since you can strip their nearly persistent boons and weaken them while having a large health pool to survive. I’m speaking from both a tPvP and 1v1 WvW (no control point) perspective.

I love my engineer, but the class isn’t getting love. I wanted something that was effective against fotm overpowered 1v1 classes that wasn’t overplayed. Necro seems good on paper, but I’m not sure it’s as effective as I believe it to be.

No, our damage, more often than not, is not enough to outdmg their healing. In a 1 v 1 battle on a point, the fight usually is won by the person who first gets help from teammates.

Is this a philosophical question like “Can wet toilet paper stop a bullet” ?

Depends entirely on builds, but a good tPvP level dagger Ele will always beat any necro save a well bomber when the ele’s escapes are on cooldown. The majority of the time you won’t see an Ele that good and it plays out as Andlat Helsonr says.

The only time I won against D/D ele (after almost a 10 minutes fight) was when the stars aligned and he got stuck without removal in my Well of Corruption, while I had enough hp to try to burst him down instead of just focus on survival. While those 10 min were ticking, he managed to kill a lowbie or 2 with me on his back at the same time.

The fight was epic, fun, but he still alt+F4 when I’ve tried to stomp him… So yeah, ele normally won’t lose, and when they do, they’re gone. At least now we get loot

Necro doesn’t really have consistent boon removal. And ele has consistent boon application, as well as consistent condition removal.

Corrupt Boon during armor of earth can help burst one down though, though they had alot of escapes.

All the Eles I fight in WvW either take 5 minutes to kill or run away. Having Corrupt Boon or those sigils that strip boons on crit helps, but I’d say you need either extreme burst or an attrition-focused build to beat them. I went the attrition route with my necro.

Hey Lettuce,

What build are you using now? I had a hard take making an attrition build that could be as effective as a P/D Thief or a DD hybrid Ele.

Kardiamond.6952:

[…] I had a hard take making an attrition build that could be as effective as a P/D Thief or a DD hybrid Ele.

You’ll be having hardships for a long time to come, I’m sorry to say.

Yeah I know it, I actually gave up. Just curious of lettuce build. :P

Hey Kardiamond. My build is:

- Full Knight’s armor
- 20 in Death Magic (Shrouded Removal, Reaper’s Protection)
- 20 in Blood Magic (Bloodthirst, Vampiric Precision)
- 30 in Soul Reaping (Spectral Mastery, Master of Terror, and either Foot in the Grave for roaming or Near to Death for zerging)
- Dagger/Warhorn with sigils of Rage and Blood, Axe/Focus with sigils of Bloodlust and Blood (not final on the Rage and Bloodlust sigils)
- 5/6 Runes of the Vampire until they fix the DS bug with the 6th bonus
- Omnomberry Pie and Superior Sharpening Stones

For utilities, swap between Well of Suffering, Corrupt Boon, Spectral Wall, Spectral Walk, and Spectral Grasp as the situation calls for it. Elite is Flesh Golem because otherwise I never used the elite. Heal is Consume Conditions.

Basically you survive a long time because of the constant siphoning and toughness, and you do damage by stacking Vulnerability on your target, which helps punch through Protection and other boons, plus Knight’s comes with a good amount of pow/pre. I’m still working out the optimal balance of defense and offense. A few days ago I swapped out the jewels for all Berserker’s and that’s working pretty well, I will probably stick with it.

Also, the 20 points in Blood Magic are the only “mandatory” part of this build. I’ve done 30 in Spite and 20 in Curses, I’ve done 10/10/20/20/10, and all have been pretty effective, it just depends on what traits you like. Right now I have Reaper’s Protection because I want to be immune to GS warriors and the initial burst of D/D Eles (when they Updraft, the fear hits them before the dodge kicks in), and I use Foot in the Grave because I want to shroudstomp people :-D

When this build works, it works great. A few days ago I was roaming around solo and started fighting a dolyak. A ranger showed up midway through, so I killed him, then went back to the dolyak. ANOTHER ranger AND a D/D ele showed up. I finished off the yak and managed to kill them both with about 80 health remaining – all those little 38’s and 57’s plus the sigils plus the runes added up over time to keep me alive, the whole sequence was maybe 6-7 minutes long. And I have a recording of it, I’m at work now but can post the video when I get home if you wish. They were sort of bad players but so am I; I get flustered in combat sometimes and press the wrong skill buttons :-) I guess my point is that the build doesn’t require that much skill to use because of the many inherent defenses.

When the build doesn’t work, it’s because I didn’t play well against a burst Thief (using DS at the wrong times so I don’t absorb damage, etc), or get unloaded on by multiple people. It would also be pretty bad against pure condition builds since there’s only 1 source of removal besides CC, but I’ve only found like 1 or 2 of those in the past few months and I wasn’t alone. Defensive Guardians and D/D eles are looooong fights, but very winnable.

No power necro’s are squishy and their “burst” takes to long to set up/ they’d just ride lightning or mistform away, and an ele can counter almost all your damage as a condition build with their just their heal skill now that Ether Renewal got buffed, removes 15 stacks of conditions over ~3 seconds with a very short cooldown, Given that necro’s are really slow to apply stacks / you have to nail a lot of ground targeted slow casting skills in order to build up any reasonable amount only to have it stripped by a heal skill, needless to say necro’s do not “counter” ele’s.

P.S. if you eat a single one of their combo’s it’s pretty over cause you’re heal isn’t going to be all that strong cause they don’t stack conditions on you. G.l G.l.