Enjoying Necro and Have Some Questions
1) Blood magic. And said support is mostly for downed people. Better than nothing though.
2) About the same as for regular necro. RS2 is useful leap, but it has bad habit of auto-locking.
4) For condi – full Viper. For power – mix of zerker and valkyrie gear, due to crit over-cap on Decimate Defences.
Welcome to Rivendell, mister Anderson
1.) Necros are a great offensive support class in wvw (no other class has as many boon corruptions and aoe damage)
2.) Average ( only non shiro revs are slower)
3.) Depends on which mode your playing, greatsword is amazing in pve and average in pvp (better off using axe), dagger is decent too.
4.) Berserker
As a Necro/Reaper there’s more or less nothing you can give to your party. In endgame the only thing we’re able to do better than any other classes is corrupt boons but in PvE it’s useful only against few raid boss, then there’s only a little space for necromancers in the pve top endgame.
You can try to use the Blood Magic traitline to grant to your team a littel vampiric effect and stop the hp decacy while downed, you can also try to use the Transfusion grandmaster trait to heal a little your allies, but that’s really poor if compared to what all the other classes can do. We can’t help to stack might, can’t heal and our damage (in PvE) is almost always the worst of the game.
There’s two skills you can use to help your team: Plague Signet and Epidemic. The first grant you to steal from your allies a lot of conditions all the time, working as a condi clean for your teammates (and using the staff 4 to send that condi to your enemy obtaining dps) and the second is useful against a lot of mobs because you copy all the conditions on an enemy to all the others obtaining a lot of AoE damage from your allies.
In WvW you can use the Epidemic spamming a lot of damage (if you play a condition build) or Well of Corruption, corrupting a lot of enemy boons and granting an advantage to your Zerg group.
The necromancer is a purely selfish class, the same for the Reaper elite specializzation. But in PvE you will survive better than any other class. In sPvP you’ll be eaten alive and the same in WvW because the necromancer don’t have any real active defence (block, evade, stealth, immunity…..). You need a lot of practice to do good in sPvP with a necromancer and don’t end frustrated.
The necro/reaper is the worst class in terms of mobility and also have the worst access to stability or breakstun abilities. Your only leap is chained to the reaper shroud and have an aftercast that reduce it’s effect, then you have spectral grasp as a gap closer in PvP but an enemy player with stability will be totally immune to it’s effect, making you waste the skill (that also can be evaded, dodged, blocked and more) and is totally useless in PvE. You have the worm as a teleport but can’t be used as a movement skill because have 1.5 sec of casting. Spectral Walk grant you a lot of swiftness and with the warhorn 5 you obtain a lot of swiftness, that for PvE is enough to run in teh map but in WvW or sPvP isn’t enough at all. Also the spectral walk grant you a teleport back, more or less useless (maybe only in WvW to disorient an enemy that is chasing you)
The sigil grant you 25% of movement but you lose an utility slot. Can be used but it’s not the best choice, the combo spectral walk + warhorn 5 grant you 45 sec of swiftness with a skill cooldown of 30 and 50. Basicly you can run all day long with swiftness, there’s no need to have the signet (they’re not cumulative, swiftness win over the sigil and you have only the +33% speed).
All the other classes have mobility skills like leap or teleport in a measure enough to cover all the distance you can obtain with the swiftness spam, making the necro the slowest class of this game and the easiest to catch.
The daredevil don’t even need swiftness, he can spam teh shortbow teleport and move away for miles in 2 seconds. A necro can’t compete. warriors have leaps with the GS, guardians have a leap on teh GS and two teleport skills (one on the sword and one really good utility skill), eles have leaps and teleport, mesmers have teleports, rangers have leaps. Before HoT the engi had our same problem but now the hammer grant him a really good leap if need mobility and can spam swiftness better than us.
The necromancer is not made to have mobility.
With the dagger/warhorn you can try a vampiric build with Berserker and BloodMagic/Spite/Reaper traits (you can chose the combination you want, but the dagger/warhorn with the vampiric effect is really good), is funny and grant you a really good survavibility and Power damage.
The GS is good, but only in PvE (sadly is too slow to be good in any PvP situation but you can make some funny builds with it). You can use the GS/Staff in PvE and go Berserker with Spite/SoulReaping/Reaper traits, you will do good. But it’s not the meta build for shure.
Actually one of the best builds is Sinister (or eventually Carrion) with Staff+Scepter/Warhorn with Curses/SoulReaping/Reaper.
Still remember: your inflict lesser damage than more or less any other class can do, but you can still be really good. If you’re a PowerPlayer that want only the best damage the necro isn’t for you, but it’s still really good and a good necro can do really good things. At last you will stand still if all the team die because you’re made to survive to everything (only in PvE because in PvP everyone can kill you easy and fast).
For the armor, you can do every day Citadel of Flame run 1 and 2, farming for the Exotic Berserker or Rampager equipment (waiting to obtain the Sinister equip, that you can also buy from the TP) and obtaining some golds.
You can chose to play power and go berserker with dagger/warhorn or greatsword/staff, or go sinister with a condition build using staff and scepter/x.
Try what’s your favorite playstyle before craft your ascended equipment (you have all the time you need), but you can also change the equipment statistics of an ascended armor/weapon using the Mystic Forge if you end with the “wrong” set.
I’m really liking the play style of the necro. I use to play a lot of thief but wanted to try something different and be able to provide some more team support. I enjoyed the damage and mobility of the thief, but I felt that’s all it could do.
1. As a Necro/Reaper, is their some decent support I can provide for example in WvW or FOTM?
2. How is the mobility for a fully unlocked Reaper, I know we have constant 25% speed with the signet. I know it would be less than the Daredevil but is their more to it as well?
3. I’m enjoying the dagger, staff and tested the greatsword in the pvp lounge and liked the play style. What builds would you recommend for when I have everything fully unlocked?
4. What armor should I be using, exotic and ascended wise. I know most exotics I can obtain from the TP easily which I plan to do initially, ascended might take me a bit longer to acquire so I would need something to cover the gap while I craft ascended. I do have ascended Sinister and Berserker accessories, but I feel like Sinister would be a better combination for the necro accessory wise?
Thanks for the help.
Hi
The answers to your questions largely depend on what game mode and playstyle you enjoy most. I’ll try to give you some answers, but keep in mind things will change soon with the next expansion.
If you go for ascended gear, and spend a lot of time / resources on it, then changes come and your gear will be all messed up you may have some regrets. But I think its worth it to go for at least some ascended, if not all. Yes you can change ascended stats easily, but some of those depending which stats, can get very expensive when going for full set.
Reapers are very strong in WVW, weak in mid / higher end SPVP and mediocre in PVE.
In WVW, the lack of mobility doesn’t really matter, you use warhorn 5, sometimes spectral walk, + Reaper Shroud 2 for your mobility. However, you have to switch out your utility skill before combat, as having the signet or spectral walk on your bar will greatly reduce your combat effectiveness because you are basically wasting a slot. The gaps are filled by team mates.
There are many effective builds, which overlap with builds for PVE, but not SPVP. So when gettign gear, you only switch out a few pieces, usually armor with a different runeset, and some traits which are saved into your WVW / PVE templates anyways, and you’re good to go.
I highly recommend getting Viper weapons, a mix of Viper and Trailblazer armor, and a mix of Dire and Sinister trinkets, rings etc. Do not go full viper or full traiblazer as you will go over the duration caps for your main DPS condis, hence the sinister and dire.
Switch out some pieces of viper / sinister, for trailblazer / dire, along with 2-3 traits, when you need more defenses for the tougher content such as ceirtain PVE bosses, or running with an outnumbered group vs larger groups in WVW. You will need vastly more survivability.
Here are 2 template exampels for you, mind you, these are just templates, customize them as you see fit and make changes for your playstyle:
You can make cheap exotic variants 1st to see how they feel and play, before you go for ascended.
Heavy Deedz – COSA – SF
A lot of really good advice, thanks for the in-depth review on this for me I really learned a lot. I was hoping for some more team support, because the class is so fun to play and I wanted to do more for my teammates. I sometimes feel selfish enough playing my thief lol.
The condition conversion seems very beneficial as well in WvW when running with a zerg, going to have to give that a try. The staff seems to do well, and I would want at least one weapon for range.
I mostly would be playing WvW, FOTM and some open world PvE as well.
All this information definitely gives me a lot to think about. I had no idea about most of it.
For support you can run shouts with trooper runes and well of power. Because of condi meta it’s what I did to help my allies in wvw.
Really though the best way to support is with boon corruption and pushing hard. If you have allies who don’t want to push very often you might aswell play something else. If my guild leader starts hugging walled objectives and building siege I swap to hammer rev because reapers are garbage for defending/ fighting on the back foot.
Your best team support is not dying, followed by condition management AoE, then dps.
Well of Corruption, WoD, CPC, marks, shouts, Reaper’s whirl finisher, Epidemic, corruptions, chill blasts, condition transfers, and many other debuff (and the precious few buff) skills are there to disadvantage your team’s opponents. Even with a power build, do not underestimate your AoE condi pressure.