Guild Wars 2

Evening! I am new, still downloading I am looking at either making Thief or Necro as my main profession, I am just looking for some insight into the class from folks who have been playing. I have read that Necro damage is not on par with a lot of other classes and they are very squishy. Thanks in advance for any information =)

Hey there and welcome! I would say take a look at some of the guides around and see if any of them are of any particular interest to you and/or tickle your fancy in terms of what you’re looking for!

Nemesis has some great ones in the sticky at the top:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/Necromancer-tutorials

Lopez also has a few guides that I think are very well-written:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/Guides-for-condition-necromancer-Updated

And if you’re wanting something a bit tougher, take a look at another one I like:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/Juggermancer-Final-Blog-Link

Of course, there are more, just have a glance through the forums.

Overall, I really enjoy my Necromancer! I havn’t gotten much into Thief myself, so I can’t give you too much good info there, sadly. What sort of aspects were you wanting to get into with the game? Anything that you particularly tend to like to do (i.e. Glass Cannon bursts, longer games of attrition, etc.)?

Thief is 10x more squishy than necro, in fact if you really wanted to you could build quite the tanky necro. Necro currently has lots of bugs and bad skills, I’ll go ahead and get that out, but it also has the most adaptability to play it pretty much however you feel comfortable. Yes some builds are more powerful than others and are the flavor of the month, but you’ll always have that. If you can stick with necro long enough to learn it well, I can just about guarantee you’ll like it more than thief. The only thing I use my thief for now is storage space :-P

From a Necro standpoint I will tell you my experience when I first started a Necro.

I found that for the first 20 odd levels that I had used pets and they were quite effective in the lower level area’s. Despite alot of their shortcomings in the higher level area’s when you first start off with them you will be asking what all the complaining is about. It is only when you start getting higher up in level and moving into the higher level area’s and doing dungeons that alot of the issue’s start becoming evident.

For me the middle levels were the hardest for levelling my Necro. Mainly because you don’t have enough points for the useful Traits ie lower the Well’s cooldown for them to be effective. So you are mostly stuck with corruption skills or spectral skills, but if you can stick with it when you get past this dip the class starts picking up again.

The higher you get up the better Necro’s start to get and its at this point you can start moulding it into the build route that you plan going. I found that levelling up Necro you will probably visit the retrait guy a few times along the way to adjust the build for the various stages of levelling.

Necro compared to a Thief is dependant on what you plan doing. I tried Thief and I found him to be very squishy and had to be very careful in PVE events and WvW. Necro on the other hand I found alot easier for events and although they may not shine in WvW I am finding that the Necro shines more when running in a group. It doesn’t mean you cannot do 1v1 or 1v2 but you do need to be really good to pull it off.

If your expecting to do really high numbers then the Thief is the way to go but at the same time, although you deal high numbers you are very squishy. But the Thief is one of the best classes for escaping fights. Alot of people are going Thief because of seeing videos of a thief taking on large groups of people and surviving. The problem being is the people making these videos are really good and/or culling issue’s in WvW making stealth seem overpowered and helping the situation in these battles.

There are quite a few thief’s running around WvW because of this and more times than not they die. On the rare occasion I will meet a really good Thief in WvW who will kill me, maybe they are more prominent in sPVP/tPVP but I couldn’t tell you as I do not play sPVP/tPVP much. I will say it is dependant on your build for this as some Necro builds are alot squishier than others and dealing with a Thief is alot harder in certain builds. I still find it amusing watching a Thief pop out of stealth hit me thinking im a squishy only to try stealth and get out of there.

I still find Necro the most fun and yes we have bugs and our class does have issue’s but we are still viable. We may or may not be worse off than other classes that is still up for debate but I have fun with Necro and having tried the other classes out, Necro is still the one class I enjoy the most playing the game.