Guild Wars 2

It just seems to me that increasing the damage of Rending Claws by about 50% would
a) actually make the attack worth using, ever
b) give necros a means of dealing almost decent damage to structures from range

Currently when it comes to structures, necros have a small number of options. They can use Necrotic Slash, but this requires you to be in melee range and also in a power build that actually uses main hand dagger. They can use minions, but minions just aren’t great and the AI will usually go attack some nearby mobs instead of the structure you want them to focus down. Staff autoattack is kind of okay-ish, but staff as a whole really relies on the autoattack combined with the dots from Mark of Blood and Chillblains to actually maintain any kind of reasonable DPS. Axe is usually regarded as a worthless weapon, even builds that use it for the Ghastly Claws spike damage don’t use the autoattack because it has less DPS then any of the other options available to the necromancer at any given time.

Interested in hearing what other people think about this.

Also may as well use this topic for another suggestion I wanted to make;
Include the Death Shroud skills under the weapon skills tab in the hero panel, as well as other sub form skills like the abilities you have in Lich Form and Plague, for the purposes of making these much easier to familiarize with and remember.

Yeah I almost never use the Axe to be honest.
Ghastly Claws is great but Dagger just deals so much more damage overall.

With a Knight/Zerker mix you can just melee mobs, heal, melee some more.
Then when you are at low health you just dodge backwards, Life Siphon, use off-hand skills or Life Blast, heal again and get right back in to melee some more.

I rather take a Staff with me for the 1200 range Life Force building and mass Condition transfer plus Chill.

Unholy Feast could use some adjustments too, if you ask me.

the axe is a 1h I use it with the focus so that it does have chill, and yes the dagger is way better dps, but you can’t be melee at all times, so for a secoundary weapon you need something with range and at least for power builds compared to a scepter or staff it does good dmg. I just think they need to increase the range of the axe to 900

PlasticHippo.8934:

the axe is a 1h I use it with the focus so that it does have chill, and yes the dagger is way better dps, but you can’t be melee at all times, so for a secoundary weapon you need something with range and at least for power builds compared to a scepter or staff it does good dmg. I just think they need to increase the range of the axe to 900

Yeah many people from every Profession start off with a melee weapon and then fall back and switch to a ranged weapon when they get to low Health.
That’s very standard, isn’t it?

Thing is if you are running a Power build as a Necromancer and have full Life Force you can often just use Life Blast instead of Axe.
It has 900 range and if you trait for Unyielding Blast it even pierces mobs.

When I wanna get up close and deal lots of damage I use the Dagger.
When I need to fall back a bit I’ll use Death Shroud.

When I wanna stay as far as possible and/or play very defensively or my party has tons of Conditions on them I use the Staff.

With all that said using Life Siphon → switch → Ghastly Claws is pretty nice, and I’m not surprised that there are builds that use both Dagger and Axe.

You’re right though that the axe shouldn’t deal as much damage as the dagger, because if it did no one would use dagger due to the range disadvantage, but as it is now the axe could be buffed considerably before it even came close to having as much dps as the dagger.

If you go axe you use a life force build with fury and use DS auto attack instead of axe AA. I find it easy to work around the drawbacks and to make use of the cool stuff. But yes the auto attack of dagger and axe are incomparable and i hope it gets fixed, its a cool weapon otherwise, the problem is you basically just get 2 skills from a MH.

You can never afford to use axe and dagger at the same time because you need aoe damage and control, and staff is your only source of it besides axe #3.

Zenith.7301:

You can never afford to use axe and dagger at the same time because you need aoe damage and control, and staff is your only source of it besides axe #3.

And death shroud 4, and well of suffering, and epidemic, and plague.

Axe 1 has no use at all and should not be used under any circumstance, ANYTHING including turning around and running is better than Axe 1. Its not even a damage issue, Axe 1 needs to do more than what it dose now.

I’m not sure about a 50% buff on Rending Claws (Axe 1) most people including myself use Axe for either the utility of Unholy Feast (Axe 3) or the burst damage of Ghastly Claws (Axe 2) and i rarely find myself auto-attacking (although any buff would be welcomed).

Blood Curse (Scepter 1) does need a massive boost to structure damage though. They should introduce a hidden ‘structure damage’ stat on all weapons so it doesnt interfere with balance.

It kitten es me off that they still haven’t fixed this.
Has anyone played a warrior? Used warrior axe? Compare it to this. It’s like playing a character 50 or 60 levels lower, that is the damage difference. The pitiful extra range on it or vulnerability is no excuse. Plus actually i can hit stuff quite far away from me on warrior with my axe due to the cleaving, it’s quite a wide arc.

1. it needs to cleave.
2. it needs to do a lot more damage. Amazingly, even traited the AA sucks. You can’t even say, “it needs trait to be usable” because it isn’t true.

Tobias.8632:

Zenith.7301:

You can never afford to use axe and dagger at the same time because you need aoe damage and control, and staff is your only source of it besides axe #3.

And death shroud 4, and well of suffering, and epidemic, and plague.

LOL, one is a channel that doesn’t last at all in pvp under pressure, well of suffering is on a 40 sec cd, and both epidemic and plague are condition build weapons — they do jackkitten for power builds.

Zenith.7301:

Tobias.8632:

Zenith.7301:

You can never afford to use axe and dagger at the same time because you need aoe damage and control, and staff is your only source of it besides axe #3.

And death shroud 4, and well of suffering, and epidemic, and plague.

LOL, one is a channel that doesn’t last at all in pvp under pressure, well of suffering is on a 40 sec cd, and both epidemic and plague are condition build weapons — they do jackkitten for power builds.

Locust Swarm is both damage and control at the same time. And it works in power builds. And it boosts Life Force while providing swiftness, so there’s some support too. And it procs on-crit effects very reliably.

No real point here. Just saying Locust Swarm is pretty awesome.

Locust Swarm’s aoe damage is pretty negligible.

Locust + Well of Suffering + Lich Form = easy 9k+ DPS