Guild Wars 2

I’m thinking about totally support concentrated build with maximum healing power and good survivability for dungeons/hard events with small party and of course just for fun cause it’s all about it, isn’t? Full Cleric’s gear with Runes of Dwayna, staff + axe/focus with sigils of life and water. Feel free to share your thoughts:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fQQQNAW3djQaR7daia87JAZGPj90DyHfb4D5C

I run a similar build 10/0/30/30/0 with Dwayna runes and Staff Dagger/Focus.

Stop running the Axe, the DPS is bad and you can get better vulnerability from your focus and using one of your wells. Dagger has far superior damage potential (at least twice if not more then Axe) and it gains you life force while DPSing. You will be tanky as well if you spec into boon duration and healing so you should be able to afford the melee range just fine.

I highly recomend using the stacks of might on life blast as well as blood is power (swapping out one of your wells for it is your call depending on your group comp) to take maximum advantage of your boon duration and actually put out decent DPS. Built correctly your DPS won’t be bad and your support capabilities are nothing short of amazing.

When things start to get rough pop Well of Blindness or Plague Form and proceed to blind your foes.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fQIQNAW4djQah6daqb87JCpHY7aPb6B5624gK8eA;T8AgzymEMJZS1kiJqbM3Iuxej7G5NrGGbs3A

You don’t need the Regeneration Duration increase from Rune of Dwayna, nor the additional Regeneration procs, as the uptime is already 100% between Mark of Evasion and Mark of Blood from Staff.

Embalmer

Aexrael.5918:

You don’t need the Regeneration Duration increase from Rune of Dwayna, nor the additional Regeneration procs, as the uptime is already 100% between Mark of Evasion and Mark of Blood from Staff.

Embalmer

The reason for using Dwayna rune is more WvW centric, whenever I hit heal I spit out an 1000HPS+ AoE heal around me including regeneration. Sometimes you can’t proc your regeneration mark off of anything and there is nothing for focus #4 to bounce off on.

The duration is not necessarily but it is helpful in certain situations.

Also the build I linked is outdated, I use the heal on exit from death shroud instead of heal on life transfer.

How much does that typically heal for (and at what healing power)? Does it heal you as well or just allies around you?

At around 1200 healing power:

Regeneration ticks for about 289.
Well of Blood ticks every second for around 670.
Leaving death shroud heals for about 700.

Also you should have supperior sigils of water which proc for about what regeneration does.

Some half decent builds here, but some flaws. Starting with the OP, the 15pt box in Spite and 25pt box in Curses are not worth it, go get something good instead. Your skills on the toolbar are fine.

The Axe will grant more Vulnerability than giving up a utility for a Well and have no downtime, keep it – it also has half decent range, enough to keep you out of melee. Standing in melee range of many enemies and bosses is suicide. However, the 600 range attacks still count as melee and so they’re not reflected or blocked by any projectile affecting abilities and walls.

Sundial has good input, even if I disagree with much of it as well. One key part he does have right however, that I’ve yet to see anyone other than myself do for a support spec, is pour 30pts into Death Magic. My advice is to take all the same boxes as he in that line.

Finally, I find Sigil of Water’s proc to be very, very low and uncommon as well. I’ve changed to Sigil of Life on my staff and second set’s mainhand, and Sigil of Energy on my second set’s offhand. Twenty five stacks of the Life sigil, which you should nearly always have up unless you manage to die a lot in this tanky spec, means 250+ healing power. That’s tasty – if you keep 30pts in Blood Magic, something I’ve not done, it will mean 800+ heal ticks on Well of Blood and 340ish ticks on your regen. The other sigil gives you an extra dodge on weapon swap.

This is all assuming you’re in full exotic Cleric’s gear.

Melee on SOME bosses is suicide, but with my build you are so ridiculously tanky I rarely find it to be too problematic. I do sometimes switch to my Axe however depending on the fight. I just find Dagger better the vast majority of the time with my build but I won’t totally discredit people that run Axe most of the time with their build since they may have no focus on doing much damage at all.

And yes, Sigil of Life is amazing even in WvW with a build like this. You are so tanky with these types of builds that you shouldn’t be going downed often, allowing you to get a massive bonus to healing. Even in dungeons I keep +25 stacks up most of the time.

Runes of the Water and Runes of the Monk both have +Healing Power and +Boon Duration which are the bread and butter of a support Necro. You can get your Protections and Regenerations to last a good amount of time with Death Magic and +Boon Duration Runes.

Very good point Savoth. Superior Rune of the Water looks very nice for increasing the duration of protection (which is already at +50% if you use Onmomberry Creams).

How much does the heal proc off of it for you because that would really be the deciding factor in whether I switch to it or not.

I run a 3/3 split for the +15% Boon Duration from both Rune sets. I’m not sure if they stack cumulatively, directly, or respectively, but my boons last a long time and that’s what I wanted.
I’m not a big fan of the heal procs personally. The weapon ones don’t do enough and my Well will heal enough to get anyone to full making the proc moot.

How long is a long time?

Right now my tooltip shows 4 1/2s with +30% from traits and +20% from food.

I would be curious to see how long it is with your rune setup + consumable.

I don’t know if it has changed in an update, but a while ago tooltips on abilities only reflect +duration from traits and weapon sigils. So it may say 4.5 seconds from the +30% traits it could be even longer than that. Test it with a friend to see.

The reason I said this is I tested a bleed build with 100% increase in bleed duration, but the tooltips only reflected a 40% increase in duration (+10% sigil of agony and +30% from traiting into spite). Fortunately, when cast the actual move lasted the full 100% increase in duration.

Munster.3058:

I don’t know if it has changed in an update, but a while ago tooltips on abilities only reflect +duration from traits and weapon sigils. So it may say 4.5 seconds from the +30% traits it could be even longer than that. Test it with a friend to see.

The reason I said this is I tested a bleed build with 100% increase in bleed duration, but the tooltips only reflected a 40% increase in duration (+10% sigil of agony and +30% from traiting into spite). Fortunately, when cast the actual move lasted the full 100% increase in duration.

yea the tooltip dont update at all beyond a certain % had a freeze build wich said it lasted 6.25 second while in reality it last 11+ seconds

Sundial.9015:

How long is a long time?

Right now my tooltip shows 4 1/2s with +30% from traits and +20% from food.

I would be curious to see how long it is with your rune setup + consumable.

My staff regeneration lasted about 9 seconds and the protection from my Wells lasted around 6 seconds without consumables (fractions how I loath you). All other boons had similar boosts of around a 2x duration.

At around 1200 healing power:
Regeneration ticks for about 289.
Well of Blood ticks every second for around 670.
Leaving death shroud heals for about 700.

Well of Blood is a beast with its long duration! How frequently does it pulse by the way, is it 1" or 3" nowadays?
700 for Deathly Invigoration sounds pretty underwhelming actually… Does it at least heal you as well as people around you? Or just people around you?
I assume by the fact that you switched that Transfusion was even worse?

eh…i tried something like this last week, its actually very sub par compared to other class iterations of ‘heal-heavy support’. Even a shout warrior can do better. This is primarily due to the death shroud heals not working as intended (supposedly). Its just not very good.

kKagari, its not so much the heals as everything else that goes along with it. IMO one dimensional heal builds are far from optimal. Good support builds do many things well.

You offer alot to a group that other classes speced for support can’t. AoE blinds are a big one (Plague Form, Well of Blinding). You have plenty of other CC to go around as well.

You can still do decent DPS if you spec correctly in addition to all of your healing/support/CC abilities.

Oh, I agree we have a lot of utility for doing all kinds of stuff, but just from the healing aspect, its a bit of a waste of time. Wells are great, I use them a lot. I feel like necromancers have to go out of their way to ‘share’ their healing with others, so I personally would ignore that and just support with boons or condition removal.

I’d just like to voice that it’s my opinion that no Necromancer using Cleric’s gear has decent DPS.

However, kKagari, I strongly disagree. Necromancer has some of the best healing for others, outside of Guardian’s elite and Blast spamming Water fields. Life Transfer, Mark of Blood and Well of Blood are nice to have and you’d lose a lot by not having them. The second issue is what you claim we should focus on removing conditions and applying boons – we’re very limited in boons and our condition removals arn’t anything special.

And to then agree with Sundial, pure healing is a waste. You need to blind them, you need to make good use of your combo fields and finishers (area weakness or area retaliation in particular), you have an area daze if you take the warhorn, fears, snares and much more. The best kind of support Necro, the one we play, will tank, heal and debuff all at once.

OK I take your point, this build does provide a lot of utility other than healing to the team, with all the blinds etc, so it’s wrong to view it in terms of raw numbers along.

However, if you’re telling me that Deathly Invigoration, a MASTER level MAJOR trait, heals for a piddly 700 at healing power 1200, when the Elementalist MINOR trait Healing Ripple heals for twice as much at zero healing power, then I have to lift my hands up and say they just don’t want us playing healing builds!

I fully acknowledge that the necro offers stuff to their team over and above their healing ability that other professions don’t, but, well, so do the others. Elementalists have more heals, higher damage even when specced for healing, and very frequent condition removals, and Guardians have more tankiness, cc and group boons. Not saying those are better, just saying everyone brings something unique to the table, and the very least you can do to maintain balance is to ensure parity between equivalent-level abilities. So if a master-level trait that does exactly the same thing (passively-activated PBAOE heal triggered by activating your class mechanic every 15" in the case of the ele or 10" in the case of the necro, so they’re pretty much equivalent) is twice as effective on one class than in the other, well, that’s clear evidence of poor attention to balance or dodgy quality control.

It’s true we have quite good condition removal though – even with Plague Signet bugged (which will hopefully be quite powerful when/if it’s fixed), we also have Staff #4 and Well of Power, so that’s quite a lot of options. (Although I’m not sure how many conditions per pulse Well of Power converts, if it’s only one then that would be somewhat underpowered compared to the other wells…) But again, not something other classes too can’t achieve.

Mhm, don’t take Deathly Invigoration – then you’re set. I dropped it on my support build a long time ago.

Well of Power converts them one at a time once per second for five seconds.

Yeah, I actually dropped that yesterday.

Its really sad how bad the traits are in that line. I am actually considering dropping 10 points out of blood magic and putting it in curses (But chilling darkness is bugged still sidefrown) I could put it in Soul Reaping too for the additional life force gain and vulnerability on death blast. Ten more in Spite could work too to give marks +10% damage. I tried wells siphoning HP and I found it to be lackluster.

It just seems like all the options I have are lackluster and have little synergy.

I dropped those ten points when I dropped Deathly Invigoration, there’s nothing worth having after Life Transfer’s heal and the Well cooldown reduction.

Chilling Darkness works just fine on your blind circle, even if it has no effect on Plague. It’s very good for pushing and keeping foes in your buddies’ AoE circles – as well as having more attacks miss you. I recommend trying it.

In my opinion all siphoning and that mark damage box are nonfactor traits.

Karther.7481:

I’d just like to voice that it’s my opinion that no Necromancer using Cleric’s gear has decent DPS.

However, kKagari, I strongly disagree. Necromancer has some of the best healing for others, outside of Guardian’s elite and Blast spamming Water fields. Life Transfer, Mark of Blood and Well of Blood are nice to have and you’d lose a lot by not having them. The second issue is what you claim we should focus on removing conditions and applying boons – we’re very limited in boons and our condition removals arn’t anything special.

And to then agree with Sundial, pure healing is a waste. You need to blind them, you need to make good use of your combo fields and finishers (area weakness or area retaliation in particular), you have an area daze if you take the warhorn, fears, snares and much more. The best kind of support Necro, the one we play, will tank, heal and debuff all at once.

I agree necromancers are great for support, but if we are talking healing, and just healing, there is no way necromancers are among the best. Engineers can easily provide better heals with just the med kit alone. We’re likely on par with a water attuned elementalist. A heavily specced heal warrior can provide OK utility but awesome instantaneous 2-3k aoe heals also.

And yes, pure healing is a waste, which is why skills like deathly invigoration sucks, 700hp heal at with full clerics + blood traits. Life transfusion would be ok if it scaled with healing power but it doesnt, which ends up being a slow HoT that is easily interrupted.

Derk.3189:

We’re likely on par with a water attuned elementalist. A heavily specced heal warrior can provide OK utility but awesome instantaneous 2-3k aoe heals also.

I played as a healing ele in spvp (stole zravex’s build), and believe me, they provide FAR MORE raw healing! Just indicatively, check out my post above about Healing Ripple, which heals for 1,200 on attunement even with nothing in Healing Power, and is only a minor trait!
Condition removal is debatable, they cleanse a single condition every 5-10" or so, but can’t remove multiple conditions like necros can with their Staff #4 skill (keep forgetting what it’s called) or well of power. So only one at a time, but far more frequently.

my minion master got some innate healing too. it’s great if you know how to time the mark of blood to hit your whole team good ticks of 190 heal add that to the 292 heal from life transfar x9 and you got yourself a pretty good healer very underrated sure its not super but every bit helps.