Guild Wars 2

Hey everyone. I’m just getting back into this game…I had stopped shortly after hitting 80 on my Necro. I’ve been doing a lot of reading on various builds and can’t decide which I’d like to pursue. The three builds I’m considering are tank, conditions, and hybrid. They’re all based off of a bunch of videos I watched that were made by Nemesis.

Anyway, I’m wondering how important gear is for these builds to be effective, because I don’t have any. A particular concern is that with the tank build, I’d need to hit a certain threshold of tank gear before the build would become viable.

If anybody would like to give input on the build types, I’d love to hear it. My goal is PvE, starting with dungeons and Fractals.

Thanks in advance for any/all help.

I’d say the answer is pretty obvious. Without the proper gear your damage will be absolute crap, and that goes for every class in the game. Want to do condition damage well without condition gear well you won’t do very much damage. Want to tank? without high vit/toughness gear you won’t be doing any of that either.

In my opinion the actual build is only like 25% or 20% of the build. Gear is by far the most important part.

You need gear to be able to have the best statistical ability. That said, only tanks really need their build to work; a dead tank is a worthless tank. Other than that, damage builds then take a big hit because they will be doing a whole lot less damage. Support builds that scale off healing power will also hurt.

Any build that utilizes things with low scaling are the best without gear. Non-damaging conditions, boons, and anything with high flat damage work well. This includes ranger spirits, necro minions, banners, guardian/ele boons, etc. These all scale off traits/the utility themselves, and gear tends to just give minor increases compared to something like a rabid necro, who is nearly useless without gear because the crit chance isn’t there, crit sigils aren’t there, condition damage isn’t there, etc.

I should have been more specific. I have enough gold to buy some starter level 80 gear on the AH for whatever spec I pick – but I won’t have dungeon-level gear. My question is whether or not one of these specs is more dependent on having higher level gear than others.

In this order:

Tank is most expensive, you will need ascended gears.
Hybrid second because you are covering two different styles.
Conditionmancer is cheapest since its one focus only.

That being said hybrid and tank will be funner then a simple conditions build.

Lastly DO NOT BUY YOU EXOTIC GEARS!!!! I made that mistake you will hate the skins and end up farming dungeons for nice skins. Trust me save your money and buy a set of rares and farm dungeons.

By starter L80, do you mean rare quality rather than experimenting with various master quality gear at a much lower price?

In any case, it is generally better to stay away from pieces that add critical damage as Necromancer does not have strong enough direct damage to make up for the missing other stat bonus. Weight more of your stats toward condition damage if you can but there is no issue with mixing the other stats with the exceptions of critical hit damage percent increase and boon duration. You will not need to worry about those stats. In many ways, not using a totally maxed out set like all Rampager or all Cleric’s is a little safer. Too much toughness and vitality makes you a target and cuts into damage output. Too little makes you squishy. If you have enough karma, look at the temple armor sets; possibly adding 1 pc at a time to your set. The temple of Grenth set is a mixed set I found fairly sturdy and reliable while costing no gold.

Carrion is nicely balanced so if you want six of the same type, I would start with that.

Remember that +Crit Damage is a percent on top of normal crit damage so it is not like you cannot critical hit without it.

Another set you may consider early on to compliment your first L80 set is one designed for improved magic find. Again, MF gear is a percent improvment over normal odds so +100 just doubles your odds of getting a better quality drop. Five Runes of the Pirate and one Rune of the Traveller is the cheapest, biggest buff (60%) to majic find. Make no mistake, you will still get rare and very rarely exotic equipment drops even without MF gear.

DeathenShada.6397:

Lastly DO NOT BUY YOU EXOTIC GEARS!!!! I made that mistake you will hate the skins and end up farming dungeons for nice skins. Trust me save your money and buy a set of rares and farm dungeons.

Yes! This person speaks truth!

Rares are pretty good and most people won’t know you’re doing 15% or so less than your potential. Yet they are SO much cheaper. Save for the trinkets you need, because other than ascended (need to run higher level fractals, practically speaking) and karma (only three stat sets), you need to craft the exotic versions.

Just farm dungeon exotics. It isn’t worth it to buy them.

I think guild wars 2 isn’t really gear dependent because the increase from tier to tier is hardly noticeable, unless you are jumping from rare to ascended. If you have exotics, you will not really need ascended but that’s purely for the end-game aesthetic (to have the best of whatever you can have). But gamers are usually perfectionist in this sense, so it’s understood you might eventually want to stack up, but it’s much more forgiving than other mmos. You can run around with greens and still be fine.

Thanks for the tips guys, very helpful.