Guild Wars 2

I played my whole necro’s life as some sort of minion master: it was not a killer build, but was very easy to play. When I started doing seriously WvW and dungeons, my minions where more and more innefective (but still very survivable!). And with the last update, I choose to change my build to a powermancer (sort of. 30/10/0/0/30).

I’m still getting used to it, but so far, I am normally the second-to-last to die, and I feel that I am doing a lot more damage, so I’m ok. The only drawback is that now I struggle a lot to heal myself up, since I don’t have minions healing me.

Last nite, I said to my party that I was doing 3500 dmg to a boss, and my comrades said “yay!”, since it was a very good damage. But to other bosses I only do 500 dmg or so.

So, my questions are:

a) When you say “My build does XXXX dmg normally”, you are testing it against which type of mob? Depending on the mob you will make more or less damage, so testing it against different mobs will throw different results.

b) Which dmg is ok to a necro’s powerbuild? I had read of 8000+ dmg, but I don’t know how to reach that number, or against which mob was it tested (see point “a”).

I think peple are just making stuff up. There is no way that they can measure their damage, since there is no damage meter. But against bosses and training golems in sPvP, you can get a pretty good idea whether you’re dealing decent damage or not. Especially if you practice with different professions and test their individual damage.

Tbh people concern themselves way too much with damage and too little with effeciency.

It’s not the size of the boat, it’s the motion of the ocean. lol

The Veteran Giant in Cursed Shore is a popular target to use for a reference.

See for example:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/LF-Necromancer-Veteran-Giant-DPS-Test-Videos/first#post2498885

See also Nemesis’ youtube channel, such as the recent Hybrid Necro video.

There’s no DPS meters, there’s no inspect gear.

I’ve noticed, it’s usually the guy who died 5-10sec into many fights that’s telling others they are doing it wrong. (Zerker war, not in CoF1 lots of the time)

They hybrid build they recommend, dose more damage UNTIL you get with others. If there’s say a guard in the party, your going to fight for the Burning slot, if there’s any others with condi in there spec’s, your going to fight for bleeds as well. Lots of dungy boss’s have reduced condi & condi clears. So that super damage build solo on a PvP dummy is going to soon push way behind yours.

The next thing is, lots of necro’s are running that build. Lots of necro’s are again asked to swap class, get kicked on join, or if the groups nice, simply asked to sit out as it’s not worth them res’ing you over and over. It’s defiantly not as tanky as your build. And a dead necro, dose no damage.

So, play how you want to play. I’d recommend not being dead, power builds in pve.

DPS is highly dependent on your surrounding. How many warriors do you have in group? How many vulnerability stacking classes do you have in group? However, in most cases your DS life blast should do between 4k-7k on average. Which is fine compared to other classes in my opinion.

Yeah… you can check my channel for some math calculations in different builds…
But if you notice, i always use “~” or the word “average” because it is never exactly “that”.
The combat system in this game is dynamic, therefor you have to move… break combat which decreases your DPS.

There is also no tanking / agro system… sometimes a boss chases only you therefor your DPS is almost nothing.
It’s about overall effectiveness… how to increase your absolute most maximum, so you have from what to lose from when you break combat.
It’s also about a bit of survivability… so your minimum DPS is never 0.

Once you understand these, once you know “What is the right question”, you may find the right answer… which is always “I do between X and Y DPS… i do X single target Y AoE – burst / sustained”.

edit: It’s also about single target DPS and AoE, it’s about burst and sustain…

For example…
What good is that you can AoE burst 150.000 damage once every 40 seconds, if the mobs you are fighting have 200.000 health, you are pretty much screwed… you need sustain damage there…

What good is that you can sustain AoE damage 350.000 every epidemic cycle aka every 12 seconds, if you single target DPS is capped at 3750 and you’re mostly fighting few mobs… aka speed runs.

I have Level 80 Warrior, Mesmer, Necro, Engineer, and Thief.

Necro definitely has great sustained damage. Do not let people confuse you with how impressive their burst is. It is exactly like they said. If a Boss has 200k health, someone who can consistently pull 6k dps is better than someone who can upload 40k dps in 4 seconds then sit there auto attacking at 2k dps for a long period of time.

You cannot really test it per sae, but you can make other characters to 80 to have an idea of the damage between classes. This game does not have a DPS tool that keeps track of your actual damage per second, and people tend to forget that time spent moving around or not bursting drops your actual damage per second from the impressive burst you might do a few seconds ago.

A lot of mobs in PVE tend to have similar or the same toughness as each other. It saves time.

I’ve used Life Blast on my PVE Power build on the Icebrood in HotW, as well as the risen on cursed shore, ant does the same damage: around 5k a pop. Then you just need to figure out how fast you attack and you’re good.

large stacks of vulnerability are going to help our your overall damage and weakness is going to drop your DPS a large amount.

I run the same build 30 10 0 0 30, I was in a a low level map killing a Veteran Ogre Hunter and he spammed weakness on me so much it took literally 3 minutes to kill him. The other mobs around him respawned three times, and my wells kept coming off CD repeatedly which is how I got the time figured out.

I used my heal to cleanse but he would put that weakness right back on me instantly it was a real pain in the rear fight.

Out of curiosity, has anyone else noticed that Dodging doesn’t always interrupt Life Blast? I’ve had a number of times when I fire the blast off mid-dodge, or as soon as my dodge finished.