Guild Wars 2

Hi, everyone.

I used to play GW2 and write quite a lot here on the forums until I took a break from GW2 at the end of 2015. During that time, I was following PvP streams quite a lot but mostly out of habit and for the people, rather than strictly for the game for which, at the time, I completely lost interest.
Fast forward few months and I’m thinking about coming back. I have no idea what PvP and necro looked like last season and would appreciate people sharing their experiences.

In particular, I’m interested to find out:

1. What necro build was dominant last season?
2. How did it fare in different matchup (against mesmers, eles, druids, and so on)?
3. With recent changes to mesmers and the upcoming removal of Mercenary amulet how do you see necro’s viability? What builds do you expect to be played?
4. Can we talk about any, even slight, build diversity or is there still most likely going to be just one competitive build?

Any insight will be greatly appreciated. Sincere apologies if a topic like this was already posted lately – I haven’t had time to read through the forums just yet.

M

From what I can tell the removal of the amulet won’t affect necro as much as other classes. I believe people have been trying vipers amulet for necro these days, but correct me if I am wrong anyone.

Necro was dominant last season in part due to the large chill uptime and strong damage application of chill. They used merc amulet and had decent tank status as well.

This season with the reduction of chill uptime I think people are turning towards vipers or perhaps wanderers, essentially losing out on the toughness and vitality.

They are still pretty strong if used a bit more carefully, but I don’t think you will be seeing many of them in ranked this season.

Yo Leman,

there were quite a lot of variants for meta builds, but mainly merc signet spite, merc shout curses and wanderer shout curses (r55 necro build) which imo was the best one, and actually gained a lot of popularity on EU meta game. Depending on which build you used, you had a better shot against certain classes, but you could pretty much duel everything. Eles did not die without spite, neither druids (unless you were using wanderers), but you had pretty much free win against power based builds such revs/engies. With curses and traited suffer you could win mesms, imo impossible with signet spite. Anyway, necro rotated most of the time with the ele, so its not like duels were that relevant anyway.

Now that merc is going to be removed, I guess that spite builds will switch to carrion and curses builds to wanderers. I dont think vipers is going to be used unless we see a really tanky meta . Warrs were using wanderers as well as merc, so I dont think they are rly affected with the inc changes. Mesm I guess is going to switch to carrion, but not 100% sure. Proly still better than necros, warrs too, so I dont think necrs are going to be meta.

As for inc builds, I’ve tested some of them without merc amulet and it feels rly bad unless you’re playing the wanderers shout. Maybe we’re gonna see some carrion corrupt builds and stuff like this, but I feel like without merc, wanderer curses is the best way to go. Obv everything based on my opinion, while I’m an exp necro I cannot know for sure what top teams have theorycrafted, so…

Also, small patch inc tuesday, so maybe some buffs/nerfs

Sorry for typos or messed stuff, rly late here, omw to bed.

Ok. Thanks for that.

A lot will depend on whether power Rev stays as powerful for S3 or not. If it gets some major nerfs, Wanderer’s builds might be okay.

What if Necro receives no balance patch notes at all? : O