Guild Wars 2

just as a quick note, i’m only concerned with sPvP in regards to this topic.

i want to play a bunker necromancer. i have read a few posts saying that necros can’t bunker as well as elementalists or guardians. i don’t have the experience with the class to know whether or not that is true. i do love the necro. he/she is all dark and depressed and what not. i also like getting hit in the face. so, naturally playing a bunker necro, or at least a tankyish necro, makes sense to me.

so far i’ve been leaning towards some sort of 0/0/30/20/20 or 0/0/20/30/20 type build. or maybe 0/0/20/20/30. i’m not too sure. i just can’t figure out what stats i should be more concerned about most. is it better to go more condition damage with a shaman’s amulet, or would having 28,000 health and 2,800 armor via soldier’s be more useful? i sometimes run a kitten 00/20/30/20 with wells, dagger/focus – axe/warhorn, and soldier’s amulet in hotjoin. it’s stupidly fun. but i’m not sure it would translate well to tPvP. i do realize i’d at the very least need to swap one of those weapon sets out for the staff if i were to run it in tournaments.

to summarize, i’m basically asking: what is the general consensus on bunkering as a necromancer, and how should i go about doing it effectively?

I’ll try my hand at this.

(Copy and paste link)

http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=;0_-34J0-I-J0m3ZJkJ0;9;6JJT;413-27-39Aa-F1SZ;0Rk06Rk069cL

Reasoning:

Your main goal as a bunker is to be as hard to kill as possible. So think about what makes something hard to kill. Lots of health and armor is the most basic thing. Necromancers also have DS and Plague. And then there’s boons. Specifically regeneration, protection, and stability. Finally there’s some conditions that help reduce incoming damage, like weakness.

How does this build take advantage of those things? Necromancer has a high base health. This build has 20k. It also has over 3000 armor. The life force pool is increased by 30% through Soul Reaping, making DS better at absorbing damage. Mark of Blood provides a ton of regeneration. Protection comes from traited wells, Spectral Armor, and the automatic Spectral Armor. It also comes from runes and sometimes from Well of Power. Stability mostly comes from Foot in the Grave (SR 30pt major). AoE weakness is created through staff 3+4 and from dagger 5.

Basically your goal is to be as annoying as possible while using your AoEs for area denial. Keep in mind that your marks are both huge and unblockable. Swap weapons regularly to keep the weakness up. It’s really an underrated condition.

IMO the main reason people say Necro can’t be a good bunker is because it requires much more skill than the Guardian and Elementalist. Those two classes have easy access to stability and essentially just stack their boons and go to town. Necro has less stability and is more reliant on cooldowns to be effective in this role. Still, it looks quite good on paper. Keep in mind I threw the build together in about five minutes. With proper practice and testing I’m sure it could be improved.

Necro Advice not derived from wiki incoming:

Necro has no tools to be a bunker.

Necro bunker requires multiple attacking targets. So it is completely negated by a single roamer with ranged weapons. Necro can’t heal off what it can’t hit. And the Minions which should provide those additional bunker tools are useless in competitive play. Especially when they take up utility slots, can’t path over a blade of grass, and often don’t even attack hostile targets.

However, when Necro has a solid pile of hostile targets, Necro is a powerful bunker. So you can feasibly perform the damage soak roles of a bunker and hold a point as long as you have multiple targets within range to hit and stack healing reactive from.

I personally think all bunkers should have this kind of forced dependence on multiple targets. Whether ally or enemy. An empty bunker is just a building no one wants to go in because of the smell. I want to see all bunker builds for all classes rely on both allies and enemies.

tl;dr

Necro has no feasible solo bunker build that does not rely on R1 enemies. Necro has an amazing support bunker build that can soak up enormous amounts of damage as long as there are allies with stability enemies to attack.

i think the real goal behind necro’s “bunkering” is going to be DS uptime. that means you need life force generation out the @$# so that your health pool stays off topic.

daggers create far and away the most life force.
locus swarm generates life force when it connects, and persists through death shroud.
spectral armor, spectral walk generate life force when we take damage outside of death shroud.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fQQQRBIhdG1IjW3e2mvG9mCQqg1TF+OSxxKT9A+2RH;TEAA1A

-life force generation: with locust/spectral armor and automatic locust/spectral armor at 25/50%. Axe 2 and Dagger 1.

-stun breakers: spectral armor, flesh worm (also gens life force)

-over 50% protection up time from spectral wall alone (so, more with boon duration and popping spectral armor).

-condition removal every 5 seconds from death shroud, or from dagger offhand / heal.

-has knockdown, cripple, immobolize, daze

the biggest weakness of a necro bunker imo is healing. what makes guardians and ele’s such excellent bunkers (or rather, pigeon holes them into +healing) is that their naturally low health is compensated by ridiculous healing coefficients and large variety of incombat heals. while necro’s have DS, they really completely on DS to get them through until their heal is off cooldown.

Wiki and tooltips suggest DS is the go to Necro feature, but sadly it is far from it do to bugs that allow both the user to prematurely end DS, but also any attacker watching the animations can also time a strike that will end DS prematurely.

So yes, on paper DS should be more than a save to proc boons and absorb some extra damage, but in practice DS is nothing but a save that you cannot rely on for any kind of sustained defense or offense.

Any time at all spent in competitive sPvP breaks down your reliance on DS. You can’t build Life Force fast enough in competitive play to maintain a DS rotation so you will find yourself using it less and less over time.

Build up and boom never works in competitive PvP. Anet is very shortsighted in this as well as many other extremely obvious PvP issues they have just adopted in what seems like a dart board collection of traits and features.

thank you guys so much for the advice and builds to try out. i now have a better perspective on both the play-style of the necromancer and how to use our tools effectively. if anyone else has any suggestions or anything to add, feel free. i’ll continue to watch for new posts and hopefully we will generate some more information for other people out there. i know there have been many times that i’ve come to the forums to just read and learn.