Guild Wars 2

I currently run condi and I want to have a power set to swap builds when necessary/I feel like it. The ones I’m familiar with run full zerker but I have heard people running knight or cavaliers, and then there are the whole slew of HoT stats like captain marauder and all sorts of other stuff that I didn’t see too many people messing with yet. What’s all your opinion on the different gear sets for running power necro?

Also what about the runes for these power do you guys think work well with the power build? Strength runes for sure has a place I think but those things aren’t cheap!

This is my actual build and works really well.
I crafted this set before the expansion so I have all the trinkets with Knight stats but you may want to try Captain and drop the Sigils of Accuracy.

Necros are actually a really interesting case. You can go full Zerker if you want and still have a good amount of tankiness and sustain, or you can mix in Knight’s, Valkyrie’s, Cavalier’s, even some Soldier’s gear and still deal good damage. This is especially true for Reaper builds since they get access to Decimate Defenses, which can grant up to 50% free crit chance. Combine that with Deathly Perception and a Valkyrie Reaper will hit exactly as hard as a full Zerker Reaper while in Death Shroud against anyone with maxed Vuln. Crazy, right?

My suggestion would be to play around with it and see how much mitigation is right for you. Full Zerker has the fewest caveats and allows for the greatest flexibility in trait selection, but it’s also less able to stand its ground against heavy-hitters, which means lower damage uptime if you don’t play near-perfectly.

As for runes, I run Runes of Strength and they work really spectacularly. Then again, I also picked them up literally years ago, back when they were around 50s each. I’ve been so satisfied with Strength runes that I haven’t bothered to experiment with other sets.

Berserker with Scholar is still the best way to go. Sigils are usually Force + Air, though there are some other options that can possibly be taken into consideration, albeit usually not as good if you’re looking for more damage. Not sure how Hydromancy compares against Air on Nec, though I assume it loses out.
Valkyrie/Cavalier… are more dependant on party buffs and actually keeping up 25 stacks of vuln (which really isn’t an issue in organized groups, but well, pugs.) Also, keeping Berserker-gear gives you the advantage of swapping it around to other chars if necessary once you have ascended.

Really depends on how good you are at dodging and how lazy you want to be while playing. I’m lazy but a decent player and run knight’s armor w/ eagle runes. Ascended zerker weps plus ascended zerker trinkets. Minotaur steaks and cheapo oil because it’s PVE. I still do a considerable amount of damage and it’s pretty hard to ever go into a downed state even if lazily beating on a champ. Best way to see what works for you is to go to pvp lobby and try different stats against Svanir and see what you like.

So no one tried and liked any of the new HoT sets? i was curious on people’s thoughts on them

There’s this Crusader MM build which has a ridiculous amount of sustain, especially now that minions take almost no damage in pve.

There’s also a coopted wvw build that translates well for solo pve.

I just go full zerker stats. With Rise and the Shroud together your overall survivability is higher than anything else I’ve played in the game. I use Runes of the Traveler for the permanent movement boost on my Necro’s armor.

I use a Chilling Victory/Blighter’s Boon build with that setup. The silly amounts of chill and might from it mean that the shroud is rarely down for long in combat, and when it IS down, I have plenty of tools to wipe out masses of things without difficulty. It’s good for PvE, and in PvP/WvW I’ve had some small success which I attribute more to the other players being even worse at PvP/WvW than I am rather than anything to do with my gear.