Guild Wars 2

I’m gonna start leveling up my necro hopefully tomorrow but am looking for a decent build that I can use to level with. Haven’t found a guide, maybe haven’t looked hard enough. Am looking for what skills are best to use as well as what to place in early traits (11-20, 20-30, etc). What weapons/armor are best to use early on along with stats. When I do reach dungeon levels I plan to level there when I can (may skip AC though), so what type of builds (traits/skills/gear) work well in dungeons early on? Am curious about end game gear too was thinking that prec, tough, condi being a good combo but since I’m new to this I can’t be sure. I know by end game equip I’d like to use staff as a secondary wep at the least. Thanks in advance for taking the time to help, it’s very much appreciated.

Aw, really? 94 glances and no response? Not even a here’s a guide you could look at or a general point in the right direction. kk.

I personally like staff and scepter/warhorn. All of my traits are in blood magic, death magic and spite. It works pretty well. I like using lots of minions, that way I almost never tank the damage.

I don’t know much about dungeons.

Is this about leveling up as fast as possible or is it rather a “the journey is the reward”-type situation?

I’d try a power/wells build. You can get the aoe from wells and nice single target from axe or dagger…or both if you want.

I have been running with axe/focus and dagger/war horn. A variation of talentless’ but since I’m only 34 so far for my utilities I use the DMG wells and spectral walk. The wells make up for your lack of aoe DMG. For the elite, its a toss up until you can get the reaper.

For traits I have been going into the death shroud line for the vulern and piercing on blast and the power line for lowered cool down on focus abilities and increased range.

I usually stick to axe/focus unless I need to siphon health or gain life force with dagger quickly. However using spectral walk in the middle of a fight and face tanking you gain life force super quick, then you can pop into Death shroud and just blast away.

There is really a ton of ways you can go, just try different things and find what you like. I’m tempted to even drop dagger for staff for some extra aoe and ranged. I tried both condi and power and both are fun, but so far I like power more. You can still use epidemic to spread conditions too.

Necro is my 1st and only character, so it’s been a while since I leveled up. IIRC, I went with a minion build and it went pretty well. You’ll hear a lot of people complain about minions (and a good portion of the complaints are valid), but they do bring a number of benefits to the table:

1. They make soloing veterans and most events pretty simple.
2. They don’t benefit from your gear, so you can save a bit of cash that way.
3. This ties in a bit to point 1, but the fact that you create a number of additional targets dramatically cuts down on the amount of damage you take. This helps when you pull more mobs than you had intended, or against very strong mobs.

As for weapons and stats, anything works. I’d probably suggest a power build with Axe/whatever and a Staff. The Axe stacks vulnerability, which does benefit your minions, and the Staff provides them with regeneration (which they don’t naturally have) and some other benefits as well.

Traits are pretty self-explanatory. Your priorities are +50% health and +30% damage. I think that health is better to rush first, but it really doesn’t matter IIRC.

Hope this helps!

flow.6043:

Is this about leveling up as fast as possible or is it rather a “the journey is the reward”-type situation?

I like to learn as much as possible on the class I level next. Would I like to level my necro fast, yea, but not at the expense in learning how to play her well. I ask things about type of gear stats to use when leveling and skills/traits I should aim for 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc, in order to get the best output for her. I ask about dungeons so I can learn to better work with teams and what part she would play in them. I do want to use a staff because I do have a staff in mind that I want for her (no it’s not the Bifrost, or Final Rest =oP). Yes, I’ve heard that minions aren’t really great but that doesn’t mean they aren’t useful while leveling but I don’t want to be reliant on them in the end (they would be good cannon fodder for jade maw, though). All of this leads to a good foundation in making my necro work best for my future play style with her.

Understood… well, in preparation to mastering any class, it’s safe to say that early lvls are very different from what you will be doing once you reach lvl80, and can therefore be skipped.
Assuming this isn’t your first character and you have some gold and mats banked up, I’d advise you to start with maxing crafting professions. They will advance you about 14 lvls each. check out gw2crafts.net. cooking and jeweler will only set you back very little gold, then I’d replace cooking with either artificer (for staffs and because it’s also a cheap one) or tailor for your armor… or both.
If you have the funds to do 3 professions at once, you can start getting to know the class from lvl45 and up, which is the more exciting part anyway

Equipment: While you lvl up you should buy new stuff on the trading post as often as possible. Because especially at lower lvls equipment is sold for just 1 copper above vendor price, so you’ll be able to switch gear with minimal financial loss.
A safe stat prefix when using the staff is carrion/chrysocola (cond dmg as main trait, power/vit minor)

Skills: I assume you will be gaining further exp through exploring map etc. That means many enemies at once, which is why aoe is key. Greater marks is available as an adept trait, and probable the first one I would buy at an early lvl. Make youself familiar with marks, how to place and time them. Use death shroud as much as possible.
For your utilities, maybe start by picking just one type (at some point I’d check out each and everyone of course), as in: check out all the corruption skills, or all wells… reduced cooldowns for each type of utility are available as master traits.
This should be a good way to get to know the class until you reach lvl80, I think…
and instead of then going after a build that is allready in the forum, maybe you’ll have one figured out by yourself allready

okay you say carrion for the staff what about for armor/jewels/? I’ve seen 2 sets that seem viable. Pwr/prec/cond/ and prec/tough/cond. We are able to use axes and daggers, so I take it there’s a viable crit type of build. Would I work with just berserker armor for this or should I add cavalier jewelry in the mix for added toughness?

I’ll be pretty much testing out these things while leveling first.
Thanks for all the guidance so far everyone.

I just use 20 power crit with minions with 30 blood line for health siphon from pets atks and health on crits. 20 Toughness as well for bleed on crit might stack on ds. you can basically just stand infront of any pile of mobs outside of a champion in pve and face tank with the toughness, hp, weakness on dagger off hand and aoe blind and life being returned by minons .

The axe stacks vulnerability so that your minions dmg is amplified. As they atk they heal you and your atks heal on crits due to the blood line. Minion skill 20% refresh insures they are always up. Use the minion bombs to burst things down after stacking vulnerability with the axe. Kills faster than scepter and staff from what I have seen. You can also switch to staff and mark bomb get the regen and switch back.

Once you hit level 30, get +20% health for minions, go full minion build and just wear all MF gear. As you continue leveling, get +20% damage and vampiric master, in whatever order you feel comfortable with. Use staff to keep regen up on your minions. Leveling and doing your personal story will be a breeze.

I leveled with early access never swapped from MM aside from spvp. But if you plan on pugging dungeons early on… its fairly broken way to approach it. True I did 1-76? Never bothering to leave queens dale but it was ega… and anet didn’t have a chance to kitten on everything yet. So I could farm CM ~20mins a run for a lvl… now you can’t. One your xp gets chopped horribly with each next run to the point where I don’t even consider it useful to do more then 2. 3rd run xp will be about the same as 1 event.
If you stick strictly to pve for leveling minions or conditions would be best choice. Power builds require 80 level gear and full traiting to be viable otherwise wells do laughable damage and you use them less then anything else.
Condition is fairly good for aoe kills but much slower if you think in terms of 1v1… also don’t expect to be even remotely useful on any events. Theres a 25 bleed cap and all other classes can stack bleeds faster so pretty much you will be useless.
Minions… its easy but will be wonky until you get 50% health buff and cd reduction so 20 traits in death.
As far as gear for pve goes… zerker stats(power,precision,crit) for anything that isn’t condition spec. For condition toughness,precision,condition… try to keep bleed duration/condition duration high otherwise they fall off too fast.
If you aim to power level… meh… crafting I guess.
1 thing to note… if you deside on which maps to do as MM… skip anything with flame legion and water. In water you can’t use golem… flame legion=all ur noodles are dead 90% of the time. Pretty much skip most of ascalonian maps. 1 bush… BUSH… from blazeridge at 80… with full MM… is about half dead minions and they don’t regen so its pretty pathetic mm or not.

PlagueParade.7942:

okay you say carrion for the staff what about for armor/jewels/? I’ve seen 2 sets that seem viable. Pwr/prec/cond/ and prec/tough/cond. We are able to use axes and daggers, so I take it there’s a viable crit type of build. Would I work with just berserker armor for this or should I add cavalier jewelry in the mix for added toughness?

I’ll be pretty much testing out these things while leveling first.
Thanks for all the guidance so far everyone.

Yes, there are crit builds. But before you go there, you should think about one thing first: Is the staff going to be your main weapon or just a secondary as a support.
With staff-only-builds you want to avoid precision as much as possible, hence cond/power/vit… on your entire gear! (or soldiers, but that’s harder to get by at earlier lvls)
Why? Because you don’t use the staff for its direct damage or to get some “on critical”-effects. Having a dagger or axe as main on the other hand makes a Pwr/prec/cond/ and prec/tough/cond more viable.

So, my advice: check out all weapons first, pick the combo that you like, then decide on gear stats accordingly.