Guild Wars 2

After a bit of creative tinkering I’ve made a norn necromancer after deciding that the necro is indeed the aspect of gameplay I want to get involved with. Looking up at the class’s tricky risk/reward play mixed in with the option to of aggressive condition play I am sincerely wanting to give this class a try.

First off I want to avoid minion master builds solely because I dislike relying on the AI in this game. Saying that as a ranger main I am completely fine with not having any real reliance on the game’s player created AI for damage. (Utility is fine but relying on minons for reliable dps is so sketchy.)

Though I’m merely entranced by the overall look/playstyle the necromancer provides I would like some honest opinions of the class. I understand when you see a necro in sPvP or WvW you focus him/her down. I do not know if this is just a stigma towards them, fear of what’s considered “evil” that compels them to do so or if there is just a general lack (or different) of defense that is more difficult for the class to use.

Overall give me some thoughts and opinions of the class and perhaps a few pages where I can read up on the class. The stickies above provide builds but I would like to read an indepth class evaluation if you’ve seen one.

From what I understand of the necromancer is that we are made to be an attrition class meaning the longer the fight the better position we are. But in reality we are forced to become something else: a burst type class(both pve/pv) without the tools for them. The only tools that remotely works in this case are terror and dhuumfire. In PvE we are forced to use burst due to the dps meta.

The reason why are forced in pvp to become burst type is because:

-life force generation is either hard or low. The easiest example is looking at the weapon skills the only two weapons which provides a decent stream of life force is the dagger and the staff. The dagger functions well in that regard but it is not that of a great weapon, the staff just plain sucks except for the mark spam.

- Necomancer need life force : simply said without life force we have almost no way to defend ourselves. Powermancer even need it for their damage and with the new dhuumfire change conditionmancers too.

-Life force is lost when using death shroud even when taking no damage.

- All the necromancer’s defences do not scale with the amount of users. This means that if two people attack us we die twice as fast which is not the case with other classes which have defences like blocks,evades,stealth,… . It makes us easy targets for focus fire and burst, add the lack of counters to cc and we are just sitting ducks waiting to be killed/stunlocked.

Combine those four reasons and you can see why the necromancer can’t play an attrition game since:
The longer the fight takes, the more life force we lose which is hard to regain and the more chance we have to encounter an extra enemy which will make it nearly imposible to survive.

I can say a bit more of my view on the necromancer and it’s playstyle but I’m a bit short on time, I hope it helps you with understanding the necromancer.

From a PvP perspective

From what I understand, the original intent for necromancers was to be a slow but sturdy profession designed to outlast their opponent if the opponent could not burst them down fast enough. They would become more powerful the longer a fight lasted via life force and lifesteal, while their opponent would become weaker due to sustained damage and debilitating effects like poison. Hence, the necromancer would have been a natural bunker with good sustained damage. In the beta, this was found to be extremely overpowered, and the profession was redesigned at the last minute.

The issues stem from what exactly the above poster stated. Necromancers rely upon a massive health pool to survive, unlike other professions who rely on blocks/evades/invulnerability for defense. Balancing this is a nightmare – the designs are incongruent. Make regeneration/lifesteal/life force slightly too powerful, and necromancers are overpowered. Make it too weak, and they’re underpowered. What makes this more complex is the fact that they must be balanced for both 1v1 and group fights. Giving necromancers enough self-healing to win in a 1v1 would make them much, much more powerful in a fight where they are siphoning from multiple opponents. So necromancers were gutted, having their self-healing reduced to far less than that of other professions and making them the opposite of their original design.

Death Shroud is a real oddity. It’s supposed to be the necromancer’s core mechanic, and it serves for both offense and defense. Activating it to use something like Doom will require that you use the shared 7-10 second cooldown on Death Shroud itself. Some traits are designed so that they trigger on entering/leaving Death Shroud, but their effects are very weak/short, so you would need to flash in and out to make full use of them, removing your ability to utilize Death Shroud for defense.

While in Death Shroud, you cannot heal, and life force drains over time, which is intended to prevent necromancers from simply sitting in Death Shroud so that opponents have some kind of opening to attack the necromancer. This assumes that Death Shroud is basically a “block” or “invulnerability state” on a 7-10 second cooldown, but that’s not how it works – the reality is that, as stated before, this can never be properly balanced against a real block ability that makes you invulnerable for X seconds. The complexity of having so many abilities, traits, and mechanics tied to a single cooldown is absurd, and I cannot fathom why it was designed this way.

PvP Builds

Sadly enough, the only current viable build in PvP that functions as originally intended (attrition) is minion master. But of course, minion AI is currently re-broken due to a recent patch. Minion master has a lot of defense, actual lifesteal, and constant, near-unavoidable damage and poison over time to pressure the opponent. They gain life force from their minions dying. In a slow fight, they can simply resummon their minions at full strength. They have an obvious weakness – area damage will kill all of their minions at one time and leave them open to attack. So, as much as I hate using minions, they get a thumbs-up from me for staying true to their original design.

Conditionmancer is, somehow, one of the worst builds in the game at attrition. This is despite the fact that conditions tick over time. The massive amount of condition removal and the nondiscriminatory nature of most condition removal means that attempting to stack bleeds to high intensity over a long period of time to punish slow attackers simply does not work as intended.

Powermancers aren’t too different from other professions’ power builds. They have some burst attacks, and they have good sustained damage. However, they are still built around Death Shroud, and one main type of power build even relies upon Death Shroud to do damage via Life Blast (which used to do more damage the more life force you had for a while after the game’s release…kind of sad they removed that mechanic entirely).

There is a lot more to say about necromancer, way more than could fit in one post. Basically, their core design simply does not fit with the game’s design, and they are barely hanging on to the meta.

Imho, Necromancers are focused down because they have the most access to AOE’s, are usually the slowest and can spread conditions from person to person like the flu (Epidemic for instance.)
As for my thoughts on the profession I’d probably say the pros and cons are;

Pros
High base vitality coupled with toughness in your gear makes you pretty tanky. Vitality and toughness in your armor and you’re looking at a ridiculous amount of survivability.

Most people will welcome you in groups.

When roaming about Thieves will generally steer clear of you.

Anyone with low vitality but high toughness will melt against you assuming you’re a condition build (being that conditions ignore armor)

Lots of versatility

Decent group support (Well Of Suffering is a godsend for damage increase)

Cons
If not traited/using Signet of The Locust you’re slow as all hell.

No matter what build you shoot for conditions are pretty well always going to follow you. Meaning, as far as I’m aware at least, you’re never really going to put out a ton of direct damage

Health siphoning is absolute garbage. It’s great in theory but terrible in practice so unless you’ve got a healing power stat (even then it’s not very impressive) you probably shouldn’t waste your time with it

Although I’ve said most people will welcome you in their groups, that’s most not all. Next to the Ranger, Necromancers are probably just after them for not being wanted in dungeons

best suggestion: roll any other class, necromancers are garbage, always have, always will, Arenanet knows this and they don’t care, they want the necromancer to be the worst class in the game, that’s their main objective

Since PvP is covered I’ll hit up PvE for you. WvW isn’t my cup of tea, so I’ll let someone else do that one.

From a PvE standpoint the necromancer is seriously lacking in that regard as well. We do have really good damage output, from both conditions and from a power standpoint. However this doesn’t compare to the warrior all that well so we don’t often replace them or hold a candle to them. Our problems with defense in PvP are the same in PvE. And in some cases its worse, and others its not as bad. For example, a boss who focuses a necromancer will kill the necromancer without much problem. Especially if the player isn’t that experienced with the necromancer. Because we rely so heavily on DS for our defenses, and DS doesn’t even hold a candle to invulnerability in terms of how useful it is and lets not forget that its supposed to replace that plus stealth, vigor, stability, blocks and evade skills we become quite lacking and are easily downed in even the most basic boss encounters if you are inexperienced with the profession.

Another problem is our other primary defensive mechanic being life stealing actually doesn’t function with Death shroud. So no healing while in death shroud. You end up being put into a rock and a hard place because of this and life stealing really isn’t worth taking because of how little it heals for and because it functions poorly with death shroud.

We also suffer in condi builds because of other players pushing your bleeds off. Warriors and mesmers are especially bad for this considering their builds will often have traits that apply bleeds on crit that push yours off without them even being remotely dependent on the bleeds for any meaningful amount of damage. This problem isn’t so much a necromancer problem as it is a condition meta problem in PvE.

Over all. We are the unloved profession that needs a complete overhaul the most. Yet we are ignored because we are unpopular.