It’s a “celebrity effect”. The champions are using that build, so all the me-too leetkiddies decide that if they just imitate them they’ll automatically get good themselves.
I’ve been using that build about 60% of the time in pvp since 23/6 (the rest of the time I was trying out different variations of condition builds to see if I could still make it work, and a bit of mucking about with minions), and I admit that it’s the best necromancer build available right now. It’s definitely viable (even at high level, as Abjured have shown), but it’s certainly not what I’d call optimal (or “meta” as the kids are calling it these days).
The reason I don’t think it’s optimal is because of the role it fills in your team. As someone using celestial amulet, the role you need to play is definitely that of a bunkery brawler. You’re not expected to hold 2v1 for days, but you definitely need to survive long enough to get reinforced. You’re not expected to deliver the same kind of bursty punishment as a zerker thief, but you need to pack a solid enough punch to help the thief down an enemy holding a point fast enough that THEY don’t get reinforced.
Here’s why I think celestial necro is suboptimal for that role: in terms of survivability, if you have full DS and Plague off cooldown, you can actually stand on a point longer than even an elementalist. If you have neither of these conditions, you go down almost as fast as someone in zerker gear. Moreover, an elementalist may be squishier, but they have multiple defensive skills, all on staggered cooldowns, and much better healing-over-time than the necro. An elementalist holding 2v1 can run off the point, go behind a pillar, heal, then jump on the point again, and repeat that a few seconds later. The necromancer, while being able to stay on the point longer, only has active heals (except for SoV’s passive effect, which is small), and two of them rely on lifestealing at short range. You can’t duck in and out of a fight, coming back at nearly full health, keeping the enemy busy without them being able to down you for as long as an ele can. Water attumenent comes off cooldown much faster than an empty life force bar can be refilled, is my main point! And if you decide that a point is lost and you’re better off helping elsewhere, you can’t just use a Burning Speed to zoom away from the fight (while evading!), getting away safely even at low health the way an elementalist can. If a necro commits to a fight they’ll either win or they’ll die there.
Ditto in terms of damage: while a celestial necro can inflict much higher sustained damage than an elementalist, they need DS off cooldown, a bunch of might stacks, and life force>50% to do that. Between Reaper’s Might and Signets of Suffering, you’re gonna build up some serious might if the fight goes on awhile, but before that your damage will be mediocre. By contrast, an elementalist’s sustained damage is lower, but they have a lot of high damage skills with staggered cooldowns, letting a good elementalist choose between pressuring you hard enough to force you to retreat, or saving some cooldowns for when you’re just low enough that they can checkmate you.
So if you’re comparing 1v1 on who to include in your team, celestial necro or celestial ele, ele wins hands down: they can fulfil that role much better. However, there’s one thing that makes the signet necro relevant, and why it’s still a decent include in most teams in spite of this: all those boon corruptions you can do make you the only thing that can make a d/d elementalist sweat a little! Cele necro is one of the few things that can sit 1v1 on a point against an ele for a significant amount of time. It’s one of the few builds that can even kill an ele 1v1, although a good ele will stay alive so long that either you or they will get reinforced. With elementalists being the strongest class right now, and one of the most popular in pvp, this means that a cele necro will always have a decent matchup against nearly all enemy teams. You might be a suboptimal matchup against nearly every other class in the game, but against an ele, you’re, well, ok, they’re not exactly quaking in their boots, but you counter them better than anyone else does (to the extent where anything as overpowered as today’s d/d ele can be “countered”). You’re not exactly the ele’s natural predator, more like that prey that’s really annoying for them to kill. You’re not a fox to their sheep: they’re the fox to your hedgehog.
So until ele gets nerfed, cele necro will find a place on pvp teams as a situational meta choice. When that happens, I expect people will realise that it’s not really the optimal class to feel that bunkery brawler role that celestial signet fills, and go back to using other things.
