Guild Wars 2

Fairly new to the necro arts, thanks for all the replies on my previous post.

Was thinking of making a minion build and was wandering what’s the best traits to spec in and what traits to pick as I trying to find the best minion build possible including weapon choices and the like

Thanks everyone

Here’s one which would be very aggressive (i.e., very glassy):
http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/necromancer/?5.0|6.1g.a7|8.1g.a7.d.1g.h4|1g.a4.1g.a4.1g.a4.1g.a4.1g.a4.1g.a4|1g.67.1g.67.1g.67.1g.67.1g.67.1g.67|u379.0.u23a.a3.0|39.1|3s.3y.3z.41.4g|e

Personally, I prefer a more conservative build – see the one in my signature – which could be used for an MM build just by adjusting the traits to the same as in the above link.

There’s quite a wide bit of variation possible, even just within MM builds.

That spec is all over the place and does little to support actual MM spec.
Spiteful removal is utterly worthless no matter the spec. Damage on marks… meh. Better options there. 30 points in spite is… too much not enough points for important things.
Greater marks again… aren’t needed with MM.
Mark of evasion…. what? You are not condition spec you are MM spec.
Dagger has 0 benefit towards mm damage. While axe provides vul stacking to 10 so 10% for yourself and 10% for every minion. Any “debatable” dps superiority of dagger autoattacks goes out of the window here.

http://www.gw2build.com/builds/simulator.php#1.5.4.7.18.0.0.0.0.0.105.112.113.114.129.2.2.0.302.309.0.0.0.0.333.340.341.347.352.0.0.0.0.20.0.30.20.0

This is BASE MM spec. It picks everything that is needed.
Training of the master is mandatory, so 20 spite is required. Other trait grab focus recharge because everything else doesn’t work with MM spec or plainly worthless/broken. While focus fits build more then any other offhand weapon.
Minion Master and Flesh of the Master are mandatory, so 20 in death. 10 more for death nova/necromantic corruption for pvp. Minions die… and they die a lot might as well benefit from extra damage from it + for pve infitite weakness stacking from it. By doing what you should be doing regardless of situation blowing up your bone minions since their active+cd far out dpses and smacks weakness+poison on top.
Vampiric master is also mandatory since MM lacks reliable condition removal and mostly relies on soaking up damage instead of mitigating it. Now the adept trait in blood… its ether bloodthirst for steady pve it gives negligible increase at first but look at it this way. Example (rounded out of my kitten numbers to make math easy) each minion hit heals you for 20 health. with that trait you heal for lets say 25… may seem negligeble at first but remember thats 20 for each minion… you run 6+usually 1 jagged. so 20×6=120 hp when all 6 hit… bone fiend hits twice toss in 1 jagged and you have 8 hits… 160. If you blow up your bone minions like you should youd drop back to 120 but lets just go with easy to digest. Don’t forget blood fiend heals for … umm I forgot how much but its a lot lets say 500 on top of that. So we get 660 from 1 attack from all your clowns. Now if we add in that trait and increase each individual attack from 20 to 25 you get 25×8500=700. 60 hp still doesn’t seem much. Now lets say you are chain pulling for 10 minutes of fighting something really durable. lets say 1 chain happens every 2 seconds. 10 minutes = 600 seconds / 2 we get 300 heals. 198000 hp generated from just your minions pelting away at things without trait and 210000 hp traited. Now after 10 minutes of our imaginary number game difference is 1 base necro health pool… A LOT more noticeable. But that’s just for pve…. in pvp… meh too many variables too much chaos crappy ai… it all gets tossed in the window.
Anyway you can always swap bloodthirst for transfusion and heal with life transfer. Across the scale benefits no downsides.
As for weapons axefocus remeber your source of damage as MM isn’t just you. Your minions are included so any marginal headway dagger holds in dps is overwritten when compared to how much vulnerability benefits MM with multi sources of damage. Focus same deal it allows you to spike single target… depending on moons and luck up to full 25 stacks if it bounces funny. Then you can pop #2 and rip the benefits. No other offhand provides that much burst. Dagger could be useful but if you have death nova it serves no purpose short of 1 extra condition removal. Warhorn is always great in pvp and for moving but thats true for all specs.
Staff for offhand is mandatory. Thats your 1 and only interrupt and one and only heal for minions. Ontop of that its your only condition removal w/o using offhand dagger. Also provides 1 extra poison field and blast finisher for even more weakness stacking.

Don’t get me wrong marks are great… just not in pve or even pvp with mm… in wvw yeah… but only because its all about ranged aoe regardless of your spec. They work fine with every spec but dumping points to get greater marks when you are strained for traits as MM is bad idea because you are forced to drop integral parts of minion build in favor of situation utility.
But I will still say it what I gave is base spec. You can always go wild and experiment. It’s just that MM in gw2… is too needy for specific traits otherwise its more of a handicap then anything else.

MM actually has a lot of variation (more than I gave it credit for in the past). Even in PvP, you don’t need to run the standard 20/0/20/20/0 base. If you’re looking for a strong PvP build, I’ll post mine when I get home, I used it last night in the tournament and could consistently hold my own 2v1, and won pretty much every 1v1 I had (very decisively in some cases, I wish I had gotten footage of the poor guy that went to our home point first in the “practice” game).

Bhawb.7408:

MM actually has a lot of variation (more than I gave it credit for in the past). Even in PvP, you don’t need to run the standard 20/0/20/20/0 base. If you’re looking for a strong PvP build, I’ll post mine when I get home, I used it last night in the tournament and could consistently hold my own 2v1, and won pretty much every 1v1 I had (very decisively in some cases, I wish I had gotten footage of the poor guy that went to our home point first in the “practice” game).

Yep for pvp the base isn’t really that good. Greater marks actually becomes good choice for wvw… 30 in spite makes more sense for spvp… 30 in blood for condition dumper(unreliable but still) again a choice. 30% damage and probably… health with siphon would be the only things I would not advise dropping no matter what. But thats me.
There are some awkward but semi fesable condition mm hybrids for wvw not so much for spvp or pve. Anyway. That build I gave is where you start :P And this is the only build where axe is actually good lol.

Yes, the build you linked is pretty much the most generic minion build you get, although I wouldn’t recommend using that setup in PvP

Axe has a few good uses:
1) Minion builds
2) PvE burst builds (around axe 2)
3) Retaliation

Also, I completely forgot to post my build, so here it is
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fQAQRBHRhG2IjWpermlG9eCQ6R0UX9kCuBHSxuSD-TwAA1CtIcS5kzJjTSjsGNGYVwOkZIA

If you have questions feel free to ask.

As for condition MMs, I have actually seen some really strong ones that basically use Minions as a source of constant pressure and pseudo tankiness, while using a tanky condition build on top.

Yep yep. With MM condition you drop idea of barbed precision on favor of what condition always lacks, survivability. Unfortunately my beef with it is really shallow sigil choice.
Now I want to make few comments on yours. Purely from pvp standpoint. Necromantic corruptuon… don’t get me wrong its more or less working. Chance is fairly bloody low but if you run a lot of minions it gets high enough BUT and here is major issue with that trait. Its random. Which translates into it being unreliable at best. Also boon stackers really don’t care for loosing 1 boon which leans towards regen removal followed by vigor removal which is better of two but still isn’t much considering classes that stack vigor regens can do so much much faster then you could ever strip them. In short too random and unreliable also 50% sure aegis and block screw it over while putting it on its innternal cd(not 100% sure here I never really tested it because I started disliking trait soon after trying it out).
Another thing Bloodthirst… while I would never argue about in pve… because I agree its awesome. In pvp…. not so much. People aren’t npcs they make pathing even more problematic then ever before too much downtime and it only shines over an extended period of time. Short encounters the benefit is negligeble due to ooc regen and the like.
Dagger oh is great for defensive purposes I won’t argue here. But if you dropped lets say NC and picked what MM sorely lacks, condition removal, and picked fetid consumption… while same as the other trait its random… it does help in a bit more steady way. Only conditions that aren’t all that important are vuln and weakness in pvp. Everything else is a good to go. Except for below 1 sec leftover bleed stacks but that’s just rng.
If you had that… you could change to focus for solo pvp so you can stack 20 vul stacks instantly for a nice #2 axe opener. Or use focus for on demand boon removal coupled with chill which is godly cc for pvp which again MM lacks. But dagger for pv kitten till a rock solid choice.
Retaliation on DS is solid for pvp.
On subject of axe retaliation… only works well for pve because to get good duration on it you need max number of targets. In pvp people don’t stack… all that well. Still solid for wvw but dangerous.
What MM can do fairly nicely in wvw is siege breaker while defending towers. Leave a worm somewhere behind doesn’t matter run in with 2 bms and golem. Pop charge/axe 2/explosion then ds #4… that combo does A LOT of damage then u just pop your worms active and leave to recharge and reload.
For wvw purposes its also not that bad to drop minion cd in favor of greater marks.
Mmmhm… Other then that solid stuff. But frankly my beef with boon removal is not so different from condition dump I just think it has a little less chance to waste a cd on something pointless.

I use the Corruption because I needed Dagger OH, and corruption can help make up the difference of boon stripping I lose. Assuming I only have Bone Fiend+Flesh Golem up, on average (and as you said its random, so this is only a statistical average) I will strip a boon every 6.67 seconds, with Bone Minions up that drops to every 5 seconds. Basically, it is around the same strips per time unit, but over time instead of burst. I like this because it means I am almost always removing boons over time, whereas dodging a single focus 5 means no stripping at all for 20 seconds. Why no 30 Blood Magic? I don’t want to kill my minions off faster, they are a large source of damage, healing, and control in my build.

Bloodthirst is there because it is the best for what I’m using. Axe channel = 9 procs of siphoning, dagger channel = multiple procs, dagger chain is high procs per second, locust swarm procs a lot, I have a lot of things procing that siphoning, and having it heal more is good.

Axe isn’t taken solely for retaliation. Its taken for retaliation, vulnerability, cripple, and the channel. That channel is the sole reason I can close out fights a lot of the time. I don’t hit multiple people often, but that is completely okay, it isn’t about having high retaliation uptime, but using it smartly to add another bit of DPS to my build.

It’s just me? Because i never saw a decent MM ever and i’m lv 31 at Spvp

The few I found while using my condition necro went down in the blink of an eye,

I cannot image a good niche for this setup, if i’d rather to be a bunker i’d go with an engineer, elementalist, guardian, ranger or even mesmer,

I understand that even when your Spvp gear is inferior to your PvE gear, minions are the same and therefore are more valuable,

Saw 1 really good MM. And I’m almost always full condition, he was actually very annoying because he used los properly. Well I guess the increased difficulty simply came from the fact that person on the other side was thinking on the go and using creative approach instead of “me smash with you big stick”. But yes in spvp good mms are very rare.
Back to mm I totally forgot about cripple on axe LOL. And MM is my exclusive spec for pve ~_~ Ah… But back to my 30 blood point. It’s a matter of sticking close to eles lul just use the fact that eles are stuck with 60 points spent the same way no matter what… and 10 in air is usually again best pick for either dagger or staff support. Anyway… stick close and let them heal your little cheering squad. Eles make amazing partners for MM necro… we provide the meat wall they provide beefing up and keeping the train going. Also minions tend to chew up aoe limiters which is icing on the cake. And thats another reason why I would grab transfusion instead of bt :P Maybe I should stop sticking to eles so much and get this outa my system >_>
Also me and bhawb totally hijacked this topic and turned it into “compare notes”.

Engels.8537:

It’s just me? Because i never saw a decent MM ever and i’m lv 31 at Spvp

The few I found while using my condition necro went down in the blink of an eye,

I cannot image a good niche for this setup, if i’d rather to be a bunker i’d go with an engineer, elementalist, guardian, ranger or even mesmer,

I understand that even when your Spvp gear is inferior to your PvE gear, minions are the same and therefore are more valuable,

Condition Necros have a huge advantage against Minions, so you’ve had a biased experience. In the right team, Minions bring a ton of control, burst, and survivability, as well as being one of the strongest 1v1 small fight builds out there. I’ll agree that the vast majority of them are terrible though.

I take BT because I love the personal healing. I just don’t have the LF generation to rely on LT, I usually only get enough LF to use Doom and jump out or use it as emergency HP. Also, I’m almost always on home point, which means I very rarely face a lot of AoE (its very rare that the fight will have more than 2 people on each side), and with Flesh Golem being the only non-disposable non-ranged minion, I don’t need a lot of healing.