Guild Wars 2

Being an avid Mesmer and Elementalist player (levels 80 and 70 respectively) and doing much sPvP across the two of them, I decided to give Necromancer a try. I didn’t do any reading, I just slapped together a 0-30-10-30-0 build, with a Dagger/Focus primary and Scepter/Dagger secondary, and charged right in there. I chose 3 of the 4 spectral utilities, opting for defense over offense (as I know I can rip through Necromancers like a wet paper bag on my mains), and charged right into some structured games without even looking at runes and so-on.

What I found was that this class is actually fine where it is. Granted, it took a lot more work and skill to be on-par with the Mesmers and Elementalists I fought (all of which being the same spec as me on my mains — go figure) and I only really kicked the bucket when I either got Moa Formed or someone else jumped in. But you guys have so much passive Regen and Protection mixed in with health siphons and other abilities (Death Shroud being a nice osht button) that the fights went really smoothly and I found myself getting into a nice “rotation” of sorts without having to look anything up.

My conclusions are as follows: You guys succumb too easily to Stability. Without having any natural invulnerability of some sorts, your control relies entirely on the other person lacking Stability at that given time, which is pretty hard to track/watch for on the person you’re fighting (with most people seeming to have Stability at all given times…). You also seem to have a TON of AoE/mark abilities without any means of controlling someone long enough to get them stuck in them.

Suffice it to say, if I ever attempted 1v2, I pretty much got smacked down and spit on since I lacked the defensive capabilities and cast time privileges to do any damage back (which would have been negligible, regardless). But I will say this: you guys seem to be in a better place than I initially thought. Granted, the pet-spec necro I fought and destroyed while playing in my spec, who probably had much more experience with the class than I, is probably the mascot for this whole “necros are terrible” campaign, but I’m curious to see where the main complaints lie.

And yes, I know there are a lot of glitches. I kept these in mind and worked around most of them in the time I played.

I tried a minion master and it is just too buggy, they have a lot of stuff to fix before that build will be viable.

I play a well/mark necro and love it. I really wonder why people complain about the necro so much.

I can take pretty much any class on 1v1 with little to no problems. Survivability is insane, and aoe damage is just huge when you stack them, and you get nice combo field bonuses. Ironically, the only thing I have a hard time against is if a spamseeker thief gets the jump on me, even though I have the most of my pvp games on my thief. oO Chills and slows are good but do nothing to stop the spammage of that blasted “skill”.

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Dagger/Scepter on one hand, and staff on the other. Runes of the undead on the armor and hydromancy on the staff and hydromancy and geomancy on the d/S.

I run with wells ofc, and flesh golem, the charge is just awesome for those hard to beat heavy armor guys. This build will let you farm points and heads.

1 of the big problems with Necros are the cast times. They are stupidly out of place. It takes like 3 seconds to cast Spinal Shivers (rofl? This should be AOE if it takes that long to cast) and staff #1 skill is almost out-runnable. Lich form attacks take a long time to cast. Dark Path takes a long time to cast.

It goes on.

A couple of days ago I got really tired of playing my thief in sPvP. It’s a great class, but I really felt it’s a no win class in terms of satisfaction. You can either rule on a FotM build or you can feel a bit stupid playing a less effective build.

I dabbled in a few classes lazily, hoping one would jump out as interesting and effective without being lame. Necro really hit the spot.

I’ve tried a marks/wells build, a power dagger build, a bleed build and other more random combinations and it’s been great fun. On the wells, bleeds or dagger builds I really felt like I had the potential to be competitive (once I got better at playing the class) but also challenging.

My first alt is a necro because it is super fun. Minions are seriously bugged almost to the point of being unusable. Other than that there is a long list of bugs (see the sticky at the top), many having to do with traits, or utility skills not working like they are supposed to. Since I’m only level 33 and have only played PvE and WvW with the necro, I don’t think I have enough necro experience to notice when the skill/trait bugs show up. Those who have played the profession a while are much better at spotting the bugs, and particularly pointing out when the bug makes a necro’s life suck.

I love my necro, but i wont lie i do not want to be a condition necromancer, i wanted to be a bloody minion master like from gw1 but the AI in gw2 is horrible for them, often times they dont attack the target i want them to, heck more likely they stand there and watch me die. Now my 80 engineer completes this role for conditions much better then my necro and I have tried a few different builds with necro to feel this role and I cannot say he is better then a engineer. The necro does excel at getting rid of conditions better then other class’s I cannot deny that. If plague signet worked right it would actually transfer all conditions on allies to me and i could then use that correctly, right now it transfer 1 and copies the rest so its not as good as it should and many other things bother me about the bugs he has with all his traits.

Now back the main issue. I do not want to be stuck using condition necro builds and wells. Wells are a very nice skill we have but most times allies cannot tell when they should be a well that will convert conditions to boons or boons to conditions so it makes it hard to know what the team will be doing unless planned already not to mention in PVE instances most times we put a well down then have to leave it already since so many aoes. Wells also have a very long reuse time so if you spam them all at once they are not up again quickly for reuse or when you need them again.

I could go on but this post has been long enough.

Passive regen? Lets see, there is 5 second regen when health drops below 90%. There may be another 5 second regen if you take Mark of Evasion (10 second internal cooldown). And then there is the one in the focus, tho you need to be within 600 of your target for it to bounce back to you.

If you manage to get them all going you may be looking at 2500-3000 heal in total (not counting healing power gear) if you manage to not get hit in the next 15 seconds.

As for life siphon, thieves do more with their Signet of Malice passive than we do when we dump 15 points into blood. At present our vampiric traits do not scale with healing power, and we are not sure if that is a bug or intended.

So I want to start by saying that I think this is a fair assessment.

I would like you do address each of the following if you feel so inclined.

1. Necro is outshined in every area of the game by at least one class.
2. This makes the Necro a jack-of-all/master-of-none type class, but what is given up in specialization is not compensated by the other areas.
3. Some main hands and off hands are underwhelming.
4. Traits are a mess (odd pairings, weak traits, etc.)
5. Bugs, bugs, and more bugs.

Those are my issues on the class.