Guild Wars 2

So I’ve been playing my Condition Necromancer for awhile and I’m here to discuss some tips on how to counter our weaknesses. From my personal perspective I see the Necromancer weak to Thieves, Rangers, and Warriors. A decent Necromancer should be able to kill the other classes.

I don’t know how to counter everything so feel free to comment and discuss how you counter certain classes. I will add what you wrote to this topic.

Theives -
I used to have so much trouble killing them. I hated when they would stun me out of no where and I have no way to react to them. The Thief is the most mobile class while the necro is the least mobile.

Counter -
This come from pro thieves and mainly every Thief I talked to. Conditions Conditions Conditions. I paired Weakening Shroud with Foot in the Grave together. The second they get close and stun me I pop into Death Shroud then use my #3 for fear then #2 (normal necro not reaper). This will apply so much bleed and force the Thief to retreat. It should be an easy fight after this.

Rangers -
I would have never expected me to have trouble with a Ranger until Druid became a thing and was able to remove 13 conditions just by entering Celestial form. Druids have so much condi cleanse and healing potential. The major issue I have with Druid is their ability to stay at very far ranges and spam Immobolize. They will be ranges outside of our Plague Signet range.

Counter –
Haven’t found one out yet, feel free to discuss

Warriors -
The resistance Warrior basically kills any Condi Necromancer. I personally find the boon Resistance very overpowered. Warriors have Healing Signet and Berserker Stance for resistance. The issue Necro’s have with Berserker stance is that it pulses every 3 seconds and reapplies Resistance. That means if you strip that boon away it’ll just come back and you just wasted one of your skills.

Counters -
Haven’t found any but run. Feel free to discuss.

I’m sure some information might not be correct. I only play Necromancer. If I made a mistake let me know. I’m still new to the game but I’ve been playing a lot of PvP and WvW. I see a lot of potential in Necromancer (even though a lot of people say otherwise). I really like spamming conditions and if anyone wants to see the build I use feel free to ask.

Thieves: Thieves simply kite you out with their superior mobility. Given an unknown amount of time and good skill/patience, a thief can win every single 1v1 in the game, especially against Necromancers. That said, not every thief is patient enough and may overstep their bounds at some point. Major methods of assisting your fight against them is to run Warhorn and any combination of Weakening Shroud and Spiteful Spirit. Having on demand multi-hit and instant-hit abilities severely helps cleanse blind, which is the major shortcoming of the duel, given our slower attacks.

Rangers: 1500 range is painful, and the slower movement of our abilities, plus lack of mobility, make it extremely painful at times to try to close the distance. Celestial Form cleanse is also rather brutal, given base Necromancer’s slow application speed. Putrid Mark is a pretty heavy breaker in this matchup, as the size of the mark effectively allows you to range the mark to roughly 1440 range. Another thing to realize is sometimes you need to think outside of the box; Plague Signetting or Putrid Marking the pets is a very valid path to take when in a difficult position. If you find you run into a larger number of Rangers than other classes in a given day, I highly recommend running Corrosive Poison Cloud, it helps to greatly shore up our weakness to the longbow as well as provide decent Weakness uptime. Also plays exceptionally well against Bristleback.

Warrior: The same way thieves beat the kitten out of us, we can beat the kitten out of Warriors. The name of the game is kiting here. You need to be capable of maintaining distance between you and them, and find ways to regularly reopen gaps. The matchup is much easier with abilities like Foot in the Grave, Corrupt Boon, and Summon Flesh Wurm, since they give you easy ways to protect from getting locked down, ways of dealing with Resistance and Stability, and ways of reopening the gap. Another strong way to kite warriors is to jump-dodge into their abilities; since the pathing of abilities like Rush cause them to move to where you are, jump dodging through them before they hit you allows you to gain distance through them when they’re locked into the attack animation. You can also dodge towards the origin of their Whirling Blades for a similar effect. The duel isn’t an auto-win, but it’s a perfectly fair fight if you know your way around it.

Hope some of these tips helped!

I don’t think I can kill a good thief 1v1… If they catch me in the open, I can ward them off, but they always have an escape and they will be back. Really frustrating… Especially if they’re specifically patrolling around trying to stop people from rotating to points and joining teamfights.

Druids’ constant immobilize is complete BS vs Necros, but I’ve been having a little better luck vs. them with a Signetchill condition spec that I’ve been messing with instead of the standard Corruptionmancer. With a lot of using a quick Reaper-2-Unreaper to get in range, followed by a boon corruption bomb to force them to play defensively until I can land a cc-chain to finish them.

Warriors, ugh… One thing I’ve been doing is only dodging their primal bursts if they’re less than 50% health and I’m trying to finish them to prevent the heal. Otherwise, I don’t wanna say lean into it, but you can really use their condition bombs against them with a well placed transfer and quick change of pace from chill kiting into a reaper cc chain/burst. (obviously this is macebow warrior specific)

But yeah, these are all very mismatched uphill fights for us… I feel like we have to do so much more to come out on top. =(
I look forward to seeing this thread grow and see how everyone else deals with these three professions in particular.