Guild Wars 2

I was thinking of rolling a Necro, but I’m not interested in playing a caster unless I can spec for high damage. Is this possible with Necromancer? It doesn’t need to have the AoE damage capabilities of an Ele, of course. As long as the single target damage can compete.

A lot of people will tell you that the necro is this attrition class that needs to outlive the opponent on sustained and rather low damage. But that’s not true, there are some combos that can kill a player who doesn’t react to it quickly enough in a few seconds.
However, it still doesn’t come close to a few backstab crits of a thief of course.

Go for dagger/focus + Staff with berserker.
30/0/0/0/0 for trait baseline for close to death. Rest of the traits are quite flexible.
Damaging wells for utilities and golem/lich for elite.

Ah, what I forgot to mention: As a necro, you don’t need to be a glass canon to deal high damage.
You also don’t need to take the power/crit route for it.

Even as full berserker you can take moderate beating with high base health+shroud.

flow.6043:

Ah, what I forgot to mention: As a necro, you don’t need to be a glass canon to deal high damage.
You also don’t need to take the power/crit route for it.

Please elaborate. Are you referring to the Rabid + Undead/Centaur/Afflicted/Krait setup when you say you don’t need to go the power/crit route or are you referring to something else?

Darkheron.6271:

flow.6043:

Ah, what I forgot to mention: As a necro, you don’t need to be a glass canon to deal high damage.
You also don’t need to take the power/crit route for it.

Please elaborate. Are you referring to the Rabid + Undead/Centaur/Afflicted/Krait setup when you say you don’t need to go the power/crit route or are you referring to something else?

Minions can do pretty significant damage, so that may be the route he’s referring to.

Not what I would recommend, necessarily, but it is at least an option that many classes don’t have (Rangers are the only one that can really out-do necros with that style).

I was talking about trapping people in cc chains while they have conditions on them and dealing direct damage at the same time. Against top players of any class this is rather hard to pull off because they will use stunbreaks, blocks, invulnerability… but it’s still doable.
Of course this gets more effective with a glassy build (berserker or rampager only), but if and how you pull it off is not necessarily exclusive to a certain gear or trait combination.

You will never, ever have the burst of an actual burst class as the Necromancer, unless you are full glass spec and use Lich form+WoS (and anything else you can use that will get a bonus from Lich). We have amazing sustained damage, and you can still have “bursts” using our abundant CC to do huge damage over a few seconds, but it isn’t like Mesmers where they can just say “I’m dropping burst” over mumble, and half a second later the enemy target is on his butt.

Alright, thank you for the replies. I will have to try Mesmer properly aswell to decide. I like Necro’s aesthetic more, but of course, the fun factor determines. In the original Guild Wars, Mesmer was definitely not the kind of caster I wanted to play, but it seems a bit different in GW2.

Mesmer is very different in GW2 compared to GW1.

Necros can do quite good spike damage, but they are all outplayed by a good player. The well bombing is the biggest burst I suppose, but many classes get out of them so easily. Other one is axe 2/life blast bursting but it reguires you to have 100% LF at the start of the fight.

Necromancers really shine in high sustained damage so if you want to do really big bursts frequently with a caster, you should roll a mesmer or an elementalist many of us is suggesting.

One high power DPS build with high reliability and moderate sustain is 30/x/20/x/x where you take near to death with all minion upgrades and use MH dagger. You should use wurm/bone minions, shadow fiend and bone fiend with flesh golem ofcourse. When you combo your dagger 3 with rigor mortis and golem knockdown (near the end of the immobilization) you can spike the dmg up with your dagger autoattacks and minions. The rest trates are either for life leaching (blood magic) or soul reaping (improved life blast, good for finishing off a fleeing enemy)

I my self like rabid undead terror condition build (0/30/20/0/20). I have about 2800 armor and I can do a moderate burst of 6k spike in 3s (2k dps from terror + bleeds + poison) with corrupt boon → doom or fear mark → doom. The cooldown for fear mark → doom burst is about 35 seconds and the cooldown for corrupt boon → burst is 40 seconds but it will reguire your target to have stability. Note that there must be at least 17sec between the bursts because of doom.

I like the sustained damage and being able to pull of a moderate burst really fast to finish someone off.

To sum up necro stuff, everything on base can be used most of the time (except corruption skills, that are op in the situations where you can use them and useless the rest of the time except for stacking up self condis for consume conditions) and has high investment/gain/loss ratio, sadly our scailing is dumped into 1/3 of the skills and the typical base damage got cut by 3/4ths during the great death shroud immortalization known as beta (compare numbers on most utility skills we got and youll see most end up lower than some 1 chain spam parts). But if you go hybrid (rampagers or Carrion/Rabid if you feel like somehow standing in melee with a 900 range weapon) with something like a 10/30/0/0/30 setup spamming fears, 4+ conditions on a enemy and dropping 1-3 life blasts every 10 seconds, you get pretty high sustained damage.

True burst can be gained with Valkyre arcane eles (insane spikes that manage to outdo warriors with time warp) and quad-mind whacks from zerker mesmers, but they have their own gripes (eles losing out a ton of stuff that might not be worth the trade and mesmers having close to no reliable/controlled zone aoe outside of their confusion on glamour).