Guild Wars 2

I keep hearing this comment by many many people about necros having no real place in PvE content. And I also have noticed a lack of them in many random fractals and dungeons that I run. What is the reasoning behind that? Is there something about the profession that just doesn’t work well for PvE content, or is it just people complaining to complain?

Necro has no real AOE besides staff which is rather weak in a straight up fight. While necro is not weak that makes them sort of undesirable for a dungeon but they can do open world PvE good enough with the right setup. Though like every class you can make it work if you try hard enough.

The issue is that what the necro is really good at (boon and condition manipulation) just isn’t relevant in PvE. When was the last time you saw enemies throwing around a lot of conditions? Or saw them using boons that weren’t instantly replaced when removed?

In addition, boss mechanics make control conditions (another necro strong suit) pretty much worthless. Blind has only a 10% chance of working, Weakness has its duration halved, and Chill doesn’t seem to have any effect on how frequently attacks come. Consider that many bosses have permanent stability (so no Fear) and what the necro really has to offer in PvE is unimportant compared to other classes.

Short answer would be that boons > conditions. And buffing > debuffing. Also the lack of a melee cleave weapon and the very selfish nature of the class doesnt help.

Some debuffing is good but the kind necro has (wide variety of control conditions) isnt needed. And the stuff like vuln and blinds which are good and needed can be done better by other classes.

Basically from what everyone else has already stated yeah no desirable fields,no decent aoe,traits need reworking,there not horrible at single target dps but there not great at it either.Ive tryed and tryed to get a decent build going and all i really felt comfortable with is a power mancer build that said they can work its just no where near as efficient as other classes that do our job such as condition removal,boon removal,vul stacking and offer other great assets to a team.Im having trouble understanding why they made the class this way if the pve content seems to work against us.Finally after playing necro since the start made a warrior and realized how much potential and fun this game could be.From getting max vul with just axe/mace skills to good dps and banners ive never felt so useful before.

I think the thing to remember is that, optimally, you probably have better choices. Are you going for optimal, boundary-pushing PvE? Or are you just going to PvE for fun? If the latter, you can make Necro work just fine, though you might have to put a little extra effort in. Also, blind pugs that require certain make-ups because of their % chance of success based on skill required might not want you. That doesn’t mean you can’t find a good group of folks to run with and have a good time.

It’s up to you on what kind of effort you want to put into the class. If you truly love Necro, it’s probably worth it. If it’s an alt you thought about PvEing with, maybe it isn’t.

Necro isn’t BAD per se, at least not to the extent where you won’t be able to do anything, etc. They are the WORST, relatively speaking, primarily just because everything they can do can be done better by other classes. See my other topic about theorycrafting necros a bit further down.

Anything a necro can do, another class can do better… that’s why.

But I need to clarify that, so far, I hand’t been thrown off from any party for being a necro. Some laughs, yes, but no kick.

When you think of PvE, you should separate it into trash mob vs boss mob. Necromancer excels in wiping out trash mobs with AoE conditions but does below average in handling bosses with Defiant who are able to ignore many of the conditions and CC employed by Necromancers.

In my opinion, Arenanet should re-evaluate conditions allowed on bosses, perhaps by profession. Without CC, the Necromancer is a low-mobility face-tanker. The bleed cap “issue” can be avoided with player build choice; i.e., spend points elsewhere. However, the reduction in CC effectiveness is tougher to deal with.

Necros also only have one [short-ranged] melee attack option. Necros are the only profession that is thusly limited.

I currently play necro, i havnt had any trouble with parties and some have said i do a large amount of aoe dmg but people have opinions etc. Necro is a fun class to play but other classes may be much better.

So… I have a warrior and an engineer, while a agree with the above posts (mostly) I find myself playing my Necro in pve all the time. I can’t really explain it but I find that I kick so much kitten

Just yesterday I was running AC when we were fighting the spider my party died when it was at like 75% I just finished the fight like a boss! (That was with full conditions)

Its because there’s no karkas in dungeons or fractals yet lol. Idk how many of you have ever messed with karkas much, but they act like they were built specifically for necros to kill. High hp (2 bars to be exact) lots of boon applications, conditions, some even transfer conditions back, a strong need for aoe and cc (to help control the hatchling movements should the aoe not take care of them), the only thing they lack to make it perfect is their evade feature needs to rely on their endurance like players so our weakness would be more useful on them and wa-la! everyone would should bring necros for karka runs (well if a zerg couldnt burn them with nothing but auto attacks in a few seconds…. but that’s scaling issues).

In all seriousness though, the problem with necros in pve is:

• condition caps
• our aoe isnt good or bad, but what we bring to the table with any of our skills are only mediocre and easily outshined by much more viable, versatile, and robust classes
• the enemies are designed around the other class mechanics, not ours (except karkas) especially when it comes to excessive enemy hard CC- due to our lack of stability- and their lack of boons/endurance-dodge mechanics (I know may enemies have been updated to have evades now, but it acts more like a skill for them and doesn’t use endurance)
• bosses and defiant/unshakable….nuf said

One more thing to make Necromancer more viable in dungeons is to tweak trait trees for Guardian and Warrior so they are rewarded running high defense builds. Finding out in the first few minutes that the light-armor Necro draws more aggro than any other group member is depressing.

Nay of the Ether.8913:

Its because there’s no karkas in dungeons or fractals yet lol. Idk how many of you have ever messed with karkas much, but they act like they were built specifically for necros to kill. High hp (2 bars to be exact) lots of boon applications, conditions, some even transfer conditions back, a strong need for aoe and cc (to help control the hatchling movements should the aoe not take care of them), the only thing they lack to make it perfect is their evade feature needs to rely on their endurance like players so our weakness would be more useful on them and wa-la! everyone would should bring necros for karka runs (well if a zerg couldnt burn them with nothing but auto attacks in a few seconds…. but that’s scaling issues).

You forgot the fact that karka are the one enemy type where condition damage has a clear advantage over power builds due to having very high armor and low health.

Not high enough armour. And reflecting becomes very useful on karka. Dredge at scale 70 fractals required a necro to shorten the clear time of clown car from 40mins to 20mins. That was because at that scale the armour and boons they had made direct damage very weak. So a condi/rampager necro helped alot. They changed fractal scaling and removed the high scales and now theres no need for such a necro.

Alright in advance I apologize for how long this post(s) became. What started out as a simple examples of Necro usefulness in Fractals… blew up in my face. What was to be half a page is now 3 posts. I just feel there’s too much complaining in the necro community and not enough experimentation and actual playing to find a place for Necros that may already be in the game. So much so this has spread to the entire GW2 community. Read at your own risk.

Karka are not the only thing Necro’s are good at killing. I can think of many enemies a Necro is great at mitigating and making hard fights easier. I will use some Fractal examples. First this is my build I use for everything (different trait setups in SPvP and WvW) including high level Fractals. Keep in mind I won’t be going into damage. However, generally my damage in PvE/WvW with no might stacks or Epidemic averages about 1.2K-1.7K area bleeds per tick. Not including damage from Golem, poison, torment,and transfered conditions. The bleeds alone are still a lot more than many other bunker/support builds can manage against one target let alone 5+ with similar gear. I know my Cleric/Support Guardian DPS connot come close to matching my Apothecary/Support Necro’s DPS.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fQAQNAW7YjQad6Zaia07JApHXj9zTP6ecxjKMMA-j0CBYiCyINJjWQZm8IQpnBNNdRjVTFRjVPjIqWfEziDzImIqWIgFrBA-w

http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/necromancer/?5.5|6.5f.h1k.0.0.0|b.5f.h1k.8.5f.h5.0.0.0|51q.719.5f.719.5f.719.5f.719.5f.719.51q.719.0.0.0.0.0.0|31m.0.31m.0.21m.0.31m.0.21m.0.31m.d15|0.a6.u245.u68c.0|30.d|3t.4a.4c.4b.4g|e

Fractals:

- Urban: Necromancer’s can easily area pulse blind Ascalonian Warriors as they charge in. Necros can also strip the 25 stacks of might into lots of weakness with WoC after enemy monks use their buffing skill which is a HUGE damage decrease to the NPC groups. They go from doing one hit kills to barely scratching players and ally NPCs (save for the Warriors). Only Mesmers with Null Field will come close but only remove the boons and don’t convert them into weakness.

A support healing build is going to be able to keep Charr allies at 80-100% health indefinitely, even at the end with groups of Ascalonians. This can be done art 900-1200 range like I did last night on a level 34 run. I was constantly dropping MoB, WoB and Transfusion on NPCs that were fighting about 2.5 groups alone while also dropping everything else on my team struggling with 2-3 Ascalonian Warriors. NPCs hung on and killed off most of the two groups and team finished off the 2-3 warriors and then were able to finish off the NPC fight. Any other healing/support class would have to choose one or the other running in very close to NPCs to heal or joining Team to help. I just stayed in the middle of both my team and NPCs and multitasked.

Lastly for Urban Fractal, stacking on Ascalonian Captain is made easy. Stack up MoB mass Regeneration, WoB, WoP and WoS or WoD right before his first agony attack which also stack area protection). WoP turns burning into Aegis on team and NPCs… . Followed by Tranfusion for a nice 5K heal. Then I cast WoC turning Captain’s Protection it into stacks of vunerability. Plus it takes about 2 secs for the Protection to pop up after each WoC stripping pulse. A long time when there’s 5 players and 10 NPCs attacking. It all adds up to a very dead Captain very quickly.

Continued:

- Cliffside: With high Agony resistance this is a cake walk. I can pretty much face tank the legendary cultist, use his own conditions to give him long stacks of weakness etc., and help other teammates by converting conditions into more boons. Stacking on the torso seal is trivial to the point of a joke with any team composition because of Well and Mark stacking. Arm seals are much easier as you can constantly pull with Marks and turn stacks of vunerability on team into 10 seconds or so of protection, blind them etc. Months ago a team messed up and killed Cultists on both sides on level 28ish. Was on my Reflect Phantasm Mesmer then switched to Rabid Necro ( instead of my Apothecary build because I believed in all the negativity about healing/well support and that pure DPS was better at the time). Still wasn’t going well. Then after another 10-20min I switched to my Well support and we did it easily within two tries.

- Molten: That fight that everyone thinks is hard with the 20+ Vet Charr that everyone runs past and slowly pulls/kills? Can be utterly nullfied by a Necromancer using WoD first on the group, letting it expire and using Plague skill two for 20 seconds, then following up with other Wells etc. The team then has about 30-40 seconds of easy fighting to drop the entire group and do so almost everytime. A few weeks ago all but me and another necro didn’t run past even though I said I would handle them with Plague/WoD. They obviously didn’t believe me cause they left us to die and me and said Necro finished all but 3-4 and survived before team realised we didn’t die but we actually were winning handingly. They “helped” finish off the last mobs. I think it was a level 38-42ish Frac too.

- Underground: Same pros apply as Urban and Molten. You have mass blinds, are able to convert Dredge protection etc. into helpful conditions with opposite effects and can heal on the fly without setting up a combo or having to be still/within 600 range of teammates. Bombs is fairly trivial since I can single handingly aggro most of the Dredge, kite them and survive until the rest of the team runs in, places bombs and defend against a small number of enemies until they explode. Unless I mess up and get hit by like 10 grenades at once, I usually coast back to safety.

- Underwater: Switch all possible traits to MM-like build. Put Epidemic on for Jelly. Done (we all know this I think).

- Reactor: All points above apply. Necro CC is very helpful on healing Oozes. End Boss can be soloed by switching traits to MM as minions die rarely and never fall unless you do. Even if this wasn’t the case, I believe MM would still be strong here as you could summon and forget while concentrating on surviving until they fell, then repeat. They also take pressure off by becoming targets of the beam attack.

- Volcanic: Necro CC, Flesh Golem for running Grawl. WoD/Plague for Lava in addition to support wells and CC/mass condition damage on the run (Marks) helps a lot too.

- Aetherblades: Boon conversion, Condition conversion, Mass Condition Damage, Dead Aetherblades.

Continued:

There’s almost all the fractals (the ones that matter) where Necro both brings something uniquely effective to the table and is able to survive easily. I didn’t include gimmicky stuff like WoP/Consume conditions allowing to pull 3+ switches in places, Necro life steal keeping Mai Trin from stacking boons on level 37 Mistlock. I never mentioned DS anywhere even though its great for absorbing damage when you know somethings coming (like Molten Beserker stomps etc.) If Necros want to be effective in things like Fractals we have to use our strengths instead of ignoring them and saying “Well x class can do that too…” My question back is: “Yes they can, but can they do it all at once while also doing y and z?” Mechanics of skills and how they’re casted/used are just as important as big numbers. That’s part of the problem since its very hard to see what a Necro is doing.

A perfect example of this was bleed ticks before they updated the way damage is displayed. All I could brag about was “look at all those hits for 100-180!!” Other players were always like “klolwhatever I do 10K in a burst.” Now with the update I can see that all those 100-180 bleed ticks are actually like 1.7K to 4K damage per tick. Other people can see this too. That’s why when I burn people down with Rabid set in WvW they’re overwhelmed and message me like “Wow those condition ticks are huge whaaaa?” With 25 stacks of might I can brag about AoE 3K, 3.5K and, in WvW, 3.9K bleed ticks with a total support/tanky build.

In closing though the big problem for Necros is older dungeon content that didn’t and still doesn’t have effective use of boons and conditions from enemies and focus too much on dodgable super DPS attacks in 20 second intervals. If Necro’s could mean the difference between a zerker group doing 120% of their damage instead of 30-50% because of weakness and protection all over the place, Necros (and Mesmers) would be much more useful. Also power needs a buff on Necro since each time I tried it months ago in SPvP I was not impressed. Finally made a WvW Soldier zerg build and was still not impressed (although I liked how it plays in zergs).

Before Ascended Weapons my Necro, Mesmer and Guardian were decked out in optimized gear. I could have chosen my Mesmer, who like my Necro had multiple fully decked out sets, or my Guardian to continue in Fractals and WvW. Not only did I choose my Necro, but I chose my Apothecary build over Rabid to deck out first in full ascended. Now this could be a mistake one day if Anet somehow destroys the viability of my set/build (so far every patch has improved it a little except the MoB nerf in SPvP and an overall condition patch/buff is hinted at), but I never felt my Mesmer and Guardian could change the outcome of fights or be as versatile with their builds in PvE/WvW.

So no, I don’t believe Necros are bad in PVE. I do believe some dungeons and “enviromental bosses” are just designed wrong and ignore large segments of the game mechanics, thus making us redundant. Make the rest of the game more like Fractals (which appears to be happening with LS), then Necros will become more important.

Not being able to have 2 condition users in a group is pretty annoying, even if you are the only condition specced person you can lose out on your DPS.

Something that is really on my nerves at the moment is that 90% of my groups seem to have a mesmer who uses duelists and if they go that spec they will have a forced trait that illusions do bleeds on crit (100% also). If they have 3 of these up duelists will do potentially 24 bleeds (normally somewhere around 15-20 though).

Though that’s 15-20 of my bleed damage deleted by a teammate, this is such a broken mechanic that needs to be fixed and have said this in a few threads now but its just on my nerves that ANet have done 0 things about it to fix it.

And for this reason you shouldn’t bring a Necro in PvE.

No Vigor/Endurance Regen/Block/Invul/Reflect. Meaning your the only class in the game that can’t ‘sustain attrition’ in the ’avoid this or 1shot death fights.

Condi is bad because of no object damage, and caps.

Power is bad because of 1 target melee range.

MM is bad because of no control over minions, they don’t ‘scale’ & you can’t shorten the CD on summoning them again. Also 1 target again.

Support is bad because of ‘burst’ support only. You can’t use support buttons or even res someone if your in DS.
We ‘were’ kings of condi manipulation. But a ninja, silent stealth nerf, they removed cleaning condi’s off of allies.

Bweaty.9187:

No Vigor/Endurance Regen/Block/Invul/Reflect. Meaning your the only class in the game that can’t ‘sustain attrition’ in the ’avoid this or 1shot death fights.

Condi is bad because of no object damage, and caps.

Power is bad because of 1 target melee range.

MM is bad because of no control over minions, they don’t ‘scale’ & you can’t shorten the CD on summoning them again. Also 1 target again.

Support is bad because of ‘burst’ support only. You can’t use support buttons or even res someone if your in DS.
We ‘were’ kings of condi manipulation. But a ninja, silent stealth nerf, they removed cleaning condi’s off of allies.

Life Transfer becomes a support button in DS if you go Support, and wells continue to tick while you’re in DS.

I personally prefer Balekai’s lengthy explanation and examples of how Necro can be extremely useful in fights over quick one-liners about how certain builds are bad.

Thanks for the content, Balekai. I don’t really PvE, and I don’t have a support mentality, but I very much appreciated the read. I do love wells, partly because of my love of wells back in GW1 (where I was much more support-y with keeping wells and Blood Ritual up on monks and the like, along with some nuke spells in the interim. Go figure.), and partly because they are more useful than they lead on (getting Vigor, Aegis, and Prot in PvP from WoP just feels so incredibly good).

It’s probably been said (‘d like to think it has), though Wellmancer’s using Dagger are exceptionally strong, and their Wells are great for burning down a group of mobs in no time. I leveled through PvE using full power with wells, and it was a breeze.

AOE dmg is high with power necro. Pop up wells, go DS, hit 5, fast 4…. pug mobs are dead. Even in WvW making 2-5k hits on zergs.

Well what defines someone as good is how good they play, not the class. That being said for pve they are bad. Damage low support low no reflections no vigor, why take one? that is the question. For dungeons I wouldn’t kick one or anything, but in fractals 49 I definitely wouldn’t run with a necro

Cogbyrn.7283:

/snip

Thanks for the content, Balekai. I don’t really PvE, and I don’t have a support mentality, but I very much appreciated the read. I do love wells, partly because of my love of wells back in GW1 (where I was much more support-y with keeping wells and Blood Ritual up on monks and the like, along with some nuke spells in the interim. Go figure.), and partly because they are more useful than they lead on (getting Vigor, Aegis, and Prot in PvP from WoP just feels so incredibly good).

Thanks and I like Wells for many of the same reasons since i’m a former GW1 player myself.

Painbow.6059:

Well what defines someone as good is how good they play, not the class. That being said for pve they are bad. Damage low support low no reflections no vigor, why take one? that is the question. For dungeons I wouldn’t kick one or anything, but in fractals 49 I definitely wouldn’t run with a necro

Read above (very long) if you haven’t already. I give a 3 post (really 2 posts covering fracs, 3rd is conclusion) fractal by fractal reason why and how Necro’s can be very useful and in many cases uniquely useful on all the non-cakewalk levels based on my daily experiences.

Also whenever there are mobs casting bleeds and/or chill there is pulsing Vigor, whenever there is Burning there is pulsing Aegis, Poison into pulsing Regeneration, Vunerability into pulsing Protection, Weakness into Might. This is due to Well of Power and there’s a lot of bleeds, burning, vunerability on teammates in Fracs. It’s not hard for a Necro with Well of Power to stack 10-15 seconds of each in addition to team boons when team is being hit by condition spikes.

Between all the wells, healing support, mass protection, weakness, pulse blinds in combination with other support skills of other classes, I find there’s really no need to dodge on most fractals, even on 49. In fact, I find I can facetank a lot of things better than say Guardians when I use my wells wisely, because damage is mitigated so much and I have so much incoming healing, that most vets or bosses can’t DPS through it or are too slow to kill me, allowing for dodging and kiting for 5-15 seconds while recovering. During that time I’m still able to do potent condition damage DPS due to range weapons, only losing potential DPS from Geomancy and MoB if I have it on.

But really any Power/Cond Wellimancer has access to the main utility skills for benefitting teams since WoD, WoP, WoC. and WoS work on any Well build and are easily interchangable to fit the moment.

The only thing I miss in Fractals with Necromancer is reflect on Uncategorized. Necromancer really has nothing to offer on that fractal save for burning down both ettin/charr champs at once with conditions and helping fear golems into place. However, said fractal is easy anyways which is the pattern: The more basic, easy and one dimensional (game mechanics wise) a PVE is, the less useful a Necromancer is. The more complicated, harder and multi-dimensional (using boons, conditions, adds along with bosses etc.) PVE is, the more useful Necromancers become, if built for it.

@Blekai: Blind spam is meaningless in Underground fractal due to it all being Dredge (which can’t be blinded). Weakness spam I could believe, though.

Warriors with warhorn give better weakness than necros.

spoj.9672:

Warriors with warhorn give better weakness than necros.

withering precision gives 7s weakness on crit
signet of spite 14s weakness (reuse 1 min)
corrosive poison cloud 4s (reuse 40s)
enfeebling blood 14s (reuse 25s)

withering precission (trait) + daggers enfeebling blood = perma weakness

Withering precision: 5s
Signet of Spite: 10s
CPC: 5x 3s
Enfeebling blood: 10s

Use base values pls.

even with base values u can do perma weakness due to weakness on crit aka withering precission…

And it required to run the “sub-optimal” condi build and its only perma for single target which are mostly bosses which halves the weakness duration. How perma weakness going by you and where? Or you just spam stuff and Epidemic it?

Also withering precision got a 20s ICD, thats why its a bad Grandmaster trait.

Rapier.3675:

even with base values u can do perma weakness due to weakness on crit aka withering precission…

Not with the 20 second ICD, you can’t.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

@Blekai: Blind spam is meaningless in Underground fractal due to it all being Dredge (which can’t be blinded). Weakness spam I could believe, though.

lol you know four months ago, I was trying to remember why I wasn’t taking WoD before on Underground after a huge break from Fractals. I totally forgot about the blind issue.

Regardless, area Weakness from Staff+Scepter/Dagger and area Protection from Wells combined certainly does the trick in mitigating their damage.

Dalanor.5387:

Withering precision: 5s
Signet of Spite: 10s
CPC: 5x 3s
Enfeebling blood: 10s

Use base values pls.

Just to add to the list the easily done Chillblains + Putrid Mark combo. So it’s really:

Withering Precision: 5s w/ 20 sec CD (if you crit on time)

Signet of Spite: 10s w/ 60 sec CD

Corrosive Poison Cloud: 5x 3s Area Weakness w/ 40 sec CD. Also a chance for about 5 other secs of single target Weakness if self infliction is transfered.

Enfeebling Blood: 10s Area Weakness w/ 25 sec base CD. (Edit: I thought 10 seconds was too long. When I got back home and checked enfeeble blood its 6 seconds, not 10 for weakness part and changed calculations below accordingly and fixed a stupid mistake/typo below concerning cond dur.)

Chillblains+Putrid Mark: 5s Area Weakness w/ 25 sec total base CD to pull off combo.

A total of 46 seconds of Weakness to one target in one cast of each skill , 26 seconds of area Weakness.

If we count recasting of some of the skills in the time it takes the longest cooldown to end (SoS), WP will trigger an addition two times and EF, Chillblains+Putrid Mark one more time for an additional 21 seconds of Weakness, 11 seconds area.

In the end that’s 67 seconds of individual Weakness and 37 seconds area within a 60 second period, before counting condition duration food, other duration sources and 20% CDs traits. A Dhuumfire Rabid Necro will be able to achieve 113.9 seconds of Weakness in 60 seconds with 70% Condition duration (30% from Spite, 40% from food). 94% uptime vs. bosses not counting any trait CD improvements.

And yes this can be easily achieved by a viable Dhuumfire build replacing one utility spot for CPC. Even without CPC you would achieve 47 seconds of Weakness, without duration buffs. Either way a Rabid Withering Precision Necro can easily reach 66%-100% Weakness uptime on bosses solo… again before CD traits.

To go even further lets only count Enfeeble Blood and Chillblains+Putrid Mark combo, two skills every Condi Necro will be able to do using Staff+Scepter/Dagger. Lets assume said Necro has only a 40% Condition food duration buff and Staff Mastery (like my support build for example):

Enfeebling Blood: 8.4s Area Weakness w/ 25 sec base CD.

Chillblains+Putrid Mark: 7s Area Weakness w/ 20 sec total base CD to pull off combo.

That’s 15.4 seconds of area Weakness in a 25 second period. 61% uptime just for playing any Condition based Necro with proper weapons types and food. Of course this may not be the case because of missing a CD finish due to ill time weapon swaps, accidently using Chillblains without Putrid Mark etc., but this is the case for every player who gets kded, fumbles a skill, retreats to recover etc. There’s going to be issues.

So those saying a Necro cannot achieve long or perma weakness on mobs or a boss are wrong. Before saying something is flat out not possible we need to crunch the numbers, post them and work out the actual in game mechanics in our heads before making statements about what is or isn’t possible, good or bad.

Yeah but the cost of achieving that amount of area weakness is way too high. The warrior gets really good access and only loses a 5% modifier and some cc to get it. Warrior also grants group vigor and provides a blast finisher when giving weakness. I think its pretty clear which class id prefer to get area weakness with. Especially as most groups have atleast 2 warriors (80% uptime of aoe weakness).

Not to mention a good consumable for fractals is scale venom which procs vuln and weakness (no icd so cleaving attacks work really well with this). This means you dont even need warriors with warhorn to get perma aoe weakness for your group. Necros arent needed for weakness and the lack of cleave becomes an issue.

Overpowered Boss: Haha I now use 1-hit-kill 80k damage attack. I win!

Warrior: Ha not so fast! I can block!
Guardian: I block too.
Thief: I can dodge 24/7. But this time I will stealth to make you lose target lock.
Mesmer: Good luck finding me in my clones.
Elementalist: You attack move so slow it will never catch me! If it does, I can use invulnerability.

Necro: I am downed. I got nothing to face tank this.
Ranger: I am glad I never got invited to the party. This would have been a waste of time.
Engineer: Agreed.

CHIPS.6018:

Overpowered Boss: Haha I now use 1-hit-kill 80k damage attack. I win!

Warrior: Ha not so fast! I can block!
Guardian: I block too.
Thief: I can dodge 24/7. But this time I will stealth to make you lose target lock.
Mesmer: Good luck finding me in my clones.
Elementalist: You attack move so slow it will never catch me! If it does, I can use invulnerability.

Necro: I am downed. I got nothing to face tank this.
Ranger: I am glad I never got invited to the party. This would have been a waste of time.
Engineer: Agreed.

At least ranger and engi has options to avoid it.

Balekai.6083:

too long didnt read

I wasnt sure so checked the wiki. I remembered correctly. Attention please!

“Weakness is a condition that decreases the rate of endurance regeneration and turns half of all hits into glancing blows (that deal 50% less damage). Stacks of weakness increase the duration of the condition. Only stacks up to 5 times. "

edit: It changed at the June 25th patch and as it says:

“Weakness: Changed from 50% fumble on regular attacks to 50% fumble on all attacks. Now only stacks up to 5 times (still stacks duration).”

Don’t forget Skale Venom consumable for weakness and vul. 5 people with that up and you can rack it up even with other traits/skills classes have. No need for a Necro just for these.

Also do mobs do glancing blows with weakness? I’ve never noticed it before as guessing it doesn’t say glancing damage for incoming damage? It should though.

@spoj.9672:

No the cost isn’t too high. I can easily achieve this with the build I already run as a Rabid if 100% uber awsome duration is what you’re going for which seems to be the bar set, by switching 1-2 traits and 10 points of traits. The fact is you don’t even need 100% weakness uptime to be effective on bosses.

Also on your Warrior points. Here’s Warrior’s access to Weakness:

Call to Arms: 6s Area Weakness with 600 radius on 20 second CD

Fierce Blow: 8s hammer cleave Weakness on 12 second CD

Pulverize: 5s Mace cleave Weakness on 1 second attack.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with Call to Arms. Here’s my question though: Who uses Hammer and Mace against a boss? No one. Warhorn? Why unless there’s heavy chill etc. and you really really need Vigor (and are not stacking)? At 70% cond duration a Warrior will only have 10.2 second Weakness with Call to Arms. you would need two warhorned Warriors to achieve 100% Weakness uptime against normal mobs, 4 warhorns for bosses. When you can have one necro easily making it close to the 100% uptime on a boss. Those warriors would be better served using a GS, benefiting from more damage on weakness traits and DPSing, while a Rabid Necro achieves near 100% area weakness uptime solo while still doing 90%-100% of their DPS and still using optimal weapons.

@Dalanor.5387:

Even though it only stacks 5 times, you’re only using 4-5 skills stacking Weakness, so this isn’t an issue. I would have to go into it further (but not going to because I need to get a few things done before reset), you should be able to reach 100% duration anyways because by the time you “restack” weakness some/most of the stacks should be finished, allowing for more stacks.

Maybe you should read the calculations and you would figure out this is probably what would happen. Again you have to crunch the numbers and think about how they apply in reality. Opinions don’t matter so much.

@CHIPS:

Can’t really disagree with this. If you’re not running a tanky Well build with weakness+protection or get a lucky blind (10% chance lol), a 80K hit is going to kill you as a Necro with nothing to fall back on unless you dodge, get Aegis from WoP/allies or are Sylvari. Good thing there isn’t many, if at all, 80K hits.

@Nijjion:

Mobs and players do indeed give the notice for glancing blows. You will only notice them when they hit you or a Minion etc. because you can only see damage against yourself.

As for Skale venom, I don’t think the cond duration (because of the classes procing it) along with it being mostly single target is going to reach necro area+single target weakness, especially on a boss.

—

I have a lot of patience but i’m looking for a real conversation. No offense guys, so far most of the arguments anti-Necro seem to be quick one sentence to one paragraph retorts “Well x class can do y better if they put z on” arguments that aren’t completely thought through. I then look at it only to find this class not so good at it due to the numbers, how its applied and playstyles/mechanics of it. For example this Weakness debate is now “Well if I have 2-5 Warriors/Thieves then I don’t need a Necro for Weakness.” You guys aren’t seeing the opposite arguement which is “We don’t need 2-5 Warriors/Thieves applying/gearing for Weakness duration if we have one Rabid Necro.” Or is it ok for other classes to switch a few weapons/traits around gimping their DPS/survival, but not ok for Rabid Necro built/optimized that way already to switch out lingering curse for withering precision (we don’t even really need to do that to keep near 100% uptime on mobs/bosses)?

Not to mention no one has addressed any of my main points concerning Necro usefulness in high end fractals after it was declared a Necro unfriendly area by some… I guess that’s because it was so long no one read it, which is completely understandable btw lol.

You misunderstand me. Warhorn is is all you need on 2 warriors to get near perma weakness. Necro has to change traits lose dps and all sorts to get perma weakness and most of it is single target. Thats a high cost for a crap condition.

And like i said already if you need weakness. Just get the whole group to use scale venom and you get perma weakness just from the consumable. No need to ruin your groups builds for a condition that you probably dont even need.

spoj.9672:

You misunderstand me. Warhorn is is all you need on 2 warriors to get near perma weakness. Necro has to change traits lose dps and all sorts to get perma weakness and most of it is single target. Thats a high cost for a crap condition.

And like i said already. Just get the whole group to use scale venom and you get perma weakness just from the consumable.

I perfectly understood you. I crunched the numbers and confirmed that 2 warriors get 20.4 second weakness uptime, with 70% cond duration, on a warhorn 20 sec CD. Against bosses this will be cut in half to 10.2 seconds again. 50% uptime. However, you’re arguing two warriors with warhorn equiped vs. bosses when most warriors are stacking to do highest DPS possible with GS, can do the same thing as one Rabid Necro. That’s not entirely true

Necros only have to change 1 skill and trait for another if they’re running Rabid Necro 30/30/10/0/0 which is higest DPS conditionmancer in the game. That trait is grandmaster lingering curse for withering precision which may not be needed and CPC on instead of Epidemic (which is useless vs 1 target). You would only be missing out on a defensive skill or Blood is Power, but since your a Rabid Necro and there’s going to be might all over the place is a proper group, you don’t need it anyways. To Dalanor’s point even if you’re worried about 5 stacks of Weakness hitting target, you can wait until weakness stacks are almost done to cast CPC and stagger application.

First off. Why would you use weakness on a boss. Its purely for trash in fractals. Second warriors dont achieve highest dps with GS. They use an axe gs rotation which has room for a warhorn on the offhand if you dont mind losing 5% modifier, vuln and cc. Third rabid necro is terrible dps on bosses. Condi necros only excel at aoe and thats because of epidemic. But yeah thats really strong on bosses…. And even with the aoe condi necros can do its pretty bad compared to power aoe/cleave on other classes. Heck even power necros burst aoe is better than condi aoe(suffers from high cooldowns but its still good enough for trash).

So you ARE sacrificing a lot to get weakness because you are changing to a subpar build to get it. Whereas warrior doesnt have to change builds they can just take a offhand warhorn. But like I said already. Noone needs to build for weakness because you can just stack scale venom instead. Thus rendering this whole arguement pointless.

Just to throw this observation in from a third-party perspective: it looks like Bale is actively engaging in finding ways that Necro CAN work in PvE scenarios, and everyone else is trying their hardest to find excuses as to why Necros CAN’T work in PvE scenarios.

Checking someone’s positive assertion with a theoretical negative is definitely important, but I think people often get mired in the negative and don’t step outside and start checking their negative assertions with positive theoretical.

Just a few cents. I’d like to contribute, but I don’t PvE. DS Powermancer WvW or bust.

@spoj.9672

I accept your explaination of Axe DPS with Warhorn. However, you said has “room” for warhorn. It is optimal or are you just working it in? Also I didn’t know we were talking about Fractal bosses. I thought we were talking in general PvE play. Even so, there’s tons of times your stacked on a boss or loads of trash.

Weakness isn’t useful? Please. In combination with Protection most things will hardly scratch the glassiest of teammates.

Weakness reduces targets damage by 50%, 50% of the time and slows down Endurance regeneration by 50% as well (not useful in PvE of course). That is fact. If you kept it up indefinitely that’s team 25% damage reduction average you didn’t have before. A 10-20K hit by a boss can turn into a 5-10K hit. Add in Protection it becomes a 3.35K-6.7K hit. Also if you play smart and time Weakness application correctly, you can achieve the same thing against heavy hitting spike dmg if you know boss tells. Why wasn’t Weakness useless a couple posts ago? Or did it become useless after I started to prove Necro could keep it up 100% of the time?

I disagree Rabid DPS is a sub par build for Necro. No offense, but a Powermancer will never, ever reach the potential AoE damage of a Rabid Conditionmancer against trash. Not even spikes with Wells. A Rabid Condi Necro is going to be running about 15-20 stacks of area bleeds (conservative). It takes less then 10 seconds to apply most/all the bleeds then sustain them. Lets do the Math:

Rabid Necro with around 1861 condition damage, with food and before/after 25 stacks of might.

Bleeds: 15-20 average at 136 ticks indefinitely for 2040-2720 area damage per second. 2640-3520 with 25 might stacks per second. That’s indefinite especially in PvE. With said 25 stacks each Mark of Blood application = 8069 damage over 15.25s on a 4.75s CD. Every area bleed skill will apply at least 7K damage over their durations. Even Dark Path will apply 5K total bleeds.
Burning: 790 damage per second against 1 target the entire fight. This can be kept up against one target or epid to multiple easily. Runs into problems with burning queues. So now were at 2830-3510 damage per second indefinitely unless somoene gimps damage with lesser burning. Around 3650-4530 damage per second with 25 might stacks, throughout a fight.

In addition to Torment, Poison, Fear (if you take it) and normal crap power damage augmented with 50% crit chance (Life transfer hits about 2.5-3K), you can easily do 4-5Kish area condition damage per second, always with no might stacks. Probably a lot more with 25 Stacks of might bringing your attack 3400, but to be conservative 5-7K. It is impossible and I mean impossible for a Power Necro to achieve that much AoE damage. Especially if the necro does take Epidemic. They only have two-thee AoE skills (WoS, WoC and LT) that an adequately high base AoE damage. Powermancer still out paces against a single target though when in Beserker gear, but they don’t even have access to cleave.

Rabid builds still have 2700-2800+ armor to fall back on too. Condi DPS is really easy and safe to apply as well, is fire and forget/tracks (unlike wells where the enemy can walk out of them) and can be fired at 900-1200 range. You can be running away from an enemy casting AoE skills behind you and still do great DPS. Rabid Necro is not sub par as a build. You need to take another look at Necromancer skills/mechanics before claiming a Powermancer can out AoE a Conditionmancer.

Here’s a Rabidmancer “Withermancer” maintaining about 10 stacks of Might I slapped together:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fQAQNAW7YjMaF7pbmb87JEpCXD0jeRXAxoHEjxcMA-jUCBYhCyINJjWAmqYIapoFRjtaqIasqbY6YER1GxFRrWIgFrBA-w

Doesn’t look broken to me.

Edit: Oh my just checked out Skale Venom consumable. I was thinking the thief skill Description:

“Double-click to consume.
Skale Venom(10m): You have a 10% chance to inflict weakness and vulnerability for 5 seconds when you hit a foe.”

Nice, but why would anyone kitten their whole team just to have the excuse not to bring a necro and not use a slayer potion (even though the dmg reduction is bugged) in a dungeon with this? Who carries these? No one carries those potions (maybe they should) and they’re not class specific unless it says “Everyone but a Necro can take this potion.”

You dont lose much optimization taking warhorns. And only place id consider using it on warrior in combat situations is in fractals. Weakness helps but we have dodges and other damage mitigation. Warhorn also allows us to be lazy and be more mobile between trash clearing and grants us extra vigor. So its not a terrible choice.

Personally I wouldnt run either. If i was running necro in fractals Id rely on weakening shroud and maybe offhand dagger + CPC on my zerker build. But only for dredge fractal. For warrior id stick with mace offhand for the cc and id probably use scale venom if I wanted weakness. Taking scale venom on all classes in the party instead of dps potions is pretty good in fractals as most people dont have pots for every type of trash mob. This also solves your weakness problem without effection builds and increases group vuln access.

Since dredge cant be blinded, thats about the only place its really good for. Dredge fractal, laurent and mossman are about the only places its worth worrying about weakness.

@Cogbyrn
I see what your saying. But im not going to desperately try and find a use for necro when its really just being forced. Atm everything necro can do well can be solved by different classes better or by using consumables. The only unique thing necro has is perma chill and it is situationally useless just like weakness. It use to have lifesteal darkfield exploit on jade maw, but they fixed that with the fractal patch along with removing access to the only difficult content which actually benefitted from a condi necro. It improved clear times dramatically when played properly.

I wont apologize for shooting down ideas in this thread because when people talk about pve usefulness i regard that as involving the meta. Which means condi builds and so on are just not an option. There was one place where it was worth having a condi necro in pve, but as i mentioned thats not accessable anymore(scale 70 dredge fractal).

The other downside of the example above is the time it needs to deal the full damage. You need time to cast spells, apply bleed and let them run. While other casts auto attack hits the same every 1/4 second. You get it.
Thanks for the effort, making all the calculations and explaining it, but as spoj said:

spoj.9672:

[…]its really just being forced. Atm everything necro can do well can be solved by different classes better or by using consumables.

With the current tools necromancers has and with current mechanics of pve in dungeons / fractals / open world, necro stays unviable, non-optional, useless, dead weight.

@spoj:

Dredge is not the only place blinds are useful. Like in my lengthy post about Fractals, I explained how well they can work in Volcanic against Lava Elementals, how invaluable they are against Ascalonian Warriors and how wells in general can prevent anyone (NPCs/Players) from ever going down. How you can pulse blind the 15-20 Charr on Molten Facility Fractal for 25+ seconds and easily have team DPS them down instead of running past them and setting up a pull etc.

Again Weakness, blinds, just one or two things in an arensal of Necro support thats all available at once, on one character. I also mentioned mass protection, chill, 1K regen per seocnd, indefinite 300 tick regeneration, extreme siphoning and potent condition area condition damage all on one build. Also I’m not tryng to desperately theorycraft a build or way to make Necro useful. My Fractals posts are entirely my life as a Fractal runner and how it plays out everyday (well now at least, since the daily is everyday). That’s why almost every post I have made when I check the numbers works. Because the proof of what i’m saying has already been proven to me time and time again through actual gameplay and experimentation for a year now. Experimentation that has become my main build.

Dalanor.5387:

The other downside of the example above is the time it needs to deal the full damage. You need time to cast spells, apply bleed and let them run. While other casts auto attack hits the same every 1/4 second. You get it.
Thanks for the effort, making all the calculations and explaining it, but as spoj said:

spoj.9672:

[…]its really just being forced. Atm everything necro can do well can be solved by different classes better or by using consumables.

With the current tools necromancers has and with current mechanics of pve in dungeons / fractals / open world, necro stays unviable, non-optional, useless, dead weight.

No problem, but I have to disagree strongly with that conclusion based on the conversation. So far I have not seen one person prove to me what I play regularly is not actually working or that another class can do all of it at once, better. For example you can say it takes a long time to gear up conditions, but it really only takes 10 seconds to stack 15-20 stacks of bleed as a Rabid Necro. I know this because I did a skill usage guide months ago for myself, to see just how many stacks I could get and maintain with a non crit Necro with Geomancy sigils and MoB over a minute or so. Took about 15 seconds to get 15 stacks of bleeds and it plays out ingame everyday. A Rabid Necro is twice as good at stacking extra bleeds. I know this because I burn down camps in WvW on a Rabid Geared Condimancer in 30 seconds more or less of fighting and sentries within about 5-10s. Once the conditions are up, they stay up. Show me that they don’t.

Solve is different then better or making a class “useless.” Many classes have many things that others have access to. That doesn’t mean they have an easier time doing them. Very few other builds of classes can do multiple things like the one I posted in my Fractal posts. I believe through experience that a Necro can shine at doing a host of things at once due to skill setups, with unique reaction time. The only problem is that when you do content that’s very easy with minimal fight mechanics, all that’s needed to be optimal is 4-5 Zerker Warriors and a Guardian.

However as I mentioned before, the trend is not towards Zerker content over the last couple months. It has been mostly in the direction of support/heavy builds instead. This goes for Fractals especially.

I think you need to re read my posts. I said blinds are not useful in dredge fractal. Dredge are immune to blind.

And yes i am fully aware blinds are very good for trash. But necro have very limited ways of getting blinds. Eles, guards and thieves all have better blind access for trash mobs. Ele has a pulse blind and a blind on auto attack (Lightning hammer). Thief has a spammable pulse blind which pulses twice as fast as WoD. Guard can spam blinds all day long as long as mobs are constantly being killed.

In response to necros loadout. All the things you mentioned are severely limited on the necro, except for chill. They can all be done by other classes much better. I wont go into details because its getting a bit tedious having to explain every single thing. My advice is to go play other classes at a high level and you will realise why necro is a poor choice if you could pick from any class.

You seem to be another person hung up on the idea that warriors and guardians are the the best classes. They arent. For my prefered group compositions it would be 1 or 0 guardians, 1 or 2 warriors, 1 or 2 eles. A mesmer or a thief if their utility is required. Ranger for certain dungeons is also really good.

Also a thing to note. The reason why I say condi is sub par is for exactly the reason you seem to think its good. 5-10 seconds is far too long to get your bleed stacks. No trash mob should last longer than 5 seconds. Ive tried condi necro in fractals before and everytime i tried to epidemic stuff i had to rush and cast it when they had 3-5 bleeds. Otherwise they would die before epidemic finished casting.

It flat out doesnt work well unless you have 1 extra tanky mob that can survive longer (a veteran or silver mob). But those shouldnt last 5 seconds either. And as im sure you are aware, condi dps on single targets is pretty bad expecially when classes take your bleed stacks even when using beserker builds. So condi necro is only good for groups of mobs in theory but doesnt work out so well in practise. Worked fine in fractal 70 dredge because they had really high armour and perma protection at that level.

However as I mentioned before, the trend is not towards Zerker content over the last couple months. It has been mostly in the direction of support/heavy builds instead. This goes for Fractals especially.

This is completely misguided and wrong. Fractals requires more coordination including cc and proper damage mitigation. But zerker is still the best way to do it. If you start taking cleric or pvt builds you will have a really hard time dealing with cliffside and dredge fractal (Made much easier with high dps + blinds and cc). Regen and healing will do nothing to save you if you cant dps things down fast enough.

I love having one necro in my party regardless of anything