Guild Wars 2

Vigor. Running high end dungeons I’ve come to realize endurance is extremely important. There’s never enough of it to deal with focused aggro from the majority of enemies, especially in Arah. It makes boss encounters like Giganticus Lupicus an absolute nightmare. Despite knowing his every behavior and mechanic, even if all dodges are used to their maximum potential, when Lupicus has focused aggro on you and you’re a necro, checkmate. You are simply dead. This situation is exemplified in almost any boss fight when you are the boss’s target, and even a significant number of dungeon trash mobs as well. I’m going to explain why endurance serves necromancers more than any other profession in GW2.

Everyone says the problem with our profession is dps. While that’s probably true, there’s also an unspoken issue involving Death Shroud and endurance that actually results in loss of dps. When necromancers are out of endurance, we use Death Shroud as a meat shield. All other professions can utilize Vigor allowing them to dodge a third or fourth time again twice as fast. Necromancers have to absorb the damage with Death Shroud instead. Did you know that Life Blast only hits maximum damage above 50% Life Force? That means necromancers are losing dps, because instead of dodging extra attacks we take a huge hit in Death Shroud putting us under or close to the max damage threshold.

Endurance is more valuable to offensive Death Shroud necromancers than any other profession in the game. Dodging saves us from sacrificing precious Death Shroud dps. So, Vigor is the Death Shroud necromancer’s dream buff. It doesn’t make sense that necromancers are the only profession without Vigor. It effectively raises our dps without adding or changing multipliers to necromancer attacks.

Thanks for reading.
Please give us Vigor, though.

Support necros (who also duals as tanks, or as close to it as this game gets) don’t suffer from this problem. That is, of course we still don’t get vigor, but we are among the top survivable builds, while still offering strong support to our team mates. It’s enough to get you through any PvE content in the game as it is, and once they fix the bugs (and I’d like to see a “fix” to the glaring problem of our heals not scaling with healing power — Transfusion — or being so small I don’t see a point in even getting them — Deathly Invigoration). If they fix those things, I don’t see how a support necro has anything to complain about.

Of course, other necro builds should be able to run dungeons as well, and if they’re not, that’s a problem. However, I can’t really say anything more about that, since I’ve only run support. You could always try it out; maybe you’ll find it more enjoyable than you think.

@Daiva, or one could just reroll a Guardian and be a much better support while still having decent damage.

Best guess is that they think we will pop DS to absorb the damage rather than avoid it.

@Swadow: Then why don’t you? If you want to keep playing your necro, then do that. If you don’t, then reroll something you do want to play. The fact remains: (support) necros are very much capable of handling all PvE content, which is what this thread is about (I feel useful enough in WvW as well, but we’ll save that for a different discussion).

As I said in my first post: there are some issues (that I expect to get fixed), but they’re not large enough to make it even remotely close to being undoable. You go play your far superior guardian, and I’ll play my necro, and enjoy the kitten out of playing, and successfully doing what I set out to do. Then, when they fix the bugs and heals, I’ll stop occasionally frowning about it, and live happily ever after in a land of eternal bliss and joy. Sounds good?

dont need vigor, when you can keep up retaliation almost non stop.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEy7EhlNRlY

Edited to try and better convey the role of endurance on necromancers.

@McWaffle

What? Guy had like 10% uptime on Relatiation… Also, how does retaliation stop you from taking a dirtnap? Answer: It doesn’t.

???????

On Topic: While Vigor sure is nice, it’s definitely not mandatory. If we had vigor on top of Death Shroud, high base VIT, and natural synergy with toughness, we would probably be absolutely broken.

Retaliation is not very good for dungeons because hitting them back for 500 doesn’t really matter when they have 50k hp and are hitting you for 5k a pop. So I dunno what that guy is on about.

What would be better than vigor is making:
a) perma stability while in DS like it used to (or at least the stun break part upon use of F1)
b) plain removing the dps lost aspect (take max damage, put it as our 10% life blast damage and then scale for 5% damage for every 10% life force if they really want energy management).