Guild Wars 2

Hi there,

I am thinking about either levelling a Necro from 1 to 80 or using the levelboost thing from Path of Fire to get one.

I have never played the class (or any other cloth using caster) before but I would love to play a Reaper for fluff and style reasons.

Now, I know I cannot just start as a Reaper so was hoping some of you might be able to tell me which build would be fun and easy for leveling or generally PvE content?

Spite, Blood Magic, and Death Magic with Minions is an extremely simple way of leveling through the class. Minions practically never die in PvE, and they eat aggro for you while also healing you. It’s a relatively braindead way of doing it, but it works very well. It can be kinda fun to min-max your minion usage with things like detonating Bone Minions and breaking bars using Flesh Golem Charge and Bone Fiend’s Rigor Mortis.

Which weapons should I use? Staff?

Campa.9741:

Which weapons should I use? Staff?

Any combination of Staff, Dagger main hand, and Axe main hand with Dagger offhand and Warhorn offhand. They’re all perfectly valid to pick from and give a reasonable variety of different effects.

If you have a dagger in either mainhand or offhand, you can also trait Quickening Thirst (blood magic t1) for a nice passive movement speed buff. Nice little addition for running about in open world.

What game mode and play style do you prefer; ranged, melee, with pets or without? Do you have an image of how Reaper should play that you want to try?

Also, if you are thinking of leveling from 1 to 80 in PvE, your build will evolve from pretty close to nothing at the start. Die-hard, story-mode, completionists may want to level without tomes or a boost but it is also perfectly acceptable to skip straight to L80. WvW and PvP let you do that without much investment.

That is a great question… the honest answer is probably I am not sure. My first ever GW2 char that I levelled to 80 the traditional way was an Engineer… I shelved it and played a Warrior to 25, wasn’t too keen. Then I started levelling a Guardian and I enjoy that class quite a bit, loved sPvP with it and playing sort of bunker/disruptive builds… not sure any of that is viable anymore though.

Then I levelled a Ranger to 80 and started HoT on the Ranger as well and again, I do enjoy the class. I used my HoT lvl 80 boost on a Thief, which I only had at lvl 1 and did sPvP with… haven’t really PvE’ed a lot with it if I am honest.

The Necromancer looks interesting because of a Power Reaper PvP build I have seen. What I like about it is that it seems like a class that can potentially just jump into the thick of it and be quite beefy with high survivability.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5p_pcFP5GGw&t=194s

power based build with soul reaping (50% crit in shroud (not scaled down on low lvl maps) + vital persistance (cd reduction of shroud skills on base necro = nice!)) is probably one of the best ways to lvl up (just dont kill yourself with 1111 in shroud on reflects).
+ everything you like (spite and blood magic maybe)

a well, spectral grasp, a horn . any heal you like, any 3rd utility, any elite and any main-hand you like + staff on weapon swap for tagging.

minions were mentioned – is nice, but i dont like it, its soooo passive and imo fairly slow (but good vs soloing champs, if you are new to necro).

if you want to continue open world and enjoy just passing by mobs and killing them while you are on the next 5 – go condi full shout reaper with reaper rune. (curses 3-2-2 or 1-2-2; soul reaping 3-2-3; Reaper 1-x-2)

basically any build works for lvling and open world, but i find the first one incredibly easy and more active than minions.

Since most of the gear you find while leveling is power, I’d suggest dagger / warhorn, spite 122 and blood magic 221, all wells and lich form

I’d say power Spite 1-2-2, Soul Reaping 2-2-2, and Blood Magic 2-3-1 for leveling. Dagger/Dagger for primary damage with Staff secondary for unblockable marks and kiting. Signet of Spite, Well of Corruption, and Well of Suffering for utilities. Flesh Golem elite and Blood Fiend healing to round it out.

Wells & Minions
This is a power build. You should:
1) Unlock Quickening Thirst for the run speed
2) Unlock the minions you can use
3) Unlock the two damaging wells
4) Unlock Vampiric Rituals
5) Now that you have levelled up a bit pick Spite (damage) or Death Magic (survivability) as your second and third specialization slot.
6) make your way to lv 80