Guild Wars 2

Hi,

my necro is lvl 40 at the moment but I’m doing very little damage..
I’ve searched the board but I didn’t find a guide or something about leveling a necro.
Could you help me? I’m looking for the fastest leveling speed (= max. damage).

Thank you in advance

I see a lot of folks running around as minion master builds. If you are just looking to level to 80 it seems like an easy way to go.

Max death magic, get minion and staff traits and throw the rest into a trait line of your choice depending on what you want to do. Curses if you want to do condition damage or spite if you want to do more direct damage yourself or blood magic if you want to tank right up front with your minions.

At lvl 40 20 points in death magic is probably best if you just doing open world pve, and then going from there.

The problem with any tutorial is that there isn’t a set way for the Necro to level, you can level as dagger/wells, conditions, or MM. MM is probably the easiest as you would take the least amount of damage, but dagger wells is incredibly powerful and allows you to fully utilize warhorn.

I eventually went with adding loads of defence, and just trying to out-health things. Damage in close range was my first attempt and it was abysmal, and minions are good farming but the moment something remotely difficult happens… nope. :/

I found Vampiric Master to be a game changer. That, along with Bloodthirst, made a minion build so easy to level. The Blood Fiend siphon was buffed right around the time I was leveling my necro, and it made powering through renown hearts and DEs pretty easy. My weapons were Dagger/Horn or Axe/Horn and off-hand Staff, mostly to give my minions perma regen.

And your first elite should be the Flesh Golem.

Condi builds are pretty bad at lower levels, and even on my 80 when I do level 50ish content I like to swap to MM. It just feels like the scaling of bleeds with level is off somehow.

As for gear, I loaded up on Toughness and Vitality wherever I could get it and used Minor/Major/Superior sigil of Bloodlust. I didn’t worry too much about gear, though. MM and Siphoning work so well because they don’t change much with gearing.

LameFox.6349:

I eventually went with adding loads of defence, and just trying to out-health things. Damage in close range was my first attempt and it was abysmal, and minions are good farming but the moment something remotely difficult happens… nope. :/

If you don’t take the 20 in Death Magic minions are virtually worthless. If they die resummon them. 20 in spite is meh, if you have condition gear than 20 in curses is the way to go because there aer so many nice things there.

Personally 20 in Blood Magic or Death magic are the best ways to invest when leveling.

When I was leveling I personally went for 20 into Death Magic + 20 into Blood Magic.

I primarily used Staff (With Staff traits from Death Magic) + Wells (Suffering + Corruption) + Bone Minions.

I just went around, gathered up 5 mobs, threw down Wells + Marks (2 – 3 – 4 – 2) and exploded the minions, things tended to die very quickly (Also the perma-regen from Staff #2 when traited is very nice for tougher opponents)

I used P/V/T gear, I could have gotten away with more precision/crit damage stuff but I didn’t mind doing slightly lower damage as it meant I could stand my ground at all times.

Other ways to level do exist (Such as Sceptre/Dagger condition builds utilizing Epidemic to get high stacks of AoE Bleeds) but I only tried them out briefly.

To level 60 going minions (no real trait requirement but as people said 20 into DM helps) is usually the fastest way, gearing up your fine (blue) weapons and armor every 5~6 levels (the base ones go from 40 copper to 1 silver and aint soulbound thus can be sold back to tp after use) is also a big thing. On another note always having any cheap food (the kill xp bonus), the zones levels gathering tools to gather everything and killing off mobs in remote places helps a lot.