Hello, I love the idea of micro managing summons in any kind of game so I love my necro in the GW1 and GW2 so therefore I was kinda wondering what weapons and gear set i would need, I’m running on full apothecary exotics with the superior rune of the undead and I’m using scepter/dagger with staff as swap. I use apothecary for the conditions and toughness, and since i have the superior rune i do more condition dmg. I have the healing since i put points into blood to heal myself when minions do dmg and when i pop DS and use life transfer it will heal my pets and allies, kinda tried it some dungeons and it was ok.
I know for sure that you’re stats will never benefit your minions but still being able to spread diseases and aoe down stuff while getting nuked by minions seems pretty good. But with the changes and the fact that i have been on in a while, i noticed that axe/focus seems pretty good now and since you will apply vulnerability minions should be able to do more dmg right? Any help on this would be greatly appreciated and also would like hear on any advice on some wvw builds and if MMs could be useful in them. Thank you very much.
In WvW MM builds are good for roaming, just realize that as a necro every fight is “all-in”, you either win the fight or you die, there pretty much isn’t any middle ground.
As for gear, I suggest either running a berzerker setup, which makes you a bit more glassy but with the damage to back it up, or soldier (power/vit/tough) for a tanky MM. Condition damage isn’t great for MMs because condition damage builds really need utilities like epidemic and BiP, which you won’t have. Healing power is okay if you are going for a tanky/support setup for a team, and are using well of blood and staff since you can get off some pretty huge heals with it.
Yes, axe/focus work really well because you stack a lot of vulnerability with focus 4 + axe auto attacks, potentially increasing minion damage by 25%, and also the cripple/chill from axe 3/focus 5 work really well together to keep people locked down.
These suggestions really aren’t going to work if you want to be a minion master. Axe/Focus with Berzerker gear? Why not just drop the minions at the point and focus on a full power build? There’s no way the minions can stay alive without healing, and for the 20+ seconds that they are down, you are very vulnerable.
And as to your original problem, Fenirian, it seems more of a question of how viable is the vulnerability stacking ability of axe/focus is in conjunction with minions. Just because you use staff most of the time (I’m assuming this from your post) doesn’t mean you can’t take axe/focus along as your secondary set. Throw down a few marks of blood on your minions, and you can switch to axe/focus once you’re comfortable enough with maintaining regen on your minions (can be helped out by boon duration increasing runes). Your single target output as a necromancer using an axe is really not that much; it is the minions who in conjunction with the vulnerability that deal the majority of the damage, so there’s no reason for you to become glass cannon when the minions are supposed to be doing the damage. Going full Berzerkers gear to specialize in the axe is also a poor choice because it gimps not only your ability to heal and maintain your minions, but also your AoE damage. It matters not that you don’t have Epidemic or Blood is Power on your bar; the fact is that staff benefits much more from condition damage than from power, and between the combined DPS of you and your minions, power won’t help your axe enough either. Keyword: enough.
You do also specifically ask about WvW in your post. I stand by my above recommendations. Play to the necromancer’s (and minion master’s) strengths. You excel at surviving and doing damage over time. Your minions and staff skills provide knockdowns and crowd controls. You have the toughness, death shroud, and multiple meat shields to avoid getting bursted down. Don’t suddenly try to go glass cannon and burst as an axe Necro. There will be very few times when a glass cannon necromancer will be able to overcome the hundreds of glass cannon thieves and warriors that roam WvW.
Rune wise I personally use Dolyak. Sigils I use cripple duration +10% and steal HP after swapping weapons. However in WvW you could very likely go with a stacking sigil on one set.
Minions stay alive very well on their own without healing. It isn’t your job as an MM in GW2 to babysit your minions, it isn’t like GW1. You summon them, make sure they do their damage, then let them die for the poison and resummon them. If you are using a power build with minions you will have enough survivability on your own anyway.
Minions stay alive very well on their own without healing. It isn’t your job as an MM in GW2 to babysit your minions, it isn’t like GW1. You summon them, make sure they do their damage, then let them die for the poison and resummon them. If you are using a power build with minions you will have enough survivability on your own anyway.
I think you have GW1 and GW2 mixed around, in GW1 the only good minion master was the minion bomber, and so you never bothered to use Blood of the Master to heal them.
You can’t do the same in GW2. Why not? Well for one thing, the recharge time of bone minions in GW1 was 5 seconds, compared to 16.66 seconds in GW2 (assuming you went into the death magic tree for some reason with a power build). You could also have up to 11 minions, whereas you have 6 in GW2, and that’s not even taking into consideration the much longer recharges of the other minions. Death Nova doesn’t even do damage in GW2, it’s just a stationary poison cloud that last for three seconds, which won’t even hit half the mobs/players in this game because they’re ranged or won’t run into your stationary 3-second poison cloud. You rationalize the usefulness of a minion with the effects of its death, but a minion that’s dead is effectively a wasted slot for the duration of the (long) cooldown. Do you really want to trade skill slots for the possibility of a 4 second poison on a 20 second cooldown?
There are much better utilities to take if you want to focus on a power build. The point of taking minions is to utilize them to their potential, not to use minions to enhance your own build because chances are, there are better alternatives. Is your suggested build better than the one OP has right now? Very possibly. But does it make effective use of its minions or its utilities? That point I highly doubt.
Thank you guys very much for your ideas and suggestions and details to the minions. I think I finally decided what to do and again thank you very much.
