Guild Wars 2

Greetings every one.
First of all i love this game, yet i have a strange question, its about my necromancer. I started playing a few weeks ago with it, and now it is level 43 I finally managed to buy the traits book, but i am lost in how to setup his traits, till 40 i struggled with it, making wrong traits it seem, and most of the profession builds are for lvl 80 characters.
I love using the elite pet and i have scepter and dagger, staff alt weapon.

But my question is how to make use of the traits and in what order am i supposed to put these to ; Hav the most use of these traits. I mean my dps is kinda low but so is everything, takes a long time till i kill some mob. Thats fine, but i have a feling i am wasting time going on like the way i am doing things right now.

Any Help leveling this necro up in the right way is appriciated.
Should i go minionmaster or keep putting points in curses? Do i need to get more hp to balance out fights? Its all confusing me.

Cheers,

There are several ways to go about it. The weapon set you’re using now is condition-oriented so it’s only normal that it takes a longer while to kill mobs, however it provides you with good aoe damage and kiting options, so you can take on 5 mobs at a time and deal with it pretty well by staying away and using your ds when you run out of kiting options until the cooldown runs out.

If you want to continue with a condition spec, it will be fine for leveling, but not the most popular option for dungeons due to a few things like bleed stacking cap, defiant buff on bosses affecting fear damage etc. For this I would personally go down the Death Magic line to 20 points to get the bigger staff marks and reduced cooldown (they work together now, yay! /sarcasm off). 10 points in Blood Magic will give you some regen for a little sustain when you start the fight and another mark of blood on dodge, which is up to you to use cleverly for those extra bleed stacks. If we’re talking strictly pve, I’d also go for 20 points in Curses for that extra condition damage, picking up traits II and IV for longer bleeds and the extra bleeds applied when entering ds (which is again up to you to put to good use). A simple rotation with this would be starting in staff, cast marks 2,3 (feel free to cast 4 and 5 as well whenever), dodge into the mobs, enter ds, exit ds, swap to scepter/dagger (have a geomancy sigil on one of them), cast scepter 2, dagger 5, dodge away. For utils you can bring whatever fancies you, epidemic is ofc nice to spread conditions further.

Now my personal preference is an aoe power build, basically staff with dagger/focus (or warhorn instead of focus, up to you), go for knights armor with some berserker accessories, wells of corruption and suffering. As a third util I normally go for the movement speed signet so it doesn’t take decades to get from A to B (also the aoe lifesteal is not negligible when you have 5 mobs around you). Trait-wise you will want to buff your staff so again the staff mark size and cooldown, then Blood Magic III and VIII for wells cooldown reduction, then you can go anywhere from there (Curses 20 points for placeable wells, soul reaping for more crit damage, life blast piercing and marks generating even more lf, or blood magic up to 30 points for wells to siphon life).

If you want to kill single mobs faster then yeah, minionmaster is your friend, take a dagger and warhorn/focus and the traits that buff their damage and hp, maybe the one that makes them siphon life to you, though they will most likely tank for you as well. Use well of blood heal and regen from mark of blood to sustain them in harder fights, also putrid mark to take conditions off them if needed.

for PvE, minion mastery is pretty fun and doe lots of damage. If you choose to play this way, definitely go for +30% minion damage (spite line), +50% health (death magic line)… outside of this, do whatever you like: you can choose blood magic if you want to heal your minions, or go full on spite for more power… try different things. You’ll struggle in dungeons with minion mastery though.

I like using dagger/focus — dagger has great damage (I’d use scepter only for conditionmancer build) if you have power… Focus #4 is great as it gives vulnerability which is a great condition for minion masters (it boosts damage for all your minions).

Staff is great. Staff #2 helps keep your minions alive.

While your leveling you will find you cant get enough precision to crit. So you should just stack power stat gear. Dont worry about your traits too much. Id recommend going for spite or soul reaping while you level. Minions stay at the zone level so they will always be effective. But wells and power builds make killing things very easy. Basically dont worry about traits and stats and all that too much. Just try out what you want to try out and learn how to play the class. Using DS is probably the best thing to start practising with early on. Along with dodging. And have fun. :>

The best way is to first think about how you enjoy playing. Once you answer that question you can start thinking about traits and what not.

I have been using scepter / dagger since level 10 or so. Minion Master was something i thought of doing, but after trying i saw the mobs i killed with scepter went down faster then my minions could do. Altho i dont have enough trait points to make 30% more damage and hitpoints for the minions.

I would like to know how to use the axe tho, i have been hearing good things on it. How would i set that up? Gearwise and i believe its axe/dagger? Thn for second weapons i can use scepter/dagger?

Right now all my gear have prec/con. No power / con to find.

I think the absolute best thing you can do is to try out a whole bunch of stuff. I can usually afford a new equipment set (excluding trinkets, you don’t really need those until level 80) every 5-10 levels while leveling, picking a completely different stat setup (defensive, offensive, crit, conditions, etc.) and every time I also visit the guy to retrain my traits and completely change my build.
That way, by the time I’m level 80, I know what I like about a profession and how I would like to play it from level 80 onward.

So maybe the next time you change your armor, get away from condition damage and scepter/dagger, and focus on a more power-based approach with dagger or axe. It’s not that expensive to retrain your traits at the trait book merchant dude, and you’ll learn amazing stuff about what the Necro can do from trying all these different things.
Above all, be creative and play how you want to play, not how people tell you to play. I play an Axe/Dagger + Dagger/Warhorn Necromancer, even though a lot of players say that’s a stupid or useless combination.

And if you don’t want to listen to me, don’t.

Condition and Minion Master builds got more survivability but less damage, power builds however got less survivability but more damage (Power Bunker builds suck).

If you go with any of the power builds, Dagger or Axe main hand is a must. I personally prefer dagger since it has higher single target, and hits way faster. If you go condition obviously scepter is your best choice. Dagger off hand can be used for both power and condition, however focus and warhorn are great with power builds. Especially warhorn as locust swarm can grant you swiftness to go through the content faster, and does AOE damage which lacks a bit in power builds.

Try this whatever your build was, put 15 in Curses and select this trait: Weakening Shroud Cast Enfeebling Blood when entering death shroud. Now if you double tap F1 to go in and out of deathshroud, you gain fury while cast enfeebling blood doing AOE damage and applying bleeds/fumble on enemies around you. Give it a try and see if you like it.

I am gonna see if i can get power/con before i do this. Its hard to find anything worth buying .

You can always run hybrid, doing both condition and direct damage. It’s a very effective build for necros. You won’t top damage charts, but you won’t be stuck in one playstyle either and it’s tons of fun. Your traits will be spite/curses/ and usually blood for healing-sustainability, but the last one is really up to how you want to play your build. I’ve seen some people use soul reaping or death magic instead. I think it’s about time I put up some of my hybrid builds, so once I get those posted I’ll put a link here for you. If you need any help in game feel free to whisper me.