Guild Wars 2

I’ve started playing again after a few months break, I’ve been playing Necromancer exclusively since I bought the game but I’m still quite casual, my first build was conditionmancer. I’m not sure what my build is now but its mainly power/toughness/precision.

What builds would people recommend for WvW and maybe some PVE? I’ve seen alot of mention of axe being used, I was under the assumption everyone hated axe last time I checked.

Well if you done condi… go power. I wouldnt recommend full knights, but parts of the armor sure (especially for WvW). You want ferocity to actually use the precision, so got to throw in zerker or similar. I am currently using 6/2/0/0/6 in sPvP, WvW and PvE lol. The skills differ a bit but that’s about it. Staff/dagger/focus, but if you’re zerging WvW or something then scepter/warhorn or axe/warhorn is of course another option.

WvW and PvE both favor variants of power builds. The conditions that are most obnoxious in WvW are things like chill, blind, cripple, weakness, and poison, which stack in duration, part of Spite’s power line.

PvE prefers power for a different reason: Bleed is capped pretty easily on major bosses so a lot of dps is lost due to players knocking theirs and others bleeds off the stack. Burning is pretty much 100% uptime, as are most of the other conditions that stack in duration so straight-up damage tends to perform better

I believe that Axe has regained favour because it has passable burst damage and burst Life Force generation. The idea is that you swap to Axe, use #2, switch to Death Shroud / Offhand / Utility Skills, Use #2 again, then swap almost immediately back to your primary weapon set.

It also has popularity in Minion Master builds because the ranged attacks make it easier to direct your minions to the next target, and the vulnerability on the auto-attack is one of the few ways to boost the damage of your minions.

There could be better and worse reasons, those are just the ones I’m aware of.

Two other related reasons to use axe are…

… dagger is higher dps but requires the player to get into the visual effects soup around some bosses so it is hard to see and avoid face-tanking. Axe is next higher dps and has enough range to avoid the worst of large scale events.
… when minions are not spectators, the vulnerability bonus multiplies damage by the number of minions; i.e., 10 vulnerability and five minions means each minion does 110% damage, which adds up to an extra half of an average minion in dps, not including your own extra 10%.

1 vuln on a target = 1 might on everything atracking that target. It is not a big deal in PvP, especially when you consider the dps penalty for taking axe, but never let a PvE boss get too far below than the cap if you have allies to take advantage of it.

What sort of wvw do you do? If it’s big groups then tanky gear is probably best, and you should carry staff on one set and axe/free choice on the other. You’ll have enough life force generation to mostly stay in death shroud anyway Your PVT gear will be fine.

If you’re solo or small groups then conditions is still perfectly viable. Probably the best in fact. Minions is annoying cause every time you cross a shallow stream your flesh golem will despawn, and berserker powermancer doesn’t really have the survivability with all the stat inflation you get from food in WvW.