Guild Wars 2

Hi everyone,

I’m quite interested in playing a Necromancer but I keep getting laughed at because I chose this class. Apparently we are useless in pretty much everything and no one will be wanting to party with us for dungeons? o_O Is this really true or are those players just looking to bring me down?

I just wanted to play a class that interested me roleplaying-wise and was quite interesting as well. I love the death shroud mechanic but dislike the minions so I’m not really keen on using them either. Is it viable to build a Necromancer that does not use minions? Which kind of builds would you recommend in this case?

Thank you in advance for your feedback~!

Of course necro isnt useless, he is very useful in WvW, lacks utility but has high dmg as zerk in pve, access to almost all condis + heavy aoe damage via spreading conditions or wells, and in pvp he can turn the tide to win the teamfights. I can handle most 1v1’s in pvp, both as power or condi necro.

Note: Minions in pvp are used by noobs and couple of good players.

Whoever says a class is useless is a moron, no class is useless.

its not useless but it is very easy for the enemy team to make it useless due to no escapes and basically no decent practical stability.

it takes a lot more skill to get out of bad situations then any of the other classes and most of your time will be spent trying to stay alive and active instead of being the communal hot potato.

in other words once you know the class if its necro thief or warrior the necro will take more effort to use in organised situations especially after the last update =|

OP: Necromancer can certainly work in PvE, its just not ideal because its the only class that can’t provide offensive buffs or active defensive buffs for the team (eg. frostspotter ranger, PF ele, PS/EA warriors) and by active defense I mean it can’t apply aegis or block/reflect against overpowered sniper projectiles, which is mostly a guardian thing, but mesmers eles thieve and rangers can all stop projectile damage to some extent. We may get buffed in the future for pve, but for now its certainly not completely terrible, its just comparatively sub-optimal compared to other classes for the support I mentioned, but its damage is fine, and you should be able to out DPS mesmers, engis and rangers with the meta pve build.

If you want to play a necro, by all means play it! Doing what makes you happy is more important than following the advice for others. Just optimize your build for the situation, and you’ll be fine, however in organized speedruns with pve-guilds for the super hardcore they may not want you to play necro, but if you just do pve with a casual guild, your friends, or just random people, necro is fine. Those players are pretty much just bringing you down, if you use necro the right way in the right situation, you’ll do very well.

I would use my necro in PvE, but I’m too constrained for money to get full zerker gear/scholar runes for necro at the moment, so I just stick to ele for pve at the moment, which is becoming a bit soulsucking. The meta PvE necro build is 6/6/0/0/2 with zerker everything and scholar runes and blah blah blah. And I think dagger/warhorn and staff? Its stickied I think so you can check it out to be sure.

If you’re interested in doing organized WvW of any kind, necromancers are one of the most important damage based classes in the GWEN meta, which will make you feel far from useless

I main necro in WvW, and its honestly more fun and effective than any other class for me in WvW (water rotations on ele are too stressful for me). In tpvp necro isn’t considered to be all that great right now, as most people are playing with hambow war, s/d thief, and celstial d/d ele. Its a bit of an antimeta class in my opinion, since it basically serves the purpose of punishing boon spam classes more heavily than a mesmer can, but in a group fight if you go on point, you’ll probably be focused and die, but if you can avoid that you can do a decent amount.

You don’t have to use minions at all when you play necro, its only really viable in some tpvp builds, but generally at the lower end of the spectrum. If you do WvW, a build utilizing wells and deathshroud is optimal for large scale fights and condition builds are great for small group roaming as well. For a well bomber build, you can run 6/2/0/0/6 if you’re feeling risky, x/2/4/x/6 if you want the staff traits/more toughness and tagging power. Right now Chill bomber builds are becoming popular in WvW, where they use chill duration runes/food and chilling darkness combined with well of darkness and plague #2 to keep groups moving at the speed of slug for a very long time (which is a x/4/x/x/6 set up). The chill build is what I’ve been running with lately and its really fun to chill so many enemies in an otherwise traditional power build set up.

You can play Necromancer in any game mode you want, WvW we are very strong and PvP we are okay, although we have issues. In PvE the problem is we are simply the weakest profession, however unless you plan to do coordinated speed clears that isn’t ever going to be an issue (humorously others like Rangers are more likely to get kicked from a group, I’ve noticed).

Bhawb we aren’t weak in pve…lack of party buffs is one thing, dps is another

Pelopidas.2140:

Bhawb we aren’t weak in pve…lack of party buffs is one thing, dps is another

And we don’t have strictly amazing DPS either.

We can have 5k+ ranged dps on our own…we are tankier than most classes in zerk gear because of deathshroud..lots of condis and epidemic…if we had on top of that amazing dps I’d be surprised. So no, I dont think we are the weakest (as dps)

Anything that can be cleaved, and we’re going to be punished by doing incredibly low dps compared to those that can hit multiple targets in PvE.

Pelopidas.2140:

So no, I dont think we are the weakest (as dps)

Weak in PvE has little to do with DPS. Would you rather bring a Necro that brings nothing special to your group, or another profession who not only matches the Necro’s DPS, but through group buffs makes all the other players’ DPS higher.

There is a very good reason Necro is considered the worst PvE profession.

Lack of cleaving is annoying but we have lots of powerful cooldowns to rack up AOE damage. If fire fields have been used already I open with Well of Suffering and Poison Cloud, dagger 5, scepter 2, axe 3, DS 5, DS 4, then focus anything that’s still standing after that. That covers most pulls for me. I love COF P2 for that door part of the path. really lets necro aoe shine

I say this as someone who tried a more “useful” class after hearing all the time how bad necros were and trying some PvE zerker builds on my engi that just seemed way less effective. Now, I attribute that a lot to my relative inexperience compared to my necro but still, didn’t really seem that even playing very well would exceeded a necro in usefulness in a big way. I mean, yeah, he has fire fields. But other than that I wasn’t impressed.

Then play an ele. Even nearly mindlessly rolling my face over the keyboard on a build I copypasta’d from the forums gave me better AoE on a lower CD, decent buff stacking, better damage, better team support/utility.

The only issue is that I don’t understand the profession and not having DS meant I had to learn how to play without the crutch of a massive HP pool that would allow me to tank things that will kill me now. But even then, if I’m just paying attention I can drop healing/dodge and its all easy. And this is with far less than 100 hours on a profession, vs all the time I have on Necro.

Note: Engi was about the worst comparison you could have picked, next to like Ranger. Afaik while they are great in coordinated groups, they aren’t particularly good in pugs unless you understand the profession really well.

Necromancer is tied as the least played profession, with Engineer. 90% of the people who cry and say “Necro is bad, ban Necro from PVE.” haven’t even seen a Necromancer in their life, let alone understand how it works.

I have been playing Necromancer since beta, when it is optimized for direct damage, it has the potential to out-burst a berserker warrior. and the arguement that it is “bad at group utility”, is pitiful quite frankly, Necromancer can perform mass AOE healing, AOE condi-cleanse, it has about a thousand different combo fields, and outputs insane amounts of damage, it makes Warrior look like a leech, to put it bluntly.

Play Necro. Join us.

The argument against necros is that other classes do things like condi cleanse and heal better (although I bet with some of the new traits there is a potential for a pretty mean healing spec out there, just doesn’t seem to practical to me), and has the “wrong” fields (only “relevant” ones in PvE are Fire and Smoke, and some Water is nice).

That said, I think part of stems from the lack of small scale PvE content that really challenges players to their limits, and too many mechanics that favor the zerging meta that I think contributes to the toxicity. I personally believe knocking fire fields down to 1 or 2 stacks of might would still be kitten fine, and that 3 stacks puts every other fields effects to shame, and that FGS should be nerfed as well.

Too many of the dungeons are a non issue, and though I like Fractals, I frankly am not compelled to keep leveling them higher to see just how hard it gets. I think if we had more content that pushed players to the limits we’d start to see the value these other classes provide. Whereas now, the only value is: can you deal lots of damage or stack might? can you reflect projeciles or condi cleanse? This eliminates a lot of the value of something like the utility a necro provides. Boon Stripping is more or less a non issue, and a lot of the utility/defensive conditions like weakness, chill, blind or immobilize aren’t rendered very valuable. Most the content doesn’t hit hard enough to warrant that and creatures ai and tendency to stack up is problematic.

That said, I love the tough world bosses/events they’ve been adding which require a lot of coordination, but I want to see them take another look at 5 man content. It’s in a kitten sorry state. Mechanics by and large are trivial or just a total gimmick and rarely test a player for competence.

The argument against Necros is that we have non-existent unique utility. Any relevant conditions we can apply, someone else can do just as well, if not better. We have no finishers to stack buffs, all that our fields do is apply more conditions (which are fairly easily mainted anyway), our healing is great, but to do it requires lots of giving up on damage, whereas others can heal very well without investment.

Basically, we don’t contribute to the team in any meaningful way. The few contributions we can make (vuln stacking, weakness, poison) can all be done by someone else that will also provide all the group support we are lacking. Even our damage, while not bad against a single target, is outclassed by others, there just isn’t a single thing that is needed in groups that we can do best.

If you look at boss blitz, the reasons that Necromancers were decent was because of mechanics that are totally worthless in PvE.

Bhawb.7408:

If you look at boss blitz, the reasons that Necromancers were decent was because of mechanics that are totally worthless in PvE.

You mean Queen’s Gauntlet. Boss Blitz is the 6 Legendary event involving a bandit, a pirate, a centaur, a flame legion, an ogre, and a destroyer. Necros really aren’t much good there for all of the typical PVE reasons.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

You mean Queen’s Gauntlet. Boss Blitz is the 6 Legendary event involving a bandit, a pirate, a centaur, a flame legion, an ogre, and a destroyer. Necros really aren’t much good there for all of the typical PVE reasons.

No, I mean Boss Blitz. Shrek fight wants Necromancers and Thieves above all, Spartacus is also very friendly towards Necromancers (with only 2 attacks that’ll reflect), Boom Boom is good for Necromancers (poison), and Wiggins and Pony are doable by literally anybody. Only Pyro really shouldn’t have a Necro.

We’re as good off as anybody in BB.

Well the two fields used for PvE (fire, smoke) are used for preperations before an engagement. You use smoke field and blast in it before you skip, and you mostly use fire fields and blast in them before a fight to have high amount of might during fighting. Though some do favor blasting fire fields during combat, the general norm I have seen in PvE is that these two fields are usually utilized out of combat.

That leaves you with water fields which are much less spammy, light fields which give underwhelming Retaliation and unpractical condition cleanse, ethereal fields which give either Chaos Armor for a randomly arranged boon table and seemingly underwhelming application of confusion. Dark fields on the other hand can provide life siphon for projectiles and whirls (most common finishers) which can provide decent extra damage as life siphon is instant and cant be mitigated (I think it also scales of power but I am not sure), and blind for leaps and blasts (blast gives AoE blind so its arguably better than smoke field + whirl combo) which can be coordinated to mitigate damage by quite a bit. So except water fields, dark fields are one of the (if not the) best fields that can be used during combat.

Edit: I tend to blast in my own fire fields during combat if the fight is slow while I am on my Guardian, but only do so without mingling with other fields around. Even so, my fire fields are always seperated from other fields (by a careful dodge behind or coordination of the group or movement) so shouldn’t be subjected in same category with other fields.