Guild Wars 2

What are popular stat combination choices for Necros in PvP (WvW/sPvP/tPvP)?

Is there a large number of Necros who choose Rabid?

Is Rabid a popular choice for Necros in PvP?

Rabid is pretty much the only choice for condition Necros in PvP, carrion isn’t even an option.
First because Necromancers for sure don’t need vitality, second because precision is vital for on-crit effects and third because a discrete amount of toughness is required if you don’t want to implode.

In WvWvW, some popular stat spread are:
- Full Soldier (known also as Juggermancer)
- Half knight half berserker
- Hybrid (there are a lot of variations over this one, but the main stat spreads are rampager, berserker, celestial, carrion and rabid, tuning them at will)
- DS tank (not yet so popular since it is a new one, but it is pretty much cavalier, soldier and valkyrie, using deathly perception).
- Full rabid (conditions are viable in WvWvW)
- Mixture of Rabid and Carrion

In PvP:
- Rabid
- Some brave berserker runners
- Some soldier minionmancer/blood tanks

Haley.2390:

Are Condition Necros popular in PvP? Is there a large number of Necros who go full Rabid in WvW? How viable is full rabid in WvW?

Full rabid is the only and best option for necromancers in any form of PvP.
Any condition necro you see around is most likely running full Rabid.

sorrow.2364:

Haley.2390:

Are Condition Necros popular in PvP? Is there a large number of Necros who go full Rabid in WvW? How viable is full rabid in WvW?

Full rabid is the only and best option for necromancers in any form of PvP.
Any condition necro you see around is most likely running full Rabid.

Oh, I see. I was just wondering. A thief from the Thief forum was telling me that Spiteful Spirit’s Retaliation is a good counter to CnD combos. I said that Rabid was popular and that it would mean Retaliation would suck as it would have low Power. He said that Rabid was not popular and told me to check the Necro forum.

Retaliation deals decent base damage. It’s also not too good versus C&D unless the thief happens to be a pistol thief, which you don’t care for. C&D tends to be heavy spikes, not fast spikes like unload or pistol whip, unless it’s the aforementioned sneak attack. Which is more like tickles.

Haley.2390:

Oh, I see. I was just wondering. A thief from the Thief forum was telling me that Spiteful Spirit’s Retaliation is a good counter to CnD combos. I said that Rabid was popular and that it would mean Retaliation would suck as it would have low Power. He said that Rabid was not popular and told me to check the Necro forum.

None runs Spiteful Spirit, pretty much because it is worthy only in DS heavy build and because Reaper’s Might is always a better choice.
The only reliable access to retaliation is Unholy Feast from axe.

sorrow.2364:

None runs Spiteful Spirit, pretty much because it is worthy only in DS heavy build and because Reaper’s Might is always a better choice.
The only reliable access to retaliation is Unholy Feast from axe.

So Condition Necros are popular, right? And you said pretty much most Condition Necros are running full Rabid?

DS heavy builds are usually not Condition builds then, right?

How would a Condition Necro reliably generate Life Force against a Thief?

A Thief from the Thief forum told me this:

I disagree. With Necro’s high Health pool, they can invest all their gears and items to improve their Power. Also with their Death Shroud mechanic, they really don’t have to worry much about their survivability, thus they can focus more on improving their damage output.

It seems this statement goes against Necros who choose to go full Rabid and don’t get any Power.

Haley.2390:

So Condition Necros are popular, right? And you said pretty much most Condition Necros are running full Rabid?

DS heavy builds are usually not Condition builds then, right?

How would a Condition Necro reliably generate Life Force against a Thief?

Condition necros are popular, of course. There are obviously many nuances of builds and I don’t exclude that someone would run with Spiteful Spirit instead of Reaper’s Might (I wouldn’t).

It depends on the build. Any condition necro will generate LF through Feast of Corruption for sure, then people might run a spectral utility for extra LF generation.

Haley.2390:

A Thief from the Thief forum told me this:

I disagree. With Necro’s high Health pool, they can invest all their gears and items to improve their Power. Also with their Death Shroud mechanic, they really don’t have to worry much about their survivability, thus they can focus more on improving their damage output.

It seems this statement goes against Necros who choose to go full Rabid and don’t get any Power.

This is just a false statement.
Necromancer’s can’t affort to invest everything into power because they lack damage cancelling capabilities (evades, invulnerability etc), so, considering that they are also light-armoured, they absolutely need to stack a decent amount of toughness to survive.

You can try it by yourself to see how much a berserker necro lasts.

I prefer using Carrion amulet + rabid jewel when running 30/20/0/0/20 given how things are set up at the moment. It’s far from “not even an option”. (tPvp)

Shalla.3967:

I prefer using Carrion amulet + rabid jewel when running 30/20/0/0/20 given how things are set up at the moment. It’s far from “not even an option”. (tPvp)

I don’t know why you would do that.
You lose precision which is vital for on-crit traits and sigils and you also lose toughness, which is more valuable then vitality, even with the increase LF scaling. This only for gaining power you wouldn’t use since scepter and staff scale horribly with power (I can understand only Life Blast, but if you’re running vitality you wouldn’t use DS as damage output, but more as a defense) and a couple of vitality which is anyway quite high by base on Necromancers.

I can understand Rabid+Carrion jewel, but Carrion+Rabid jewel just makes no sense to me (and an huge portion of the Necromancer playerbase, apparently).

sorrow.2364:

Shalla.3967:

I prefer using Carrion amulet + rabid jewel when running 30/20/0/0/20 given how things are set up at the moment. It’s far from “not even an option”. (tPvp)

I don’t know why you would do that.
You lose precision which is vital for on-crit traits and sigils and you also lose toughness, which is more valuable then vitality, even with the increase LF scaling. This only for gaining power you wouldn’t use since scepter and staff scale horribly with power (I can understand only Life Blast, but if you’re running vitality you wouldn’t use DS as damage output, but more as a defense) and a couple of vitality which is anyway quite high by base on Necromancers.

I can understand Rabid+Carrion jewel, but Carrion+Rabid jewel just makes no sense to me (and an huge portion of the Necromancer playerbase, apparently).

I use double Geomancy as sigils, and as for Dhuumfire, I feel that 17% crit chance + fury on demand is enough to keep it up when necessary. Barbed precision is negligible. I prefer having the extra power to help deal with some of the current anti-condition builds, plus I like having some direct burst through Feast of Corruption and Life Blast, if needed. Extra retaliation damage is also nice, but not worth mentioning to be fair.

Apart from that, I find huge amounts of precision to be lackluster for the build. As for Vit vs Toughness, I’ve come to prefer the first against the current amount of teams/players playing condition cleave. I find that It should be my own fault for having bad positioning and eating burst rotations whereas conditions may not be as avoidable right now.

Obviously it comes down to preference and using whichever amulet is the most useful against the enemy team’s setup, but I don’t think rabid is as superior as you’ve stated.

Rabid is not good for PvP. You just need enough precision to proc Dhuumfire, and then go carrion. Vitality scales better in the current meta and in general, and you don’t want to use on-crit anyway.

Bhawb.7408:

Rabid is not good for PvP. You just need enough precision to proc Dhuumfire, and then go carrion. Vitality scales better in the current meta and in general, and you don’t want to use on-crit anyway.

I wouldn’t go as far as saying that it’s not good, as both got their own strengths and weaknesses. I do prefer carrion nowadays though, given how most damage is currently dealt and how you should be positioned in a team fight (which in my view, is the most important part of our survival), but it does come down to personal preference.

I still think Rabid is a better choice.
I’ve never felt I had problems dealing with conditions as a Necromancer to the point I needed extra vitality over toughness.
As a conditionmancer, you always have access to Putrid Mark and Deathly Swarm, plus I usually run with Well of Power as a stunbreaker to provide extra condition cleansing to teammates too.

Said that, Necromancers have an high health pool without any vitality, with the addition of Death Shroud. On the other hand, I found myself pretty susceptible to direct damage and fast burst, so I prefer to run with more toughness instead of vitality.

Saying that Rabid is not good for PvP as Bhawb did is kinda too much. As far I know, every necro in the last PAX qualifiers was running full Rabid.

Rabid is the most popular but due to recent frequent changes but i hear a lot of necros switching to power builds with zerker/celestial gear.

Also we may need to relook at carrion, since DS takes its power from vitality. Just a personal guess and what i’m working on right now.

DS also technically takes its power from toughness since less damage taken is more or less like an increase to your LF pool. It just won’t affect conditions, to which necros aren’t specifically against receiving (not with 3 ways of transfering them and spiteful removal, and of course, consume).

Toughness is still better than vit in almost all cases.

Hakkology.3189:

Rabid is the most popular but due to recent frequent changes but i hear a lot of necros switching to power builds with zerker/celestial gear.

I currently run with pieces of Carrion to take advantage of the new Death Shroud (since you gain Life Force as percentages unlike healing.) But I recognize that Rabid is popular among Necros. Maybe it won’t be as popular in the future with more conditions appearing in PvP and the Death Shroud changes, but it’s been a popular choice for a long time.

I made this post because a Thief told me I’m wrong to say Rabid is popular for Necros and told me to check the Necro forums (which I’ve been a frequent visitor of since the beginning.)

Carrion has been run by the highest tier Necromancers for a long time, although it is possible they switched to rabid solely for the precision for Dhuumfire. I’ll have to talk to them again to see if anyone has changed, but I don’t see why they would when vitality scaling just got a buff.

Bhawb.7408:

Carrion has been run by the highest tier Necromancers for a long time, although it is possible they switched to rabid solely for the precision for Dhuumfire. I’ll have to talk to them again to see if anyone has changed, but I don’t see why they would when vitality scaling just got a buff.

Honestly, I was never aware of high tier Necromancers running carrion over rabid.
It has been proved mathematically that Necromancers benefit from toughness way more than any other profession in the game, so I still see no reason to stack vitality over toughness. Stacking it when you already have a decent amount of toughness makes more sense, but going straight for vitality over toughness is not a good choice.

Anyway, Dhuumfire isn’t the only thing which benefits from precision.
Sigil of Earth and Barbed Precision, which might look bad, add quite a lot of damage if paired with high precision because they have no internal cooldown (SoE may have 2s of IC, but the duration is higher).
The chance to have at least one extra bleed per attack are 88% (44% to trigger them both, 22% to trigger SoE only, 22% to trigger BP only) on each critical strike, which means that at 50% critical strike chance you have 44% chances to inflict at least an extra bleed per attack and 22% to inflict 2 more bleeds, which isn’t that bad at all.

carrion vs rabid

toughness vs vitality

on crit proc cooldowns

Ohhh this topic has the potential to go places.

sorrow.2364:

Honestly, I was never aware of high tier Necromancers running carrion over rabid.
It has been proved mathematically that Necromancers benefit from toughness way more than any other profession in the game, so I still see no reason to stack vitality over toughness. Stacking it when you already have a decent amount of toughness makes more sense, but going straight for vitality over toughness is not a good choice.

Anyway, Dhuumfire isn’t the only thing which benefits from precision.
Sigil of Earth and Barbed Precision, which might look bad, add quite a lot of damage if paired with high precision because they have no internal cooldown (SoE may have 2s of IC, but the duration is higher).
The chance to have at least one extra bleed per attack are 88% (44% to trigger them both, 22% to trigger SoE only, 22% to trigger BP only) on each critical strike, which means that at 50% critical strike chance you have 44% chances to inflict at least an extra bleed per attack and 22% to inflict 2 more bleeds, which isn’t that bad at all.

Actually no, I’ve seen math to show why we benefit more highly from vitality. Due to base statistics I can understand why people would say toughness, however considering we get an additional eHP scaling of 1.2(?) with vitality due to DS it works out much better. Also Geomancy sigils are far more commonly used, as stacking/bursting bleeds has more value than throwing down a bleed here or there.

Source: I know for a fact that Gibbly and Zombify both use Carrion, or have only recently switched over. I can’t remember if the others I know do or not.

sorrow.2364:

This is just a false statement.
Necromancer’s can’t affort to invest everything into power because they lack damage cancelling capabilities (evades, invulnerability etc), so, considering that they are also light-armoured, they absolutely need to stack a decent amount of toughness to survive.

You can try it by yourself to see how much a berserker necro lasts.

Haley was quoting my statement, which is obviously misrepresented.

I was speaking within the context of a DS build specifically to handle a CnD troll build (not the CnD combo build Haley’s implying) and not Rabid Condition Build that Haley’s been insisting.

Nor I ever suggested to go Berserk Mode either.

My original post can be found here:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/So-how-can-I-beat-CND-with-a-necro/first#post2478761

Have a great day.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

sorrow.2364:

This is just a false statement.
Necromancer’s can’t affort to invest everything into power because they lack damage cancelling capabilities (evades, invulnerability etc), so, considering that they are also light-armoured, they absolutely need to stack a decent amount of toughness to survive.

You can try it by yourself to see how much a berserker necro lasts.

Haley was quoting my statement, which is obviously misrepresented.

I was speaking within the context of a DS build specifically to handle a CnD troll build (not the CnD combo build Haley’s implying) and not Rabid Condition Build that Haley’s been insisting.

Nor I ever suggested to go Berserk Mode either.

My original post can be found here:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/So-how-can-I-beat-CND-with-a-necro/first#post2478761

Have a great day.

If anyone cares about the drama, read our posts in their entirety. I stand by my posts. You objected to my saying Rabid is popular and told me to check the Necro forum.

Well, here we are.

I just can’t play a necro with dhuumfire in 30 spite. You give up too much to get too little (with very poor minor / major traits on the way there).

Running 0/30/20/0/20 myself with staff cd % and greater marks (this is huge for me to be able to land a specific effect on someone even if they are blocking), as well with 20% red cd on spectral skills and LF on marks trigger.

Regarding carrion vs rabid, toughness is great. Conditions are not what you should fear, is something that everyone gets hit by in current meta, what is important is to know when or what to cure / transfer and don’t try to stress yourself to be “clean” as fast or as much as possible.

If you have good toughness and add protection on top of it – while having weakness on whatever is attacking you, you pretty much can say you nullified the burst you couldn’t dodge / DS (as was shown in the tourney as well with necro living the stealth burst gank in middle by predicting the opener and using abilities in right order).

Regarding burning – while the damage is nice for sure, it only takes ~6 stacks of bleed to equal the damage from burning with same condi power. Am sure most of you can self sustain 10+ stacks easily in pvp. (and even aoe).

So I prefer to run on the safer side with less potential single target damage, but larger and unblockable marks, good LF generation, decent LF pool, accessible protection x 2 (spectral armor + spectral wall), leaving me with one utility slot for whatever I desire or see fit in a particular situation.

Look at engineers, they have good condi damage, but it’s single target pretty much (haven’t saw a single engi running grenades in tournament tbh), they run toughness as well, have better mobility, but their bombs unlike our marks need time to apply their effect and the enemy can simply choose not to come nearby (or use a block / stablity etc). Also most of their attacks can be reflected.

Anelyn.4593:

Regarding burning – while the damage is nice for sure, it only takes ~6 stacks of bleed to equal the damage from burning with same condi power. Am sure most of you can self sustain 10+ stacks easily in pvp. (and even aoe).

You will never, ever see 10 stacks of bleeds sustained on any decent player in PvP unless they are 100% out of condition cleanses; and it just will never happen in team play. That is why burning is so strong.

Bhawb.7408:

Actually no, I’ve seen math to show why we benefit more highly from vitality. Due to base statistics I can understand why people would say toughness, however considering we get an additional eHP scaling of 1.2(?) with vitality due to DS it works out much better. Also Geomancy sigils are far more commonly used, as stacking/bursting bleeds has more value than throwing down a bleed here or there.

Source: I know for a fact that Gibbly and Zombify both use Carrion, or have only recently switched over. I can’t remember if the others I know do or not.

Keep in mind that toughness scale with DS just like vitality.
The main difference is that toughness increases also the effectiveness of your heals (so the overall sustainability), which is something Vitality doesn’t.
On the other hand, LF generation can be considered as DS healing and it is percentage-based, but you need obviously to stay out of deathshroud to “heal” your life force and when you are out of DS, you have less effective heals (CC will heal always for the same amount with increased vitality). Also, DS natural degen is percentage-based too, that means the higher is your health pool, the higher LF you’re loosing while in DS.

About Sigil of Geomancy vs Earth, it is a tough argument too. They aren’t commonly used as much as Sigil of Earth as far I know, pretty much because Sigil of Earth allows for better bleed application over time, which is something experience has taught us is better than stacking more bleeds with more duration in a single time. With SoG, you can stack 3 bleeds every 10s, with SoE, you can stack a single bleed every 2s.

Overall, you can mantain 3 bleeds for 7s with geomancy on a 9s window, with a total of 21 ticks,
while with SoE you overall apply about 4 stacks over 9s, which lasts 5s each, for a total of 20 ticks overall.

The difference is that you apply all the bleeds stack of geomancy all at once, so what if your enemy cleanse during the cooldown of geomancy? Well, you lose a considerable chunk of damage output. SoE does not suffer from the same problem because it applies bleeds constantly, so if an enemy cleanses during those 10s, you are capable to stack some extra bleeds on him without the need to wait for weapon swap.

I can understand that SoG works better with non-precision builds, but since you’re benefitting from Barbed Precision too when running precision builds, there is no comparisons imho.

Also, nothing forbid you to run both SoE and SoG on S/D, unless you have not enough precision.

Bhawb.7408:

You will never, ever see 10 stacks of bleeds sustained on any decent player in PvP unless they are 100% out of condition cleanses; and it just will never happen in team play. That is why burning is so strong.

Actually, if you are capable to manage your conditions decently (which means cover them properly), you can mantain 10 stacks of bleeds on your enemy, even if he’s a good one.
It is up on his cleanses, of course, but also up to how you manage your stacks on him.

Without seeing the specific maths current to the latest patch, I generally consider the “Toughness vs Vitality” debate a wash for the Necro. The other professions use Vitality for dealing with spike damage and Toughness for sustained damage, but because DS and Life Force generation both scale with Health and DS benefits from higher Toughness, we use both stats for both types of damage mitigation. The main difference is that Toughness (as I understand it) drops off in effectiveness if you stack too much of it whereas Vitality scales linearly, meaning some Toughness and a bunch of Vitality is likely where our sweet spot lies.

It would be really helpful for someone who understands the intricacies of our DS maths to re-run the numbers for this current patch and see what our optimal Armor and Health are now.

Actually, having more natual HP means that you are less in need of stacking vitality.

Before the DS buff, Necro needed to stack toughness over vitality because they had natural high health pool and low base armor. The situation after the DS buff is still the same, with the only exception that now Necromancers have even larger base HP pool than before.

Stacking vitality of course is good, but only when you have already stacked a decent amount of toughness first.

The only reason you might want to stack more vitality than toughness is because you know that you’re going to eat a lot of condition damage but, considering how necromancers are capable to manage conditions, how easily they can cleanse/transfer them and how susceptible they are to direct damage, well… toughness all the way.

sorrow.2364:

Actually, having more natual HP means that you are less in need of stacking vitality.

This might be true for other classes, but the necro’s high hp pool is the only defense we have.

There have been so many threads on this topic already… the bottom line is: you need to heal several times until rabid overtakes carrion in effective health, and that is assuming that you take direct damage only. When taking condition damage carrion is a lot further in the lead. And then there’s the much higher direct damage with carrion.

It really comes down to if you need on crit effects. I made the switch to rabid last month because Dhuumfire was triggered more reliably. Now the duration is cut in half so I’m back to carrion w/o burning, kthxbye (and good riddance).

flow.6043:

sorrow.2364:

Actually, having more natual HP means that you are less in need of stacking vitality.

This might be true for other classes, but the necro’s high hp pool is the only defense we have.

There have been so many threads on this topic already… the bottom line is: you need to heal several times until rabid overtakes carrion in effective health, and that is assuming that you take direct damage only. When taking condition damage carrion is a lot further in the lead. And then there’s the much higher direct damage with carrion.

That’s the point.
The fact that we have an high health pool allows us to stack toughness without any drawbacks as any other profession have.

The fact that you need to heal several times, I’d like to see the topic with that reference. As far I know, one heal might be enough to overtake vitality, especially if that heal is consume conditions.

Carrion is +6.440 HP, which means overall 24,812 EHP.
Rabid is +644 toughness, which means 35% extra damage reduction for overall 24,802 EHP.

So, by base, Carrion and Rabid offers the same EHP value without DS. A single heal allows Rabid do outperform Carrion against direct damage and by quite a good amount.

With Death Shroud, you have the same situation, since it is 100% of your HP, so the overall EHP are the same with both Carrion and Rabid. The only difference is that having higher health pool means higher natural degeneration as much as higher “DS healing”. So, as much as Rabid has no advantage in Death Shroud healing (see LF generation), carrion has the disadvantage of increased natural degeneration (while in DS), but increased DS healing capability (while out of DS). So, overall, Carrion and Rabid in DS perform the same.

If you take 100% condition damage into consideration, then Carrion is of course better, but with 50% condition damage input and 50% raw damage (so a real situation), we have always 24,812 EHP for carrion and 21,587 EHP (half of the damage reduction) for rabid.
A single Condume Condition will effectively close the gap between EHP of carrion and rabid for 458 EHP. If you manage to remove 3 condition (another real situation), then you close the gap between the two by 838 EHP, this assuming that your main heal is your only source of healing.

So, two well-placed consume conditions (so from 4 to 6 conditions removed) are enough to let Rabid surpass carrion in EHP AND they move the situation from 50/50 DD and condi to something more imbalanced toward DD, meaning that Rabid gains for a short time better EHP gain.

Obviously, I didn’t take into consideration that:
- Necromancer, because they are light armor wearer, are more susceptible to direct damage, which means that 35% damage mitigation of Rabid is higher than 35% damage mitigation on a ranger or a warrior
- Condition damage can be completely mitigated by condition cleansing (which Necromancer have quite much), while direct damage can’t be mitigated properly because of the lack of vigor/evades/invulnerabilities.

There is a lot more DD than Condi damage going out at all times (all condi appliance skills also have a DD component). While not all of the DD is burst, it’s still a large chunk of damage over time (cleave damage). Being able to passively reduce it via toughness (and pop DS / protection for the burst windows) your EHP and time spent being active are increased a lot compared to a pure vit build. Especially for necro where your means of avoiding damage are very limited, and you will most likely save the dodges for burst / CC (that will lead up to burst etc). We can’t ping pong evade frames like a S/D thief dancing through aoes / cleave dmg.

sorrow.2364:

The fact that you need to heal several times, I’d like to see the topic with that reference. As far I know, one heal might be enough to overtake vitality, especially if that heal is consume conditions.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/Runes-for-Condition-Necro/page/2

This was the last “big one” on this topic, I think. Lots of math and everything…

sorrow.2364:

Carrion is +6.440 HP, which means overall 24,812 EHP.
Rabid is +644 toughness, which means 35% extra damage reduction for overall 24,802 EHP.

This assumption is wrong.
In sPvP, depending on the type of runes you are using and how many points you invest into Death Magic: you’ll have between 26% and 35% damage reduction with a rabid amulet, and 0-18% for carrion.
So the difference is somewhere between 17-26%. In your example: 35% damage reduction for rabid means 24k ehp, carrion with 18% dmg reduction: 29k ehp. So in that case you’ll need 3 heals to overtake carrion if you only take direct damage and don’t use Death Shroud.

flow.6043:

This assumption is wrong.
In sPvP, depending on the type of runes you are using and how many points you invest into Death Magic: you’ll have between 26% and 35% damage reduction with a rabid amulet, and 0-18% for carrion.
So the difference is somewhere between 17-26%. In your example: 35% damage reduction for rabid means 24k ehp, carrion with 18% dmg reduction: 29k ehp. So in that case you’ll need 3 heals to overtake carrion if you only take direct damage and don’t use Death Shroud.

I don’t know how I came up with 35% damage reduction.
Anyway, damage reduction is 26% with Rabid, so EHP are 23,148 against direct damage. One heal will put Carrion and Rabid on par.

Against 50/50 condition damage and direct damage, Rabid is 20,670 EHP and Carrion is again, 24,812 EHP. A Consume Condition with 4 condition consumed, heals effectively for 8136 HP on carrion and 9193 on Rabid (adjusted with half of the damage reduction of Rabid), which is 1000 HP of difference. 4 consume conditions only with only 4 conditions consumed (you probably consume more conditions on 50/50 situation), you have outperformed Carrion.

Also, keep in mind that using WoP, Putrid Mark, Deathly Swarm or Consume Conditions will put the situation again on 100% direct damage and 0% condition damage. In that case, Rabid is better.

Mixing both vitality and toughness is still the best solution.

Death Shroud benefits from carrion and rabid the same, as I’ve said before.
More vitality means also higher health degen.

At the end of the day, the longer goes the fight, the more you heal then the better is Rabid over Carrion defensive-wise. If you manage you cleanse your damaging condition frequently (which is something Necros can easily do), Rabid is definitely better than Carrion. The increase precision is another sweet addition.

sorrow.2364:

Stacking vitality of course is good, but only when you have already stacked a decent amount of toughness first.

Do you have any detailed mathematical analysis taking into account the patch changes to support this opinion? I’m not just being flippant: nothing anyone’s saying means anything here unless they can bring hard numbers to prove it. The Necro’s DS mechanics interact with both Vitality and Toughness, so you need to take it into account to determine which is better for the Necro over the course of a fight and initially.

Blaine Tog.8304:

Do you have any detailed mathematical analysis taking into account the patch changes to support this opinion? I’m not just being flippant: nothing anyone’s saying means anything here unless they can bring hard numbers to prove it. The Necro’s DS mechanics interact with both Vitality and Toughness, so you need to take it into account to determine which is better for the Necro over the course of a fight and initially.

The fact is simple and I’ve already said why.

There are mainly two kind of damage in this game: direct damage and condition damage.
Both of the damage can be cancelled in two ways. Direct damage can be cancelled through evasion, invulnerability, blocks etc, while condition damage is cancelled through cleansing and condition transfer.

Necromancer has great access to the second while not-so-good access to the first one (zero to be honest), which means they are less susceptible to condition damage while they suffer from direct damage, so stacking toughness first to counter that (has been proven that Toughness works better against direct damage) is a good choice.
All the mathematical calculations done until now has never taken into account the innate ability of professions to mitigate different types of damage, which is an huge factor, since you might want to be able to survive to both direct damage and condition damage.

Another fact you have to take into consideration is the base statistics of a profession. If you take into account a profession like Thief, they have low health and higher base armor, which means that stacking vitality for them makes more sense, since they are starting with more base toughness while being incredibly weak against condition damage.

Also, I’ve proven in my previous post that Toughness, on the long run, provides better EHP compared to Vitality, which makes you last quite a bit longer at the start, but the longer the fight goes, the worse is its effectiveness.

Those were the main points which lead to the conclusion that Toughness is the best choice for Necromancers.

The patch has changed pretty much nothing.
The situation is still the same.

The main difference is that, as before, in DS you can’t mitigate condition damage as you would outside DS, which means that Carrion is probably a better choice if you plan to stay in DS only.

So, let’s take two examples. The first one with rabid amulet (so 26% damage reduction and 18,372 DS HP) and the second one with carrion (24.812 HP according to tests while in DS).

We want to stay in Death Shroud for 1 second at least, which means that you naturally degen 4% of your LF:
- Rabid: 734 HP lost per second, 924 EHP against direct damage
- Carrion: 992 EHP lost per second against all damage

So, the more you stay in Death Shroud, the more Rabid has advantage over Carrion, but you need a lot of time to take over Carrion.

When you spend point in soul reaping, the situation is pretty much the same.
Let’s say we have 30 points into Soul Reaping.

- Rabid: 23,883 HP, 30,009 EHP against direct damage 955 HP loss per second, 1203 EHP loss per second against direct damage
- Carrion: 32,225 EHP/HP, 1289 HP/EHP loss per second

But, overall, the EHP difference is not so much noticable (we are talking about ~1000-2000 EHP difference at max) considering what you gain while outside Death Shroud.

This post is complitly pointless. Players are choosing amulets for own game play and cover they weaknesses.
Since necro attacks are pretty slow,personally I run (if I am using Terrormancer) rampage amulet for more crit chances = oftenburning/bleeding/Reapers Precision(LF)

You seem to be discounting Life Force gain, though, all of which is %-health based. This means every time I regain LF, I get more back when I have more health, which makes Vitality act as a sort of Healing Power (except better than Healing Power for the Necro because it not only works while the Necro is in DS but it also procs off far more skills). Toughness’s effect on EHP is static for the Necro (it will always mitigate the same % of damage), but Vitality’s role is more complex because of DS totals and LF gain mechanics. I would really like to see an analysis that takes those into account.

Furthermore, I question whether your DS numbers are correct. I’ve been away from the boards for a bit but last I heard, the consensus seemed to be that this current patch increased our base LF to 120% of our health, which means a Rabid Necro would have about 22,046 LF (28,660 with 30 Soul Reaping) while a Carrion Necro has 29,774 (38,706 with 30 SR). Toughness will continue to effect DS equally regardless of how much LF you have, but the harder DS scales with Vitality, the better Vitality is over Toughness, making it a relevant number. If DS didn’t scale with Vitality at all, Toughness would clearly the be better stat, whereas if it scaled 100,000%, you could get an insane amount of additional mitigation with even a little bit of Vitality (and an unstoppable amount of mitigation if you stacked Vit as high as it would go).

Blaine Tog.8304:

You seem to be discounting Life Force gain, though, all of which is %-health based. This means every time I regain LF, I get more back when I have more health, which makes Vitality act as a sort of Healing Power (except better than Healing Power for the Necro because it not only works while the Necro is in DS but it also procs off far more skills). Toughness’s effect on EHP is static for the Necro (it will always mitigate the same % of damage), but Vitality’s role is more complex because of DS totals and LF gain mechanics. I would really like to see an analysis that takes those into account.

I did not discounted LF regain. You can’t gain Life Force while in Death Shroud except for Life Transfer, which is marginal anyway, so it doesn’t make sense to consider also LF gain since it does not contribute to sustaining.

I’ve considered only how much a 100% LF bar allows you to survive, how you generate it doesn’t really affects the calculations I made. You get to 100% (or 75%, whatever you want) life force with carrion as fast as you would with rabid.

Also, the extra “DS healing” you get from Vitality is compensated by the extra 25% healing of Toughness.
They are pretty much the numbers I’ve written about DS degen, considering them as LF generation instead.

sorrow.2364:

Direct damage can be cancelled through evasion, invulnerability, blocks etc, while condition damage is cancelled through cleansing and condition transfer.

Necromancer has great access to the second while not-so-good access to the first one (zero to be honest)

It seems that this is a common misconception since Necro has access to DS to cancel direct damage which favors vitality to increase the amount of damage to be absorbed.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

It seems that this is a common misconception since Necro has access to DS to cancel direct damage which favors vitality to increase the amount of damage to be absorbed.

No, the misconception is thinking that DS cancels direct damage.
It doesn’t. You still get hit, you still get conditions applied, you stil get CCed and you still get damage. DS is just a bit more HP you can access with a cooldown of 10s.

sorrow.2364:

I did not discounted LF regain. You can’t gain Life Force while in Death Shroud except for Life Transfer, which is marginal anyway, so it doesn’t make sense to consider also LF gain since it does not contribute to sustaining.

Spectral Walk/Armor/Grasp, Locust Swarm, someone dies while you’re in DS…
Also, why would you assume that lf regen is irrelevant when outside of DS?

sorrow.2364:

Sir Vincent III.1286:

It seems that this is a common misconception since Necro has access to DS to cancel direct damage which favors vitality to increase the amount of damage to be absorbed.

No, the misconception is thinking that DS cancels direct damage.
It doesn’t. You still get hit, you still get conditions applied, you stil get CCed and you still get damage. DS is just a bit more HP you can access with a cooldown of 10s.

That doesn’t explain why it doesn’t cancel direct damage. Getting hit, condition, CC, etc. are not one in question here since those are mitigated or canceled by other means.

Cancelling a direct damage means preventing your HP from taking the damage so you evade, go invul, block etc. because the damage is instead absorbed by those effect. Necro can go to DS to have the same result.

As for frequency, a lot of invulnerability and block skills from other professions has a much longer cooldown than DS.

flow.6043:

Spectral Walk/Armor/Grasp, Locust Swarm, someone dies while you’re in DS…
Also, why would you assume that lf regen is irrelevant when outside of DS?

That is a different situation. As I’ve pointed out after, the DS regen numbers are the same of DS degen, so there is nothing I’ve missed to point out.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

That doesn’t explain why it doesn’t cancel direct damage. Getting hit, condition, CC, etc. are not one in question here since those are mitigated or canceled by other means.

Cancelling a direct damage means preventing your HP from taking the damage so you evade, go invul, block etc. because the damage is instead absorbed by those effect. Necro can go to DS to have the same result.

As for frequency, a lot of invulnerability and block skills from other professions has a much longer cooldown than DS.

What you’re missing is that DS is just some extra less valuable HP, not damage cancelling. Why?

Let’s say you want to mitigate a Backstab, for about 6k damage. How would you do that on other profession? You simply dodge, block or go invulnerable, and 100% of the damage is mitigated on demand.

What if you’re a Necromancer? Well, you NEED to have at least the equivalent of Life Force of the damage, otherwise the damage will just overflow on your HP bar. To mitigate 6k damage, you need approximately 30% of Life Force on base HP. Once you mitigated the backstab with 30% Life Force, then you can’t cancel any other damaging skill that will come after for a considerable amount of time (30% Life Force is tough to build up). So, if the Thief will chain another CnD+Backstab or an Heartseeker, you have no way to mitigate them unless the two dodge available to everyone.

Yeah, is true that a lot of invulnerability and block skills from other professions have much longer cooldown, but they not only mitigate 100% of the damage, but they are available from different sources at the same time.
A guardian, for instance, can mantain permanently vigor, which means 2 extra dodges on an endurance bar (3 seconds of evade every 20s), plus blocking damage via Protector Strike on a 15s cooldown and 4s blocking on 45 cooldown with focus, plus aegis here and there.
Don’t let me even start to compare it to evasion thieves and rangers.

The fact that you can’t be CCed and getting condition applied is another proof that DS is by no means invulnerability.

Ok, so let me see if I can get the math straight. This assumes DS is 120% of our max HP.

30/30/10 hybrid build. S/D + Staff, no utilities that give LF. I’m using Carrion and Rabid amulets here but all that really matters for our purposes here is Vitality and Toughness.

Vitality
24,812 HP, 0% damage reduction (for our purposes), 24,812 EHP.
DS: 29,774 EHP, lose 1,191 per second, gain 893 per condition with Feast of Corruption and 1,191 per target struck with Staff’s autoattack (up to 3,573 per cast).

Toughness
18,373 HP, 33% damage reduction, 24,436 EHP.
DS: 22,048 HP/29,326 EHP, lose 881/1,173 per second, gain 661/880 per condition with Feast of Corruption and 881/1,173 per target struck with Staff’s autoattack (up to 2,643/3,515 per cast).

So in a low-LF regen build, it looks like it’s pretty much a wash between the two from the perspective of the raw numbers. Normally, this would mean Toughness is simply better than Vitality in the long run, but there’s a wrinkle: Toughness has no effect on Life Force while DS is down and ideal DS usage involves only using DS for relatively short periods of time. As a result, DS amounts to pure burst mitigation for ideal playstyles, which means the Toughness-vs-Vitality debate is indeed a wash when it comes to DS. Both stats provide a roughly equivalent amount of protection there.

This means that in a low-DS build like this, the question becomes exactly the same as with other professions: how well can you heal? This particular build doesn’t have great healing, but the numbers are also so close that I’m inclined to give the edge to Toughness anyway with the caveat that DS being used to buy time for a heal could skew things a bit more towards Vitality, but probably not very much.

Now, let’s look at a power build: 30/0/10/0/30, Dagger/Dagger+Axe/Focus

Vitality
24,812 HP, 0% damage reduction (for our purposes), 24,812 EHP. (The same as before.)
DS: 38706 EHP, lose 1,548 per second, gain 3,406 per Dagger autoattack chain, 5,109 per Axe #2, 6,386 per Focus #4, and 3,406 per second from Spectral Armor (assuming Gluttony works with it).

Toughness
18,373 HP, 33% damage reduction, 24,436 EHP. (Also the same as before.)
DS: 28,662 HP/38,120 EHP, lose 1,146/1,525 per second, gain 2,522/3,354 per Dagger autoattack chain, 3,783/5,031 per Axe #2, 4,729/6,290 per Focus #4, and 2,522/3,354 per second from Spectral Armor (again, assuming Gluttony works with it).

At this point, the loss/second is much closer but all the other gains are notably higher for the Vitality build. A build that relies on rapidly gaining LF and entering DS frequently is going to get a lot more damage mitigation over time by stacking Vitality than by stacking Toughness, simply because those 100s from all your regen sources are going to add up much more quickly than your meager healing effects when outside of DS. I can’t find the numbers for how much LF you get back from dying foes, but in a PvE situation with a lot of nearby deaths, Vitality builds will almost certainly blow Toughness builds out of the water in DS survivability, potentially to the point of overkill.

Furthermore, a build that spends a significant amount of time using Axe #2, Dagger #2, and DS#4 and makes use of the Dark Armor trait will drop the damage mitigation disparity from 33% to 27% while channeling, pushing the meter even further in a Vitality amulet’s direction. You also want to emphasize a rugged LF bar to take better advantage of Strength of the Undead: a build that allows you to stay above 50% LF for even one more hit will give you better damage as well as better defense.

Conclusion: When it comes to simple damage mitigation, Toughness should generally be preferred in builds that don’t dip deeply into Soul Reaping and don’t have very good LF generation while Vitality is better for builds with heavy SR investments and more LF generation sources. As usual, how much healing you expect to get plays into this decision as well (a 30/0/10/0/30 Necro who focuses on autoattacking in Dagger while facetanking a dungeon boss running with a Water Ele and support Guardian to heal him may prefer Toughness anyway regardless of its inferior LF generation).

However, unlike with other professions, both stats will still give a roughly comparable amount of tankiness regardless of build. While one stat may be a bit better or a bit worse for your survivability than the other, the other two stats on the Amulet should be what informs your decision, not whether it has Toughness or Vitality. We would need a different set of calculations entirely to compare Power and Crit Chance for condi and hybrid builds to decide between Rabid and Carrion.

Thank you Blaine, that was a great read.

Thread is leading to other discussions, that’s good, too.

But I want to ask one of the questions from my OP again.

Is Rabid a popular choice for Necros in PvP?

I see some Necros saying it is and others saying neither way, but I don’t see any Necros saying that Rabid is not a popular choice for Necros in PvP.

Regardless of whether or not you go full Rabid or whether or not you believe it is optimal, do you guys believe it is a popular choice for Necros in PvP?

I frequent this forum a lot, and even though I don’t go Rabid, my take from this forum is that I believe Rabid is a popular choice for Necros in PvP. I have no opinion on what most or the majority of Necros use, just that Rabid is popular. And I do not believe there is any way to know with absolute certainy—just wondering in the context of what can be gathered from the Necro forum.

Is there any compelling evidence from this forum to suggest I should not hold this belief?

Not sure about PvP. I’d venture a guess that Rabid is a popular PvE option because you can get most of a full set for free from Karma vendors in Orr, but obviously that wasn’t your question. I would be really interested to see a set of stats from Anet about which professions take which amulets with what frequency.

You may want to cross-post this thread over on the sPvP forum. They may be able to answer questions of sPvP popularity better than us here, or even just give you another data point.

Blaine Tog.8304:

You may want to cross-post this thread over on the sPvP forum. They may be able to answer questions of sPvP popularity better than us here, or even just give you another data point.

Thanks for the reply. I thought of whether this forum or that was a better idea. I was thinking of PvP as encompassing all of sPvP/tPvP/WvW.

I thought it’d be more simple to make one post here rather than to make two posts (one in the sPvP section and the other in WvW discussion.)

Also, I was interested in the Necro forum’s general opinion specifically because I was asked to check here by someone who said it was evident on this forum that I should not say Rabid is popular among Necros in PvP.

Haley.2390:

Thread is leading to other discussions, that’s good, too.

But I want to ask one of the questions from my OP again.

Is Rabid a popular choice for Necros in PvP?

I see some Necros saying it is and others saying neither way, but I don’t see any Necros saying that Rabid is not a popular choice for Necros in PvP.

Regardless of whether or not you go full Rabid or whether or not you believe it is optimal, do you guys believe it is a popular choice for Necros in PvP?

I frequent this forum a lot, and even though I don’t go Rabid, my take from this forum is that I believe Rabid is a popular choice for Necros in PvP. I have no opinion on what most or the majority of Necros use, just that Rabid is popular. And I do not believe there is any way to know with absolute certainy—just wondering in the context of what can be gathered from the Necro forum.

Is there any compelling evidence from this forum to suggest I should not hold this belief?

Sorry if this discussion has been misleading. Rabid has always been, and probably always will be a very common gear stat for Necromancers.

For WvW I think Rabid is more common, and better than its s/tPvP brother, as there exists a much higher stat ceiling, and toughness/condition damage synergy gives much more meaning there (whereas in sPvP its like 1 damage per tick of bleeds).

Bhawb.7408:

Haley.2390:

Thread is leading to other discussions, that’s good, too.

But I want to ask one of the questions from my OP again.

Is Rabid a popular choice for Necros in PvP?

I see some Necros saying it is and others saying neither way, but I don’t see any Necros saying that Rabid is not a popular choice for Necros in PvP.

Regardless of whether or not you go full Rabid or whether or not you believe it is optimal, do you guys believe it is a popular choice for Necros in PvP?

I frequent this forum a lot, and even though I don’t go Rabid, my take from this forum is that I believe Rabid is a popular choice for Necros in PvP. I have no opinion on what most or the majority of Necros use, just that Rabid is popular. And I do not believe there is any way to know with absolute certainy—just wondering in the context of what can be gathered from the Necro forum.

Is there any compelling evidence from this forum to suggest I should not hold this belief?

Sorry if this discussion has been misleading. Rabid has always been, and probably always will be a very common gear stat for Necromancers.

For WvW I think Rabid is more common, and better than its s/tPvP brother, as there exists a much higher stat ceiling, and toughness/condition damage synergy gives much more meaning there (whereas in sPvP its like 1 damage per tick of bleeds).

Thanks for the clarification.

I’m just making sure I’m not out of line to say “Rabid is popular for PvP Necros” when someone tells me it should be evident from the Necro forum that I should not say that.