Guild Wars 2

I am curious if there are any necro bunker builds available post-patch, or any at all.

With a second health pool and fear, I am curious by the necro’s bunker possibilities

Patch didnt change a lot except add the possibility of stability-crazy builds with 30 in SR. We make decent bunkers, you can find builds that allow necros to bunker, the only thing is that there are a few big weaknesses (like CC) that kill our ability to be the main bunker for a team. With a secondary bunker (or a bulky team in general) we can bunker pretty well though.

10/0/30/30/0 works pretty well for PvE and soloing camps in WvW. I run Dagger/X (whatever I’m feeling at the moment) and Staff. Well of Blood/Suffering/Power + Darkness/Signet of Locust swap out. Elite is whatever you like. Soldier gear. Give it a look- nothing special and not very good for fighting players.

I have been trying out a few things. We got a buff to stability uptime, a buff to weakness, a ward (actually a one-way ward, which is even better), a buff to well cooldowns, more stunbreaks on lower cooldowns, several buffs to LF generation, and a much needed buff to our decapping ability.

With our already superior condition control and rumored further buffs to our sustain, I’d say that it won’t just be viable, it could soon be the right choice. In fact it may be already, but I haven’t done any real testing to be able to say that for sure. The only difficulty I’ve been having is working out which build works best.

Spectrals working in DS means you pretty much can’t lose DS while in DS for the duration of spectral walk/armor if you have tanky enough gear. How good this works for spvp? Probably doesn’t as it doesn’t protect you from conditions which will get piled up pretty badly.

i think the lack of stability kinda makes necro a 2nd rate choice for bunker, seeing as it wont matter if u cant even stay inside the capping area and get chain cc’d to death

Targuil.3741:

Spectrals working in DS means you pretty much can’t lose DS while in DS for the duration of spectral walk/armor if you have tanky enough gear. How good this works for spvp? Probably doesn’t as it doesn’t protect you from conditions which will get piled up pretty badly.

That’s the main problem I have been running into actually. To get stability and a bunker level of toughness in light armour, you give up most of your healing traits and skills, but you can’t count on deathshroud to make up for it because you can’t use any of your condition control in deathshroud. There’s some kind of balance to be reached but it’s difficult to figure out.

BTW we have more stability than anyone. Significantly more. The trade off is that it has to be traited for of course, which is, as mentioned, half the reason I’m running into this problem.

Here’s an example build that mostly works by flashing DS, only sitting in it if you need to wait for cooldowns to come up, and a guardian build to compare to:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fQAQNAoYWjMaZ7daeb87JAJFPb9kiv3m6B8ofOA-TsAgzCmI2RtjbHzOyds7M+Y9xsBA

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fUAQNAW7dlUgqCnFSPEf4ES2jRCBTQsHYEH1RXFcIA-TsAgzCmIySllLLTWyssZN+Y9xmAA

The necro has better condition removal, more protection, more stability, weakness, more ehp, more and better control effects, and has a better elite for emergencies.

The guardian has 76 more armour, passive condition removal giving them more time to do other things, 2s block on heal, shield of wrath, sanctuary, plus provides allies with better condition removal, protection, and stability.

So far, the necro bunker is a long way ahead in terms of personal survivability. Where it gets difficult is comparing the healing numbers and the class mechanics.

I’m not saying this is the best necro bunker build since the patch either, but for now it’s something to compare to a guard.

Questions I’m still not sure of: Should you just run 3 wells and a wall? Are deathly invigoration and shrouded removal better than weakening shroud, reaper’s protection, and the retaliation traits? If you swap one for reaper’s, is near to death still better than soul marks and master of terror? Is it in the first place? It’s made more complex by the death and blood attributes being so significant too. Does deathly invigoration and 100 healing power give more sustain than 10% more protection uptime and 100 toughness? Where does 10 seconds of pbaoe weakness every 15-21 seconds fit on that scale? These are very different questions to ‘do I need 3300 attack or can I get by with 3200?’

It used to be much easier when wells were the only way to build a necro bunker. Still, I think in the current condi heavy meta, necro bunker is probably better than guard. One thing is for sure, they better be very careful about how they improve our sustain if they do decide to do that. We’re already competitive bunkers, give us too much more and we will be way over the top.

For pure, mid node bunkering and team support I think Guard is probably still better. But a Necro bunker brings other advantages, namely they can still dish out good DPS via Epidemic while being very tough to kill. The buff where spectral armor/walk effects still work in DS was a HUGE buff to Necro survivability vs focused DPS.

The key to making a Necro bunker is spectral armor/walk + last gasp proc and managing their cooldowns so they don’t overlap, as well as keeping as high uptime of regen on yourself as possible (optimally you can have 100% uptime on regen). Here is a good build of a main Necro bunker, but as I stated above you can tweak this for more damage and be an off-bunker and still be very effective.

http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=;044Z;1kHkC0C4gJkJ0;9;599JT;13;01;023-37AVN17;2Uwl6Uwl69cJ

There are many variations. You can easily drop weakening shroud for the retal on DS activation. If you want to off-bunker you can drop stability for terror. You can swap out geomancy for energy runes if you want more defense. You can drop Epidemic for Spectral Armor as well if you want that extra defensive cooldown but I don’t feel it is necessary.

P.S. You are also a beast at res’ing with Mercy Runes since you have a low cooldown stability on demand plus you can pop plague as well.

So I went through and figured out the absolute peak healing each of those two comparison builds can do and the guard is ahead. The necro can heal about 850 per second, the guard 920. I only used the base heal for consume conditions btw, the numbers are about even with an average of 2 conditions consumed each time, necro pulls ahead with anything more than that. Neither will even approach those numbers in actual play however, and I think the necro will get closer.

The reason is that they assume things like the guard having 100% vigor uptime and never having to activate virtue of resolve, the necro never having dagger 2 evaded, or the guard never having staff 4 interrupted, plus both having perfect rotations so that no two healing abilities are ever available at the same time, which is more than likely impossible.

Not that much was done for attrition. The +6 heals from vamp stacking full heals gear, slightly faster LifeForce gen, and being able to have spect running while in DS.

The patch was a ‘keep the pressure up’ in PvP.

They did help along with with ‘non advertised’ stuff, like 1/3rd downed life fixed, transforms like Litch not getting full multi-min CD if interrupted, and minions are better.

Been testing some more and I don’t think it’s viable right now, despite being better at first glance than a guard. The issue is the lack of passive defenses. Guard dodge roll is a third of his healing, his condition removal is passive, and his active heals have much shorter channels. By comparison, necro bunker is like trying to play piano written for an octopus. Your cooldowns conflict with each other too often, and there’s just too much to do spread over both weapon sets. It’s a lot more work for not enough gain.

Dagger 2 is the biggest culprit. It’s easy to get the channel off, flash death shroud gives enough stability for the whole channel, but having to decide between finishing your channel and say, dodging a shatter or clearing 8 bleeds is no fun, and finishing the channel is rarely the right choice. 3.5 out of every 12 seconds is just too much. With double the cooldown and double the healing it would work fine.

There are definitely players around who could make it work better than I can, but I suspect they’ll still run into too many cooldown issues when faced with a few CC chains and a pile of conditions that need clearing.

Basically, Necro bunkers can work, if you have a team to support the deficiencies. It isn’t as copypasta as other bunkers are, where you can just plop them in any team and they are filling the bunker role regardless of the team comp.

I don’t know, I don’t think there’s a team that can cover for ‘not enough time to do everything’.

I mean as far as ‘weaknesses’ go, that’s it. We can take less direct damage, remove more conditions, heal for just as much, and control the point better. The problem is that we have to do them actively.

Guard condition removal: 1 per 10s passively, plus 4 more every ~30s instantly.
Necro condition removal: 1 per 7s instantly, plus dozens more, but with cast times.
Guard gets a 2 second pause button when he heals, necro often needs to use stability to heal.
Guard can save his stability for reactive use, necro needs to flash DS every 7s to get the other benefits it provides, and has to use every second one just to channel one skill.
Guard dodge roll heals him and evades, necro has to both dodge and flash for the same effect.

Everything guards do passively, we have to use active effects for. Things that guards do instantly, we have cast times on. To get the same amount of healing, we have to give up a third of our time to channel dagger 2.

We have to manage our cooldowns so that we are in the right weaponsets to maintain regen while having dagger 2 ready as soon as we flash ds, and that often conflicts with which condition removal we have available, which is another one of the big problems.

The tools are all there, but they clash with each other too often. If foot in the grave worked on dodge roll instead of DS, all these problems would be solved btw, but it would be too op with sigils of energy and/or someone giving you vigor, and wouldn’t solve anything if it had a cooldown, because then the conflict would be ‘spend my endurance to dodge this or wait for stability cooldown?’

Something else that would help significantly would be swapping the trigger effects on mark of evasion and deathly invigoration, so that you heal on dodge and drop a mark when leaving DS, but the cooldown on mark of evasion would need to go. That would make maintaining regen much cleaner, so you’re less likely to get caught in staff when deathly swarm is your only ‘available’ condition removal, or in d/d when putrid mark is what you have, while also reducing the amount of deathshroud flashing required, allowing you to save your stability for when it’s needed. I’m just brainstorming though, I haven’t thought through all the impacts something like that would have.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the idea that necro can bunker better than a guard in the right hands. I have no problem with having to work harder for higher payoff, but I’m questioning whether anyone can make it work with things as they currently stand.

The next step for me is to figure out a build that doesn’t need to flash DS constantly, but I seriously doubt we have one that could stand up to a guard.