Guild Wars 2

I read Altrols guide compendium but those are catered towards tpvp and im looking for a power build for pve. Solo, dungeons, events etc. I was thinking 30/0/10/0/30. Using axe/focus and staff. What im curious abiut though is whether this is a legit build or me just hoping it is. Also, what kind of gear should i be aiming for? Valkyiers, zerk, or maybe a mix of both? Any advise would be greatly appreciated!

I’m assuming you’re aiming for a build focused on direct damage (i.e. not condition damage, sustain, or support), so the following advice is for that.

30/0/10/0/30 is a good power build for PvE, but I would recommend Dagger and Axe mainhands rather than staff; you have death shroud for 1200 range now (and most encounters don’t need 1200 range). Obviously you can switch for encoungers where you want 1200 range, such as if your group is ranging Lupicus.

My personal recommendation on traits (but you don’t have to use exactly these of course):

in spite:
(first one has a lot of options: focus recharge, life blast grants might, or signet recharge for signet of the locust and signet of undeath)
axe mastery
close to death

in death magic:
lose a condition on entering death shroud – this skill is amazing in certain encounters, especially with reduced death shroud cooldown.

in soul reaping:
life blast pierces
death shroud recharges faster
+50% crit chance in death shroud (change to stability for fights that need stability)

Since this is a pretty traditional direct damage build, you should probably go for exquisite ruby jewels or ascended berserker accessories. Armor depends on how comfortable you are with using dodges and death shroud to absorb damage; it’s possible to go full berserker in this, but starting out P/V/T (soldier’s) will give you a lot more room for mistakes, or T/P/P (knight’s) will give you a good amount of room for mistakes while doing significantly better damage than soldier’s.

If you can’t afford berserker trinkets, valkyrie or cavalier’s (available from the temples using karma) is a reasonable choice, but you should still put exquisite ruby jewels in them.

Ok, thanks for the input. The reason i chose staff over the dagger idea is for more aoe options, but will i not need more aoe?

You can switch out your weapons constantly. Its a good habit to swap weapons and utilities for different situations. Dagger provides the highest single target damage with its auto attack so its worth having one (with a warhorn).

What del said basically. You can swap between soldier and berserker gear only taking hit on your crit damage. Its a basic sit in DS and spam life blast. With 2 wars/2guardians in rares…. i can spam 5k shots indefinetly. Tho I would recomend droping 10 in curses rather to get 1% lf on crit swapable for targetable wells. Depending on which you want more in a given situation. Also just a heads up sigil of strength works wonders for this particular spec. Not only every life blast gives you 1 might there is posibility that every crit(which will happend a lot) will give 1 extra might stack. Not as important with guardian/mesmer/warrior groups but still something to consider if you are solo.

And I would argue that dagger isn’t that good for this one specifically in pve. More lf gains on axe :P And vuln even if very few before your fill up life force are better then nothing. Main idea is to sit behind in DS and hit hard shooting thru as many targets as possible. Not poke things in the butt with a butterknife. Tho… axe is not an option for pvp use of that spec >_>. When i run that in pvp i use dagger for immobilize and sticking ontop of target. Axe is much better for pve tho.
Oh yeah… WoS and WoC work marvels in this spec since you drop and forget them when your lf ran out in general they come off cooldown right as you run out of LF. Assuming you don’t loose lf to damage.

Your weapon choices should change based on the content you’re facing.

Personally, I like Dagger/Focus + Staff. That way, I have strong single-target damage (Dagger has by far the most single-target damage of any of our weapons), strong ranged damage, strong AoE, and strong utility.

However, the Focus is mostly pointless in PvE so I switch to Dagger offhand for the extra condi clear and AoE weakness. Dagger/Warhorn + Axe/Focus is also a strong set, but as you noted your AoE damage is lacking so that’s a good set to use when fighting bosses. Use Dagger when it’s safe to melee, then switch to Axe when you need to back off a little and DS when you need to back off a lot.

Really, though, it comes down to which weapons you like, which suit your playstyle. One of the cool things about the Necro is that all our weapons are viable. You might get slightly better DPS with an Axe + Dagger mainhands than Axe+Staff, but the staff is such a strong weapon that you’ll never go wrong having it available.

Blaine its about 30 spite 30 sr ds spam spec :P But good point non the less. Like I said dagger/axe changes depending on what you need more. Lf or damage. With ds spammer in pve depending on group dagger can become pointless simply because you take little damage in ds and therefore your priority should be refilling life force as soon as you can so you can switch back to hitting hard instead of sitting in melee range getting hit nonstop and wasting lf on mitigation instead of damage.
And focus is imo is best pve offhand. You don’t need condition clears in pve there is hardly any content that needs extra ontop of consume+staff. If your in dungeon yeah it could be much needed extra clear but tbh its easier to get someone capable of aoe clearing it then spend potential damage output on mitigation. Focus 4 if you stand melee(closest) stacks a nice 14 stacks of vul in single use great for a solid channeled+wells opener followed by ds lb/lt. Daggers too single target and immobilize doesn’t work on what really needs to be immobilized. On the other hand perm retaliation is still damage so is criple which affects anything besides object type enemies.

Syfin.6875:

Ok, thanks for the input. The reason i chose staff over the dagger idea is for more aoe options, but will i not need more aoe?

Piercing life blast from death shroud, along with well of suffering/well of corruption + death shroud 4) will do a lot more aoe damage than staff in a power build.

But

You can switch out your weapons constantly. Its a good habit to swap weapons and utilities for different situations. Dagger provides the highest single target damage with its auto attack so its worth having one (with a warhorn).

This is entirely correct – you should switch weapons and utilities for whatever is best for the current situation (I also switch armor, but most people don’t). Staff is a great situation weapon and has some very good utility for some fights (and is great for running and kiting).

While axe has more burst life force generation, dagger has more sustained life force generation and more sustained damage, as long as it’s safe to get into melee range. I almost always have a dagger as one of my mainhand weapons in PvE.