Guild Wars 2

Hi,

I’m looking to level my new necro to 80 as quickly as possible, I might take a bit of time off to experiment in WvW and sPvP, but essentially my goal is to get to 80 as soon as I can and re-spec. Looking at traits and skills, it seems to me that the fastest way to do this is a power build focused on wells. Would you mostly agree? What would be a recommended build for that, keeping in mind that I’ll reset all my trait points anyway once I hit 80?

At the moment I’m level 25, so no Elite yet. My game involves pulling as many mobs together as I can and dropping well of suffering, well of corruption, and Asura pain converter on them, as I basically run around trying to do as many hearts and events as possible. Anything I could be doing differently to level faster?

Thanks!

How much money do you have from other characters? Maxing a crafting skill will get you 10 levels no matter when you start, and if you follow guides around the internet you can do it for less than 5 gold per crafting skill.

Yeah I could do that, but I don’t have much gold set aside and I’d rather save up for going legendary, eventually. Besides I do want to play my way up, I just want to do it quickly.

If I remember correctly a conditions build tends to be the fastest. It lets you tag multiple mobs, gives you a lot of AOE on short cooldowns (compared to wells), has synergy with one of the most powerful heals in the game, and deals some of the highest damage for necromancers.

Also make sure you collect most of the resource nodes around you and keep your crafting up to your level or more. Complete dailies on that character, finish any map you start, and do your personal story.

lettucemode.3789:

How much money do you have from other characters? Maxing a crafting skill will get you 10 levels no matter when you start, and if you follow guides around the internet you can do it for less than 5 gold per crafting skill.

Just to point out, you don’t get 10 levels from maxing a tradeskill. Its more like 13-15 depending on your crafting crits, and even if you are low on gold you should max Cooking as it only costs around 1g (make sure you’re buying mats at the appropriate time of day).

If you plan on crafting to level then make sure you go to an overflow server where you don’t have any WvW bonuses and obviously make sure you don’t have a crafting booster active. Crafting criticals increase your crafting experience and allow you to hit 400 crafting faster, but they do not increase your character experience.

For example when I had 18% crit from WvW and a crafting booster active I got 9 levels from 1-400 cooking, but when I did it again on a different character without any bonuses I got 14 levels. It costs more money to max a tradeskill without bonuses, but you arguably get more bang for your buck without crafting crits.

Aside from crafting the above posters are correct: Dailies, DE’s and especially your Personal Story are the best way to level. Condition builds are great for DE’s because of all the AoE (Signet of Spite + Epidemic is great in the earlier levels). But if you’re looking to change things up then Dagger power builds are really fun too.

Ugh… I find questing to be extremely boring – my necro is 23 (last 3 levels gained in wvw) and my highest level character is a level 50 thief. I play the game mostly for PVP but would like to get max level so I can be viable in wvw and see if that gets more interesting (can be pretty boring unless you are part of a group). I actually kind of enjoy my necro more than my thief most of the time. I do questing for like a half hour, get sick of it and switch over to the mists for a couple weeks before going back lol…

So… you’re saying that a condition build can in fact kill trash mobs more quickly than a power build with wells? I’m finding that condition damage is puny at low levels, hence the idea to go with wells.

Regarding the other tips, I do my personal story until I become too low level to survive, then run around doing as many DEs as possible and hearts to level up, completing maps as I go along. Although to be honest the exp boost for completing a map is stupidly low, hardly more than a basic heart and far inferior to a chapter in my personal story. The only thing I don’t do is complete dailies on my necro, I save that for my main.

Easiest leveling build is using increased mark size with staff, plus ranged wells. At low levels use minions to face tank creatures up until you can get wells to siphon health. After that, drop minions and use wells + siphoning, eventually getting ranged wells (so you aren’t in as much danger right away and can let other poor noobs tank for you).

Other than that, do personal story like you do already, and also be sure to craft if you can, its decent experience and can easily bridge the level gap to the next story quest (and also if you are gathering resources as you wander, it will be pretty close to free).

Bhawb.7408:

Easiest leveling build is using increased mark size with staff, plus ranged wells. At low levels use minions to face tank creatures up until you can get wells to siphon health. After that, drop minions and use wells + siphoning, eventually getting ranged wells (so you aren’t in as much danger right away and can let other poor noobs tank for you).

Other than that, do personal story like you do already, and also be sure to craft if you can, its decent experience and can easily bridge the level gap to the next story quest (and also if you are gathering resources as you wander, it will be pretty close to free).

Regarding the crafting – just gathering along with questing has not been nearly enough in my experience.. there is always some ingredient in the middle not easy to come by (i think cherries for cooking?) or another resource that is difficult to farm and expensive to buy off the TP (e.g. jute scraps). It definitely does give good xp though – just seems that in my experience I Run into a wall where I am out of a key ingredient and haven’t made enough gold to be able to just buy it off the TP.

What I do to remedy that is by salvaging every white item I don’t use.

Daemon.4295:

So… you’re saying that a condition build can in fact kill trash mobs more quickly than a power build with wells?

Absolutely.

Power builds can absolutely demolish a single target in the blink of an eye, there’s no doubt about that. But with Condition builds you can pull tons of mobs at once and kill them all quickly and easily. Condition builds are especially useful for DE’s where AoE is the most important type of DPS (and Epidemic is easily the king of AoE).

Even though Condition builds are rather weak against single mobs compared to Power builds, being able to take down 5+ mobs at the same time wins out in the end. That’s not to say that Power builds are not effective however, I myself switched out of Condition because I found it was not as fun on a personal level. I’ve been running a Dagger/Focus or Dagger/Warhorn (depending on the situation) and I’m loving it, but I do not kill mobs as quickly as I did with Conditions.

From the levelling I have done on my necro I agree 100%. I ran dagger/warhorn and scepter/dagger (always using staff as 2nd weapon) and found it to be way easier to use scepter/dagger conditions. This is due to the AOE as mentioned but also due to the fact that you can easily/quickly stack a bunch of bleeds and just easily stay out of melee range for the shrot amount of time it takes for the bleeds to take the mob down. Therefore, there is much less downtime between fights due to low health.