Guild Wars 2

The Curses line is the de-facto ‘condition’ tree for Necro, it gives Precision along with Condition Damage. However, Precision does little for pure condition Necro’s and is outstripped in damage by Power even for condition builds, excepting perhaps you are using multiple Earth Sigils on a two weapon setup and mostly using only that set. Even then for it to compete with power it requires bleeds to run near their distance 5 seconds or beyond and that is no given.

I don’t understand why this line gives Precision. Dots can’t crit. They seemed to slap on the tacky Barbed Precision at the start for an excuse to give Precision, but it really doesn’t add that much damage, and doesn’t scale up well with condition damage due to the 66% chance to proc. Additionally, a pure attrition condition Necro (meaning no Spite) is not going to have good power, and therefore their crits hit like a wet noodle. And are further inflicted with gimpy return from Soul Reaping, since it is buffing weak crits to begin with making the crit damage there not add much.

The new flavor of the day is of course Dumbfire even for condition builds 30/30 or 30/20 and with that Precision becomes more useful to proc your Dumbfire. But for those desiring to go back to a more traditional condition build, and not be a glass condition (oxymoronic idea right there) Precision is in many ways, dead weight. Condition Duration would make so much more sense here, and put Precision up on Spite. Dump Barbed Precision. It wouldn’t change the FotM 30/30 one bit, because you’d still get the same 4 boosts, but for anyone sick of being railroaded to that build, condition builds would get stronger without Precision and with Duration here and would thus open up more variety of builds outside Dumbfire + Terror.

It doesn’t help that Reaper’s Precision and Withering Precision are just not desirable and rarely taken as the only other synergy crit traits in Curses.

Power, Precision, Vitality, and Toughness will never, ever be on the same traitline as another. That is because those are the four "primary"stats. Even without any investment, you have a value in those four stats. Condition Duration, Condition Damage, Healing Power, Boon Duration, and Critical Damage are “secondary” stats.

If that is the case then Precision should simply be made more valuable for condi. This could be done easily by simply messing with the math on Barbed Precision, since its an auto pick in this line. Up the proc rate closer to 100% of crits. Going up to say 90% would only increase damage added about 400 over 20 attacks, or a full rotation of every skill, or about 15 seconds. As well as make the other crit traits better or change them.

And actually this could have been a viable solution itself to helping our pressure, instead of the silly dumbfire.

It is pretty telling that the top tourney condi Necros favored Carrion over Rabid (least before dumbfire), despite Rabid actually mirrors the stats given out in the condition line.

IMO the biggest problem with barbed precision is that it doesn’t do much.

66% chance to inflict a 1 second bleed. One bleed is anywhere from 105-145 damage on proc, but only 0.66 x crit chance of it happening. That… really isn’t a lot. Against a single target this ability might as well not exist. When fighting multiple targets you’ll get sparse bits of condition damage scattered aimlessly among them. For comparison purposes, we’ll assume a 50% crit rate. so in all barbed precision gives you 0.33 bleeds per attack.

To compare, precise strikes by warriors has a 33% chance for a 3 second bleed. Engineers have a 30% chance for a 3 second bleed. Mesmers have 100% chance for 5 seconds, but only from illusions. Doing the math, this comes to 0.5 bleeds per hit, 0.45 bleeds per hit, and finally 2.5 bleeds per hit.

The worst out of the bunch (engineers) inflicts 36% more bleeds per hit than necromancers of equal precision. This is only the the surface, however. The second issue with necromancers is that their condition attacks don’t attack rapidly. You can fire off a few plinks with the scepter, but this is slow to execute, so conditions don’t build up that quickly at all.

Warriors, Engineers, and Mesmers all attack much more rapidly. Engineers hit up to 3 times as much with grenades, making their procs 3x more effective. I don’t have a particular attack count for Warriors and Mesmers, however I definitely know that mesmer clones (particularly 3 sword clones) can attack at roughly the same rate as the scepter with a delay between them, so I would say 3 clones at half speed is roughly 50% more attacks per second than a necromancer.

It is here where rangers also benefit. They have Sharpened Edges, which is a trait that is identical to barbed precision. What rangers also have is twice the attack speed on their shortbow, as well as the off-hand warhorn and a pet that attacks alongside of them.

And this is why I run carrion on my necro. You only need, like, 20% crit chance in order to have a reliable dhuumire proc, so after a few Rampager components you’re good to go.

This is yet another of the reasons why I have high hopes for the healing power attribute eventually becoming viable for the necro, as right now precision is pretty much useless. You could arguably mount a defense for it if you run earth sigils (which indeed I do), but even then there are more than viable replacements that do not rely on precision at all, and the rest of the procs you get either aren’t worth it to begin with (barbed precision) or only require a low crit chance to be effective over time due to the internal cd (dhuumfire).

Hopefully one of these days, when a.net is done scaling back our offensive output sufficiently that we can start talking about adding actual sustain to the class again, healing power will be made worthwhile enough to make the move, at least partially, from rabid to apothecary.

I’m just curious as to what you’re running for runes and sigils on your armor/weapons.

Barbed precision was changed lately, I think in the June patch. It’s now a 2 second bleed, which was a pretty surprising stealth buff, imo.

Even more to the point, that means with 50% bleed duration you’re guaranteed (Enemies with -Condition Duration excluded) 3 ticks of bleeding from every crit.