Guild Wars 2

Now that most people use spite/soul reaping and blood magic is considered inferior traitline i dont really understand why most people still run with warhorns in PvE.
Okay, #5 is slight dps boost but lets be honest- it tickles. Swiftness for skip purposes is a joke since you catch combat state when running through mobs. Also the cooldown is horrible. Life force gain is good when you are at 0% and surrounded by 5 or more vets. Trash just dies so im not even considering it.
Maybe #4 ? daze is short, cooldown is long, animation is long and hard to use when we want to interrupt a specific skill. Why would we ? Again, trash and vets are dying fast, champs have breakbars and 2s daze in most situations isnt good enough.

Before HoT warhorn was great thanks to lower cooldown trait and all those life siphons from blood magic line. Now imo it loses its purpose. And most warhorn skins are crappy like hell :p

Some people like me who dont run gs (too clumsy and slow, easy to interrupt, avoid by blinding/evading, long cooldowns, low single target life force gain) stick to dagger and wonder what to use best for offhand. Right now focus has better damage utility (boon removal, chill, vulnerability) with better single target lf, and dagger is awesome for survi (condi transfer, blind, aoe weakness). And yet i still hear warhorn is superior. Can some1 explain to me why?
Because right now i think it is just a relic of the past.

Meh, I still use it for the swiftness.

OanSur.4590:

Some people like me who dont run gs (too clumsy and slow, easy to interrupt, avoid by blinding/evading, long cooldowns, low single target life force gain) stick to dagger and wonder what to use best for offhand. Right now focus has better damage utility (boon removal, chill, vulnerability) with better single target lf, and dagger is awesome for survi (condi transfer, blind, aoe weakness). And yet i still hear warhorn is superior. Can some1 explain to me why?
Because right now i think it is just a relic of the past.

Are you actually wondering anything here or is this just a naked ploy to voice a strongly held opinion?

Nobody says you have to use the greatsword or warhorn. Play how you want.

Don’t make fun of things, however, because you can’t make them work for you.

No one has stated Blood Magic is a bad trait line. For what it does, it works well, and it can actually add to the DPS of a build while providing mitigating healing sustain in melee. It works best with Dagger, however, and in situations where most players are going for greatsword or condition builds, the dagger is seeing less use and the slower strikes of the other weapons get less added DPS and survival from the life drain. Give it some time and you’ll see the game shift in response to some new mechanic or skill alteration which will result in Blood Magic seeing more use. It could be as soon as the 17th.

As for the warhorn? Most of the time the dagger requires you to sit in autoattack anyway for maximum DPS and life drain since dagger 2 and 3 are a flat DPS loss. People like the cripple from dagger 5 and the bar break in dagger 4’s daze. The recharge time is long, yeah, but most dagger Necros are used to just standing there and hitting 1 at things. It’s how I played in PvE for about two years, so I’d know.

OanSur.4590:

Now that most people use spite/soul reaping and blood magic is considered inferior traitline i dont really understand why most people still run with warhorns in PvE.
Okay, #5 is slight dps boost but lets be honest- it tickles. Swiftness for skip purposes is a joke since you catch combat state when running through mobs. Also the cooldown is horrible. Life force gain is good when you are at 0% and surrounded by 5 or more vets. Trash just dies so im not even considering it.
Maybe #4 ? daze is short, cooldown is long, animation is long and hard to use when we want to interrupt a specific skill. Why would we ? Again, trash and vets are dying fast, champs have breakbars and 2s daze in most situations isnt good enough.

Before HoT warhorn was great thanks to lower cooldown trait and all those life siphons from blood magic line. Now imo it loses its purpose. And most warhorn skins are crappy like hell :p

Some people like me who dont run gs (too clumsy and slow, easy to interrupt, avoid by blinding/evading, long cooldowns, low single target life force gain) stick to dagger and wonder what to use best for offhand. Right now focus has better damage utility (boon removal, chill, vulnerability) with better single target lf, and dagger is awesome for survi (condi transfer, blind, aoe weakness). And yet i still hear warhorn is superior. Can some1 explain to me why?
Because right now i think it is just a relic of the past.

When used with the blood magic trait line, warhorn still works just fine. The five’s damage may not be huge, but it definitely adds up (the longer the fight the better), and on top of the lifesteal constantly proccing from it you’re getting what is frankly respectable damage on top of a little bit of sustain, and this is a game (well, all MMOs are like this really) where every little bit helps. Swiftness is always great in any fight, it’s some of the best life force gain on any weapon we’ve got (the argument “it’s great when we need life force but pointless when we don’t” is just, lol), and the cd on the 4 may be huge but it eats break bars and is amazing in pvp.

Warhorn still great in pvp, seeing less use in pve because we’ve got more consistent and higher forms of damage in reaper shroud and gravedigger spam. In other words, different weapons for different situations.

Blood Magic is not the inferior traitline. lol

Warhorn wins if your party is going to keep vuln at cap anyway and you don’t encounter many boons and/or having access to another breakbar-reducing skill is more helpful; WH5 is some bonus damage on the side along LF-regen, basically use and forget. It really depends on what you want and need; that being said, I find myself slotting focus more often.

Ok gonna list some dps situations.

For a greatsword + dagger rotation:
Focus > untraited warhorn
traited warhorn > traited focus (but you wont have vampiric presence so you must be second necro)

Pure dagger:
Focus > warhorn always (but you take both so it doesnt really matter)

Basically focus has always been better. But now warhorn does have one very niche situation where it is better for dps. When not talking purely about dps theres always the daze to consider though.

The DPS of Locust Swarm’s effect might be low, but the damage/second of casting time is actually unmatched in the entire game (aside from instant cast skills, where that’s immesurable). 4 coefficients/cast second is extremely high. This goes to 6 when traited.

For reference, Gravedigger (which has pretty good DPS when spammable), is only 2.4 (not counting aftercast).

Yeah but focus is also good and on a much lower cooldown. Which is why it wins out in so many scenarios.

4 deals a lot of damage to breakbars.

5 triggers crit sigils really well and adds more siphons if you use blood magic.

btw don’t use the warhorn trait. Use vampiric presence.

Is there another off-hand that increases your DPS on targets that already have full Vuln?

Yes. Its called focus.

The vuln is nice but thats not the reason i advocate it over warhorn. Its because it flat out does more damage and has a much lower cool down.

spoj.9672:

Yes. Its called focus.

The vuln is nice but thats not the reason i advocate it over warhorn. Its because it flat our does more damage and has a much lower cool down.

Cool, now that I’m actually doing PvE I’ll be able to use it then.

Oansur, Who in the world told you horn is superior in PvE? The last time I ran it seriously in PvE was for the interrupt chance during an experiment using Rune of Perplexity.

Ps: I typically run traited dagger / traited focus in PvE when not running greatsword/shouts. When I do run greatsword, staff, scepter/focus, or axe/focus are typical combo’s.

Off hand dagger is weak and unnecessary in PvE.
Horn causes as many mobility problems as it solves and bosses are immune to stun.

What I love about necros is the flexibility in their weapons, especially kitted out with Viper’s now. I swap often (same with traits) depending on situations now, based on what’s required. The weapons all offer some different benefits, as they should.

spoj.9672:

Yes. Its called focus.

The vuln is nice but thats not the reason i advocate it over warhorn. Its because it flat out does more damage and has a much lower cool down.

also more reliable life force refill \^_^/

Life force generation and daze for breakbars. One of our best offhands, if not the best for pve, right now.