Guild Wars 2

So to start off I will give me condition spec Necromancer build which has proven very effective in tournaments or playing with a few friends in a hot-join game. However playing solo in a hot-join is a little more difficult with this build.
Spells:
Consume Condition
Epidemic
Signet of Undeath
Corrupt Boon
Plague
Traits:
Spite: 30
IV: Signet Mastery; Signets recharge 20% faster
VII: Spiteful Marks; Marks deal 10% more damage
OR
V: Spiteful Spirit; Gain retaliation for 3 seconds when entering Death Shroud
XII: Close to Death; Increase damage by 20% to enemies under 50% health
Curses: 30
II: Hemophilia; 20% Increased bleeding duration
VII: Master of Corruption; Corruption skills recharge 20% faster
XI: Lingering Curse; Conditions inflicted by scepter spells last 33% longer
Death Magic: 10
II: Greater Marks; Increases area of marks and marks become unblockable
Runes and Weapons
Weapons:
Scepter: Sigil of Superior Earth
Dagger (offhand): Sigil of Minor Corruption
Staff: Sigil of Superior Earth
Necklace: PVP Rampager’s Amulet with rampager gem
Runes:
Superior Rune of the Afflicted x2
Superior Rune of the Centaur x2
Superior Rune of the Krait x2

Now I picked all those runes for an obvious reason and that was for bleed duration; my bleeds last about 12 seconds on somebody; I use rampager’s amulet because of the crit bonus because I find that Necromancers have a hard time getting bleeds up quickly and for me the quickest way is through crit; I can get up 3 bleeds with one swing of my scepter if I crit which is often because I have 62% crit.

Finally the things that I think are correct about this build and the aspects that I think should be tweaked slightly. I will start with the pros. First off I do believe that this build has a lot of survivability and incredible team support; in my tournament team the Signet of Undeath has helped me and a condition thief win a 2v4 and win the match because we were able to take the middle point. This spec is also good damage, after you gets the bleeds on which can be difficult and slow but once they are on and you epidemic and things start to drop fast. This build is incredible for team fights and it works 1v1 as well because you deal good damage with bleeds and get them on fast with crit (hopefully); not to mention you build up lifeforce a lot faster with Signet of Undeath while in combat so it gives you that extra 5 or so seconds to win the match or escape a thief’s Pistol Whip. This spec also allows a lot of control over the situation, you can pop into Death Shroud to do a quick fear or switch to staff and fear and slow down enemies, it works very well if you time it correctly. To sum up:

Faster bleeds on a target

Incredible aid in team fights

Decent in 1v1s (however the moment the second person jumps in you are done)

Lots of control over a situation

Now for the cons, and these are more just tweaks that I think should be made to further polish the class, I do believe that Necromancers are quite balanced just for some minor tweaks in the class and obvious bug fixes which have already been listed in other peoples’ posts. Personally the biggest con for me is the use of a condition Necromancer in PVP, it seems as if we are just there for Epidemic at times, which frustrates me and I am sure other players have been frustrated by this as well. Because if people wanted a condition spec to put up bleeds fast they would just get a condition spec hunter or a condition spec thief. This is where I believe this can be tweaked just slightly and my solution is to increase the speed of the scepter 1 attack just slightly; for example if we get 3 bleeds in 3 swings it just be increased to maybe 4 swings in that same time period so we get that 1 extra bleed, it would make a big difference in my opinion. One other con is move ability; Necromancers cannot get away in a fight if we are in trouble; at least not condition specs, not very well at least. I have no speed boost or anything like that and not willing to reduce my bleed stacking for it. Don’t really know how to fix this might try some more Sigils on my staff and see if anything works better. Finally for me the last con is the fear duration, 1 ¼ second… this is not much at all especially when a thief steals to you and fears you for 4 seconds or a ranger’s pet will fear you for 2 seconds. I think that something definitely needs to be done about this because Necromancers should be the main profession that can fear it is just in the nature of Necromancer just like in almost every other game that has some sort of Necromancer like aspect to it. Now as to the crit conditon build cons the main one is not being able to move very fast and the other is just you have to tank the damage, there is not much else you can do. To sum up:

Increase speed slightly of the scepter 1 so that we won’t be useless doing damage to somebody and feel a little more confident going into a fight.

Speed is a big frustration at times but I don’t see this one getting fixed very much; will have to play around with sigils and stuff see if anything works

Finally and most importantly Fear duration NEEDS to be increased because the 2 fears we have combined is still not as long as if a thief had stolen fear from us. (If they are spec’d to have longer condition duration which most are at the moment)

Have to just tank damage most of the time.

I hope all this helps somebody just thought I should get a view point out there and hopefully some of these things will be fixed and tweaked; if anybody has any questions for me or any comments about my spec or something I could do to improve it, leave it in the comments it would be much appreciated. You can also always whisper me in the game if you have a question or just want to hit up some tournaments. Hope this helped.

seems very squishy to me. i dont know why you are running so much crit when you have no spells to really take advantage of it. oh and btw the spite XII trait doesnt work with condition damage. I would go at least 20 into Soul Reaping for 3% LF on marks and spectral armor @ 50% hp. i dont think 30 into Spite is good for a condition build.

It is not that squishy actually, just have to be smart with it, and that super sucls witth XII trait; ok back to the drawing board thanks for the information. Not so sure about Soul Reaping to be honest, never attracted me too much, like the toughness. And I like the Spite because it increase bleed duration as well.

Signet of Undeath is a terrible terrible signet. Now you don’t even have a stunbreaker.

Its good for team fights and I stand by it. It has pulled off so many times and won the match in tournaments

I can’t really critique your build a whole lot because everything is really personal preference and playstyle. I do feel like we are somewhat pigeon-holed into getting the same utilities as any Condition dmg build. I would love to be able to pick up Spectral Walk or Spectral Armor for a bit more survivability and a better stunbreak(Plague Signet as a stun break isn’t as reliable since you have a major condition removal talent tied into it, which means you wont always use it for actually breaking out of a stun every time)

I do have the same issues:
Not being able apply bleeds as fast as other classes(ON a side not though, I do think a major overlooked condition that necros bring is poison among others. But poison is huge!)

Speed is also an issue but that’s somewhat the way we choose to build ourselves. If you were to sacrifice damage for more utility skills and use a Warhorn over a Dagger, you would have a Swiftness/Cripple AND a Daze. Though, the dagger 4/5 skills are just too good to get rid of imo.

And of course, the “fear” class has lower duration fears than any other by default. It’s always frustrating to get feared by a thief due to how long it lasts ><. We do have the option to trait/rune/sigil for longer fears but there are MUCH better choices that are almost necessary to even bringing a Necro in the first place.

All in all I think some tweaks to the Necro are needed and will hopefully come in time. Right now I’m fairly happy with the changes they made today, but I wish there were either more changes or they would have these updates more often.

You really should NOT take duration runes. You already have great base condition duration + traits, condition dmg would go way further.

I only consider duration runes on people with super short duration conditions where it’s actually a big enough boost.

The duration allows for some really good team fights, my spec is based almost entirely for tournys and I have changed after discovering that certain talents were helping, I have lowered my crit to 45% and gone for more condition damage but kept bleed duration, went for spectral armor at 50% health, trying it out, feels kind of weird still but working well and much more managable in hot joins ive noticed and still destroys in tournys. My team usually runs condition theif, bunker elementalist, bunker engineer, myself (cond necro) and finally we either have a condition mesmer or ranger. My spec works incredible for this because I hop between two points and always go mid first and this is where the bleed duration and signet of undeath help because we can get bleeds up to 25 stacks fast because of the spec and I epidemic and they last for a long time on the entire team and it usually wins us the fight.

Konvoy I completely agree with you we can get stuck, I love experimenting with weird trait builds and stuff and seeing how it goes but for the moment we are stuck a bit; hopefully they will take some of the tweaks to heart. The two I really hope to see be tweaked are speed of conditions being put on and fear duration.

The greatest cons of any condition build currently in my opinion are the bugs afflicting it… most notably (again in my opinion), the use of Plague Signet (a fantastic and wonderful skill both for support utility and, combined with Epidemic, putting maximum conditions on your foes… if it would… you know… actually work right).

Plague Signet is amazing and I would use it except for 2 things, first off my team has a lot of condition removing attributes to it already, we needed a quick revive that would put the other team off balance and secondly; I really suck at realizing how many conditions I have on me at times and I have tried it and it usually just ends up killing me.

The skill itself is currently bugged. I still use it for condition stacking, but infuriates me that it doesn’t do what it is supposed to do.