Guild Wars 2

Hey guys. I made a necro recently out of curiosity on Rym’s blood magic support build. The class seems cool but I feel really ineffective.

Its not the build or entirely my lack of skill, I just don’t see what exactly I’m doing that another class couldn’t do better? With the sole exception of healing/rezzing I feel rather.. Redundant.. I just can’t figure out anything Necro excels at that another class couldn’t do?

So I ask all of you.. When you play Necro in PvP what do you contribute to your team beyond damage? What role do you play?

I play a very bunkery build that requires 3 people to get me off a point. I usually win 1v2 when people are running damage builds. Can another class do it better? Probably, but can they do it and look as good as me? Nah

Hello Chaos Archangel! Necromancers fill a niche roll and has a ton of builds.
In order to understand them we need to go through some of the builds.

But first the basics. A necromancer has a naturally high healthpool with deathshroud, able to get twice the hp pool. They are able to do an aoe cripple and apply weakness in deathshroud aswell as putting up some bleed conditions.
Most necromancer specs use staff as one part of the weaponspecc which gives slow, condi, fear(CC) and condi transfer.

Condition necromancers are able to transfer conditions from allies onto themselves and give them to the enemy, or put on heavy condi pressure on the enemy team.
There are several ways to make a condi necro, but they put alot of pressure and can very strongly fight mesmers, engineers, warriors, guardians (even with condi cleanse utility). Only profession you usually have trouble with is very sneaky thieves and elementalists.

Power necro: Using Wells. Able to drop wells which heals you, do damage on each pulse, able to rip boons from the enemy and cleave down the team.

Minionmaster necromancer: Able to hold and defend a single point against 1 or 2 professions with little ease, giving plenty survival and damage.

Bunker necromancer: Explained by Zalavaaris.

This is very general but you get the idea.

IDK in PvE or WvW 2 much. Majority of my exp comes from PvP and I can tell you in PvP necros excel at condi transfer, boon rip, soft CC and face tanking. Necro in a nutshell.

Okay I’ll be honest with you Chaos. Blood Magic support is mainly for super tanky NEcro builds (like the bunker builds described above) or for PvE, in which things like vampiric help maintain scholar bonuses.

Now the role of a necromancer is not at all support in the traditional sense, which is probably what you wanted it to be. Instead you become a bastion of anti-support for the enemy team. To do this, take Curses, take weakening shroud and path of corruption, and use dark path as much as possible, its porbably our best skill. The weakness uptime is HUGE, since applying it in a team fight makes zerker specs hit like a wet noodle for a while, making it feel like a debuff version of applying protection to ourselves. Where eles, guards, and the type of mesmer builds you run spam out boons to everyone else, necros take those boons away, as though the Santa Claus that everyone wanted turned out to be Krampus in disguise.

Going into Spite and taking signets completes that picture of boon corruption. Soul Reaping is usually the next logical choice for soul marks, vital persistence, and the the stunbreak trait or death perception.

So yeah, I mainly play cele signets, its a really good build right now. The amount of debilitating conditions you apply is insane, and being able to transfer back the condis of others is an immensely powerful niche that makes necromancer one of the best 1v1 classes in the game.

When I have a decent amount of life force, I feel comfortable in 1v1ing nearly anything. Mantra mesmer was the primary counter in the past (since it was god mode), but since the nerf, they’re much more manageable. One of the biggest niche for necros is being able to reliably kill eles, another godmode class that excels 1v1 and in teamfights. Dark Path corrupts 2 boons and applies 5 seconds of chill. Chills make eles die incredibly fast by kittening up their water/earth attunement recharge, and the chill of death proc , and burning transfers makes the counter pressure even stronger.

So yeah I encourage you to stick with necro at least as an alt, and try to think of it as the ultimate debuffer instead of the ultimate supportbot.

So many mesmers in the necro forum. Is it me or the mesmer and necro community have a large overlap?
Anyway, as a main mesmer and noob necro, I would say that boon corruption is what I like the most with necro. Sure mesmers can remove boons fairly well, but corrupting is a obviously better. Then the survivability while dealing “ok” damage with the cele signet build is very nice. I also love plague form in a team fight or how to incapacitate the whole enemy team with blinds and weakness while your own team kill them.

Transfusion
/15 rezzmancer

Oh and i play a weird build with Grove runes(+25% protection uptime) and Spectral Wall for good Protection on myself and teammates along with the fear which could be vital in either interrupting a stomp or giving yourself some breathing space

primarily
Boon corruption

Secondarily
Keeping 1, 2 or sometimes 3 enemy players off point for as long as possible with a bunker build. You can take a lot of punishment and deal out decent damage, as well as still having some condi transfer. Just gotta find your comfort zone.

Mine, for instance, is what I said above in PvP, and in PvE (dungeons and fractals) I’m great at holding aggro and living through big fights in the middle of enemies.

-Transfusion (yep not stomping my buddy today thief!)
-Boon corruption (stability in the way? Not a problem!)
-Bunkermancer (highly underrated when you can just steal health for days until someone comes to help. In your face rampage warrior.)
-Dem conditions. Yeah, we don’t have the highest condition damage in the game, but those classes don’t have epidemic.
-Condition eating/transfer. Best self condi clearing class in the game. It’s always nice to have the conditions thrown right back in their faces. Plus I don’t think the other classes can physically “EAT” their own conditions. Yum.

Silverkey.2078:

So many mesmers in the necro forum. Is it me or the mesmer and necro community have a large overlap?

Robert Gee has united us!

I’m actually surprised we don’t see more necro bunker in high tier PvP. They have high sustain : no/few damage negation/mitigation but high passive sustain and good healing (including LF generation which is a form of healing). And they have many ways to negate stomping (corrupting stability, staff 5, warhorn 4, …) + blood magic is amazing for rezzing.

The best answer is debuffs.

Cele signets is probably the strongest buid, which corrupts boons into debuffs, sends debuffs back to the enemy, and naturally provides a lot of close range debuffs, namely weakness and cripple and a handful of bleeds. All the while they can still take a punch, deliver cc, deal good damage and provide some resemblance of support.

Silverkey.2078:

I’m actually surprised we don’t see more necro bunker in high tier PvP. They have high sustain : no/few damage negation/mitigation but high passive sustain and good healing (including LF generation which is a form of healing). And they have many ways to negate stomping (corrupting stability, staff 5, warhorn 4, …) + blood magic is amazing for rezzing.

Thats simply because the lack of blocks/invluns make even the bunkeriest of necros fall to coordinated burst. Against groups that can’t coordinate burst it is effective in a purely pointholding role.

The only true effective bunkers in the game are arguably support guard and celestial staff ele. They do more than just hold a point though. Guardians cleanse conditions on allies and give tons of boons, including stability and quickness to allies through shouts, and they make a knockback bubble when they go to rez. Staff eles have powerful AoE CC and better raw AoE healing, but their boon support isn’t as strong overall. Tempest D/Wh will probably merge the D/D and staff bunker playstyle too, making it a good semi-pointholder and great for support, but support guard will still outdo it because of “Feel my Wrath” having such a low cooldown for the utility it offers.

Chaos Archangel.5071:

Hey guys. I made a necro recently out of curiosity on Rym’s blood magic support build. The class seems cool but I feel really ineffective.

Its not the build or entirely my lack of skill, I just don’t see what exactly I’m doing that another class couldn’t do better? With the sole exception of healing/rezzing I feel rather.. Redundant.. I just can’t figure out anything Necro excels at that another class couldn’t do?

So I ask all of you.. When you play Necro in PvP what do you contribute to your team beyond damage? What role do you play?

Good condi application, good boon control, good condi control, good lockdown capability, downed cleave, counter to Rampage without the need for Moa, counter to Eles, counter to all kinds of Guardians, counter to engies, Weakness spam, chill spam. Yea that’s about it I think.

Dirame.8521:

counter to Rampage

how exactly do you do that?

Nepu.2918:

Dirame.8521:

counter to Rampage

how exactly do you do that?

Corrupt Boon, DS 3, Plague Signet (with SoS trait of course), Staff 5. They’ll step out of their Rampage right after the 3rd fear.

Dirame.8521:

Nepu.2918:

Dirame.8521:

counter to Rampage

how exactly do you do that?

Corrupt Boon, DS 3, Plague Signet (with SoS trait of course), Staff 5. They’ll step out of their Rampage right after the 3rd fear.

Or just drop well of darkness

CodeHavoc.7926:

Dirame.8521:

Nepu.2918:

Dirame.8521:

counter to Rampage

how exactly do you do that?

Corrupt Boon, DS 3, Plague Signet (with SoS trait of course), Staff 5. They’ll step out of their Rampage right after the 3rd fear.

Or just drop well of darkness

Or Plague Form.

bhagwad.4281:

CodeHavoc.7926:

Dirame.8521:

Nepu.2918:

Dirame.8521:

counter to Rampage

how exactly do you do that?

Corrupt Boon, DS 3, Plague Signet (with SoS trait of course), Staff 5. They’ll step out of their Rampage right after the 3rd fear.

Or just drop well of darkness

Or Plague Form.

Or charge them head on*

*caution: do not charge rampage warriors head on as this is the cause of death of 99% or all those who fight warriors with rampage

What we are supposed to offer that other classes dont is AoE denial and debuffing. Setting up targets for team to execute, making the other team ineffective.
Bleeds, chill, poison, weakness in combination with soft CC and fears is our style. Which is slowly being stolen by rangers i just realized

Pelopidas.2140:

What we are supposed to offer that other classes dont is AoE denial and debuffing. Setting up targets for team to execute, making the other team ineffective.
Bleeds, chill, poison, weakness in combination with soft CC and fears is our style. Which is slowly being stolen by rangers i just realized

They don’t do weakness or AoE bleeds that well. Only downed cleave.

Dirame.8521:

Nepu.2918:

Dirame.8521:

counter to Rampage

how exactly do you do that?

Corrupt Boon, DS 3, Plague Signet (with SoS trait of course), Staff 5. They’ll step out of their Rampage right after the 3rd fear.

It’s quite common for warriors to activate Berserker Stance before they go into Rampage, so in that case all of your corruptions don’t do anything.

Also, even if they aren’t immune to conditions, you still have to actually land Corrupt Boon. Not only is this hard enough on its own but sometimes you have no chance of casting it at all because 0.5 sec cast time is simply too long if the warrior also has quickness. Plus, there are 3 low cd stuns on Rampage, corrupting stability with a 40 sec cd skill isn’t really a good trade-off, especially when those stacks of stability keep refreshing every 3 sec.

@Plague: this is not a counter to Rampage. All you’re doing here is sacrifice your own elite so you die less quickly.

The only thing that can be done against Rampage is run away (which necros can’t do) or kill it with focus fire (which usually takes at least 3 people).

flow.6043:

Dirame.8521:

Nepu.2918:

Dirame.8521:

counter to Rampage

how exactly do you do that?

Corrupt Boon, DS 3, Plague Signet (with SoS trait of course), Staff 5. They’ll step out of their Rampage right after the 3rd fear.

It’s quite common for warriors to activate Berserker Stance before they go into Rampage, so in that case all of your corruptions don’t do anything.

Also, even if they aren’t immune to conditions, you still have to actually land Corrupt Boon. Not only is this hard enough on its own but sometimes you have no chance of casting it at all because 0.5 sec cast time is simply too long if the warrior also has quickness. Plus, there are 3 low cd stuns on Rampage, corrupting stability with a 40 sec cd skill isn’t really a good trade-off, especially when those stacks of stability keep refreshing every 3 sec.

@Plague: this is not a counter to Rampage. All you’re doing here is sacrifice your own elite so you die less quickly.

The only thing that can be done against Rampage is run away (which necros can’t do) or kill it with focus fire (which usually takes at least 3 people).

With plague, I won’t die “less quickly”. I won’t die at all. Even if the warr has berserker’s stance, I have additional 2788 toughness and 1852 vitality. When berserker’s runs out, the warrior is blinded every second. And is literally impossible for a rampager to kill you when in plague if Berserker’s is not on. Perma blind + weakness.

flow.6043:

Dirame.8521:

Nepu.2918:

Dirame.8521:

counter to Rampage

how exactly do you do that?

Corrupt Boon, DS 3, Plague Signet (with SoS trait of course), Staff 5. They’ll step out of their Rampage right after the 3rd fear.

It’s quite common for warriors to activate Berserker Stance before they go into Rampage, so in that case all of your corruptions don’t do anything.

Also, even if they aren’t immune to conditions, you still have to actually land Corrupt Boon. Not only is this hard enough on its own but sometimes you have no chance of casting it at all because 0.5 sec cast time is simply too long if the warrior also has quickness. Plus, there are 3 low cd stuns on Rampage, corrupting stability with a 40 sec cd skill isn’t really a good trade-off, especially when those stacks of stability keep refreshing every 3 sec.

@Plague: this is not a counter to Rampage. All you’re doing here is sacrifice your own elite so you die less quickly.

The only thing that can be done against Rampage is run away (which necros can’t do) or kill it with focus fire (which usually takes at least 3 people).

I guess you haven’t tried it. The very fact that the stab refreshes is actually their greatest weakness because it’s always at the top of the chain when you want to corrupt it. You can corrupt it with Plague Signet then chain that into Warhorn Daze, dodge the next two stun attacks and use deathshroud to tank them till berserker stance wears off, then come out of DS and corrupt and fear them, chain that with weakness combo from Chillblains and Putrid Mark.
It’s not like Berzerker stance lasts as long as the Ramapage.

Chaos I must admit it’s awkward seeing you on the ele and necro forums lol.

I run Nec in pvp for s very long time and recently I’ve focused mainly on minion master. What makes necro unique in pvp is that as bunkers we can still murder people very similar to eles. There is no hard counter for us except maybe pure ranged mesmer or pure range ranger, but both need to be zerk to apply damage to us and necro demolishes zerkers. Unlike other bunkers, we more than just hold points we actually threaten to kill our attackers. Talking strictly as a minion mancer, losing a 1v1 on a point is rare. It takes 2 really good players to down me and if one is zerk I’ll take it down with me. Minion also wrecks thieves which is a big deal. Guardians, especially meditation burning guards, will burn themselves to death fighting you. While I’ve always laughed when the devs said necros are the attrition class, they truly are now, especially with blood magic. While I played terror mancer for a long time, I felt the lack of stability a lot while using it. Using MM with good movement and good mark placement you mitigate so much cc

Well maybe I’m playing it bad, but CC-heavy classes hard-counter me (I don’t have foot in the grave and in any case, so little stability). So ranger, often warrior, hammer-guardian are a bit more difficult for me.

Cc crushed me on terror mancer l. On minion it bothers me much less. I’d prefer to have more stability but that’s not gonna happen. My buddy has been running marauder mm with spectral armor instead of flesh when and loves it for taking points.

Chaos Archangel.5071:

Hey guys. I made a necro recently out of curiosity on Rym’s blood magic support build. The class seems cool but I feel really ineffective.

Its not the build or entirely my lack of skill, I just don’t see what exactly I’m doing that another class couldn’t do better? With the sole exception of healing/rezzing I feel rather.. Redundant.. I just can’t figure out anything Necro excels at that another class couldn’t do?

So I ask all of you.. When you play Necro in PvP what do you contribute to your team beyond damage? What role do you play?

Well, my Blood & Curses build indeed may need some better video explanation. And I’ll do it, eventually.

For now, you could try less “alien” variation which would be Condition Settler’s Necro like this one: http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-340_;1kHFH0F4JIkJ0;9;479A;0136238246;48-m6V;1jwmAjwmA9Y .

Offers a little bit less support, but has more damage.

Firstly, lots of good info here, so thanks guys!

@Rym: I’ll definitely try it out man, much appreciated. I like the concept of support for any class, and preserving the dead/dying is an awesome concept IMO.

@Azure: I used to lurk these forums for a while, because I always found Necro an interesting class but I couldn’t ever find anything that would inspire me to play one. With the coming of reaper, I really wanted to get used to the mechanics of the class so that maybe I could finaalllyyy build something I enjoy. Necromancer didn’t appeal to me because of no actual uh.. in-game death manipulation but Reaper’s concept really grabbed me.

Unfortunately I was kind of rejected from the Necro guild for not maining Necro, and then to see so many necro mains advise against the class that the other forums have a running joke that “You can tell a necro main by how unhappy he is with his class.”

Misguided.5139:

AlphatheWhite.9351:

Because of course it would be unusual for any particular poster in the mesmer forum to main a mesmer. The only sure way to tell, in fact, is if you find them defending the class!

Well, it could be worse. If you spend any time in the Necromancer forums, you will likely conclude the only way to identify a necro main is they complain about the class :P

Ah poor necros. It’s sad because it’s true.

so that made me shelf my Necro until the recent specialization patch made Blood Magic really awesome. But I’ve been struggling ever since and have very few Necros to reference to since its rare to find people playing any sort of support-focus build. x.x

So thanks again to everyone in this thread, given me a lot to think about and more inspiration to keep pushing forward with the class!

Cheesing the cheese builds. That’s our purpose.

what we bring is damage and a fun game of pinball for people with cc

Chaos Archangel.5071:

Firstly, lots of good info here, so thanks guys!

@Rym: I’ll definitely try it out man, much appreciated. I like the concept of support for any class, and preserving the dead/dying is an awesome concept IMO.

@Azure: I used to lurk these forums for a while, because I always found Necro an interesting class but I couldn’t ever find anything that would inspire me to play one. With the coming of reaper, I really wanted to get used to the mechanics of the class so that maybe I could finaalllyyy build something I enjoy. Necromancer didn’t appeal to me because of no actual uh.. in-game death manipulation but Reaper’s concept really grabbed me.

Unfortunately I was kind of rejected from the Necro guild for not maining Necro, and then to see so many necro mains advise against the class that the other forums have a running joke that “You can tell a necro main by how unhappy he is with his class.”

Misguided.5139:

AlphatheWhite.9351:

Because of course it would be unusual for any particular poster in the mesmer forum to main a mesmer. The only sure way to tell, in fact, is if you find them defending the class!

Well, it could be worse. If you spend any time in the Necromancer forums, you will likely conclude the only way to identify a necro main is they complain about the class :P

Ah poor necros. It’s sad because it’s true.

so that made me shelf my Necro until the recent specialization patch made Blood Magic really awesome. But I’ve been struggling ever since and have very few Necros to reference to since its rare to find people playing any sort of support-focus build. x.x

So thanks again to everyone in this thread, given me a lot to think about and more inspiration to keep pushing forward with the class!

You wouldn’t be the only Mes main I know who tries Necro more and more recently. I know Warlord does the same, stalking my builds :P.