Guild Wars 2

Hi,

I just rolled a Necro the other day and am really enjoying the class, I’m still very low level, but it’s quickly become my favorite alt. I’ve been studying skills and traits and I have some questions about how some of these function, any advice from all you more experienced necros would be appreciated.

1. Furious Demise
Can I pop DS and leave immediately for 5 seconds of Fury, or do I have to remain in DS to maintain the boon?

2. Ritual of Protection
Do the protections stack duration if I drop multiple wells in sequence? This is important to me as I may focus on wells at lower levels.

3. Bloodthirst
Does this affect downed skill 1 and DS skill 4?
The wiki states that this trait is bugged and does not currently affect Vampiric Rituals and Vampiric Master. Is that still the case?

4. Transfusion
Am I reading this right, Life transfer will heal all nearby foes for 2628 per target at level 80?

5. Quickening Thirst
I assume this doesn’t stack with other speed buffs (Swiftness or Signet of Locust) ?
According to the wiki, there is a bug preventing offhand dagger from granting +10% movement speed, is that still occuring?

6. Speed of Shadows
I assume this also doesn’t stack with other speed buffs?

7. Master of Terror
More of a generic question on Fear here. I assume fear functions like other conditions, ‘ticking’ once per second and rounding down to a whole number of seconds? So in other words, 1.9s of Fear will cause your opponent to flee for 1 full second?

8. Foot in the Grave
Same doubt as with Furious Demise, do I have to remain in Death Shrowd to maintain the 3 seconds of stability?

9. Piercing
Do any weapon skills or downed skills pierce by default?

10. Marks
How long do these last without being triggered? Can I roam as far away from them as I like?

11. Unholy Feast (Axe 1.3)
Am I right that you can basically keep up perma-retaliation with the axe, in high density mob zones? If you run a power build this is pretty impressive, retaliation hits hard as it’s unaffected by armor. This point alone might lead me to trade out scepter for axe.

12. Dagger
On paper this weapon seems deadly, if you can pull off melee. Traited life siphoning and 3 seconds of immobilization (great for PvP and in conjunction with wells) in your main hand, 6 seconds of blind and chill (if you trait Chilling Darkness) and condition transfer in your off hand, plus a fairly large area of weakness and bleeding. Is it as good as it sounds, or am I missing something?

13. Epidemic
What is the duration of the conditions transferred, is it the original duration of the condition inflicted, or the remainder of the condition duration still up on the target?

14. Plague signet
Does it instantly transfer any condition an ally receives to me?
How does this work in PvE, does it pick up conditions from party members only?
Can I transfer immobilize and stun?

15. Signet of the Locust
According to the wiki, the active effect heals for 778. Is that per foe, in a 1200 radius?

16. Signet of Undeath
Does this revive downed players instantly?

EDIT: Forgot an important one…

17. Close to Death
Does this affect condition damage as well as direct damage? Will my bleeds and poison be doing 120% damage to anyone under 50% health?

I’ll just answer what I know, and leave the rest for others.

1. Anything gained by going into DS will remain even if you leave it, so yes, you keep the boon.

3. Yes it affects downed 1, not sure about DS 4

7. Yes for damage, but the CC portion will last through 1.9 seconds

8. No

9. Staff auto attacks do

10. A pretty dang long time. Enough so that you can place all your marks and they will all be off CD long before the old ones fade. I think it was a minute to disappear on their own. I have never tested distance

11. I guess theoretically you could, I’d only switch axe for scepter if you are going power build, scepter is much better if you do condition damage.

12. Main hand dagger is incredible for damage and LF gain in a power build. Off hand is generally considered a condition build offhand, you are probably better off using Dagger/Focus in a power build, and Scepter/Dagger in a condition, as they synergize better.

15. That is per person it affects, yes.

16. Yes. It is currently bugged when people are very low on HP and affected by poison though.

17. To my knowledge, yes.

Follow up to Bhawb’s post.

2. Yes, they stack in duration. It’s granted to your allies in the well also.

4. Transfusion heals allies, not foes. You are damaging and healing in an AoE at the same time. It is per target, but the healing value isn’t the same as the damage value.

5. Correct, no speed buffs stack, it will always use your highest speed buff. This is true for every class. To my knowledge there’s no bug with Quickening Thirst.

6. See #5.

7. The short answer is what Bhawb said, though it’s not quite accurate in terms of the damage. For the long answer, see this post: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/Epic-conditionmancer-TPvP-with-commentary/first#post1402573

13. It is the remainder of the conditions’ duration.

14. I believe it transfers 1 condition per ally in range every 3 seconds. It will work on non-party members. Daze and Stun are not considered conditions so no, you can’t transfer them.

17. Close to Death affects your direct damage only.

Just some quick tests since I wanted to see some tihngs I didn’t know:

17. He was right, I was wrong. Easy enough to test (also, time to change my build).

3. It appears to to affect damage slightly, according to my tests it raised the damage from ~91 per tick to ~97 per tick, with about 60 less damage at the end.

And quickening thirst is not bugged. Just tested it using completely sound scientific methods (running between two trees and counting the seconds, once with, once without, dagger). It seems to work.

Bhawb, stop running conditons with minions and you wouldn’t have made the mistake :P. I never run close to death, and am one of the few that don’t really enjoy it. I am sure it’s pretty awesome with dagger bunker builds though :P.

:P I wasn’t running conditions with minions, it was a condition build I recently made. I wanted a high AoE condition damage build using scepter/dagger plus crits to quickly apply lots of high damage conditions then epidemic them to larger groups. Thinking that 20% extra damage to this build sounded perfect I grabbed it (strangely enough I still got incredibly good results from this as long as I remembered I wasn’t a bunker anymore). But since it doesn’t work, that’s 30 traits that are very useful into some life siphoning and life force generating.

I’ve been trying to make non-minion builds (although as I say that I’m working on my minion build) to have some kind of ability to vary my setup beyond MM and easy-mode wells/staff in PvE.

Bhawb.7408:

:P I wasn’t running conditions with minions, it was a condition build I recently made. I wanted a high AoE condition damage build using scepter/dagger plus crits to quickly apply lots of high damage conditions then epidemic them to larger groups. Thinking that 20% extra damage to this build sounded perfect I grabbed it (strangely enough I still got incredibly good results from this as long as I remembered I wasn’t a bunker anymore). But since it doesn’t work, that’s 30 traits that are very useful into some life siphoning and life force generating.

I’ve been trying to make non-minion builds (although as I say that I’m working on my minion build) to have some kind of ability to vary my setup beyond MM and easy-mode wells/staff in PvE.

Have you ever tried a full on DS centric build? With a mixture or signet/spectral/wells? I actually had a build if I can look it up where I was in DS every 10 seconds with Life blast being ridiculously awesome. I was stacking might like it was going out of style. 18-25 with stacks of vulnerability it was hilariously fun, but I never used my utilities except to build more LF so it was kind of boring after awhile. Let me see if I can find it.

Tried? Yes. Successful? No. I just never gave myself time to work out a proper build, and I’m still working on not sucking at power builds.

Bas.7406:

Bhawb.7408:

:P I wasn’t running conditions with minions, it was a condition build I recently made. I wanted a high AoE condition damage build using scepter/dagger plus crits to quickly apply lots of high damage conditions then epidemic them to larger groups. Thinking that 20% extra damage to this build sounded perfect I grabbed it (strangely enough I still got incredibly good results from this as long as I remembered I wasn’t a bunker anymore). But since it doesn’t work, that’s 30 traits that are very useful into some life siphoning and life force generating.

I’ve been trying to make non-minion builds (although as I say that I’m working on my minion build) to have some kind of ability to vary my setup beyond MM and easy-mode wells/staff in PvE.

Have you ever tried a full on DS centric build? With a mixture or signet/spectral/wells? I actually had a build if I can look it up where I was in DS every 10 seconds with Life blast being ridiculously awesome. I was stacking might like it was going out of style. 18-25 with stacks of vulnerability it was hilariously fun, but I never used my utilities except to build more LF so it was kind of boring after awhile. Let me see if I can find it.

Yeah I made one long long ago, but it did get boring fast, and even though you can smack down a single target fast, it takes forever to take down groups, it is easy to tank large groups though. It’s pretty flashy if nothing else, sure looks impressive to someone watching from the outside lol.

Thanks for the helpful comments. I originally rolled a necro to spec into condition damage, but I didn’t realize quite how effective the class can be in a support role.

I’m building around wells at the moment, as it seems like grouping mobs and dropping wells is a fast way to level. Once I hit 80 I’ll likely respec to a condition damage build oriented around corruption and epidemic, mainly for dungeon runs and maybe a bit of WvW. I haven’t really thought about sPvP yet, I’m just concentrating on leveling as quickly as possible at the moment.

My PvE build is completely around supporting staff/condition damage with scepter/huge damage spikes with wells. You do pretty high damage if you throw down wells/staff marks all at once (don’t fear), and I’ve often found that if I throw down all my wells/marks on top of a group of enemies, and run in, use DS 4 then drop fear mark and back out, I’ve usually killed the entire wave of mobs (or pretty close), and then they are easy enough to finish off, and I’ve taken no real damage since I was in DS the whole time. It also helps out your team because a wells build with vampiric wells makes you incredibly tanky and you WILL always have aggro, and this means your team can run as high on damage as they want since you can soak up all the aggro right at the start then run around kiting them until they die. Its really hard at first, but once you get used to it even really difficult dungeons ain’t got nothin’ on you.

Bhawb.7408:

My PvE build is completely around supporting staff/condition damage with scepter/huge damage spikes with wells. You do pretty high damage if you throw down wells/staff marks all at once (don’t fear), and I’ve often found that if I throw down all my wells/marks on top of a group of enemies, and run in, use DS 4 then drop fear mark and back out, I’ve usually killed the entire wave of mobs (or pretty close), and then they are easy enough to finish off, and I’ve taken no real damage since I was in DS the whole time. It also helps out your team because a wells build with vampiric wells makes you incredibly tanky and you WILL always have aggro, and this means your team can run as high on damage as they want since you can soak up all the aggro right at the start then run around kiting them until they die. Its really hard at first, but once you get used to it even really difficult dungeons ain’t got nothin’ on you.

You are correct in just about everything except you are running conditions with wells which is kind of counter since in PVE boons are rare. Running wells with dagger/wh in P/V/T gear plus siphon health on wells = awesome tankage. You could roll up some major damage without even breaking a sweat.

I am thinking of carrying some pvt gear and trying to “tank” for my guild so our guardian can play his dps alts.

Couple of questions on tanking as a necro.

Three Wells plus ?? and Lich form combined.

Do you run Life Transfer heals or siphoning is 50 percent more effective?
Do you grab points in the minion tree or do you snag better DS or run up the power tree?
Staff plus Dagger WH would be some stunning aoe damage to wrap up your condition, but then you have to trait for Marks plus trait for wells, and you would lose the extended ds.

Do you run Life Transfer heals or siphoning is 50 percent more effective?

If you’re leaning towards a more group support role, then Transfusion over Bloodthirst. But you did mention being the tank, which then suggests that you’ll be more concerned with personal well being, therefore Bloodthirst is a better option – assuming you pick up Vampiric Rituals.

Do you grab points in the minion tree or do you snag better DS or run up the power tree?

Death Magic opens up two of the better Tier 1 traits, i.e. Ritual of Protection and Greater Mark. These two are worth 20 points into Death Magic and suffering with Reanimator.

Staff plus Dagger WH would be some stunning aoe damage to wrap up your condition, but then you have to trait for Marks plus trait for wells, and you would lose the extended ds.

For tanky AOE, go for Axe Focus instead of Dagger Warhorn. Axe generates Life Force much faster, allowing you to stay in Death Shroud longer and make use of Unyielding Blast for AoE damage. Furthermore, you have easy access to long-duration Retaliation for some added damage.

Bas.7406:

You are correct in just about everything except you are running conditions with wells which is kind of counter since in PVE boons are rare.

The wells are using the trait that applies them from range, and using P/Cond/Vit gear (atm I actually use full P/Cond/MF gear, and even with no defensive stats I do fine). Well of Suffering applies vulnerability, Well of Blindness (or w/e its called, the one that blinds) applies blind/chill, Well of Blood gives AoE team heals, and then I usually run BiP. All of my wells will siphon HP on top of the damage/utility they already bring, and as I have the same power as a P/V/T build I do fairly high damage with WoS and either Lich form (for vulnerability and damage in single target boss fights) or Plague (for AoE blind/chill/bleeds). I have never found the need for defensive stats in dungeons as a necro, I almost never get downed unless I have full boss aggro for long periods of time.

Its a support/condition build, although I double as a tank in most PvE situations because of my high control and life stealing.

So can anyone confirm whether Bloodthirst affects downed skill 1 and DS4?

Daemon.4295:

So can anyone confirm whether Bloodthirst affects downed skill 1 and DS4?

Downed skill 1 yes. Death Shroud 4 no.