Guild Wars 2

I spend 80% of my play time in WvW as part of an organized guild. We spend our time running and gunning for secondary objectives off the main effort – supply camps, lightly defended towers, npc flips, supply interdiction, that sort of thing.

I don’t want to drop the class, but clearly we have both bugs and class concept issues that have not been addressed. Hopefully, we will get some sort of attention soon. Here is what I have have been running lately -

http://gw2skills.net/editor/en/?fQQQNAW7YjQah7haaa87JAJFPf90DyHX8IFFPMA;TMALQGXs9A

I have accepted that my support job is to provide healing wells, suppress keep walls with lots of red circles, chill groups of people so we can catch them, and blind groups of people to minimize their output during the opening moments of an engagement. Not really the master of death thing, but it has its moments.

Well are pretty much the only way I can make these contributions work, so the 20 in Curses for Focused Rituals is required. Further Ritual Mastery in Blood Magic makes the well cool downs shorter by 20%

For healing, I do not gear + healing, but I have the bonus from 30 in Blood Magic. The Ritual of Life(well of blood on revive) is surprisingly useful in WvW when it fires

For wall suppression, the increased staff marks (the ones that work), and the well of corruption help keep people back. Its odd how people seem to avoid red AE marks, even though many of them have little affect.

Chill is covered by staff Chillblains, though its cool down is still noticeably long, even with Staff Mastery for 20% cooldown reduction. Dagger 4 is working with Chilling Darkness(chill 1s on blind), and works well to snare close runners. Plague #2 is not chilling via Chilling Darkness. I tried rune of Grenth, but didn’t even see consistent chill results with the healing well, so dropped it.

Blind is covered by Well of Darkness and Plague form. This is pretty much the only thing that makes this play style remotely interesting. People routinely fail to realize they are being chain blinded, or standing in a blind well. They waste so many abilities on our melee cluster in the opening engagement, and then its too late to get away.

I find my ability to survive is quite high with 20 in Death Magic, and 30 in Blood Magic, so I often run forward with the melee to try to attract attention from others who are actually killing the enemy. The wells heal me a bit through Vampiric Rituals. I wonder if they would help more if I took Bloodthirst(50% more effective siphon), but I dont feel I can drop my other Blood Magic traits for that. Death Shroud has zero interaction with my build. Its for a short feat, and is just another suit of armor if I am under pressure. I cannot contribute to my team in any way in Death Shroud, so I try to stay out of it.

Plague ball is better than Lich tactically for blind suppression, but Lich causes a lot of zerg panic. I guess people just don’t understand that staff / scepter necros cannot really hurt you in lich form, so they run. As we fight a lot of 10 on 10, or 10 on 20, or sometimes 10 on 30 piecemeal, getting the enemy to route early helps, so I run lich quite a bit.

Gear is a bit of a mess. Power wont help my auto attacks significantly, precision is meh, because crit doesn’t help me, so I mostly focus on condition damage for what that is worth. I find myself attaching odd sigils to freeze or bleed people.

I am not in any way saying that this is a great build, but this is how I contribute to our WvW efforts. I have turned the tide of many a small engagement with timely wells or elite play, but I DO NOT THINK THIS IS ALL THIS CLASS SHOULD BE CAPABLE OF – had to bold that to make sure people didn’t think I was happy with this build or play style. I hope they do something that can allow me to run a more offensive build and do the master of death thing. Until then, this is my best marginalized effort.

Any comments or feedback one what I am doing, or what others are trying in WvW would be appreciated.

I was actually thinking of doing something similiar for WvW, as you say though, not really the master of death feel…

Otherwise looks like a really solid build.

As a note, if you take the Sigil of Superior Earth, the one that causes bleeds on crits, precision becomes good; especially paired with the first minor trait in the curses tree.

I like what you’re doing. I’ve been meaning to get around to a similar playstyle / build, but… honestly, builds like that are bad to me, because you provide so much support and utility that you essentially buff your allies and debuff your enemies but don’t do much in the way of ending your enemies. Therefore you rely heavily on your teammates, and that’s something that requires them to be competent, and that just never works well for me.

I’m glad its working for you. I too hope they widen the possibility horizon for our class. Necros are awesome!

I’ve been running power/+healing Well support builds in PvE dungeons that are very similar to your WvW build. I’ve had so much success in groups that I’ve started running it in solo PvE as well. It works great, and I’ve even had group members thank me for joining the group.