Guild Wars 2

So i love the idea of corruption skills and condition transfers, but I noticed I died A LOT as a condition necromancer even though all my gears were appropriate level and virtually every weapon and gear I use stacks condition, I even have condition rings and 2 condition accessories. I fight in appropriate areas and don’t mob intentionally. And all my traits are in spite. I used a scepter and dagger with CPC and Epidemic.
After dying multiple times as a condition necromancer I switch to pretty basic melee necromancer, would lead with a staff casting every mark until they closed the distance, then switch to dagger warhorn and suddenly I stopped dying all the time, and this is with all the condition stacked. I switch to the lowest tier minions and I no longer struggle in combat.
I was told condition necromancers are suppose to be very good, and after stacking virtually all possible condition gears I died constantly and considered switching classes. I love the concept of condition necromancers and really wanted to be a viable one, but after dying repeatedly I couldn’t maintain interest. I went from about 11-14 in the ashland region dying repeatedly and after switching to dagger+warhorn i gained considerable survivability in really bad situations.
What did I do wrong?

Well at low lvls condition sucks better go with power build and some minions to lvl up.

I went with D/D and staff when lvling up. blood is power and epidemic are great by the way. I hsd no problems lvling with this as I had a mix of condi and power. This is not a great lvl 80 set up but its good fun to lvl.

check out the necro tutorials at the top of necro forums for some good tips on condi set ups and play style

Condi necros are horrible at low level and very gear dependent. I use my condi necro for PvP/WvW and dungeons. The main problem is that condi necros have only DOTs, no burst whatsoever so fights are always long. Aim for rabid gear so you can have both condi and toughness. You have to keep your enemies at a distance with the condi necro: use the staff for chill and fear, and scepter 2 for cripple. You can also use the focus for the long 6s chill. If they still get to you use the fear from DS to make them go away. Dodge a lot as well. For the elite use plague for more condis and a big increase to hp or flesh golem and use it to knockdown foes.

(it was a long time ago but…) I seem to recall struggling at low levels until I got my Flesh Golem who could then tank for me. Things became a lot easier after that, so it may be worth considering running with one of the melee minions until you get your elite.

Nyghtshadow.4206:

The main problem is that condi necros have only DOTs, no burst whatsoever so fights are always long.

Maybe not as quick as a thief haste backstab burst… but it’s definitely doable with some condition builds.

At low level in a necro condi build your burst (terror) just really isn’t there.

Oh I wasn’t necessarily talking about a terror build. If you can stack a lot of conditions on a target, interrupt heals and deal good direct damage at the same time then terror is just the cherry on top.
But yeah… not just impossible at lower lvls, but also if you don’t have the right gear for it.

This happened to me too, I’m currently leveling my necro and levels 1-15 human zone I breezed through dying only once because of a dumb mistake on my part.

But then I went to the Sylvari starter zone to get some SPs to unlock blood is power, and vs the nightmare court’s rapid fire bows, goodlord it was night and day. They can bring my HP down so quickly! I don’t know if necro’s have access to vigor or not but I can only dodge x2 and have to wait an eternity for it to come off of cooldown, and I have no idea how I’m supposed to mitigate the damage minus going to death shroud (which is a very short reprieve, then I die).

Does necros have a “Oh Crap!!!” button when they are very low health and need to do some crisis management? Esp at lower levels (I’m currently level 23), but also at higher levels?

EDIT: I’m attempting to run a condi/power hybrid build with epidemic blood is power and eventually spectral walk as my utility slots, sceptor/dagger and axe/focus skill set. When things aren’t swarming me or rapid firing, my necro does great. When there is a ton of damage coming my way, I just don’t know how I’m supposed to manage those. I main a thief so I’m used to having some extra dodges, and I also have a level 80 guard who gets vigor on crit, so I guess I’m not used to any other defense besides dodge

Silver.4798:

This happened to me too, I’m currently leveling my necro and levels 1-15 human zone I breezed through dying only once because of a dumb mistake on my part.

But then I went to the Sylvari starter zone to get some SPs to unlock blood is power, and vs the nightmare court’s rapid fire bows, goodlord it was night and day. They can bring my HP down so quickly! I don’t know if necro’s have access to vigor or not but I can only dodge x2 and have to wait an eternity for it to come off of cooldown, and I have no idea how I’m supposed to mitigate the damage minus going to death shroud (which is a very short reprieve, then I die).

Does necros have a “Oh Crap!!!” button when they are very low health and need to do some crisis management? Esp at lower levels (I’m currently level 23), but also at higher levels?

EDIT: I’m attempting to run a condi/power hybrid build with epidemic blood is power and eventually spectral walk as my utility slots, sceptor/dagger and axe/focus skill set. When things aren’t swarming me or rapid firing, my necro does great. When there is a ton of damage coming my way, I just don’t know how I’m supposed to manage those. I main a thief so I’m used to having some extra dodges, and I also have a level 80 guard who gets vigor on crit, so I guess I’m not used to any other defense besides dodge

- No access to vigor via traits or skills.

- Our “Oh crap” is Deathshroud, to soak up the damage. However, using it ONLY this way is a bad habit, and later on you’ll see it is more effective in situations (e.g., while your BiP is on CD, why not go into DS and siphon some enemy health!)

-At higher levels, Plague elite doubles your health and gives you some time for things to come off of CD.

-Use DS#3 and Staff#5 Fears to interrupt the enemy.

-At low-levels as a necro, I kite ALOT, and prefer Vitality gear and traits, just to give my health some more breathing room.

-Use Consume Conditions for a heal skill.

Necros become extremely tanky towards end game once you get traits and gear with 3 stats on it. The conditionmancer also needs enemies with large enough health pools to be able to stack a huge amount of conditions. I recommend leveling with minions and staff axe/whichever offhand you prefer. The axe lets you keep your distance and apply vuln that helps your minion damage, the staff can give them huge amounts of regeneration.

Minions are a good choice for utilities because they have a 100% up time and deal pretty good damage in addition to tanking for you. Wells, epidemic, signets (other than locust), and spectral skills are inferior at low levels because the fights are shorter and their cooldowns are fairly long. Also, consume conditions or summon blood fiend for your heal, I personally prefer cc because if your blood fiend dies before you can heal with it, you can get into trouble.

if u dont think condition builds are viable at low levels you aren’t playing it right.

Bull Zooker.1672:

if u dont think condition builds are viable at low levels you aren’t playing it right.

Love this kind of posts so informative and usefull for the reader.

So I tweaked some things, I went scepter/warhorn and the range of the scepter combined with two weapon skills with cripple works very well. Then the daze skill and pain inverter. Things are going much better.

I don’t mean to be snarky, but telling people “ur doing it wrong” and leaving it at that is… less than helpful, to put it bluntly.

My problem is this at the level I’m in:

Lets say I encounter 3 nightmare court targets with bows, all spaced out (I can only get one of them at a time in my AoE skills) These guys start their rapidfire and knockback annoyance, I used up both my dodges and my heal and then take some more damage. Now I’m at 10% health, and I can’t really run away (I’m well within their shooting range so running away is futile).

Now what do I do? Deathshroud? That will only soak up some damage for a few seconds before I’m back to exactly where I was before, my health still at 10% and maybe one more dodge, my heal still 10-12s or so away. Best I can do here (with my novice skills and shaky knowledge of the necro class) is to do as much damage to one target as possible, get downed, and try to take him down while being downed to get back a bit more health and my heal off of cooldown. This works maybe 10% of the time, the other 90% I just die.

More to the point, the downed necro skills… I don’t get it, is there an effective way to use them?

what I have found, now that I’m managing my condition necro much better, is you can’t be condition 100% of the time, you have to adapt to a situation you know condition wont work.
I was fighting, I think theyre called scralebacks or something, and they regenerate health, so I couldn’t even kill them with my condition build, but by switching to dagger/focus, using pain inversion, was just mowing through them. Sometimes you need to do a lot of damage fast. And arguably I shouldn’t be using the weaker build when dagger focus is so much faster, but I feel that if I stick to condition build I’ll be that much better with it when it allegedly becomes viable. I feel it’s safer but with two cripple skills I tend to retain a bit more hp.

if my phone hadny bugged out and deleted the huge post I wrote it would have been more informative. However theres a reason for tbe necromancer tutorial posts in our necro forum and im not going to repeat what someone else has already said.

my advice would be DS can be used in tricky situations to negate your incoming dmg long enough for your heal to come back of CD most of the time. if that doesn’t work for u take plague as an elite and spam blind when you get in trouble. the AoE blind is very effective.

lvling my 2nd necro I had to use plague form once to save my heini whilst fighting mobs much higher lvled than me and it worked wonderfully. u can go straight from plague form into DS too to buy yourself more time.

Don’t you have to be 30 to get plague? I’m nowhere near there

IronPlushy.4256:

So i love the idea of corruption skills and condition transfers, but I noticed I died A LOT as a condition necromancer even though all my gears were appropriate level and virtually every weapon and gear I use stacks condition, I even have condition rings and 2 condition accessories. I fight in appropriate areas and don’t mob intentionally. And all my traits are in spite. I used a scepter and dagger with CPC and Epidemic.
After dying multiple times as a condition necromancer I switch to pretty basic melee necromancer, would lead with a staff casting every mark until they closed the distance, then switch to dagger warhorn and suddenly I stopped dying all the time, and this is with all the condition stacked. I switch to the lowest tier minions and I no longer struggle in combat.
I was told condition necromancers are suppose to be very good, and after stacking virtually all possible condition gears I died constantly and considered switching classes. I love the concept of condition necromancers and really wanted to be a viable one, but after dying repeatedly I couldn’t maintain interest. I went from about 11-14 in the ashland region dying repeatedly and after switching to dagger+warhorn i gained considerable survivability in really bad situations.
What did I do wrong?

The build you are going is NOT a conditionmancer build, it’s a hybrid build.

The weapons you should use as a hybrid is 1 Scepter/Dagger 2 Axe/Focus Utility Blood is power, signet of spite and [Insert whatever you would prefer like Epidemic]
And for the gear according to your trait is Power/Precision/Condi Damage

Now to be a Conditionmancer the only thing you need at traits is 30 points at curses and the rest is up to you!
Gear Precision/toughness/condition damage
Runes
2xSuperior afflicted
2xSuperior krait
2xsuperior (dont remember)
and the 2 weapon can be a staff

The biggest issue with the dps on condionmancer was that +condition dmg gear is so scarce in comparison to +power that i had buy/craft my own in order to keep my dmg up. (lvl 40 now)
What i found out is that if you are lvl 20 for example with lvl 10 gear dont go to a 20-30 area and expect to have an easy time.

Vaffelman.6954:

The build you are going is NOT a conditionmancer build, it’s a hybrid build.

The weapons you should use as a hybrid is 1 Scepter/Dagger 2 Axe/Focus Utility Blood is power, signet of spite and [Insert whatever you would prefer like Epidemic]
And for the gear according to your trait is Power/Precision/Condi Damage

Now to be a Conditionmancer the only thing you need at traits is 30 points at curses and the rest is up to you!
Gear Precision/toughness/condition damage
Runes
2xSuperior afflicted
2xSuperior krait
2xsuperior (dont remember)
and the 2 weapon can be a staff

Superior rune of the centaur?

Just to make it clear: the hybrid build you are talking about is a conditionmancer, even by your own definition (30 in curses). Epidemic is not up to preference with this build, you have to use it. Signet of spite on the other hand…? I believe Nemesis uses well of suffering instead.

IronPlushy.4256:

what I have found, now that I’m managing my condition necro much better, is you can’t be condition 100% of the time, you have to adapt to a situation you know condition wont work.
I was fighting, I think theyre called scralebacks or something, and they regenerate health, so I couldn’t even kill them with my condition build, but by switching to dagger/focus, using pain inversion, was just mowing through them. Sometimes you need to do a lot of damage fast. And arguably I shouldn’t be using the weaker build when dagger focus is so much faster, but I feel that if I stick to condition build I’ll be that much better with it when it allegedly becomes viable. I feel it’s safer but with two cripple skills I tend to retain a bit more hp.

Against those scalebacks (or whatever) you could also use Chilblains to poison them, which reduces their regen. Or pull them all to you and then use well of corruption.

I use a condition build with staff – axe/warhorn. Someone else recently posted that he uses the scepter in a power build.
So don’t worry about fitting the “traditional” role of a conditionmancer, if there ever was one.

you dont need plague to survive but whilst lvling (past lvl 30) plague is a good elite to take. better than golem in my opinion.

When I was fighting ranged I would tend to use Blood is Power/Dagger #4 on one of them as that very quickly gave them 4 long lasting bleed stacks backed by 10 Might and a blind, they would go down quickly and allow me to focus on another mob.

More importantly though, kite them through line of sight denial. Ranged will move if you LOS them, so run behind something so they are forced to move to hit you, you’ll probably find they’ll clump up at a spot where they can see you again and allow you to effectively AoE them.

Silver.4798:

I don’t mean to be snarky, but telling people “ur doing it wrong” and leaving it at that is… less than helpful, to put it bluntly.

My problem is this at the level I’m in:

Lets say I encounter 3 nightmare court targets with bows, all spaced out (I can only get one of them at a time in my AoE skills) These guys start their rapidfire and knockback annoyance, I used up both my dodges and my heal and then take some more damage. Now I’m at 10% health, and I can’t really run away (I’m well within their shooting range so running away is futile).

Now what do I do? Deathshroud? That will only soak up some damage for a few seconds before I’m back to exactly where I was before, my health still at 10% and maybe one more dodge, my heal still 10-12s or so away. Best I can do here (with my novice skills and shaky knowledge of the necro class) is to do as much damage to one target as possible, get downed, and try to take him down while being downed to get back a bit more health and my heal off of cooldown. This works maybe 10% of the time, the other 90% I just die.

More to the point, the downed necro skills… I don’t get it, is there an effective way to use them?

1) With the 3 ranged attackers, you really can’t do much other than what you mentioned. Necro is an attrition class, it just isn’t a warrior that can chop them down 1-by-1 fast enough to avoid being killed in the meantime, especially at low-levels. Dagger MH helps, but even that’s not always enough. Once you are higher level and more geared, though, necros are pretty darn tanky, especially for a light armor profession. So, you may just need to avoid those situations

2) For downed, target an enemy low on health and use #1 and 2&3 when they are off of CD. If you can get 10 pts in Spite, taking Death’s Embrace is really pretty potent for rallying. But at your level, those 10pts may be better spent elsewhere.

To be honest I’ve always preferred Hybrid and Power in PvE.
No need to worry about bleed caps, condi immunes and having multiple targets to make Epidemic actually do something.

I remember way back when I first started playing at launch people were hailing Necro as a WoW Warlock who should only spam DoTs, but ever since those days I’ve been using Carrion, Rampager… and lately Knight and Zerker.
People kept hailing the Scepter and I was dumb and believed them, then I went Dagger and never looked back.

Pure condi only really shines in small scale PvP with little condi removal or vs hordes of foes in PvE.
It’s very powerful but also very situational if you ask me.

A Hybrid or Power build with Well of Suffering on the other hand can deal decent damage anywhere.

ok so I just unlocked my third skill slot and now that I can run 2 corruption skills AND epidemic my condition necromancer got a lot nastier with 2 corruption skills and deathly swarm combined with the normal condition inducing weapon skills i had been using, feast of corruption is a lot more powerful.
I’ll miss my exploding bone minions that were so reliable and the double bursts of big damage made many fights easier, but I think my condition necromancer is going to be ok now.
I think a lot of players are configuring and giving advice for necromancers with most of their skills unlocked, but I just hit 20 last night.

Personally, I leveled MM, and I would suggest anyone do the same. The bottom line is, you will rarely die, things go down fast enough, and while you are not supreme at controlling conditions, you are not trait dependent or weapon dependent or gear dependent.

You can easily solo vets in a MM build, which would be much harder without. The entire concept of traits/runes goes out the window when you are leveling and changing gear daily. Go minions + whatever weapon you like and enjoy the leveling. I 100%ed the map this way.

EDIT: and take whatever traits you want. You don’t necessarily need MM traits either. They work fine without.

+1 to what Rennoko said. Open world PvE with minions is mind numblingly easy, and don’t require you to do anything besides let them face tank.

Why would I want a build that is mind numbing and simple?

Rennoko.5731:

Personally, I leveled MM, and I would suggest anyone do the same. The bottom line is, you will rarely die, things go down fast enough, and while you are not supreme at controlling conditions, you are not trait dependent or weapon dependent or gear dependent.

You can easily solo vets in a MM build, which would be much harder without. The entire concept of traits/runes goes out the window when you are leveling and changing gear daily. Go minions + whatever weapon you like and enjoy the leveling. I 100%ed the map this way.

EDIT: and take whatever traits you want. You don’t necessarily need MM traits either. They work fine without.

I’d have to agree, 100%. I actually leveled using Scepter / Dagger / Conditions…I took the Minions out for a spin in Orr when I was bored and wanted to punch myself in the face for taking the hard route to 80.

The Minions may be kitten but they’re a hell of alot easier than really ANY other way to level. Personally, I don’t think any class has an easier way to level 80 than a Necromancer who uses Minions.

Regarding the “Three ranged enemies” situation…

First off, you want a staff. Staff is just inherently easier than scepter for handling multiple mobs.
If at all possible, run away from one of them far enough that it’s forced to leash closer to you, and presumably closer to another enemy.
Use the fear on Death Shroud (And reaper’s mark!) to push at least two of the mobs close enough together that you can AoE both them. Make sure to do this before you apply any chill or cripple, or wait until it wears off. Otherwise your push distance is much smaller.
For bonus points, wait to push them while they’re channeling the rapid fire attack so you can interrupt their continuous high-damage skill.
As well, on your staff, make sure you’ve targeted an enemy that’s not the closest one to you, then position yourself so that you’re firing through one enemy to hit the one you’ve actually targeted.

Giving up damage at the beginning of the fight to set up your opponents can be very worthwhile in PvE, and fear is surprisingly good for it.

IronPlushy.4256:

Why would I want a build that is mind numbing and simple?

Well, it’s not entirely simple and mind-numbing; you still need monitoring of your minions health, positioning, and CDs. But MM is good for faster leveling, if this is your nth character leveling to 80, and it is good for soloing champions rather than waiting for others to show up, and also for generally getting yourself into situations you might not otherwise.

But otherwise, I don’t find MM my preferred playstyle. I dunno, maybe I just don’t want to share the kill credit with a bunch of misshapen, mindless critters.

If the sole purpose of adopting a build is to lvl up more easily, but really you want to play a different style, then you could also just complete a few crafting professions and be done with getting to lvl80 in less than one hour (if you have the resources for it).

I don’t think its wise to level one way if you are planning to have to change that at max level for whatever reason. Those levels are a good training ground to improve with your final build style, and having lesser options on your way up can help you learn the strengths and weaknesses of each skill sometimes better as that’s all you have to work with. I found the Necro an extremely easy class to kite with even without minions. They shouldn’t be necessary as a crutch.