Guild Wars 2

I usually wear soldier full set, for maximum survivability in almost all settings – pve, pvp, wvw solo (zerk for raids), but i’m seeing that vitality doesn’t have much interaction with necro’s abilities, nor with traits.
If I’m correct, DS scales with health, but i don’t really know how much is such scaling, especially without taking the soul reaping line.
So, if i still wanna go for power tanky builds, would knights be a better idea, for the added precision? Or is vitality really helpful, despite me not seeing it.
For now, even with full soldier, there are times where i don’t last very long, and aside from toughness, that gives me bonus power thanks to the dm trait, vitality doesn’t seem to play an important role; that’s why I’m asking this now.
Reason i ask is: i tried taking both dm and bm; from what i’ve seen, soul reaping works well with dm, but practically shuts off bm, especially the life steal part. Instead curses has decent interaction with both lines, either with minions or with wells; but it gives its best with good amounts of precision. Still, i like being more tanky than damaging. But if precision can synergize better with life steal, condi transfer, weakness uptime, and of course dmg, giving overall more survivability than vitality, then i’ll surely switch it. So I’m asking you what you’d suggest, especially if some of you have already tried this setup

So I’ve actually tried doing a side by side comparison of soldiers to knights by auto attacking a golem to death. What I found was that both amulets killed the golem in roughly 12 seconds, which means that with knights you are losing out on your vitality for really no good reason (except for critical hit procs, which we don’t have many of in our traits). So IMO stick with soldiers.

There is no real reason why you need a full set of anything aside from going full condition – or of course changing the runes.

Knights is by far a better universal set than soldiers due to the precision. You can swap between soldier trinkets (for a tough build that still have some crit oomph out of DS) and zerker trinkets.

Keep in mind that in WvW spike damage is better than sustain. The psychological impact on a a player seeing his HP drop in half due to the enemy hitting him as full zerker is half the battle won… Killing a fleeing enemy is much simpler than killing one that fight back. That’s why Thieves are often so successfull in general and fail so horribly against Necros – drop everything on your feet and watch them melt. Its not like you could have fled anyway lol.

Thanks, both position are interesting. But i think i’ll follow Dawdler suggestion of switching to knight: the numbers against the golem may be the same, but the only immobile things in wvw are we necros, sadly; so some crit that boosts normal and condi dmg so that we don’t miss too much if we can’t stick to the enemy for a couple seconds seems appealing.
I still asked tho, in order to see if this was near the truth or if the numbers, even against moving targets, wouldn’t have changed much
Thanks

Generally soldier>knights but under certain conditions knights can be better then soldier (e.g if you have alot of on crit procs, a lot of healing etc.). The reasons for that are that damage scales better with power then with precision and toughness scales with hitpoints (meaning more health/healing makes toughness more effective). Also toughness has diminishing returns meaning the more you stack it the less effective it becomes.

Also tboneking knights actually does more damage but the difference is rather small (i think around 100 effective power, which should not enough to notice a difference in golem killing speed) so you are right that it is not worth losing out on the vitality. Note the calculations were only with the amulets without any runes/traits etc.

I’d like to point you to a thread I started, it’s on the third page now but relevant to this one too.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/How-to-hit-like-a-Zerker-in-Knights-Cavalier/first#post5305788