Ok, so generally the necro form is a pretty miserable place, and a fair bit of that admittedly is justified. However, I happen to find this class a hell of a lot of fun and know there are plenty who feel the same, so let’s share some experiences and any useful info we’ve picked up along the way.
So, me. Fell in love with this class in the beta weekend, rolled one immediately and despite having a few other 80s I’ve always considered my necro my main. Started doing mainly WvW, with mixed results, but lately my focus has been on sPvP and a bit of PvE with my guild.
PVE
I love necro for this. With traits, staff and wells are both incredibly powerful support tools, and I’ve got a lot of use out of plague form. As you can imagine, mass blinding and chilling of hostile mobs for 20 seconds (25 throwing in a well of darkness) can take a hell of a lot of pressure off the rest of the group.
I won’t be winning any awards for damage, but there are other necros out there who can and do that role and excel in it. Hopefully one of them will comment here on necro as a DPS class, but I play support so can’t really say much.
WvW
This is where I probably have the least experience, but: for big group fights, you’re kitten good at throwing around a lot of AoE conditions and support abilities. For general roaming, a 25% move speed signet and spectral walk make it pretty mobile and it’s a very capable fighter. I run a heavy scepter condition build for this and have fought down a surprising range of enemies, though frankly I’m still not great at it. Again, hopefully a more WvW-oriented necro will chip in here.
sPvP
Necro has become my favorite class for this, frankly. I still don’t claim to be anywhere near the top skillwise, but I’ve got consistently good results which have only got better as I got more experience.
I’ve heard good things about deathshroud-heavy builds in sPvP, but I run a heavily bunkered build with a staff primary weapon, two wells and corrupt boon. I originally tried this build as a joke, just to see how hard to kill I could make myself, but found it worked so well I started using it seriously. This was after I’d tried a sPvP equivilent to my usual condition build and failed miserably.
I’d just like to stop here to mention corrupt boon is, from what I’ve found, one of the best and downright hilarious moves we have. You’ll know why when you use it on a heavily buffed up guardian or elementalist.
You’ll also hear a lot of people say that wells are useless in PvP because you can just dodge out of them. In my experience: that’s actually not the case. If you time them well, and use the right one for the right situation, they’re fight-winners. Not to mention that if you’re supporting another person or two, there are often so many effects flying around that the enemy doesn’t even notice that they’ve just had a chilling WoD dropped on them
Anyway: I’ve found it fairly capable 1v1 as well surprisingly enough. Just yesterday I was dueling a bunker dagger elementalist. I couldn’t do enough DPS to bring them down, but they couldn’t kill me either.
Hell, I’ve even tried running round as a minion master in sPvP and while it wasn’t the greatest thing in the world it actually turned out to be surprisingly effective. Especially when my flesh golem stopped eating popcorn and actually hit stuff.
So yeah, if you think you’re doing badly, or just want to try a different style, just go nuts with your traits/gear, step in to structured and see what happens. Worked for me.
Again, I make absolutely no claims to being great at PvP or any kind of authority on the subject, but I’ve found this class perfectly capable and very enjoyable, and anyone who feels the same is welcome to offer up their own advice for new players or those just looking for help/ideas.