Guild Wars 2

CC Charles.3675:

Hello everyone,

Due to the amount of threads about thief and its gameplay impact, we have decided to open this thread in which you can discuss your concerns about Thieves in PvE, sPvP and WvW.

This will allow us to collect your feedback with more efficiency and forward them to the appropriate teams.

You can articulate both, positive and negative feedback for it, but we ask you to stay constructive and polite when you want to express your opinion, all posts that break the forum code of conduct will be removed.

Thank you!

We don’t have a thread like this, so I thought I’d start it instead, hopefully then we can convince a community manager to convince the right dev teams to look at the feedback and do something about it.

While browsing the forums I have noticed lots of complaints about this class, more so then any other on the forums, it kind of made me lol looking in the theif class and seeing a feedback thread made by a Community Coordinator as I thought, theifs are strong enough right? I mean I know I get killed by them in about 5 seconds flat so..

Anyway, here are a few threads worth reading that have caught my eye and have had a positive outlook from the Necromancy community:

• The Post your top 3 issues thread – https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/The-Post-your-top-3-issues-thread/first#post824247
• Suggestion Changes to Spectral Armor – https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/Suggestion-Changes-to-Spectral-Armor/first#post910848
• On necros being broken – https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/On-necros-being-broken/first#post856798
• Siphoning Not a Beneficial Strat At All – https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/Siphoning-Not-a-Beneficial-Strat-At-All/first#post909328
• Flesh Golem Charge – https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/Flesh-Golem-Charge/first#post903161
• Make Fear Necro only – https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/Make-Fear-Necro-only/first#post891072
• A few suggested changes to Necromancers Axe – https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/A-few-suggested-changes-to-Necromancers-Axe/first#post917723
• Simple Improvements to Death Shroud and Boons – https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/Simple-Improvements-to-Death-Shroud-and-Boons/first#post869278

Just afew threads which have made some good points over the past couple of weeks, its worth A Net taking note of whats being said, we know they do take feedback (as they are obviously doing so in the thief forum) hopefully with Necros needing major attention we can get some feedback through to the developers so changes can be made.

-LoVeRSaMa

i would like to see dagger siphoning and power builds being viable.

Again, not enough people play the necromancer for ANet to care what we think. The most popular classes always get the attention first.

Kravick.4906:

Again, not enough people play the necromancer for ANet to care what we think. The most popular classes always get the attention first.

Lets make them care, by showing them what we think, and bringing all our opinions to one place.

It’s plainly clear that they are ignoring all the threads about broken minions and other issues…

Every time i’ve e-mailed them they tell me to post it on the forum… there are already hundreds of posts stating the exact same issues i’m trying to report.

The reason why thieves get that post and we don’t is simple. They want feedback on thief gameplay and not necromancer. Why I don’t get is why do they focus on the most popular classes? Shouldn’t they be focusing on the less popular ones so people play them?

Elmentcius Koronel.6234:

The reason why thieves get that post and we don’t is simple. They want feedback on thief gameplay and not necromancer. Why I don’t get is why do they focus on the most popular classes? Shouldn’t they be focusing on the less popular ones so people play them?

More people play classes like guardian, warrior, thief, so they make more people content if they focus their attention on them.

Or maybe they just try to avoid specific topics like AI, which was never one of Anets strong points (GW1-ranger’s pets were horrible too).

Actually, it’s not clear at all they’re ignoring minions. They’ve explicitly said that fixes to ranger pets was a priority, and since the problems with both minions and pets are in the NPC AI, it would be downright difficult to fix one but not the other. I’m not saying that anet couldn’t manage that if they tried, but…

My main issue is just with the axe which I posted here https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/A-few-suggested-changes-to-Necromancers-Axe/first#post917723

It’s fine for a power build but the range needs a small boost and the no.1 needs a chain that’s all… Read that thread for my full thought on that issue. The only other issue I have is the minion ai for those times I feel like dropping my signet/bip/well for them. The majority of my issues are bugs and a few tweaks that are needed with spacific weps.

Simple Improvements to Death Shroud and Boons
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/Simple-Improvements-to-Death-Shroud-and-Boons/first#post869278

I’ve been waiting for a few months now for the minion ai to be fixed because I wanted to create a mm necro.. it’s really annoying when you buy a game that feels unfinished because it has a lot of bugs

Honest feedback (with my opinion), this class is a patchwork, poorly designed class. It is my opinion that the devs could not decide on the design and over-comprimised to add both their desires/designs and ended up weakening the class entirely. It should not be called necromancer, but maybe corruption mage, or bleed/blood mage. Has nothing to do with necromancy, and is boring. I am by far not the first person to post these concerns, and the following lists of blunders.

— DS mechanic does not appear to work that well in my opinion, and is WAY overvalued by Devs. Abilities are slow to fire, slow in general, and work only really if you trait into stability. Thus, if you want DS to be useful, your stuck with spite and the soul reaping trait lines (weeeeee) to make them even worth your while. Besides the fact that you can’t see conditions on you, y ou get buttslammed around with CC galore, and usually ends up being a hp dump.

— Traits lack synergy, don’t work, and don’t even seem to have a huge impact on the necro’s abilities, except a few.

— Skills, and the majority of abilities, minus a few that almost all necros use, are lackluster, lack power, are too situation dependent, and just are a disappointment at times.

— weapons need tuning, and appear to be watered down unless you build to the extreme. Axe, even with full power hits like a wet sack unless your talking about the #2 ability, which is easily interrupted to easily, or you get excited about stackign short lived vulnerability. Condition builds depend entirely on scepter and staff. Power builds depend entirely on daggers, and axe is the kitten child in between. I am unimpressed.

— forms/elites are unreliable, kill minions, and are practically our only stability ability, except going extreme into the DS trait line (which is the only way to get crit damage up… GOD) Yet they lock you out of utility skills. Plague is the only one that seems worth its weight in a team fight because you can chain blind. The flesh golem runs around like a powerhouse at times (usually when i attack mobs) or stands there in pvp, unless i use his rush ability.

— We have no stability, except for forms (which can be cancelled with moa) or a grandmaster trait that gives it to you for a whopping 3 secs.

— Conditions are one click removed, or removed with abilities with short cooldowns.

— class is slow, cumbersome, and can’t keep you pinned down at all. I can get away from a necro easier than almost any other class.

— fear, well, to get good fear, you need to trait for it, get a bunch of runes, and use staff and DS3. Warriors have longer fear, Thieves have longer fear, and the mothers of thieves and warriors have fear. Fear is lackluster, and perhaps the worst form of CC because they run away from you while your trying to damage them, I would rather they cower at my feet so I can at least get a few wacks in.

I am hard on this class, because it was my first level 80 and I was excited by the original videos. The class does not measure up to most other classes and I have 2 other 80s. All in all, I am just never scared when I meet a necro when im fighting. I know I can get away, or CC him, or remove his conditions (unless he goes power necro). I was motivated to play this class the most, and have been let down the most. It seems so cumbersome and poorly designed. And with all the friggen films about zombies, vampires, and other forms of undead, we get kitten looking skull faced rats, smoke mobs, and an ugly tail swining scorpion. How can I be scared of something this kitten looking. The flesh golem looks and moves like sloth from the goonies, and basically irritates me with his lack of attacking. seriously, sloth standing around texting your girlfriend, do something!

Gryph.8237:

— DS mechanic does not appear to work that well in my opinion, and is WAY overvalued by Devs. Abilities are slow to fire, slow in general, and work only really if you trait into stability. Thus, if you want DS to be useful, your stuck with spite and the soul reaping trait lines (weeeeee) to make them even worth your while. Besides the fact that you can’t see conditions on you, y ou get buttslammed around with CC galore, and usually ends up being a hp dump.

I agree with this for the most part… Maining a axe/ death shroud necromancer the death shroud no.1 is only good above 50% life force making >50% a use life transfer and pop out mechanic… In pve it’s only good when you spec for 25% slower drain and the stacking vulnerability/might on life blast shots…. But still it’s limited horribly by the >50% damage reduction…. Honestly life force drains on it’s own and goes down when hit…. Don’t punish our damage just because we take damage…..

Also something I forgot to bring up was they need to give specteral armor a stability and lower the cooldown by 50% 30 sec cd so that we have a good oh kitten button for pvp.

Necromancer is a lot stronger then people think.

But I agree that many of the bugs/weird mecanism are affecting the gameplay.

I can’t wait the day I will be able to play my necro as a Minion Master.

Or the day that a condimancer will use DS for something else then a damage soaker.

Or finally the day that we will be a real attrition class. As right now, I don’t see my necro stronger as the combat continu. I drain my LF, burst my CD like every other class, and if they decide to run away, they are gone. P/D thief is a good exemple of an attrition class. Slowly do damage, you can’t escape, you waste your CD trying to get them, then you die.

But Overall, I love the necromancer. I just think it deserve a bit more love.

We have a boring class mecanism (DS), that had so much potential. I think since they changed it from beta necro, they didn’t have much time to think about it.

It should be like our elite transformation, with skills depending of our weapon set and acces to our boon, heal, and utilies.

I’m asking for too much

P.S : I also think we are less a priority for them right now, since we have a low amount of player. It’s a company, they have to take care of the majority. Thief and now new FotM Elem seems to be ahead right now. Elem got so many support from Anet lately.

A 2h melee weapon with aoe, since were the only class in the game without a aoe melee weapon.

A scythe comes to mind being a necro and all.

Rework of deathshroud, when i made my necro the first time in beta i was worried about having an extra health bar that somehow would limit the class and all our skills, the more i leveled the more true this felt.

Scaling in general just being bad or nonexistant on the class, lifesyphon, pets.

Make the character creation fun by making me think, omg 8 awesome classes which one do i pick instead of sigh warrior or guardian :>

@Kardimond Have to agree our DS is the most boring class mechanic there is. It takes away choices and we have no idea what conditions we have on us, if our skills are off cooldown? is our DS skills off cooldown?

I recommend this post to everyone interested in a complete analysis of the profession (as well to the OP to add this one to the list): Necro skills, balance and opinions

I just read it and you may agree with him in some things or not, but it’s well made and have some nice ideas to improve our profession reasonably (it’s not something like “buff all our skillzz!!1”).

Good day necromates.

Kardiamond.6952:

Necromancer is a lot stronger then people think.

No. It’s not. Not in Pvp anyway on anything but paper

Necromancers are horribly inconsistent to play because they demand the person playing them make every single move to absolute perfection every time. Think about it. You miss ONE MARK and you’re f’ed if the target is remotely competent. You waste one ONE DODGE, same thing because you’ll just get whirlwinded for half your health pool. You miss a blind or a chill and it’s over for you. You get CC’ed in DS and the whole thing is completely wasted.

I can watch other players instaheal 3/4 of their health pool or go invisible or pop up three ‘pets’ each doing 1k per hit or simply equipping a great sword and smashing their face on 3 to take half my health away in one move they don’t even need to target in any way.

Meanwhile, if I hit every single mark, my weapon swap and my wells just right I can take 2 guys down at once, but if I miss even one keystroke or mark the whole fight turns into a desperate struggle and if I miss a second it becomes impossible.

It’s not that necromancers don’t have a lot of awesome stuff in theory, it’s that the class, against other players, requires such an insane level of precision compared to other classes that it’s a horribly frustrating and inconsistent experience and people get irritated and, ultimately, give up. Why should anybody fight with a class that requires you to have rubber fingers when they can just roll a guardian or a warrior and roll a ham back and forth on the keyboard to accomplish the same win percentage?

And how do you fix it? I dunno, but I got some bad news. Anybody who ever played a Warlock in WoW has seen this all before. You fix ‘em up to do what they’re supposed to and you’re just going to have every other class (probably rightly) screaming that Necro’s are way too OP all of a sudden. You try and tweak their damage they just turn into glass cannons who have to lurk behind teammates all the time. Even if Anet wants to fix the problems with this class, I’m not sure how they’d do it without either frustrating everyone else or just making the class a boring one-trick pony.

well i think youre wrong. necros are hands down the best bunker busters in the game. theyve got loads of sustain. where people go wrong (as someone mentioned before) is in building their necro as a specialist. u gotta build the necro for high sustain AND DPS. glass cannon builds work as well. full bunker builds are good, but a little subpar to other bunkers imo.

in PVE, necros are beasts. ive play guard, ele, ranger, mesmer all to high levels, and necros have the most sustain + aoe dps, in addition to some amazing support.

mechanics that do need to be addressed though: minions, dagger, axe, power builds in general, and siphoning.

lets stop making useless posts & prepare for the next patch , i predict necromancer nerf . wells + DS + staff = to much aoe dmg == we re screwd

We don’t have one of these threads because Necro has very little noticeable impact on the larger player population. The reason thief has that thread is related to players, who aren’t running thief, taking issue with thief doing 35k damage in 2 seconds, and Heartseeker spamming for the win. They wanted to consolidate all the “thief is broken OP” posts into a single thread.

I am pretty sure the balance lead designer plays a thief so they will always been slightly OP. Happens in every game, whoever gets to make the decisions gives themselves a slight advantage, subconsciously, regardless of their own intentions. Human brain is what needs a patch.

Necro has no such impact on other players in PvP so no such thread needs to exist. Mostly because the core functionality of what it means to be a Necro, MINIONS… don’t work right. And of course a multitude of traits that seem awesome on paper have little to no noticeable impact because MINIONS DON’T WORK OUTSIDE OF SITUATIONAL PVE AND TROLLING 5x Minion Master TOURNYS…

At least not competitively. I am not saying a rank 40+ can’t get naked, drop all traits, and run full minions to farm up all the tasty rank 1-10 players. We can. Its hilariously easy because 99% of new players have “tip of the iceberg” syndrome. They see the tip and they are convinced that’s all there is because that is all they can see. Makes it pretty easy to roll them as an experience tourny player regardless of skill level.

But competitively Minion Master is useless. Minions are dead before attacking if they attack at all, even with 50% more HP. And the delay between their attacks is so long, that even with every damage trait assigned, your pets still combined to less damage than a single Staff 2 bleeds. And that Staff 2 also gives regen in AoE so its pretty much a healing skill not a damage skill.

The supposed tools if you are trying to go defensive minions. Those are sekc right, click a skill and if you pet survives for the 10 seconds it takes to execute, the skill misses to range or is obstructed leaving you with a mammoth cooldown on a skill that lasts half a second and 90% of the time fails…

Necro is full of enormous cooldowns on skills that have no meaningful impact. This severely limits viable Necro builds. And the majority of those that are viable, rely on bugs to be competitive. Not to say Necro can’t build a brutal support/condition or a kitten DS/Power/Toughness roamer, but that’s all there is. That makes us Warlocks. Not Necros. Which, after playing a Necro in every major MMO since March 1999, I find personally offensive. I was sold on the Necro with Minions. What I got was the Warlock with wells and epidemic.

wiazabi.2549:

A 2h melee weapon with aoe, since were the only class in the game without a aoe melee weapon.

Ele’s don’t have a 2h aoe melee weapon either.

the grass is always greener.

Gryph.8237:

Honest feedback (with my opinion), this class is a patchwork, poorly designed class. It is my opinion that the devs could not decide on the design and over-comprimised to add both their desires/designs and ended up weakening the class entirely. It should not be called necromancer, but maybe corruption mage, or bleed/blood mage. Has nothing to do with necromancy, and is boring.

Correct.
The design principles that they seemed to want, reading at development notes here on the forum, was that the class was a ‘lock-down’ specialist which was hard to escape from, hard to kill, but not necessarily the fastest killer.
That’s fine as a concept.
Except that it doesn’t actually work in principle!
Also, if it was actually implemented that way, that’s all it would be and no provision for the alternative play-style options that ALL other careers get. In our case it would be Minion Masters and Single-target/High Damage

If you want to be tough to kill, lock people down be hard to escape from and kill relatively slowly, I’ve got 4 mates I play regularly with that combination… and they’re all Guardians!

My Necro pro/cons?
I’m a highly speed, light armour class that practices being cautiously positioned on the battlefield, condition-specialist AOE and CC in my WvW guild.
I don’t do well at single target damage
I don’t soak up a lot of damage myself
I have very limited escape capability
I do have a very good personal heal
I do have great area denial
I have some damage-offset in Deathshroud
I do have decent amounts of personal +% speed

That is what I bring to the table as a ranged-standoff class, played fairly much exactly the same as a Staff-Elementalist would, instead of being an ‘up in their face damage soak’ that they seem have thought we where apparently going to be. Statistically, THIS WORKS (I have an 18-1 kill/death ratio because of it) and Anet deluded in thinking that we are currently anything else in its current form.

minions, minions and minions, I’m pretty sure most of people adressed these issues but I’m just gonna number the ones I have most problems with

1) minions not regenerating health outside of combat: sure, I get that they aren’t supposed to be ranger’s pet and be tanks, but the fact my minions die from single hits it’s bad, but having to have them run around with me on the field with 1% health and me having to waste a CD and expect a Healing well to help them is bad enough at it is, I have to also resort to more cumbersone meanings to resummon them like changing skills back and forth, which is just problematic and speaks of bad design altogether

2) reanimator: completely useless trait, I get the jagged horror shouldn’t be anything but cannon fodder, but they hardly last, and on top of that they die from even the meaningless hit, they should either not degenerate health, or simply do it at a much slower pace so they mean something whenever they get spawned, on top of that, Death nova is currently bugged and doesn’t work all the time, the fact that you can be a better minion master without having to spend a single point in death magic which supposedly is the trait line dedicated to minions is ridiculous and again, bad design altogether

3) minion survivability: it’s awful, imho they should derive some small % from the user main stats, or otherwise not be affected by AoE (like other mmorpgs design their pets), because at it is, any single boss fight consists of myself spamming staff skills and waiting for minions CD to go off because they die from any Boss AoE whatsoever, I have to sit there twiggling my thumbs doing nothing while the pets die incessantly doing no damage and contributing nothing to the overall fight

4) Little variation when it comes to minion: just compare the ammount of versatility we had with minions in regards to Guild wars 1 and look back to the measly ammount of minions we have right now and how uninteresting they are with their skills, nuff said, in GW 1 we had different skills that had damage or some kind of utility and on top of that it could spawn a different minion regarding corpses or players/monsters dying from Curses, all we have in this game are skills that spawn minions and that’s it, as a Minion master I feel constrained because well….I’m a one trip pony, summon minions > they die instantly > resummon them > rinse and repeat

Dakiaris.2798:

My main issue is just with the axe which I posted here https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/A-few-suggested-changes-to-Necromancers-Axe/first#post917723

It’s fine for a power build but the range needs a small boost and the no.1 needs a chain that’s all… Read that thread for my full thought on that issue. The only other issue I have is the minion ai for those times I feel like dropping my signet/bip/well for them. The majority of my issues are bugs and a few tweaks that are needed with spacific weps.

Added.

alanis.6094:

Simple Improvements to Death Shroud and Boons
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/Simple-Improvements-to-Death-Shroud-and-Boons/first#post869278

Added.

Also in team pvp recently I have noticed that my AOE damage isnt enough, people can heal way to much and crush my curses.

Its pretty lame tbh..

Thresher.3049:

Gryph.8237:

Honest feedback (with my opinion), this class is a patchwork, poorly designed class. It is my opinion that the devs could not decide on the design and over-comprimised to add both their desires/designs and ended up weakening the class entirely. It should not be called necromancer, but maybe corruption mage, or bleed/blood mage. Has nothing to do with necromancy, and is boring.

Correct.
The design principles that they seemed to want, reading at development notes here on the forum, was that the class was a ‘lock-down’ specialist which was hard to escape from, hard to kill, but not necessarily the fastest killer.
That’s fine as a concept.
Except that it doesn’t actually work in principle!
Also, if it was actually implemented that way, that’s all it would be and no provision for the alternative play-style options that ALL other careers get. In our case it would be Minion Masters and Single-target/High Damage

If you want to be tough to kill, lock people down be hard to escape from and kill relatively slowly, I’ve got 4 mates I play regularly with that combination… and they’re all Guardians!

My Necro pro/cons?
I’m a highly speed, light armour class that practices being cautiously positioned on the battlefield, condition-specialist AOE and CC in my WvW guild.
I don’t do well at single target damage
I don’t soak up a lot of damage myself
I have very limited escape capability
I do have a very good personal heal
I do have great area denial
I have some damage-offset in Deathshroud
I do have decent amounts of personal +% speed

That is what I bring to the table as a ranged-standoff class, played fairly much exactly the same as a Staff-Elementalist would, instead of being an ‘up in their face damage soak’ that they seem have thought we where apparently going to be. Statistically, THIS WORKS (I have an 18-1 kill/death ratio because of it) and Anet deluded in thinking that we are currently anything else in its current form.

You can build for extremely potent single target damage using Vulnerability stacking, Blood is Power, and Might stacking. Gear for Power Crits and Crit Damage, while you trait a healthy blend of power crit/conditions and death shroud. Dagger/Focus or Axe/Focus for even more vulnerability.

You can put 20+ stacks vulnerability down in 2 seconds. How you use those stacks is up to whether you are ranged or melee focused. Blood is Power, Plague Signet, and Epidemic combine extremely well with stacks of vulnerability x20. So does everyone else’s, everything…

So yeah. Necro single target damage can be created and you can spread that epicness to everything in range and benefit all allies in range at the same time. You just have to perform a perfect keyboard dance of motions like a Korean RTS player and give up all your tankish survivability. Max payoff is around 30k damage and takes 2-3 seconds to build, but you can build on the run, from 1200, and AoE as well so… its functional single target DPS between cooldowns.

Disclaimer: Even following the above advice you will need to dance carefully to avoid wasting cooldowns, or you are gonna spend most of your time running back to where you died.

The only thing Necro is really missing is functional Minion Builds. To get the proverbial Heartseeker Spam between Backstabs, Necro need functional Minions. Then the single target usefulness will be where it should be if you build for it. Too many long cooldowns on skills that don’t really do anything magical to warrant them is creating a void. Minions should be filling that void with something more than hilarity and bucket slaying.

Ok, keep in mind necro was my first class at 80, now my engi reached 80 and I feel far more comfortable with it so it might just be a case of necro is not my class. Here goes…

1. I could just make one build work for me that I enjoyed (pve) in terms of eviciency and that was scepter/dagger + axe/focus. Here DS is the incoming DMG sucker, at WoW + DS4. I’d say this build makes sense but since i need BiP and of course epidemic my space left for tools is limited.
2. Power and DS (especially with the axe) was the reason i leveled the necro but as soon as I tried to do more DMG with DS then one bolt to finish a mob (even this takes so long) it doesn’t really work.
3. In terms of feeling there are two points I like much more when playing my engi:
a) I have far more tools (control, heal, support…) but this is perhaps more a class design question.
b) I just realize this is the most important point for me:

With the necro I’m really afraid ALL the time to switch weapons away from scepter/dagger because even if the utility of the staff, the burst of axe2 or dagger1 would be good it sucks to be locked for 3-5 more sec. to the weaponset wich offers more or less 1-2 good abilities while I loose all my bleeding stacks. SAme reason I couldn’t make these weapons work for me.
I’m pretty sure I would enjoy my necro much more if I had no CD on wepon swap ( yes, would be too much) or more in terms of balance a shorter CD of weapons swap, and/or DS, even without the trait.

An idea for DS improvement would be to implement more effects just for the first 1,2 or 3 LB (perhaps in a non power traitline). If the the first two would apply 2 bleeds or burns each (just made that up) you would not have the feeling (as a condimancer) that DS’s LB is just too weak. Still could work with the normal CD on DS.

OK, just some thoughts from a ‘felt’ kind of point.

Cheers.

XiL.4318:

Correct.
The design principles that they seemed to want, reading at development notes here on the forum, was that the class was a ‘lock-down’ specialist which was hard to escape from, hard to kill, but not necessarily the fastest killer.
That’s fine as a concept.
Except that it doesn’t actually work in principle!
Also, if it was actually implemented that way, that’s all it would be and no provision for the alternative play-style options that ALL other careers get. In our case it would be Minion Masters and Single-target/High Damage

If you want to be tough to kill, lock people down be hard to escape from and kill relatively slowly, I’ve got 4 mates I play regularly with that combination… and they’re all Guardians!

My Necro pro/cons?
I’m a highly speed, light armour class that practices being cautiously positioned on the battlefield, condition-specialist AOE and CC in my WvW guild.
I don’t do well at single target damage
I don’t soak up a lot of damage myself
I have very limited escape capability
I do have a very good personal heal
I do have great area denial
I have some damage-offset in Deathshroud
I do have decent amounts of personal +% speed

That is what I bring to the table as a ranged-standoff class, played fairly much exactly the same as a Staff-Elementalist would, instead of being an ‘up in their face damage soak’ that they seem have thought we where apparently going to be. Statistically, THIS WORKS (I have an 18-1 kill/death ratio because of it) and Anet deluded in thinking that we are currently anything else in its current form.

You can build for extremely potent single target damage using Vulnerability stacking, Blood is Power, and Might stacking. Gear for Power Crits and Crit Damage, while you trait a healthy blend of power crit/conditions and death shroud. Dagger/Focus or Axe/Focus for even more vulnerability.

You can put 20+ stacks vulnerability down in 2 seconds. How you use those stacks is up to whether you are ranged or melee focused. Blood is Power, Plague Signet, and Epidemic combine extremely well with stacks of vulnerability x20. So does everyone else’s, everything…

So yeah. Necro single target damage can be created and you can spread that epicness to everything in range and benefit all allies in range at the same time. You just have to perform a perfect keyboard dance of motions like a Korean RTS player and give up all your tankish survivability. Max payoff is around 30k damage and takes 2-3 seconds to build, but you can build on the run, from 1200, and AoE as well so… its functional single target DPS between cooldowns.

Disclaimer: Even following the above advice you will need to dance carefully to avoid wasting cooldowns, or you are gonna spend most of your time running back to where you died.

The only thing Necro is really missing is functional Minion Builds. To get the proverbial Heartseeker Spam between Backstabs, Necro need functional Minions. Then the single target usefulness will be where it should be if you build for it. Too many long cooldowns on skills that don’t really do anything magical to warrant them is creating a void. Minions should be filling that void with something more than hilarity and bucket slaying.
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What build is that?

I have found its still no compatible to other classes, also I get knocked down to 0 health usually in about 5 seconds, a Warrior absolutely slaughtered me the other day and Apparently they are supposed to be weak against Necros and Mesmers…

I tend to fire up my warrior if I really need to get some single-target takedown action happening
It does it so elegantly with all the tools for the job with easy to get equipment, that it just makes everything else seem like completely excessive faffing around! Have mucked around a little with axe on the necro, but compared to axe on my warrior, it may as well be the difference between night and day.

Its just a power build. 30 in spite 30 in death shroud + 10 anywhere you want. Just DS juggle and stack vulnerability with BiP to burst single targets. Everything else is pretty much generic necro no matter what build you run. Swap utilities and use what’s needed, etc…

I use Dagger/Focus for the Power/DeathShroud roamer build and Dagger/Warhorn for my bunker version.

http://www.guildhead.com/skill-calc#mcVzMm9cmF0vomF0vox9MGGomqMoMo

I main a axe/death shroud build and I use this build… Works best for sustain and soloing… The empty skill is able to be swapped out I use signet of locusts if I’m in a heavy aoe situation for a bonus heal traited it’s a full heal… I don’t go with the cdr for focus because it doesn’t affect the no.4 and I don’t use the 5 enough to justify using it… Signet of undeath is good for group situations but can be swapped out while soloing.

Armor I run full knights gear with zerkers trinkets, power/toughness/crit damage back and zerker weapons…. I have on issues in wvw, solo pve , dungeons… The skill slot I can swap out gives me enough options that I can adapt to any situation aoe/support/damage/utility as a whole….. Rune/sigil wise I run superior ogre with a sigil of force+ accuracy so that I have 41% crit to go with my 71% crit damage… Accuracy on the zerkers staff for my long range option for those situations that demand me be higher range…..

Really it all depends on your play style though you can set up a axe build for nearly anything… The only thing you need is 30 in spite… You’re able to run without the 30 in SR if you want just depends on the gear and your general play style… If you want large numbers all the time though you may wanna pick a different class…. We have 18k base health at 80 so our damage is a bit lower because of that…. we trade burst/low health for sustained/high health.

Another thing that bugs me is mobility… i find it really difficult running away or catching up to people, even when using both the war horn speed spell (locusts) and Spectral Walk (swapping between the two)… every other class (except Guardian) seems to able to dash away with some spell or invulnerability or bloody permanent invisibility with a god kitten short bow teleport (seriously what where they thinking?) or whatever in these situations. Really struggle in this area…

I main a roamer Necro. Its not shortbow thief or jumptard warrior, but a consistant 33% ain’t bad at all. Especially when you got Death Shroud to juggle.

Axe auto-attack and Ghastly claws needs to hit up to five targets in a 300 range radius around the main target, I think it would be cool to have a cleave attack at range.

Hmm maybe a range of 240 would be better.

XiL.4318:

I main a roamer Necro. Its not shortbow thief or jumptard warrior, but a consistant 33% ain’t bad at all. Especially when you got Death Shroud to juggle.

Most other class can spec for a consistant 33% sprint. Hell my engi can have it without wasting an utilities.

The out of combat mobility isn’t the issue, it’s in combat that we don’t have mobilities. We don’t have 3 leap like guardian, or mist form and RTL like Elem ect.

We have Spectral Walk, that can be useful but will mostly teleport you right back in the zerg, or Flesh worm, that is kinda good, but doesn’t fit most build.