Guild Wars 2

I think it should be an easy decision if you’re a conditions necro rocking Signet of Spite and Epidemic to pick staff, that’s obvious. After going through your marks any mob is going to have a lovely line of red beauties under their name. However… what’s your secondary? Since the nerf on skill 3 for Scepter in beta, it’s got a lot less “bite” and just can’t seem to compare damage wise with the other weapons. Despite that, if you want to gear for condition damage it’s still up in the air. Looking at main-hand axe and dagger, neither do any sort of damage over time. Dagger has immobilize on 3 and axe has vulnerability on 1, but neither of those intensify with condition damage.

It seems like it should be the necro’s thing to drain life, lay on conditions and do damage over time, but rangers, engineers, mesmers and hell, even thieves can lay on conditions and stack bleeds way faster and easier than necros. A simple solution I think would be to add poisons and bleeds to any of the main hand axe and dagger skills. Maybe the dagger 1 skill Necrotic Slash could apply 2 stacks of bleed, one with each slash. Perhaps the Axe 3 skill could apply aoe poison. These would really help up the damage and be more competitive with other profession’s condition skills. Compared to the ranger’s shortbow poison volley, axe splitblade, or greatsword maul attack, (all of which do DoT, are in the 2 slot, and thus have quick cooldowns), it’s pretty ridiculous that only two main hand weapons do damage over time for the necro.

We all know necros need a bit of love, I don’t want to resort to the gimmick build of the week to feel powerful and effective. I’d like which weapon to use to be a much harder choice, because they should all have something great to offer.

Not all necro builds are conditionmancer ones… You are trying to strengthen the already strongest necro build.

Let dagger and axe be what they are meant to be—more for power builds or tanky builds.

I know not all builds are conditionmancers, but that’s not to say that other builds wouldn’t be strengthened by them. Dagger might not need it if the life siphon gets fixed, but I definitely feel like axe needs it, as right now it doesn’t seem to really have a place.

While I do see where you’re coming from, overall I think the weapons were designed with gameplay variety in mind.

Scepter is intended for conditions
Axes for high power damage
Daggers for tankability.

At the moment, the last two don’t quite really mesh together in their roles properly. Daggers do more damage than axes, and are roughly equal with the axe damage grand master trait. Daggers don’t get any real benefit from the HP siphoning skills in blood because they’re all broken. This in turn nerfs Necromancer survivability overall.

Aside from the health siphoning bugs, I think the problem is that the Blood tree overall has a lot of very good major traits for tanking/support that are far too concentrated. You’re stuck choosing 3 major traits when you’ve got 5-6 really good ones to pick, that unless stacked don’t really bring a large benefit. This needs to be fixed. With the same notion, most minion traits are in the toughness tree, which is quite unfavorable for those who wish to tank but want nothing to do with minions. If these two trees somehow perhaps swapped some traits around we could get better survivability builds that aren’t reliant on minions, and minion masters could become more tanky and it would make having the kitten moronic AI more bearable.

Power builds are a different problem altogether. The Spite tree has no actual good power traits until grandmaster. You end up using fillers for things like Death Shroud, and then having to dip into curses for extra crit chance.

The Spite, Curses, and Soul Reaping trees all need some more work done. For starters, most of their minor traits are just crap. Death Shroud traits need to be reduced and mixed together more. There’s currently so many of them, and individually most are pretty lackluster. Death Shroud’s current implementation is quite weak, so nobody even bothers going into Soul Reaping anymore. I understand that they want Spite + Curses to be the glass cannon build so you have no points left to spend on survivability, but the two trees have such a weak synergy except for just boosting base stats. They really don’t go together almost at all.

I don’t even know where to start with the Soul Reaping tree. I honestly don’t think the base life force pool boost is enough, given how quickly it depletes in Death Shroud. The tree is all Death Shroud, and there are a ton of Death Shroud skills all over the place in other trees too. The boost to crit damage is nice, but not worth taking due to the whole tree being useless outside of death shroud. Soul Reaping needs synergy with something, and I think that the reduction/fusion of a lot of DS skills would help it greatly. Maybe implement a trait that reduces incoming damage while in DS for tanking? Maybe unlock us some abilities that use Life Force as an alternate resource to deal damage outside of DS? I don’t know

I would love to see some more weapons been hybridized a bit more. So that depending on traits you could use a weapon with either power or condition builds.

I would love to use Staff as a standalone condition or power weapon (currently it’s very good for either as a standalone weapon). Dagger that did some bleeds, which could be focused on through traits or something would be neat. Axes could probably be left as the pure Power/Crit weapon though, when it finally gets buffed lol.

Saying “most minion traits are in the toughness tree, which is quite unfavorable for those who wish to tank but want nothing to do with minions.” is like saying “most condition traits are in the curse tree, which is quite unfavorable for those who wish to have critical chance but want nothing to do with conditions”.

Minion traits are actually spread in spite death and blood with its main focus being death. There are plenty of good traits in the death line for non minion masters. Why people fail to realize that I don’t understand. The same thing with DS. It seems to work good for any build including conditions, stack your conditions and pop DS while they are doing their damage.

I feel like people want to focus in one aspect as a necromancer and expect all other trait lines to offer them increased damage based on one line throwing out the class mechanic. It’s a class mechanic USE IT. There are DS traits located all over the other trait lines because you should be using DS regardless of your build.

I don’t complain that I have to go into spite to get 30% increased minion damage because it actually helps the 5 other weapon skills I use to do so and my DS damage.

I currently use this: http://www.gw2build.com/builds/simulator.php#1.5.4.7.21.0.0.0.0.0.105.113.114.126.129.0.0.0.306.309.312.0.0.0.333.340.0.0.0.0.366.362.0.30.0.20.0.20

Everything I have synergizes. I use the axe because the vulnerability stacks increase my damage, my teams damage and my pets damage. If you notice I am a pet build that does not go full death magic, mainly because the grand master traits do not appeal to me and I would rather have better axe damage.