Guild Wars 2

Mainly for PvE builds

I see many people posting about items with precision condition damage and toughness. I know toughness is pretty good but it also makes some monsters focus on you (like lupicus). A necro can be tanky, but with a condition build you won’t have many escape tools at hand and such, which is why I wonder, why not bring power instead or vitality with condition damage, this will prevent you from having focus fire on you while you dish out conditions in dungeons.

Toughness adds cond. damage due to rune of the undead

Necros already have a high base pool so adding toughness generally makes more sense

As far as I aware mobs do not target you because of your toughness rating, in fact that sounds like pure speculation to me. I’ve seen elementalists and pets ‘tank’ him pretty sure they pack very little toughness

Additional note your post seems to contradict yourself, I assume you mean Rampagers (prec, power, condition) instead of Rabid (cond, prec, toughness)? see earlier points

Also it is rare that I see escape utilities being important in PVE, with the exception of Lupi (which you can generally make do with DS/plague if really necessary) no other boss would warrant defensive utilities with the toughness you already get from gear

My two cents

As Savan pointed out because of Superior Runes of the Undead 6th add-on you can gain 5% of your total Toughness into ‘Condition Damage. Using Power, Precision, Toughness’ or ‘Precision, Toughness, Condition Damage’ armour sets you can hit around 2000 Toughness which adds an additional 100 Condition Damage.

Vitality would be equally as good for non-condition based builds as it adds directly to your Death Shrouds overall health pool better then the Soul Reaping tree does.

@ Savan when I was running a toughness condition build I noticed mobs/bosses would go after me more in dungeons, will need to test it out again. I know about the Superior Runes of the Undead I’ve tried this on PvP, good damage but duration not so much, I guess more into Spite might make it work better, i was just thrown off by the price on these runes on the TP. I would’ve thought they would be worth way more if this was really the way to go.

The runes are cheap because the materials used to make them are really cheap, not because people arnt using them.

I’m still struggling with all of this myself, so I’m certainly not an expert.

But I don’t see how rabid can be a dps gain over carrion for condition builds. Is barbed precision amazingly good? Because with a low crit damage the direct portion of the skills will scale much better with power. And I dont see the condition damage from toughness compensating for the fact that you’re running around with green accessories.

Barbed Precision is not good (if it procs, it’s a 1-second bleed so you get one tick). Superior Sigil of Earth is just that good.

Bleeds stack to 25, and each stack deals 1 tick of damage every second. Superior Sigil of Earth gives you a 60% chance on crit to inflict a 5-second bleed, on a 2-second internal cooldown. Now I don’t have full exotics (missing exotic dagger – it’s a Masterwork from the Frostgorge Sound Kodan vendors. Level 80 Rabid Dagger, and my Staff off-hand is a rare Carrion, and my Jewelery is Power/Precision/Condition Damage) but my bleeds tend to hit for 125-130 damage a tick, so Superior Sigil of Geomancy bleed will give me 625-650 damage whenever it procs, over the next five seconds.

It’s not about the direct damage. Forget the damage the crit itself is actually doing. It isn’t important. The idea is that you wear the enemy down with high condition damage and being able to so much as fart and there’s a half-dozen extra bleeds on your target while at the same time havin high toughness to whether blows and jumping in and out of Death Shroud, or using Plague to mitigate damage.

So you run Earth on a scepter and build up bleed stacks and spread them with epidemic as appropriate.
On the staff, do you use fire, since it’s all AoE anyway?
And the OH dagger could have cond damage stacking, bleed duration, 5% precision, AoE bleed on weapon swap, etc.

Zogyark.4597:

Mainly for PvE builds

I see many people posting about items with precision condition damage and toughness. I know toughness is pretty good but it also makes some monsters focus on you (like lupicus). A necro can be tanky, but with a condition build you won’t have many escape tools at hand and such, which is why I wonder, why not bring power instead or vitality with condition damage, this will prevent you from having focus fire on you while you dish out conditions in dungeons.

My Rabid PvE set is for WvW. Building that set is priority #1 for people that WvW and do dungeons on the side.

Priority #2 is building a third set (Carrion) for straight PvE if the game had really hard content that required it.

Then lastly, I have a Berserker’s set for power spec PvE kittendation when I want to turn my brain off and spam dagger 1 on DPS race fights like Simin in Arah.

NatashaK.9418:

So you run Earth on a scepter and build up bleed stacks and spread them with epidemic as appropriate.
On the staff, do you use fire, since it’s all AoE anyway?
And the OH dagger could have cond damage stacking, bleed duration, 5% precision, AoE bleed on weapon swap, etc.

I’m sure some folks have their own ideas of what they put on the Staff.

Me? I put on Superior Sigil of Energy because we don’t have a reliable way to get Vigor. Every 10 seconds, you get a free dodge.

Without toughness you just generally take too much damage.

I recently switched from a 30/0/20/20/0 build

over to a 0/30/20/20/0 build, dropping some power atributes and sticking with full conditions and full defence + toughness and + vitality

this lets me run maximum servivablity and still have nice condition dammage-

in WVW im like a super tank, and i feel the duration of my dots is neglagable because everyone wipes them after about 5 seconds anyway so this is the way to go -

i mostly use staff, but in 1v1 situations i swap to septer/ warhorn for quick kills

altho if im fighting a gaurdian elementalist or a ranger, they can just wipe my dots fast enough that i need to switch back to staff to do any real dammage

Staff 1 – necrotic grasp actuly saved me from dying several times

id love to sub in ssome crit , but without high toughness and high vitality i find that i die way to fast to do anything in wvw, plus the small amounts of vampiric health drains from blood keep me in the fight longer,

30 in death or 30 in blood i feel is a waste as none of the higher teir tallents are worth it

this is a tanky condition build, with max gear you can have 1.3 k toughness and 29k hp – with death shroud to boot

youll deffinatly be a wrecking force in wvw, just consider yourself healing and dot support and max range and youll be fine -

My assessment of the only viable necrobuild for WVW

enjoy -

I’m not sure aggro works that way, first of all.. I’m not sure how it works at all.

You’ve only 2 choices for gear that have primary condition damage — either pow/vit/cond or prec/tough/cond

necros have decent base HP, you don’t get much out of power unless you’re a power build (you DO get SOMETHING, though, so I’d not ignore it).. but you get more condition damage from toughness, and though I’ve not tested it and shouldn’t say anything.. my gut tells me we get more damage per point of precision than power..
simply on account of either sigil of earth (on my scepter.. and on some of my offhands too, for a total 84% chance to proc on crit), or sigil of fire on staff, and of course i often grab the trait for chance of life force gain on crit

plus, hey, we don’t often have conditions sitting on us for long but crits and conditions aren’t affected by weakness.. so, bonus!

sometimes my bleeds tick for 164 and that’s pretty rad.

Sounds fair I’m convinced, mainly because of the staff skills on toughness and the cheap runes. what I wonder is the duration on these condition builds, Since there’s no points into power at all, do the conditions suffer greatly or can you easly get sup to 25 stacks and sort of keep it up there?

Zogyark.4597:

Sounds fair I’m convinced, mainly because of the staff skills on toughness and the cheap runes. what I wonder is the duration on these condition builds, Since there’s no points into power at all, do the conditions suffer greatly or can you easly get sup to 25 stacks and sort of keep it up there?

Instead of correcting your above post I will just forward you to a post I made earlier
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/What-s-a-good-dungeon-necro-build-specifics/first#post650735

You would never want to cripple your dps just to stack 25 stacks on your own, power is not useless for a cond necro neither are the traits

I have 30/30/0/0/10 build and picked Prec/Tough/Cond (I use svanir armor, hoping to get arah armor for looks) with Superior Rune of the Undead in all 6. I use scepter/dagger with Superior Sigil of Corruption in my scepter (lidless eye) giving me up to +250 on condition dmg (10/hit stacks to 25). I have Superior Sigil of Blood on my dagger(Malefacterym).

I last quite a while and if you ask my guild mates they think it’s hysterical that it takes forever for me to get dropped. The reason is not just toughness, but I use my heals, conditions, plague form (yes this is a must) and DS to give me multiple avenues to survive. Necros are a complex build that require timing and skill.

I use this build for PvE and WvW. I do nasty dmg and great survivability. I also have condition dmg in my jewelry where possible (I can list that if anyone is interested).

As for the question about monsters and toughness; different monsters attack based upon different factors and yes there are some that hone in on toughness. They are usually boss monsters or higher end monsters that I wouldn’t want to solo anyway so with a good team you can take them down.

The main thing that triggers aggro, if not the only thing, is conditions….though bleed is not a big one so necros don’t need to worry, burn is more of an aggro puller though the big ones are things like cripple and blind as far as I know.

Boom! http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Aggro

Copy/Paste for the lazy people

The aggro table of a hostile NPC changes dynamically depending on a number of factors, in order of importance:

1) closest target to them
2) who is dealing damage
3) top damage dealers
4) who is using a shield
5) others (see Tanking tactics wiki)