Guild Wars 2

Hey. Just something I’ve been wondering based on playing against necromancers in SPvP, but not having experience running one myself.

Sometimes when I engage a necromancer, he or she will use fear to make me run away.
Then pop it again.
And again.

And, well, most times I’ll break out of it, expecting a burst. But sometimes I can’t or won’t bother, and… It doesn’t seem to make a big difference, I guess? I guess I’m usually down 3-4k hp from the whole deal, but it seems like they’ve burned a lot of cooldowns to do damage equivalent to a few autos without really piling anything else on top of all that.

So, uh, what’s supposed to happen? Is chaining fear at the start of a fight just bad technique in general, or a good trick that doesn’t do much against my build (usually, interrupt mesmer with a lot of condition clears), or is there an upside to this opening I’m not seeing?

Fear chaining at the start of the fight like you describe is bad technique and doesn’t accomplish much. Fear chaining as part of a condi-bomb or to interrupt a heal and seal a fight is an entirely other story.

I know as soon as a necro fears me early that I can likely heal without a problem… And they can’t. So that’s pretty much the fight right there between two Necros.

But otherwise yes, an early fear chain isn’t very damaging and you’re right to think it’s sort of useless for them. There is also a chance though that you’re getting hit with nightmare runes and reapers protection, so it could be passive procs.

Well they most likely have made fear into a damaging condition, so popping those skills as frequently as possible results in more damage. Its also 3-4k damage that you had no opportunity to respond to because you were fleeing in terror.

Also one of the procs might be nightmare runes which cause fear when you get hit once a minute

So, I guess what I should ask is: what does a typical “terrormancer” burst rotation look like? (How quick, how much damage, which conditions?)

The dream scenario for a condition necro is that you apply burning and a few bleeds to us. Then we stack a bunch of bleeds on you, transfer your conditions back to you and fear chain you. The goal is to bait out all of the enemy condition clears and stun breaks before this. In that scenario your probably taking 3k damage per second for 3-4 seconds while being cc’d. That’s basically the end of the fight for most builds.

Necromancer is not that good at condition damage outside of scepter and fear and is horrid at hard CC except for, again, fear so Necro’s like to use it.

As Roe said, though, once it is on CD, there are limited options for hard CC. Horn has a daze, there are a few stun break utilities, golem knockdown, OH dagger and fiend binds, a few traits with questionable value, and the two popular elites with stability. Burning a fear just for condition damage carries significant risk. Fearing someone into a fall is a good use of it but requires position. The condition damage aspect is not as great a factor; better to interrupt a long CD skill with it but using it as much as possible is tempting. It _does_ do damage.

Still, letting an opponent inflict a long burn, some poison, confusion, and bleeding before transferring them back via dagger, staff, or signet, then fearing is ideal. Necromancer is great at handling other professions’ short-term condi pressure but its own condition damage only seems good outside the profession. A real Necro condi burst comes partly from the opponent as returned conditions or corrupted boons.

lol ive asked myself the same question. You would think that they would try getting the most out of fear chains by applying a lot of condis first or power bursting after each fear

Its really not that good, they are giving up all of their CC just to pressure out a stun break and cleanse. Use fears to interrupt more key abilities, or use a fear chain as a finisher so that they can’t do anything while you burst down that last couple thousand HP when they’ve already burned their ways to stop you.

Thanks, folks! Lots of good answers. I picked the one that seemed to most closely sum up the overall consensus.