Guild Wars 2

Just by using the “Life from Death” and “Speed of Shadows” traits, the necromancer can heal 5 people for an absolutely massive amount of damage every 6 seconds just by double tapping shroud. Why aren’t people using this?

2,5k hp every six seconds is not that worth if your trade-off are LF gain and Shroud itself

2.5k x 5 targets = 12.5k, and if you don’t have to use shroud, double tapping it actually does not consume any LF

Every 7* seconds. Also you’re losing a lot of other stuff by just flashing Shroud. You’re losing any offensive effects and you’re losing your primary defensive skill. It’s really not worth it to just flash Shroud because you lose so much if you can’t use Shroud. 2.5k healing per target isn’t worth it.
In addition, you need to take Blood Magic for this so you either lose the sustain from Soul Reaping, the signets and might from Spite, or Reaper. Not to mention the other benefits of those trait lines (such as Last Gasp or Chill of Death). None of those are worth losing for a bit of healing.
You also need a Healing Power amulet to even get 2.5k healing. Which means you lose other stats.

Necromancer does not have on-demand spike heals. In emergencies, Necro heals are puny.

However, Transfusion, LfD, and/or all of the little Vampiric heals do add up. They tend to help more in big PvE events where multiple people go down to boss AoE attacks.

Well actually I think our spike healling is pretty decent, its our sustain healing that is lacking. As others mentioned, it is a serious drop in potential offense and self defense to flash shroud on cooldown. Not such a big deal flashing shroud in pve as we may not need that extra defense, but still it comes down to why take a necro healer when we are so outclassed in that department?

Protivnik.8907:

Just by using the “Life from Death” and “Speed of Shadows” traits, the necromancer can heal 5 people for an absolutely massive amount of damage every 6 seconds just by double tapping shroud. Why aren’t people using this?

Because outside of raids, there’s really no reason to run a healer in PvE. A little bit of healing can be helpful if you don’t have to go out of your way to get it, but it’s not worth speccing for it on purpose.

Our actual healing numbers are decent. Nobody runs necro healing builds because necros provide kitten all besides that. Where is the burst condi removal? Where is the boon support? Those are requirements for bunker builds. Well of Power and well of blood need cd decreases, Death magic needs aoe prot, aoe condi removal (on Shroud 5 preferably), and Life from death needs to remove a condition.

zapv.8051:

Our actual healing numbers are decent. Nobody runs necro healing builds because necros provide kitten all besides that. Where is the burst condi removal? Where is the boon support? Those are requirements for bunker builds. Well of Power and well of blood need cd decreases, Death magic needs aoe prot, aoe condi removal (on Shroud 5 preferably), and Life from death needs to remove a condition.

Yes, we do not have boons. But our ally and self condi removal is “ok” (probably not enough in this meta, but very decent) and we can still provide high damage:

I do play for the fun of it sometimes a crusader healing-damage necro.

Looks like this
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vRAQNBmQD7kZTobTscTwdTgeTsoNYxRwMYHkqEkCWUTBgQ2BA-TpQWABAs/AnlBAA

You do have marauder-esque damage + celestial-ish healing and pretty decent survivability. I have results like 300k outgoing healing and 500k damage at the end of the game.

Main weakness as always as necro: CC.

Otherwise, not meta, but not too bad.

I think it has to do with the illogical interactions in the build that should use healing power. Ok we start by looking at blood magic.

Last rites boosts healing power when the player has low health and vampiric heals the player so looks like a good combo but vampiric scales so badly with healing power it results at best in an increase of 3 health per hit and it only gets worse when tghe player has higher health.

Life from Death has a strong healing coefficient and so has Transfusion but Transfusion lowers your Life from Death healing output since you are using the shroud for at least 2 seconds. Vampiric rituals has no negative effect on Life from Death but has poor scaling with healing power.

Ritual of Life the rezz trait does not increase Life from Death/Transfusion rezzing and the extra effect is a well of blood. Transfusion and Vampiric Rituals compete. Speaking of well of blood and Vampiric Rituals it has a great healing power but its boosting trait Vampiric Rituals has not.

Now lets add a weapon to the Life from Death, shroud flasher to this, staff seems like a safe addition but Speed of Shadows and Soul Marks compete. Another weapon set is dagger warhorn, dagger has life siphon and warhorn procs lots vampirc procs, but both generate a huge amount of life force which you don’t need since shroud flashing.

These are not all strange interactions but I think it is enough to show that the synergy is not there. This lack of synergy will make the dedicated necro healer not viable.

they need to make shroud flashing builds semi viable in a pvp setting.

give us a way to use our life force in a shroud flashing build.
I think the best way to do this would be through a trait

I’ve posted this before, this is the most healing you can get out of a necro:

sigil of renewal 345 + 0.4 HP

Life from death 522 + 1.5 HP

Transfusion 360 + 0.2 HP

Well of blood AoE 280 + .4 HP

Regeneration 130 + .125 HP

42.5% outgoing healing, 1881 HP
Sigil of transference 10%, Delicious Rice Ball 10%, Sigil of benevelence 12.5%

Sigil of renewal
(1097 base + 466 OHE = 1563)

Life from death
(3344 base + 1422 OHE = 4765)

Transfusion
(736 base + 313 OHE = 1049)

Well of blood
(1032 base + 439 OHE = 1471)

Regeneration
(365 base + 155 OHE = 520)

Totals for Heals per second(40seconds, well of blood):

Regeneration 520 X 40 = 20800

Well of blood: 1471 X 5 = 7355 (I am only counting the ticks for people standing in it and not myself)

Sigil of renewal: (9 second CD = 4 uses) 1563 X 4 = 6252

Life from death: (Lining this up with sigil of renewal, better when used together) 4765 X 4 = 19060

Transfusion: (I am only going to count it once as it is a situation heal) (1049 X 9 = 9441)

Heals per second: 62 908 / 40 = 1573

With Transfusion and Life from Death and the Sigil of renewal, you can AoE spike heal for about 15 000, but the sustained healing is very lacking. It is mostly regeneration if you can keep it permanently up.

Necros are inherently selfish: Self heal is where it is at. I use 66% crit heal food, vampiric rituals, and heal on well bombs. Almost a guaranteed 100% health rate.

Thank you for the responses. The original reason I asked this question is because I’ve been doing very well with healing power in conquest as well as dungeons. I recently face tanked cave troll in AC with minions and was really impressed at the sustainability necro has with a settler’s set for instance.

Since they released the new amulets, I’ve been playing around with mender’s amulet and I feel like it’s even tankier given that you can run sigil of blood on dagger! I love it.

Anyhow the healing has been working for me for a while and I was just curious why it never caught on. With minions it’s been a lot of fun at least in my experience

You mean people actually play base necro without reaper?

Transfusion is amasing, but situational and tied to primary-damage skill. Nice off-heal/reanimator. Terrible main-healing.

As for minion healing, it’s kinda borked. You can solo HoT champs in glass gear without ever dropping below 60%

Personally I’ve been having a blast with my hybrid build. It doesn’t take a huge investment to get good results out of Healing Power for a necro. The necro shows some good utility depending on how you set up.

Depending on your trait set up, every life siphon also heals the players around you. When you pull downed allies to you with shroud 4, you also group heal while still doing damage. Wells heal the group as do marks.

Healing power directly affects you’re heal skills but don’t forget that might also affects Condition Damage along with direct damage.

So my hybrid runs only 300-500 healing power (depending on weapons used) with good results but I’m still looking for my optimum amount. I run runes of strength, Rampage armor (to remove the need for precision sigils), a sigil for increased condi duration, torment and/or might on crit sigils, and of course sigils of force. D/F, D/S or Staff.

Still tweaking this all in and juggling trinkets and such. I’ve been enjoying the fact that I get decent melee, good group support, good condi up-time and and decent survival skills. I’m looking forward to seeing how this comes out.

I dont know but I’ve personally always considered Transfusion to be one of the best WvW healing/rez abilities.

Well give me a good bunker support necro build so i can test it in spvp.

Those I tried lately were subpar versus scrapper/mesmer bunker. With the new shout for ranger, druids got a nice safe rez too.

I played vampiric reaper build lately, condi build and power well build.