Guild Wars 2

OK guys, this is my first post on these forums, so bare with me.

This is a build I use for WvW mostly, but is also viable in PvE and sPVP with a few skill changes.

As with all Chillomancer builds this one is centered around the Chill debuff, which for me is one of the greatest in the game for all purposes. 66% slower movement speed and 66% higher skill cooldown – enough said. It may be the single most OP condition in the game as of right now.

As Necros we are blessed with a variety of ways to stack Chill on a target and more importantly to transfer this condition to others in AoE with Epidemic. In WvW this is so awesome that the first time I Chilled a target in a zerg and hit Epidemic I felt tears of joy running down my cheeks. Literally. There’s nothing more deadly to an enemy zerg than a Chillomancer.

So without further ado – here’s my build:

http://ow.ly/fzIQp

Let me explain it’s main ideas. It is centered around Chill, so it has all Chill inducing skills & effects possible -

1. Chillblains (Staff 3 skill)
2. Spinal Shivers (Scepter & Focus 5 skill)
3. Spectral Grasp
4. Dark Path (Death Shroud skill 2)
5. Chilling Wind (Lich Form skill 3)
6. Chill of Death (Trait X from the Spite tree)
7. Two Sigils of Hydromancy on each of the weapon set

Many Chillomancers use the Chilling Darkness from the Curses line to get even more Chill. I don’t like it. I don’t find we Necros have great ways to constantly apply Blind to get the Chill and 1 sec. duration even when with 100% frozen duration increase is very small.

However, this is personal taste. You may find it a worthwhile trait, especially combined with Well of Darkness. I don’t like wells very much, even though they have good synergy with a Power build (which mine is). Again my personal taste.

Now for some explanation of the skills. I find Spectral Grasp very useful to apply Chill AND pull back running foes in WvW (especially after the recent patch, which made it a lot more usable). It’s great for pulling people from walls in sieges too. A must skill for me.

Epidemic is the primary and only way to transfer your stacks of Chill from a single target to all around in a pretty good radius (I think 240). It has low cooldown, especially when traited for it, as I’ve done in this build. Again a must have.

Spectral Walk is a no-brainer. Swiftness is life in WvW. Without it you are a sitting duck. It’s even better when traited for, as I’ve done.

Lich Form increases your HP pool and gives you another source of Chill. Good when dealing with a lot of DPS coming your way or when you need time for skills cooldown. Also the auto-attack hits like a truck in a Power build.

Now to one of the main differences between this build and most other Chillomancer and Conditiomancer builds – it doesn’t rely on precision. I find it we don’t need to rely on criticals to apply our conditions as most other classes. Actually only Barbed Precision applies Bleed on crit. Most everything else is skill based.

Additionally there’s no armor & jewel set combining Prec/Vit or Tough/Cond. Dmg. So being a Power/Cond Dmg has great synergy with the Carrion set and Chrysocola jewels, which I’m using to stack Vit. I personally like Vit more for Necro, as it increases our Death Shroud bar too.

Let’s talk about my build’s traits. As you can see I’ve put 30 in Spite to get Spiteful Talisman (20% reduction on Focus skills for faster Chills), Chill of Death (for even more Chill) and Close to Death (for more DPS and semi-burst at the end of fights). This also gives me 300 more Power and 30% increased condition duration (which is a must in this build as you’ll see below).

I’ve put only 10 in Curses to get Hemophilia as 20% longer Bleed duration also has good synergy with the rest of the build. I loose 200 Condition Damage without putting 30 in this trait line, but I think there are better alternatives and even without it my Bleeds do a respectable ~80 dps (since the armor & jewel set combine for a total of ~ 700 cond. damage).

I’ve also put 20 in Death Magic. This allows me to get Greater Marks and Staff Mastery. Easier & faster Chills is all this build is about. Plus this gives 200 Toughness, which put my armor at a shade over 2000 at lvl 80, which is respectable.

Finally I’ve put 10 points into Soul Reaping. From this I get the only small trait in the build which is good – Gluttony (faster Death Shroud means faster Chill from the Dark Path skill and greater survivability). It also allows me to get Spectral Mastery. This trait alone not only allows me to get Swiftness for 30 sec. on only 48 sec. cooldown, but also reduces the cooldown of Spectral Grasp from 30 to 24 sec. And faster Chill is always welcome in this build

As for the equipment – as I said before I use Carrion set with Carrion weapons and Chrysocola jewels. Here’s the place to mention the runes, which are the bread and butter of this build. I use 2 X Superior Rune of Lyssa for +10% condition duration, 2 X Superior Rune of the Mad King for another 10% condi duration and 2 X Superior Rune of Ice for +20 Frozen duration (alternatively you can use 2 X runes of Sanctuary or 2 X runes of Svanir depending on preference/price). This combined with the Hemophilia trait and the 20 point in the Spite line gives me +70% Frozen duration and +70% bleed duration. Combined with Rare Veggie Pizza you get a shade over +100% duration on both conditions and 90% duration on all other conditions you can apply like immobilize, vulnerability, etc.

With all this when I hit a single target with all my Chill skills I get a stack of around 30-34 sec. of Chill. Ladies and gentlemen, I rest my case.

So what all this comes down to? Here’s a little rundown.

This build is great for:
- stacking Chill on a target, preventing them from escaping and crippling their skill rotations
- AoE Chilling whole zergs to make them easy prey for your DPS teammates.
- Good (not great) condition stacking on targets
- Good (not great) “white” damage
- Great survivability. Between the Large HP pool (~ 24k with full Carrion exotics), the Death Shroud and the Lich Form you have a total of around 40k hp pool to throw at DPSers while you Chill them to death. I’ve routinely took on 2-3 people in WvW and survived to tell the tale.
- A good source of stability through Lich Form
- Slowing incoming dps from bosses and mobs in PvE. What is cool is that most bosses are almost immune to Blind and CC, but not to Chill. This slows them for safer kiting and slows the use of their skills a lot. Only the ones who have very fast cond. removal are a nuisance, but with som many sources of Chill even they are not a problem.
- Great range – using scepter and staff is as good as it gets for a range Necro.
- Overall I’ll give this build a 9.5/10 for WvW and 9/10 for PvE. for sPVP it will need a a little bit of tweaking, but is still viable in its current form.

What this build is bad at:
- No burst whatsoever
- Average-to-low DPS. You can still kill, but you are not “The Killer”. You leave this job to other in your group. Still, in a 1v1 and 1v2 situations it may be a slugfest, but I usually come out the winner.
- This is a high maintenance build. What I mean by this is you should constantly rotate your Chill skills, constantly swap weapons for the sigil procs, change between Death Shroud and normal form, etc. If you want a more relaxed playstyle, this is not for you.
- Higher “out of the box” price – without runes, sigils and exotic equipment the viability of this build is reduced considerably.

As a whole this is a mightily fun build I must say. I can’t take the credit for its conception of course – it is just a mixture of different Chillomancer and Conditiomancer builds available around these forums. However, I think this particular iteration has a very high synergy between its traits and skills and offers one of the most complete and viable ways to play a Necromancer (mostly since all traits and skills used are one of the few that are NOT bugged

Please try this build and feel free to comment. All thoughts, ideas and recommendations will be appreciated.

P.S. Sorry for the long text everyone. However, as the people say – no pain, no gain

Thanks for the post, Argylas. I run nearly an identical build and have a complete blast. I am surprised you don’t take Chilling Darkness trait. I guess it makes sense since you are taking Lich Form. I take Plague Form with Chilling Darkness. Chill for one second sounds bleh, but applying blind every second with plague form so… I love it for WvW. When the group needs to push, I quickly flip to plague and move in.

I agree on the overall DPS, it is not amazing. I love my build though, and feel that it helps turn the tide in most battles.

Thanks for the post, and I agree that chill is awesome. Now lets wait for them to nerf it haha.

Wow, so many hours of theory-crafting and testing this build and I never thought of combining Chilling Darkness with Plague. It’s never late to learn something new I guess Thanks for the heads up Kheldar. I’ll definitely give it a try.

Kheldar.6278:

I am surprised you don’t take Chilling Darkness trait. I guess it makes sense since you are taking Lich Form. I take Plague Form with Chilling Darkness. Chill for one second sounds bleh, but applying blind every second with plague form so… I love it for WvW. When the group needs to push, I quickly flip to plague and move in.

Chilling Darkness doesn’t work with Plague.

alanis.6094:

Kheldar.6278:

I am surprised you don’t take Chilling Darkness trait. I guess it makes sense since you are taking Lich Form. I take Plague Form with Chilling Darkness. Chill for one second sounds bleh, but applying blind every second with plague form so… I love it for WvW. When the group needs to push, I quickly flip to plague and move in.

Chilling Darkness doesn’t work with Plague.

Really? I learned something new too, haha. I guess I just assumed it did. Oh well, I still take plague for the constant blind. Thanks, Alanis.

Tried chillomancer. It was a good idea until I came to find that opponents spamming weapon 1 skill is what it takes to defeat you. At least they move slowly most of the time.

I’d imagine that chillomancer’s more valuable in a group than solo. If your buddies can use all their abilities and several enemies can only spam 1 from a distance, I’d call that a pretty lopsided fight.

Why do you use 2 x Rune of Baltahzar? (15% increase burn duration) ? I guess thats a miss click and should be another rune? We Necro realy dont need to increas “our” burns

The Balthazar Rune is put in place of Superior Rune of the Mad King used in the build, as the skill calculator is not updated with it. They both give + power, but the Rune of Mad King gives +10 Condition duration instead of the 15% burn duration.

Nice build! I’m not a fan of chillmancer, only because I don’t like the playing still, but it still an efficient build!

The issue I have with it, is it doesn’t seem to affect Thief a lot (Longer cooldown? What cooldown?). And since half the people I fight in PvP are thief, I have to spec for it.

I was wondering, you said you were specced for epidemic to be short cooldown. I don’t see it in the build, is it a mistake or I am missing something? :P

Good post!

@Kardiamond – You are right, I erroneously thought that Epidemic was a Spectral ability and Spectral Mastery affected it. Sorry about this. Anyway 15 sec. cooldown is still pretty low and I’ve been able to use it twice in one fight numerous times.

About Thieves – the other night me and two gildies of mine (an Engie and a second Necro) were roaming in WvW and were ambushed by 3 Thieves. We were able to take them out in about 15 secs. They tried two more times afterwards, specifically searching us out for revenge. Let’s just say they probably smashed their keyboards out of frustration.

But boasting aside, thieves are not such a problem with this build. True, Chill doesn’t stop them from spamming Heartseeker or what have you. However, it SLOWS them. And this is their death. Their burst can’t kill you completely because of your high Vitality and respectable Toughness. Especially if you have good reflexes and enter DS to soak up the damage immediately when you notice you are being attacked. Afterwards you just stack Chill on them and begin your DPS rotation. Most of the time they are usually such glass-canons that they can’t stand more than 7-8 seconds of punishment and try to stealth themselves and run. Then is the perfect time to use all available marks from your Staff if available. The Chill slows them so much that they can’t run far away when stealthed and the marks get them. The end results is a dead thief pops out of stealth in a couple of seconds

is there a way to run a chill build with axe/focus and stafff? im not a big fan of condition dmg.

Tateguy.7485:

is there a way to run a chill build with axe/focus and stafff? im not a big fan of condition dmg.

Ascii has a good one…https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/Post-Your-Build-Thread/first#post275467

He made a thread too but I can’t find it right now.

I wouldnt break my hump for an extra 20-30% duration, food (40) + spite (30) gets you far enough imo since fractions count with non-damage conditions. Food is by far the best way to get duration, since it takes away massively from any other source (except spite) to get each %, just not worth it.

so someone mentioned in a diff thread about spite line condi duration not stacking with hemo – that it (the game) would use the higher of the 2 (in this case the 30% from the spite line). is this, in face, true? if so then i guess swapping to chill on blind would be better way to go?

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/Max-Confusion-Duration/first#post1348753

No I’m pretty sure it stacks (you can test it in Heart of the Mists if in doubt), but it’s capped at +100% duration, so people using +bleeding duration gear can exceed that.
However, the +33% from Lingering Curse is special in that it can take you over the +100% cap.
No idea how that interacts with +duration from food, whether that’s still subject to the +100% cap. Never tested with food.