Guild Wars 2

Hey, I’m sure there’s plenty of guides and builds available, but I thought I’d share what I’m rolling with as its working well for me! It’s intended for 1v1 and 1vx scenarios, but would work well in small-scale fights as well.

WvW Protection Roamer

This build is very durable owed largely in part to the exceedingly high up-time of protection. It boasts five sources of protection and long duration at that. Unless it is stripped from you, you can have 34s of continuous protection — and if they some how manage to get you below half you add another 18s to that. It has near 100% uptime.

This is a power spec utilizing D/D and staff to further provide survivability via blinds, cc and condi removal. Sigils of Mischief are used to add more blind and chill, and Plague form is used as an ‘OHSH__T’ button (using the pulsing blind you can maintain chill on your opponent making your escape easier).

Other builds will no doubt have more damage, but this set-up is a well-rounded mix of damage and survivability.

I like how it looks, it has good stat distribution but lack ferocity in my opinion.
The main issue with a build like this is necromancers can’t quickly pump out lots of boons to cover up the important stuff (protection, stability, fury) so fighting thieves (who are swarming wvw), mesmers and other necromancers can backfire really bad on you. Imagine giving a thief 20 sec protection, or getting it repeatedly turned to vulnerability.

I would suggest swapping forgeman for runes of the earth, they give more protection duration, the 3rd effect gives a much shorter protection but is on half as long a cooldown so it is not that big of a loss, but more importantly it will give you magnetic aura that reflects projectiles which is very handy since pew pew rangers are also plaguing wvw and necros are weak to long range pew pew.

In my experience sustain for necromancers comes from quickly filling up your life force in combat and lots of snares in form of cripple chill and other disables which are a lot less effective in wvw due to stupid foods making them null and void vs some builds.
This is a huge issue if you also happen to be fighting a competent opponent who will not hit you when you got ghost armor up, which is what seems to be the major life force generator for your build, since you are using off hand dagger which has no l.force generation and are not using soul marks and don’t have gluttony or reaper’s precision.

Even still i like what you made here i will probably get the gear to try it, but will tinker with the stats a bit to get more ferocity probably gona swap something for a few cavalier pieces and some zerker for assassin to make up for the lost precision.

edit: also also spectral wall will not give you protection if you walk through it when you already have protection on you

I tinkerd with the build a bit and made this.
It has 1 more source of protection and twice as much ghost armor and more ways to generate l.force also moar ferocity.
It has a bit less toughness and a lot less health but the 20% l.force pool increase somewhat makes up for the hp. The loss of dagger speed buff is made up by perma swiftness, the only down side is waaaay less chills and no spectral attunement.
Spectral mastery also affects last gasp but the editor seems to ignore that for some reason, and also last gasp can stun break if you are stunned when it triggers.

Revision 1

Here’s how I interpreted your two inputs, kind of mashed the together. There’s Perma-Swiftness from Foste and more Ferocity. Still losing like 4k hp, and ~100 power off the base build, but the Ferocity is up in normal zerk range. Still has Good armor.

I swapped out Wall for Well of Darkness as I was unaware of that protection point. I guess The uptime was so big I didn’t keep track of it

More blind + more chill = more living so that works too. Having a thief steal your protection is pretty terrible, but tbh I really don’t run into it all that often. Maybe its just the server I’m on though.

The original inclusion of Dagger offhand was based on aesthetics mostly, that and the trait, but I agree that those points could be better spent elsewhere.

6/6/0/0/2 Dhuumfire, Krait or Perplexity runes. It’s way too much fun.