Guild Wars 2

I’m not sure why this shows as a Bad Link for me, but if you encounter the same problem copy paste it into the URL and it should work. http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fQEQNBmWDbkRLcvdTbjfPBIp45rjeIsyJTpAe2B;TEBgyyuEcJ5S1liLKhM/I+xWkTIZRrKGkittenYDxrCA

Many of my friends have requested I share my Necromancer build so I’ll describe and explain it here. I’ve got 600+ hours on my necromancer. Let’s get to it!

Stats, Runes, and Sigils

• Power / Vitality / Condition Damage. Power isn’t too important, but it does help. Power will improve your DS damage and mark damage, and it helps take down siege structures, not to mention kill enemies faster. Vitality, on the other hand, is the most important stat for necromancers, because it increases your hps both in and out of DS greatly improving your survivability.

• x2 Rune of Lyssa (10% cond duration), x2 Rune of Grenth (20% frost duration), x2 Rune of Ice (20% frost duration). Hit an enemy with Staff 3, Focus 5, and/or DS 2 to accumulate a high frost duration on your target. Then, if he’s got friendlies nearby, hit him with epidemic. You’ll have 6+ targets frozen for a duration that can exceed 10s. Thieves are one of necromancers’ greatest threats, but frost is one of thieves’ greatest threats. Over 50% of the thieves that jump me immediately regret their decision to engage me. If they’re frozen, it will be difficult for them to escape and maximize their dps.

• Sigil of Force (5% damage) for Staff; Sigil of Earth (60% bleed on critical) for Scepter; Sigil of Corruption (Every kill stacks condition damage) for Warhorn. Sigils are less important than runes, so you can choose whichever ones suit you best. I choose Sigil of Force for increased damage especially for DS skills and Sigil of Earth on scepter for improved single target dps. Sigil of Corruption for the warhorn is going to significantly improve both your single target and group dps. The 10% freeze duration sigil is another good choice to put on a ocus.

Weapons and Skills

• Staff and Scepter/Warhorn. The staff will prove to be the strongest necromancer weapon by far with the trait setup below. As for the other weapons, you may use an axe if you wish, but in my opinion neither the axe or dagger compare to the scepter simply because of their ranges. Maximizing your range, especially on melee professions, is extremely important for survival. The warhorn is mainly for maintaining swiftness with Spectral Walk. You can swap out to a focus if you feel the extra swiftness isn’t necessary for your situation.

• Consume Conditions – It’s got a low cooldown, and being able to both heal yourself and remove conditions with one skill puts the necromancer in the category of “Hard to Kill.” Removing frost, cripple, vulnerability, weakness, bleed, and burning all at the same time while healing yourself should be a no-brainer.

• Spectral Walk – With the traits below, Spectral Walk and Warhorn 5 will grant you infinite swiftness. The traits will also grant Spectral Walk life force on use and a longer time to use Spectral Recall. This is great for running supplies, escaping, and utilizing rambo style distractions.

• Epidemic – Epidemic is extremely powerful in WvW and spreading 10+ seconds of frost to 5 more enemies is incredible.

• Spectral Armor – With the traits, Spectral Armor is granting life force on use, faster cooldown, and longer duration of life force absorb. There will always be a time in WvW when multiple enemies will try to focus you down. Hopefully you’ll be in DS when that happens. When you’re about to drop out of DS, spam that Spectral Armor so that it’s used immediately when DS wears off. You’ll often regain 100% life force allowing you to reenter DS again and absorb a huge chunk of damage. It can buy you enough time to escape and give friendlies a chance to help you.

• Plague – It’s an instant cast stability with incredible buff to stats, most notably the defensive stats (Vitality, Toughness, Armor). When Spectral Armor is on cooldown, DS cooldown is too long to reactivate, or you see an opportunity to tank a group of enemies, pop this baby and use area blind. You’ll become incredibly difficult to kill.

Traits – 0/30/20/0/20

• Curse traits – Toxic Landing (I), Spectral Attunement (X), Lingering Curse (XI). There are so many cliffs in WvW maps, and Toxic Landing allows you to escape many situations down cliffs and can allow you to get around easier. Spectral Attunement is extremely helpful for gaining life force and extends your survivability. Lingering Curse, in combination with pizza type nourishments, will make scepter your best single target dps outside of DS.

• Death Magic traits – Greater Marks (II), Staff Mastery (V). Greater Marks not only makes it easier to hit enemies, but also allows you to hit enemies and siege equipment on hard-to-reach higher grounds such as tower walls and cliff sides. Staff Mastery is going to help regain life force, improve dps, and raise condition uptime.

• Soul Reaping traits – Spectral Mastery (IV), Soul Marks (V). Spectral Mastery is the key to maintaining infinite swiftness with the help of warhorn 5. Soul Marks is the most important necromancer trait in my opinion, because now you have 5 weapon skills that grant life force as opposed to just 1.

This build honestly makes me feel like I’m the most powerful profession in WvW. I can 1v1 almost anyone, and in large groups I’m doing very high damage with Epidemic and incredible utility with frost, high ground marks, and damage absorption. Thanks for reading and feel free to ask questions!

Jaha, this looks like a very fun build! I play my necro with a similar set up, but I like this variation better. I just started to get into WvW and I think I will definitely have to play around with this.

Thanks for the post!

The names we give to builds just get worse and worse haha.
Anyway I have a suggestion for you OP: Spite instead of Curses. See, if you wanna focus on Chilled, surely you prefer + 30% condition duration over +30% condition damage.
But yeah necro’s chills can get pretty brutal haha

I encourage you to put this build into one of the build editors and then link it at the top of your post. Having explanations for why you chose something is good but a lot of people like to be able to ‘see’ the build laid out on a web page and such.

Good job on the build
Madame Moorshade Teknomancer.

I’ve edited the post to include a link to a build generator. Thanks for the suggestion, Teknomancer!

@ Doctor Orderly MD PhD DDS, I’ve experimented with Spite rather than Curses, and it is truly effective. However, I’ve decided that condition duration is hardly a problem especially with Super Veggie Pizzas on hand. The traits in the Spite tree are ok, but I personally like the extra cond damage and utility that the Curse tree provides. An extra 4 seconds and 5% life force for Spectral Walk from Spectral Attunement is certainly a powerful attribute!

FYI- You can’t really hit the enemies with Spinal Shivers if you are using the Warhorn.

@alanis

FYI- You can switch out the Warhorn for a Focus anytime you’re not in combat.

I wouldn’t put Bloodlust sigil in a warhorn. It’s so hard to get killing blows with that weapon. With a necromancer at least.

Okay, direct damage version:
goo.gl/XMxYQ
(FYI, gw2skills links don’t work here because they have a “?” in the url)

This focuses on Axe/focus. Focus gives you a skill called Spinal Shivers, chills for 8.5s on a 16s cooldown. You also get a 30% chance to inflict a 3.5s chill on critical (10s cooldown). That works really well with the Axe, which has a high hit volume (hits frequently). You have a 46% crit chance with your Axe, so that chill will activate frequently. I also took Spectral Grasp, to further keep enemies from fleeing with a pull and a 7.25s chill.

Defense for this build is all about the massive health pool. You get a 27k health pool and tons of life force.

Offense is all about high direct damage. You get high power and tons of good crits (41-46% crit chance, +25% crit multi). You also get +20% damage against foes under 50% health, which means that one or two crits will finish them easily.

Basically, this build offers far better chill application than yours, and damage that is direct rather than condition-based. Single-target damage is better and faster, but you lose out on the epic AoE condition damage from Scepter and Epidemic. Still have decent AoE with staff (which does good direct damage now).

I would change the build name to Frosty the Snowmancer.

Other than that, it definitely looks like an entertaining build. Out of curiosity, are you able to harass larger groups of enemies with hit-and-runs? (obviously not getting kills, but just slowing down group movement)

@Dacromir
I’m very interested in seeing this build you speak of, but unfortunately it says that your link does not exist. There are always sacrifices made in order to transition into a different build, and I’m concerned with what exactly that would be with the one you’ve mentioned. If you can post a different link, I would love to see it.

@Sirge
That build name is quite clever! The build is a bit more spectral than frosty, but it definitely utilizes frost to a high degree.

Hit and run tactics work great. You can rambo from a distance with Spectral Walk, quickly spam all your marks, and then use Spectral Recall to get outta there. Enemies often becomes slightly confused and increasingly cautious. This will most certainly slow them down. Spectral Walk can also be used to run away from battles when you’re low health in order to get out of combat for hps regeneration. Then, you can immediately pop back to the location of battle while regenerating to full hps!

Hell Nirvana.9045 – It doesn’t matter what weapon the sigil is attached to, as long as you get the killing blow with that weapon set (ie: not the staff), it will trigger the sigil. Same applies for all sigils.
Something I would note however, is that you can (and I do, for wvw) is carry a spare weapon with a stacking sigil, build stacks with that, then switch out to your proper weapon with a more directly useful sigil (in this case you could have a rare 80 horn with sigil of bloodlust, and an exotic with a sigil of force, for example).

When I first started playing the Necro I used the focus for the chill also. After awhile I tried dagger, and at first I hated it! But with dagger in your offhand you get to transfer your conditions, and you get three stacks of bleeds, which really adds up. Thing is you don’t really need the focus because with Sceptor you have a cripple + bleed, then pop into DS and chill + bleed, then you have your sceptor chill + bleed off CD again, then go into staff and Bleed them followed by your poisen + chill, then DS again (chill + Bleed), then rinse and repeat. PLUS you have two fears you can use. So you should really have them slowed most of the time anyway? But the dagger allows you to stack a LOT more bleeds and transfer conditions which I prefer. But then again I just like conditions.

None of the links works in the topic discussion. :/ (copy/pasted works!

Is Death really worth having?

Why not go go Spite instead of Death?

@Kuldebar
While it’s true that Spite is probably more effective for offense, there’s a survivability factor that needs to be sacrificed to go Spite instead. It depends on your playstyle. I prefer to use 50% reduced fall damage which is extremely underrated in WvW when properly used. It can be used to bait enemies to follow you so that they suicide or take massive damage. It can allow you to escape from zergs as well. Spite also sacrifices the additional 5% life force on use and effective durations of Spectral Walk and Spectral Armor that come with Spectral Attunement. I suppose you really have to be on top of your game in order to maximize the effectiveness of Spectral Attunement. However, now that I’ve witnessed the difference Spectral Attunement makes in both survivability and mobility, I’m hooked.

Ive been running the same build minus the emphasis on frost (0/30/20/0/20) and its quite effective.

I tried out the runes/sigils you recommended and WOW, does it make a huge difference.

Great build sir.

Jaha.2840:

@Dacromir
I’m very interested in seeing this build you speak of, but unfortunately it says that your link does not exist. There are always sacrifices made in order to transition into a different build, and I’m concerned with what exactly that would be with the one you’ve mentioned. If you can post a different link, I would love to see it.

Fixed.

@ Dacromir

That Spite build looks very good. It certainly takes frost and direct damage to a higher level than mine. My only real complaint is that it sacrifices too much condition damage for direct damage. It gives opponents who have max toughness, if not max vitality AND toughness, a far greater advantage than with the build I’ve posted.

Don’t get me wrong, though. I’m not looking at that Spite build with a mindset of, “What can I find that’s wrong with this build?” I’m looking at both the weakness and the strength that it suggests. My overall conclusion is that while it is a very effective build with higher direct damage and condition duration than the build I’ve posted, it sacrifices too much versatility in comparison mainly because it lacks condition damage.

Thanks for posting it. I had to think pretty hard about what it would be like to play with that build. I was trying to incorporate some of its strengths into mine.

Jaha.2840:

@ Dacromir

That Spite build looks very good. It certainly takes frost and direct damage to a higher level than mine. My only real complaint is that it sacrifices too much condition damage for direct damage. It gives opponents who have max toughness, if not max vitality AND toughness, a far greater advantage than with the build I’ve posted.

Don’t get me wrong, though. I’m not looking at that Spite build with a mindset of, “What can I find that’s wrong with this build?” I’m looking at both the weakness and the strength that it suggests. My overall conclusion is that while it is a very effective build with higher direct damage and condition duration than the build I’ve posted, it sacrifices too much versatility in comparison mainly because it lacks condition damage.

Thanks for posting it. I had to think pretty hard about what it would be like to play with that build. I was trying to incorporate some of its strengths into mine.

Yeah, both direct damage and condition builds have their strengths and weaknesses. Direct damage varies widely in its usefulness. It will absolutely wreck someone with base toughness (dead in seconds), but against someone with high toughness and moderate self-healing, it’s moderately good at best.

In contrast, condition damage is great against most builds, because most people only take one or two condition removal tools. However, some people take really good condition removal, and they will absolutely wreck you. A good anti-condition Guardian, condition-management Necromancer, water Elementalist, or shadow Thief can hard-counter your build so hard that you’ll have virtually no chance at killing them.

I prefer direct damage because there’s nothing that counters it as much as a condition-removal build counters a condition-based build. It takes me a while to kill bunker builds, but I can still kill them. It’s personal preference, but direct damage is more my style.

Change elite to reaper of Grenth? Just to overchill even further.