Guild Wars 2

I thought it would be helpful to have a thread that discussed some tips and suggestions that other Necromancers have learned that might not be so obvious, or have been overlooked.

Here are a few I’ve learned and use:

Consumable and Food Buffs http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/11i9bj/absolute_must_have_consumables_for_condition/
The condition duration buff is huge, with or without points into Spite.

Focus
I believe this offhand is very often overlooked by Necromancers, especially by conditionmancers in favor of the offhand Dagger. I personally found that I had plenty of bleeds as is, but being able to Epidemic an 8s Chill onto enemies (in addition to whatever else is on the target) is often more powerful than weakness and an extra two stacks of bleed.

Toughness
Even for WvW, Toughness is huge. Since we basically lack any real escape/disengage measures, we have to be able to take the inevitable hits that will occur. I’d greatly recommend getting the 4p Condition/Tough/Prec karma pieces from the Orr zones.

These are good advice, and I’ll add my voice behind them.

In the garrison, we are able to place our marks on the underside of the lord’s room roof and they will trigger on enemies standing up there. I’m assuming the same can be done with wells, but I haven’t tested it since I don’t run with the ground-cast wells trait.

Yes, you can do that and people will melt with 2 wells down, especially when you use scepter 2/5 in conjunction.

I for one sometimes switch to focus for the chill, and regen. Also, I use axe 3 to get a group crit in rotation with scepter 2.

A typical rotation on my scepter/dagger – axe/focus Hybrid build Looks something like this: Start autoattack on scepter, drop scepter 2 (cripples/bleeds), scepter 5 (bleeds), BiP (Bleeds), scepter 4 (sends my bleeds from BiP to them), hit with scepter 1, switch to axe, cripple with 3, followed by 2 wells dropped (corruption, etc), focus 5 (chill), and axe 2. (mix and match, but you can keep cripple/chill up. a bit. Sometimes ill throw in DS 2 to chill, and DS4 to boost damage.

OF course the above is for 1 on 1. for massive groups, I will sometimes swap axe out for staff, and use staff 3 in there to get a group chill, and use aoe like crazy. I haev soloed a 3 on 1 (heh, not one was a mesmer or a guardian) before with the above rotation, and luckily had epidemic up instead of my wells.

Bigger groups will look force me to drop staff 2, 3 (chill), 4 while dropping 2 wells, then switching to scepter and dropping the cripple/scepter 5 combo, all while backing up

If someone ignores me in a fight, which heavies often do, I will burn them down, or force them to use their heals to cleanse. If an enemy cleases my conditions, I will immediately drop the rotation to begin at the beginning, and I will us DS as a time sink if I cannot immediately switch back to scepter weapons to initiate condition burn.

Thanks for the advice, yeah that chill can really add more CC to my build.