Guild Wars 2

I’ve been pretty optimistic about the Necromancer, but after reading the weird symbols that they’ve chosen to call update notes I must say my two weeks old warrior looks very attractive at the moment.

Agreed. Actually the first word that popped in my mind when I read “new condition blablabla infusion mitigated new condition blablabla” was “ah, radiance…” and it was a horrible idea in lotro. I would like to see how they have implemented it though before I go all doom’n gloomy (I play a necro, it’s pretty doom’n gloomy already :P ).

Awesome video, power necro myself, though I haven’t geared up yet.

What jewelry are you using?

Any 2-handed weapon would do for me to be honest, as that is what we currently lack the most. But pistols? Just…. No….. I’d rather take a 1-handed mace/sword or something.

*Necromancer comes skulking in to your thread* JonPeters can you come to the necromancer forums pretty pleeeeease? ^^ *Necromancer goes Death Shroud and runs away from the evil Rangers*

Swadow.6213:

@Arolas Look at his skills, http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Caladbolg.
Twilight Crash = Illusionary Wave Mesmer
Maelstorm Strike = Whirling Wrath Guardian
Electrolyze = Chain Lightning Elementalist
Skyfall = Backbreaker Warrior

Necromancers have no access to anything like those so… not only is he a Guardian/Mesmer but a Guardian/Mesmer/Warrior/Elementalist

Hehe I see where your’e going, but I still disagree as these are skills related to the weapon, not him being a warrior, elementalist or guardian. If you get what I mean… Our skills are related to the weapon not the class, so this, in my opinion, doesn’t say that he is anything else than a necromancer.

Very interesting and good videos Nemesis! Gave me a lot of pointers when I started to go into the PvP aspect of the game
I’m running a bunker build at the moment that I’ve fallen in love with, using staff and axe/focus and playing around with different wells and boon corruptions/condition removals. The main difference between your build and mine as far as I can see is that I got around 2k thoughness, while you got just below 1k! The blind well makes up for it though of course. I don’t have any crit on the other hand, think I got like 4% or something :P But it seems to be working for me!

+1!

I don’t usually kite thieves. I run a bunker build (2kish toughness, 2kish vitality and 2k+ power) with well of power, signet of spite and corrupt boon. For weapons I use staff and axe/focus (I have been thinking of trying out warhorn instead of focus though), and I trait so that I get a reflective boon (reflectes damage back at the attacker) everytime I heal/enter deathshroud. Combine that with axe 3 and your’e looking at roughly 10 seconds with reflection. This rocks against high burst classes like thieves. The way I use Death Shroud is when I get jumped I go in and out if it, hit axe 3 and press my heal. It’s important to get as much out of the reflection as possible. If he stealths I either drop the well at my feet, dodge when I think he is going to jump out again or hit Death Shroud if I have life force (which is why I try to just jump in and out of it, I’m not always near a good and fast supply of life force so I have to make do with what I have) to absorb the incoming burst (hopefully I still have some reflection up still!). The rest of the fight involves just trying to get him down using the well, not allowing him to buff himself up, and not allow him to debuff me too much (you will get one and the other eventually, as they’re bound to be on cooldown some time) and using axe 2 whenever it’s up. I’m hitting 3k with this all the time so it’s not that bad in my opinion.

And RhysSebastian.7651s suggestion also works pretty good, interrupt his bursts, try to gain distance and stay mobile.

Hope this helps

They are stubborn players that play their class through bad times! Actually in all seriousness, I find that most necro players are better players alround than say the average mesmer/thief. This could be because they seek challenge and ways to improve themselves (not that easy with a bunch of malfunctioning traits, I know!), which in turn breeds better players.

And as mentioned by Dispari.3980; they complain a lot.

Swadow.6213:

Trahearne might have been a Necromancer, but he switched classes when he got that sword and became a Mesmer/Guardian. I guess someone forgot to told him that there are no secondary classes in GW2.

Where did you find this information? If there is source saying he actually became a sudden FOTMer (the kitten!) can you provide me the link? No offence here of course, I just like to deal with facts instead of fiction
Here is the link to wiki site, note that he is not described as anything else than a necromancer and a Marshall (which is a title).
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Trahearne

Edit: pardon my spelling mistakes, I’m on my iPhone at the moment :P)

Where did I say that Trahearne is a necromancer from the skilles he used?
From the GW2wiki: “Trahearne is a firstborn sylvari Necromancer…” dumdumdum.

The stack limit is a bummer on most end-game dynamic events, where it involves killing one big boss for example. Those bleeds stacks pretty fast and we usually fall a little behind before the stack reaches the max limit. The way you can see if you are contributing a lot or not is to notice if your bleeds ticks of very fast, very slow or somewhere in the middle (I usually end up on the very slow end of the scale depending on the other professions that are present). If it ticks very fast, like the numbers are flying off the screen, you could guess that you are contributing with at least 10+ of those bleeds, if it goes very slow then it usually isn’t more than 5ish bleeds from you there. So either something needs to be done so we can be viable bursters (outside of DS), or we need a damaging condition of our own like a disease or something that can increase in power over time, i.e you apply the disease and at first it isn’t that powerful, but the longer it stays, the more damage it does. This could help on tough bosses that takes a long time to kill.

/signed
I think Greatswords would fit very nice to the necromancer. To be honest, whenever I think of a beeing that deals with death I usually think of vampires, undead knights etc. and they usually have some pretty beasty big weapons. We currently only have one weapon that’s made for melee (dagger), and we’re missing in the two handed weapon section. Mesmers got it, elementalist kinda got it (elite skill), but that doesn’t count as a permanent weapon of course ^^, so I don’t see a reason to why we shouldn’t get something big and nasty that we can reap death with. At the moment I feel that I want something more with my necro (and it’s not bleeds!), a Greatsword that could incorporate some big hitters on a long cooldown and some boons (which we lack as well if you look away from the short duration boons from DS) would complete the class perfectly. And for goodness sake, make the greatsword have a gloomy, scary effect, like a green putrid smoke or something ^^
And to those saying scholars shouldn’t wear Greatswords, Trahearne comes to mind (and he is a necromancer)…

But first, fix the bugs of course.

Got a loooong playlist with different songs from “Within Temptation”, nothing beats a little gothic rock! And when I do something epish, “Jillian (I’d give my heart)” fits for every occation.

I got to agree that this is mainly a l2p issue. Yes, the necro falls severely behind when it comes to what other classes can perform, but that doesn’t mean we suck if played correcly. I fear that if we get buffed too much before all the bugs and errors are fixed, we will become just another faceroll class. This is what I love about the necromancer, if you’re going to be good at it you simply can’t faceroll it, you have to think and use your utilities and skills to their absolute best. DS is awesome for boon/condition application and to soak up damage from Bull’s Rush + 100 Blades faceroll warriors for example, Axe 3 + in-out of DS + a healing skill (provided you have the traits) will give around 10 secs with reflective damage, which is awesome against warriors, thieves and other bursters and our boon and condition convertions are mind-blowing against professions that uses a lot of conditions/boons. The choices are vast. It really isn’t as bad as many would make it out to be. With that said, I can’t speak for PvE as I’ve only been 80 for a day.

Depending on my build, I either run Well of Blood or Consume Conditions. I can’t actually remember when I last used my blood fiend, it’s just bad overall in my opinion… The thing I dislike the most about it is that it’s a pet, and pets can be killed. So if you’re unlucky, your heal is dead when you need it. I’d rather run with something reliable that I know is available to me whenever I need it.

+1
In my opinion I think all the complaints about necros are a little bit exaggurated, if you play it right you can be a big asset in parties. My necro is 65 atm, reason I’m not 80 is because I’ve been playing sPvP for the majority of the time, and if I play my necro right I’m owning everyone except very very good players (not thieves and mesmers in particular, one of my most hated classes in 1v1s is engineers). I think we should give our dev a break, the game hasn’t been out long and I think it is a bit naive to believe that everything is going to be perfect this early. As the devs have said earlier, they will work on balancing issues when they have let the meta game stabilize, a very wise thing to do in my opinion. If they give in to everyones demands about buffing the necro, I believe we will become OP. We need some adjustments here and there, but I’m very sure the dev team knows this aswell. So I suggest all the ones that are complaining/are going to complain to make it as unpersonalized and constructive as possible if they are going to complain. If I were a dev reading the forums, the first thing I would do would be to ignore posts like “OMG Y NO MOAR DPS”, “u suck ANet, fix class naow”, “I uninstalled the game, my necro doesnt one-shoot” etc etc. Then I would move on to posts that look a bit more constructive and may give me some objective feedback. So have faith everyone, it isn’t as doomy ’n gloomy as many would have it.

This is my current PvP setup (ish, I’m not on the gaming puter atm so I’m not 100% sure on the traits, but most are correct)
http://tinyurl.com/c6rxveb

I have gone for direct damage instead of the condition damage trend that seems to be going on. This is mainly because it seems to be a lot of players that’s having an anti-condition build atm, so I have gone for a high power(2.4k) and relatively high survivability build(1.8k toughness, 1.6k vitality). I used to go for a more squishy condition based build, but found myself dying more than I liked and not really doing the damage I wanted (but we are playing a necromancer though, I guess we can debate if we can ever do the damage we want in PvP compared to the other classes :P ).
I use an axe because of the vulnerability condition applied from auto-attacks and the retaliation boon from Unholy Feat. I also have a couple of traits that gives me retaliation for a few secs when I enter death shroud and use my heal, so I can get a fair few seconds of retaliation that are doing wonders on high burst damage classes like thieves and rangers. I also have a rune that gives me power when I swap to the axe in combat (I always start with the staff, unloading the marks first before I swap). So my build envolves a lot of weapon swapping and stance dancing. I feel that I can pack a decent punch (I’m doing 3k on Claws on average, did a 5k the other day, not great, but hey, I take what I can get), and can also take a decent amount of beating. I’m not quite satisfied with my build just yet, going to test a few runes on the off-hand, maybe try a different starter weapon set instead of staff, try some different armor runes etc. But overall I think this is a fun build to play around with