Guild Wars 2

Every repair person I talk to makes cautionary mention of bear-wrangling. Of course, one could infer from that the notion that bear-wrangling is unadvisable, but let’s just say I’m the incorrigible type that wants to bear-wrangle just because I shouldn’t… Where can I find this seemingly ubiquitous recreational activity?

Could you rephrase that with more hyperbole and drama, please?

Anecdotally, I experienced a significant increase in damage output switching to a condition build, as described in the “So you want to be a necro” thread on GW2Guru. It has worked well for me, even at a low level.

That thread is worth a read, but to sum it up, go Scepter/Dagger – 2HStaff. Put trait points in Curses, and then Spite, and use Sigils of corruption. Go with Hemophilia and Reaper’s Might for the first trait tier. Use Consume Conditions in your heal slot, and for utilities, Corrosive Poison Cloud, Blood is Power, and Epidemic.

Open with Grasping Dead, followed by Enfeebling Blood and Corrosive Poison Cloud. Make sure you’ve acquired a target, then follow with Blood is Power, then Deathly Swarm, and finally Epidemic. By doing that, you’re crippling, weakening, poisoning, and stacking bleeds in an AoE, and then continuing to stack more bleeds on yourself and your single target. After using Deathly Swarm to transfer conditions to your target, you’ve stacked quite a bit on that single mob, and you’ll want to quickly use Epidemic to spread all those conditions to every other mob in the area before it dies.

When abilities are on CD, spam Blood Curse, and Feast of Corruption (when it’s up)

Do this and watch everything around you melt :-) Obviously this favors groups of enemies over single mobs, but I haven’t noticed a problem using the same rotation for single target. In my experience, this has dealt a TON of damage to mass amounts of mobs at once, which can result in several enemies being angry with you. You MUST dodge a lot, and keep grasping dead up as much as possible to slow the enemies coming for you. Remember to keep distance between you and them, or you’ll die.

Good Luck!

I had a similar issue, finally figured it out. You have to actually have the scabbard picked up (which will change your action bar). In my case trying to swim quickly across the surface of the lake, something hit me HARD (not sure what) and I had to come out of a downed state at the surface (which caused me to drop the scabbard). Not realizing I’d lost it, I ran to the the green area towards the top of the instance, and couldn’t complete until I found where I dropped the scabbard and picked it back up. In my case, it marked the scabbard’s location with a green symbol when I got close to it.