I personally love how the starting Wraith Masque looks on dark-furred Charr, add the T3 Magus cultural armor, some white/lightish blue or green and you have a spectral battlemage, fits perfectly with the Reaper GS and isn’t the standard grimdark plus hood combo.
This is more for PvP and focuses also on dagger damage, but it’s close to what you’re already doing. Also, as a general rule, this forum’s going to hate on you at least a little bit for posting a build that has signet of vampirism in it – consume conditions is the go-to for almost all necromancer builds.
I greatly enjoy the utility of Spectral Wall and Corrosive Poison Cloud for defending and assaulting points in PvP – both provide damage mitigation for the necro and control/debilitate the enemy. These effectively highlight some of the necro’s area of control and further provide reward for getting up-close and personal (more on the wall than the cloud).
I might swap the well to suffering if you want to stack more vulnerability to increase team damage. The traveler runes are to help rotations and to increase protection uptime. Still not quite sure what I’d do for D/F set sigils.
Aww, the current Flesh Golem needs some love; always looking up to its older (GW1) brother is no good for minion morale. Perhaps a tiara to make it feel like the prettiest princess.
You will need the toughness if you’re going to join up with a zerg at all while in WvW. As for the well, I’d think corruption would be more useful to hate on some boons, especially if you do intend to dive into a zerg, although that’s not really a recommended strategy unless you really know what you’re doing. However, switching the cooldown reduction on blood is power for ground-targeted wells can help you do AoE damage without diving if you like the large-group play.
If you want to take it to smaller scale WvW, I’d swap out the well for another signet, say plague signet to give you a stun break and for the spite of transferring conditions; with the stacks of might you get when activating the signets, spite and plague combined give you a nice condition spike with added condition damage.
The slot skills aren’t showing up for me, but guessing from your traits you’re probably running signet of spite, blood is power, and perhaps one other signet (locust maybe?) to stack up some might. Makes for an interesting direct damage/condition hybrid. Almost no extra toughness, which makes that HP you siphon off easier to knock back down again; you might think about swapping a few armor pieces for knight’s or rabid (depending on whether you want to sacrifice power or condition damage) to make yourself a little harder to kill and making that siphoning more worthwhile.
I, for one, would put as much support as I could behind a hammer necro, if, as suggested, it includes golf-swing-punting jagged horrors at enemies.
About the suggested hammer #5 – if the skill calls for a five-second channel to gain might and then converts it all to regeneration at the end, wouldn’t this be the same as just stacking regeneration during the channel? Or would the active skill skip the conversion, allowing for gratuitous might stacking in lieu of regeneration?
I was originally thinking of doing a more permanent DS-based build, but that makes it more difficult to stack retaliation and protection. However, you could use dagger #5 + axe #3 + spectral armor just before sitting in DS for a little longer if you want to absorb a few more hits.
I’ve only looked a little into deathly perception builds, mostly before my necro hit 80, but I’d think that 90% crit in DS would not feel that much different from 100%. If you use a sigil of accuracy on a weapon, you can make up for the loss of a little precision.
Due to the recent outcry against the nerf bat punishment our class is receiving, I started to theorycraft a build to embody the spirit of the necromancer at this time – a ‘Glutton for Punishment’ build. The idea being, let the community focus their hate on us, focus fire us, and bring themselves down as they realize that we like it.
The following is meant to be a tanky WvW small team build, with an emphasis on finding as many sources of retaliation, protection, and weakness as possible.
I originally played dervish in GW1, loved the idea of using spells and weapon attack skills in melee while still not being the squishiest thing out there. My friend, who had played for much longer than I had, told me about the ranger/necro touch build, and from there I had my first taste of necro skills. For the flavor, I used an axe to make sure my auto-attack got me into melee range and the knife-skin grim cesta was a great touch to the feel. At this point, I decided to actually roll a necro primary, but I didn’t play it too much before GW2 came out.
From launch, I mained an engineer, mostly because the mechanical mayhem that was available. I rolled a necro to try leveling mostly in WvW, but I didn’t get very far until I started reading the forum. I saw the idea of the power necro build, and it returned to me the same sort of feelings I had for the tanky-melee-dps I had going in GW1. So, I started putting more time into my necro. Then I was enlightened as to the unadulterated joy in corrupt boon and running people down with spectral grasp. My happiness was, in that moment, complete.
