Guild Wars 2

It doesn’t ‘quad your power’. It triples it. It also only doubles your precision. The problem with this is that the trade-off is that you get an awful skill-set and a very slow auto attack. The precision buff is negligible because on pretty much any zerker build you won’t need the extra precision. Just throwing one build out, 30/25/0/0/15 will do way more dps auto attacking with the dagger than done auto attacking with lich form.

Even 30/10/0/0/30 would rather not be in lich form because that build’s damage comes from Death Shroud, which gives them +50% crit chance anyway. For conditions—that speaks for itself. You gain no benefit from Lich Form here whatsoever. Tell me, what build is Lich Form good with, exactly?

edit: Not only is it only 3x power and 2x precision, but the base values for these stats are what are multiplied, making it even less useful.

With most builds Lich Form will have you do less dps than you would do while outside of it, so it’s kind of a waste. Yeah, the horrors are good for drawing attention away from you in PvE, I guess, but that’s about it. I’d rather just keep Flesh Golem for the extra little bit of constant dps, aswell as a CC on demand that can hit multiple targets if I need it. Plague’s also a decent panic button if you need that kind of thing. Both are better than Lich, imo.

Again, agreeing with Lily here. I don’t mean to be offensive here, but I don’t know what tier of WvW you’re in, but in anything decently high the Wurm will probably easily be killed, either intentionally or unintentionally. I don’t play WvW much, but whenever I do and I -try- to use the Wurm, it never works the way I want it to. Here’s the problem. It’s a 1200 range teleport. So, in a zerg vs zerg situation, this is kind of useless, because being 1200 yards away from something like that will mean that you’re still in harm’s way, especially since every other class has more mobility than us. If they want you dead, the wurm teleport won’t stop this.

Okay, let’s assume you’re roaming. It’s not even very useful here. You’re tethered by its range if you keep it out. You -have- to stay within 1200 range of it or else your escape is gone. My biggest problem with it is that it’s a teleport tethered to a mob that you have to be in 1200 range of—that also has to stay alive for when you want to make use of it that also has an underwhelming cooldown. I saw your videos, and the people you fought against were honestly a joke. Note—I’m not saying the Wurm is completely bad, but it’s pretty bad and it won’t work often. Maybe once in a while, but no often.

Also…Spectral Walk does not make you tankier. Spectral Armor does. I don’t know if you run both of these at the same time, if you do, I suppose using both and using Death Shroud would make you pretty tanky, yes. But that’s 2/3 of your utility being used on lackluster skills. Vouch for either all you want, but I’d rather not use things with effects like that that have 1 minute cooldowns. You have skills like Blood is Power, -any- of the Wells, Epidemic, some signets, Spectral Wall if you’re into that kind of thing, and others I’m probably forgetting. Would you really pick Spectral Walk/Armor over these? And furthermore, would you really pick -Flesh Wurm- over these? I certainly wouldn’t, just for the sake of being able to say I have some mobility. I use that term loosely when concerning those skills.

The problem with posting a video for something like this is that it’s one event. Just because in one particular fight, in your particular tier, you cannot say that all players don’t target the wurm, or that spectral walk is the best thing ever and both are on par with Blink.

I’ll end with this. Even if you think these skills are fine for mobility, I’ll bring up something I said earlier in this post. Do you think they’re worth picking over the other skills we have at our disposal? You sacrifice a lot by choosing one of those skills, and I can’t imagine what would make any of them worth it. In any scenario, all I see is you losing damage. Damage that already has to be sacrificed for a reasonable degree of tankiness with your gear in a situation like WvW or even PvP so you don’t get completely trampled.

Lily.1935:

MethaneGas.8357:

Lily.1935:

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How do those videos of WvW relate to PvE where enemies will kill any flesh wurm you spawn, especially in Fractals or dungeons? How does showing me one player who knows what they are doing against a group of players who don’t show me anything? Am I supposed to be impressed by a competent player? How does this fix the multiple aoe attacks that hit over 1,200 range in all directions? How does this change that I can’t fear or immobilize many of them? How does this fix the 5 enemy limit on the Spectral wall? How does this make the nerf any better? Answer? it doesn’t.

Agreed @ Lily. The problem with Flesh Wurm, Spectal Walk, and Dark Path isn’t that they don’t work at all, that’s not what most of us are saying. The problem is that they only work in very few situations, which isn’t how mobility should be. The stars shouldn’t have to align just for us to be able to pull off what every other class in the game can do easily. With Flesh Wurm, we have to worry about if the enemy is competent enough to kill it off, or if it won’t get killed by stray AoE, or by anything in general, really. And after that, we have to worry about if the place we teleport to when using the Wurm is still safe. We have no way of knowing if the area we placed our Wurm at is even still a viable area to escape to since we have no vision of it. What if enemies swarm the area where it’s at? What if someone simply -waits- there? There are too many scenarios that can go wrong with the Wurm, that makes it radically different from a blink, in which you teleport, and you know where you’re teleporting to, and it doesn’t rely on a fragile creature being at the position you want to be at.

For Spectral Walk—same deal, different scenarios that need to be accounted for. The biggest thing about SW is that you have to move to put it to use you have to actually move yourself, and therein lies the problem. What if you get immobilized? What if you get stunned—or, to shorten this list, what if you get CC’d at all? Not to mention, the threshold you have to use Spectral Walk is very small, even when traited for. And you probably don’t want to trait for it in the first place. Dark Path has a longer list of “what-ifs” than the other two, making it even more situational.

You might say that these are all just “what-ifs” and that they might not even happen. But none of those things are anything uncommon. A lot of people pack CC in WvW and PvP. Most people know very well what the Flesh Wurm is and will destroy it if it’s put down. It’s not like it’s tanky enough to take punishment either, and it’s not like it does any amount of damage that’d make anyone weary of it. To be honest, the only time I’ve ever found our “mobility” skills useful are Spectral Walk for quickly going back to where I was if I make a mistake in jumping puzzles, and Flesh Wurm in a solo fight against GL, where the teleport can actually get me out of his cage and it probably won’t be stopped. I’ve only ever used Dark Path for a quick extra chill to help me kite, but there are a number of other things that can do this.

Thieves’ sword attacks cleave. So if they give us sword it’s not like cleave would be out of the question—unless of course, they simply don’t want us to have cleave.

With what little WvW I do play, I didn’t find the stability necessary on Necro. Then again, my playstyle is killing the opponent before they have a chance to really do anything/CC me, etc. Regardless, the only stability I can think of on our class is via foot in the grave. I wouldn’t take this under any circumstances, because, well…if you’re investing that far in Soul Reaping, you’d probably want Deathly Perception at that point. Furthermore, you probably don’t even want to go that far into SR, especially not in WvW since it’s already a lackluster tree (imo). I mean, I guess we can also use Well of Power to convert a condition into stability, but that’s not reliable at all.

I know what you mean, that’s part of the reason why I switched to hybrid in PvE. Though berserker’s the best in terms of efficiency, it’s really boring to play. Hopefully you found my advice helpful, and hopefully you enjoy whatever you end up doing with your Necro.

Well, let’s start from the top!

I’m a bit biased towards how effective minion master can be, as I personally don’t think it hasn’t been and still isn’t viable (yet). Looking at the build in the first link, starting with the traits, they seem to mostly be in order. Personally, I’d remove 5 from death magic and the 10 from curses and put 15 into spite. From there you could choose spiteful talisman or reaper’s might, depending on your play-style. Or, you could remove another 5 from death magic and put 20 into spite, giving you 20/0/20/30/0. This’ll allow you to fit in Training of the Master aswell, and the power gained from your traits will probably be more than what you’d get from deadly strength anyway. The weapons—the staff is good here. Scepter/Focus isn’t a legit combo though, and furthermore, since Deadly Strength is giving you power inherently, there’s no reason to try and use a condition based weapon set, and you kind of touched upon this yourself. I’d use dagger/focus or dagger/warhorn, but if you pick warhorn, be sure to choose reaper’s might in your spite line. Oh, right…for gear here, since you don’t want to focus on conditions here, you’d be best with berserker if you choose to go 20/0/20/30/0 or Cavalier where applicable with 15/0/25/30/0.

Second build! I’ve seen this—I’ve used it, in fact. In my opinion, it’s Necro’s best build for PvE currently. Personally, I took dagger/warhorn but used axe/focus on for my alternate weapon for quick vulnerability stacking and Axe #2 when the situation was available for such things, which allowed for bigger hits. Everything else there is in order.

The last one I can’t give you much advice for, since I don’t really WvW and almost strictly PvE. I can tell you, however, that if you choose to go hybrid, the only real route, trait-wise, would be to go 30/30/0/0/10. Funnily enough, I use a hybrid build currently for PvE. I don’t know how well this’d translate to WvW, but I have all rampager armor, celestial trinkets, rabid scepter/dagger, and berserker axe/focus, along with full divinity runes.

Anyway, I feel like I left things out there, but those are my opinions/suggestions. Feel free to inquire further.

Even at lower levels, you’ll do a lot more damage focusing on either conditions or damage than you will using minions. At least, this was my experience while leveling my Necromancer, and for later levels, they’re definitely outclassed. Limiting people to 1 minion would not only not make sense, but it would interfere with traits and builds. There are traits that give you more per minion you have out IIRC.

As for nerfing the minions themselves…I strongly disagree. If anything, they need to be buffed (barring the flesh golem). They’re also extremely frail. And I agree with Bhawb. A UI for them would be all that’s needed. They’re not as important a part of the class as you think, unless you’re expressly going for Minion Master, which is fine and dandy if that’s what you’re into, but very few people do that seriously.

I wasn’t referring to Soul Marks, really. I don’t know, maybe the life force generation with a scepter/x and soul marks is decent to you, but to me it’s more along the lines of something using dagger/x and axe/x. The life force generation from the dagger auto attack and axe 2 is a lot better than anything a staff and scepter could manage, especially when you factor in gluttony, which I’m unsure stacks with soul marks or not.

Lily.1935:

SolemnMalevolence.5248:

Part of me wants us to get access to pistols so I can feel like Dante. But more than anything I’d probably want greatsword. I mean, hey, Trahearne gets to use it. Sadly, I doubt that’ll happen either. I’m most likely anticipating sword out of every existing weapon.

Dante isn’t a necromancer o.O

I know. But our skills…the non condition-based ones anyway, tend to be dark and demonic in nature the same way his are. Like, Axe 2 sort of reminds me of Trillion Stabs. Focus 4 reminds me of that ricochet bullet from Ebony and Ivory, and so on and so forth. :P

Part of me wants us to get access to pistols so I can feel like Dante. But more than anything I’d probably want greatsword. I mean, hey, Trahearne gets to use it. Sadly, I doubt that’ll happen either. I’m most likely anticipating sword out of every existing weapon.

Lily.1935:

If there is one thing I’ve learned about arena net from GW1. Its that they are far from flawless. Many changes they have made to professions in the first game where meant to “Nerf” builds that made them even stronger or things they did to “Buff” builds made them weaker. So when they say the change they did was to fix the problems we where having by buffing other parts while nerfing this was a “buff” I have to take it with a grain of salt.

just because you have escaped form a situation using the necromancer’s teleport skills doesn’t make them good. I’ve escaped using dark path before and I do it quite frequently. But that is because I have no other real option to do that. I’ve successfully escaped more often with the engineer’s acid bomb, the guardian’s Line of Warding, or the mesmer’s blink. And my necro has a good 500 hours at least on each of them. Also considering the fact that other professions have far more access to abilities to escape then we do and they are far more successful says a lot.

I think a good chunk of us are in agreement though, that the necromancer’s defenses are seriously lacking in a tone of areas and this nerf done to us a while back has only made it worse.

Agreed. Though, ArenaNet seems intent on making us based on attrition or sustain or something of the lack, rather than being able to escape from situations. Which is swell—actually, that style of fighting is rather appealing to me. But they’ve done nothing to make it possible. Lifesteal is a complete joke, even with the recent tweaks to blood-magic, so that’s out of the window. Death Shroud is only manageable (decently) with one build, and even that has its limitations, such as cruddy life force regeneration at range, or the fact that Death Shroud isn’t even a reliable way to survive since blows overflow to our actual health pool.

Your first paragraph sums things up pretty nicely. Everything they’ve done, in regards to Necro anyway, to promote build diversity has just shown us that we have very few things that are viable.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

As an aside, a necro running Scepter/Dagger, Spectral Wall, and Bone Fiend with Dhuumfire can apply every condition in the game. Surprising reliability on it too.

Why do you need Spectal Wall? We have an inherent fear in the form of Death Shroud skill 3. Bone Fiend…that immobilizes, right? Death Shroud 5 does that too.

Using a dagger and a warhorn, with 30/25/0/0/15 you’ll do more damage with the dagger auto-attack in most groups than you will with conditions. Granted, this is all (for the most part) single-target damage. Condition specs are way better with AoE, but for most bosses you’ll lag behind.

I honestly don’t think we’re the ‘masters of conditions’ as far as applying them goes. Though, I’m almost certain we have more ways to pass conditions onto foes and outright get rid of them to benefit us (consume conditions) than any other classes, so there’s that. I also don’t use a condition-based build on my Necromancer. Well…not entirely. I play hybrid.

But, anyway. Though mobility in PvE isn’t entirely important, sometimes it’s needed. Lupi, for example (depending on how you’re fighting him anyway). WvW and PvP is another story entirely, where it’s key for survival. And it’s something we lack, and it’s something that a lot of people have the right to be upset about when every other class has something that’s at least decent.

As a side note…Necromancers deal more damage directly than they can with conditions, when built properly.

Lily.1935:

MethaneGas.8357:

Lily.1935:

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1. Read again what I said. I didn’t say we didn’t have teleports. I said we didn’t have any that could get us out in a pinch. Which is a big difference. Spectral walk is good and all, but when you are running away its secondary effect to teleport you back isn’t an option. If you can time it right with jumping off cliffs it could be good. But that is also assuming you don’t already have a tone of conditions and damage on you already so that is out. Flesh wurm isn’t a good one to get you out either. Unless you go in planning to loose, and then you have to make sure its far enough to where they don’t notice it and make sure you be mindful of its distance to teleport which doesn’t make it practical. So, my point stands.

2. Yeah, that is fair. I was rather upset with the change and still not happy about it so I’m sure you can see where I’m coming from.

PS: the problems with the nerfs they ended up doing to the necromancer was they ended up applying them too quickly after the update was released giving people no real time for people to adjust or understand how this effected the metagame. On top of that the nerfs effected the PvE community which was something arena net used to be more mindful of back in GW1.

I agree with Lily here. Though Necromancer is my favorite class, I have two issues with it, and two issues only. In PvE we bring nothing to the table over any other class and we have very little mobility in general with nothing to make up for this. Yes, we have teleports, but…well, they’re only ‘good’ in very specific situations, practical in a few other situations, and dead in most. Flesh Wurm is probably the best one we’ve got (in my opinion). It’s easy to set up, and you can teleport back to its location at a whim, assuming you haven’t gone far enough. If it’s in an obscure enough location, it’s a great escape. This is also extremely useful in PvE. Very nice against bosses like Lupi.

I like Dark Path, but it’s very…fickle, I guess. It’s difficult to get it to work properly, and not only that, it’s very easy to just avoid unless you intend to use it on an NPC. However, this is only 1200 range, and the projectile is quite visible, so if someone’s paying attention they can easily tell what you’re trying to do. It’s also not practical in PvE. I’ve never been in a situation where I’ve needed it other than the express purpose of an extra chill so I could keep something perma chilled.

Now, we’re left with Spectal Walk. It’s a cool gimmick for surviving ridiculous falls or cheating jump puzzles, but the main issue here is that you have to move to make use of its teleport, and the threshold for making use of the teleport is very small untraited…and you most likely won’t trait for spectral skills when there are better options. Running into a fight with it active isn’t viable because you’ll have no time to do anything before you have to make use of it or it becomes wasted. And with our limited mobility, making use of it mid fight is difficult.

Lily.1935:

I think the problem is more with the Racial elites rather then how useful they are for the necromancer. All the necromancer elites are useful if not a bit underwhelming. And truth be told I would much rather have a utility skill then any of the necromancer elites. But that isn’t to say their elites are bad. Just not very impressive.

That tends to be the problem with every class’s elites though…with a few exceptions.

The one thing I liked about 30/10/0/0/30 is that it was so Death Shroud-centric. I really wanted to play something that utilizied our mechanic as much as possible, so that’s one thing the build had going for it. I’ve always thought Death Shroud, as a concept, was pretty cool. I’m not so sure about Vital Persistence though…life force may decay slower, but damage taken will drop it just as quickly, and that tended to be what pre-emptively ended my Death Shroud duration more than it just running out.

Lily.1935:

Laar.5476:

spoj.9672:

Lily.1935:

A Zerker has a higher burst while the Condi has a higher sustain. Sustain and AOE are what I tend to value most considering how frequently I run fractals and dungeon.

Zerker necro doesnt have burst. It has sustained high single target dps and burst aoe. The burst aoe is less dps on a single target than the regular dagger rotation. Also a good player wont have any downtime on zerk necro dps in full melee.

Condi does have better sustained aoe and thats a reason to consider it for certain fractals. Everywhere else zerker is better.

They mentioned axe and staff in their talk about zerker builds so at best they might be using a 30/x/x/x/30 build and counting axe 2 and DS 4 as burst. I don’t recall them talking about dagger at all until the 30/25/0/0/15 build was mentioned by SolemnMalevolence, which apparently takes competitive fighting game type reflexes to play. If it was some kind of axe/staff build that was used it’s no wonder the DPS was low.

I’ve known people who like to play zerker with staff in WvW. I personally don’t like using staff as anything besides a defensive/control weapon. So that is why I mentioned it. My Zerker build is 30/10/0/0/30 and it is quite burst. The Dagger does match the damage of life blast if no wells are up. However, being up close in PvE isn’t ideal in most situations especially with 1.8k armor. So this is why I call it burst damage because their sustained damage is suicide. If they can do it, more power to them.

My weapon Choice for Zerker is Main weapons Axe+Focus secondary weapon Dagger+Warhorn.

That might’ve been where your misunderstanding was coming from. o: The primary zerker build is 30/25/0/0/15. At least, as far as dealing the most damage goes. You mostly use dagger/warhorn for dealing all of your damage, and there’s no burst involved. You’ll be dealing consistent damage with the dagger auto-attack. When I played it, I occasionally switched to axe/focus strictly for applying vulnerability if whatever I was attacking didn’t have 25 stacks, and maybe using axe #2, and from my understanding, that’s how most people play it.

It actually does quite a bit of damage, especially in group settings. And unlike the death-shroud centric build you don’t have to worry about life force too much and your damage output isn’t controlled by how easy of a time you’ll have staying in death shroud and controlling your life force in any given fight. Using axe/focus, or death shroud itself as the primary method of dealing damage tends to give either lesser or downright lackluster results from when I tried a build like that.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

SrebX.6498:

I agree that in PvE we do fall short a bit. I wouldn’t say unforgiving, but it is a bit tougher… It’s PvE though, dodges and stun breakers are usually enough, you don’ t NEED soaking abilities for PvE… It’s just PvE

PvP wise we rock

The problem in PVE is that we only have 2 dodges, and no access to vigor either. And 2 dodges often does not cut it. Every other class in the game can fall back on other defensive skills to survive insta-kills, but the necromancer does not have that option. And this has created a severe unbalance in regards to the other classes.

See, if our defense is lacking, then surely you’d expect that our offense makes up for it… but that is not the case. In PVE we are also lacking damage-wise, due to said problems with conditions, and our lack of a Cleave attack.

To be completely honest, 2 dodges is more than enough. When I used to play zerker Necromancer, I never had an issue where I wished I had vigor. This is from someone who’s played through Fractals 60ish, and done every dungeon. I’d agree that our defense is lacking, but we don’t need it. Every notable boss I can think of telegraphs any attack that would be able to 100-0 us through a full death shroud and full health. Any other attacks are pretty easily dealt with. Now, I can’t speak from a conditionmancer’s point of view on this, but as a zerker, I had no issues dodging key attacks and then generating enough health and using my heal to be able to keep fighting without fear of dying or doing down.

As far as damage goes…for the condition end of things, I could see why you’d think you’re lacking damage in PvE, but from a berserker’s point of view, I never felt like I did any less damage than most classes, barring the ones that do an absurd amount like thieves or certain elementalist builds. Though, I’ll admit, the lack of cleave means that all this damage is restricted to single target, and that really sucks. In my opinion, our biggest problems in PvE are not that we don’t do enough damage, or that we don’t have enough mobility. It’s that we don’t bring anything special to a party that other classes can, which makes it so that others don’t want to take us. We’re a very selfish dps class. What I mean by this is that other classes can bring reflects, banners, more reliable combo fields, weapons that everyone can pick up, AoE stealth and things like that. We don’t do anything that supports the rest of our party. I’ve never felt like I couldn’t keep up with other classes in terms of damage dealing and the ability to handle PvE situations. I have, however, felt like I don’t contribute to the group at all, while other classes do.

edit: This is all spoken from a PvE point of view. I don’t do much PvP at all, and I’m not one to dabble in WvW either.

Eh, from what I gather, her play style makes her more efficient with a condition build over zerker, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Honestly, as far as builds go I’d just pick the one I like the most since PvE isn’t demanding in the slightest. And from what I’ve seen her post she does have quite a few hours of necro under her belt. x:

Lily.1935:

SolemnMalevolence.5248:

Lily.1935:

spoj.9672:

Except in pve beserker does beat condi.

It really doesn’t. I’ve done the testing and have armor and weapons for both specs. The Zerker is better then condi for one dungeon. And that is CoF. Other then that, Condi is still better.

It actually does. With something like 30/25/0/0/15 you’ll be killing things a lot faster than you can setting up all of your conditions in most groups for pretty much every PvE encounter. Not that conditionmancer is particularly bad, but it’s in no way faster than a full zerker setup. Despite this though, I play hybrid because I’m a vanity fiend and want to use my Eye of Rodgort and my fused axe in the same build while still being viable.

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Well, uhm…going through all of this one by one, I’ll say this.

The zerker Necro build that does the most damage doesn’t rely on death shroud in the slightest, so DS uptime and time spent outside of DS won’t affect your dps at all. It uses the dagger auto attack as the primary method of dealing damage. When I played the build, the only time I really went into DS was to soak up damage I couldn’t avoid, which is still pretty effective even with damage overflowing into our health since you have so much life force generation.

As far as defenses go, I honestly never even think about this when I decide on a build for a character. Not to sound elitist here or anything, but dodging key attacks has never been an issue for me for any boss in the game, so damage taken won’t really be an issue, thus, neither is armor. The way I see it, conditionmancers have built in toughness because of rabid, so that’s their damage buffer if they can’t evade attacks. Zerker mancers have rapid life force generation to use DS to mitigate damage to their real health bars. It all kind of evens out. Or at least, that’s how it’s felt to me after playing both. Still, though, avoiding attacks has never been an issue for me, so…

As far as range goes, staying in melee range isn’t difficult for anything. If you absolutely -have- to have range, the zerker build can just use life blast, which has 1200 range now. Granted, the damage will be lower because you’ll be that far, but it’s still an option (though I can’t see where you’d ever -need- range). As for the staff, I haven’t touched it in a while. I personally don’t think it’s a good weapon at all.

For hybrid…I can’t vouch for it too much since I’ve only recently started using the build on my necro. It definitely doesn’t outdamage what I was putting out as a zerker but I think it holds its own against condition builds with the advantage of not having to solely rely on such things. As I said before though, I play hybrid for the extremely trivial reason of wanting to be viable while still being able to use all of my neat little weapons. >_> But it’s still pretty good in my opinion. Regardless though, none of those three builds are particularly bad. All of them can be used in PvE, as you said, since there’s nothing hard about PvE. But in terms of what’s the ‘best’ I think zerker takes that by far.

Lily.1935:

spoj.9672:

Except in pve beserker does beat condi.

It really doesn’t. I’ve done the testing and have armor and weapons for both specs. The Zerker is better then condi for one dungeon. And that is CoF. Other then that, Condi is still better.

It actually does. With something like 30/25/0/0/15 you’ll be killing things a lot faster than you can setting up all of your conditions in most groups for pretty much every PvE encounter. Not that conditionmancer is particularly bad, but it’s in no way faster than a full zerker setup. Despite this though, I play hybrid because I’m a vanity fiend and want to use my Eye of Rodgort and my fused axe in the same build while still being viable.

The adjustments I made make those builds viable for both sections of content too. 0/30/20/0/20 is very viable for WvW and PvE. The second I haven’t tested as much outside of PvE but with how defensive it is in nature, despite being power based I wouldn’t doubt it could hold its own, especial with necro’s natural tankiness.

Annnd, continuing from my previous post because character limits are lame.

Other than the celestial armor, I’d personally use zerker for everything else. As far as runes go, since you are defensive in nature more than other power necro builds, scholar runes would be great here. Staying above 90% wouldn’t be hard, so you’ll get the power boost more often, and they’ll make up for the slight power loss from celestial armor more than ruby orbs can or other power based armor upgrade options. Your sigils are fine. I don’t like energy too much, especially since you are tankier here. I’d personally use force instead for a massive damage increase on top of 25 stacks of bloodlust.

Oh, and quickly touching on skills for a moment. Spectral walk, armor, and well of suffering are pretty much a must here. Walk and armor are the core of the build and the reason you have the traits the way you do, as well as gear. Suffering is more or less a necessity since you do a bit less damage than other power builds, and you need something to make up for it, so that’s a nice burst aswell as vulnerability stacker to help you out more than other things would, like blood is power or signet of spite for example.

All in all, this is a much better build than the first, though it still falls short and isn’t really viable without the tweaks I made or similar ones.

Oh, right. As for why I won’t touch on minion master. Simply put, I don’t think it’s a viable build anywhere. I main necromancer and play it everywhere. I’ve tried it quite a bit…in pvp, in pve, wvw. It just doesn’t work. If you’re a good player, you might still do well with it, but you’d be -much- more effecient with other builds. It’s fun for the novelty, I guess…but that’s about it. Anyway, hope the feedback helps. Good luck, have fun.

Onto the next build. I decided to skip over the minion build—more on why I did that after I finish with the feedback for your power build.

Okay…first, the weapon setup. I really like it. I used to run a solely power-based necromancer for the longest time. From when I hit 80 on him back in April or so, all the way until this month. Dagger/Warhorn and Axe/Focus is the best setup for a power based necro imo, and you have that, so props to you. People tend to underestimate the warhorn, but it’s definitely powerful there. A side note, I find it’s useful to keep a staff in the inventory with this build, for fights that more or less require range. Life Blast might have 1200 range now, but death shroud only lasts so long, and building up life force with those weapons while being forced at range isn’t very fun…I’ve tried it. Best to swap to the staff over axe/focus.

Anyway, moving on. You fall short with the traits again. You seem to really like 10/30/0/0/30. For your previous build, it doesn’t work due to the weapons, but here, that’s actually fine to use. The problem is the choice with your traits. While some people might opt to use 30/10/0/0/30 for power based necros, or 30/25/0/0/15, this actually works aswell, but it’s far more defensive in nature. The trait setup you have allows you to invest into the two spectral traits, the one in curses and the one in soul reaping, making your spectral skills far more effective. This, in turn, helps you stay alive and increase life force generation rapidly. To help you stay in death shroud which is likely your focus with this build.

That being said, in spite, reaper’s might is a -must- for a build like this. You will be in death shroud often, thus, you will be using its auto attack often. You want that auto attack to be as powerful as possible, and having it grant a stack of might per use is quite powerful. I touched on curses here a bit, and I can see you use spectal attunement there already, which is good. I would also use weakening shroud here as it synergizes well. Spectral skills are defensive in nature, and you will be entering death shroud often. Having an AoE weakness upon entering DS greatly decreases incoming damage from everything around you. This not only increase your survivability, but your team’s aswell. On top of that, you can use spectal armor or walk to take advantage of the enemy’s weakness and have an easier time proccing life force gain off being hit to manage death shroud more effeciently.

Other than weakening shroud and spectal attunement, the last trait is a tossup for me. Banshee’s wail is fine, or focused rituals. This leaves your investment into soul reaping, which is good, but again…the traits are off. Spectral mastery is good. You want both spectral traits with a build like this because you’ll be using them to survive and deal damage. However, you’ll want to lose foot in the grave (which is more or less completely useless imo, outside of perhaps pvp related content…and even then, not too great) and path of midnight. Path is fine, but not here. Here, you need piercing life blasts. The vulnerability per hit also makes your life blasts scarier and increases not only your damage, but your entire team’s due to the vulnerability stacks. Your grandmaster trait should be deathly perception as having 100% crit chance in death shroud is obviously a huge power boost and you are a power based necro using this build.

Onto gear…berserker’s gear is fine here. The cavalier trinkets are not, and neither are the runes. One option is to go full zerker…which is certainly viable, but I was experimenting with a build like this before I decided to use something else when I switched from my variation fo powermancer. Since this setup is more defensive in nature than other power builds, you can easily make use of the newly released celestial gear for your armor—just your armor. Celestial also ends up giving you higher crit damage than zerker in those slots, which si something to consider. You also get toughness, vitality, and condition damage. Though you are not specced for conditions here, you do inflict them. Off crits, off tainted shackles, enfleebling shroud, etc. It is a bit of a dps boost, not much, but it’s there. Also something to think about. The toughness and vitality synergize with spectral walk and armor, further increasing their effectiveness and making you tankier without much of a power loss.

I guess I’ll give my two cents here since I consider myself a very experienced Necro player.

I’ll just give my feedback on the builds int he order in which they’re posted, so…starting with the first.

As the above poster stated, with the weapons in the first build, it’s very clear that this is a condition build. In no way can it be power based due to the weapons. If the staff was something else—anything else, actually, except a scepter of course, it could function as a hybrid (which are very viable) but using a staff in combination with scepter/dagger means this -has- to be condition based or else it won’t be doing anything. That’s where your problem is.

First and foremost, because your weapon setup limits you to conditions, you don’t want to invest in spite. Condition duration is not that useful, and the traits from spite are even less useful. The heal proc from spite’s minor trait won’t be doing much for you, not even if you’re killing hundreds of mobs. Trust me. I haven’t noticed it doing much even in fractal 48 dredge where I’m killing that many things. All of the adept traits won’t be helping you either, especially losing 3 conditions when you kill something. With S/D and Staff, aswell as consume conditions you already have many ways to not only remove your conditions, but transfer them to enemies. In fact, as a conditionmancer, you want to avoid flat out removing your conditions if you can because you can transfer them with the dagger offhand and staff, or consume them and heal for extra if you need it.

Your traits in the curses line are fine, however, since you opted to pick terror there, you’d most likely want master of terror since you invested in soul reaping. Now…soul reaping in this build is not inherently bad, but the choices you make for traits make it bad. Also, you don’t need to invest quite that much there. 20 points would have been fine, enough for you to get master of terror and anything else of your choice, leaving you 20 points to put into death magic, which would greatly help this build since it uses a staff secondary.

Onto the gear choices…this is really all over the place. It seems like you were trying to go for some sort of hybrid setup here for a balance between power and conditions. But with your weapon setup, you cannot do this. Or rather, you cannot do it effectively (not even in the slightest) So that means you can’t really get away with wearing anything other than rabid gear (since you want to use undead runes, which are nice). Alternatively, you could switch to carrion if you wish, for the extra life force and use nightmare runes since you spec into terror. Both of these are fine. The carrion option actually synergizes with the core of what you’re trying to make this build since you invest into soul reaping, which already increases your base life force pool.

The sigils are fine here, I suppose. Condition doesn’t have much in the way for sigils so what you picked is fine. Though, I can suggest replacing the sigil of accuracy on the dagger with the new sigil of bursting. The text on it is bugged at the moment, but it offers a flat 6% increase in condition damage, which will be big after you get 25 stacks of corruption off. More useful than the extra 5% crit chance imo, which doesn’t do a whole lot for you since your crits will be weak regardless. It’ll proc extra bleeds, I suppose, but I would rather have stronger bleeds than more frequent weak ones, especially when conditions can be cleansed and when most of your weapons inflict them.

Just posted this in the Necromancer rating thread. Really proud of how it came out, so I’m posting it here too.

8/10. I like the use of the devil mask on a human and the armor setup is solid. The staff could use some changing to make it perfect, though.

I present my masterpiece…all he needs is a backpiece that matches the look.

Erika.8256:

Yes, it can be done by every class – just the bosses.

I’d love some of those who finished all/most of the achievements to come forward and tell us how they did them.

How do you do the Subject 7 achievement as a Mesmer?
What boss did you pick for 5 gambits?
What class/build did you use for the 8 orb achievement?

I honestly would love to know the answers to those…as these achievements CANNOT be done by every class imho. Bosses..sure..whatever, specific achievements…not so much.

I’ve done all of the achievements on my Necromancer, using a full berserker build traited 30/25/0/0/15. So I guess that answers question 3. I can’t answer question 1 as I don’t play mesmer…if it helps, on my Necro, I just used the dagger with is strictly single target dps. So…whatever weapon is strictly single target for mesmer, use that and I imagine you won’t have any trouble. When Subject 7 splits, he retains his name. The adds will be named ‘ooze’, so you can target subject 7 and make sure you don’t kill the adds. For the five gambits I chose the tier 1 boss, as she’s by far the easiest of the 3.

My point in my earlier post wasn’t to be a ‘snowflake’ it was to say that the fight can be done without the invincibility mechanics in other classes that people are whining about being so overpowered or unbalanced. As someone who mains a necromancer and also has a guardian and thief, I don’t think in the slightest that my necromancer isn’t on par with my other two characters (who are fully geared, by the way). I like my necromancer and think it’s equally as strong as my other classes.

There are some things my necromancer brings to the table that my other classes, and all the other classes for that matter don’t bring. On my necro, I have a nearly 100% uptime for weakness. I’m sure someone could bring this to 100% uptime with traits and gear, which is pretty big. That’s a lot of raw damage mitigation. While it’s not absolute like aegis or things of that nature, it makes you last longer overall. Combined with this are spectral skills, which improve life force and allow you to access your second health bar easier which is further damage mitigation.

Another thing a necromancer can do is apply two different types of damage without really needing to spec for either. As a power necro, I can give the bosses some pretty heavy condition pressure without being a condition spec just with all of my skills. I have natural outlets for poisons, bleeds, torment and other DoT effects that make me do more damage than most other classes. (Contrary to popular belief, Necros actually do quite a bit of dps.)

I’m not touching on a lot of things, but I will mention one last thing. There’s a reason these bosses don’t have defiant. You’re supposed to make use of that, and a necromancer can do just that again, without even speccing for it. You already have an innate fear in the form of Death Shroud 3. Our weapons also include other CC. Stakitten is also a fear. Warhorn 4 is a daze. The list goes on. We can also cripple, chill…etc. There’s so much we can do without even trying to kite and control bosses to further mitigate damage. It may not be aegis or invulnerability, but it certainly brings the end result—the death of the boss.

So that’s why I say it doesn’t come down to class, merely skill. And there is skill involved. Liadri has a pattern. Nothing about the fight is RNG. Learn the pattern, and with the right amount of skill she’s more than beatable with any class.

To be honest, there really isn’t an issue with balance here. I’ve looked over a lot of posts about the gauntlet’s content being too difficult for certain classes, with some even claiming it’s -impossible- for certain classes, but I have to respectfully disagree. While the Liadri fight is certainly tough, I don’t think any one class has it easier than another. I think it comes down to the -player- having it easier over other players. Sure, guardians, mesmers and the like have access to built-in mechanics that allow them to completely ignore damage, but timing is still crucial with these, and many players that main these classes are still struggling.

Me? I main a Necro, and it took me a few tries, but I was able to beat Liadri myself, using only the two dodges my class is equipped with and no other real damage prevention mechanics. Just to note, I never once had to change my build or slot skills for this. I used the same 30/25/0/0/15 set-up with full berserker from tier 1 all the way to tier 3. So, while I agree this content is challenging, I think it’s silly that people are complaining about it being impossible or ‘too difficult’. The current level of difficulty for the gauntlet bosses is what A-Net likely intended it to be. While some people might be able to finish it quickly, it might take others a bit longer. As Chopps said, a lot of people are probably used to instant gratification. A lot fo what A-Net has done in the past has encouraged instant gratification, with many meta achievements being able to be accomplished through a few hours of grinding out content. This is different. It doesn’t involve any grind—it involves skill.