Guild Wars 2

Hi all. Heart of Thorns has brought me back from a very long absence from the game (I quit mid way through the scarlet story). Because of my very long absence and the new elite specializations, I’ve decided to pick a new main.

I spend the vast majority of my time solo, often at odd hours when there’s not many people on. Hence the most important aspect of a class is that it has to be capable of soloing as much open world ‘group’ stuff as possible. At the same time, I enjoy the occasional fractal or dungeon so I’d like to play something that’s somewhat desirable in groups.

The main two classes I’ve been looking at are the Reaper and the Herald. I have an old power based necro at 80 and I’m loving both reapers shroud and the GS. However, I remember necro being relatively poor for group play due to bad sustained AoE, low damage, and very little relevant support. From what I hear, the damage is now at least competitive and the AoE seems to have been fixed by having a cleaving power weapon. Unfortunately it still seems like it’s lacking damage support. Were the changes enough to make necro desirable for groups?

As for Herald, I’ve leveled one up to 40 and am enjoying it so far. I like the resource management gameplay and both the support and damage potential seem to be insane. My only concern is that I’m struggling with champions and other group stuff. Since it’s been a very long time since I’ve leveled anything, I’m not sure if that’s just because I’m under-geared or inexperienced or if the class in just inherently worse at soloing stuff then the reaper.

I’d greatly appreciate an advice. Sorry for the long post.

TL;DR:
1) Is the reaper desirable in groups?
2) How is the herald at soloing ‘group’ stuff in the open world?

I’m afraid sword is the undisputed king of PvE for the sole reason that melee>ranged. The current min/max build actually runs a mix of sword/sword, sword/pistol and sword/focus depending on the encounter. However, since the build is a phantasm build the sceptre is actually the best ranged weapon for it as the phantasmal berserker on the GS is much weaker then the iduellist or iswordsman. That means if you run a full phantasm build like http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/84947-mesmerizing-the-enemy-guide-to-mesmer-swordx-dps-builds/, you can run it as a ranged set.

I believe that people have found that the sword’s phantasm is more powerful then the pistol’s if phantasmal haste is not taken. If it is, I think that they’re pretty similar. (link here:http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/84947-mesmerizing-the-enemy-guide-to-mesmer-swordx-dps-builds/ ). Another interesting finding in the thread was that scepter is a better off set for sword then GS since the GS’s phantasm isn’t great.

They probably launched the patch today as rift goes F2P today as well.

Thanks for the answerers everyone. It seems like the general consensus is dagger for 1 target, DS for >2 and staff only for >3 which seems about right from my experience. The only thing left to consider is that the staff marks do add a little DPS. I know its not much due to their long cooldown but it’s something.

I’ve been toying around with builds for my necro and I’ve been wondering when the AoE of the staff will cause it to out DPS the daggers auto attack? It’s quite clear that if five enemies are present then staff wins, but is that still true for two or three?

Also, I also believe that life blast with the pierce trait will out DPS the dagger if there is more then one target, but in an instance with four other people to benefit from your vulnerability and the sizeable self might (traited) does it win out on singe target damage as well?

I’ve finally decided to buy an ascended amulet for my power based sword/x greatsword mesmer. Most of his gear is berserker’s so I was thinking of going with the berserker one but the stat increase on the celestial one has given me pause. While damage stats are obviously much better for him, none of the stats on the celestial one are a complete waste besides perhaps the healing. Which one would everyone recommend getting?

P.S. I use this guy almost exclusively for solo and group PvE so WvW effectiveness is not my primary concern.

I agree that vitality and healing power seems like a strange mix. Most healing builds I see use toughness and healing power since the toughness means that each point health gained from healing does more. Vitality just means that you heal for a smaller % of your health. As for the OP, there is no cap (soft or hard) on toughness as far as I know. You should always balance toughness and vitality to give you the highest effective health. As necros have lots of health to start with, a little extra toughness is generally accepted as best. After a certain point vitality becomes better but that’s not horribly easy to reach without a large amount of knights gear, and extra healing only skews this more in favour of toughness.

Embolism.8106:

Regarding GS Clones vs Staff Clones in a condition build: first, Staff Clones can inflict Burning, which does more damage than Sharper Images Bleeding and is practically instant. Second, Staff Clones also stack Might and Fury on you: because Clone stats are based on your stats, this transfers over to Clones, giving Staff Clones higher condition damage and 20% higher crit chance than GS Clones.

Also, taking the Illusionary Elasticity trait allows your own Winds of Chaos to doubletap, i.e. doubling its output against a single target. Overall, you definitely want to go with the Staff in a condition build.

The fury is a good point but GS can give you quite a bit of might with mirror blade. Also, Illusionary Elasticity does not effect staff clones so you’d only get one extra condition/boon from yourself. Also, while the burning may do its damage quickly, it doesn’t scale as well from condition damage as bleeding so at some point the bleed will backload more damage then burning.

Despite this you may still be right in that staff is a better condition weapon then the GS but I’ll reserve my judgement until I get time to test it.

Another note: If you choose to use power/prec/cond gear instead of cond/prec/tough gear like many pure condition build do, the GS’s and the iWarlock’s direct damage will still be quite high while maintaining decent condition damage.

Edit: @ Osicat. I agree on the survivability. No mesmer weapon beats staff on survivability.
Edit #2: Not 100% sure about the bleed vs burning part I remember hearing it somewhere but I’m too tired to double check. Please correct me if I’m wrong.

Lets get something out of the way first. For a power based build, GS and sword do considerably more damage then any other weapons we can use, with sword slightly ahead of GS depending on your offhand (i.e. not torch, which is for utility and not DPS) at the cost of being close to the enemy.

What staff offers, is defence. As such, if you want to be optimal, you should only use staff as one of your weapons when you’re having trouble surviving with only your utilities, dodges, interrupts and distortion.

I myself used the staff as a secondary to sword/pistol all the way through beta (staff actually did out DPS GS then due to slower animations on spatial surge) and up to when I was about lvl 60 on live but now I run almost exclusively with both sword and GS.

For condition damage, things get more interesting. There are two big problem with mesmers and conditions in PvE. The first is that, between kiting and the naturally slow attack speed on mobs, confusion isn’t that great. The second is that we ourselves have no real ability to maintain large stacks of conditions like sceptre necros, sword warriors, grenade engineers ect. Staff 1 is our only non-confusion spamable condition attack and its both slow and doesn’t do condition damage 1/3 of the time. This means that the only real way to apply conditions is through the Sharper images trait and clones.

This is when it gets interesting. The staff clones already apply a condition but the attack rate in very slow, while GS clones attack very fast and hit multiple times per attack. This means that GS clones will proc sharper images much more then staff clones, so after a certain amount of precision (which is easily achievable with lvl80 exotics) GS clones will do more condition damage then staff clones. The GS phantasm also hits more times then the staff one. As such, while I haven’t run the numbers myself I’d guess that GS also does more damage then staff in a condition build.

Xyonon.3987:

I really love the Staff. I use the passive that your Illusions inflict bleeding on their crits and the staff can set up some illusions pretty fast. Also you are able to escape often, so you are able to solo even harder bosses. It brings a lot of utility with it. Also the damage of the GS doesn’t look better for me to be honest.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Spatial_Surge
201-348 dmg every 1.5 sec
= DpS of 134-232

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Winds_of_Chaos
111 basic dmg + 33% of 328 burning + 33% of 298 bleeding = 320 dmg every 0.75 sec
= DpS of 426

The problem with this calculation is, i made it without Power / Con. Dmg.. I sadly do not know how it affects everything. But since Winds of Chaos also may bounce to another enemy or to you to increase your power even more, i really think it deals more damage.

I’m not that expirienced, ready to get teached.

Unfortunately there are a few problems with this. Firstly both the wiki and the in game tooltips are often incorrect, with many of them accounting for some factors but not others. Secondly, power, precision, crit, and malice is unfortunately vital as different abilities/conditions use different percentages of your power/condition damage. Power based attacks can also crit, which means that both your precision and crit damage also increase the attack damage.

For example, your calculations gave the GS an average of 183 DPS, but when you factor in a 40% crit chance and 70% crit damage (easily achievable in exotics) it now has 183*(10.4*2.3)=351.36 DPS.

Finally, a good chunk of the GS’s damage comes from mirror blade, mind stab and its phantasm while the staff also gets a large portion of its damage from its phantasm. If you want to accurately compare DPS for the weapons you need to account for all its abilities, and hence the cast times, rotations traits ect.

This is not an easy game to theorycraft in but If you’re keen to do so I’d highly recommend doing tests in the mists instead of relying on the wiki. Anyway, good luck.

I’ve found that a mix of P/V/T, berserker and knights gear to be optimal theoretically. Remember, our damage scales best with power and knights doesn’t have a huge amount of that. Crit also sees a little diminishing returns so after a certain point the precision becomes less valuable.

Also, the value of toughness scales with vitality so throwing in some vit from P/V/T or even P/V/CritDam gear can be very helpful for a build. You still want much more toughness then vitality as we have a naturally high HP but there is a point achievable with less then a full set of knights gear that vitality becomes more valuable.

Try and play around with the spreadsheet here https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/Gear-calculator-spreadsheet as it gives you a good feel for how the various stats interact.

Edit: Full knights gear does give you a nice balance between offence and defense if you can’t be bothered to mix and match. The difference in value to an optimal blend isn’t huge to be honest.

Edit#2: As for what piece to have as berserker, each piece of gear has a different ‘value’ for 1# crit damage. You can easily calculate this value by dividing the lower of the other stats on the gear by the crit damage. You want to choose gear that has as low a value as possible so you get ‘bonus’ crit damage. I believe the spreadsheet I linked has these values in it as well if you’d like a list.

Talentless.5708:

Knight’s gear would be most advised if going a shroud build. Toughness effects the reduction of life force which is based on the damage dealt, while Vitality/HP is not a factor in Shroud mode. As long as you can have 19-20k HP on a shroud build, you’re good to go.

I actually I’ve heard that it does scale with vitality as well as toughness http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/66677-shroud-not-scaling-with-vitality-or-thoughess/. Feel free to test it though as it’s something that deserves attention.

Smoeki.2756:

Power/Toughness/Vitality is my favorite build at the moment, it just fits my play style more. I haven’t invested into an exotic set yet but even with rares It’s really nice.

If your really good at evading damage the Hybrid Damage build looks really nice Condition/Power/Precision. I can see me liking that one also but I don’t have any gear at the moment to try it out. I really would like to have a Power/Cond/Toughness but I don’t think that gear exists at the moment. I would like it I thinks though…

I never liked the full Condition build because of the caps on corruptions and It always seemed to gimp the support options in group play.

Prec/Cond/Toughness can be purchased using tokens from Twilight Arbor and Power/Cond/Vit is easy enough to find. The first is probably the best gear you can get for a pure condition necro while the second is only slightly worse then the Power/Cond/Toughness gear that you want.

Thanks for the advice everyone! I think I will go with the power build then. I was thinking of grabbing the P/V/T dagger and focus for from AC (death shroud scales well with both vit and toughness) and then have the rest of my gear as a mix of berserker from CoF and knights from the TP. I’m curious as to what staff to get though. the skills seem to have quite a bit of condition damage on them so perhaps Pow/Cond/Tough from TA?

I’ve recently hit 80 so I’m looking to invest the tokens that I’ve gathered in some gear. I’ve been using a power based build utilizing dagger/focus, staff and death shroud http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fQAQNAodWjMaV6ZaKbM8JApCPH944hZm6x6sjOA. I love the theme of the build and I’ve had moderate success in dungeons with it but I’m not sure if it’ll hold up in fractals.

I don’t mind scepter condition or hybrid builds too much but I worry about its effectiveness in PuG’s with the bleed stack and I’m not sure if I’ll be able to stay alive in fractals with the relatively low survivability of most decent hybrid builds.

What’s everyones experiences with power builds in facials, condition builds in PuG’s, and hybrid builds with general survivability?

Note: WvWvW and PvP are not huge concerns with me.

After reading an excellent guide and build by Reverse Ghost on guru, I’ve been wondering if condition damage, sigils of earth and 100% bleed duration (2 sigils of each Krait, Centaur and Afflicted, hemophelia and pizza) would be a good substitute for crit damage in a fairly standard dagger/staff build? Initially I was thinking of running mostly knights with a touch of zerker or a mix of P/V/T and zerker but perhaps rabid gear would actually provide more damage then the zerkers. In the mists I’ve managed to keep up 5-ish stacks of bleed with a knights amulet and the appropriate ruins/traits (although not the pizza so I didn’t have 100% for the extra barbed prec tick) due to the daggers fast attack speed and it may make running a dagger OH/Blood is Power combo instead of Well of Corruption and focus OH like I was planning.

Kiriakulos.1690:

I think that a focus off-hand would be a better choice if you intend to play with a friend most of the time, the vulnerability and regen are probably better than the blind and focus 5 can really help with boon stacking enemies.

Also as a Necro with staff you always have access to 2 interrupts, 1 single target from DS and another from the Staff 5.

Does the ranger use shortbow? If so Epidemic might be more useful than Well of Corruption.

Signet of the locust is really bad for combat active, swap it out for another Utility when you go into combat, I suggest Well of Darkness since you seem to be used to using blind for interrupts.

I personally prefer Greater marks since it doubles the mark radius and putrid mark transfers all allied conditions in a 1200 AoE to enemies inside the Mark.
Ritual of protection is a very short protection spell which would only be useful as a reaction, something that’s unlikely with well casting, so I’d swap that for greater marks.

The whole blood magic tree is questionable really, I ’d rather have more crit damage and Soul Reaping has some very good traits like piercing blast and Soul Marks, which combined with staff traits generates huge amounts of Life Force.

Using Death Shroud as a third weapon set, interrupt, damage mitigation and burst damage is key to successfully using Necros, so it’s something you should really focus on if you don’t have practice.

EDIT: Just saw you intend to use Lich Form as your Elite, in that case Critical damage is really essential. Almost every hit in Lich Form is a critical strike, any Crit damage is pretty much applied as a straight damage increase while it lasts.

Thanks for your advice. With all of your recommended changes (baring the utilities as they will change from encounter to encounter) my build looks like this: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fQAQNAodWjQaV6ZaKbM8JAJFX/c0jjHmZKFrzOA

I definitely see your point about Soul Reaping over Blood Magic. The only trait which I’d feel particularly bad about loosing is Ritual Masterly as the cooldown for Well of Blood is a bit long for my liking. Would it be at all possible to swap out some points in curses instead? For example:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fQAQNAodWjQaV6ZaKbMcKAJFX/8kisHP+wx0HWH

As for the utilities, the ranger prefers to use longbows so epidemic may not be the best choice. I’ll probably swap out the signet for non-trivial combat and for dungeons and well of corruption will be swapped out as well depending on the encounter.

Hi all. I’ve recently made a necro to play with my ranger friend and I’m looking into builds for him. Wells seemed a natural choice as the’ll help my friend both directly through their effects and indirectly through combos. As such, I’ve decided to go with what is mostly a power build since wells seem to synergies well with them, as well as both death shroud and lich form, which I’m quite fond of. As for the weapons, staff was an obvious choice and daggers feel much better to me then axes so I wend with d/d and staff. So far my build looks like: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fQAQNAoYWjQaV6ZaKbM8JAJFXj9kisHP6xxDzMA

I picked dagger as an offhand since my experience with my guardian has taught me how valuable blind can be, and enfeebling blood gives me a little extra aoe when using my daggers as well as allowing me to maintain almost an 100% uptime of weakness. The aoe is bleed damage though, but hopefully the condition damage I get from the curses trait line will be sufficient in making it, and mark of blood on the staff, worth casting.

I’m not too sure about some of the traits though. I’d like to have greater marks but I’m not sure if it’d be worth swapping out ritual of protection or staff mastery for it. I’m also not 100% sold on the last 10pts in curses.

That’s why I’d prefer the first of my suggestions. It wouldn’t reduce the number of special attacks used in a fight, it would just give incentives to space them out while adding a risk/reward aspect to some otherwise spammed skills. Hammering 3 until you run out of initiative is essentially no different then just auto attacking in terms of fun, and it still means that you are left auto attacking while your initiative regenerates. This way players have a choice between quick burst or better sustained and the ability to use defensive or support abilities at all times.

I’m participially keen to see this on Pistol Whip as it would mean that it could be buffed to a point that it is actually a dps increase over the swords auto attack, while the diminishing returns for spamming would mean that its burst can be kept low enough so that its not OP in PvP.

I think that the biggest problem that the thief currently has is that it the initiative system means that players can spam their most damaging move over and over. This means that if their initiative skills deal decent sustained damage they have OP burst and if they have tame burst they have mediocre sustained damage. One fix for this is to give incentives for holding initiative or disincentives for spending it too quickly. A few examples of possible fixes could be:

1) Let our damage skills (eg. pistol whip, LDB, cluster bomb) do more damage when we have higher initiative, much in the same way that heartseeker deals more damage to enemies with lower health. This is my favourite idea as it promotes less one button spam without making auto attack our only dps option like it is for S/P now.

2) Give a ‘fatigued’ debuff if we use too much initiative too quickly that reduces our damage or slows our endurance/initiative regen. (Would like to see a general damage buff to compensate for the loss of burst.)

3) Give initiate a passive damage boosting property like in many of our traits. I’d prefer suggestion 1 still as this may force us into auto attack spam.

As for our weapons:

D/D: A solid weapon but the SS->C&D->BS combo probably needs to be looked at.

D/P: needs a little love in PvE. The lack of any offensive AoE means that it is difficult to justify as a main weapon there (all weapons should be justifiable). Head shot is also not fantastic there, as the relatively high initiative loss is normally not worth a single interrupt there, especially when for a little more initiative you can get multiple AoE blinds.

P/P: See D/P above for the head shot and AoE comment. Also, body shot is pretty worthless.

P/D: Some luckluster skills as above.

S/P: This is probably the weapon that could use the above initiative changes the most. All current strategies with this weapon revolve around spamming one button. An incentive to manage resources or a powerful situational ability (I’m looking at you head shot. Possibly high damage on interrupt?) could make this weapon much more fun.

S/D: Flanking strike is too buggy for me to bother with this set much. Otherwise it would be a good weapon.

SB: This weapon makes thieves playable for me. So many of our sets lack ether utility or AoE that this is a mandatory secondary weapon for me. I’ve heard rumours of nerfs for it, which I sincerely hope comes with great increases to our utility in other ways as I can’t see the class being competent as anything but single target dps otherwise (or non-boss control with S/P). As for the actual weapon skills; cluster bombs can be difficult to use properly with Australian lag and 1200 range would be greatly appreciated on the auto attack.

It was actually not ground targeted in the beta but it barely ever hit because of it. They changed it so that you could lead your target so that you can actually land it. I agree it needs some love though. Its not very useful for anything besides the boon removal.

I think the range is simply shorter then advertised. If you cast it fairly close it goes off without a hitch but it gets very unreliable from near max range.

I feel its pretty balanced as is atm. Any initiative increase would hurt D/P thieves quite a bit as they don’t have any damaging attack besides HS.

Two words: Black Powder. Probably one of the best tank skills in the game.