Guild Wars 2

Thanks so much for the answers! That made lots of sense to me, I decide I will swap my 20/20/0/0/30 build to a 0/20/20/0/30 build and use staff instead of GS!

Gaidax, that post was just perfect ^^, cleared all my doubts and yes, the build did look quite weak on everything. Being a jack of all trades with a mesmer isn’t as effective as I thought! XD

So.. hello!! I am at work, bored so I was playing with some builds.

I want to make a mesmer build based on my favorite weapon combination and I got quite.. stuck because I only found -ONE- possible way to trait all 3 weapons.

The weapon combination is:

Sword/Focus
Staff

Sounds pretty easy, but I need 10 points in duelist to trait sword, 20 points in chaos to trait staff, 20 points in inspiration to trait the awesome reflexion on focus. And then another 20 points to get Illusionary Elasticity, which I consider a must for staff.

That makes my talents: 0/10/20/20/20

Sword is straight foward damage and cleave, while staff seems to be a really hybrid weapon. Does staff clones apply more bleed/burn with their Winds of Chaos? This build lacks the “bleed on crit” for clones. (which I really can’t get without giving up either staff 20% recharge, reflective focus or extra bounces, I don’t know which I’d give up if I had to pick one.)

Would a rampager set of gear go well with this build? Or should I drop crit and invest on Carrion maybe? Maybe balance both to get vigor on crits often?

Can anyone give some feedback on this build? I am currently playing a 20/20/0/0/30 shatter build with full zerker gear (sword/sword (focus in teams) and greatsword. I find myself bored often with the playstyle, seems like a kitten thief with better team utility. (feedback bubble, portal and timewarp)

Would staff and focus reflection add more to the team to make up for the loss of damage?

Unpredictability.4086:

I don’t overly analyze the profession and don’t have fun with Necromancer though.

What’s that supposed to mean? I don’t overly analyze any profession and I don’t have fun with engineer.

Playstyle is personal. Doesn’t mean engineer is broken in anyway though.

Oh my, I’m being owned on my post. Sarcasm
Also thanks Blaine.

I just noticed one thing I did wrong on my post, I couldn’t cover stuff with math, facts, date and whatever else.

Sorry guys, I -play- the game, I don’t compare my character damage output and how much % fast I can kill a mob. I play for fun, I don’t theorycraft and engineer out my “kit”. And many people, if not most (sorry, no data here), just want to get home from their jobs, click on play and ENJOY the class.

People like these guys who wants buffs and nerfs are INDEED whiners, because I’ve played several MMOs before, and they are NEVER happy, because true balance is impossible. Since one class will outperform the other by 0,0001%, and they’ll keep crying about that minimal difference.

You have date?
You have math?
You have theory?

Well, I have something you guys don’t!

I have FUN!

And now back to the game, time is short and I’m gonna have fun with my friends on fractals, yes, probably 16,7% (made up!) slower fractals, but with about 300% more fun and laughs!

sorrow.2364:

Nobody is going to take a Necromancer over, let’s say, a Warrior, a Guardian, a Mesmer or an Elementalist.

This is the kind of stuff that makes me go crazy.
So far in fractals up to my level, I never got kicked because I am a necromancer.

Casual players don’t kick people because they are X or Y class, come on, be realistic here. Also, don’t you have friends? I run stuff with my friends often too, never had issues either with me being a necro, and actually, my dungeon group has TWO necros.

People don’t mind finishing the instance in 25min instead of 17min. You are being completely unrealistic when you say: “NOBODY WILL EVER TAKE A NECRO OVER X or Y”, that implies that no necromancer, ever will do any kind of group stuff.

And you can be hybrid and get some defense, of course, you won’t do as much damage, and might be slightly more squishy than specialized builds, yeah, but it’s fun. I can stack 25 stacks of vulnerability in less than 8 seconds by myself, and keep it 100% uptime above 12-14 stacks, how is that not helping the team? Necros can perma poison too, and keep almost 100% uptime on weakness as well. We are natural debuffers, we are not supposed to buff the team.

Hello guys, lately I’ve been seeing a lot of posts concearning the state of the class and people crying for nerfs or buffs all over the place. After reading many, if not all, of these posts I found myself disagreeing with most of them.

Who am I? I am a casual player, I play for 3 hours a day top. I don’t do tournaments PvP, only hot joins. I love PvE, my fractal level is currently 26. And I am about to complete my map 100% for the first time! (curses wvw) So I guess I can consider myself an ordinary player, probably the most common kind of player in this game.

I have 4 level 80 characters with full exotics, but only 3 pink pieces of jewerly spread across them. The classes are: Warrior (cookie cutter zerker), Elementalist (d/d jack of all trades), Engineer (boring grenade spammer) and my necro, which is by far the most powerful class I have.

I made this post to clarify to the major part of the player base that necros are NOT, BY ANY MEANS as kitten as people cry in these forums, actually, they are not weak at all. If you are thinking about rolling a necro, ignore those whiners, they want their class to be turned into the fotm so they can win serious tournaments and such.

What I see here is people usually complaining about necro’s skills from one of two points of view: “Power/crit necro” or “Conditionmancer”

Do you really need to pick between these two? I look at the necromancer skill set and I am amazed how A.net made this class. I think they -never- made necromancers to be pure condition, neither to be a burst class. All our weapons benefit from power as much as they benefit from condition, so why “ kitten #8221; yourself by picking one of them and then coming on the forums to say skill X should change because it doesn’t benefit X build? A classic example is the scepter 3, or DS on pure condition builds.

I’m not saying the class is perfect, there are tweaks to be made here and there, but reading these forums for a couple weeks it sounded like necro as almost unplayable. So before most of you guys who complains about A.Net post, you should first consider that -most- necro players are actually HAPPY with the class while a few dozen guys flame these forums. The happy ones rarely make posts about it, so there it is.

Good job Arena.net, thanks for this amazingly fun and challenging class to play!

Kyton.3815:

I’m glad to see some input on this topic, but I can see you probably just jumped to my bolded sections for each class instead of reading the second paragraph I had where I said “Note that all of this is just the base mechanic, not including traits etc which all classes have to add a bit to how they play.” Elementalist attunement swap grants NOTHING untraited aside from access to the new set of weapon skills. I have an elementalist as well, and yes….every trait line will add something to one or more attunements. At any rate, it sounds like you still agree with me that the Elementalist mechanic is superior than Necro’s.

I can tell now I made a mistake in my personal ratings of the classes since a lot of people seem to be focusing on that…..in particular the elementalist one

I can see how some would also find the Warrior burst a boring skill since it is just one ability on F1. However, since it adds the capability to get a new always available effect based upon what weapon you use I personally find it more useful (raw damage, stun, fire field). There is no downside to it, unlike Death Shroud where you can’t heal/be healed, can easily accidentally cancel it, can’t tell how long you have left on cooldowns, can’t get out of control effects, so on.

I agree 100% that Death Shroud has it’s uses. I’ve used the quick jump into DS ->fear->out of DS when knocked down and need to avoid a follow up attack such as 100 blades myself. I just feel that the benefit/drawback ratio is unfavorable. But hey, everyone has their own opinion and I respect yours if you feel it is great as is. I’m glad it is working for you. For me….it feels like in PvP/WvW it just slows my rate of dying without doing anything beneficial in most cases.

Yes, I think the elementalist mechanic is better than the necro’s. I am biased, elementalist is my main class, and it’s a blast to play and “stance dance” on it’s elements.

DS can be “buffed” in quality of life, like swaping your weapon’s bar for the DS bar when you transform, so you can see the cooldowns. I also would love to be able to swap my weapons set while in DS, so I can come out ready to do something else.

My other issue with DS is that you can’t passively spec for it well, like you can on elementalist, each talent line gives something good added to attunement. For DS you need to spec INTO it, and it’s not an effective build imho.

Necro can have many playstyles, I leveled quite fast following these steps:

Early level (1 stat only gear): staff + epidemic with all +condition damage gear, basically go with bleed mark and then epidemic to tag as many mobs you can.

Mid levels (2 stats on gear): Here I got more condition damage, my 2nd weapon set was scepter/dagger, I could reach the bleed cap in all mobs (but the epidemic target) fairly easily.

Late levels (3 stats): Now is when I had most fun with my necro, I swaped to a hybrid build, very similar to the one on Nemesis tutorial. Using rampager gear (+power, +crit, +condition.) I could deal great single target damage with axe/focus (focus for the vulnerabilty debuff) and still keep a decent aoe with scepter/dagger bleeds (and epidemic). The best part is that I finally found my Death Shroud useful for more than the extra HP, I could actually AoE burst with life drain (plus dots), or stack might with plague blast before going rampage with the axe.

Imho, necros are made to be played hybrid, so you get full benefit from death shroud spells, extra damage on your basic attacks and be able to destroy objects. I really don’t like full condition damage anymore, except some WvW situations I run with a chill duration/condition/debuff build.

Nay of the Ether.8913:

I can count how many times DS has saved me…on one hand too. Its all well and good in 1v1 or even 1v2, but get more than that on you and you might as well not even have ds at all.. Oh wait my bad we can just escap….errr nm…oh we can just evad…nope, oh I got it we can invuln/shrink/stealth….dang guess not. Ah I got it we have that all powerful fear right? Because phh no one runs with stability hidden under 200 boons right?

Oh, you want to 1v5? Yeah, necro isn’t for you, sorry. sarcasm
And if DS has saved you less than 5 times, you are either undergeared, a liar or a terrible player. Considering the rest of your post, I’ll guess it’s the last.

I have no issues on medium scale skirmishes on my necro, I actually excel at it with a chill duration build and condition damage.

No offense, but you (the OP) have no idea of what you are talking about.

Elementalist class mechanic isn’t just a glorified weapon swap. You receive extra buffs per attunement and on swap. It also counts as weapon swap for sigil purposes. It’s probably the best class mechanic in the game.

Thief mechanic is basically just a shadow step with a random effect on it. Check on thieves forums, they hate it with passion, how can it even be considered “Best”?

Warrior mechanic is overly simple, it’s a 5th button and some warrior builds don’t even use it, because they relly on having full rage all the time.

Necro DS is amazing for suvival, the extra fear is a good “oh crap” interrupt, or escape skill. The drain life can heal allies, it also has a “charge” for chasing targets. Oh, yes, it has it’s own hp bar that can mitigate some bursts! I can’t possible count how many times DS saved my skin solely for the extra HP. Can it be buffed? I’d like dark blast to be based on my mainhand, just that.

Necros have more issues with the bleed cap than they have with DS. I think necro DoTs shouldn’t be bleeds, they should be something unique to necros, like confuse is for mesmer. Like “curse”, it’d work exactly like bleed, but you wouldn’t have to share it with thieves, warriors and everyone else…

Aren’t rangers the best snipers in WvW?

1500 range, full glass cannon builds picking off enemy team’s squishies from safe distance?

I want a ranged DPS class and can’t figure one in this game, my elementalist performs way better with dagger/dagger tanky/dot build than with staff. Engineer plays best on mid range, riffle warrior could do it I guess, just… kinda bleh? I mean, I play a warrior to mellee people and crit for 10k with a hundred blades :P

Yes, the commander icon shows up as well.

My main is a mesmer, I love my mesmer, and yes, we are one of the best duelists in the game. We are not weak, we have alot of suport skills and one of the most OP skills in the game. (Portal Entre)

Yet, I believe this bug should be fixed. Because it’s a bug, it’s annoying and defeats part of the class’ mechanics.

You guys come here and laugh when someone says something on mesmers should be fixed. We have bugs remaining, just as every other class. The OP isn’t asking for a buff, he’s asking for a fix on something that he believes that should be fixed.

And I also agree with Rio’s words.

Voodoo Tina.4180:

Read your own post.
You could be clearer. You say that generally stun is preferred to daze.
The trait gives you 50% chance to stun on daze.
If half of your dazes stun, and you prefer stun to daze, what’s your problem?

Alright, let me try to explain his point:

First lets run down on what each thing does:
- Daze: Interrupts and prevents the target from using skills for a period of time.
- Stun: Interrupts, immobilizes, and incapacitates foes for a short duration.

The difference between a Daze and a Stun is really just the immobilize. Both usually last 1 or 2 seconds top.

Why would you waste a Tier 3 talent to have 50% chance of immobilizing someone when you cast a daze? They already can’t do anything… and it’s not even “Turn your dazes into stuns” (100%), it’s unreliable.

Yes, stun is better than daze, but not to justify a 50% chance to turn one into other as a tier 3 talent, it should be a Tier 1 talent at best. Tier 2 if the chance was 100%, since all you get extra is the immobilize anyway.

As it is, the talent is useless, unreliable and a bad joke for a Tier 3 talent.

Did you understand now? should someone make a graphic or draw a picture to you?

So I made this awesome build I wanted to play out swaping from elixir gun for single target to flamethrower for aoe and got terribly frustrated to find out that when you swap out your weapon, your auto attack simply vanishes and you have to set it (ctrl+R click) every time you change weapons.

Please, make Flame Jet and Tranquilizer dart have auto attack by default, it just makes any build that uses either weapons useless for pvp where you need fast reaction, and spamming my number 1 repeatedly (sometimes a must) reminds me of another MMO I’d love to forget… >.<