Guild Wars 2

If you are playing PvE/dungeons, most builds work and there is a good bit of variety, so don’t feel like you HAVE to play a cookie cutter build.

That being said, if you do want to resort to it, Rabid is the best armor for the standard condition build. Unfortunately, rabid gear on the tp is like the most expensive exotic armor in the game. Thus, the easiest way to get this is through karma vendors in orr or doing dungeon runs (TA/HotW and something else I believe). If you don’t have enough karma and want transitioning gear, I suggest level 80 rare rabid gear. It won’t cost much more than 2g for the entire set and is pretty close stat-wise to exotic.

Most condi builds avoid traiting for DS because it’s damage scales with power. Besides a panic button, entering can give you fury which is useful for procs. Sigil of Earth stacks with barbed precision, so I would still take it.

As for Death Magic, it’s your call, but very few condimancers run without Greater Marks. While Reanimator is useless and many people hate it, it generally isn’t THAT much trouble. Greater Marks is usually too good to pass up.

As for pure burst necros, there are viable builds and aren’t pointless, but they generally center around dagger and wells rather than axe and other utilities. But yes, pure burst sacrifices almost all of their survivability, and will be up close with dagger range.

Lopez has a pretty good guide on condimancer somewhere in the first few pages of the forum if you want to check that it.

EDIT: I just want to reiterate that many builds work for PvE so play what you like. GW2 isn’t about min/maxing your stats if you want to have fun.

With 0% critical damage and 17xx power, grabbing an axe is just not worth it. Your damage on axe swap will be less than on your S/D swap, and you are losing the utility granted by staff.

Unfortunately, while boring, the standard rabid gear S/D + Staff build would be superior in overall damage and equal in survivability. I think the problem is that you are trying to do too much with one build and as a result spreading yourself too thin. The other problem is that axe is a power weapon that needs both high power and high crit damage to be marginally effective because it is only really used to axe 2 burst. In the end, there is no niche that your build can fill that a standard condi build can’t do better.

To address other points in your post, skipping siphoning is fine (to be blunt it sucks). Necros actually have among the best condition removal in the game. Taking untraited well of blood is not worth it, especially with zero healing power, so take consume conditions. If you opt for staff swap, staff 4 removes all conditions (and transfers them). Sigil of Generosity is a very mediocre sigil for a necromancer, and with such high crit chance you are sacrificing so much damage by losing the Sigil of Superior Earth.

Hope this helps!

I’m not sure if I’m interpreting correctly, but if you are focusing on condition traits then you should be avoiding axe and dagger altogether. In a power build, necros love dagger mainhand because dagger 1 does significantly more damage per second than axe 1. In fact, axe 1 is one of the lowest damaging autoattacks in the game.

Popular opinion is that axe 1 is so bad that it destroys axe altogether. Coupled with the fact that 600 range is a “no man’s land” (not far enough to be safe as with a ranged weapon, not close enough to warrant melee level damage) and you have a recipe for disaster.

That being said, if you enjoy axe and wish to stick with it, Ascii and Nemesis have some niche builds that utilize it to good effect. However, neither of them “stick” to axe. They both agree to only switch to axe to use the burst on axe 2 and cripple/retaliation on axe 3. Then they either switch to DS or their swap to wait for cds.

Hope this helps!

EDIT: To address the other point of your post, d/d is usually not suggested except for roleplaying reasons. MH dagger is a power weapon, OH dagger is a condition weapon. Scepter/Dagger + Staff is the cookie cutter weapon choice for condition play simply because scepter 1 stacks conditions and staff is a versatile, long ranged, amazing overall weapon.

DeathenShada.6397:

@ Bobosaur

No you haven’t seen nemesis build then and cerulean’s. Vulnerability can hit a stack of 25 in around 3-4sec with this build.

You can use focus 4, your wall, or your well. You have 3 different skills to stack a large amount off the bat. Not to mention that puting 30 points into the Spite tree gives you a increased condition duration by 30% also if you use

Rare Veggie Pizza[s]
Food
Required Level: 80
Nourishment(1h,30m): +40% condition duration
+70 condition damage
+10 Experience from kills

All that condition duration will stack and last a hell of a lot longer.

This is true, but I believe he is using this build specifically for WvW. In WvW, focus is only a reliable vulnerability stacked on 1 target. Condition duration itself is rather useless in this case because 10seconds of vulnerability vs. 20 in WvW will not really make a difference. It will either be cleansed or the target will be dead before 10 seconds is up.

I like the theme of the build and awesome that it includes axe, but the problem with vulnerability is how long it takes to stack it (outside of 1 on 1 focus 4).

In theory, improving party damage output by 15% seems awesome. But by the time you stack 15 vulnerability with axe 1 and ds 1 on someone in WvW, it’s likely that they’ll have long been dead. Death Shiver and Axe 1 also both have pretty measly range, putting you in a lot of danger while stacking. WoS and Spectral wall are decent for stacking vulnerability but require good positioning (especially with the lack of focused rituals).

That being said, I think it can still be a viable build. My advice to improve the build-

1. Focus more heavily on support. Since you wont be able to compete with a true damage based build (inherent weakness of axe), I would completely drop the spite line. You can then pick up Enfeebling blood (weakness) and either focused rituals or spectral attunement in curses. Then, with the remaining 10 trait points, pick up Transfusion from the blood line.

2. Change to staff secondary. Staff is the best “support” weapon we have and is a great swap for any necro in general. If you do change to staff, I would suggest swapping ritual of prot for greater marks since you only have 1 well anyway.

These are just my opinions and not necessarily the best… In the end, if what you are doing works for you and is fun, then it’s the best build to have!

Vamp Precision (and the entire life siphoning trait line) is not popular…

Even in the “big aoe farming” scenario, Vamp precision offers nothing. Damage wise, with 50% crit, you are looking at an additional 0.3 of a bleed worth of damage (31 dmg per second) per target. Healing wise, assuming you are physically hitting the 5 targets constantly twice a second (nearly impossible), you offset 1.5 bleeds worth of damage on yourself. IN THE MOST IDEAL SITUATION POSSIBLE.

That is not a “good trait” by any stretch of the imagination, and is negligible even under ideal circumstances.

EDIT: But I agree, the many bugged traits probably do need priority.

I actually wasn’t even aware of Natural Vigor vs. Adrenal Implant or I would have brought it up in the original post (I’m not very familiar with engies). As wintermute said, in theory this could be perfectly acceptable, but adept minor to grandmaster major seems extreme.

Balancing traits such as Vampiric Precision and Halting Strike would open up a lot of new build possibilites. As it stands, they are just so awful that they can’t work even if you focus your build on maximizing its effectiveness. In combination with toning down or modifying existing, possibly overpowered traits, I think we can avoid pigeonholing classes into certain builds.

To avoid using mug as an example again, I’ll use Greater Marks. Part of the issue is that Staff is almost required on any necro build (another problem altogether), but the other problem is that Greater Marks is NECESSARY if you even have staff equipped. The other major adept death magic traits don’t look bad on paper, but in reality cannot even compete with Greater Marks. What this results in is necromancers being “forced” in every build to grab this trait.

(So the issue is not just trait balance between professions, but also within the same profession).

For clarity, I’ll use what I consider one of the the strongest and one of the weakest 10 point traits in the game.

Mug (Thief): grants 4,000 – 7,500 damage to steal

Vampiric Precision (Necromancer): grants 32 health/deals 32 dmg on a critical hit

For those who don’t play necromancer, 32 is not a typo. With the addition of another necromancer major trait (Bloodthirst), you can increase the siphon to a whopping 51 health per critical hit. With ~50% crit chance and 2 hits per second, the combined effect of these major traits is 2*0.5*51 = 51 heal/second.
In other words, with constant attacking you are able to negate HALF of ONE bleed stack with these TWO traits
~1-2 minutes of constant smacking will allow your two combined traits to do ONE mug of damage

I’m not sure what aspect of necromancer was so wildly overpowered to warrant this disparity in trait strength. Perhaps Reanimator. On a serious note, it is painfully obvious that there is a gap in effectiveness between traits that should be addressed to promote build balance and/or diversity. THESE GAPS ARE NOTICEABLE ACROSS ALL PROFESSIONS.

NOTE: I am not voicing an opinion on whether Thief/Necromancer is overpowered/underpowered, merely that there is a HUGE disparity between some traits. Thieves have their fair share of weak/useless traits and Necromancers have their fair share of strong traits. I picked these two traits because I think they highlight the extremes on the trait spectrum.