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I’ve been getting desperate as most necros to find a build I like that works, and finally I found two, only two, that work in my style and can be effective when used appropriately, I thought I’d share for those who like build experimenting.
Don’t get me wrong I’ve been very down on Necros and I don’t think this patch has saved us, but my favorite glass-cannon build has just been made better. I use this for hot-join farming and it’s very effective.
Glass cannon
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I’ve been running a spin on the ‘hit like a truck’ build
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fQQQRAnd4djMaV6Zaib07JAoH5irzRPQWZmpKAPA;T4Ag0CnoqxUjoGbNuak1sIYQwhgNBPCmEA
foresaking the soul-reaping tree for Spite.
With the reduced CD on spectral abilities, and life force gain on use + spec walk, axe and dagger, I have a lot of soul force often, and can use death shroud both offensively and defensively.
Now my Life Blast (which crits for 3.5-4k) casts faster, so it gets line-of-sighted, dodged, etc. less often.
Axe actually does pretty solid damage. I used to run 2x dagger mainhand with warhorn in one and focus in the other, now I run axe + dagger with focus offhand for both (4 does awesome damage and stacks even more invuln now).
As for dealing with thieves / warriors as a glass cannon:
-stick with your team and pick your fights wisely.
- Dagger 3, drop both wells. If they stand in it casting 100b or pistol whip, you win. Remember you can still switch to death shroud while stunned and eat most of a 100b damage with enough to survive if you have 100% life force. You also have your V key when you see the bull charge coming.
-STICK WITH YOUR TEAM THIS IS NOT A SOLO GAME
-Use your axe 3 and your wells to wait out stealthed thieves, if they try to walk into the wells while stealth to burst you they’ll get a healthy dose of riciulous damage to the face.
-Use dodging, use death shroud 4, and when they leave stealth use your fear for some free up-time on them, even if it’s not long, use spectral walk to out-run them
-spam dagger 1 while walking backwards, do not underestimate dagger DPS.
Bunker & Regen
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Unfortuantely my regen build which is also my tourney build got nerfed.
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fQQQRArd7djMah6Zaea07JAJFX/8kivHP6BxIzMA;T4Ag2Cno8ycj4GbXOvkdtIYQwhgNBPCmEA
Used to run 2piece water & monk & dwayna for long regen bunker build. I’ll see if it’s still as good, if not I’ll just switch to Undead runes for more damage.
The next most important thing to my discovery of this build is not the traits, or the abilities, but the of the Shaman necklace. Do NOT underestimate bonus healing for necro, just because our life stealing either doesn’t or barely scales with it!
Now I’ll warn you this build is slow to play, it’s not particularly rewarding or interesting but you can, in time, 1v1 most other classes, yes even thieves if you use your CC and AOE appropriately.
The point isn’t to have mad 1337 healing from regen, it’s to last long enough that your consume conditions and wells come off cooldown, you then reset the fight pretty much. Remember consume conditions scales with bonus healing, and so does the ‘per condition’ part, so having a lot of bonus healing means your 6 does crap tons, and its only a 25s cooldown. Instead of using it as an ‘oh kitten’ / condition wipe I use it as a mass heal every time it won’t be significant overhealing, then use the rest of my abilities to keep me up until it’s back while wittling away my enemy.
When you’ve dotted your enemy down to 50% and you’re 45% and they think they’ve got you, suddenly you’re 95% and drop all your wells again, it’s a great feeling. I’ve won 4v5 tourneys by bunkering the middle point against multiple attacking foes for several minutes.
You aren’t a guardian, you are not to stand still and take the abuse! Use your marks to control them, use your well of darkness when they try to get on you in melee, don’t panic fire at as soon as the fight starts. Use your death shroud as an extra HP pool, if you’re getting close to dead and your heal is just off CD and you have 10% soul force built, use it to stay those few seconds until you get your heal back.
You’re also not a designated healing, you’re a hybrid attrition class! You may provide AOE regen buff for your team but this is more of an aside to your personal survival. It’s also important to realize how useful you are to your team alive, given your CC, your ability to strip boons off the enemy with your well and Focus 5, as well as cleanse friendly conditions with your well and staff 4.
I also think it’s important to forget chaining staff 3+4 for the blast combo unless the situation explicitly presents itself where you both need to use 3 for the chill + poison and 4 to remove conditions. I save this ability as my primary condition wipe.
(edited by instantcoffee.1785)
I run the follow runes:
2 water, 2 dwayna, 2 monk. This puts a huge extension on your regen, coupled with your bonus healing and ability to remove poison you’re a self-healing machine.The goal is to out-attrition your enemy, as the Devs intended, and so I built this with their philosophy in mind.
Thieves do not wait for your regeneration to last long enough for an extension or to let you have your battle of attrition. Same with warrior, mesmer, elementalist, engineer, guardian and ranger.
Stop being bad. You have access to fear and chill with staff, blind with well, fear with death shroud, chill with focus, cripple with scepter, and dodging. You can run either a pet with knockdown or plague form to aoe blind while your poison runs them low.
Thieves shouldn’t be giving you issues. They have 16khp max, you can dot that down in no time.
I use a regeneration build, it’s my go-to and yes it stomps on thieves because their burst doesn’t touch me through well of darkness and staff marks.
Every class can be easy to fight against, even necro’s are easy to fight against. We necros can be made to look overpowered if used by a skilled player. We are actually one of easiest class’s to counter in a 1 vs 1 setup since its so easy to get away from the necro.
Tired of bad players using this cop out.
I use a regeneration build, it’s my go-to and yes it stomps on thieves because their burst doesn’t touch me through well of darkness and staff marks.
Not this kitten again, “Hey guys look at this build I found the class is saved! I’m the first to consider this!”
I run the follow runes:
2 water, 2 dwayna, 2 monk. This puts a huge extension on your regen, coupled with your bonus healing and ability to remove poison you’re a self-healing machine.
On top of that you have good damage.
I use 5% crit sigils on all weapons.
The goal is to out-attrition your enemy, as the Devs intended, and so I built this with their philosophy in mind.
I do not like your build because vampiric wells is awful, and does terrible healing while requiring the enemy to stand it it and the Soul Reaping tree is lackluster if not awful.
If you want to be more offensive try Undead runes.
(edited by instantcoffee.1785)
Moa is OP and should be removed or should be removable by well of power. It’s so stupid how it’s basically an “I win” button and they get to beat on you while you’re morphed. Bullkitten, I wish we had an elite half that effective instead of a broken pet, a “train me now” and becoming a moving well of darkness.
Should benefit from the 400 toughness when channeling trait, this is bullkitten.
If virtually all of our utilities can be interrupted by CC or even dodging as well as many of our weapon attacks they should be considered channeled and grant toughness during that time, not just dagger and axe 2.
Either that or stop this ‘everything has a cast time and can be interrupted mid-cast’ crap that makes us need stability when we don’t have it.
Ridiculous oversight IMO.
Does anyone else feeling dodging is way more detrimental to our ability to cast abilities than most other classes?
(edited by instantcoffee.1785)
It’s not all about dps. If you’re dead you do no DPS, toughness still helps.
Until your 40 your spec will hardly define your play style and until 60+ it does very little and not until 80 will you be able to complete a well rounded build…. and even then you can’t because most of our traits don’t work as intended.
The problem with a well build in PVE is if you’re soloing hearts the cooldowns are too long for steady, consistent fighting. I found minion master to generally be best for soloing as you can generally maintain 2 or 3 pets at a time, they will die and they will die frequently, but you really have no other abilities that add consistent damage to help you in soloing.
Also I advise against using the blood fiend, in fact I’d almost forgotten it exists, because when it dies you have no heal in the bag and you’re screwed. Both of our other heals far outshine it.
DS2 is for dagger necros in pvp, more or less. The dev says he uses it, swaps out of DS then uses dagger immobilize as it lands.
As for DS in general, it’s a way to keep doing damage without losing life. As a power build you’ll do less damage than daggers but more than any weapon auto-attack with life blast >50% life force, then use 4 and toggle out.
If you’re 15 points into curses use 4 right away as you gain fury for 3 seconds entering DS with 15 points, and you have a chance to cause bleeding on crit, life siphon pulses a lot of attacks quickly, over an area, so you have a chance to stack some solid bleeds and crits there.
That said it’s still lackluster.
On a side note has anyone come to a conclusion regarding Trafalgars stack o mancer build in the sticky?
I run this except I run 30 points death magic, then either 10 spite 30 curses for a condi build or 30 spite 10 whatever (usually curses to pick up the lifeforce on crits) for power build.
I then run 3, 2 piece sets for +%might duration, coupled with full boon duration from death magic you get 22 seconds on might, very tanky and very damagey, ezz good.
I typically only run power version in WvW to bash doors with daggers, as they are amazing dps for door bashing especially with 20 stacks of might.
(edited by instantcoffee.1785)
Yeah most auto attacks will automatically target the nearest enemy even if they’re out of range. I noticed with my Ele staff on earth I was casting rocks when at Keep and could tell when enemies were coming and from what direction from a long ways off.
Working on rerolling to ele but I hate level grinding.
Staff auto attack will show you where a stealthed thief is, just keep spamming 1 and follow the claws.
So in the end necro’s are for one thing, PVP point holding/taking, and little else…
Most classes can do this, because all it involves is being tanky, we aren’t really any more exceptional at it than guardian, warrior, mesmer, elementalist, or engi.
It’s really a stupid excuse when anyone says, “Well you’re doing it wrong you’res a tanky class! Go bunker build!”
It’s a giant cop-out, we don’t do anything particularly new or exciting as bunkers and it’s the only thing we do, because vitality and toughness make everyone tanky, and we get condition removal.
So do guardians, who also get a lot more retaliation, knockbacks, healing, etc. that let them not only hold points, but take them by knocking the enemy off so they can turn it over time.
I just started playing an Ele build with 30 point arcane taking the various gain X based on Y attunement, you just shuffle F1-4 and you’re unkillable, do good damage, and have way more support for your team than a necro, it’s ridiculous really.
Anything anyone says we can do, they obviously haven’t tried doing it on another class.
…. Do we really need another one of these posts?
Just one day I would like to log into these forums and not see it cluttered with Necro sucks/Mesmer stole my DPS/Warrior has better surviveability posts
Fact is, this is an MMO – balance has always been an issue in every MMO at some point. One day you may log in and find your OP, next month you might log in and find you’re getting stomped by every class.
Thing is professions change, mechanics change, games change – pretty much everything changes – that’s the nature of MMOs – they are constantly changing and evolving
Instead of creating another one of these largely unproductive posts, surrounding yourself with other inane posts – why don’t you just take a break from the game/go play another class/PVE/craft etc
Your time would be far better identifying profession bugs and posting them in the sticky (ANET Devs actually look at those) – these posts add very little value and its highly unlikely that the Dev’s are going to turn around and buff your class simply because you said you would quit playing…..
No need to throw your rattle out the pram
It’s the community’s right as the customers to voice their opinion, it’s the producer’s duty to try to make them happy, if they want them to buy expansions, gems or anything else, that consumer has to be enjoying the game. We aren’t responsible for the success or failure of the game.
It’s the same way mitigation vs. HP works in most games.
The best outcome in terms of effective HP is balancing the two, each point of one makes the other stronger, the same way crit and power do, each point of power makes your crits hit harder, each point of crit multiplies power effectiveness.
Well if you’re taking less damage, each point of HP you have is worth more.
The thing is for necromancers, we already have high HP, and toughness is weak to conditions, but most of us run builds heavy in removal. This increases the value of toughness for us pretty significantly, as does our self healing.
The question at the end of the day though is do you get enough mitigation from toughness to outweigh the amount of HP we get from vitality?
In my experience I feel hardier running vitality builds in SPvP. I think this is in part due to the fact that we can get so much HP, as much as over 30k with knight medallion, vitality runes and full Blood Magic, and part that despite our condition cleansing there’s still cooldowns and such, you still take damage from them.
We also already have access to protection which is 33% damage reduction, already increasing the value of our HP.
I think it’s also possible toughness just doesn’t offer a lot of mitigation
Staff also has a projectile and blast combo finisher. Apart from minion bomb, our only combo finishers. I often go staff#3 -> #4 just for the area weakness/extra damage when conditions aren’t a problem. Combine that with Light/Dark wells for different effects.
This is a huge issue with necros, how our combos, and damaging abilities, we need to save for their utility, and yet they still do lackluster damage.
Axe and dagger are pleasing to use because you only use the abilities for what you need them for. 2 on cooldown with axe for life force and damage, 3 for aoe damage / snare.
Staff’s auto attack is pathetic, it’s the lowest dps auto attack of all our weapons, so mostly we use marks for damage in that mode, so then do you use your 3 for damage, or save it for kiting when you need it? What about our 4 then, the combo finisher? Do we use it for a finisher after 3 or save it for when we need to hot-drop all our conditions?
Yeah these choices might seem like ‘flavor’ but when you’re already struggling to bring down your opponent they really just seem like bad mechanics.
Hey let’s justify bad weapon design and ineffective damage by calling them ‘backup’ weapons.
Lol it’s funny how people allow their class to get kittenand make excuses for the company doing it.
Seriously, 19k in 7 hits and you complain about that?
You are seriously complaining about a skill that does 2715 damage per hit.Please tell me this is not true.
I know it must be surprising for a thief but…for some professions this is a high number especially because when you mash button x it doesn’t respond anymore because gasp it is on a coodlown!!!
And Gasp you have 2 entire weapon sets (or 4 attunements, or as many kits as you want to bring) of CD’s to use! Hitting DD 4 times is the equivalent of using every single CD on both weapon sets!
This is honestly the saddest thief complaint I’ve seen. The backstab stuff I can understand, though I disagree with. Then the condition spec crying started, and I just laughed. This, however, is the worst I’ve seen – complaining about an easily dodged ability from a visible glass cannon spec’d thief. DD is hilariously easy to dodge due to travel time (just ask anyone who’s ever run away from a thief with enough endurance to dodge) – you sat there and ate DD after DD from an obvious glass cannon (while being fairly squishy yourself), and rather than examine what happened, how it could be prevented (extremely easily, as I’ve pointed out), and adjusting your playstyle, people come to the boards to QQ, and similar people who cry for nerfs before learning how to play hear the clarion call and join in.
What kind of stupid logic is this, I can use all 5 of my weapon abilities, switch, use the other 5 and use the other 4 of my class abilities and NOT kill someone.
Using your resource pool does [Edit]not kittening entitle you to a kill.
(edited by Moderator)
AOE damage is even more useless in 5v5 where you have less people and bunker meta where your goal is to kill some super tanky guardian, or be a bunker yourself.
I never said devs say that, I said the community says that. Please share with us the quote where I said it’s the devs? Look, I can do it to!
When classes have unequal imbalances they cannot give equal attention, they have to give special attention to the classes that are hurting most.
(edited by instantcoffee.1785)
Most classes have a burst option, a viable one at that, we don’t truly have one as all our ‘burst’ options basically make us a sitting, killable duck (lich form, aka moa form, dagger power build).
As a warrior I can be an attrition build, a burst build, a bleeds build, CC build, AOE healing & support build.
Guardian has similar options.
Eles as well, I’m not as well informed about engi, mesmers are quite strong in several areas, thieves are great at what they do, leaving rangers and necros with a narrow set of build options, let alone strong/viable ones.
It’s quite laughable that some classes have so many good options while others are told to just accept they have one mediocre one and the rest are laughably bad.
What the hell is wrong with this community that they think this is acceptable game making?
This happened in seconds there was no time to react.
It bounces 4 times as stated above. This means 4 casts are required to hit one target seven times. 4 casts for 19k… sounds balanced to me, especially since the thief is out of initiative at that point. Dancing dagger is at its best vs. 2 targets.
I’m sorry no, that burst potential shouldn’t exist, at all, even if it’s rare, or hard to achieve, it’s stupid.
I disagree, make tab target ignore clones. Frankly the only people mesmer tricks work on is new players, why should they be a new player bully?
Then you have to take into account they are balanced the the ‘tricks’ in mind that no longer work on experienced players.
Honestly their downed 2 is a joke if you know how it works. Real mesmer always pops out after the clone and has a thing over its head. Now that Ele got their downed fix they probably have the worst downed state in the game.
Lol yeah thieves should have a monopoly on glass cannon builds, berserker items are exclusively theirs and everyone else should go cry in a corner.
I wish my scepter aoe snare did that, instead it just applied bleeds in an area after a long cast time, during which you miss your target 9 times out of 10 and does, oh, 300 damage. Lolololol.
This game is awful I’m about ready to quit.
Based on what we’ve been getting from the devs in terms of necromancer design goals / the ‘stencil’ of how they should function, not only is it impractical but it will never work in the environment GW2 has made with SPvP.
First I will address the ‘inescapable’ issue. The idea that necromancers, once engaged are hard or impossible to escape and because of this we give up OUR escape abilities.
We all know that this is, currently, not true, lets just slide aside the fact that we are very escapable.
Now in order for this class design to work a few things must be true. One is that we must not just be a good 1v1 class, which currently we are not. We must be the BEST 1v1 class as we have only the option to ‘lock horns’ as they say and duel it out. What good is the ability to lock horns if it’s a lost cause and you can only see defeat?
Secondly, what’s more important than being able to keep up with a target – if this is your design intent, to stay on our target indefinitely – is to keep the target from escaping to seek help, because once the target is able to retreat to their team, you’ve lost your fight and you aren’t really preventing them from escaping at all, they’ve escaped and it’s done.
If we COULD lock down an enemy and prevent their escape entirely, not only would we need absurd amounts more CC than we have, we’d be absurdly overpowered.
Moving on to the idea we are ‘attrition’ based. This doesn’t work in current GW2 SPvP meta. Slow damage is simply not valuable, you need to get your target OFF the point so you can cap it, this relegates us to a bunker/defensive role only. This brings us back to our other issue, we cannot effectively 1v1 most other classes, and even coming close to doing so requires kiting and significant movement, and you CANNOT ‘bunker’ a point while kiting!
Now a slight aside from function facts vs. fiction is how this play style effects ‘fun’ for public matches.
It’s quite simple really, you’re not in control of the outcome of public 8v8 matches, you’re 12.5% of your team, if the other 87.5% of your team is bad you aren’t going to have much fun unless you’re effectively capable of killing an enemy in a reasonable time frame to glory farm.
Lets be realistic here, most people doing 8v8 measure fun on glory, score and kills, not on the success or failure of their team, as playing to win often costs you more glory than if you’d lost and farmed kills all match. Because of this a class that performs poorly in 1v1 or at collecting kills in general is not incredibly fun to play for the average person in a public match, so when you’re team is bad, like really bad, like 500-100 at the end, being spawn farmed, you get NOTHING and have an abysmally unfun time.
At least as a burst class you can just about guarantee a kill every time your burst combo is off cool down, you can reap SOME benefit despite being on the losing team.
As a Necro you basically have one option. Return to Heart of the Mists, try another match.
Please stop ramming your head against this broken idea of a necro and create the class we need.
This has happened to me twice, last time was on my thief and it was 13k, myself and a team mate in tournament mode dropped down to take Keep, I was full health and dropped instantly.
This time was on my necro, I joined a bad team, being farmed right outside spawn, I was engaging and suddenly I hit the ground. My current build runs 30k hp, and this took less than 5 seconds, it was NOT multiple uses over a long fight.
The class being fun is the only reason anyone plays it at all, if it wasn’t fun, and was this broken… lol.
Yeah what he said they’re a lot of fun when you’re being carried.
“It’s a necromancer! Quick, kill it!”
This has been posted a couple times which is odd. Do your teams really leave necros to free cast?
As a necro im normally saved for last for whatever reason in groups to die. Unless I use Lich then im turned into a moa or burned down before i even cast 2 attacks.
He’s doing that one thing that makes him dangerous, quick use your 10 to stop it then kill him to teach him a lesson!
HEY GUYS I FOUND THIS BUILD THE CLASS IS SAVED YOU CAN ALL GO HOME.
Jk other classes still do the same thing better.
I’m not a developer, and feel free to tell me to shut up and go away (although I warn you, I will grumble!) but the Life-Leeching complaints are symptomatic of a much larger problem.
That problem being: We, or the other professions in the game, or perhaps healing mechanics entirely, scale poorly with Healing Power compared to some other stats. Not all stats are created equally!
Allow me to provide an example in the form of a stat called Prowess, also known more commonly as Critical Damage. In Guild Wars 2, all Critical Hits have a base damage of 150%. So a 3000 damage sword swing from a Warrior clocks a 4500 critical hit. According to the wiki, 1 point of Prowess equates to an extra 1% on top of the baseline 150%. So, with 30 points in Soul Reaping, your prowess is 180%, your crit does 180% damage (in the Warrior example this makes the crit 5400 damage).
Healing Power on the other hand scales linearly and rather feebly at that. Regeneration is a common boon for us to throw out – it comes from Staff 2, Focus 4, and the 5-point minor in Blood. Regeneration scales at a rate of 1 point adding 0.125 health to a Rejuvenation tick.
To provide a more anecdotal example, by kitting myself out entirely in Exotic Clerics’ armour with 6/6 Superior runes of water, and rare Cleric’s Axe/Focus and Staff, as well as full exotic Sapphire Jewelery and 20 points down Blood Magic for good measure, I clocked in at nearly 1800 Healing Power.
My Regeneration still healed for less than 300 a tick out of a 20-21000 health pool.
If Life Leech and siphoning do indeed scale off of Healing Power (and we have no reason not to believe this) then their weak performance are part of the problem that is Healing Power as a stat scales horribly. Professions such as Guardians make it through by simply having a large pool of on-demand burst healing skills – it’s the sheer high base numbers given to them and the multitude of them that makes them effective healers. For everyone else with low initial values, even a significant chunk of Healing Power won’t do much to budge your healing up.
The optimist in me would love to see a build focused around Life-Leeching. Really, I would. The realist in me says: If the developers can figure out how strongly they want Healing Power to impact the metagame of PvP without it spiralling out of control, then we might be able to make some progress with a Life-Leeching build.
As it stands, Healing Power is woefully underscaled for the concerns of level 80 PvP, and life leeching ends up falling under this category.
I disagree I don’t think healing should be strong as it’s unfun for a game to have unkillable self-healing classes, I’d prefer healing as a sort of alternate tough/HP, it extends your effective health and time to kill but doesn’t actually replenish HP at a rate higher than damage.
I think we just need to have effective damage capable of making use of the extra time it buys us. We currently do not.
If you’re soloing, life siphon builds with minions are very safe and effective, they’re just awful for everything else.
In pvp they can work when AI doesn’t bug out.
I remember the third day after release, a warrior running the starter set fought me with his rifle. I was running a standard spite/soul reaping condi build I’d just looked up online.
We fought for about 3 minutes and when he finally won he called me an ‘op kitten.’
Really?
His guardian/elementalist/mesmer abilities come from Caladbolg, you get to use it in part of the Sylvari quest line and it gives you the same attacks.
I’d just accept not turning to find my flesh golem is spectating my fight form afar.
You won’t survive explore modes relying on life siphon.
Currently I run full power/tough/vital, double daggers, death magic for boon duration, reaper’s might, and 3 set piece bonuses for +20% might duration.
Use daggers to stack soul force, go DS, stack might to ~10, swap out, use blood is power for 10 more might, 20s duration per stack, poke things really hard.
Try it.
As long as they don’t add CTF, every game has ctf and it’s always bad.
As if we need another reason to play bunker builds.
It’s my understanding axe is for use with minions do to vulnerability, and for deathshroud builds due to having highest raw DS/second generation off using 2 on cooldown (uninterrputed). It still blows dick, that said.
When I got the thief teams, twice I was on my thief and we won, and it was a 500-150 landslide.
Another time it was against us and it was a hard defeat.
Fact is most pubs can’t handle thieves.
If I was to suggest a list of changes, the initiative cost of heartseeker needs to be higher, it should NOT be frivolously spammable as a kittening GAP CLOSER it’s an ATTACK yet they can just keep mashing it until they win. If you miss a one it should be detrimental. You should actually have to BE GOOD to land a hit that hard.
Heartseeker is the #1 reason new/bad players are successful as thieves, they can kill low health players by mashing 2 repeatedly. Changing the damage threshold did not solve this issue, giving it a high initiative cost is way more important. It’s STUPID how thief attacks deliver you so perfectly to your target where most require you to at least face your target and be close to them to perform without missing.
Next would be to hit backstab damage. Reduce the damage, give it a 5 stack bleed or 10 stack vuln, or a stun.
Next would be remove quickness from Spvp, but that’s probably a different discussion altogether and I feel only effects pistol whip which IMO isn’t that bad, not as bad as 100b warrior as the setup is harder and cleave is smaller.
What we need is more ‘removes crowd control effects’ specific condi removals for classes that need them and less ‘removes all conditions’ that screw over bleed classes.
I’m starting to think thief isn’t as “pickup and win” as everyone thinks. A thief in spvp was hitting me for around 100 with his death blossom and 200 with his double (or dual, I forget) strike, and no, I don’t run bunker builds.
Then he must have been naked.
Building full defenses is not the answer to imbalanced class damage. You can’t have a game say that you can play how you want, then turn around and have a class force your hand to be full defensive.
And ‘from the perspective of an engineer’ how many classes have you played? How many builds? One class perspective is hardly any perspective at all. That’s 20%, come back when you have the other 80%.
Except thieves can play pretty much any build and be super easy.
Warriors have that 1 cheese build.
They’re too easy to play and it’s dumb. High burst should come with a high skill requirement.
Buy I’ve been in 3 games where one entire team was 6-8 thieves.
The staff is the middleman of our jack-of-all-trades arsenal, as support is about all we’re good for. We can apply regen, which is nice, and transfer condis, which is about the main this it’s useful for, on top of penetrating and generating soul force on hit and being our only 1200 ranged weapon, it’s a pity on fights that demand that range due to range cheese exploits in dungeons we’re stuck doing such garbage damage. It’s also amazing how many bosses don’t even trigger marks at all, and by amazing I mean kittening absurd.
Exactly, we have no strength. The fact that we are equally weak at everything gives us the illusion of being a jack-of-all trades.
Now on to our power builds. If you think necros shouldn’t have power builds YOU ARE WRONG please LEAVE.
Why is it necessary for necromancers to have a power build?
1- because everyone else is allowed to, why should there be a bias against necros?
2- as previously stated, some situations don’t favor condition builds
3- as previously stated conditions are currently too easy to shed and take too long to stack in SPvP and I think it’s a large part of how we suffer. We don’t have access to any kind of burst application of conditions like a hot-quickness to stack up bleeds quickly in a burn-down situation. Until things like this are resolved I believe a power-build alternative is necessary for our viability in SPvP.
- thing wrong with our power build is the weapons!
Axe is awful, there’s no way around it, the damage is pathetic. 2.25 second channel that caps out at roughly what a thief in equivalent items does in an auto attack. Are you kitten me?
Dagger does comparable auto attack damage to other strong melee classes, but does not cleave, its 2 is a joke 3 is -okay- but honeslty making it do meaningful damage couldn’t hurt. The major divide between us and other power classes is their 2+ abilities also do meaningful damage on top of their utility.
Greatsword warriors have TWO gap closers, a ranged snare, and a channeled high-output ability that scales with quickness, all of which hit really hard.
Thieves have a built in dodge, an execute type ability, a ranged AOE slow and a stealth.
Eles have AOE and ranged cleave on their daggers on top of high sustained damage.
We get NONE OF THE ABOVE.
The excuse is that our power weapons are a means to generate life force to use DS for burst. HAH. DS burst is equally low, and the builds we need to make it do actual damage leave us too squishy to use daggers or axe with its laughable ‘range’ effectively.
People KNOW that axe necros do low damage and thus attacking them is low personal risk and if you switch to dagger they’ll kite you to death. Warhorn only gives a 1s cripple and only once your in range of them, they need only wait our your 3 then open a gap on you and this game is not about 1v1, you’ll be chasing them through a group battle more often than not. There’s no reason for Axe to be so low damage and no reason our dagger can’t cleave, or be granted a magic range booster or some luxury only we are for some reason forbade.
When comparing our condition builds directly to other classes I can stack bleeds equally good on a warrior or a thief. A warrior brings with it more survivability and hard CC while a thief brings lots of avoidance and stealth. I can make a caltrops + death blossom build that will stack bleeds as fast as a necro while being nearly unhittable.
We are hardly the masters of condition application, only the ‘masters’ of self-condition management and removal. That is ALL we are good at, and considering necros are the primary condition using class, we are basically our own worst enemies. Necros counter necros, and everything else counters us by simply not relying on conditions to be effective, and pooping on us with burst damage.
Now back to looking at how I’d build that condi build. So Spite is an option in terms of pure damage, yes, but as I have defined in the above it’s not exactly a great choice because you will be trained and you will die unless your gear is explicitly built to make up for the weaknesses of your traits.
So the other common choice most people roll with is Soul Reaping. Lets put aside how RIDICULOUSLY bugged this trait tree is for a second, not the least of which is the 5 pointer Gluttony. This turns us into a crit + conditionmancer. The problem with this lies in that you’re taking a large portion of your traits toward critical damage meaning you need sufficient critical chance to back that damage up. Too much of one without the other is not as strong a choice as a blend. In SPvP the precision from curses alone brings us to 18% crit, this is very low. Less than 1 in 5 attacks being a critical. Remember, our conditions DO NOT critical, for those new to game mechanics, so we’d be gearing to beef up the weak part of our dps, our non condition damage, through RNG reduction scaling, basically bringing our crit up to where it’s smoother and more reliable to stack more bleeds. This sounds good until you look at that at 50% crit which is about the max you can hope to run in SPvP you’re still at a 60% chance PER CRIT to cause a SMALL bleed, so that’s 1 in 3 hits causing a bleed, at best.
The other traits from Soul Reaping are generally forgettable except, imo, the very last two, 5 seconds off DS re-use timer and stability, but imo one or the other should be accessible in the next tier down because one is weak without the other. While it has traits like 3% life force on mark trigger, reduced cooldowns on spectral skills and DS skills I still feel like we lack the traits in this tree to both make DS DESIRABLE and to make it chargable in a reasonable timeframe in SPvP in this trait tree.
Death magic is way too minion focused. Toughness is great because it synergizes with our already high base HP pool, and boon duration is great for our might stacking builds and protection, but I feel the trait options for anything but a minion build under this tree are very lackluster. The protection on wells is short, the staff traits are amazing, but I don’t WANT them under a defensive tree I want them available to an offensive build favoring staves to begin with! Currently we must place 20 points in Spite, 20 points in Death and 20 points in Soul Reaping to aquire all the staff-centric abilities. While the intention of this may have been to make the staff useful to many builds, I feel it just means we’ve spread the ability to make staff a powerful mainstay weapon accross too many areas and it will always fill the role of a backup / utility weapon only. That’s ignoring the fact that its auto attack is TERRIBLE.
Blood magic is only good for wells, our Deathshroud healing support build (also wells). Sipohning life is a joke. If you want to be a defensive, self-healing class, guardian is your calling. Our siphoning will never scale in any meaningful amount to make us feel like vampiric life-stealing walls. Not to mention poison gets thrown around in this game like crazy which is 33% healing reduction, and is easier applied than removed, yes even by necros with their multiple ways to remove it, which frankly if you’re an all-in anti-condition build with 30 blood magic, you aren’t doing much of anything else.
I find this quite often the misconception new necros have. They build really tanky and think it’s great how long they live, but don’t realize that they end up just being ignored and dying last because they didn’t bring anything meaningful to their team, where a guardian can provide bonuses like aoe retaliation, regeneration and also remove conditions while being hard to kill. If you aren’t supplementing your tankiness with useful damage or support YOU ARE JUST A SPECTATOR.
So that’s my gripe on condition builds, on top of the fact that it PVE / WVW it makes you useless for things like attacking walls or graveling burrows etc. because you can’t apply conditions or crit them.
To be continued…
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