Guild Wars 2

I just finished my remaining class of ascended armor. Legendary armor should be worth several times the cost of ascended so each piece should be close to the cost of a legendary weapon. Arenanet cannot have purple armor that takes less effort to gather than pink.

Endless Soul.5178:

Shouldn’t that be Talking Mini Swordmaster Faren?

You’re losing it Anet.

Can I trade 15 stacks of blade shards for Gift of Something?

The loot formula seems to take total damage into account when deciding on award tiers. Too little damage compared to other players on any particular non-champ may give nothing. More damage seems to skew the ratio of trophies and bags.

Low cast-time spike-damage and pre-cast traps like marks are necessary when not soloing.

Greatsword is too slow compared to dagger and staff but axe, scepter, and all of the off-hands are bad at tagging. Shroud 2 and the damaging wells are good.

One problem is Epidemic does not seem to count, CPC does not do enough damage, and condition damage builds do not optimize shroud. – You cannot tag with a condition damage build.

Another problem is greatsword’s lower tagging capability but at least that can be remedied by a weapon swap.

I ran MH dagger, yesterday. It has less delay than greatsword, its single cleave and some active positioning make it competitive for three trash mobs and superior for one, and it is better at ensuring a “tag” on a mob in a havoc environment.

Scepter is horrible at tagging. It is the worst weapon for the profession. Before I could get 5 bleeds, mobs were burst down but other players. Epidemic usually fails because the mobs are often dead of bursts before the skill completes casting and. Epidemic also does not seem to count as a tag for drops, anyway. Staff’s piercing and AoE burst easily surpasses tagging capability for any of Necromancer’s condition or other utility weapons. Veterans and lower rank mobs die too fast for condition damage to ramp up.

I paid close attention to burn rates of trash mobs in PvE events running berserker and viper setups. I each case, I felt as if spike damage from other professions’ direct or condition damage dwarfed Necro Reaper’s output.

Both max power and max condition builds felt bad compared to how I feel other professions play and how other max builds playing along side me look.

Necromancer only seems to do well camping scepter on bosses, using grave digger on broken break bars, or corrupting boons.

Is this just my imagination?

Why not also suggest minion outfits? Wishes for new minions and minion skins have been constant for nearly 4 years. Many of us would pay gems for a little uniqueness.

Spoj has a guide on Dulfy that still has a lot of relevant information.

I would still like power necro to be viable. Having only condi/corruption necro be viable…

I wonder over how such a small “build tolerance box” as scepter / corruption defines class balance.

Balance, please.

Power builds have more variety and can be a lot of fun, too. Reaper, once you have the hero points, is also a power trait line.

Get yourself a berserker set when you can. With a berserker power build, staff pierces for 1k, dagger can do 4-6k per cycle, and axe is almost tolerable when used with minions. Focus hits like a truck and Life Blast does several thousand damage with its slow moving blob of Death.

If you are gathering hero points, power is best. Condition damage is the only viable build for raids and PvP but power is OK or better for other content. Condition damage builds need optimal situations to get meta: bleed stacking in PvE, or boon corruption in PvP. Condi pulls Necromancer into the meta, else Necro would not be in the meta. Power builds, on the other hand, are durable, have no real dps ramp-up time (turbo lag) for bleeds, and allow play style ranging from Berserker to Cleric to bunkering as soldier or MM.

Shroud is Necromancer’s immunity skill. It takes a lot of skill to use effectively and adds a great deal of variety to game play.

Shroud is like casting a complicated Moa on yourself and getting a second health bar you have to manage as much as your real health.

There is no good way to build for condition damage without scepter. Always trait Lingering Curse for the highest dps.

With that said, feel free to experiment with Terror and Dhuumfire for more condition dps or minions for more sustain.

Reaper is not strictly required.

Fishing and better crafting, please.

Crafting should be of more use than it is. Relying on the toilet, ascended, legendary, event items, and guild halls to sink materials is boring. There is no surprising result from crafting – no RNG. Extra XP for a critical success means nothing.

Fishing could add chance and reward.

Your own conditions are based off your condition damage and duration stat’s, though. This is why MoC is there. CB gives 2 bleeds for 12 sec in addition to the 6 sec poison and corrupting 3 boons. All are based on your stat’s.

LfD heals 5 in an area on exiting shroud. It is especially useful in a power-MM build where Putrid Explosion is not used and the player opts, instead, to keep minions alive through LfD and Transfusion. Death Magic, Blood Magic, and Soul Reaping is a sort of power bunker build where your minions tank for you and you heal them with shroud. Cleric’s is good. PvE only.

Mantacake, HoT is kind of a challenge mode for PvE. The players tend to be adept at soloing hard content so, despite the weak “encouragement” to group, the population tends to either zerg or solo the map.

However, if you stick it out, you can find map zergs that help players complete maps or run coordinated event chains. They tend to be very loose associations, though.

Better for new players may be to work on personal story and fully mapping the original content. There are also more social, less intense, events in the original maps, including dragon fights and dungeons, or fractals. WvW is also more casual.

Alternatively, you could pursue crafting or role playing.

Jumping into the hardest solo PvE can be disheartening, especially with the lack of socializing it brings.

Relax, join a PvE, PvP, or WvW guild and play as you like, for fun, and without driving yourself too hard.

Kadin.2356:

Yea I don’t really understand. They designed the weapon without a niche to fill. It excels at nothing. Dagger has more damage and utility and it’s only a 1h weapon. It’s seriously stupid. Speed up the #1 attack speed, increase damage, add utility like boonstrip, do SOMETHING.

Watch greatsword damage in PvE while surrounded by mobs. Total damage gets very high. Only one mob needs to be below 50% health for a Grave Digger recharge and shouts give great sustain when used in a crowd.

A cleave weapon (power-based AoE) was a massive hole in Necro capability and forced Arenanet to add a single cleave to dagger.

Greatsword has a niche. That niche is PvE crowd control. Expect its usefulness to decrease the farther you go from that niche. Look hard at the traits, too. Every one of them scales up in a crowd.

Walls are hard to use. Allies have to be disciplined enough to go through their narrow path and the caster has to time and position the wall really well or it will miss, which is hard when enemies can see and avoid it.

The wall change nerfed PvE, too, and made me sad. I could place a wall right where mob trains lost invulnerability and terrorize many of them.

Minions do not scale of your equipment so they flatten the stat vs dps curve while adding a ton of sustain by holding aggro.

As long as you are running MM, max dps gear is not as glassy and bunker gear is not as impotent. Zerker, Carrion, Soldier, Dire, or temple armor choices are fine. Cleric’s armor is fine. Axe is fine. Everything is fine.

It is solo PvE and minions are easy-mode.

If blind did not clear at the first attack, WoD might work. Make it cause continued missing or low rate hitting until it is cleared or expires. That would be a lot of rework, though.

I think, and correct me if I am wrong, off-hand dagger simply lost a lot of utility as condition clears proliferated. It is now only good when transferring multiple strong conditions.

I would like to see damage scaled way up or more powerful CC added to both skills.

Dark Pact on main hand got buffed with an added corruption – probably because imob by itself was also too easily cleared. I still think it is too weak, though.

Rezzet.3614:

either the boon corrupt has to go or be replaced by boon removal
or the skill has to become an actual ranged projectile so it can be reflected

Necromancer boon corruptions are there for game balance. It should make all other professions think twice about building too heavily for boons without condition clears and hard CC. Boon spam is fine for PvE but such performance enhancements should carry risks in PvP. An easy example is stability. Without a reasonable chance your opposing team has boon corruption, stab loses its tactical risk.

Right now, scepter-corruption is the Necromancer’s only competitive build in PvP and is not all that powerful given how glassy such builds are. Please do not suggest nerfing the only build with any value without also suggesting buffs to condition and power builds as part of your re-balance plan.

No argument from me. I have always maintained that greatsword is a PvE weapon.

It… is… sloooowwww….. for… a…. reason…….

Necromancer is better at managing conditions than inflicting them.

Where other professions sweat conditions, Necromancer eats them, donates them, or duplicates them.

Necromancer’s main condition dps comes from bleeds but they are relatively weak. They take time to stack into a high dps. Burning, on the other hand, does a bunch of damage so it’s dps ramps up fast. Other professions can do more condition damage but Necromancer is always there to leverage what is on the field with condi-mastery skills.

Tadsoul.6951:

what problems are you guys having with axe?

I feel like if using a power build i should mostly use axe over staff however in pvp i find this is not the case

i think the main reason i use staff over axe are
1.) staff trait location
2.) traited staff
3.) unblockable
4.) traited staff has 4 main skill effect which overwieght the effect i get from axe/x

traited axe doesn’t help it compete because i don’t use it for damage and cooldowns arent an issue

Axe is good in solo or small group PvE where vulnerability stacking is meaningful because mobs do not really try to get away but it does not do enough in any other game mode. In PvP, people just laugh at the damage and ignore the vulnerability.

Vulnerability is not a hard CC, a soft CC, or a DoT condition. Unholy Feast is the only thing on axe for PvP. It needs a 4 sec ICD or be on AA instead of 12 or 10-ish. Even then, retal and a single condition…

Necromancer is a profession that other professions should be wary of engaging for Fear of being drawn into a long battle. Axe just sux at that. It does not have enough “capture” ability. Honestly, axe should have increasing CC as range increases.

You may be thinking I am overly complimentary toward greatsword but I feel it is adequate in addressing the PvE gap of AoE power damage. I make no claims on WvW or PvP viability, other than agreement it was not designed for them.

Greatsword was meant for no-toughness builds where a tank holds aggro and the Reaper stands behind the mobs and spams Gravedigger with impunity like a blender. For that, GS is very good. Of course, Necro-Reaper could tank but susceptibility to CC and reliance on Shroud transforms that remove GS skills are deliberate handicaps.

mixxi.4283:

I was wondering if it was possible to make a build with greatsword in one hand and scepter in the other.. I have not seen any builds like this and I wonder why?

It is possible but not very efficient. Going hybrid means a drop in power dps without ferocity so it is not 1+1=2. It is more like 1+1=1. With hybrid you also tend to give up sustain by trying to improve both power and condition damage in traits.

IMO, Reaper is an AoE power line that filled a gaping hole in Necro capability.

Chill is a soft CC condition, not a DoT condition. Confusion between soft CC and DoT builds is as old as the game with people calling them both “condition”.

Chill of Death was meant to give Reaper some hybrid use but it did not work out well because it tied damage over time to soft CC duration. Chill duration made counterplay in PvP difficult while having damaging chills pushed off by others in PvE was inconvenient.

To be fair, the elite trait line and even some of the core trait changes violate the original, and nonsensical, design rules for Necromancer – rules like “no mobility”, “no cleave”, “no stab”, “selfish” and such.

There was no reason to impose functional restrictions for thematic reasons and we have seen Arenanet gradually remove them for Necromancer and other professions.

I would like to see Chilling Darkness reverted to when it was stronger now that duration from other chills is nerfed and Elite specializations have that power-creap going.

For those who purchased the pass, do you lose map progression when using it?

It was to make GW2 merchandise:

Men’s and women’s personal time pieces, including custom faces for Apple’s iwatch.

Rumor starts now!

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vREQNArYWjM0QlN2VDO1A7NOCGKZTnClA9KmifNOABQEA-Txh3wAROFA0U/hk+mX7PQU5HgnAgWlgBAQA2ZdWn7MAA-e

I did it with some difficulty the first time through without any hints off the internet and with the squishiest low-power build I had. It was really interesting figuring out what to do but I did die more than once.

Next time it should be easy.

Edit: mistakes I made were…
Floor traps repeatedly
Jumping off the path to glide instead of attacking the shard
Hard-hitting new mob attacks
Exploding elemental bits
What are these little elemental bits for?
Killing adds instead of ignoring them
Trying to stretch the beam without attacking the shard
…and more like that.

I had fun. Ty, Arenanet!

Everyone that posts on this forum or elsewhere, including video posts, has a view to express. The Necromancer forum has usually been pretty good about constructive criticism and offering reasonable solutions to perceived deficiencies. There are still posts that express negativity, though.

The Dev’s care about players’ experience but hyperbole probably goes right into the bin.

For example, Rise is still good and other professions with similar skills received the same nerf. The last patch was equitable, I think.

The changes to Life Blast is a clear buff to core Necro and improves all core builds, not just some seldom used trait.

I noticed the buff to ranged damage on Life Blast, too.

I took the Viper’s raid setup I used in Bloodstone Fen to Tangled Depths and messed around with it adding both Dhuumfire and Terror while dropping Master of Corruption and slotting Spectral skills for a wierd hybrid build. It was only partially functional but smacking mobs with LB, Terror, and Dhuumfire with extra duration sure felt satisfying.

So then I dropped Spectral Mastery for Fear of Death, swapped Spite for DM, loaded up on minions, went scepter dagger and axe focus and played a while with a core hybrid MM. Somewhere along the way I got lost but my minions carried me while I goofed on LB.

I tried Bloodstone Fen on Saturday completing the story and some exploration solo; just diving in with no research or preparation.

The build I used was Spite, Curses, Soul Reaping, and full Viper’s with condition duration consumables. Scepter dagger were my primary weapons and used all corruption skills, though I switched them around a few times.

For the story, it was not an optimal build so I cannot recommend it. I found myself wanting more sustain as I learned the story’s mechanics and the new mobs’ skills.

The build and some minor variants were better for solo roaming but I feel it too over optimized.

For those of you who tried Bloodstone Fen as a Necro last week, what was your build(s) and your impressions?

WoB requires stacking, which is very rare in WvW unless players are stacked at immobile objects like in a siege. WoS also helps destroy objects and can assist in area denial. Neither are very compelling when mobile because the healing or damage is metered out in pulses.

The other three wells have the same issue but they focus on giving your team boon and condition advantages. It is the same job as using Epidemic: Do not expect to do much damage when managing boons and conditions is your primary task.

Is this an Emperor’s new clothes request? You can always take off your armor and outfit and play challenge mode.

Maybe I am confused because the request was for invisible armor versus no armor at all (otherwise known as PvE commando.)

Sorry if did not read the whole debate.

It is a puzzle. The mob is not invulnerable. Your job is to figure out why and counter it.

I have to go with The Flow on this. Wells are far better in WvW than shouts.

WoP – anti-condi gives free buffs
WoD – Mrs Frustrations
WoS – gigantic speed bump

The other two are siege support

Don’t ignore that dagger AA generates LF while RS AA consumes it.

So, the idea is to BiP, then CC out of the gate for some base LF. I imagine adding CB and CPC will help.

Oslaf Beinir.5842:

when it comes to necromancer balancing expect heavy handed unjustified nerfs with no compensation at all.
Perhaps the only positive change from Anet would be a tooltip update and thats about it

Now, that’s negative thinking. ;p

Epidemic has mostly survived 4 years of patches because it is so situational, going from OP to useless from one second to the next.

Actually, I normally use core Necromancer in WvW.
Reaper is far better at PvE than WvW.

I thought about digging through all of the patch notes for the last four years and making a list of all the times axe has been buffed but then decided to leave off.

As Lahmia referred, axe’s primary use is in PvE for small groups and solo MM where vulnerability stacking significantly improves dps… and range is needed… and staff is not better because it is 1v1.

I do use axe for the above reasons.

Was not really serious but wanted to point out the lack of anything on axe AA to keep an opponent from kiting and resetting along with weaker power damage and a condition that no one gives high priority to clearing.

Axe should apply poison and weakness on its AA cycle.

Something like, “Epidemic now applies vulnerability stacks equal to the number of conditions copied and might equal to the number of boons copied on up to five enemy targets.”

Jk