Guild Wars 2

- have utilities work (or at the very least have sigil passives work lol)
- some defense against getting gangbanged in death shroud. Right now necros are so easy to train in ds

Uhm, warrior have higher armor and hp than most classes because warriors make up for it through superior mobility and active damage mitigation. Wait what?!

Clumsy.6257:

Yenn.9185:

Khallis.5708:

tom.7468:

Yenn.9185:

I think the main problem is the base HP of other classes, added to the fact that warrior wear heavy armor.

In terms of DPS, warrior isn’t even on top 3, according to someone who did the math. So that’s not why warrior is so good. It’s just that other classes have to put it some survivability in order to catch up with warrior’s survivability.

Thieves can get higher dps against targets with less than 50% hp, Ele can get higher dps against targets stuck in a wall and if there is only one mob they can get similar dps with lightning hammer.
Bomb engineer could probably out dps warrior too. But Im not 100% sure about that.
So warrior dps is in no way OP. If anything its a little too low.

you must be a bad warrior

What do you mean? He is absolutely correct. Bomb engineer, afaik, has lower dps. But thieves and ele both have higher dps than warrior.

this is what i dont get, people still think warrior has high damage when in reality its lower-mid tier damage, basically tied with ranger

I was gonna make a strawman argument. But then I realized I could never 1-up your post on a bullkitten-scale, so I didn’t bother.

Grok Krog.9581:

For dungeoning, you really don’t need more than 2 Warriors in my opinion.

(cough shifting baseline syndrome cough)

Just to reiterate; if this was true for every class we would have 16-man dungeon runs. Might give an idea of just how balanced warriors are :>

Considering everyone is rerolling/alt’ing a warrior I have to conclude they are totally balanced and not over the top at all in any circumstance.

“Gaudriann OR warior pls” threads all over the forums are yet another indicator that classes are perceived as being equally viable.

Plus you have to keep in mind warriors’ mobility, sustain, buff support and okay damage etc are balanced by the fact that warriors are super hard to play. Plus it totally fits the theme of the class as the unstoppable group support juggernaut.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

If the law of averages makes us assume both groups have the same skill level, then the law of averages makes us assume both groups have equal amounts of ascended gear.

can i downvote this somehow?

asura reporting in. i just realized how much bigger the radius really is haha

+1, keep it topless ._.

Azzer.8137:

spoj.9672:

Xyonon.3987:

-> DS penetration <- it’s compared to cleave too 3x 6-9k

And warriors cleave without doing kitten dps. Trying to justify a build because it has piercing doesnt work. The damage from lifeblast isnt good enough even with piercing. You would need to hit about 12k consistantly with lifeblast and pierce to compete with warrior. And im sure I dont need to tell you how unreliable piercing is compared to real cleave. Theres no point comparing pierce/cleave dps when looking at necro. Focus on single target or pick another class.

even in your full “ascended” stuff auto dagger does not do 12k either per second.

The best build is still and always will be the one you are comfortable with not some “math” people do because they think they are smart or whatever.

Just because you don’t believe in math doesn’t mean there is not a max dps setup :/
rofl <_>

I don’t like the concept of siphoning (in pvp) and hope they will just abandon it and come up with something better. I have never seen siphoning being balanced in any MMO I’ve played. It was either too weak (gw2) or overpowered. And whenever it was overpowered it made the whole pvp experience unbareable and led to the most kittened playstyles.
So I’m pretty ok with it being tied to minions, and minions being cannonfodder in pvp.

I like that quote. It’s actually what drove me away from wow; at one point they put all the classes into a giant blender and characters lost their ‘identity’.
Good to hear it’s by design intent. So here’s to hoping those conceptual ideas are here to stay. A little balancing would help, but he admitted that.

I tried MM today, randomly picking up all the traits that sounded cool and ended up with the exact same build tattoohead posted (+full zerker :>).
I chose axe because your contribution to your overall dps is lower than in a non-MM build, so the difference between dagger and axe is lower. Plus i figured with vulnerability stacking the minions might actually make up the the damage difference.

Build: Death Shroud berserker (30/10///30)

Situation: PvE: dungeons, map discovery

Rotation: DS1 spam down to 50% LF (playing as if strength of undeath actually worked), focus#4 & axe#2, switch to warhorn#5 > dagger#1 spam, switch back to axe on weapon swap cd, use axe#2 or focus#4 if they are up, go back into DS and repeat

Desired effect: Quite good dps at range, it’s more about the fluency/feel of the rotation than actual #1 dps. It is as exciting of a dps rotation as it gets for necro.

//edit: ^then epidemic for good measure :>

I love spectral walk, it’s one of my default utility skills. Amazing for exploration, one of the better movement skills necro has access to, breaks stun, looks amazing, teleports you out if you (planned to) overextend.

I hate the wurm. I saw an old video of it being heavily abused to teleport around, tried it out ingame, it didn’t work. I tried it for dps, liked the dps, hated the awkward behavior of not despawning out of teleport range. I think I’m disappointed with how little fun it actually was to use.

PVE:
Minions don’t scale with your stats. They are only buffed by your traits. You can pretty much choose either way.
Imo there is more synergy with power though:

• trait placements
• axe1 buffs their damage (axe1 shudder :/)
• playstyle (minions complicate bringing together large groups and have to run to your target before attacking when you use them in a ranged build)

(I have only used them in map exploration up to the lvl 80 zones though)

waiting for the warrior boiz to come in and explain how that is actually pretty balanced because stuff

(i) you must be inside the mark (ii) while it gets triggered by an enemy

I like the layout!
I think this guide actually made me choose necro over warri and guardian when i started gw2 around two months ago. Well done

Yeah, but more often than not they are not in melee range for the sake of not being in melee range. mostly there is no inherent reason to stay at range as much as ‘we’ do – or there is a reason and that reason is wielding a hammer, in which case you can be sure you will spend some time in melee range.

$_$ is all there is to it. you dont have to understand it for it to be true

Yeah, i totally see your points. To me it was more about the 100% staff fear than the 90 condition damage. The good thing about it is both 6 Lyssa and 6 Traveler make good wvw sets of their own, so one can just mix and match.
About the geomancy, I guess that’s a playstyle preference. I chose Staff cooldowns to encourage swapping, you chose lingering curse to encourage sticking with scepter.

Those are really small nuances to a really similar idea imo. I like it

geomancy > earth, if you can make use of it at all:
-geomancy is 21 bleeding ticks per weapon swap (10 sec)
-earth is 20 bleeding tick in those 10 seconds, assuming it proc instantly after the ICD which is highly unlikely
and that is not even taking multiple targets into account :>

If conditionmancer was more viable in dungeons, I’d use two identical sets of scepter/dagger, both with geomancy&battle and swap weapons on cooldown. Given the current state of necro pve it’s not worth the investment and hassle

HA! I see I’m not the only one who has given 100% condi duration a try in wvw. I ended up picking 4traveler/ 2lyssa/ 1giver over double giver though, to actually get a +100% fear with staff#5.

Have you tried out sigils of geomancy lately? They go ridiculously well with BM III. Just dodge, swap, DS is a bleeding stack that’s almost worth cleansing. Con: you’re going toe to toe and it offers little to no cover conditions by itself. (//edit: I just realized that I moved 10 points from curses to death magic for staff cooldowns to encourage weapon swapping. Guess I play quite differently after all.)

Props for the 100% duration without master of terror, nice build

From a ‘lore’ (for the lack of a better word) point of view the classes are spot on in my opinion. You got the sneaky thief, the unstoppable juggernaut, the crippling immobile necromancer that debilitates other classes down to his level etc.

That leaves pvp as a complete kittenhole though for some classes. For a necro it’s not actually kill or be killed, it’s more like be killed or let the opponent disengage (or fearlock them to death – i mean downed state…). Guess gw2 pvp is just not for me, and judging by participation, for anyone :>

Majority vote would suggest... warriors getting buffed!

c_C

c_Q

q_Q

* puts 5 stunbreakers on his bars *

outclassed :>

Sounds good! Not sure if you’re already asking for input in this thread though. Anyway, here’s my choice of topics:

WvW:
1. Ascended gear and target audience of gw2/wvw
2. Zergs – or numbers in general
3. Nightcapping

General gameplay:
1. Dungeon group class balance
2. Temporary vs permanent content
3. Ascended gear and target audience of gw2

asura > sylvari > *
imo

actually: Frailty looks pretty kitten decent o_O

Even in the pvp lounge dagger AA keeps up at 2~3 stack. Let’s say 2.5% damage increase on average. Assuming a 5 player party that’s not capped on vulnerability and every player doing the same dps, that would put the personal damage gain a sigil would have to offer at 12.5%… making it the best sigil under those conditions…

Hey, Im looking for some input as to which sigils you are using on your weapons for a pve zerker setup. Trait setups are 30/25///15 and 30/10///30

• 25 stack: is a given (using perception atm because im cheap, and i figure it scales better at good buff levels, plus my gear is not good enough to hit the crit cap in the ds build when solo), as it’s the single highest bonus available.
• Sigil of Force: 5 % damage ~ 100 power ~ 3 stacks of might at 100% uptime, even at low buff levels. Scales amazingly with buffs. Both my mainhands use that one, as it can’t interfere with might stacking and is a permanent bonus.
• Sigil of Battle: looks decent on a DS build and is actually what i use there. Can be abused by daggerbuilds by constant offhand switching, which makes it look decent enough.
• Sigil of Strength looks incredibly bad for necro. I couldn’t even sustain the 3 stacks of might it would need to break even with Sigil of Force – using dagger AA… so i count that out.
• Sigil of Air/Fire: Fire looks decent. Napkin math suggests it blows 3 might stacks (a.k.a. sigil of battle) out of the water. The tp prices suggest otherwise, so really undecided on this one.

TLDR: Is there anything better than:
Dagger + Force & Warhorn + Battle
<->
Axe + Force & Focus + Battle
for DS and

Dagger + Force & Warhorn + Battle
<->
empty & Warhorn + Battle
(switching offhands on CD for 6 constant stacks of might) for Daggerbuilds?

3krait/3afflicted should be the highest pve dps (derp kitten ) if you make use of weakening shroud. Only thing i’d ever trade that in for is 6 nightmare + hemophilia, and that’s a big maybe.
10% condition duration + x is what go for in wvw (40%pizza+10% = 50% all, 100% fear), so yeah 6 lyssa or 2 lyssa + 4 whatevercondi is what i have in mind as well

Not a fan of undead/scavenging as they force you into really awkward gear setups (and/or make you lose more damage in lost ticks than you gain in condition damage. lol :<)

not gonna pretend im surprised this is all over the place ._.

Good guide, as always, but you REALLY should give a tldr version. I only listen to it because I’m somewhat new to the game and still have map discovery to do, so it’s easy to listen in the background. Hard to imagine someone would dedicate hours focusing on your videos though :/

Corrections as to my knowledge:
Weakening Shroud: 15 sek ICD instead of 25.
Weakness is -25% damage on average, not -50% (as it’s a 50% chance to reduce the damage by 50%).
Chill of Death proccs at lower than 25% hp (from what i can tell. It happens to finish off guardians sometimes )
Oftentimes you are not going for new condition ticks (80% fear, talk about 3.x second dhuumfires). Although you probably know better, it’s confusing in a guide.

Good work

^true

If you really wanna min/max just try out one of the stat calculators online and see which gives the best results for you. (I could actually see celestial being an option if you don’t wanna make specific staffs for specific tasks.)

I went with rabid, because it’s best in slot for conditionmancer and quite okay for wvw well builds, which is the occasions where I use the staff. ymmv

I don’t think the design fits the overall UI so I switched back to the old design right away. The old one is actually easier for me to read and to gauge if it’s worth using Epidemic. Guess I might use the new one for theorycrafting/-checking once in a while.

What i really love is the new groundtargeting options. Anet really nailed this one. I’ve never seen a more intuitive implementation.

It gives your opponent the choice of
*moving out, taking increased torment damage to avoid the blast/immobilize
*dodging oor / dodging the blast by burning one or two evades
*staying immobile, avoiding the torment x 2
… in theory. In practice the damage is so low that it ends up being an aoe cover for good conditions. And the damage per activation time is quite good as a fire and forget ability.

the way i see it the damage proccs are part of the package. other specs get (one huge bundle of) direct damage, we get pitiful direct damage + DoT application – the exception being wvw dhuumfire. Then again it’s just our faceroll spec so we can play with the other facerollers :/

ps: terror is fine where it is, given the state of the game. Plus it’s a cool trait from a theme the class p.o.v. (imo)

@OP: play some classes to level 2 and join the pvp lobby and try some of the suggested builds. It’s the fastest way to figure out whose posts on the forum you can skip and which are worth reading. Most of the people in this game are not exactly ‘taking the scientific / fact-based approach’ to put it REALLY REALLY nicely.

Don’t listen to the RP guys… You dont want to roll necro, judging by what you wrote in the OP. Apart from being a scholar class necro is THE opposite of everything you’re looking for in the class.
It’s the most selfish class, it’s unwelcome in dungeons (well, in minmax groups that is), MM sucks for anything but open world, the one place where necros shine is pvp.

Lifeforce ‘enables’ us to use DS skills (by entering / staying in DS). Lifeforce is also our damage soaking mechanic.

You are not gonna forego the skill usage aspect, so starting a duel with <100% lifeforce lowers your effective hp bar (which the necro is designed around) to sub 100%. That makes no sense to me on so many levels.
And that is not even going into playstyle aspects like difficulty of building lf or healing damage up again as a necro.

IMO it is the necro’s choice to start the duel with <100%, just like it’s the thief’s or guard’s choice to blow their class’ mechanics before a duel. Full lf bar should be default though, just like others starting with their class’ mechanics available.

In the end it comes down to players judgement. You make your choices and live with the consequences and apparently the guild seems to be cool with you starting at 100%, else they wouldn’t have dueled you for hours.

Go for minions as utilities for more steady damage (hf keeping them alive though) or go with the link above for epidemic goodness

http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/necromancer/?5.1|b.1b.h5.8.1b.h16.0.0.0|6.1b.h16.0.0.0|1b.712.1b.712.1b.712.1b.714.1b.714.1b.714|4w.d1g.2w.0.3w.0.2w.0.3w.0.1b.9b|u49b.u47b.a5.0.0|30.d|3r.3u.43.3x.4g|e

Conditionmancer Bawi-style:

• 30/30/// + 10 is universal for every dps condimancer (10 death magic for starters), so is 40% pizza
• full rabid is a given
• +100% bleed duration is the single biggest dps gain, MUCH more so than any amount of condi damage you could realistically trade it in for. Assuming you make you of the duration gain (a.k.a. no cleanses or mobs dying too fast)
• 3 Krait & 3 Afflicted runes + rabid weapon is the best way to reach the missing 30% bleed duration, assuming you can make offensive use of Weakening Shroud (Curses IV – 15 sec ICD) regularly.
  If you can’t, then go Hemophilia (Curses II) plus 10% condition duration from somwhere else (rune set or giver weapon or 10% bleed duration sigil… runes being the most reasonable)
• Sigils of Earth beat Geomancy most of the time (Epidemic bursts or PvP aside). If you have to ask for directions you wanna go earth
• Flesh Golem.
• rest is fine-tuning and playstyle

Thanks guys, just from the tool tips it’s really hard to gauge the performance of the elite skills

Care to post your trait setup Hussler?

From the 30% crit the gear gives you im guessing you’re going for Curses 15 and SoulReaping XII for 100% crit in shroud (as in: drop wells, shroud, 5, 4).
Curses III and either IV (for max in-your-face playstyle) or VI (if you need targeted wells)?
Blood magic V or IV?
SR III and XII and… VIII?

Looks really interesting, too bad you cant 20 into BM for well CD.

playstyle:
- power-based long range weapon (think guardian scepter)
- infight mobility (vigor, deathshroudish mistform, escape skill, …)

mechanics:
- bleed stack gone (is this 2013? o_O)

apart from that i’m really content with necro so far (first 80, only char 20+ though)

Which prefixes and sigils did you choose for your underwater weapons?
I reached 80 some time ago, those slots are still green and I’m thinking about getting some cheap exotics there. While I play all specs (power, condi, …) I will not get specific underwater weapons, just a general use set.

Trident: Rampage stats, Sigil of Earth
for damage, rampage seems better than carrion for ‘hybrid’ use, skills are somewhat split between power and condi anyway
Spear: Berserker or Knight(Soldier), Sigil of Hydromancy
the only bleed is only a long cooldown, so that leaves power, Knight + Hydromancy with wvw roaming in mind

oh, and is the best headgear green and costs ~1k karma?

I’m thinking about trying a thief. Appearances aside, are there any racials i should take into consideration for wvw (mostly roaming)?

At the moment I’m thinking:
Asura – LOVE the style, dont see a worthwhile racial
Human – female style is ok, Reaper of Grenth worth it?
Norn – hate the male style, like the female style, snowleopard good/needed on a thief?
Sylvari – cant seem to like them, <3 Caithe but thats about it
Charr – just no

Guess it’s mostly Grenth or snow leopard viability that im asking about.
Any input appreciated, t.i.a.