Necromancers are in a strong spot in small fights, but people don’t like to use the builds that are great for those small situations: wells and minions.
Are we inherently weak to burst? Yes, very much so. Are thieves great at burst? Yes. What are thieves weak against? Burst. Are necromancers [generally] good at burst? No. Notice something here? Thieves have what we are weak against, and we don’t [generally] have what they are weak against. Why, I wonder why a necro would ever have trouble with a thief?
The reality is that a stealth thief’s success in a fight boils down to: can I stay alive during the gaps in stealth. If they can successfully stay alive when out of stealth, they will win (or not lose by running). If they cannot manage to avoid enough damage when they are out of stealth, they will fall apart. And that is the main thing that fighting thieves boils down to, killing them when they are out of stealth, and surviving them when they are in it.
You can aggro him from 900 range, if you are properly CCing the targets, it shouldn’t be too big of a deal; although yes he is a magnet for aggro.
Pact quarterstaff, deathwish, corrupted branch, and pirate crook are all decent staves for necros as well, and fit the theme of chill/death.
Those abilities “putting the ball out of our court” is assuming a few things:
1) That them running away is more beneficial to them than it is to us
2) That they can even run away
3) That not attacking us is their best option
In PvE, none of these are remotely an issue, mobs will attack you anyway.
In WvW zergs, none of these are issues because a “zerg” as a collective entity, is not able to just retreat (momentum is so heavy in WvW) or just stop attacking you, so it is a similar situation to PvE, but with separate reasons.
In WvW small groups/solo, and sPvP, lets even assume for a second that CHIPS is right, they just stop attacking you. How is that even remotely a bad thing? That means every time you go into DS or use SA or SW, it is no different than if you had popped invulnerability (not being damaged and impossible to damage are no different in this case). That isn’t leaving it up to someone else, you are forcing them to make a choice: waste skills and time attacking me, when I am either not taking any real damage (DS), or you are filling up my LF bar so in the future you can’t damage me or you can completely ignore me in the hopes of “countering” my abilities, but at the cost of giving me free reign over the fight for a few seconds. That isn’t letting the enemy have control over the fight, you have directly forced them into making a choice, where both paths that they can take from that choice are worse for them than if I didn’t force them into it.
Necromancers underwater are incredibly strong.
Bone Fiend doesn’t hit quite as hard, but in reality he ends up outpacing Shadow Fiend because of his range and finishers.
At your level, with only 20 in two trees, putting that 20 in spite/death magic is best, and dropping a minion won’t be too big. However when you get 30 into Death magic (which you will when you are high enough), the extra utility that that one minion brings will far outweigh the little extra damage you can get from one utility.
Axe/Focus is the best main-set minion setup. You already have minions doing single target damage, and will have them doing 30% more damage via traits. Auto attacking with Axe will give about another 12-15 stacks of vulnerability, which can be brought up to 20-25 with each Focus 4. That is 12-15% more damage flat out, up to 20-25% more damage with Focus 4. In addition to that, 12-25% extra damage in a team scenario is much better than a little bit more personal damage. Axe also brings cripple, which synergizes with the Flesh Golem and Bone Fiend cripples to kite anything that doesn’t instantly aggro minions.
Fetid Consumption just isn’t worth it in his build. He has staff already for taking conditions, and he is in PvE, where you will rarely get hit with enough conditions to need that much condition removal; especially if you are going to sacrifice poison fields, which are amazing for Weakness stacking.
Which leads to the next point: the only time taking shadow fiend is worthwhile (over the other 3 minion choices) is if you are running around a lot, and thus a stationary minion isn’t good, or if you are brand new, and don’t want to bother with exploding Bone Minions. Using their active makes them far outdamage shadow fiend, especially when they will cause AoE weakness if they are in your poison fields, and drop poison fields themselves, which then synergize with both Bone Minion and Flesh Wurm, both of whom have projectile finishers on their auto attacks.
A hybrid build basically combines a condition build (precision, condition damage, condition duration) with a power build ( power, precision, crit damage). That way if I am in a dungeon with someone who can stack 25 bleeds, I can swap to an axe, and still do high direct damage, whereas if I were a condition build I would have to fight with him for bleed stacks to do damage.
I have hit people at long range with it pretty often, what you want to do is use Grasp early in the fight when people are at close range for an interrupt, or save it for when they run. Many players will turn tail and use a mobility move (like RTL), if you toss it off at the right time (takes some practice/getting used to) it will hit 99% of players right in the back, and fling them back to you. It surprises most people, and in that split second, and since they are usually only running from a fight they were already losing, that secures the kill quite nicely.
It isn’t an all-purpose skill, but in the right builds it has a few cool niche uses that really make it shine: such as pulling people right back into a well after a dodge (too close to dodge without pure luck), interrupting someone, or for that long range pull right back into combat, along with Dark Path, for the real feel that ANet promises of being inescapable.
To my knowledge, the only minion that gives LF is Flesh Golem, and then Flesh Wurm if you blow him up.
PvP is all about what do you bring to your team. A necromancer just thrown into a pug game is going to do very poorly, unless you are playing a 1v1 build and just sitting on near point (we have 2-3 1v1 builds that are very strong in the boon-heavy meta). The problem is that any necro not totally geared towards 1v1 needs team fights, and needs team help; comparing it to a moba, you are the carry, you need support to be able to drop huge epidemics and blow people up with corrupt boon/fear chains.
We have the potential to do great things in PvP, but it really requires high skill to do so, and it requires a team that is going to help you achieve that. But realistically we are in a good place in PvP, we just need that out of combat mobility to be just about set.
PvE is another issue. Fractals is the main challenging area of the game right now (people tend to just drop any other dungeon path if it is too annoying), and I don’t think many people appreciate what a necro can bring. We have very high healing, we have very strong damage reduction via AoE weakness/chill, its just that people don’t see that, whereas you will see the stack of buffs a warrior/guardian/ele gives you.
It will still hit at 1200+ range, it just won’t pull them fully; but a 900 pull at 1200 range brings them in range of everything except dagger auto.
They will never “fix” stacking. Hybrid is our highest damage source.
The Quaggan backpacks are amazing.
And it takes time to release stuff, I would imagine it makes more sense for them to release things that everyone can buy, rather than reskin minions for a small population of one of the smallest communities (necromancers) in the game.
I’d take cute minions. Flesh Golem becomes a big teddy bear, Bone Minions become little bunnies, etc.
It is a hybrid build, I have precision/condition damage/power. It lets me go from conditions to power whenever the situation calls for it, and doesn’t have the standard drawback of either one, at the cost of not having defensive stats.
I would love a less super-adorable backpack from the gem shop. Quaggan is far too adorable for me to be taken seriously as a master of death and corruption with him flopping around on my back.
400 extra toughness is more than the difference between Light and Heavy armor.
Epidemic only spreads remaining condition duration, it won’t ever increase it.
1) I don’t know what zergs you are in, I don’t get interrupted every 2 seconds
2) People can’t dodge forever
3) When lag becomes a real issue is when all skills start becoming unresponsive, meaning every ability will be hard to do anything with. Same with culling, you are just throwing out things hoping someone gets hit.
4) I have never run into a zerg that can cleanse that fast, it only takes 1 second to get your Epidemic off
Epidemic + any immobilize = AoE snare.
Barring Eles, Thieves, and Mesmers, who can obviously leave combat in a much easier way than other classes due to long range near-instant movement abilities and/or stealth, no other class is going to get away from a necro by running.
With a Scepter you can have 50% cripple uptime. Axe/Focus gives you 33% cripple uptime, 25% chill uptime. Dagger/Warhorn not only gives you swiftness to chase, but cripple to keep them slowed, plus daze/immobilize for very hard lockdown, with 33% cripple uptime. Staff is the weakest in this area, with only 20% chill uptime. All of these are with no +duration for conditions, and aren’t including the fact that you can switch weapons easily for longer lockdown. You also have access to DS 2, which will take you to the enemy at 900 range, and has 33% chill uptime.
Even an ele is a bit hard-pressed to get away from you, only managing it if they cleanse off any chill/cripple on them, and RTL away. Thieves and Mesmers have a slightly better chance if they can blink+stealth to make it difficult for you to know where to follow.
10 Seconds would be a nerf in PvP where you want a high spike damage setting (you aren’t keeping enemies in a well for 10 seconds), and a buff in PvE where being able to sit in dark/light fields every fight is really nice.
@ Bhawb – any chance you can post a link to your PVE build, I would be really interested.
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fQAQNAW7YjQaV6haub87JAJFPj9kCvHP6RwDzMA;TkAg1Cqo8xUkoInPrFGVsrA
I change my utilities, elites, and traits a lot, but that is my general build. I’ll often use BiP or CPC on bosses, Lich for bosses, Plague for general dungeoning, Flesh Golem for wandering around, Well of Power for dredge, and traits can switch around a bit depending on how I’m changing my utilities.
Also obviously the stats are off, since it only had PvP stuff, and I have 2x Rune of the Mad King (I know they don’t work atm, but I don’t care enough to get ones that do).
The mobs are responding to a personal attack on them, minions will respond in the same way to damage.
I don’t need to do a “rotation”, I just need to attack the person with single target abilities twice. That isn’t a huge issue, I really hope that everyone in a fight is planning on attacking their enemy at least twice. Why don’t they attack on the first hit? Probably so you can pull enemies even with minions out; attack the mob, get the pull, then when he gets close attack again for minion aggro. Why don’t minions aggro on AoE? I imagine either because there is no way for them to magically know which of the 5 people you hit to attack, or because you aren’t truly targetting anything (note that they will begin aggro on staff marks, they just will not change aggro).
The reasons for their patterns make absolute sense, and if we did not have that limited control we would be far worse off. The problem is that most people think that they can just pick up minions and magically make them work without any effort. You need to learn minion AI just like you need to learn how to use any other build out there.
Underwater condition builds are absolutely ridiculous, in my experience.
They have been working on our AI since launch, it has improved noticeably since then (Flesh Golem used to carry an immense hatred for life at launch, he’d chase anything that moved all the way across maps until he or it died).
And yeah, I’ve spent many hours testing minion AI. I’m making a video about it soon enough, once I figure out how to get it all done.
That isn’t accurate. You need to land one attack, then start another attack. For example auto attacking once with dagger, then casting focus 5 will begin aggro the instant focus 5 starts casting; even if focus 5 is interrupted for any reason, they will continue attacking.
What role do you fill in tPvP?
+1 For the music choice.
Have you ever used this build in tournaments? sPvP is fine, but I think most people will agree it doesn’t mean much for testing how strong a build is overall.
I think the minion AI should react upon the start of your attack, not upon you hitting the enemy twice. Hitting the enemy twice is very conditional. The necro should be the one controlling the minions, not the enemies.
They react upon the start of the cast of your second ability. Meaning if you auto attack once, then do something like focus 5 with a long cast, they will aggro on the beginning of the cast, not when the enemy is actually hit by it.
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Then play a roaming class. You are obviously looking for a roamer build, which is something that necromancers are not, at the moment. You are looking for a thief or elementalist.
Nope.
I wanna play the necro the way he should work. The way ArenaNet say he should be.And a simple roamer don’t do what i’ve described.
A roamer kill. I don’t want a high spike/killer class. I want a attrition necro that “lock” a player down. If i kill someone they will just come back in few seconds.
I’m looking for a necro.
Again, you are looking for a roamer. No one says you have to kill an enemy the second they are downed, hit them with an attack every few seconds, and dance around their body while they slowly degen to death.
1) There will never be something introduced to the game that can keep thieves locked down except death, unless you can catch them out of stealth, and there is no reason for a thief to want to fight you at the spawn, so they will just shadowstep past you.
2)Necromancers will never be fast enough to intercept an enemy roamer.
3) RTL on eles is just broken right now, everyone agrees that. It isn’t up to necromancers to counter a broken mechanic.
4) Why would you try to lock people down in open territory, when necromancers fight at our best when someone is forced to stay in a small circle?
5) The current meta does not use classes that are lock-downable. They use thieves and eles, who are going to blink past you before you get the chance to fight.
Again, you are listing out things that a roamer does, so why don’t you actually pick up a class that is good at roaming, so you can roam with it? Necromancers have their place, but roaming will never be it, at best we might become counter-roamers.
(edited by Bhawb.7408)
They would be OP if there was no CD (in certain situations), but I do wish they’d get rid of the degen, it isn’t like a single minion with no degen is too good.
There is also PvP, where people will apply a lot of conditions. Conditions in PvE are much less prevalent.
The use of deathly swarm and putrid mark is to get conditions off you, most of the time enemies will take care of applying them for you.
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Then play a roaming class. You are obviously looking for a roamer build, which is something that necromancers are not, at the moment. You are looking for a thief or elementalist.
Necromancers can run side point bunker specs very well, using either DS, staff, or minions.
Minions work well because you can still get fairly high single target damage, while having full soldier gear for 27k HP and 3k armor, with quite a lot of siphoning from the minions, and either a lot of boon stripping (really hurts eles) or poison fields (hurts everyone else).
Staff works if your team is always planning to send people to finish the fight for you at near point, or as a second weapon in bunker builds with high healing power for constant high regen application and utility.
And DS works very well because you can have a very defensive set using high LF generation, yet with 5s DS CD, you can keep perma-fury/ret, remove conditions quickly, keep about 60% weakness uptime, and still have pretty high sustained damage from ret procs and high crit chance/damage.
I’ve been testing out bunker specs that would work in the middle, the problem is that you need very high LF generation, with high healing power to keep yourself topped off, using wells to control fights, otherwise it is really easy to blow you up the second DS goes down; although that can be mostly negated if you have a support guardian throwing out boons for you.
The problem is that minions were different in every way in GW1.
You had one of two goals, do tons of damage via death nova and spamming trash minions(along with craptons of other micro managing, which is why most people just let an npc do it, because they were better), or you used heals like blood of the master to keep a permanent facerolling zerg of 10 minions at all times.
The problem is that in GW2 minions have very little in common with GW1 minions, outside of being the necromancer minions. In GW1, they were fairly crappy, easy to kill mobs that you could summon only if you had a corpse around, their AI was perma-set on genocide mode, and overall MMs were useless unless they had a steady stream of corpses and at least 5 minions to work with. However when we did get a steady stream of corpses, you turn into an unstoppable zerg that would faceroll anything short of a boss.
GW1 minions are why GW2 minions are so different. They are much more singularly impactful, meant to stay alive a relatively decent amount of time, yet not forever, and they are finally useful in most areas of the game, instead of a complete niche build. And most importantly, we don’t need to use our entire freaking skill bar just to MM; when our minions are down we are no worse off than a well build with wells down.
Also, I find it hilarious that people complain about minion AI in this game. In GW1 your minions’ AI was basically what Flesh Golem used to have; kill everything in sight, on sight, screw what anyone else says. They didn’t respond to your input, they didn’t focus targets, they just attempted to murder anything and everything that was nearby.
Seems like you’d run out of names pretty fast when you just blow them the heck up every few seconds, lol.
Pro tip, don’t go into a trait tree simply for the stat bonuses, go into the trait tree for the traits. People go into Spite for the traits in spite, with the added bonus of condition duration and power; I don’t know anyone that goes into Spite in a terror build for the Condition duration, when you can just eat some food.
I don’t see how mesmer illusions even come close to being pets in any stretch of the imagination.
Two of the same type of 5% sigils do not stack, but a 5% crit and 5% damage should, I believe.
Thats what I meant by more reliable; not necessarily that they keep it as a projectile, but just keep the utility (1200 range pull, chills, 10% LF) and then do whatever they want with making it a more effective tool at that pull.
While that would be incredibly entertaining, I don’t see them doing that when we already have Grasp, I find it more likely that they would make Grasp more reliable before giving us a new skill that has almost the exact same utility.
That was just an example of how to accomplish 100% fear duration in PvP. Most people that I know of that use Terror builds get 70% duration, as long as it is applied after other conditions are (always should be the case for the damage boost), you have a very good chance of getting a second tick on the normally 1 second fears.
Master of Terror = 50%
Spite = up to 30%
Various rune combinations = up to 20% (assuming the runes work)
Any blast finisher on Spectral Wall will give chaos armor to people in the blast (I’m not sure if this has the AoE limit). The only blast finishers necromancers have are Putrid Mark, Flesh Wurm, and Bone Minions (both minion finishers are their actives).
So while any blast finisher over any ethereal field will give people in the blast chaos armor, Wall + those 3 abilities is the only way to self-apply it.
Every build lettuce listed is viable in PvP, and he left out at least 3 that I know of as well. Necromancers have, far and above, the most amount of viable builds in PvP right now. Part of that being that we don’t have any single build that is far and above the best, so people go out of their way to theorycraft and invent new builds. Why would anyone in their right mind spend a few hours theory crafting a new ele build when they can just copy/paste a D/D build and be set?