If you don’t want to run axe in your off-set, run staff. That gives you a 25s CD condition transfer AND a fear (fears are amazing in pvp), and frees up your offhand in your main set for focus, which will increase your damage output.
Go D/F, its better; dagger offhand is a condition weapon.
Another fallacy since it seems i didnt explain as well, what i pointed out is that they do not lack the continous application conditions that you mentioned as a class strength for the necromancer, i did not say they would need to use them in combat that often since updraft earthquake and boon reapplication take care of the damage migration components. Also a as a ele you can remove 3+ conditions every 10 seconds so no, they wont stick around for long and also you did waste your stun break (or god forbid heal) and strongest mark what is in no way having all your skills up. Unless you go into zone bunker control mode (staying on 1 point with plague and not letting the ele force you to chase him or letting him knock you down in time for combo to go off), trying to outlast a ele is a very stupid idea.
*I even said that back in the days when people said ele are kitten that the kite control they give is just as strong as a necromancers or guardians zone control…
Its not that elementalists lack conditions, they have plenty. But once you are actually equipped with your one weapon, you don’t have the easy access that necros do. Each attunement has maybe half the conditions that all necros have all the time. Even if you rapidly swap attunements, once you swap the conditions you applied with one attunement wear off quickly and you can never keep them up like a necro.
The difference is that every single build that a necromancer uses has lots of condition access. Axe/Focus has huge vulnerability stacking, cripple, and chill. Dagger/WH has immobilize/cripple/daze. Staff has bleed, poison, fear, and full condition transfer. Scepter/Dagger has bleed, poison, weakness, blind, 3 condition transfer.
Also, our staff/heal are only 25s CDs. That isn’t exactly long, it means every 12.5 seconds I can either: transfer all my conditions to you, or heal for 5.2k + 700 per condition. That is without any traits. Un-traited, elementalists have crap condition removal. Once you trait to remove conditions, you are losing access to something else you could have had with those trait points, whereas every necro can have a lot of condition removal with no investment, just a weapon or heal (which is the best heal ever anyway.)
If you are a power build, you’re just going to end up with tons of aggro, you really can’t avoid it. High HP, close range, good damage = high priority target.
While comparisons are bad between 2 different builds, the only condition that ele cant apply just as good as necros is poison and maybe weakness… but for that they have burn and multiple ways of hard cc in just weapons making your while point flawed again.
Okay, lets say an ele stacks a bunch of conditions on me, I just transfer them back. An ele can use 5cds to force a bunch of conditions on me sure, but then I staff 4 and now they have all their conditions on CD, and I have all mine up, and the ele is still the one sitting around with all the conditions on them.
One does not simply out condition a necro, it just doesn’t happen.
What I do to remedy that is by salvaging every white item I don’t use.
Easiest leveling build is using increased mark size with staff, plus ranged wells. At low levels use minions to face tank creatures up until you can get wells to siphon health. After that, drop minions and use wells + siphoning, eventually getting ranged wells (so you aren’t in as much danger right away and can let other poor noobs tank for you).
Other than that, do personal story like you do already, and also be sure to craft if you can, its decent experience and can easily bridge the level gap to the next story quest (and also if you are gathering resources as you wander, it will be pretty close to free).
To my knowledge, aggro pulls in this game are based off of a few things (don’t ask for source, this was november when I learned this):
1. Max HP
2. Recent damage done
3. Total damage done
4. Being a Guardian
5. Proximity when “aggro’ed”
It might also have to do with armor, but I don’t recall that. Basically, when a mob “aggros”, or decides to attack, it does so based off of those things. It will attack targets with high HP, targets who have done a lot of total damage (this decays over time, so if you did 10k damage 1 minute ago, it has little bearing anymore, recent damage being an aggro effect derives from this), how close you are to the target, and then finally Guardians have a little increased aggro-ness; meaning if all other things are similar, guardians should pull aggro.
This is why necros very often pull aggro, and why I have nearly perma-aggro in dungeons. We tend to have decent frontloaded damage with wells/marks, we almost always will have the highest HP, tied with only warriors, we can often be close range for DS/axe/dagger/well abilities, and since we have strong sustained damage, even if your thief far outclasses your frontloaded damage and proximity, the decreasing weight for that initial burst will eventually make your sustained damage out-prioritize him.
Basically speaking: if you want the closest experience to face-tanking every mob in the game, play a dagger/well necro.
Just curious: why this setup?
Because its a bad setup for a necromancer to stay alive, and a great setup for an elementalist.
Its not that you “can’t” compare these two things, its like comparing an off-road 4×4 with a track racing car. Is that track car going to drive far faster than your off-roader? Heck yes it will. What about once you go off-road though? That track car is going to smash itself to bits (or just be completely incapable of movement), whereas your off-roader will be flying all over the place.
Why? Because that’s what they are made to do. Elementalist’s are made to have high boon access, they are made to have strong heals, it is in their class design. However Necromancer’s have huge HP advantages over Elementalists. We also have access to poison, chill, weakness, vulnerability, cripples, and condition transfer that they just don’t.
For example, an elementalist is in game, how do they go about playing defensively? They use boons (usually via switching attunements and using earth attunement skills) to reduce the incoming damage, in the process of this they will also likely drop a few conditions through traited attunement switching. Once they start losing HP, they use water attunement skills to heal it back up, or their pretty weak dedicated heal.
Now a necromancer is playing, how do they go about playing defensively? They do it by applying poison so they enemy’s heals are 33% less effective, then apply chill so their skills take longer to come back up, weakness to stop dodge rolling, vulnerability to decrease how long they are alive by increasing our damage output, blinds to stop incoming damage, cripples to kite, and condition transfer/removal to stop it from happening to ourselves. We use corrupt boon/focus 5 to stop enemies from being able to buff themselves easily. All this time that our enemy is taking more damage, with increased CDs from chill, reduced healing, less survivability from less boons, etc. we are passively gaining HP with life siphoning, and we are storing up LF for DS (if you are playing right this doesn’t take too long to hit). Then when they burn a bunch of CD’s for a burst, we swap into DS, tank it all, and BOOM, they have burned CDs for absolutely no gain; isn’t that a version of invulnerability? And then when we are finally getting low in HP, we pop dedicated our dedicated heals (which have really short CDs, and the highest HP heal in the game), and are back at full again.
That is why comparing is bad. Elementalists are balanced to require those heals and boons to stay alive. Necromancers are balanced to need conditions and DS to stay alive. They are two different ways to reach the same conclusion.
Short answer: No!
I’m shocked at the topic tbh having played necro since launch. Could it be that our mediocre ability to deal with stationary targets like burrows and such is the reason?
Actually, I find myself almost feeling OP in AC because of the burrows. Why? Because I run a staff/wells/plague build. I can literally solo burrows in AC faster than the entire rest of my team can handle one, the key is to put staff marks right on top of the burrow, when a spawn triggers the mark, the mark will do its raw damage to the burrow as well. Drop wells that siphon on top of that, and you can insta gib your first burrow just dropping well of suffering + marks then DS 4. Then go solo another burrow by popping plague + blind and running around a bit dropping marks/wells on the burrows.
You just need to remember the only thing is that your staff auto sucks, otherwise you can easily drop burrows.
In GW2, I don’t think its so much of an issue for a necro. Sure it makes you visually a bigger target, but it isn’t generally that difficult for people to see even a tiny asura and target them, even in big WvW zergs.
Especially if you just want to be a norn (I really dislike asura’s anyway), just go for it.
I agree that some of our life siphoning could use a buff/fix/change.
However, this is a terrible comparison and you’re going to get flak for it. You are comparing elementalists, with the highest (or second highest, next to guardians) healing in the game. Their sustain is based off of healing and then trying to maintain buffs on top of their newly refreshed HP bar. Necromancers sustain by keeping our opponent’s damage low, by using DS + LF gain to mitigate any bursts, with whatever life siphoning we have acting to heal up the extra bits. We also have huge heals in our dedicated heals.
We sustain differently, its not that they can do it better or worse, they do it differently. Their’s relies on using buffs and earth attunement to mitigate damage, and then water attunement to heal up; we use conditions and DS to mitigate damage, and then huge dedicated heals and small life siphons to heal up. Its just different.
Focus is just plain better in power builds. Chill + boon stripping will outclass a weak AoE bleed/weakness, and a big vulnerability stack/some regen will do much better than a blind/condition transfer.
Dagger off-hand does pretty bad damage in a power build. If you want to use it for condition removal or the weakness, feel free, but you would do much better with a focus instead.
Any suggestions on a more range style of play?
Would it be best to go with Minion Mastery for that?
No, minions are at the farthest 600 range (axe range), and often more in the 200s (or melee range if dagger main hand).
Conditions are the longest range.
Stability doesn’t remove fear, it only prevents it from being applied while active. So the damage should still occur, you just cannot fear people with stability on (unless you corrupt stability itself).
Condition damage has no good synergy (only the Death Nova poison), so the only reason confusion would be good in this way was if they tweaked minions to have synergy with condition damage.
Stability would make them immune to fears (I believe), but you probably want to pick up corrupt boon in any PvP scenario anyway, which will make their stability another fear.
We do. Fear becomes a dot skill (when traited), and I am fairly sure that is unique to necros.
I would suggest Lich form in almost every situation. Plague form has some very situational uses in a power build, if you happen to be in a situation where allies desperately need AoE control (blinds) then its good. And flesh golem is good in situations where popping lich would make no sense (non-dungeon PvE, there is no point to pop lich for 3 level 80 mobs).
Otherwise, Lich can do insane amounts of damage on its own, if you are fast you can get the 8vuln stacks down 3 times, plus minions to annoy people and a big AoE boon/condition stripper.
People have a bias against necro’s because they play a necro, do terrible at it, then talk to other people who similarly sucked with necros and eventually this “necros suck” resonance builds up. If you get into a dungeon with a group, however, your team will love you afterwards, or your money back. I’ve had most of my friend’s list adds through pugging dungeons because: you almost never get downed, you will almost always hold aggro, you either get mass AoE damage or huge single target (power vs condition).
We don’t have instant condi removal that can save our lives.
Consume conditions.
The analogy was fine; wrong, but fine.
Tides of Blood (necro trident auto-attack) doesn’t require LoS either.
One of the few reasons I can tolerate underwater combat as a necro, the fact that you can hide behind mountains and still hit your target all day.
Yeah, rare armor isn’t worth it in the long run except for MF armor (since the exotic MF armor gives no worthwhile stat bonuses for the cost). Just go straight for your exotics, although you can transmute the looks if you want. However, rabid stats do very well for crit based condition builds.
The only way I would see a cleave weapon happen is if the AoE damage it did could not crit, or could not apply on-crit condition effects. Otherwise rabid-condition builds would be far too strong being able to AoE bleeds to entire teams just auto attacking.
Interesting, it must have been changed since I tried it last. I do remember that really high jumps used to kill me through death shroud (obviously falls into an abyss would, but I wasn’t meaning though), but I haven’t done it in a long time.
What Shady said, you can also just pop DS and survive stupidly high falls too, although I would imagine OP’s method should theoretically work no matter the initial height, whereas DS does eventually not tank enough.
You are correct in just about everything except you are running conditions with wells which is kind of counter since in PVE boons are rare.
The wells are using the trait that applies them from range, and using P/Cond/Vit gear (atm I actually use full P/Cond/MF gear, and even with no defensive stats I do fine). Well of Suffering applies vulnerability, Well of Blindness (or w/e its called, the one that blinds) applies blind/chill, Well of Blood gives AoE team heals, and then I usually run BiP. All of my wells will siphon HP on top of the damage/utility they already bring, and as I have the same power as a P/V/T build I do fairly high damage with WoS and either Lich form (for vulnerability and damage in single target boss fights) or Plague (for AoE blind/chill/bleeds). I have never found the need for defensive stats in dungeons as a necro, I almost never get downed unless I have full boss aggro for long periods of time.
Its a support/condition build, although I double as a tank in most PvE situations because of my high control and life stealing.
And if you trait into poison field on explosion, they make very strong fight-ending tools. Wait for your enemy to hit the 6k-10k HP mark, then pop one of them for 2-3k damage plus poison, hit them with some burst to drop them lower, and you’ve either forced them to waste a heal with 33% reduced effects, or you can pop your second one and drop them in a poison field, which makes it very difficult to get up easily.
DS has a number of very straight-forward uses in builds, and then a number of more nuanced ones that I’m hardly an expert on.
The straight forward ones are going in and out of DS a lot with traits so it applies boons/removes conditions and various other “on use” effects, generally in power builds since while you are in DS you can use the 1 skill once or twice for big crits then get out and use those new toys its on entry traits gave you.
Other straight forward ones are less about on entry effects and more towards just building high power/crit damage and using DS 1’s ridiculous crit damage.
Some less obvious uses are like Nemesis’ guide that uses DS 3 for fear damage, or using a condition build that applies conditions with every crit; going into DS will give fury (more crit %) plus DS 4 is a huge AoE 9 tick ability, where every tick can crit.
Plenty more uses (using DS 2 in a dagger/wells build for gap closing) offensively, and there is always defensive use for a second, easily refillable HP bar and awesome fear access.
ahh thanks guys, was hoping to make a crazy build based around bone minions only lol
Bone minions can still have some decent niche rolls in direct damage builds, for example a power build with dagger/focus and wells to bomb teams could benefit from minions, summon them right as you get in, drop well of suffering and use focus 4 and 5 to stack up vulnerability/chill and damage, then explode the minions at the end for something like 2k-3k+ damage each, would be very possible.
+1 to what Bas said.
Either build a full tank build with P/V/T with Axe/Focus or Dagger/Warhorn, or build less tanky but with more personal damage using Berzerker gear. You can also run both weapons (which I commonly do) or run staff off-set for the fear/chill/condition transfer, just figure out how badly conditions are hampering your fights and use that to gauge things.
I’d also suggest switching out blood fiend if you go into tPvP, you can get away with it in sPvP because you shouldn’t get focused often enough to need the much better heal from Consume Conditions, but Consume is a much better skill right now.
My PvE build is completely around supporting staff/condition damage with scepter/huge damage spikes with wells. You do pretty high damage if you throw down wells/staff marks all at once (don’t fear), and I’ve often found that if I throw down all my wells/marks on top of a group of enemies, and run in, use DS 4 then drop fear mark and back out, I’ve usually killed the entire wave of mobs (or pretty close), and then they are easy enough to finish off, and I’ve taken no real damage since I was in DS the whole time. It also helps out your team because a wells build with vampiric wells makes you incredibly tanky and you WILL always have aggro, and this means your team can run as high on damage as they want since you can soak up all the aggro right at the start then run around kiting them until they die. Its really hard at first, but once you get used to it even really difficult dungeons ain’t got nothin’ on you.
Nerfs to FOTM builds or just very strong builds in general are a completely different issue. Then we start to talk about things that are just strong enough that they overcentralize the game, although they still retain counterplay. Or something which has such a small, specific counterplay that it is unrealistic to expect people to deal with it.
And Necro’s have to go through a lot of work to get as successful at this vs many other profs that can stack much more readily.
With my condition build (and I have very little experience with it in PvP), I can pretty readily stack 10 bleeds and perma poison at any time I want, just with a few scepter auto attacks. I agree that 60s bleeds aren’t all that helpful in PvP, but you still get 10 stacks of might for a pretty good amount of time as well. Its not like necros don’t have really accessible conditions, because we have extremely easily accessed ones, we just also have very strong ones on very long CDs.
Its a gross oversimplification of their interaction, and has misleading ideas. It shows the relation between time invested and skill, but it leads you to believe that whoever’s line is on top wins. Also, the “perfect” curve is false. All that needs for balance is for the realistic in-game output of two classes to be similar at their highest levels. That means that even though elementalist “perfect” play will outclass warrior “perfect” play, it isn’t really possible for an elementalist to actually play perfectly, there are too many decisions going on at once, too many skills and CDs to track, too much to do that it just cannot happen. Warriors on the other hand can pretty reasonably do this nearly all the time. That means in a fight between a great warrior and a great elementalist, the warrior is doing his best to not just play perfect (because this isn’t too hard for him), but to force the elementalist to not play perfect, because that is the counterplay to the elementalist’s higher skill cap. If he cannot reach the cap, his advantage is lost, and he is stuck playing a very difficult class without the benefits of it.
OP is, in its simplest form, the lack of counterplay. At lower levels, counterplay can be skill, or playing on your opponent’s lack of skill, at higher levels, it could be using teamwork to beat a stronger opponent 2v1, or knowing their skill rotation and interrupting it, but the only time something is OP is if there are no tools available to you to defeat them.
Jagged horrors are awesome, I just wish I could have them more often.
Minions are fine; they are NOT perfect, I have a few times where they will stand around watching me die, but it is very rare, and I’ve never noticed it make a difference in the fights (they tend to only sit around for a second or two).
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I actually like the idea of having your weapon make slight changes to DS, keeping the core abilities the same (and on the same CD), but with maybe a bit more direct synergy with builds; whereas right now while it does have synergy overall, it’s synergy with certain builds is somewhat contrived or generally defensive.
Not a bad concept (slight changes to skills while in DS on weapon), so long as they synergize with what those weapons are made to accomplish, and stay balanced. I feel like what you listed might not be the right things to implement, but certainly I think its a good conceptual idea.
I think in the above scenario, we do have an “I win” button if you run a pow/prec/tough build. It’s called Lich form. 4-6k #1, underrated #4 and situational #3 = bags-a-plenty.
If I remember correctly, doesn’t Lich 1 pierce?
That would make sense to me, because you are basically using a staff mark, just with dodging. The staff mark causes combat, so does the mark when used dodging.
edit: Not to say its balanced that the thief gets away with it and we don’t, but it at least makes sense that a mark caused by dodge rolling behaves the same as a normal one.
(edited by Bhawb.7408)
For a more honest answer, ask another class forum if they fear us as an enemy or favor us at their side in a dungeon above other professions.
I’d take this a step further, if you want really unbiased views. Go ask your guild what they think. Forums tend to have the extremes of both sides, people who really love the class, or people who really hate it, and every class forum will be like that. Your guild, however, is more apt to give you a decent opinion.
I’d also suggest you ask people after you play with them in a situation. For example, do a dungeon run, then talk to the people and see how they liked having a necro with them.
1. I ain’t no stinkin’ commie, the only red I like is smothered with blue and white like a bald eagle’s baby in its Freedom nest.
2. Please enlighten me on how we don’t contribute to these forums in a meaningful way; especially when the median post is “wtf gais, necros suck, I want full boon upkeep, 50k crits, full condition stacks on enemies 25/7, with 14k armor”.
Just tested it, it doesn’t make you enter combat. So yeah…
No. Minions scale with traits and levels, and that’s it, to my knowledge.
Tried? Yes. Successful? No. I just never gave myself time to work out a proper build, and I’m still working on not sucking at power builds.