Guild Wars 2

Play around with things. See if you like conditions or straight damage, minions or wells, doing tons of damage or being super survivable, etc. See what things you really enjoy, and just mess around, at low levels you can’t go wrong, and you get really easy chances to respec, and gear doesn’t mean anything till level 80, so you have a lot of time to choose.

Dagger is a bit better at single target, but the real difference is that dagger scales off of power and does normal damage, whereas scepter scales more off condition damage (a little power). Eventually you will probably choose to do either power-build for normal damage, or condition build for condition damage.

Imo the easiest levelling is using a staff and at least a few minions until you are pretty high in level. Minions will take aggro, meaning you wont take much damage, and staff puts down nice area damage which makes it easier for you to get exp for kills, even when others are attacking.

Necros are strong all game, and in all the game types, but at the lowest levels we can feel really OP, because your heal does damage and tanks for you (minion).

Necros are great in PvE, we have multiple builds available, and are very fun imo.

You don’t see a lot of necros because the class plays differently than others. Our builds are very rarely super straightforward, and there are some nuances in building necros effectively, and using them effectively in game. Thats not to say we are particularly difficult to play/use, just that it takes a lot more overall knowledge of the class mechanics to be good.

Yeah, its definitely dependent on the team. I played bunker necro with a team that had really strong and responsive roamers, it wasn’t a “real” team in that we had about 3 core members and just grabbed the rest on the go. You definitely only want a bunker necro when you only have one other bunker and then have two other people on your team with high damage to come in when you eventually get hit with the 2-3v1 (either they double/triple team you, or the one person designated to your node will just give up and screw around somewhere else).

How do you build a more damage based MM, btw? I have really never even considered it.

Bas.7406:

You must have laughed with delight when Anet said they were going to take a good look at nerfing the constant aoe builds. They are usually our biggest problems.

They did? Oh lawdy that will be great. Those are the only builds that can constantly shut me down as an MM. Otherwise its usually ridiculously long fights (I had a few 1v1s with a necro that lasted a few minutes every time), with whoever winning usually depending on who gets team help first or if someone seriously outplays the other.

In PvE vamp wells can allow you to tank the entire wave of mobs. Its only useful if you are going full wells (which I had assumed here, since the wellomancer title), but if you do, you will have 3-4 wells, each will heal quite a bit per tick. The more mobs, and the weaker they are, the more you get.

To see a good example, go into CoF with a full wells build and vamp wells, and go down the path that has you fighting the warden. When you reach that huge spawn of mobs from the egg sacs, run in the middle of it all, aggro everything you can, throw down every well you have on top of yourself, plus all your marks (minus fear), and you can tank through everything while the wells are up, plus kill off half the entire spawn.

Seriously, vamp wells in PvE is just ridiculous. Outside of PvE it isn’t nearly as good.

Bas.7406:

I actually have no issues with Mesmers outside of the full glass cannon GS wielding kill or be killed ones. The key to killing mesmers is to make sure you begin the attack, if they catch you first, you are almost always going to die because your minions will be clone chasing. If you begin the attack, they will stay on the mesmer.

I have a world of issues with bunker engineers and trap rangers, especially since they buffed their elite skill to be very painful.

Yeah, its when they get stuck clone chasing that it becomes painful.

I have found that I can generally outlast bunker engi’s, its the ones that run in circles dropping grenades that I have had the most trouble with because of the constant AoE. And I just haven’t run into many trap rangers that I can remember, whenever I am in tPvP they and I generally have the same job, on opposite sides of the map, so we never actually meet.

I feel condition based builds benefit more from dagger offhand than focus. It gives you condition transfer, which means less damage to you and any damage conditions transferred will do nice damage, plus you have bleeding/weakness from dagger 5.

That said, if you are more of a condition-support build (using non-damaging conditions for team-based support), then focus 4 for vuln and regen and focus 5 for chill would be an option, but ONLY when you aren’t aiming to go much into condition damage.

We have less condition removal, and more condition transfer, and frankly I’d like to keep it that way. Staff 4 transfers conditions from allies to enemies in the area, dagger 4 transfers 3 conditions on hit, and none of these are really long CDs. Plus there are some traited abilities which help with condition removal/transfer.

Personally, I like that its transfer, it makes condition use against necros much harder (stack 25 bleeds and find them right back on yourself), and is a major part of who we are. If we added any more plain removal on top, it’d just be too strong.

When not-traited, wells are placed directly where you are standing. However, if you go 20 points into the Curses trait-line, you will see a trait called Focused Rituals which makes wells ground-targetable, just like your staff marks.

PvP will grow with time. League of Legends has probably the best system currently for eSports, a fair number of people are truly professional league players, its what they do. It also took LoL a few years to get to that stage (3 years I think?) so we really do need to realize that GW2 won’t become a huge esport with amazing competition right away, they need some time to work.

First, it depends on whether you are going into WvW or PvE. In PvE as a well-based necro, you want 30 into Blood magic, for the wells siphon per pulse trait. You also want 20 into Curses for being able to ground target them. After that, if you are aiming mainly for condition damage, then its probably good to go at least another 5 into Curses for that extra % damage per condition. In WvW drop 10 out of Blood Magic, since siphon pulses aren’t as good, and go 10 more into Blood Magic for another staff trait.

If you are wanting to use a staff, I also highly suggest going into death magic to increase the size of marks and make them unblockable, and/or shorter CDs on staff. I’d also suggest looking at getting the ability to chill with blindness.

Skill wise, if you are already aiming for using lots of wells, then go for the healing well, Well of Suffering, the well that gives blindness, and then Blood is Power, unless one of the last wells are needed (situational). Plague form for your ult.

Weapons for conditionmancers are staff and scepter/dagger or warhorn, choose what you like best. Again, its up to you. If you are using the scepter a lot intead of the staff, go 30 into curses and only 10 into death magic.

So as a well-based necro, this is a generic build:
20-30 into Curses
10-20 into Death Magic
30 into Blood Magic
Staff
Scepter + dagger/warhorn
Well of Blood
Well of Suffering
Well of Darkness
Blood is Power/Well of Power/Well of Corruption
Plague Form

And you most likely want Carrion-stats. Play around a bit, listen to what others say, and figure out what works for you.

Relair.1843:

Not really, its much better but its by no means totally fixed. Good old flesh golem now just seems to have a smaller murder radius but I’ve seen him prance off to fight stuff on his own since the patch.

Honestly, although it was somewhat annoying in certain situations, I love Fleshy’s personality; running to anything attackable in sight and murdering it is great. Yeah it pisses you off when he pulls tons of aggro you didn’t want, but I still like that you can 100% count on him to ALWAYS be attacking enemies.

I very, very rarely die to a thief in 1v1. Even fully specced to burst, they can’t do more than half your HP, and after that you heal a lot of it back just using dagger 2 and the passive siphoning from minions/your own attacks. And even as a bunker necro, if the thief goes full burst to be able to do that kind of damage to you, it gives them such low survivability that you can do the same to them with your own minion bursts. Not to mention you can use DS to absorb their bursts.

The one class/build that will give you a lot of trouble are mesmers that are very good with spamming clones and shattering them before they die (minions tend to kill the clones very quickly, which actually shuts down some of the mesmer’s power if they don’t pay attention). If they pay attention though, you will almost always lose, and that is more so because mesmers are incredibly good 1v1.

CHIPS.6018:

So once the game becomes hardcore (WvW and high end dungeons) minions are useless. So what does that make minion skills? Medicare skills that’s what. Why would you want to use medicore skills when you could have used hardcore skills?

And it is not like minions are great 1v1. Most people can just kite them all day, without speed boost and without snaring your minions. High mobility classes like thieves and eles can pretty much pretend minions do not exist at all.

So minions are useless/underpowered in dungeons, 1v1 and wvw. That’s on top of a broken AI. What good it is for? Sure you can force yourself to use them. But there are always better and more versatile choices.

Only in parts of a dungeon that are heavy on AoE, and only in large-scale WvW. Its a big weakness of any similar pet build that has a bunch of pets, as each one needs to have a certain frailty; you couldn’t have each minion have 10k HP. However, outside of boss fights they are great in PvE.

They shine in 1v1. You are close to the tankiest possible build in the game as an MM, you have the highest possible HP, the highest possible toughness (slightly less than max possible armor because of armor class), have decent passive healing via life siphoning, and you should have more than enough cripple/immobilize/chill to lock people down long enough to damage them. This effect is made even stronger in sPvP and tPvP where your main job will always be node defense, and this forces every enemy you fight to come into close quarters, making it even harder to kite effectively.

Are minions perfect? Hell no, they have some stupid bugs right now, and aren’t nearly tuned to what they should be, but they fit in niche situations. But the main point of this thread is that all the huge QQing about how broken and crap minions are is stupid; they are situational, and in those situations they are great.

It has two really good uses right now:
1. A safer dagger, where you don’t need to get in that dangerous melee range, at the cost of a bit of damage
2. A great tool for boss fights, it can stack around 5+ vulnerability, which is 5% increased damage, this also works well for MMs since it gives your minions a 5% damage increase.

I think its okay where it is, if just a little weak.

The problem isn’t so much having a list of people who are undesirable, I can guarantee there are some people who are going to be toxic in any guild they ever go into; however no one could fully trust a blacklist unless it was very well done, and there is no way to do one well enough to do that.

For example, I remember people in my first guild that spread completely false stuff about the leaders, badmouthed people all the time, and stole from the guild bank; they aren’t going to magically change or be better in the next guild. However, I could just as easily have made all that up because he said I’m fat, and unless I put my name next to the blacklist entry, and have a reputation that lends itself to that, then no one cares.

Basically, the blacklist will either be so small it is nearly useless, as only highly respected and well known people could add, or it would have such little authority that no one would care, and therefore be useless.

I can’t guarantee I’d be on quite 15 hours a week every week right now, college work limits me a bit in that regard, but I am generally hitting about 12 a week. I can meet the other requirements easily, and I think we can benefit from each other (I have a good amount of knowledge about my main class in PvP and can help others there, and would benefit from an organized guild to build up my own knowledge and skill). I’d definitely be interested in joining, and if you want any more info you can PM me in game: Maestra De Muerte or on here.

Thanks.

CHIPS.6018:

In 1v1 the enemy will always move around. It take forever for that 3rd attack to happen. And even when it does it often misses. And even if it does hit, the cripple lasts only a few seconds.

And do you know that if your enemy kites away from your Flesh Golem long enough, that cripple combo chain was “forgotten” and never happens? This might be a bug but I had seen this many times.

Its up to you as the MM to use your CC to get your minions on top of the enemy. That is the biggest focus of the counterplay when you are playing as/against an MM, can I stay mobile long enough to keep the minions off me and kill them, or will they lock me down before that. That battle of mobility is a main factor, and as a good MM you should be able to use the large amount of CC I listed to win that battle.

Its really not that hard to lock people down as an MM.

Necros need fixes to some utility skills, to increase their viability in non-niche situations, slight fixes to minions to increase their utility, and a bit of trait reworking to give more useful and varied options. Thats it, we don’t need a big rework, just some fixes so things work as they were originally intended.

Don’t listen to him, those are amazing fixes to minion skills, which at present cannot fully do what they are intended to do. Only suggestion is that Bone minions can be activated still to detonate when in best positioning (if you meant that, then don’t mind me), and for the bone fiend to do it at range; since it is a ranged minion it will not likely be close enough to immobilize the right person unless the range is large.

MMs would be competitive with this.

All the other skills look good, but I cannot say 100% if those are still balanced skills, but it looks good to me. Traits look great, I don’t know power/condition builds well enough to know if this nerfs them, but if it doesn’t, then I’d say nearly every change in this is darn near perfect to what I’d like to see, without unbalancing necromancers. In fact, most of these seem more like fixes to things that didn’t work as intended, rather than buffs.

Great job, hope ANet reads it and at least looks into these ideas and tests them.

Disastro.4086:

If someone has a build that realistically works and i’m talking lvl 30+ Fractals and top tier WvW(probably roaming build?) I’d love to see it.

Those are the two worst possible areas for minions, so of course no one will have a workable build for that.

Necromancer, in THIS game, control life force, blood, and have generally strong condition flow (both applying directly, removing from teammates, and transfering from self/team to enemy). Minions were always a very small part of our power, compared to conditions and health gain/sacrifice.

striker.3704:

actually, the flesh golem cripples every third attack. This attack also has a more exaggerated movement and hits for 1k versus the average 700~

Thanks for that, I had wondered but didn’t bother to check outside of combat, and in combat there are usually enough conditions being applied/removed its hard to tell.

There should be a rework to downed states, definitely. The difference between downed state-strength is far too much. I’m all fine with trying to work the classes “flavor” into the downed state (necros life steal, mesmers clone, etc.), but some classes have far too much ability to escape or be a nuisance, or in warriors case just straight stand up and roflstomp you, while others sit there ready to revive, since there is 0% chance of getting up unless they just walk away.

The format I don’t care a ton about, but I would love to see a system to help people actually get groups together for pugging. My PvP lobby is completely and utterly dead, I’ve sat in there semi-afk or making builds for hours and seen 1 message, on a good day. I remember the old GW1 system not being terrible, but just something that we could go and see everyone that is looking for a group or members, and what they need. At the current state, it isn’t much fun to do tourneys at all because of how important teamwork is, and randoming a bunch of people and hoping your randoms>their randoms is a bit challenging.

They aren’t meant to be fully controlled. They are just adorable little machines of death that run around murdering what you attack until they die. They do, on occasion, get tired and refuse to attack, but activating their ability will fix this issue, reminding them who the boss is. It isn’t really a pet class, they are minions in the sense that every evil overlord loves and hates: mindless little buggers that don’t think much for themselves.

Ragion.2831:

Lets think about these suggestions
No minion deaths
No cast time
Short minion skill CD

are you serious or do you not realize necros already have the most hp in the game PLUS life force with the ability to cast fear, blind, chill, bleed and poison very easily, heal very well not to mention the ability to transform to gain even more health . Ability to inflict vulnerability very very easily , ability to turn invisible (norns), ability to gain life force so easily that if you really wanted to you wont lose hp below 70%. Necros can pretty much do everything all the other classes can do with varying effectiveness, but yet you simply want more? :{ . Did you already forget that the game is supposed to rely on the player’s skill not the toon?

To expand on what you said, those few things are a big part of the play/counterplay of minions. Traited minion deaths = big poison field of death, a good thing for any necro, and helps minimize the loss. Cast times and minion CDs are the only counterplay to MMs, besides perma-stunlocks. Cast times give you a window to interrupt the skill and keep the minion away for a bit longer, and CDs give you a window to really hurt the necro. If I go a fight without losing a minion (except the ones I explode), I win 9 times out of 10, even in 2v1s (and sometimes worse).

Necros have pretty strong balance right now, we could use a tiny bit of trait reworking, maybe a minor buff to minions, but more than anything just bug fixes. Once bugs are fixed we are one of the better thought out, executed, and balanced classes.

Just to help anyone answer you here, what do you do in WvW? Do you roll with an organized guild group? Do you run around in unorganized but still large groups? Are you in a small-organized group? Are you mostly solo capping small places? Are you just running around looking for duels?

Anything you can say about your goal in WvW would help. A necro build that does well in big fights won’t do well 1v1, a highly supportive necro build won’t be as good outside of organized play, etc.

OMNIBUS.2913:

Whenever i fight minion masters i just kite around them attacking the necro and the minions dont even hit me… If a minion or the player gets me with a snare i just remove it or stun break. I have also played mm myself and the minions just standing around got to me too. >.<

When you play MM, make sure to take full advantage of the large amount of cripples and chills you can apply. If you can keep someone crippled fairly often, then Flesh Golem gets on them, and Flesh Golem’s autos apply cripple, which let him apply more cripples, etc. You just need to get them locked down for a second or two initially and it snowballs from there.

As for them not attacking, the ones with the biggest issues also happen to be ones you want to blow their active skills first (anything that doesn’t die upon skill activation can be reasonably used in a smart burst to lead off, it helps get the enemy on their back foot very quickly, and most will never regain composure enough to win 1v1). Upon skill activation, all non-suicidal minions will attack the target; that should help you out.

CHIPS.6018:

4 problems with minions

1) Broken AI
2) Movement speed.
3) Damage
4) Dies in seconds in WvW zergs

1) They have fixed the over-aggressive AI, which was annoying. By now, they tend to do well, they work much better in tPvP where you will be 1v1 a lot, and I haven’t noticed them sitting around as much. It is still a problem on occasion though, and those occasions suck.

2) Flesh Golem has built in cripple every auto attack, both ranged can’t be kited, bone fiend has built in cripple and immobilize (immobilize needs fixing though), and shadow fiend has gap-closer. Plus dagger 3 is an immobilize, focus 5 is a chill, axe 3 is a cripple, staff 3 is a chill, and warhorn 4 is a daze plus warhorn 5 is a cripple. That is cc in every intelligent minion build (you should never use scepter), on at least 2 weapons.

3) Minions are best fit into a bunker build, you get 27k hp, 3k armor, and some (not a lot) of health coming in from siphoning. They don’t do a lot of damage because it would unbalance them.

4) They are terrible in nearly every large-scale WvW application, so you shouldn’t be using them anyway.

Afropenguinn.3675:

The staff and minions work hand in hand, and to be honest the reason I hate the staff is its 1st attack, it is so slow and dull. I am specced purley into my minions yes, 20 spite, 30 death, and 20 blood. Though I really only needed the extra 10 death to get the staff skill, so I may change that…and I don’t get a couple of the acronyms?

The Grandmaster death trait for poison fields is amazing in PvP, especially since you should be focussed on node defense. In PvE you can probably be okay with the staff skill, but I’d still look at the Grandmaster traits again.

I’d suggest keeping dagger/something in your build, you can switch between staff and axe/something depending on what you prefer. Warhorn is good because it gives an AoE cripple (no more kiting minions), swiftness (lets you get in range for dagger hits), and some AoE damage, plus an AoE daze. That daze is really helpful because it lets your minions all mob up, and gives you 2s for your minion-based CC to come back up.

IMO, the best minion synergy is axe/focus because of the vulnerability stacks you can maintain, meaning mo minion damage. Just play around with it, minion builds do have a bit of flexibility when it comes to weapons, depending on game-type and personal playstyle.

And yes, stack full power/toughness/vitality, if you have any other stat in your build, you are doing it wrong.

Kilger.5490:

I hate how they die when I use my plague or lich elite, I’ve entirely removed them from my bar because of this

If you are using minions as a minion-heavy build (3+ minions with minion traits), why would you not take the undeniably best one, Flesh Golem? Especially when you shouldn’t have the stats to take advantage of Plague/Lich when building as an MM

Minions are fine in the right situations, just know what those are and only use them in those situations. As for what to use in a minion-heavy build: toughness/vitality, these will give you near 30k hp/3k armor. Your focus is on minion damage, therefore your only job is to stay alive long enough for them to kill things; especially since no stat you have effects them (only traits). Since toughness/vit go hand in hand with power in gear, build the power, and make sure you are not using damaging conditions.

Also, like others said, DD isn’t very good, DW/AF (make sure to bring condition removal) or DF/staff (use the staff for when you can’t/don’t want to be in range, use 4 for condition removal, and the abilities give general utility that you can spam out then switch back to DF).

Edit: just to specify, MM builds are ONLY good in s/tPvP bunker builds, PvE in low-AoE situations, and very small-group WvW.

I would say there are classes that are more often overlooked compared to others, but nothing is specifically so underpowered or weak in some aspect that it actually causes disuse, in sPvP especially.

This is a team-based game, especially in PvP where teamwork will 100% of the time trump individual skill. Why would they then introduce a ton of stat-trackers that encourage you to not play with the team? The one thing they display right now (the points), already encourage people to mindlessly zerg it out instead of play smart.

Its called counterplay, you are trying to fight scissors with paper; stop trying and pick up a rock.

They purposely made minions different in this game. In gw1 it was all about being a mini-zerg on your own. You tag around with your team until you get 5 or so minions, then you start to snowball into an unkillable force rampaging around smashing anything you find.

They wanted to remove the niche-ness of minions, where you relied 100% on snowballing, and make them better as single-unit skills, and make the minions have more of a singular impact, instead of being all about numbers. All they need to do is slowly and slightly give minor buffs to either the playstyle overall (traits), or minor buffs to each minion (especially the healing one).

Minions are really strong in sPvP large zerg-fest situations because they just run around in full-berzerk mode, attacking whatever is nearby; yes sometimes they screw up, but it is generally rare for that to cause any decent difference. You get such high scores because minions end up just attacking everything and therefore you get credit for a lot of kills that you may or may not have really done much about.

But anyway, if you go all toughness/vit/power with minions, using d/wh (or d/d), a/f (or staff), with consume conditions or well of blood for healing (healing minion CAN work, but its hard, isn’t guaranteed, and ups your micro managing by way too much), and then ranged minions, bone minions, and golem, you can act as a very strong node defender/bunker. Switching between both weapon sets and making sure to make use of any/all CC you have, stack as much vulnerability as you can, and MM builds can do really well, unless you run into a hard counter (heavy AoE, some mesmers).

The build isn’t as OP as it was in beta, where you could 3v1 and roflstomp people, but it is still strong if you play it well. Just don’t expect it to be easy.

I don’t even care about packing up the wurm for less CD, I’d just like to be able to pop it without being teleported if I want. Otherwise you can end up in terrible positioning just to try to be able to use the minion again.

In specific, I’m wondering about dagger’s 2 and the Blood Fiend’s heal-per-attack, does having more healing make those healing effects larger, or are those heals completely unaffected by the healing stat?

Thanks

In my opinion, taking minions without going all in is generally bad, although you can make it work. Especially Flesh golem and Bone minions (with death nova) can be put into other builds and give you some help with decent damage, and the golem’s cripple/cc or bone minions poison fields can be pretty strong when you are going for holding people down in one area. However, I also feel like there are other utility skills you could have gone for that provide much stronger burst damage, and free up trait points for more useful applications. Your poisoning could be done with staff 3, and also Corrosive Poison Cloud, giving you the poison debuff, and either freeing up a utility slot for something better, or in poison cloud’s case also giving weakness to them (you can use staff 4 to transfer over your own weakness). Also, Lich form as an ult would do much higher damage (you can get autos to hit insanely hard), and applying vulnerability with some other conditions is stronger than those few autos golem will do.

I’m not exactly sure what your overall goal for this build is, s/tPvP necros are really best fit for stationary defense (our mobility is god-awful compared to classes like ele and thief), so if you could specify that, it would help people help you more.

I feel like your build is fine, and I’m sure you can do okay with it if you play it right, but I think if you wanted a burst build, you should go further towards power/crit damage, and abuse DS 1’s huge crits, and Lich 1 crits, along with something like well of suffering for big damage and vuln stacks. If you want survivability/sustain (a necro bunker), then you can trait more fully into minions with all power/tough/vit stats, or go for a condition/DS (using DS 4 to apply crit bleeds), and using a dagger + any offhand (they can all pump out good conditions) and staff.

Remember, necros will NEVER, ever be as bursty as burst classes, you can give yourself a 5 second “burst” that will do big damage, but compared to a thief’s <1 sec 15k macro, its pretty long. Your build is fine, don’t let anything discourage you from using it if its fun, but I think you haven’t specialized enough to see something productive outside of zerg-fest games (your build probably does really well in zergs, with huge poison AoE and single target pulls to melt squishies). Anywho, thats all just my opinion, and I’m far from an expert on anything.

MolotovkittentailParty.8931:

Why do you play a Necro? What do you think of it? What do you like? What tips for quality of life do you have? What can I expect and what are my playstyle options?

I have played a necro since GW1 when I saw them summoning minions. I thought that was the coolest thing ever.

I think it has one of the steepest learning curves for most people, because it has an abnormal play style.

I like that it is different. You can have cute-fleshy sacs fight for you, you can crap conditions all over a group of people and watch them be offensively and defensively crippled as you finish them. It has a lot of variety and fun playstyles for me.

Tips for quality of life: look through your trait trees and abilities, and look for life siphoning, and life force. Life siphoning is like a constant health income, and life force grants you DS, which is a second health bar.

Expect a bit of work to find a good build and niche for yourself. Expect a lot of haters on the forums and some in game who don’t know what they are doing. As for builds, aim for: wells (AoE conditions/damage), DS abuse (jumping in and out of DS often, abusing that second health bar for survivability), condition-damage (lots of bleeds/poisons), condition-spread (vulnerability, weakness, cripple, chill, plus damaging conditions, spread through AoE attacks), straight damage (axe/dagger main hand), and minions (managing undead minions for damage/survivability).

I’d also suggest to not listen to a lot on these forums. You will find a ton of complaining, and not much of help to you; in game wait until you see a necro who seems to be doing well, and then ask for tips.

I think DS should have stun break on use/exit, and a stronger fear ability. Fear was supposed to be our trademark ability, and I find a minor fear in downed, another minor fear in DS, and then a fear from the staff. The fears need to be made AoE (like the DS siphon) or longer. I do wish it had more synergy with builds, maybe that your auto had effects that went with your weapon (scepter gives it a bleed for instance), but I have to say that while it is amazing as a damage sponge and emergency "Holy crap I’m about to die ::press F1, fear nearest person, run around until your heal is ready:: and more towards something that can be used in every build.

This idea that necros are bad is hilarious, and so wrong. I played necro in GW1, I have played necro all through beta, and since launch; I haven’t played anything else beyond screwing around a few minutes.

People expect something out of necros that they can’t deliver. Necro has always been a “weird” (read: not straight forward) class, it was that way in GW1, it is that way now. A minion spec should give you 3k armor, 28k HP, and about 1.5-2.5k DPS (depends on what you use), not including any skills, just your minions auto attacking. Condition damage isn’t insane, but is complemented by easy access to AoE conditions and non-damaging conditions (vulnerability and chill abound). Siphoning health lets you giggle like a school girl as you stab a guardian in the face and drain more damage than he can do. DS is essentially a temporary god-mode at the cost of some DPS.

Necros aren’t there to out tank a tank, out spike a thief, out damage a warrior, we never have been, and never will be. Its not that we can’t do it either, I’ve tanked 3 people in tPvP while my team goes and has a picnic on the corpse of their Lord, and I’ve treated thieves like a high school jock would treat a freshman. If you are having trouble in WvW, its because you aren’t using the ability to spread AoE conditions, if you are having trouble in tPvP its because you have a horrible team, or haven’t learned how to make a build that abuses the survivability we have while retaining DPS.

If you are having trouble playing necro, then you either need to roll a new toon and stop filling every thread with inane QQing, or give yourself time to adapt to the playstyle. Devs have posted about the profession multiple times, I’d listen to them. Honestly, its a turn-off to people who might post helpful things here to see all the negativity about the profession; personally I have multiple guides I’ve written on builds that I have personally tested and found viable in game, and have helped people in my guild, but no one wants to put their hard work out there in this environment.