Guild Wars 2

Really great work! I’m going to take a close look at this once I get to Arah.

Aside: can we please keep this thread about Lupicus and Necromancers rather than an argument about necromancers vs other classes?

Acension.9270:

• Are they wanted in dungeons and how good are they in them?

I’ve never been turned down from a dungeon because of being a necro, and I’ve currently done most paths, excluding Arah and higher level fractals. I hear that in higher level fractals people mostly want Guardians/Mesmers/Warriors, but I’ve also heard of necros doing level 38+ fractals.

Acension.9270:

• Can they dash out a lot of DPS and can they tank well.

I’ve heard it’s not possible to do as much damage as several other classes if both spec purely into damage. That said, people mostly spec pure damage for CoF farming, so unless that’s your thing it usually isn’t a big deal. There are several higher damage builds on the forums. One issue is that a lot of our damage is single target damage – while we have a great AoE weapon (staff), it has less damage and more control/support (but also hits lots of enemies, which still makes it effective)

They can definitely tank well. We have naturally high health (although low toughness), and death shroud provides extra tanking health. We also have a good amount of healing if specced for that (although most people don’t). PVT or HPT gear both allow us to tank pretty well. However, we don’t have access to vigor, which means we have to absorb more of the boss’s damage.

Acension.9270:

• Last thing. How are they in boss battles, like dragons and stuff.

They’re great in dungeon boss battles. Signet of undeath allows you to res multiple people at once while moving. I run a healing/support build and can heal the team a lot during boss fights.
If you mean open-world boss battles, I don’t do those much, but my understanding is they’re now so pathetically easy that anyone can do them effectively.

Chickenbone.5918:

I don’t disagree that this is a minor point. Since it’s against the norm, a designer must have actively thought to put this little regen handicap on minions.

I see why that seems to be the case, but that’s not really how software bugs work (I’m a software developer). A small difference like this could easily be an unintentional bug. I agree it’s annoying, but I don’t think ANet is out to get us and expect it to be fixed eventually.

I’m guessing it’s just a bug.

You can re-summon by switching skills and switching back (although it’s incredibly slow to wait for the cooldown).

Well of Blood also heals minions, as does deathly invigoration (for very little)

theodor.3480:

thanks again. i’ll try out some stuff keeping your advices in mind. think it’s best if i experiment and see what works best for me.

Definitely!

Ezeriel.9574:

Necros are on a good place. I think they need more group healing, or support, or something….

Condition-mancers still can’t a weapons rack, which is just plain stupid, but who needs a way to kill siege weapons when we got super adventure box!

All-in-all, a decent class for pve and wvw, not so much for dungeons.

While I would love more group healing, Well of Blood is a really, really good group heal if you have healing power. Staff 2 as well. Signet of Undeath is amazing in hard dungeons. I put out a lot of group support, and dungeons aren’t as boring as on my guardian – necro support is much more active than guardian support.

Without specializing a bit, we do lack party support however.

Dagger offhand is viable in PvE for defense. Dagger 4 condition removal can be very useful for certain fights, and AoE weakness is often a 25% damage reduction since many PvE enemies rarely crit. I usually switch to a dagger offhand for the spider queen at the start of AC, since her immobilize is deadly. It also looks the coolest, if you care a lot about that. That said, I usually use a focus offhand for PvE, it’s just amazing at melee range on a single target.

flow had some good comments with regards to traits. A couple more:
– Personally I would replace vampiric rituals in blood magic with either “life siphoning is 50% more effective”, since it makes your dagger 2 heal for 50% more, or “20% shorter cooldown on wells” if you’re using wells
– What equipment are you going for? If you’re going for damage, well of blood isn’t worth it; if you’re going for healing power and support it is (but you want 20% shorter cooldown on wells then)
– I think there are better options for your non-blood magic trait points seem. Dagger main hand scales with power rather than conditions, so your curses points don’t help your damage much. Retaliation is underwhelming in PvE because most enemies have a slow attack speed, and you aren’t channelling that often with dagger to make 400 toughness useful (unless you’re in death shroud most of the time, but for that you should have some points in soul reaping, and “lose a condition on entering death shroud” ends up being better than 400 toughness)
– I would put the non-blood magic trait points in either spite for damage or soul reaping for death shroud defense and crit damage if you go for high precision.
– You only need one of ‘signet of the locust’ or ‘quickening thirst (25% faster with daggers)’
– Well of suffering or blood is power would do more damage than signet of spite
– spectral walk is great for running around the map, but less great for fights, and not that useful if you’re running 25% faster anyways (25% speed and swiftness don’t stack)

Nay of the Ether.8913:

Bas.7406:

@Skyro, talk with Nay and Del Onasi about our healing abilities. I once felt like you did and then watched their support builds keep three minions alive through an entire dungeon. I no longer disagree with them.

It was more like 6 minions between the two people running MM, get it right geez, always misinforming the masses ;-) /sarcasm. Bas is right though, our heals don’t seem so epic because you’re thinking of them in terms of guardian healing which has a lot of burst heal, but necro is more of a sustained healing type, couple that with a cover for your hp bar (DS) and it does become pretty op, even if DS only lasts for a few hits, those few powerful hits were redirected and not affecting your health while you continued to heal. I would be totally on board for having heal reduction while in DS though. While I would prefer a 50% I think 25% would be more realistic and wouldn’t make it remotely op while still providing more usefulness. I run full support builds so I know firsthand just how fast and often we can pop off massive healing and trust me, full heals while in DS would be too op. I would love it yes, is it feasible, no.

I agree with most of this as well. I don’t think allowing full healing would make us overpowered, but I understand why it isn’t there. We still lose life force while in death shroud, so it would be impossible to stay in constantly.

In PvE I don’t lose much healing in death shroud – our spike heals can all be done out of death shroud safely (or have to be done outside of death shroud as with dagger 2 and signet of the locust). It’s easy to stay out of death shroud while standing in well of blood because it can heal for so much. The only self-healing we miss out on is regen and life leeching on hits, both of which are relatively minor (this starts to get unreasonable when you have minion life leeching though).
In PvP it would be a larger buff since we are more likely to need to death shroud while standing in well of blood, but I think it would bring support builds in WvW closer to their PvE viability.

Again, I understand why they don’t do it, and it doesn’t really bother me (although a buff would always be welcome).

Also, Death Shroud UI improvements, yay!

Bas.7406:

Interesting idea. I always like different takes on a build. I do have one minor nitpick outside of the clicking haha! You aren’t a power build so much as a support build. With that much healing power and control you are more of a support. Powerbuilds are based on the idea that your major stat is power with limited healing power :P.

Cleric’s gear prohibits you from calling yourself a Powermancer. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

Keep up the good work!

I think it’s more accurate to describe the builds along two dimensions: power vs. condition damage and DPS vs. bunker
Cleric’s gear is power & bunker, beserker’s is power & DPS, etc.
“Support” could be either cleric’s or apothecary’s, and they play quite differently.

Of course, the wider playerbase generally groups all support builds into the same bucket (but if we believe what they say, then both support builds and necros in general are useless :P).

One of the sad thing about support builds in WvW is that you have to choose between consume conditions, which is great for PvP but scales poorly with healing power, and well of blood, which is poor in PvP but scales well with healing power. In a group situation well of blood still probably wins, but in a solo situation it’s a lose-lose situation. Regen and deathly invigoration scale reasonably with healing power, but I don’t currently believe they do enough healing to justify cleric’s in WvW (I’d be happy to be convinced otherwise though). An apothecary staff/scepter build might be good though, since staff 4 might make up for losing consume conditions.

Just wanted to say props and this is awesome

x per fection x.2096:

I don’t think people realize how good you actually are at this. They all need to try some of these solo’s and see.

Definitely. Regardless of class, solo dungeons are hard. It’s awesome to see people doing these, thanks for putting up videos!

Wethospu.6437:

Doing your first (or few) solo is probably the hardest. Sure, dungeons have some differences but mechanics don’t drastically change. But I guess I will eventually have to rerun all paths (revamps, nerfs, etc.).

Thanks, that’s good to know. I’m just trying to get into this and they’re pretty rough so far.

Wethospu.6437:

And yeah, hopefully this topic now doesn’t completely die when it finally picked up some attention.

Yeah, it’s sad to see this end up in linksville… it really seemed more relevant to dungeons and I was more likely to bump into it there.

Awesome work! Thanks for adding another “underpowered” class to the soloing camp.

Now I want to try this with a level 35 necro, but my second necro is only level 10

Great work, and thanks for the detailed writeup!

That’s nice work, thanks! And surprising results for blood fiend.

Would you mind if someone adds these numbers to the wiki?

Grandmaster Lee.9568:

Hey that was awesome! I never thought I would see a necromancer video soloing a dungeon. I know this is a random question but, how do you have the starter mask?

Thanks!

You can transfer the look of the starter mask to level 0-79 gear using basic transmutation stones (available randomly from dailies or map completion), or to level 80 gear using fine transmutation stones (only available in the gem store right now) [http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Transmutation].
If you’ve lost your original starter mask, you can make a new necromancer, transmute their starter mask to a low level white headpiece, which makes the resulting item account bound instead of soulbound. You can then transmute the result onto your main necromancer’s headpiece.

New-AC Spider Queen as a Necromancer:
http://youtu.be/sItGayDpqNc

Video of me soloing the new Spider Queen: http://youtu.be/sItGayDpqNc

This is my second time soloing it, and first guild wars 2 video. I don’t think it’s particularly impressive, but it was fun!

The first time I tried this I died 12 times to the hatchlings; this time I had some better tactics and lived through the whole fight. For you minion fans, it makes heavy use of minions.

Unfortunately I don’t have a mic yet, but I added captions to most of the fight explaining what I’m trying to do. Alas, the video quality came out worse than I intended; I will re-encode it later, but I’m excited and wanted to share it with you now. Hope people enjoy it!

Edit: slightly higher quality video

Bas.7406:

Del Onasi has a fantastic build. If you can pm him in game he would be glad to chat with you about it. He single handedly kept all my minions alive during multiple runs.

Nay of the Ether was pumping out some heals too, but thanks!

I posted my current setup in another thread:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/Support-focused-Necro-Is-It-Possible/first#post1634418
If all I did was dungeons I’d probably rearrange the traits a bit, but having some good minions helps for solo play.

Comments on the build:
In PvE, Shaman’s gear is Vitality/Healing/Condition Damage, even though the calculator you’re using says Toughness/Healing/Condition Damage. (I like http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/necromancer/ better for PvE calculations.) Toughness is better for survivability than vitality because of how much you’re healing. It might draw you some extra agro, but as a bunker character that’s probably a good thing. Apothecary’s gear is Healing/Toughness/Condition Damage, and is what I’d recommend for a condition-based support build.

I think Staff Mastery or Shrouded Removal would be more useful than Spiteful Vigor. Retaliation doesn’t do that much in PvE (it doesn’t block damage, just damages the enemy when he damages you). It can be useful, but not as useful as losing conditions or being able to spam regen faster, in my opinion.

Just my 2 cents – one of the reasons Necromancer’s are awesome is the variety of viable builds, so feel free to do your own thing if you like it more!

Bas.7406:

Nay of the Ether or Del Onasi run a great support build. It was strong enough to keep all of my minions alive on a majority of pulls in dungeons. It is entirely possible and revolves around using wells, staff, and Spectral wall to create a constant state of protection, weakness, blinding, and conditions.

Thanks!

Necros can be very good support characters. They can heal party members for ~7000 health over 10 seconds every 32 seconds, keep constant regeneration on the party, and cast a strong AoE heal on reviving a downed teammate. They can revive up to three downed allies in an AoE, remove conditions in multiple AoEs, and chill and fear enemies in AoEs.

I currently run a healing focused build, focusing on support in dungeons and minions in solo PvE. Well of Blood (heal), Signet of Undead, and staff skills are probably the most important support skills to take. Well of Power can also be useful on some bosses to cleanse more conditions.

Here’s the gear/trait/skill setup I use in dungeons. (Disclaimer: I’m relatively new to the game and newer to 80, so there are probably some sub-optimal choices in here still, but it’s worked well so far and I’ve spent a lot of time theorycrafting on the wiki and build calculators.)

Gear: All Cleric’s (search the trading post for Mhenlo’s for cheap cleric exotics). Well of Blood scales very well with healing power, as does regeneration (to a lesser extent, but you can keep regeneration up more).
Runes are up to you; I’m using Dwayna right now as they came on my gear and add to the healing well of blood provides, but I could see Runes of the Monk or Runes of Lyssa being useful in combination with the flesh golem elite.
On my weapons I have a Sigil of Energy on my staff and off-hand, which can give an extra dodge every 10 seconds and can be helpful in dodge-heavy bosses. On my non-staff main hand I have a Sigil of Life for up to 250 extra healing power if you stay alive in the dungeon.

Traits:
20 Spite:
Signet Mastery – Signets recharge 20% faster
Spiteful Marks – Marks do 10% more damage
Notes: This tree is optional; it is useful if you want to use minions while solo (minions work well with support builds because they do the same damage on a lower power support build as on a high power build, and you can keep them alive rather well).

0 Curses

20 Death Magic:
Staff Mastery – Staff skills recharge 20% faster
Greater Marks – marks are much larger
Notes: 10 here is important for staff skills recharge faster, in my opinion. Other people will insist on greater marks, which is also useful. Removing a condition when in death shroud is always a good trait. More is optional, but 20 is important for running minions while solo.

30 Blood Magic:
Ritual of Life – Create a well of blood when reviving an ally. This gives you a ton of extra healing on hard fights. What’s not to like?
Ritual Mastery – Wells recharge 20% faster
Transfusion – Life Siphon heals nearby allies (this can be swapped with healing on leaving death shroud, but transfusion as a larger infrequent heal seems more useful)
Notes: This is pretty much manditory for a healing build. So many good traits here.

0 Soul Reaping

Skills:
Staff
Alternate set is really up to you. I use a dagger main hand because I like being able to get in close and deal a bit of damage in easier fights (being in melee range seems to attract some agro too, which sometimes is what you want). Focus 4 gives some nice regeneration and vulnerability. Dagger 5 gives AoE weakness. If you’re running Cleric’s gear you want a power-based main hand, but if you really like conditions you could go with Apothecary’s gear and a scepter.
Signet of Undeath – revive multiple team members if they are downed and near each other. I’ve saved parties from wiping with this, and it is awesome
Flesh Wurm – cast this at a far wall and have an instant teleport out of battle if things start going south for your character. You are much more of a benefit to your team alive than dead. If the rest of the team wipes, I can use Signet of Undeath and try to save the team, if I wipe I can’t. It’s also good damage if you can keep it in range of the boss. This, dodge, and death shroud give you several go-to defensive cool downs.
3rd utility – I vary based on the situation. Spectral Wall is pure support if there’s nothing else compelling. Well of Power is good in condition-heavy fights. There are several good damage utilities for easier fights.
Elite: Plague form is great for aoe blinds when your party is about to be overrun by mobs. Flesh Golem is good for some extra damage and knockdown.

I’ve been really enjoying dungeons with this build. Lots of healing in tough fights, dagger action in easy fights.

Lonewolf Kai.3682:

I just need a bit more for clarification on Healing Power and the effect of it on allies (ie minions).
Does HP work with:
1. Mark of Blood?
2. Transfusion?
3. Deathly Invigoration?

Again, thats with these traits and their effects on allies only, not the necro.

The wiki is great for these sorts of questions: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Necromancer . It will tell you not only if they scale, but by what factor they scale.

As a short answer though:
1. Yes (though it can get complicated in parties because other people are applying regeneration as well)
2. No
3. Yes

Bhawb.7408:

Death Shroud very definitely is affected by vitality, the only real question is by how much.

War Mourner.5168:

I posted it in the other thread, it’s a linear relationship between HP and LF.

Thanks, I stand corrected. I’m rather new to the game and haven’t had much time to test stuff yet. I’m glad we’ve got people who have though. Hoping to test it out a bit myself eventually.

@Arvid: Thank you for testing this more. If you have the actual damage numbers from that fight (total damage done in death shroud, total health you have out of death shroud), I’d love to see them.

I want to offer a possibly hypothesis, which hopefully I’ll have time to test in the mists sometimes. ~19k death shroud health is really close to a necromancer’s natural health without any vitality. Could it be that vitality does not affect death shroud health at all, as previously asserted?

Arvid, if your tests were done without vitality gear, then we can probably count this hypothesis debunked right now. But if you were also using vitality gear, like the original poster, then maybe this is a possibility?

Just because you personally don’t find the necromancer enjoyable doesn’t mean that Bhawb and Bas are wrong. I personally didn’t enjoy my D/D elementalist, but it’s widely considered one of the better classes in both PvE and especially WvW.

I’m not going to claim that necromancers are currently perfect. There are bugs and there are skills I think could probably be tweaked. But I will disagree that any of the current problems are game-breaking. (With the possible exception of the condition cap for condition build in group settings, but that affects several classes, ANet has said they are working on, and many people seem to still run condition builds. I haven’t played a condition build, so I can’t comment that much).

1) Warriors are great in the current PvE farming meta. They are laughed about in PvP/WvW and aren’t particularly great (or bad) in harder PvE content. Personally farming CoF path 1 all day sounds incredibly boring, but warriors are good at it.

2) We don’t have a lot of escapes, but we have death shroud, which can be amazing at the right times (it’s saved me from a couple Subject Alpha hits that protection would have done nothing against). We also have flesh wurm, which isn’t the best teleport skill around by any means, but is still pretty amazing when used at the right time.

3) Guardian’s are awesome at sustained fights. They have some other shortcomings that necromancers don’t (poor ranged weapons for one). Thieves are awesome at PvP attrition, but aren’t better at attrition in hard PvE content.

4) Fair enough, other classes have a lot or more access to poison as well.

5) Warriors are great DPS in PvE. No argument there. I haven’t heard of them being any more viable than a hybrid necro in PvP/WvW, but maybe that is the case.

6) The post just says we have multiple disables. We do. That doesn’t mean some other classes don’t or shouldn’t as well. Not all classes have as many as are available to a necro.

7) We’re better than guardians at slowing down enemies. That’s the only other class I’ve played to 70+ so far, so maybe all the other classes have a lot more mobility reduction than necros, but I would be surprised if all of them did.

People do listen to Bas and Bhawb. They can be zealous sometimes, but they have to put up with a lot of whining among the few legitimate complaints.
I’ve played a guardian to 74 as well (but got bored, I’ll get it to 80 eventually). I enjoy the necromancer more and don’t find it to be any less viable in dungeons or world PvE. I’m not any good at WvW with either yet.
While the bug list is mostly accurate, I don’t find any of the bugs to be game-breaking.

I don’t think necromancers are perfect. But they can be fun and viable in all the major game modes. While complaining about broken things or underpowered elements can be helpful, complaining that the class is broken and useless isn’t. The original post was an attempt at being constructive. The derailment about class philosophy being wrong is not. I’m happy to discuss parts of the necromancer class I enjoy, but this post has gotten long enough.

Bhawb.7408:

I’d take being able to root all ranged minions over that, honestly. Flesh Wurm almost never dies because with 1200 range you can just put him at a good range from the action. Also, one thing I took to recently was spamming flesh wurm summon/kill in PvP to stack up LF when I’m sitting alone on point.

Tricks like this remind me why I read this forum; thanks! I was previously jumping off buildings with the life force signet, trying to gain life force in cities (it almost sort of worked). But no more!

On the subject of the guild, I’m a bit off schedule for the main dungeon thread, usually only getting on around 8 or 9pm PST. But if anything is going on and I’m online, feel free to whisper me.

Thanks, got it!

This is awesome! I’d love an invite if an office is around sometime tomorrow. I’ve been trying to find someone in-game, but I seem to be missing you.