Guild Wars 2

They activate on both.

Charge has a 40sec cooldown and the birds have 45, so you can’t cast charge on every CD and get birds, you must wait a few seconds.

The birds are extremely good if you have at least 5 points in the precision line since the bleed on crit chance from the minor doesn’t have any in-built cooldowns.
That means that every strike of the 16 that each bird summoned does has a chance to proc a 1 second bleed.

The summon area is centered around you and is about 900 AoE, remember that only 5 birds can be summoned on a single charge.

Oh, sorry. Mad King runes.

Neither, use MK for birds on golem charge, they also increase power and condition duration, 10% on all and an extra 15% for bleeds.

Also, fear duration from Necromancer(6) is horrible.

I think it’s because you don’t have ranged burst damage with those weapons.

Have you tried ranged wells or LifeBlast spamming?

Pointless Specutlation?
That’s my favorite kind of speculation!

1) Overhaul of major and minor traits.
2) Traits that affect underwater weapons.
3) Wells get a 1 second increase in duration.
4) A viable way to build Life force on scepter and Trident.

I’ve already tried charge (with MK runes so that includes Birds)-> Dagger immobilize -> WH daze and well bombing him, seems like the passive stealth on low HP kicks in and they manage to survive, putting everything I have into a 40+ seconds cd.

Necros can’t block, but blindness might be an option… since I don’t offhand dagger well of darkness would be the only option. It has a longish casting time and only lasts 5 seconds but I might try that next time. Plague Form is out as well since I can be kited for the whole duration.

From what I’ve understood I need to make them miss the Cloak and Dagger? So I can’t use mark of fear since that wouldn’t even let him use the attack to waste it?

As for shadow refuge, I’ve never seen a P/D thief actually use it.

Most condition transfers have conditional activations and there are only 3 options: off-hand dagger, which is a slow projectile and requires a hit to transfer, Putrid Mark which requires the enemy to step on it to trigger and Signet of Plague which is too situational to be worth a utility slot with it’s 60 second cd.

Besides, I don’t get hit with many conditions at once for those to make much of a difference, it’s more of a constant uninterrupted bleed that ends up wearing me down and killing me.

Edit- Ok I’m getting a clearer picture about what’s going on in those fights now.
kitten seems like I can’t have my golem or any minions out then. They can just be targeted for CnD every time if it works like that.

I need help.

This comes from a WvW perspective and I wish that was taken into account.

My question is, how can I reliably fight a P/D thief?

I play a Necromancer and this is the only profession + build that I have given up on ever engaging, I’ve been defeated by it too many times to try anymore.

From my perspective this is what happens –
The thief seems to spend most of the fight in stealth.
The thief does not deal burst damage, most of it comes from bleeding.
Even if I hit him with staff marks, traited to greater marks so the AoE is considerable, the thief always emerges from stealth greatly healed and usually with boons.
I have tried to both engage in melee and maintain distance against this build, neither had any success.
Any conditions I apply seem to be removed while he was stealthed.
Fights can go for over 2 minutes, I usually blow through my DeathShroud and 2 – 3 Consume Conditions.
After any battle my log will show the thief using only 3 damaging skills: Vital Shot, Sneak attack and Cloak and Dagger.

I’d appreciate any answer on how to deal with stealth, by which I mean how can keep some damage output against him stealthed, any tells I should look out for and if I actually DO have any hope of defeating this build as a Necromancer.

Thank you for any help provided.

I might be one of the few who use them in PvE, but I wish they were available for sPvP as well.
The birds are a good addition for classes with low cooldown Elites.

Same should apply for any new rune sets that might be released.

That’s the invader stat and can be bought from badge traders in WvWvW.

I don’t really recommend those stats on armor, but at least this way it’s free to aquire.

Fastest way to accumulate badges of honor is from the jumping puzzles btw.

Our Traitlines are horrible, just look at the ARMS line from warriors, it also does Prec+ Cond Dmg.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Warrior_traits

Tell me which tree you want more, ours or theirs?

I’d like people to look at Deep Cuts and Attack of Opportunity specifically.

wiazabi.2549:

Gluttony still doesnt work ,

Spectral grasp x2 = 20% no gluttony
Spectral grasp x2 = 20% w. gluttony

If you squint your eyes you might notice that you got 21%, as in 5% more than before.

Not a speed increase, but the range it’s hitting MUCH farther.

Just test it in the mists, compare the auto attack with the mark cast range, necrotic seems to hit at 1400 now.

Minions also seem to be aggroing my auto attack targets now.

Couple of undocumented changes I noticed.

Necrotic Grasp (Staff 1) Is hitting alot further than 1200 range.

Minions seem to aggro my targets when I use staff Auto attack.

Gluttony was never broken, it’s always been such a small increase no one notices it.
Test it in the mists, count the number of Necrotic Grasp attacks it takes to fill LF pool with and without gluttony, gluttony will decrease from 33 to 32 attacks.

(NB0072) Soul reaping: Gluttony: Does not work at all.

Gluttony increases the LifeForce generated by 5% as a multiplier.

Gluttony works, it’s just completely negligible.

I’d also like to add that the SoulReaping trait, increased LifeForce pool, has already been proven to not work and that should be added to the bug compilation.

Has the OP left the forum?

sorrow.2364:

I would like to see multiple Death Shroud.
They should be based on what you want in that moment, so they will encourage players to wisely spend their Life Force into a specific shroud depending on the situation, shifting up the skill ceiling of the Necromancer (with the overall effectiveness) and giving them more skill variety.

There should be an offensive death shroud which drains life force faster but grants you powerful skills and offensive buffs, than a defensive death shroud which drains your life force slower but gives you powerful damage mitigation spells and defensive skills.

THIS. I posted my thoughts for a new DS on another thread, so here’s a copy of that -

I wish that ANet would expand the uses we have for LifeForce, right now it’s a resource bar with alot of potential, all of which is wasted on DeathShroud.

The best idea I had up to now was to make a second DeathShroud option, Shroud of Ailments.

What it would do is, when you activate it you keep all your normal skills and gain a different shroud animation on you.
While Shroud of ailments is active LifeForce is slowly drained (50 – 66% the rate of DeathShroud) and all CONDITION based damage is instead dealt to the Necromancer’s LifeForce pool.

This would allow a bunch of different things to click on the Necromancer. We have a bunch of condition transfer skills, but we can’t allow ourselves to tank too many before trying to transfer them without being killed.

Keeping the normal skills would allow us to keep recovering LifeForce, so we would be able to tank alot more of conditions on ourselves, which fits with the design idea of the Necromancer being the attrition profession, WE would be able to deal with condition much better than other professions and win long drawn-out fights.

Having the DeathShroud traits available to us WITH our normal skill set and a way to extend shroud’s active duration for longer would also make many of our traits alot more desirable.

Signet of Undeath: Has a very long cast time, I stopped using it in dungeons because all the squishy classes would downed-teleport out of my cast AoE. Even when I screamed in mumble for them to stand still. they moved, it’s pretty much reflexive for them.
1% LifeForce every 3 seconds is nothing really, every staff hit grants me alot more than that.

Locust: I use Horn so the passive is already underwhelming, the AoE life-steal is negligible and the CD is too long for anyone to consider using it as a reliable heal skill.
Since the health stolen is dependent on the number of enemies around you, recovering a large amount of HP usually means you’re only postponing the inevitable.
Any burst build will damage you for what you healed in a single attack.

Plague – Bugged, long cd, enough said.

Spite – Our only good signet passive (BECAUSE IT’S JUST LIKE EVERY OTHER PROFESSION’S STAT BOOST!!!) has a 90 second cd for ONE STACK of 6 conditions for 5 seconds, is this supposed to be a joke or something?

Look at the other professions, signets are supposed to be small effects with short cooldowns because half the point is the passive effect, NONE of our signets has a base CD below a full minute and NONE of them has a particularly impressive effect, with the exception of Undeath I suppose, but good luck getting that to happen.

Just like every other utility we have, they feel underdeveloped and badly designed. I really think that our mechanics and effects were developed late in the game cycle and were rushed out the door with very little QA, the amount of class bugs is a big indicator of this.

I wish that ANet would expand the uses we have for LifeForce, right now it’s a resource bar with alot of potential, all of which is wasted on DeathShroud.

The best idea I had up to now was to make a second DeathShroud option, Shroud of Ailments.

What it would do is, when you activate it you keep all your normal skills and gain a different shroud animation on you.
While Shroud of ailments is active LifeForce is slowly drained (50 – 66% the rate of DeathShroud) and all CONDITION based damage is instead dealt to the Necromancer’s LifeForce pool.

This would allow a bunch of different things to click on the Necromancer. We have a bunch of condition transfer skills, but we can’t allow ourselves to tank too many before trying to transfer them without being killed.

Keeping the normal skills would allow us to keep recovering LifeForce, so we would be able to tank alot more of conditions on ourselves, which fits with the design idea of the Necromancer being the attrition profession, WE would be able to deal with condition much better than other professions and win long drawn-out fights.

Having the DeathShroud traits available to us WITH our normal skill set and a way to extend shroud’s active duration for longer would also make many of our traits alot more desirable.

The summon ravens ability from the Superior Rune of the Mad King is not activating correctly when I use Lich Form.
The ability is instead triggering if I untoggle Lich Form and revert back to my normal character.

I’d also like to add that the birds summoned are most definitely NOT ravens, as can be seen in the attached screenshot.

Oh gods, it’s even bigger then we imagined.

We’re in Sea of Sorrows.

It was in a dance line in Lion’s Arch the whole time!