Hello. You’re new, and you have 1,001 things to learn already, so here’s a build that reduces your learning load to weapon skills, dodges and burst skills.
Core: Sword/Warhorn.
Sword 1 will work adequately with any damage stat you throw at it, so less worries about what armor you pick up. It hits multiple enemies and bleeds them.
Sword 2 is a great intro to gap-closers and using them for map travel.
Sword 3 is a cripple, reserve this to use just before swapping to a kiting weapon
Horn 4 gives you 10s swift on a 20s cd, letting you roam the world or get out of a bad situation.
Horn 5 is 6 seconds of AoE weakness, which is VERY nice when fighting lots of lowbie mobs. And the vigor gives you more dodges, which you need to learn.
Burst skill: An enormous amount of AoE bleeds over a very short time. You can use it at any adrenaline level and it will perform well.
Other weapon: Any. You’re learning, right? And the sword/warhorn setup can be used as your alternate/travel set while you learn the other weapons.
Equipment: This build is chosen to work with any stats. Condition damage is VERY nice for the sword, but not for most other weapons. Best to focus on power.
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fIAQBES6y9BPjfAAVoqTBoUFsD;TwAg0ynEOJdS9kyJqsMZJyymlLLZWA
Go for Deep cuts first, learn when to use signets and when to let them be. You could go for signet mastery next or embrace the pain. After you outgrow this strategy, discard it for another one that’s more appropriate now that you know the game well enough.
Recommended crafting: Jeweler (armor drops often at low levels, rings/etc do not), Armorsmith(making your own bags is important early). Keep your sword/warhorn current by upgrading from karma vendors if drops are too rare, your alternate weapon should be whatever you have that’s most powerful, except keep a rifle or bow in your inventory at all times.
Hope this helps, and remember… it gets better =)
While I was around 20 I was running a sword/warhorn bleed/signet build for crits and bleeds. Warhorn’s your best source of run speed before rage signet elite, and the burst skill is just sick against mobs. Carry a rifle or bow for kiting, and you have a complete kit for getting to 40. Just remember to get a grown-up build when you start playing in dungeons or over 40… signets are great for low-levels but crud after.
I’m actually trying out replacing GS with Sword and Warhorn for the additional Weakness from the horn and the Mobility and Bleed from the Sword (good for Arms-25).
If you’re going that route, then you could consider blademaster instead of forceful greatsword and distracting strikes instead of slashing power, since your mace/shield combo has 3 potential interrupts (pommel, bash, skull crack). Applying confusion and then letting the enemy wail away killing himself on your shield is a thing of beauty.
I hope you don’t mind some feedback.
I’d like to point out that you have 2 traits that count on weakness for damage increase, but you appear to have only once source of weakness – you absolutely must land the third mace auto to benefit. Even assuming you do, 2/3 of the enhanced damage applies to only 3/10 of your weapon skills, and one of those is your counterblow. You’d get more benefit if you ran axe/mace instead of greatsword, but of course that’s a tradeoff of some of your mobility for power/immobilize.
From a party leader perspective, I would rather have someone who is frail, but can majorly support the party with a wide variety of tools, than someone who is actually MORE frail due to the lack of attunements that wants to simply inflict damage. There are much bulkier, much stronger classes for that.
Even those “bulkier, much stronger” classes get crap when they try to do what they’re best at. You wouldn’t believe the kvetching directed at any warrior who isn’t a shout-healer.
There are people who are bound to the idea of being a DPS build, that’s true. And often they won’t consider how they might benefit others with only a little more effort. Letting a couple people shoot projectile finishers through a lightning field is a great way to get massive vulnerability.
BUT, for each of those people, we have people equally hidebound who scoff at any builds that aren’t “for the group”, sometimes without even considering whether that’s actually a good idea. Have you ever seen a necro trying to support with those dinky little 3-second protection buffs per well? That’s just sad.
It’s time for people to understand that DPS is a form of support. DEAD MOB is a buff that grants:
100% reduction in damage from that source.
100% removal of future conditions from that source.
100% reduction of knockdown, launch, immobilize, chill, and indeed all CC from that source.
We won’t enumerate the buffs granted by destroyed mob generators.
That doesn’t mean the DPS-centered player is always right. Particularly for mages, who can sacrifice a little DPS for what I believe to be a lot of support.
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Combine both minor traits into a single adept major trait, then make the toughness boon scale with level. Replace the empty traits with something useful. Keep in mind that toughness is something every necro likes, and might have non-minion reasons for entering.
Sigil of fire does not say “nearby opponents”. The flame blast hits opponents nearby to the target, but the target can be at range (I do not know what max range).
But for most sigils and abilities that do say “nearby opponents”, do not count on them working outside melee range.
If Option 2 is the path taken, then I believe ANet will do a fine job of balancing the skills. Why do I think this? Because I don’t believe they’ll simply reduce the damage of the skills and call it done (which I believe is what the Necro community fears). I think they’ll actually buff the skills they’re “nerfing”, but in ways that we may not initially care for. For example, if they reduced the raw damage of Well of Suffering, then I suspect they’d significantly increase its duration (and ultimately increasing its damage should a target remain in it for the full duration). Thus rezzing while in a well is less punishing but the skill acts as a “better” long-term area denial/punishment skill. Unfortunately, the above example would kill Well-Bombers but would prove useful in point-denial and *coughATTRITIONcough * builds.
From what well of wishfullness do you get this conclusion from? If you read patch notes, you’ll notice one overwhelming theme: The vast majority are minor changes to one single thing, and often it’s a number change. One thing they are NOT noted for is giving with one hand while taking with the other. The fear example was an unusual exception to that rule, and even in that case the give was specific to only one type of necro while the take hit us all.
Even the extremely hypothetical duration/damage change would be extremely bad. There are only two scenarios under which the change would be not a major nerf: Point-holding and a PvE solo hero because the mobs are too dumb to leave them. Bosses and players MOVE. The former is an incredibly specialized scenario specific to some PvP roles, the latter is a transfer of power to carebear mode (solo pve) from everyplace else (aka places you might actually NEED that power).
A lore-friendly and interesting way to change axe would be to make it a cone-like attack, somewhat like guardian staff %1 but narrower and longer range. Visually, you would not see the cone, but for each enemy up to three (instead of 5 like staff), you would see the normal slash-slash effect on them. Then slap 1s poison on the attack to keep with necro’s theme of having poison on multiple weapons.
As far as I can tell, Axe is meant to be used with LF-on-Crit because of the huge number of hits axe 2 lands and based on the 5-target AoE on axe 3. Then the LF generation becomes acceptable. But as noted by others, adequate LF generation in and of itself isn’t enough to make a weapon good. It has to do other interesting things as well.
Making this change, it moves axe more twords being a close-range AoE weapon, although unlike true AoE weapons it hits 3 people. It also will give some minor poison damage, and that’s consistent with “has poison on multiple weapons” and “combines power and condition damage”.
The animosity is because we are fighting over scraps from the dev table. We see very few necro fixes per patch compared to others, when nerfs are made globally we very seldom see our class rebalanced for lost power, issues that would be simple to fix never get done, traits that CAUSE problems for necros continue to be forced on us.
In that atmosphere, it’s easy for a minion necro to believe that an axe fix means they aren’t making his pets work in dungeons, it’s easy for a staff user to think that if they finally make reanimator optional, they’ll leave the trait so weak that it’s not worth picking as a major.
I think devs are seeing that necros can sometimes hold their own in spvp and incorrectly thinking that that means there are no fixes required.
And ramiah, calling wells “less powerful and versatile” for support is like saying that axe 1 is less than optimal for DPS.
Maybe each attribute should have a minor grandmaster trait that acts like you had max arcana, but only for that element. You’d also move the cooldown bonus to this trait (make it 30% cooldown).
So you’d have arcana elementalists that are good with all elements, but also ones that specialize in two elements and can keep coming back to them without arcana at all.
Sorry bad link
15 chars do not guarantee good content.
I hope anet fixes conditions so that builds like this one can shine better.
Every time you see “damage increase”, it does not include condition damage. You haven’t specified weather this is to be PvP, PvE easymode, PvE dungeons, or WvW, and those modes demand different choices.
The first thing I’d ask myself is how I can get other damaging conditions on the target as well, both to guard your bleeds from 1-condition removal abilities and to reap more benefits from your condition damage. That probably means fire from longbow and/or confusion from distracting strikes, and maybe even poison from a weapon sigil.
My expectation is that lifesteal food and other procs off crit that don’t have an internal CD will get one to balance themselves against the weapon sigils. Right now flamethrower engineers are posting builds exploiting the lack of cooldown on lifesteal food and Anet will obviously not allow that to continue.
So necros will be left with the only lifesteal ability that’s not on a cooldown timer unless they nerf that too. There would even be room to upgrade necro lifesteal since the other lifesteal methods are now nerfed, but I doubt Anet will do that.
I expect that Anet will continue to ignore the problem with condition stacking, since I’ve never even seen that they recognize this as a problem and definitely not as a priority.
I expect that Anet will stick to its stated philosophy of Necro being the class that brings condition damage together with power damage, even though the two stats quite explicitly do not help one another EXCEPT in the case of might-stacking which other classes do better.
I expect that necro pets will be fixed exactly 5 patches after ranger ones are, and the fixed pets will go from worthless and dangerous to the owner to slightly less than worthless but still dangerous and still mandatory.
I expect that no classes whatsoever will get any reworks, and indeed receive no tweaks aside from minor number changes.
No, what people are saying is that a necro can make futile gestures in the general direction of support but not actually affect the group survivability meaningfully. It’s the equivalent of blowing your daze horn at a boss, having no effect, and then congratulating yourself that you’re the best supporter EVAR.
So if you want a build that throws around tiny healing numbers and 3 seconds of prot while the ele or guardian carry its dead weight through the dungeon, yes you have a “viable” support build.
It’s basically a gimmick build whose numbers absolutely relies on the target having no condition cleansing whatsoever. Note that I didn’t say the BUILD requires this, but the posted numbers do.
The numbers look great until you realize you’re playing to the worst aspects of the current problems with conditions: filling the limited amount of condition headroom with low damage ticks. So the moment you get a condition teammate whose condition damage actually matters, he’s going to overwrite your bleed tics (bad) or you’re going to overwrite his (much worse), or for poison you’re going to send his more powerful procs right to the end of the line.
So a lot of the numbers here are vanish on contact in real-world play, unless you’re not grouping, but this build’s survivability kind of assumes you have a group.
I’m not saying it’s not a good effort – this is probably the some of the best the necro has to offer. I’m just saying the current mechanics of conditions means that you do your cdmg fast or get your butt off the condition queue.
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I would actually be totally okay with a slight damage nerf to wells. It just gets boring when all I see other Necro characters doing is attempting to wellbomb or go 20 pts in curses for GTAoE and spam them from a safe ledge.
Don’t you think it would be better to bring the necro’s other abilities up to par with wells instead of removing one of the few alternatives to conditionmancer? What, the cooldown isn’t long enough? The add-on traits aren’t weak enough? Maybe we can down the protection from 3s to 1s.
Good to know. Therefore vital striking is better if you’re counting on first strike, but if you know you can get a second or third ice spike on target, then shards.
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So Ice spike applies the vulnerability first, then piercing shards multiplies the damage after? Or are you getting the vulnerability on the target some other way?
The skills that the OP chose are “instant” spells, which can be all triggered at once. Non-instant spells of course have an activation time. A GCD is a global cooldown (applies to all skills of a certain type) which in other MMO’s can prevent cascading instant spells like this.
Actually i’m so disappointed. I main thief and i’m 35rank. I play roamer with backstab build 25/30/0/0/15. I have played 3-4 tournaments today and faced a lot of bunkers at enemy team. It’s so sad because ANet said that thieves are the best profession to nuke 1 target quckly and at the moment i can’t kill anything except other thieves. Actually there’s no more glass cannons at tPvP except mesmers who can kill me after 1 stun breaker after my Basilisk Venom.
Oh, it’s so sad that the problem of people getting oneshotted by nubs got so bad that every single one of them had to alter their build to counter you and now the fact that they’re building specifically to counter you is your chosen proof that your class is weak.
Others might expect that the class that everyone’s building to counter is quite powerful enough already, but apparently enough is never enough.
Agreed, a GC thief facerolling to win has a lot of nerve telling others to l2p.
Right after you do, buddy. Right after you.
Anet is mostly nerfing power-based grenade builds, not the entire class of engineers. Of course, since grenades were seen as the only viable spec for engineers, that sizeable subset of engineers immediately expanded it to “they’re killing our entire class!”.
The core reason I’m giving up on necro is that it needs a large rework of its scattered skills, and that is one thing anet has NEVER done since launch, so it’s unlikely they’ll ever do it, and if they do do it it probably won’t be for necro. They can’t or won’t even disable or move reanimator despite demonstrated problems with it – what makes people think they’ll ever put the well skills in one tree?
What I’m doing wrong is trying to explain reality to someone who can’t see how things that don’t have effect on bosses might affect your PvE experience. Yes, I included some minor PvP info for completeness but mostly the criticism was from a PvE standpoint.
Any class can handle trash mobs, but someone telling newbies to come play necro because you can use tornado or weakness on a boss needs to be sued for malpractice.
I agree that the current setup, where nothing stops crit but easy cleansing stops condition damage and weakness harms only those who don’t go for high crit… is madness. Maybe we’re desensitized because it’s been that way for months now, but can anyone explain from a game design standpoint how it makes sense to have it that way?
People stacked resilience in wow and hated it, but they did it anyway, because it was useful. What we have here is a bizarro-world anti-resilience, which no one really pays attention to because of its worthlessness in every place that matters.
However, I don’t think that making anti-crit a warrior exclusive is the answer. I don’t agree that it logically follows from the warrior design philosophy, and if it must be class-specific I should think that any of the condition classes would be a better choice.
The easiest and smartest way to do it would be to make fumble convert some percentage of crits into regular attacks in addition to its normal function. 50% might be too great a percentage.
Since minions get destroyed when you go into lich mode, what you’re describing is very likely a bug that will be patched. Not exactly a solid rebuttal point.
read it again. i. said summon 5 in lich, then leave lich, then summon more. not the other way around.
I read it correctly the first time. Since Lichform was modified to destroy minions when you enter it to avoid minion overload, then simply changing the order to bypass the fix is likely to be patched at a future date.
Reality check!
I throw down 3 seconds of area protection on 48seconds cooldown
I throw down area regeneration, and haven’t noticed that it’s not significant healing.
I fear what needs to be feared, except what actually needs to be feared, given the recent fear nerf, which I apparently didn’t notice.
Ways I’ve found to support:
Condition Cleanse w/ Plague Signet + warhorn 4 and staff 4. guess you didn’t notice the daze nerf, eh?
Weakness spam, which is worthless in every instance where you’re in danger of actually needing it, like against other players or bosses
Blind spam Same as above, except against players, who will instead dodge back and murder you from range. Oops.
Chill semi-spam Very, verrry VERY semi.
Well Builds w/ protection all 3 seconds of itI think the necro is pretty great at support… people don’t understand their profession very well.
I agree. Some don’t understand their profession very well at all.
Yes, nonstop wells. That is what makes necro great.
This guy and the one who just can’t get it into his head how the ability to drop out of being focus fired is relevant to being focus fired are necro’s defenders.
Welcome to the short bus of the GW2 classes.
I’m finishing a run to 40 on a warrior (rerolled warrior 2x before deciding on an asura) that was a sword/horn + Bow build combined with signets – Yes, deep strike is noob later on but positively OP sub-40. Flurry can be pretty fearsome with Condmg stats.
If you don’t want to go for conditions, axe and shield are a better bet. For catching up to people, you’d want to bite the bullet and burn a utility slot for bull’s rush, since leap is only a 600 range skill.
If you DO want to go with conditions, might I suggest bow as a better ranged friend, for example savage leap is a leap finisher, which combos with the fire field for fire armor.
Sword is all about speed, AoE and conditions.
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Since when did dagger spread vulnerability? Sure, weakness is great for a PvE hero who avoids bosses or anything that might crit. I’m not going to say that condition-transfer is totally worthless, even on the class that has as much condition removal as we do, but you do realize that you have to have a condition to spread it, and you spread it at minimum possible strength if you’re a power build, and without the spread a blind on an 18s cooldown is… less than impressive? Oh, and again worthless against bosses.
If you want stuff that will actually work on bosses, you use focus. If you want to be a trash-clearing hero… well anyone can do that.
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Since minions get destroyed when you go into lich mode, what you’re describing is very likely a bug that will be patched. Not exactly a solid rebuttal point.
“Masssster the Death Shroud” is NOT a comprehensive plan.
Does anyone else here note the delicious irony of a THIEF lecturing others that if they run a glass cannon, they’re automatically a baddie, l2p and deserved to die anyway?
>looks to see what forum he’s on<
Didn’t think so.
So have a guardian buddy cover you with a wall of reflection.
Bunkers are focused on surviving burst damage and turning the fight into one of attrition. Warriors are usually focused on dealing burst damage and don’t handle fights of attrition well. So in that case you’d be hoping that you do your job better than he does his.
Guardians are good at sustained damage, but that’s just letting the bunker set the pace of the match to something he’s comfortable with.
It’s probably better to go warrior and focus on being a skilled one that doesn’t blow all his cooldowns while the bunker has his best defenses still online.
We’re all so lucky you stopped by to point out that I didn’t actually total up all the builds inside guild wars 2 and come up with the 1% figure from that source.
Otherwise, some people might have been confused.
Most builds that are meant to be used outside of PvE kindergarden don’t use any minions except the one forced on those using any Death Magic at all, so yes.
Death shroud builds, well builds, condition builds can all be used without minions.
I would take your advice, but I can’t seem to find the “hunter” forum. Did I take a left turn at WoW again?
Also, Static Discharge + TankCat. SD may be bugged to heck, but it works for a few toolbelt skills and fortunately some of those are pretty nice.
You’re exactly right.. Fits’s extreme utility is exactly why 1% of builds have it. Your all-piercing eye has seen through the many clouds of deception and reached the truth that apparently shines only for you.
Asura Engineer.
Engineers get a lot of benefit from being asura – the asuran racial utilities are condition-based and engineers can be deadly condition users. Even a power build can benefit from Pain inverter (AoE confusion, personal retaliation) and the many shield abilities available to engineers.
Although you probably have this covered with that many tooms, asura engineer makes a fine jumping puzzle runner, with their small size, flamethrower for dark places and targettable rifle jump for harder jumps.
Also, the cultural pistols and rifles are just sweet. Too bad there are no cultural skins for engineer kits.
Don’t compare balance druid to necro.
I distinctly remember at least 4 times that balance druid accidentally got patched into relevance (until the next patch undid the unintended change), which is 400% more times then that’s happened to necro.
Why would anyone go d/d? That’s like the two great tastes that taste BLERRGH together.
Lets not forget Empowering Might for guardians. Every crit you get (subject to 1s cooldown) gives 5s of AoE might. So with a little boon duration, a staff/hammer guardian can keep retal, protection and might up for long periods.
But that’s a guardian and boon spreading is their home turf. Comparing an engi to that is like comparing the anemic nerd down the street to a competition-class bodybuilder.
Might wanna hit the guilds forum instead.
I ask because if i get even One responce from someone that says that for WvWvW they have had a good experience with it, i can consign every QQ ’ er to the suck pile, and keep playing the profession.
Honestly, is the profession as horrid as some say? or are they just bad at necro?
Sounds like you’ve made up your mind even before you put finger to keyboard. Have fun discovering at 80 what you were warned about at 0.
I mean honestly… You’re posting the question in the necro forums. There’s always going to be some people who suck so badly that they think they’re the best class ever the moment they get a WvW kill on a downlevelled newbie, and there will be others who’ve invested their ego into defending their class because otherwise they’d have to admit a mistake in going with it in the first place.
If you want a REAL answer to your question instead of a guaranteed pavlovian response, goto the OTHER class forums and ask them who they’d rather bring into a dungeon or who’d they gank first if they had a choice.
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It’s useful not because it’s actually useful compared to other classes’ stability, but because it is the last and only drop of stability in the vast, choking desert of necro traits.
When all you have is rocks, limestone starts looking relatively juicy…
When I’m defending a keep, it is not rangers or eles that enemies try to focus, it’s me, who spreads conditions like crazy with epidemic, corrupt boon… etc.
Psst. You aren’t being focused because everyone is a-tremble at your l33t bleed spreading, you’re being focused because you’re an easy victim, with no blocks, invulnerability or stealth options.
What was that word for people who are so terribad that they think they must be awesome?
Isn’t he a little short to be a stormtrooper?