Guild Wars 2

Sjach Darasv.3729:

Mathemagician.7314:

See, The thing with Necromancers is that, they can do everything you just said, AND they grant no boons to anyone around them, they are actually easy to kill, and they won’t actually kill you. Sometimes they can perform really well at the removing boons thing, but boons go up so fast, and condition removal is a valuable commodity in tPvP so everyone takes tons of it.

Funny, necros hard counter guardians because of all those boons they constantly put up. Necro has 2 abilities that run any boon on a foe into a condition, and we can fear them out of their projectile blocking bubble. We also have a well that turns any conditions on allies into boons, oh and both these wells grant allies lifesteal. Not to mention these wells will also damage down those engineers turrets and with the aoe from staff and increased mark size, yeah those turrets become more of a minor annoyance.

Yeah, it is funny.

Because actually, they don’t hard counter guardians, because Guardians have abilities that are direct inverses of ours; not to mention their signet of resolve which is constantly eating conditions. One ability consumes all conditions and converts them into boons. Sound familiar? Further, even after you eat all their boons and convert them into conditions, they have all most of their boons up again within 3 seconds.

We have one long distance one, Corrupt Boon, which is indispensable in any necro spec, but is directly negated by Contemplation of Purity. Then we have a PBAoE one(unless you are well specced) which is unusable because it puts you are out of position and into danger, or you have spent a lot of points being an inferior utility, and thus suffer in other areas(like damage). Further, it is childishly easy to dodge, only ticks 5x, and is directly countered by Ray of Judgement and and Purifying Ribbon.

Sjach Darasv.3729:

Actually in tPvP a healing/support well specced necro can bunker down very well, specially when the dps team members come to nuke down the players trying to kill you. I rather enjoy it happening, and the OP is right, Necros are constantly keeping enemies hampered with debuffs, and if you spec into wells and build up +healing, at that 2.6k every 40 seconds and easily become a 7k every 32 seconds.

That may be the case, but Engineers and Guardians will outbunker you every time.

See, the thing with Engineers is that, they can do everything you just said, AND they can actually kill you, and throw conditions on enemies / boons on allies.

See, The thing with Guardians is that, they can do everything you just said, AND they grant everyone around them infinity boons, and you can’t actually kill the Guardian.

See, The thing with Necromancers is that, they can do everything you just said, AND they grant no boons to anyone around them, they are actually easy to kill, and they won’t actually kill you. Sometimes they can perform really well at the removing boons thing, but boons go up so fast, and condition removal is a valuable commodity in tPvP so everyone takes tons of it.

Furthermore, while utility is great and all, in tPvP, a lot of the fights are 1v1, 1v2, 2v3, and 3v3. So if you are a utility Necro, then in a 1v1 you are going to be doing everything you can to not die while one of your buddies shows up to save the day; in a 1v2 you are just buffing your friend, which effectively doesn’t do much, because while you do help him win, 2 damage dealers would do the exact same thing and win as well. In a 2v3, you start to actually show a little promise. Very rarely you can support yourself and your partner well enough to survive 3 other players trouncing you. If it’s the other way around, then again, 3 damage dealers would have done the exact same thing as you and 2 damage dealer buddies in a fight with 2 enemy players. Now, in the 3v3 situation, you do actually shine. You can support and heal your teammates, hopefully debilitate the enemies, and hopefully not get shanked by focus fire. So 25% of the time you work effectively and the other 75% of the time you are just trying to get by. That doesn’t seem effective; contrast this to any other class where they are effective in 75% to 100% of these hypothetical situations.

Emerald.8653:

Nixxez.8671:

And you are the only person that does know how to play it. Eh.
How are the chances of you being right and everyone else wrong compared to everyone else being right and you being a blabbermouth? Marginal.

It’s pretty high, actually. A good exercise is to go into the elementalist forums and note how many complaint threads there are about how the class is not viable for PvP. Then, go and ask Phantaram about what he thinks of his class. You’ll find that the answers you get are very different simply because someone like Phantaram knows the ins and outs of his class, while most players will just know the class at a relatively basic level.

It’s a general rule that most of the players in a given class is probably not using it close to its full potential. For a very easy class like warrior and thief this is okay, as the classes have many simple builds with simple mechanisms, and they would still perform competently and will mostly only get rolled by a much more skilled player. For a difficult class like necro or elem, the fact that they do not work very well at “average joe” skill levels gets magnified on the forums, and you end up with tons of complaints.

Look here,
I’ve got 288 hours logged on my Necromancer over the past 22 days. I definitely know the ins and outs of my class. I sPvP’d 24/7 during the BWEs and Stress Tests. I really love the axe power build, and I’ve extensively tried the dagger build. While they can be fun to play in casual structured, neither are actually viable. In tournament pvp? Forget it. We simply haven’t been given the toolset to even come close to competing in melee, and the axe has been too nerfed to support short-range power builds. Starting with 0% Life Force in PvP makes you incredibly kittened. In a tournament setting, where encounters are mostly 1v1s, 3v3s, 2v3s and 1v2s, it can be very difficult to build life force. Having access to DS gives a source of good but slow damage output, but just by focusing the necro for a couple of seconds you can eat the LifeForce bar down, heavily lowering the damage output of Life Blast, and stealing his ‘second lifebar’ at the same time. Not having access to DS severely cripples the damage output, because as I’ve mentioned earlier, the only sources of raw burst damage are coming from these long channeled abilities that are childishly easy to avoid.

It is simply not a matter of ‘average joe’ skill levels, skill curve, or anything like that; we simply don’t have the toolkit we need to compete in the current super-burst meta. Our damage is much more of a steady, sustained damage. Even our burst damage is steady, sustained damage(long channeled burst combos). The issue here is that getting focused for a few seconds forces us to worry about surviving instead of killing. Then our damage output goes way down. Of course, this happens to every class in the game: if you start getting focused, you start worrying about surviving. You fall back a bit if you are overextended, you pop your condition removals, w/e the case may be. However, other classes have strong burst and high nukes, while Necros have slow steady. So other classes can spend 60% of their time avoiding, dodging, and healing, and then pull out a WTF-Boom series of hits ranging from 8-15k in the span of 5 seconds, while necros who spend 60% of their time avoiding, dodging, and healing can only then pull out a pair of 3-4k combos(Life Siphon and Ghastly Claws) in 6.5 seconds.

There’s a real disparity here; do you see it?

Tony.2150:

@Mathemagician.7314
Wall of text(removed for wordcount limitations)

Assuming that everyone who disagrees with you is either bad/dumb/doesn’t know how to play/etc. is a really bad way to go through life man, you need to work on that.

SO there’s a lot wrong here. First of all, having a dagger in your offhand (as opposed to a focus or warhorn or whatever) does NOT increase your damage. If it does, it’s marginal, because ‘offhands’ have weapon damage too. So if you’re telling me having a dagger offhand is going to do more damage because I attack with both weapons instead of only my mainhand dagger, you are just flat out wrong. You still only attack with your mainhand dagger.

Second, on the subject of offhand dagger, YES EXACTLY. It pushes out condition damage. In a power build, we maybe have 200 condition damage. Thus, dagger offhand does not synergize with power at all. It becomes a utility tool for weakness and blind, not a damage tool.

Now, I have no idea what you think a sledgehammer build should be, but to me, a sledgehammer is when a warrior with quickness charges you, knocks you down, and hundred blades combos you for your entire health bar in the span of 3 seconds. When that happens to me, I feel like I have been sledgehammered. Necromancer has absolutely nothing close to this. What we have is 1k hits on dagger autoattack at fast speed, so it would take about 16 seconds to chew through 20k hp. Way too slow. Then you have the life siphon combo, which doesn’t do much better. It’s about 3-5k damage(depends on crits and crit damage) over ~3 seconds, which is an extremely long channel, and is very easy to roll out of and dodge. Ghastly claws is the exact same way, about 4-6k damage over ~3 seconds, still extremely easy to dodge.

As for what you say about DS, when you are getting hammered and you go into DS, then you just threw away your entire lifeforce bar. You killed your gap closer, your cc, and your decent nukes: Life Transfer as a ~3500damage AoE is pretty good, and Life Blast hitting for 2k and critting for ~3500 is really good. But you simply can’t use DS to attack if you are using it to soak up enemy combos.

I agree, thieves are extremely squishy. But they have been given extremely good tools to survive in melee range, unlike necromancers. What tools? Stealth, numerous blinds, shadowstep, high endurance regeneration, thieves guild… Necros don’t have anything even close to these kind of tools. If you try to dagger down a thief, you’ll be doing around 5k damage to them in 3 seconds, and they’ll do around 15k damage to you in 3 seconds(thanks, pistol whip stun!). The only option left is ranged Life Siphon, which is bad because it’s low damage and easy to dodge, so it’s only really a stall card, and Axe, which is better because it has 600 range, but not much better, because the autoattack damage is low and slow, and the Ghastly Claws combo is just like Life Siphon: a long, ~3 second channel and easy to dodge.

Look, it’s obvious you play mostly sPvP. So before you respond to this saying this/that/the other, go queue up for some tournaments(you can solo queue for them if need be). Try to win early 1v1s(the ones with 0% LifeForce) at Mine/Henge. Try to make it to Kyhlo, and see how many tournaments on average it takes you(my average is 2.5 tourneys before I get to see Kyhlo in Power build). Try not to get hated on by your team for being less effective than any of 7 other classes that they could have been paired with. Go ahead and see for yourself.

Unpredictability.4086:

How can you say it’s well executed if you wish 50% of it’s skills were better?

When I say well executed, I’m talking about the functionality, the philosophy, and the implementation. I think the graphics look good, what it does to your bars is neat, and the ideas behind it are cool.

The balance of it is another matter; starting a PvP game with 0% Life Force, having it be so difficult to build early in a 5v5 match, and the underwater skills being nigh unusable are all balance-y things. But the execution… I like.

Tony, create a power build on Necromancer.
What do you see? Ghastly combos for 4-5k, OH YEAH BABY. Great damage. Wait what, 8 second cooldown and no other ways to reliably deal damage in the meantime?

Next, pick ANY other class. Create a damage build on that class.
What do you see? Steal for 3500 -> Pistol whip for 8500, spammable 2-3x and comes equipped with a stun, all in the span of ~4 seconds(which is just about how long it takes for a ghastly claws combo to execute in its entirety).
…
Ok…

Yeah, Necros definitely need some love in the DPS department.

The reason that I play condition is that it is competitive, I enjoy the playstyle, and it is literally the ONLY build that is capable of putting out any pressure. Depressingly enough, a pistol engineer is far better at conditions than I am.

Sadly, I have absolutely no idea why Rabid wasn’t craftable. From what I hear, it WAS craftable in the BWEs, but I literally PvP’d 24/7 during BWEs so I can’t confirm it.

I am a Necromancer who HAS farmed the 168,000 karma needed to buy the 4 temple pieces, forked out the ~25g to buy the Sceptre, Dagger, and Chest & Boots, and I settled for a Carrion Staff(since arguably the Staff makes use of a power coefficient just as much as a condition damage, and if they ever make a Power build not complete dirt, then I can use the staff in both builds without needing two).

It is extremely unsatisfying and absolutely depressing that my Rings, Earrings, Amulet, and Back slot items are all blue and green. Everything else is exotic, and for some strange reason there simply aren’t any options for these slots. What is particularly confusing is that on the guild merchant, there is a green backpack that has Toughness, Precision, and Condition damage(T/P/C), but there is no rare T/P/C backpack. Argh.

At this point, I am seriously considering grabbing Chrysocola Exotic jewelry and putting Crests of the Rabid on them.

I wish everyone who keeps saying Death Shroud isn’t fun would stop saying that.

Death shroud is a fantastic idea and IS fun in my opinion. I like the concept and its well executed; I wish the 2-spell was a bit better, and I wish the 3-fear could actually compete with other profession’s fears, and I wish the underwater form of Death Shroud wasn’t bad(the 2 and 3 in underwater are great, the 1 is WAY too slow, the 4 is just whack. Needs to be a DPS ability just like land shroud is).

I’m sure a lot of other people agree with me about Death Shroud being fun, but the thing is, when you don’t like something, you’re more likely to go seek out ways to complain and be heard, and when you do like something, you’re more likely to just be content and happy and continue doing that thing that you’re happy with. It makes me nervous, and I really, really hope ANet doesn’t listen to this nonsense.

You guys give me the saddest face

Sadly all of the legendaries don’t fit with Necro very well.

And I’m not even one of those skulls necros, I look like a traditional ‘mage’ would, just with dark armor dyes. It should be easy to match weapons with me, right?

Well, the cloud-happy Meteorlogicus is out. The Bitfrost is a MAYBE, but we pull out the staff at brief moments. The dagger is… well, I have no idea. But I think it’s a lava dagger, which also doesn’t fit us very well.

Risen fear is boss

I also like the chomp chomp flurry, but to be perfectly honest, I have become attached to Feast of Corruption. In all honesty, FoC is a nice solid CHOMP; it sounds heavier than the flurry of chomps.

At first I envied the flurry, but as I listened to FoC it grew on me. I wouldn’t like them to change it. I think they should institute flurry of chomps in as a different skill, like a utility damage skill. Necros don’t have any utility damage skills(unlike other classes) except for Blood is Power, which is kind of weak.

Just a pathing limitation on the way they made the skill, which should easily be fixable if they choose.

Chalk it up to bug and post it in the bug thread imo

It’s not a bad idea actually

Necromancer probably should be heavily intertwined with minions regardless of build, and giving more class powers would be a good way to do that.

Having all wells on 1 utility sounds overpowered, but I really like the spectral kit idea.

Andele.1306:

That just means that Elementalist, Hunter and Guardian (and some Thief setups) can do the same but faster. Also soloing Melandru and Balta aint special, they are known afk bosses in Explo.

Unfortunately true X(

Personally I’m not crazy about the minions.

They’re a good tool, though; many times leveling up I would take all minion utilities, all the while having none of the traits, and be able to solo a tough event, like kill a veteran a couple levels higher than me, or bumble through a cave of 287248902 dredge moderately safely.

My favorite way to play is condition, followed by power. I hope they make power viable. If they fix condition, it will probably be strong, but it will always have the problem of stacking conditions that are easy to remove, and if a condition necro starts getting focused his damage goes out the window. Positioning, positioning, positioning.

Necro, with all the minions, is tailor made to solo. Nothing about this is surprising, at all. It is still pretty impressive, I suppose.

Congratulations, but we’re still bottom of the totem pole in tPvP, sPvP, and group PvE and we still only have 1 viable(if you can REALLY call it viable) build.

New bug I found:

Path of Midnight, in addition to not reducing the cooldown on Life Transfer, has the following strange property:

While in Death Shroud, after casting Dark Path (the 2 skill in on-land DS), the cooldown starts at 10, then ticks down to 9, then starts at 12.

The tooltip states it should be a 12 and 3/4 second cooldown; I suspect this is largely just a graphical error on the cooldown counter.

Contagion.7206:

I also enjoy a conditions play style. Power is less appealing to me.

But I also had hopped that in dungeon runs, plague signet would good for helping the team, and that life siphoning would be more effective. if you maxed out Blood Magic, and debugged plague signet, do you think a group condition remover might be possible? If they buff these things along with life siphon that would be nice. Also, group activity against NPCs changes things.

PS: interesting breaking down of bleed Mathemagician. throw epidemic at the end of all the bleed stack and you’ll be laying down some real pain on everyone.

I could see condition remover becoming a viable playstyle. With a wells build and all the regen we have(Mark of Blood, Focus offhand, Well of Blood) Necro could easily play support, if we get our bugs worked out.

And yeah, Epidemic is absolutely fantastic. It’s never not on my bar as condition, except for single target boss fights with zero adds.

Boomshakaboom.5403:

Mathemagician.7314:

Boomshakaboom.5403:

you my friend are very narrow minded I’m rank 21 and use this in tournaments as well. You need to understand that there are Roamers, Cap Holders & pure damage specs. The tank spec can play roamer and cap holder

Why would you roam as a tank spec?

That makes literally zero sense; the purpose of a roamer is to catch other players out of position and kill them, not be difficult to kill in the middle of nowhere, leaving your team to 4v5 the points without you.

I have a lot of swiftness, 2 …I can hold people on route to bases, taking 3 naive players out of the game by holding them up from 40secs – infinite is priceless…especially in 8vs8.

From your responses I’m pretty sure you haven’t PvP’d a lot

On the contrary Boomshakaboom, from YOUR responses I KNOW you haven’t PvP’d a lot.

Holding people on route to bases as a tank with no pressure? Naive players? 8v8?

So you’re telling me your build is good as long as the enemy players are bad? What a clever way to build!

Look, you can have your opinion, and that’s fine. But people come here and read these forums and look for ways to be competitive and to make our broken class as viable as possible. This is the reason I am so obstinate about swallowing your nonsense. Because it’s nonsense.

I challenge you to record and present your unedited necro tank roaming gameplay for critique.

Precision is great. The first minor trait in Curses AND Sigil of Earth both synergize with it, resulting in moar bleeds!.

As a note, if you take the Sigil of Superior Earth, the one that causes bleeds on crits, precision becomes good; especially paired with the first minor trait in the curses tree.

I like what you’re doing. I’ve been meaning to get around to a similar playstyle / build, but… honestly, builds like that are bad to me, because you provide so much support and utility that you essentially buff your allies and debuff your enemies but don’t do much in the way of ending your enemies. Therefore you rely heavily on your teammates, and that’s something that requires them to be competent, and that just never works well for me.

I’m glad its working for you. I too hope they widen the possibility horizon for our class. Necros are awesome!

Boomshakaboom.5403:

you my friend are very narrow minded I’m rank 21 and use this in tournaments as well. You need to understand that there are Roamers, Cap Holders & pure damage specs. The tank spec can play roamer and cap holder

Why would you roam as a tank spec?

That makes literally zero sense; the purpose of a roamer is to catch other players out of position and kill them, not be difficult to kill in the middle of nowhere, leaving your team to 4v5 the points without you.

Bolopop.4061:

Sceptar/dagger + staff back up. signet of spite + epidemic can be a mean… spite long cd but… you pretty much spread all the condition spite does to everyone. its like having Mono at a highschool party… everyone gets it… having blood is power on top of that is also good. but try searching the net to make your judgement. fun class but right now there are A LOT of bugs with necros.

The problem with signet of spite is that everything wears off after 5 seconds, it doesn’t deal much damage, and its passive buffs power, which is in direct contrast with what you want to do with Epidemic: condition damage.

Contagion.7206:

That’s a cool idea. Spite + epidemic sounds fun.

I searched builds online… not much luck. Most seem out of date. Sort of beta builds. Do you guys think much will change as they debug the Necro?

I think Power will become viable again and people will still be running the 30/10/10/20 Condition Damage builds, except they will actually be useful instead of kitten. If everything worked as it is supposed to in the 30/10/10/20 build it would be acceptable.

Contagion.7206:

Ah, so “conditions master” in terms of the plague signet isn’t really a viable option right now…

And your suggesting not to run traits for your minions, Mathmagician? what traits would you suggest instead?

Depends on if you want Power or Condition. I ran Condition, so I picked up things like Hemophilia, Lingering Curses, and and Weakening Shroud in the Curses line. I also grabbed some utility traits like Greater marks and Mark of Evasion in the Death magic and Blood magic lines, respectively. My final 20 trait points went into Soul Reaping, grabbing either Path of Midnight or Fear of Death and Reaper’s Mark.

When I want power, I went for 30 points in the Spite line, grabbing Reaper’s Might, Chill of Death or Spiteful Spirit(Training of the Master would be fine in PvE though) and Axe Training or Close to Death, then 30 points in Soul Reaping choosing again path of Midnight and Reaper’s Mark, as well as Foot in the Grave or Near to Death. I’m a PvP player primarily though, so your mileage may vary, and you can tailor the major traits to your tastes, or get entirely different trait lines instead. It’s unfortunate that the Curses tree has Precision and Fury on entering DS, because those are great for Power builds, but little else in the way of synergy with power.

Contagion.7206:

And how effective is simply running “conditions”? Do you survive long enough for them to really cut down on your opponent, because it seems like minions just has so little health.

Conditions are surprisingly powerful. The formula for bleeds, directly from the wiki, is as follows:

2.5 + (0.5 * Level) + (0.05 * Condition Damage)= per stack per second

So if you’ve got 300 condition damage at level 40(rabbit out of hat number), your bleeds are hitting every second for 38 damage. PER bleed. The formula for poison damage is twice that of Bleed, but generally doesn’t last as long.

Bleeds last around 8 seconds, so one hit of your scepter deals ~50-80 damage(made up number, I have no idea)? and an additional 304 over 8 seconds, so about 400 damage in 8 seconds. However, you keep hitting them with more bleeds every second, so after two hits, the total damage is 800, they’ve taken ~100-150 direct damage and are now bleeding for 70 every second, then you throw a poison on, and they’re now taking 140 damage every second, which is more than your scepter is swinging for.

After 4-5 seconds of swinging your scepter in this hypothetical scenario the target is now taking 400 damage per second, and you can do other things now… like use Epidemic to make all nearby targets also take 400 a second, or pop Death Shroud and use the 4th skill for more aoe damage, or swap to staff and throw down some marks for even more bleeds/damage, or use another skill(like enfeebling blood, dagger offhand(+2 bleeds, some small direct damage, and weakness to boot)).

It’s true, your minions won’t last long, but even with traits they still won’t last long. However, they WILL last long enough for you to kill your targets. In a typical PvE encounter, I would have Bone Fiend, Shadow Fiend, Bone Minions, and Flesh Golem up. Very often all would survive or only 1 would die, but sometimes 2-3 died if I pulled a lot of mobs. They did their job; they face-tanked for me while I killed stuff. They even contributed a little bit of damage. Further, most of the summon minion cooldowns are 30 seconds, so it’s really not that bad. And it’s not like you have to wait for all of your minions to be up, just having one up will still do the job and you’ll be able to continue fighting.

Anyway, condition snowballs fast, and it’s a playstyle I enjoy. Power builds are viable in pve also; I am partial to the axe, but the dagger’s autoattack has okay damage too. Play whatever you like; the game is fantastic, and you should play what you want.

Bug? or PvP oversight? Cannot see Health Pool, Boons, Conditions, or Endurance in Death Shroud, which is different than other transforms(Lich, Plague). It’s important to know what’s going on with your resources / boons / conditions to properly judge how long to stay in Death Shroud, when to run, who to CC, etc.

I really like the green border and bar conversion Necros get when entering Death Shroud, it’s really neat! However, Death Shroud behaves more like a Downed State than a transformation.

Kerael.6879:

In addition to Mirrar: Underwater combat as necro in WvW is also awesome, have not lost a single 1v1, 2v2 or 2v3. Even won several 2v4, which might say that Necros have too much survivability in underwater combat.

PvE is a nice swim. If you go into elite plague even 10 sharks/kraits will make you bored.

This is likely largely due to the fact that most players joining WvW probably don’t have their underwater skills unlocked and have no idea what they’re doing underwater.

As for Plague, LOL. Try to plague down the sharks in Raid of the Capricorn. You won’t even be able to kill one before it kills you, let alone before Plague ends. 10? You make me laugh

You shouldn’t use health sapping, it is really, really underpowered. You get more life out of a Mark of Blood on dodge than you do out of the lifestealing trait throughout a whole fight, and they occupy the same major trait slot.

As for the PvE dungeon spec, I run conditions. It’s the best way to play; rather than run Poison Cloud(which has really short condition duration, and hurts YOU), you should run Blood is Power or Corrupt Boon, depending on the encounter. Don’t forget you can change utility skills between fights, so you can prepare properly for the next boss. Signet of Undeath really helps in dungeons; a lot.

For PvE, I run conditions. Sometimes I pick up some of the minion skills, but I don’t trait for any of them. When I was leveling up, I ran all of the minions and picked condition skills, ran with scepter/dagger and staff, and I was able to do extremely well, even against 5-6 mobs, because the minions tank for you as best as you can while you can AoE. You really don’t need to trait for the minions, in fact I wouldn’t even recommend it, because the minion AI is really bad and they behave poorly. If they die, you can always just resummon them.

HogWash.3928:

-1 op .. no point in trying to argue with you. You don’t know what you are talking about.

After reading everything, I can only concede to this, as it is my 100% exact feelings towards this thread.

Boomshakaboom.5403:

There are several viable necro builds I play 3 and they are all very different.

By Viable you mean appropriate for 8v8 sPvP where it’s a mindless, non-team game zerg, right? OK.

On Topic: I run this identical build pretty much except I chose Reaper’s Mark and AoE fear on being downed. i find the AoE fear very lackluster, but Reaper’s Mark on teammate revival can be really good. Other times, it’s absolutely mediocre. Such is Necro life, it seems.

How do you find the Death Shroud abilities? In tPvP, since Necros start with 0 Life Force(and therefore start behind literally every other profession in their ‘special’ class ability), I almost never have enough life force to DS. Do you have decent Life Force with those traits?

Boomshakaboom.5403:

this game does have tanks I tank in sPvP as I got bored with condition spam, if you want deails of the build I run say so, but I don’t really want it becoming FOTM for necros

With the extreme burst damage (30k in 3 seconds) in tPvP i SERIOUSLY doubt tank ANYTHING will become FOTM

Enjoy your stay in that ivory tower

cerulean moth.2743:

Another thing I have noticed is mentioned several times here.

I miss 50-60% of my attacks on breakable objects with Daggers and with Scepter. I stand right next to the object and continuously whiff and miss over and over.

This was exceptionally bad when doing AC Dungeon Explore #3 and trying to destroy the burrows. We couldn’t get it done because I couldn’t hit.

Thanks for the response Jon! I’m sure everyone at ArenaNet is incredible busy, and appreciate your renewed interest in getting my favorite class up to playing speed with the rest of the crowd.

Ah! yes!

It is impossible for me to break windows in Kyhlo as a condition necro!

Please address this, it is sometimes a huge problem

The problem with power builds are the low number of attacks it has.

If you notice with other classes, most other classes main hands have a good attack and offhand has a good attack. For example, Mesmers main-hand sword gives them the Flurry combo, which is a good attack, and off hand pistol gives them Illusionary unload, which is also strong. Thieves main hand dagger gives them heartseeker, which is very strong, and off hand dagger gives them Cloak and Dagger, which stealths them and sets up backstabs. Strong! Or, if you prefer, sword/pistol gives them Pistol Whip, which is also phenomenal.

Necros lack an offhand weapon that synergizes with a power weapon. The best candidate is focus, but it is only a utility offhand. The only other choice is dagger and warhorn; warhorn is great, but also utility. The dagger offhand synergizes with condition damage, which is fine, even good, but it doesn’t help power builds.

Another thing to consider is the lack of damage utility spells for necro. Other classes, like Elementalist, have damaging attacks like Arcane Wave as utility spells. The only thing even close to this for necros is the Well of Suffering and Blood is Power. Well of Suffering is actually pretty good, but the point blank nature and a small radius means anyone can roll right out of it immediately.

The autoattack attacks a bit slowly and hits a bit weak. It is not an effective damage dealer, it is only good for stacking vulnerability to set up your ghastly claws combo.

Ghastly claws combo would be fine, maybe even good, if Necro had another attack to go with it. The actual problem with ghastly claws is that its a 9x hit combo, so it’s easy to interrupt / mitigate its damage. If you see claws start scratching at your character, what do you do? You ROLL and DODGE immediately, avoiding 3 or sometimes 4 of the claw attacks. Personally, in my Power/Crit% build, the highest Claws combo I’ve hit thus far was for 5500, with a load of crits and about 12% vulnerability stacked on the target. Rolling out of half of my attacks cuts my main source of damage in half and makes me ineffective.

But what about Death Shroud, you say? The truth of the matter is that Death Shroud is unreliable as another ‘attack.’ Besides, if you place this into the formula to match Necros’ number of attacks in Power builds vs. others, consider that Mesmers have two attacks AND illusions, that Thieves have two good attacks AND deal damage with steal, etc. Life Blast IS a good attack in a power build. It can crit for around 3500 damage on the right target under the right conditions. But ghastly claws combos for 5k and a couple 2k life blast shots won’t kill anybody. And it certainly isn’t competitive, not when Thieves come in and Pistol Whip you twice in a row for 18k, or the Warrior frenzies and Hundred Blades you from 100% to 0% in 2 seconds flat.

Dagger is the same way; daggers auto attack is actually reasonable, but it has no other real attack. The Life Siphon is the closest thing to a second attack, which makes no sense, since it should be reserved for actual life drain instead of throwing numbers up for damage. The other problem with the dagger is that you have to be in melee range, and literally EVERY other class in the entire game fairs better in melee than Necros do.

The final icing on the cake is the lack of a secondary weapon set to support your power style of play. Necros are almost forced to take the staff as their secondary weapon set because of the utility it offers; one second AoE fear, a chill effect, and a condition transfer are really good. However, the autoattack is really underwhelming, and mark of blood is not useful in a power build. Heck, even in a condition build, it underperforms; it’s more about the healing with mark of blood / aoe than it is the actual damage put out by the staff.

Having a secondary weapon set that directly supports the playstyle is really important. Unfortunately, the staff is the ideal secondary weapon, and it supports more of a control and contagion style of condition damage gameplay.

It’s really late, i hope this block of text is coherent

I was in the same boat as you

For SOME reason, this stat combination, though completely viable, is EXTREMELY difficult to find.

Here’s what I had to do:

I farmed 168,000 karma so I could buy the 4 pieces from the Temple of Grenth and Temple of Lyssa events: Shoulders, Mask, Gloves, and Pants all have toughness-precision-condition damage on them. Alternatively, you can grind dungeons for them: I believe HotW has 80 exotics with these stats on them.

I had to come up with about 15 gold to buy Khilbron’s Boots and Khilbron’s Coat off of the Trading Post, but again, dungeons sell Boots and Coats with these stats.

Finally, if you want weapons, you have two options. Guess what they are? Fork over ~5-8g for a Mystic Wand, the ONLY tradeable 80 Exotic wand with TPC on it. The only dagger offhand, which I’m certain is what you want in your offhand if you’re looking for TPC gear, is called Malefacterym of Blood, and will run you about ~8g on the TP.

Don’t have that much gold? Never fear, you can sell yourself into dungeon running slavery. At 300 tokens per weapon and 30 tokens per run, you can have yourself a piece of gear in 10 runs! Considering that most runs take a little under an hour, you can grind each piece out in 8 hours. That sounds miserable to me, but actually, it could be worse(see: Legendaries).

As for earrings, rings, and amulets…

There aren’t any… none… not a single one… there isn’t even a RARE version of 80 TPC amulet/earring/jewelry.

Further, the only 80 TPC rings and amulet you can find is in Cursed Shore off of a Karma vendor who spawns after successfully beating the Champion Risen King (the eye event) at the Reliquary Vault. There, you can buy Orrian Amulet and Orrian Rings, two blue 80 TPC ring / amulet.

Fortunately, you can obtain a pair of GREEN 80 TPC earrings called Lucky Rabbit’s Foot off of a karma vendor at Caer Shadowfain in Cursed Shore.

I’ve been considering crafting 80 exotic Coral or Chrysocola jewelry, but I really don’t enjoy having the wasted stat of Power in the mix.

Well… Good Luck mate

Underwater combat is absolutely horrific

I’m an 80 Necro in full exotics(including my underwater weapons). I can barely beat a shark in Raid on Capricorn; those sharks are seriously OP.

Worse, though, I can barely beat another player. I can barely beat a couple risen in Malchor’s Leap, and I just straight up ignore all underwater combat in Cursed Shore and train them til they leash.

And the weapons are so mismatched; the Tridents 5 is a Power ability, even though it clearly is supposed to be a condition weapon. The spears 4 and 5 are Condition abilities, even though it clearly is supposed to be a power weapon. The only solution is to get both power and condition damage on both weapons, which makes for a whack build.

In my opinion, the overall problem is the casting time on all the abilities. The trident’s 1-spam is very slow, because the damage animation has to nearly finish before you can cast another stack. I would venture a guess that the trident stacks bleeds about 2/3 the speed of the scepter, which is far too slow. Life blast underwater is an absolute joke. The 5 on the trident casts WAYYY too slow to be legitimately effective. The cooldown on the trident’s 4 (the sink) makes it unusable unless you are sinking a fleeing enemy player, because if you use it for the battle then it won’t be up when you’re trying to finish another player.

The spear is well balanced, and handles well. I would venture to guess that 80% of my underwater combat relies on the spear to deal damage, since the trident bleed is slow and weak. The 1 hits for acceptable damage, the 2 deals respectable damage, and the 3 grants swiftness. As a ranged caster, I am using a melee weapon for underwater combat.

Being underwater as necro blows!