Guild Wars 2

I might start towards a set, I think you’d gain substantial survivability with not a massive tradeoff of DPS. I was having troubles staying alive facetanking VG with just blood magic + rise + jagged horrors (actually I was using FG for that, now that i think about it).

What’s a cool bonus about vitality for necros is that it increases your Life Force pool! (and therefore % based life force gains grant you more overall life force.)

I haven’t pvp’d much since HOT, but I didn’t run it in some builds in favor of Spectral Mastery. Extra LF gen made up for it. I typically was just using shroud for soaking damage, breaking stuns(pairs nicely with Speed of Shadows) and sometimes for boon stripping with POC.

And minions below that? I assume it ignores if players have that boon or not already or anything?

Does healing prioritize at all based on % hp?

When I’m lightning group, I like to bring something to pull them off, like magnetic pull or spectral grasp.

What’s tricky is balancing CC in the last phase between seekers and breakbar phases. You need to break his bar ASAP but you also need to save CC for the RNG seeker that will ruin your day.

Are there any detailed posts/guides on healing/boon priority for the purposes of raids?

I’ve always assumed that in regards to boons, the priority is:
1) Party
2) ??? (any other player closest? lacking the boons?)
3)minions?

For healing:
1) Lowest in party
2) Party
3)????
4)Minions?

I’m particularly asking in regards to minions (ranger pets, necro minions, phantasms, etc) But this is a good opportunity to figure out priorities otherwise, as well. This is very important information for optimizing your groups and comps, and I’m personally hoping as a necro that bringing minions isn’t stealing boons or healing from people that could use it first.

I’m also particularly interested in the case of buffs like elementalist regen/soothing mist. Since they aren’t heals directly, do they follow heal rules, boon rules, are they the same?

Any detailed info would be appreciated, as I’ve heard conflicting info.

This is going to be one of the better examples of what an engineer is capable of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdYdHZ-bZuo

If you notice early on, the damage is really high and trumps what a condi necro can do in a similar situation pretty dramatically, but as the fight gets more mobile, you can see that DPS drop dramatically, to only a couple thousand or less in some parts of the fight (in those isolated circumstances). A scepter necro can basically keep up his rotation minimally affected by similar circumstances. The only DPS lost because of movement in this fight for a condi necro would be:
-Some poison cloud ticks
-If the boss exceeds 900+ range from lightning.
-The ability to whirl finish as reaper as often as you can normally due to lightning duty.

The long durations of your bleeds means you’ll drop that low much less frequently, if ever, playing properly.

I’d post some footage if I had some of myself, I promise I will when I get my new CPU and RAM.

TLDR: In a stationary situation, a engi will blow necros out of the water. But in any fight with a lot of movement and/or the ability to take advantage of epidemic, it’s going to be at least even, and perhaps necros blowing engis out of the water (but also synergizing with them because of epidemic).

So far, in the 3 encounters we’ve seen I think you can justify bringing a condi reaper to all of them. (Though I’m pretty confident Dom still does more damage than I do overall on VG, people spitting out BS numbers like “25% of what engis do” is clearly absurd.)

I’m all down for curses being improved but pretty sure it’s a must have for condi in raids.

I suggest trying the NA build, it’s very potent. You can call epidemic cheese or something, but any fight it works on, curses, and condi will destroy on DPS. And TBH on VG it’s solid too.

I’ll just leave this here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODtnV2KI7gA

that’s exactly my question! I’m not sure if I should open these chests or not

(i read another member of the party’s name on it, but they kept blaming the necro).

They’re being idiots. Someone else is applying a chill, obviously. It’s not like a chill breaks the bar that fast, anyway.

Unless you’re tanking I think you’re going to need to drop your survivability in some form, you really don’t need the amount of toughness and vitality you have on your gear. But if you’re unwilling to budge, the biggest and easiest change I think would be to drop spite for curses. Spite actually provides very little to condi builds because Close to Death (20% bonus damage below 50% hp) does NOT apply to condition damage, only direct damage. Outside of that spite only really provides some good self-boon and vulnerability, neither of which should be too necessary in a raid setting, since you should be getting a lot of might and vuln from other members.

With curses you can take master of corruption, which means you load yourself up with condis but you should take a dagger offhand to transfer them. The scepter trait is also very good, you can get 10k+ grasping deads properly geared for condi damage.

I’ve been playing with this build and am very pleased:
http://sickestguild.com/forum/m/31644179/viewthread/25151391-spirit-vale-condi-necro

The main thing to note is that CPC/BIP into Dagger 4 is a massively damaging combo. It takes time for its damage to apply, but you are a condition class.

TLDR: I would recommend changing your gear if you’re not tanking, I think necros can survive quite well in vipers, but if you won’t budge, changing spite to curses will do a lot for you without giving up a lick of your survivability. I’m not a fan of staff either, I’d probably just keep scepter/d /whatever your other choice of offhand is.

I think this build can be adapted well for 5 man content moderately well, as well. A big shortcoming it has is it’s ramp time which is something that can be well adjusted for with the addition of a direct damage off-set like dagger, and/or dropping blood for SR/dhuumfire for some burst damage. (the loss of group DPS may be undesirable, I’m not 100% of the value but it seems like it might be a bad idea to drop blood) Unless I’m mistaken, I’m pretty sure dhuumfire auto attacks are higher damage than scepter autos, overall, and much more frontloaded damage certainly.

This will give you a good way to finish off low health mobs where most of your DPS would be wasted otherwise. Other options like offhand focus are good if you lack vuln, warhorn is nice if that’s covered as well, but it may be better to hold onto offhand dagger so you can always cast your combo (but once again, a 1 minute bleed may not be necessary on something about to die).

I think in FOTMs this works quite nicely, it’s nice to be able to pull out a dagger for the last few seconds of a fight when you have nothing to lose, or to start dagger/focus and get some vuln up asap before going to scepter. You can always take it off for fights where you’d rather not get locked out of scepter though (mossman?).

Join a big guild. You get a lot of advantages doing so, one of which is a large pool of players who are less discriminate since you’re often playing with new people, and a lot of people wanting to run things at different hours. Play enough and you’ll find the people who are talented and on around the same time as you.

Not to mention guild halls themselves are pretty brutal for small guilds.

Eir can be a little hard at first, but you just have to keep moving. Once garm is down, don’t let her get going and keep hard DPS on him whenever he’s revived.

Canach you just need to slot a lot of CC.

I would advise making an event out of it with some solid guildies, if possible. The mordrem loop is an excellent piece of equipment and a great piece for condi especially.

Is it possible to get additional Mordrem Loops? Other achievement based jewelry becomes available from places like laurel merchants after you unlock, yet I don’t see it at the vendor (despite having one). Hopefully this gets fixed, as it’s the only way to obtain ascended stat jewelry of partricuilar combinations like Viper’s or Commander’s.

Hmm, okay, does it have a limited number of targets? Like 5? Or does it affect all in radius?

EDIT: nevermind, I see it on wiki that it’s 5. Not sure how I missed that before.

Does Facet of Nature stack with the natural 100% cap? Wondering how to consider this for gearing other classes like mesmer.

In PvP, it definitely feels a lot more competitive with RS in the range it offers. In PvE, it feels pretty much outclassed.

1: Feels good to have impactful ranged hits, but I think piercing should be baseline.
2: Projectile should move a bit faster, and I think the bleeds should be more intense (either more stacks or more duration), this should be the tool condi players use shroud for but it feels really lackluster. If it’s bleed was AOE (in addition to the chill) it would feel pretty impactful. Maybe 360 radius too but maybe I’m asking for too much.
3: This is the biggest thing. RS3 is soooo good. Having reliable stability changes how you play. Having a ranged fear is handy I guess, But it’s pretty rarely useful (the extra range, that is). Not sure how to change it to make it competitive with RS3 that’s not just adding more damage onto it. I think a unique effect here could make a nice difference though I don’t know what spec it should be geared toward.
4: Life transfer is still awesome.
5: Shackles is cool still. Always reminded me of Morgana’s ult in LoL.

The theme of death shroud I think is an aggressive spectre that’s really difficult to get away from. Any changes to it’s abilities should probably reflect this strength.

Maybe the 3 could have some sort of secondary or conditional effect, like a short burst of Quickness or Resistance if you successfully interrupt them.

Interesting idea, but regarding Vale Guard, it’s rather easy to strafe out of without using a dodge. But maybe you have bad ping.

Signet of Vamp and Dagger 2 (scales 2.7 per healing power) do a lot with the healing power. Personally I’ve been trying to make a vipers build that gains sustain through Blighters Boon but had trouble doing well with it, but I didn’t practice much.

Is there a site that adds up all the costs in precursor crafting yet? I’d like to see which ones are still worth making, or have prices pretty much stabilized around the ones that were above their market value already?

If Anet is going to continue to add mastery tracks as they seem to be doing, I’m sure they will add new mastery points (Along with new zones) to obtain. I think in a perfect world for them, it would be very difficult for players to max all masteries, and not something they “expect” players to have. Throughout the expansion there are very few that are actually required to complete content (unless it’s like, the mastery points locked behind more masteries).

Jumping mushrooms and updraft, maybe poison lore. But notice a lot of the high level ones are just like bonus events and vendors to give you some extra daily tasks. Not required by any extent. I don’t like this thread’s argument because there are other things that people like and dislike, and saying that adventures for some reason are undeserving of having mastery points/collections locked behind them seems like an arbitrary barometer of what is and is not acceptable to gate a mastery point behind. Yes, it takes good execution especially for gold on a lot of them, but I don’t know what your expectation is to unlock everything in this game if you don’t possess the knowledge, skill or time to complete everything.

Anet will eventually have to come to terms with raids being a portion of content that the majority of players see very little of. IDK the best solution, but scaled down modes missing key rewards like legendary insights seems like an appropriate solution, eventually.

From a cost benefit analysis, they’re going to have to reevaluate eventually, I think. There’s a reason why other games always end up making a casual sort of mode.

Even as someone who’s enjoying raids so far, it seems unfair to the rest of the playerbase if they’re developing a lot of content for a very small portion of the playerbase.

We’ll see.

But not required either. I was tanking vale guard for a few nights on my chrono in exo zerker armor, until I was able to start getting together some commanders/givers stuff for boon duration. Still mostly exos.

What’s an additional frustration about the affair is that oftentimes maps seem quite active and suddenly it prompts the message, I’m scooting along getting all the pylons active in Auric Basin and then that message pops up, I don’t want to lose my credit so I close it out and suddenly I’m the only left of a group of ~10 people or so. So I just stop doing the map because I’m kittened.

While on the subject of fear and vale guard, can we bring up how fear doesn’t affect the breakbars of the split guys? At least I haven’t seen it work.

I’m usually a fan of soft enrages, but they are more difficult to design well. The advantage with soft enrages is it gives more flexibility to the composition. Say if a boss starts getting a stacking buff over the course of the fight that increases his damage by 10% a stack, eventually the damage will be so high its unsustainable, but it gives opportunities and validity to more defensive oriented stat combos to help put up with it for a longer length of time. It also opens up new design opportunities to let the player slow down those stacks (say he consumes it from some flower you can DPS down before he reaches, or casts a spell that puts up a breakbar that if channeled fully, will increase his damage unless you can break it very very fast).

It’s a generally a more interesting choice than just requiring the group puts out X DPS or you’re dead.

Still, there’s some validity there.

No, silver.

Nobody is making you do adventures, man. There are plenty of sources for XP and you don’t need to finish any specialization collections. IDK what to tell you.

Yeah, I never really know what to do with staff, especially in PvE. Damage on it is crap across the board, condi transfer is available via dagger and still able to pair it with a more damaging weapon. The chill + poison field and higher base shroud damage are nice, but seems hard to justify half your weapon slots.

No, this is a fairly recent change with breakbars. If the condition is greyed out, it does not do it’s effect, only reduces the breakbar.

It does -3.33% breakbar damage per second, at least on FOTM bosses.

Alright, I’ve got it. The change for axe, “Frozen Claws.” Instead of vuln, apply 1s of chill with the autoattack. Gives it utility as power and condi without making it a strictly condi weapon and enhances its strength as a sticky weapon. While you’re pressuring with your 1 (and doing crap damage with it) your target isn’t going anywhere. The short duration means if you stop to do anything else, it wears off. But in a team situation is a great way to peel. Seems to synergize well (and even fits with the spite theme reasonably well) and gets rid of the often redundant vuln that’s not necessary or an inefficient use of our cast times.

Wouldn’t do much for PvE, but I don’t know what hope there is for it in PvE. 900 range instant attack is hard to balance, so I think give it utility over anything. It would be an amazing kiting weapon. Probably too good at that though, or at least very unfun to play against. imagine the frustration of a class with no way to escape your grasp. I guess it would be limited to one target, and he’d never die from it. Resistance would be a spectacular counter but is still very uncommon.

His point isn’t necessarily in a guard vs necro duel, but in general, non-projectiles are “stickier” than projectiles. They don’t offer combos, for sure, but you aren’t vulnerable to reflecting your own axe 2 back at yourself, unlike true shot.

Dawdler.8521:

Mega Skeleton.8259:

My issue with greatsword is it doesn’t work as well against normal mobs, I feel. But maybe I’m just not used to it. Whipping around a dagger is just kitten effective for shredding whats in front of you. I guess greatsword takes more finesse, but as a general rule in games, slower, hard hitting weapons perform crappier against low health mobs. The slower LF gen can be a serious hindrance as well.

All in all I think it’s good the weapons excel in their own ways, and offer some different options even if they’re both power weapons.

Eh, I have found that’s exactly what the greatsword is great at. Instead of hacking away 3-5 seconds with ~2K damage per hit on low HP mobs (just your shouts/wells probably brought them to 50%), you press a single button on the greatsword and they all die. Against anything else (such as bosses, veterans, champs) you’re 90% in RS anyway and dont use any normal weapons. The dagger isnt bad and I find it the superior weapon in many other situations but definetly not in general PvE.

The only thing crappy about the GS is the spike pull, its more unreliable than the Mesmer iLeap stun and that’s quite a feat to accomplish.

More reliable than Grasp ;_;

I know typically the best way to salvage some dark energy is with weapon/armor, and that rings have an abysmal, if not non-existent rate. But what about other ascended trinkets like accessories, amulets and backs?

The wiki page is pretty skimpy:
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Ball_of_Dark_Energy/Salvage_Rate

Anyone had any experience? I’m sitting on 600 laurels and was thinking of going for some via amulets, tried one last night but just ended up with just 7 +1 agony infusions. Any other experiences?

I was under the assumption (and I thought I tested it, but maybe I was mistaken)that chilling nova only effects targets around them, not the target iteself.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

FYI, here is what a real engineer does:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPJOLSe7k6U

Yes those are 7k burns, 5k bleeds, 2k poison and 2k direct damage.

This is more what I was expecting, but it’s also a good illustration of how quickly his DPS drops when the target moves, and as the fight gets more hectic. He does specify that he’s not main engi, and so a lot of those things that become second nature when you play a class for 1500+ hours may not be as obvious. I experienced that on my chrono last night, starting out super strong but my rotations getting thrown off as the fight got more hectic.

spoj.9672:

You maintain about 1-2 extra stacks with reapers onslaught? The boost you gain is about 1k dps which is the same as deathly chill. With deathly chill both scepter auto and RS auto with dhuumfire are about equal on vipers. But scepter is significantly easier to maintain. And you will always have access to your DPS increase condi skills immediately.

If you dont need blood then dhuumfire is still good because you can get a few burn stacks after a soul spiral. But you should go back to scepter most of the time.

But then again if you take blood you have dagger offhand cooldown reduction. And the group has vampiric aura.

How do you keep high uptime on chills? In my current build I have almost no chilled, I guess if you have spite below 50% you can keep a pretty high uptime without even thinking about it, which is rad, but above 50% what are you using to keep chilled up?

Why stay scepter if RS burns (and melee range) are available? The base damage of all the reaper shroud + dhuumfires is a lot higher. Does scepter damage scale that much better + the 150 condi damage trait? (I need to see what tooltips say when fully buffed!) Also then, what elite specs are you running? (since I guess you couldn’t have spite, blood, curses and reaper)

As an aside, does anyone know how attack speed stacks? If I’m getting 10% from mushrooms, 15% from Reaper’s onslaught, and 50% from quickness, is it all additive? Is it only up to a point?

For reference, this is generally what I run in raids right now. I occasionally swap traits and some utilities depending on what’s needed (might run focus too) http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vRAQRBLRhG2JNiQ3mYzNg1NAHOYRbwmCAJgDQcEcDGCpGBpgGFA-TJRBAB+v/QGHEANeAAAcEAAA
With pretty much full vipers set, still trying out Berserker’s on my D/WH though. I think I need to change up my sigils though (i use malice on my OH dagger), energy is mostly wasted with the innate survivability afforded by blood + minions and I should definitely take something like bursting or smoldering (if it effects in reaper shroud). Actually a big fan of geomancy on the d/wh, though. It’s nice that it procs when entering or leaving RS.

I mean by dropping the chill trait for RS attack speed. But I think you’re right I’m inflating my numbers, my poison uptime is much lower than I was appreciating without curses. While necros are okay at sticking on targets, the reliance on melee range is definitely a hindrance for dhuumfire if you’re not tanking and have to be involved with other mechanics. Definitely a big point engi has over necro for condi. I’m glad you had a good time Tobias, though.

Maybe I should drop my runes of the berserker (as I’ve been playing hybrid) and go back to the trapper/nightmare combo. That does weaken lich form auto a bit but maybe I should be dropping that anyway.

I dunno, in the meantime I’m working on my chrono too…who I’m also thinking of gearing tank via commander’s armor…shame there’s no boon duration gear without toughness.

I feel like I’m taking crazy pills. I promise I’ll get footage up after I upgrade my rig after thanksgiving but every engineer POV I’ve seen has left me underwhelmed. Maybe I’m not paying enough attention to my own numbers but from my observations they seem to do at best comparable damage to my condi reaper.

My issue with greatsword is it doesn’t work as well against normal mobs, I feel. But maybe I’m just not used to it. Whipping around a dagger is just kitten effective for shredding whats in front of you. I guess greatsword takes more finesse, but as a general rule in games, slower, hard hitting weapons perform crappier against low health mobs. The slower LF gen can be a serious hindrance as well.

All in all I think it’s good the weapons excel in their own ways, and offer some different options even if they’re both power weapons.

Yeah they should update those tooltips as they must cause a lot of grief in the game, whether players know it or not. There’s even inconsistencies when they state specifically +% condition damage. Is it a flat increase to my damage or to my condition damage stat? I’m fairly certain its the latter in the case of things like Bursting. But even then I’m not entirely sure.

Golem is awesome, to be sure, but I think s/d d/wh is an acceptable amount of CC for a player, if you consider Shroud 3/5. Although without MOC, you could probably get away with spectral grasp as a utility as well.

Close to Death does not effect condition damage. Spite therefore does not provide much to condi reaper in a raid setting. Eyeballing it, I was averaging 2-3k bleeds and poisons, 600-1k torments, 2-4k burns. Which is only a portion of DPS. Those spiked higher (and sometimes lower) quite frequently. Losing MOC is unfortunate, as I’ve long advocated for it, but I’m a convert after trying it out. As I said earlier, I advise lich form if only for the jagged horrors, they can continue to provide a solid 1.5k bleeds on their own, at least, as long as tons of siphon damage and healing. I’m trying to remain modest with DPS estimates as eyeballing can be misleading.

Whirling in an engi’s fire field will provide a short term burst of damage, but ultimately higher if the wiki’s numbers are right. Twice as much.

I think losing access to most chills is acceptable. I think you should try it out before writing off Reaper entirely.

If you’re playing condi reaper, you need to be taking dhuumfire and reaper attack speed. You can turn that 1k chill into an easy 3-4k burn consistently. Be sure to get your mushrooms too. Not to mention the auto attack damage not being half bad in its own right. Not to mention minion and life siphon ticks.

And as Cog noted, tanks shouldn’t be rated on their ability to take damage, they just need to not die. Tanks should be rated on their ability to do things OTHER than tank, like support or dps. The best tanks are going to be able to fulfill those other roles mostly unhindered.

For a night of attempts, I got like 20 magnetite shards (0-2 per attempt, depending on the phase you pushed it into), which actually seems like slightly more than what someone would get outright killing it on the first attempt (but saving several hours). Not really sure how many shards are needed for rewards though.

i’m sorry you’re unhappy, but I see several contradictions in your posts, as well as things that seem selfish, TBH.
“World bosses were something you showed up for and had fun with along with countless others "
“like how Dragon’s Stand works. Massive map with multiple objectives, tons of players take part, everyone gets rewards and has fun.”

So which is it for HOT then?

Also:
“In my opinion, raids in Guild Wars 2 should have been done like how Dragon’s Stand works.”
Why not do Dragon’s Stand? Do you think having content for different types of players is a bad thing for the game? Don’t do raids then. You don’t have to. All you’ll be missing out on is some minis and legendary armor? You’ll be saving yourself lots of pain.

I’m sure you want MORE content like the stuff you like, we all do. There are players who want more robust systems in WvW, more PvP maps, more fractals (more dungeons…), more maps, you get the idea. If Anet isn’t doing enough for you, you’re totally in the right to let them know. Just know that all of us have the same right to do the same.

I am annoyed at fear not working on the split guys breakbars though. It seems to work fine on the boss, at least. I wonder why that is. The invuln, maybe?

As a Viper’s necro, on a whim I ended up trying “Rise” as a utility to see if it worked on the sparks (It does), and combined with the jagged horrors from lich form…holy kitten. Paired with Blood Magic’s minion siphoning, I had insane health regen. I highly recommend it and plan on trying it as tank tonight. I think lich form is the way to go, even if you only use the jagged horrors. The bleeds they provided throughout the fight, not to mention modest hits + siphon damage they dealt throughout the fight is probably more substantial than I could be bothered to notice. I was using Blood/SR/Reaper. I was pretty regularly keeping up 600-1000 torments, 2-3k+ bleeds and poisons, and 2-4k burns. (All of those often exceeded those ranges, but often dropped below them too)

I loved seeing my mini-minion army run over to blue/green after we finished red. It kinda cluttered the place at times, tbh!

Too late now, but this seems like an ill way to conduct this. Just encourages people to mock and jeer at each other.

I think it would have been best to mention this to leadership in private, let them know why, and pick other testers down the road.

For what its worth, in recent months I haven’t gotten a single “Do you have any other classes?” in pug groups lately, which is encouraging.

Hopefully speed-clear raids are something mostly reserved for high end guilds because of the difficulty, and that most people would be concerning themselves and be satisfied with getting the encounters down at all in a pug group.

Blood Magic provides some valuable unique utility, by sharing vamp auras, preventing downed people from bleeding out, and most importantly, being able to teleport downed players to their location. This is great insurance in situations like the vale guardian if a lightning spawns in the wrong third while the AOE field is down. That can be avoided with proper positioning of the boss, but everything can’t always go perfectly. I imagine many encounters will have dangerous mechanics that will make rezzing people difficult, and necros are the only class to provide such utility.

Vamp auras are a modest increase to group DPS and healing.

What I love about necros is the flexibility in their weapons, especially kitted out with Viper’s now. I swap often (same with traits) depending on situations now, based on what’s required. The weapons all offer some different benefits, as they should.