Guild Wars 2

Thanks I’ll try spamming it faster

Thanks for the guide Koroshi!

Hybrid builds normally shortens fights, one way or the other.

They won’t burst you down with that build, but will win the attrition fight everytime, they have the tools to do so and we lack the counter.

Don’t want to brag about my top-notch skills against thieves (because I’m far from the top and still got a lot to learn) but you can still see in my last video three fights against thiefs.

2 against “bad” ones: At 2:52 a condi thief that doesn’t even budge my health, and at 3:42 a Power one that while not pressuring me enough, still heals for a lot more than me and come back full lots of time.

At 7:35, you see a “good” thief, that heals against for twice-thrice my heal and still have good dps. All our AoE/Condition tools get removed easily.

http://youtu.be/2nYqR74yzfM?t=7m35s

Is there a special timing for the Water field to appear? I double tap to create the field, but sometimes it seems I have to wait 1-2 sec before the field appear and I can get the Area Healing off.

I’ve wasted a couple of Blasts by doing them too quickly, but in your video it seems pretty much always instant.

Thing is, I still won’t buy the Ascended WvW trinkets on my engi or mesmer, because I’ll wait for next patch… Pathetic, I really am

Maybe the reason you get hit for more in Soldier’ gear in DS is because you have more Lifeforce with more Vitality (Rabid doesn’t change your Lifeforce value), so toughness acts like a % buffer of your total lifeforce?

Don’t know if I sound like a madman but that would explains it a bit.

We eat guardians for breakfast because we have a lot of boon removal and unblockables spells. Guardian’s defense is mostly blocks and boons.

Thief eat us for breakfast because they have a lot of tools to hardcounter lots of our tools. The same tools you bring to a guardian fight will be near useless against thief.

You will beat bad one and get eaten alive by good ones, with no chance to retaliate properly.

Like danlarusso.2790 said earlier: “You have not really played WvW till you find the thief that trolls the crap out of you and there is nothing you can do about it.” And trust me, they will /laugh and /dance a lot when they do .

I see where you are going, but this specific case is really to fix a bug where some racials healing skills wouldn’t trigger a trait that have an effect when you heal. In this case no racial is more advantageous, the trait in itself does all the job.

My engineer will see more light for now, which could be a good thing all in all

Kinda disapointing to see visual and tooltips fix when we have this issue approved by Anet a couple of weeks ago.

Necros marks don’t make people die, they’re just a nuisance when 1vX, a small one at that. I’m in Tier 7-8 and they just evade through them while chasing me or just plain trigger them and remove the speed debuffs. SA thiefs are even worst, removing a condition every 3 sec in stealth and healing at the same time, they just laugh at our marks. Wells on stationary target is another matter, but even less of an issue if they’re going through them to reach a running necro.

I don’t mind pointing our strong points in group vs group fights, or when defending/assaulting keeps, but roaming alone vs many is not our forte.

7) When wurm gets killed by you using Plague or Lich, or worse, being caught in a Moa dance.

Added a new video at the top, still playing the same hybrid build that I love so much.

This time Razdhul needs to move out in the big bad world, his home is not safe anymore.

Hope you enjoy, any and all comments welcomed! If you got suggestions to what you would like to see for my next one, I’ve got thousand of hours of footage, but right now I focus on his personal story in WvW.

I would say go for both, even better if you stick with a zerg. Hybrid builds are good for keeping both pressures going, but normally lacks a bit in the survival department. If you’re always in a group you shouldn’t be worried about it.

30/30/10 with Rampager armor, one giver’s weapon, mix of Cavalier/Rampager/Berserker trinket will net you good stats overall, a nice defense and a good pressure from both direct damage and conditions. You go for targeted wells, Greater marks and you’re a AoE machine in sieges/defenses and even when roaming, peoples loves to stack together.

If you want to use scepter, I would go with dagger off hand for the additional AoE, Bleed and condition transfer. AoE freak go get them!

I saw ranger get feared when they used their longbow pushback on me from 900+ yd, so I would say the range should be around 1200 (max range of most attack/CC).

If you want 100% chance of ticking more, go 100% fear duration and never look back

While it can tick more even with 70% condi duration, sometimes it won’t and you will lose a free 1k+ hit.

You would only need Pizza and giver’s weapon if you take the trait, or no giver’s and any combination of 2x Lyssa or Mad king.

The norn elite is our best (and only) get-out-of-jail card. You’ll feel like a thief, going stealth, dashing X yard at full speed and reappearing 5 sec later way out of harm’s way.

Before the patch you would get less ticks from the wells if they were targeted, so peoples didn’t like to lose that much damage. They fixed it this patch, and it’s a real good way to siege/defend from a distance now that we no longer lose a tick or 2.

DS interaction with weapons (if you dont use Lifeblast with a staff you’re gimping your shots by a lot) and healing.

1v1 in WvW, where Crit damage can reach higher than 100% and thief 2 shot you even with full toughness? Nah we don’t have the defense required to take good one out. Each thief I kill is a bad/out of cooldown thief that got greedy thinking I was an easy kill (or theyre build for conditions). I’m getting crit by HS spammers for 7k with 2600 armor. That’s a lot of damage to take, even with 20k life and a 16k DS that doesn’t last long enough against these.

You can look at Leeto video #3 first couple of fights, he gets HS Stealth then Backstab and downed, all instant cast in one sec. The thief can HS into Blinding powder and still hit you for 7k and not get out of stealth because of the timing of stealth via this combo. So a 7k HS + Backstab 8-10k + Steal for 4k followed by HS spam (if needed). You need a lot of luck to “evade” this combo. And luck is not skill. (Nothing against thieves, more against bad stealth mechanic )

Now if you’re talking 1v1 against guardians, I totally agree we should win them all regardless of skill

Oh I have a blast playing necro(not a finisher though), don’t worry about it! My play time is limited and I want to have fun when I do play. And I don’t know anything about LoL (lol), sorry I can’t really relate to it.

But I do believe we still managed in 9 months to test the system in and out. We won’t find a new even more tankier build that what we have now, we won’t find a better access to stability than what we have now, etc etc, again with the tools we have.

If Anet gets out a new rune, weapon set, sigil, trait or new map with new objectives, of course the Theorycraft will start from scratch, but right now the game is limited in term of build, professions and mix/match. The only new build I could not foresee would be builds where you don’t use all your Traits points.

IMHO, If Anet promotes power, condition removal and boons over conditions, players will choose that road until Anet promotes something else. Meta aren’t meta for nothing, it’s (normally) what works the best in the sandbox. Each patch has a chance to completely turns the meta around, but we won’t see it until Anet decides to, not the player base. Except if every player choose to kitten themselves by all choosing the lesser path.

Engi have a lots of combo field and finishers too, without needing help. The team argument isn’t really valid at this point. Guild wars 2 is a beautiful game, but on my necro I feel like I miss some of the best parts of it, and I didn’t even notice it until I’ve played another class. When I started an engi, combo field this, flaming bullet, might stacking, water field leap and blast, mass stealth WOW! It was a new game.

You can still play all the game and do good without a single combo, but once you find about them, you will miss them. In that sense I don’t regret starting with a necro hehe, I didn’t know what I was missing.

Field management is like the next step of skills set you can learn, and I would love necro to take part in that game too. I already almost AoE-Perma Weakness without combos, I don’t see how giving me more access to finishers on my own poison field would be OP. Same for Blind. It would gives us access to more team play, where I could use others field to benefit everyone.

Gives us access to Spear and Trident on land!

But the meta won’t shift until there’s a patch, because right now I think we (as a community) tested every possible ways to play a necro with the tools we have now.

Until the tools given to us change, the meta will stay the same. Thus until we get a change, we need to voice what we would like those changes to be. At that point we’re just crossing our fingers and hope that those changes will effect us in a positive way.

Casual player here by your standard, 3 hours a day max, I even got kids meddling through cutting on that “precious” playtime ( Joke, my kids come first ). My main is my hybrid necro, around 800 hours on my +-1000 hours played. I don’t know why, but I always come back to him, I love the playstyle. Call it a love/hate relationship.

I would agree that in PvE, necro shouldn’t gives you problem. In all those dungeons/fractals runs, I’ve been shunned only once. I do play mainly with my guilds though. Only big problem I had should be fixed “soon”, the 1/3 downed health.

I love WvW, and even if I love my necro, I can still state that there are problems with the profession, regarding how Guild Wars 2 favors Power over Condition, Boon over Condition, Mobility, and DS bugs and strange mechanic that doesn’t allow us to shine to our full potential. In PvP you won’t see the same problems, even less in PvE.

I don’t think whining is the key to be heard, but saying everybody that discuss and bring “bad” points are whiners is not the way to go.

I want this profession to shine, and I will voice my problems with it if I find them legit enough. We would never have our 1/3 downed health problem even looked at if we didn’t push the issue to light like we did, and we did it (I think) in a very constructive manner.

Are all the posts about our issues constructive? Of course not. But I find the majority is. I’m smart enough to filter the good from the bad, and I have faith that new players can do the same.

About the 1vX against mass of Upleveleds (aka Zombies Rush) or plain 1vX: I have 4 80, necro is roughly 80% of total time played (+-1000 hours). The others share 5%, so I’m not experienced that much with them.

I love solo roaming, taking camps before the tally and the challenge of grabbing/defending camps when enemy players are there. And my success rate is not that bad. You can watch my videos if you wanna see the build/playstyle of how I play necro and see for yourself my “skill level”.

Yesterday, my necro kills every NPC in the camp while there’s one guy from X guild defending it. I even manage to down the guy, but backup comes (2 from same guild), I try to run but get eaten alive by the “mass”.

Then I decided to make a test. Those guys didnt want to budge from the camp (same 3) and I wanted data. I’ve logged on my mesmer, engi and guardian and tried to take the camp/stay alive while dealing with those 3.

On my guardian, I ate them for breakfast, I even get to stomp 2 while being under pressure and live to tell the tale. And I could get out of there too because of some Leap skills that can be used with no target, good timed blocks and permaswiftness.

On my mesmer, even easier, and I get a free Pass card if things goes ruff. Staff is amazing as a in-combat/escape tool, coupled with a 24 sec teleport (instant cast!!!). With 2 Invulnerable abilities on short cooldowns that still allow you to deal damage like crazy, what’s not to like. I’ve got out of the same type of situation that my necro couldn’t while killing 2 of them again.

On my HGH engi, a bit harder, but perma-swiftness, lots of conditions removal, Elixir S, Toolkit number #4, AoE conditions that hit hard and applies fast are all good tools to have against groups. I could just stomp one and had to run away, but I’m clearly not experienced with all the rotations yet.

I then logged back to my necro, tried it again for the heck of it, and the same guys ate me alive again. Even if we slot 3 stunbreakers, we’re the Ping-Pong class, and we only got one teleport that is on a 40 sec cooldown and normally needs to be precast in a direction that may not no longer suits your escape plan . And I abuse him like hell, but I still dont come close to the result of my others professions, against the same scenario.

I’m also almost done leveling a thief, and I would say that in this same situation I would’ve done way better than my necro and troll them to death.

Were my opponents really good? No. Not at all in fact. But WvW burst is so crazy that having no real way to target drop, no easy access to Protection, Block mechanic, the “Noob Cannons” turns us into ashes before we can react (with our long cast time). I do the same thing, always targeting the necro first and bursting him down. For an attrition class, things should definitely feel different.

The point about dueling is moot. 1v1 we’re a good class, not top but good. 1vX is totally different. All this turmoil comes from the Dev’s vision of the game for us, that they stated many times: We’re (supposed to be) the King of Attrition.

Then the player settles in with this mindset, try to be the Attrition monster they labeled us to be, and when he fails again and again, try millions of build, different gears setup and still have trouble handling 2-3 good upleveled in WvW, you can see there’s something wrong. Long cooldown, short effects, aren’t made for Group Attrition.

The only way I can effectively 1vX against Good Players is when I use walls or cliffs, so that my DoTs, cooldowns and such have time to come back again. My others 80 doesn’t have this issue, with hundreds of hours less played than my necro. Now, I’ve killed 1v6 Bad Players before, but the only comment I’ll get if I show these videos is “Not impressed, bad players”.

The necro is fun, but frustrating when X peoples rush you, and they do with impunity because we’re not the “scary monster with a killer dead zone” we should be.

I think it would be better if Anet labeled us something else, so that we can focus our energy elsewhere.

Hehe it’s true that anyone grouping with a necro always say “Whoa you sure you’re doing great?” And I agree about siphoning, I think it would be easier to balance it if you could decide as a player to invest or not in healing power.

It’s only dangerous for those who think we can be up to par with healing spec like the guardian, Ele and Ranger. If healing is the problem, just move numbers a bit concerning healing, don’t remove us from the equation.

There’s still builds where you can stay in DS for long, and even regenerate enough lifeforce in between to stay in it. And DS #1 on some Power build is really good pressure.

You should be able to gain health while transformed (because they try to bring DS up to other transformation), the healing could even be applied on the lifeforce, I wouldn’t mind, but saying “Ok guys wait for me to get out of DS before doing your combos in Water field” is out of this world. No other mechanics in the game punishes the player that use it like DS does for us. Even a trait line for healing on Hit/Crit/Minions is wasted when using it. Imagine what Lifetransfer could do if it would heal us. Now that 25 health per hit wouldn’t seem that bad.

We should just gain Lifeforce for being immobile, collecting the Lifeforce around us, with our hands in the air, while we mumble something like “Citizens of Kryta! Lend me your power!”.

After all we went through to have our downed HP fixed, I wouldn’t like to learn that we no longer have a downed state hehe.

Or just lower the cooldown and the swiftness effect, a traited spectral walk (Attunement) can still make you teleport farther than 1200 easily. Making the effect last like 30 sec would be too long, and by that time you may not even want to port back (and it would feel like a game of TRON’s light bike, well, maybe that would be a nice idea!).

I would still prefer having more access to it than a longer effect though.

Haha I did read your whole post but thanks. I’ll try to put it in even more simple term too.

Your SINGLE stack of 10 sec bleeding for 100 damage/sec will tick at the same time as the SINGLE stack of 10 sec of bleeding for 50 damage/sec your mesmer friend put on. So 150 damage/sec.

Now if you epidemic those 2 (TWO) stacks to everyone around, they will suffer 200 damage/sec because it take YOUR condition damage when transfering.

Hope you understand it now.

So you will see on the mob 2 (TWO) stack of bleed, each ticking for their own damage (you’ll only see your 100, not the 50 because it’s not yours, the mesmer will only see 50)

So for 9 sec, the mob takes 150/s.

Each application of Bleed has his own stack. Which means if you apply 1 Bleed for 5 sec and 1 Bleed for 10 sec, each of them deal damage at the same time for their own duration.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Effect_stacking

The only limit is the 25 stack on a target, and then it’s FIFO (First in First out). The small weak quick bleed from your Power mesmer friend may kick out your longer and stronger bleed, which is a shame really.

Edit: Ninja’ed by the Bleed master! /Bow

@Softspoken: I can help for movies and I have the will to test those things out and grab a couple of shots at each. There’s still a lot of bugs (or features) that I would like to have an official answer on and if it can help the devs to give us more feedback, I’m all for it.

If you roam and play a lot against small groups, it’s still one of the best Stunbreaker, removing the dreaded Immobilize that makes us even more of a sitting duck.

Due to the 3 utilities limit though, Spectral Walk or Wurm (or both) normally makes it to my bar. Both have handy teleports options that can be useful to confuse the enemy and escape.

I corrupted every Stability buff in the game, be it on lich, plague, tornado, rampage as one, daggerstorm and all the others transformations that grants it. It’s one of the reason I love my necro and hate transformation myself, one button cancels 20-30 sec of Stability (and the big cooldown that goes with it) and you can now play ping-pong with a Lich or a Tornado. Best game breaking plan in history.

Hehe I know you were bringing it up for good measure and fun but I’ll bite the bait. Plague seems so good for some peoples, yet everytime a necro tries it against me I just Spinal chiver, Corrupt boon or WoC his stability and off he goes with double-triple fear and all my group hits him from range. Necro can’t survive 20 sec in plague against 5 people who knows how to easily counter this, so even less against 15-20. And Plague AoE only hit up to 5 peoples anyway so zerg wins once again

Of course it can happens as WvW is full of players that doesn’t know how X professions works, but once they catch the trick, Plague doesn’t hold up as a survival tool vs other professions’ toolbox ( or toolkit ).

I love my hybrid, some love Conditionmancer, other Wellmancer and what not, but I think we all agree that due to AI/Pathing/Resistance to AoE issue in WvW, Minion master is far from the top choice.

You can find a lot of build idea in the Tutorials from Nemesis in the sticky. It’s a good foundation to start.

Bundles were fixed to save your Auto-attack if you set one, couple of patch ago.

Guys/Gals we finally made it! Thanks Jon for testing it more thoroughly and giving us a nice quick feedback!

And to whoever said to me that it wasn’t due to DS interaction way back when Targuil documented this bug, well I’ll be kitten I was right! Mommy, did you look at your grown up boy!!!

Keep up the good work! If anybody is on Northern or Denova and would like to test this in WvW, I’ll be glad to die for the cause on my multiples professions and record the time/tick/combat log to help them see the difference.

Video against 15-20 peoples or it never existed

First thing that doesn’t help the Vampire Traits:

It doesn’t scale with healing power. A mere 25 per hit is not going to save you. Thus showing us the video would help hehe.

Second thing:

You can’t benefit from all of those Vampiric traits when in DeathShroud, our class mechanic. First time I’ve seen a class mechanic hinder a trait choice like this. So if you pop your siphoning wells and at the same time you need to stay in DS to survive, it all goes to waste. Would be cool to heal our allies too but I’m digressing

Just came back from a 30 min WvW roaming with my friend who’s playing thief. We encounter 2 thiefs, down 1, gets him to almost half downed hp (can’t stomp), almost down the other, they managed to down me, I’m dead before my friend can either kill the thief or down the other. Each time I watch my combat log after my deaths I’ve suffered max 20k damage from all their abilities (Sometimes less even though I know the combat log isn’t that good). This is not a problem on my others professions, where we are supposed to have like 60k. I am not getting stomp on this profession, just burned down by crazy burst.

I hate to shelve him for now because I love the playstyle, but the frustration is building up and it kills a lot of the fun of small groups encounter we so frequently have on my tier, even more so by knowing we might not be bugged according to Anet. We really need to bring this up until the problem is acknowledged and fixed.

Latest news: Seems Jon Peters tested it and felt there was no bug…… Even after proof on our side that there is indeed a problem with our downed health.

We really need to bring this to light and have answers to our questions. If there’s no bug, can Anet please show us the number? I’m really sorry but I do die a lot faster, and cannot withstand a simple 2v2 or even 1v1 on my necro if I go down, and 2v2 are a joke to survive on all my other professions. It does need fixing.

Please keep it up there!

Keyword here is “Felt”….. You dont have numbers to bring it up? Show us numbers then, so that we can compare Combat log, health gained etc.

We have numerous tests that proved we have 1/3 health in downed state compared to others classes, and yet it’s been brought to this…

Even for me, there’s a limit to masochism.

Another point, our control is also weakened because a lot of gapcloser are not used as such, but as an escape mechanism. Swiftness is not mobility, it’s mandatory right now to just try to keep up. Call it the normal speed. Then you see them use a Gapcloser to move 600yd (and sometimes more because of swiftness) away from you, and you hope your Wurm was precast in the good direction so that you can try to come closer and chill/dark path.

I think they went in the good direction with Ride The Lightning, but I would go farther and require a target IN RANGE to even use to skills in the first place. Now that would give our Control tools a bit more value, and Swiftness would just not be the Normal Walking speed anymore so that stripping it would have even more value. Warriors, guardians, thiefs, mesmers, rangers and eles are all professions that can use gap closers the “wrong way” and on such a short cooldown that it makes our “Locking Horns” skills looks pale and depressive.

I’ve even had trouble getting away from a Warrior with my mesmer yesterday, Perma-swiftness, gapcloser non stop and must have had the 98% Immo/Cripple/Chill reduction build. He chased me around a good portion of the map until I was able to blink somewhere he couldn’t reach and he finally got bored. I was using Staff #2 (traited), Centaur rune (So perma-swiftness me too), Blink (Traited) and he was still keeping up, and when I say keeping up, he was in close combat range almost all half the time… If a mesmer can’t trail off a warrior on open grounds, imagine a necro.

It does seems like a glitch, it’s all tied up to your axe training trait boosting the Damage % field and thus boosting your EP from 3800 to 4600.

Also Axe training seems to give your Damage % a 20% increase instead of the 15% it should give, and even if you swap weapons the bonus stays.

I’ve also encountered some glitches that kept some Crit %, HP or Power from previous tries with different gear. If I restart the build from scratch it shows the real value.

Use it as a tool but keep in mind it’s not always right.

Both will trigger, one for 25, the other for around 90. (40 and 135 with Bloodthirst)

Just a shameless bump for more people to view/comment on my last one.

I feel that while we can’t roam as easily as some others classes in WvW (I still do it every time with good success), we’re really good in a controlled environment where peoples must fight us on our terms. I’ve also got some really good shots at wurm teleports and it’s potential too, but it’s less ideal when moving around the map.

Also for those who don’t know how it feels to deal with 1/3 less downed health, the last 30 sec of the videos are a quick compilation of quick death that I’ve gathered in only one evening. In some I’m just overwhelmed by a zerg so much health wouldn’t have mattered that much, but in others I’m against 2 peoples, and while one tries to spike me, the other killed me before the stomp finished. Imagine in a 2v2 scenario how this can turn good fights around the bad way.

Any and all comments welcomed!

I just think those casting time should be the same on ground instead.

I can farm karma faster than gold, so I did use my karma on all my 80 and I’ve made that karma back time after time. Even wasted 300k on Sunbeads to try to make money and craft Beaded weapons. Karma comes and goes and I’m never missing it. (No I don’t farm CoF and all the other farming spots, my limited hours of gameplay are only for fun things, namely WvW )

On the other hand, if you’ve done a lot of WvW and got some badges, I would suggest buying exotic armors at the Master Armor trader in your Citadel. For a cheap price (max 1g/piece) + a hundred badges you’ve got yourself a nice outfit, and there’s a lot to choose from now (Carrion, Rabid, Berserker, Cleric etc). Your karma can then be spent on things like Shards for your legendary.

Exotic weapons can also be bought in WvW for the same small price.

Depends on how much you farm gold vs karma I guess.

Both are even nicer