Guild Wars 2

Life steal should give Life Force as well as health.

Because Life Force is our defensive mechanic, all other professions defensive mechanics can be used within their regular health pool. Since we rely on both, stealing only life is only charging like half our survivability.

Or they could compensate that by just make it steal a lot more health.

Pinko.2076:

Can you please try your best? We’re doing massive amounts of PvE over here on our end.

Lol, we are, our objective was to get such a big weekend lead to drive them off coming out in such force. Going good, but its more up to CDs off hours ppl. If they rally not much we can do without the numbers then.

Not sure why we would want FA and DB tbh though, been there and its not competitive.

Even though Necro’s are about debuffs, we could use a few more boons. Boon stacking builds seem much more effective than condition builds, and its because conditions are so much easier to remove than boons.

Want to be the most effective you can for WvW, then have fun doing “PvE to PvP” just like other botched games in the past, of which Anet’s philosophy claimed to be against.

The time they are taking dragging their feet to get progression available in all formats is kind of ridiculous.

Point scaling based on in-map population is the easiest and best solution. And it not only helps NA heavy servers, but also Oceanic heavy ones, who would get the same break during their weak periods.

Right now they might as well not even have a scoreboard, as for anyone lower than about tier 2, off peak populations decide virtually every matchup.

It not only makes playing to win kind of pointless, but also saps energy and motivation from players, who get sick of spending gold and effort upgrading their holding and buying siege only to have it all run over without even anyone to use it or defend every single off hour period. Then players stop coming out to play later in the week, and you just get dead matches that end up screwing up the rating system. Because people just know no matter how well they play when they are on, there is nothing that can be done to overcome the imbalanced hours.

Rhyis.7058:

The funny thing about this conversation is that Mag is traditionally pretty bad at reset.

I think reset is the worst time to play and probably when the most casuals are out. Guilds don’t always get their people in where they want because of the queues. I don’t even bother, the huge zergs make combat a slideshow and its just a bunch of spamming because of how massive the fights are.

The real work gets done during the week I think. Of course some matches aren’t close enough for that to matter, but many are too.

Ninein.4782:

I think ppl are saying NA Kaineng perform poorly at reset in T3 and T4 when numbers are even which translate not being as good. The WM “zombies” in EB behave in a very unusual matter and that is what being discussed.

Kaineng has a ton of ppl though, ton of bandwagoners, not the same as specific guilds being discussed. And their strength is off peak time relative to NA not the 6 hours or so following a reset.

They also performed rather mediocre at last reset, but a match is 7 days not just reset. It’s as much about perseverance in a close match and not giving up, as having a fast start. In my experience many players on every server are very fairweather and give up quickly. And the final scores never indicate the true difference that should be in the score, but rather a bloated difference from so many people refusing to keep playing during the week. Which is why we had so much rubber banding back and forth in the old rating system.

Ninein.4782:

So what exactly wins in WvW? I don’t get any of that from your post.

Well for one discipline in sharing the same goal. Getting your 20 people to the objective and taking it over with laser like focus, instead of say half going rambo breaking off to chase and kill 10 people in a passing mini-zerg, let alone chasing one person, of which probably wasn’t threatening to do anything productive anyway. But the more individualistic player simply can’t resist such opportunities to display superior ‘skill’, or stroke the ego, and admittedly may be out in WvW more for that than anything else. But not the same thing as maximizing your impact on the scoreboard.

This is one reason why I was looking forward to seeing the result of this matchup, such a clash of styles, its a pity it isn’t more balanced numerically in coverage.

But I think calling these guys out as no skill as individual players is so missing the point. They don’t function as individual players they are a part of a sum, of a machine, its all in the name. They DPS as a unit, defend as a unit, fight as a unit.

Anyone who plays a more support oriented character can understand this quite easily, even if not taking to the same level of extreme. Can’t say I would enjoy being a cog 24/7, but can still appreciate the efficiency achievable with such a model.

sinfulape.6301:

It is interesting and actually takes a lot of training. Two big reasons why you need to stack into a ball are that firstly enemy aoes are limited to 5 targets. Secondly friendly buffs are also limited.
Being in a ball means auto-revive, as soon as a friendly sees the revive option and do not forget the benefits of chained-regen. The need to keep stacked tightly however does restrict movement. Also, the usual solo build would not work quite well in group movements, so it requires some willingness on part of the single player to sacrifice solo ability. Furthermore, many skills are reserved for group use, usually called by the commander, or party leader for instance portals, TW, buffs, aoes, reflect walls, etc.
What I’m trying to say is, group battle would be different from large scale chaotic skirmishes, which are just large numbers of solo players battling it out. Also most groups would not share critical information such as set builds, choice of combos, group composition, set maneuvers etc, keeping most other people in the dark, partially explaining why it seems so interesting.

I think that’s a good explanation and there is a method to the madness. I was not particularly impressed with WM either at the small scale level in their last matchup, and I regrettably did not get to see any of their bigger actions firsthand. But what they are going for is not small scale effectiveness or open field combat, but achieving macro level successes and not getting distracted by things that don’t matter on the scoreboard. And judging by that measure, they are very successful. I think a lot of people still fail to get what wins in WvW.

With the disconnect here, we could even go as far as saying its a cultural level difference in approach. Individualism vs Collectivism.

Johje Holan.4607:

What? How did CD take the lead? Score update with map please

I was sure Yaks was going to run away with it.

Yaks take over during NA primetime, but CD has been cutting into the lead heavily overnight and into NA mornings. People could play longer on the weekends to challenge the off hours, but now on the weekdays CD is making up more ground for longer periods.

SBI seems to have a strong period as well, I’ve seen them run the lead for short stretches but its less consistent.

It’s still been a great match, but would be even better if our strong periods overlapped a bit more.

DivineBeing.2086:

Man, I have been watching Kaineng since they were rolling intier 8.

I honestly thought they would at least start to slow down in tier 3 ut they are still chugging along.

This makes me wonder even more how Kaineng would fair up to BG.

It didn’t really live up to the hype. And will probably be several more weeks before they find a challenge thanks to the shuffle. Also coming out of this result and with the new system, Mag is looking at -14 rank drop, is that the biggest in the history of the game so far?

Seren.6850:

if people join your squad they can no longer see other commanders on the map, I guess it was done with good intention

This is a big problem, they could have just had ‘your’ commander have his Icon changed to a special color or something.

It’s helpful for every player to know where all the commanders are on the map, where battles are taking place, where they might temporarily head to if lost or separated, where to avoid, etc, just general battlefield awareness, it really restricts it.

Oozo.7856:

I’ve already said it. A thief or elem with high mobility should never lose a fight to a class with low mobility.

Pretty much. They lose fights, they just don’t die, unless they are bad. I’ve run off so many eles and theives in WvW but often don’t get a badge for my effort as they are 50 yards away looking for an easier mark or planning a 2nd or 3rd attempt.

This is a big advantage in WvW since for everyone else its a long run if you lose a fight. The only place it isn’t such a big advantage is when you actually have to hold your ground to capture something, such as a camp or lord’s room, etc.

Thankfully the whole gist of WvW involves just those very things. Doesn’t mean Anet is done balancing of course.

I think the idea is that all the servers have accumulated way too much baggage from release to present, and now almost every single server is totally different in makeup and player base than when the game launched, due to all the mass exodus’s and bandwagoning.

Now with paid transfers enforced they expect servers to much more retain their same core base than they used to, and they want the ratings to begin to more fairly represent what each server is able to earn, once it settles down after a couple weeks.

MattyP.6954:

When they balanced the classes (and nerfed AoE), they made zerging more essential to WvWvW dominance.

Which is exactly what they want, it’s no accidental result, can’t believe how people haven’t figured this out yet.

They would have to throw out the downed system altogether to reduce the effectiveness of zergs, and its not going to happen.

Should be interesting to see what the February patch brings. Most likely more tweaking regarding sPVP and no thought to WvW.

On a recent chat, Anet bragged that all the classes are nearly evenly represented in the game, problem was they were talking about PvE. Where they did a pretty decent job. But its definitely not the case once you go into WvW or PvP, and they need to be asking why is that the case.

The players that impress me are usually ones not playing one of the ‘big three’.

Tier 1 right now would actually be YK/EB/SF. We have had good fights with EB, but SF would likely be an innocent bystander.

There is no right answer, depends on a hundred things. Your build, playstyle, what parts of the game you play, etc.

But what I would suggest is just you don’t need to go all one or the other. If you feel too tanky, slowly switch one piece of more DPS stat gear in at a time until you feel at a comfortable balance for your Necro.

Nemesis.8593:

instead of DS 1, how about you scout the field of battle while you re-position yourself / run. You don’t have to go all spartan on your enemies, you can make a small tactical retreat to heal up and come back stronger then before…

Necromancer is poor at running away, I don’t ever use DS1 because everything else is on cooldown, but rather when you are being focus fired and your health is low. Unforunately, Necro gets focus fired a lot because opponents know we don’t have strong mobility or escapes. That is also why the extra 2K health I talked about is so valuable. It can help you not have to dive into DS quite so early or so long.

Then again I like to mix it up in small encounters too, even soloing camps and such where I might run into 1v1s. If you are a Necro that just hangs around in a zerg or in sieges, where we are indeed good as conditionmancers, can probably get by with less survivability.

They added something, but not worth the trouble with all the hacking.

They also need to be brought back without stat buffs. Let them grant points just like a tower or something. Or other non combat benefits, like more karma or whatever.

There should be choices. Not just for dailies, but for monthlies too. You don’t want to have to WvW? Fine, pick something else. You don’t want to have to run dungeons, fine pick something else.

The game shouldn’t dictate a strict list of everything you have to do.

I’m actually happy for the PVE players that they don’t have to go into WvW if they don’t want to.

Unfortunately, the opposite is not true. For WvW players, this is turning into early WoW all over, where you have to PvE to keep up with PvP progression. It’s totally against everything they sold this game as and their design philosophy.

They promise more options down the line but its been months since fractals have come out and no love for or paths for WvW players to get this progression in their game mode, worse, they are introducing even more new items to increase the gap between PvE and WvW players, with the only way to quickly acquire them, by doing monthlies that force you into dungeons.

How long is it going to take for Anet to stay true to their intentions? Really hoping the February patch solves this for WvW or it will begin to look like they just don’t care about keeping this part of their playerbase.

Kuldred.2436:

At 30 laurels per month from dailys, plus 20 more for the monthly makes it just over 2 months.

You only get 10 from a monthly, and the whole PoV is from a WvW or PvE player that does not like grinding dungeons, therefore the monthly is out of the picture altogether as currently you must run dungeons for your monthly.

I don’t think players should be forced to run dungeons nor go into WvW for 50 kills if they do not want to (and why do we as WvW players, want people out there that don’t want to be, only there to collect their achievement and leave – with no care for a bigger team picture).

There should be alternative methods of both finishing dailies, monthlies, and acquiring all the top gear via entirely the game mode of your choice. That has been pretty much the dev team’s pitch line from the beginning philosophy of this game and still until now, but they are really rolling the ball slowly to get it all implemented to live up to that.

I think some of the earlier comments about Bleed still being your bread and butter ring true to me. Terror should be a supplement to a bleed/condition build not its central core in my opinion. But you do not need 6 fears for 100% extra fear duration (or even close to 100%) to be well worth it. Nor do you have to sacrifice very much in the way of condition damage to get there.

Longer fears actually work in great harmony with high condition damage, because it increases the amount of time that opponents must suffer under condition damage.

Also want to make one input on Rennoko’s comment about never using DS1. When I ran almost an identical build to his, I also hated ever having to use DS1, but I found myself in situations where I was in DS to eat damage, waiting for a heal to come up and had no choice but to use it. In my experience normal health ran out way faster than LF, which is where you ended up in before you died.

With having dropped master of terror I needed to go 10 points into spite to get fear respectable enough duration, and I used to hate spite, but having tried it, I think 10 points is not bad at all, because Reaper’s Might is nice a little trait that gives you a reason (or at least some benefit) to firing off 1-3 Life Blasts while you are sponging damage. 2 or 3 stacks of might for about 15 seconds when you come out of DS will give you a nice little damage spike through nearly your whole rotation. Just an alternative to put out there.

Also would agree that sPVP tests are of little relevancy here, when these type of builds are so reliant on the usable food buffs in PVE/WvW. They pretty much don’t work without it.

Was going to make a new topic on this, but reinforcing this old one will do.

I put a lot of effort and money into getting the materials to craft the Corrupted Branch and was utterly disappointed with the weak particle effects and overall visual. The staff looks almost plain and ugly, and not in any way befitting of one of the harder to get/make items in the game, because 90% of it is just a dull blue color that does nothing.

I think its so lackluster I use an easy to get karma staff from a 40ish zone over it as my main weapon.

Please consider giving the shaft of this staff some frost effects, similar to what the other corrupted weapons get, as well as making it continue to glow when its holstered. Even when its out the effect at the top of the staff is a very weak one compared to other rare items and needs to be made more visually appealing.

Please view the comparison pictures in the OP, or here: Greatsword vs Staff, it is evident that the sword has way more pizazz and the staff needs some love. I suspect the Scepter is in need of similar attention, but I do not own it to be sure.

Weird, not sure how it makes sense in any way. I’ll take it, but would rather have conditions damage siege.

WvW gear has Power/Vitality/Toughness as well. But you need badges to buy it.

So it was mentioned in the February preview that eventually you will get a choice of subtasks you can choose to fulfill your daily. If you don’t want to craft a number of things maybe you can choose to do jumping puzzling instead for instance. My question is, is this going to extend to monthly achievements.

I.e in the current monthly you need 7 Fractals completed I believe, and personally I’m not a fan of running dungeons in this game, nor grinding them. I know some PVE players don’t care for the required WvW kills for the monthly. Can we hope to see more selectable options for monthly achievements as well so that players can play the parts of the game they enjoy most, and still get common rewards that everyone is expected to get?

It definitely goes off, but you might not even notice it a lot in big fights, which will trick you into thinking its not working on subsequent ones.

Chessrook.8643:

Placeholder models essentially says “Yes, there’s something here. We don’t know WHAT but it’s something.”

If this works, I don’t care if the placeholder is a giant pinata, just show me where its at.

TBH, this doesn’t seem like it was meant as a profession balancing patch. Not much for anyone across the board, more in the line of fixes or oversights, than really balancing.

Stinks that we have to wait more, but shouldn’t look at this patch as any kind of ‘fixing the Necro’ type patch.

I’d grant you it could be slightly more valuable in a zerg fight, or farming mobs, but these are not really our critical areas. Which are more sustaining against other attrition classes head to head, and in those cases, you are only going to have one target for this trait to work against (maybe 2 if a pet class, or other Necro) and in those cases, its pretty darn meh.

Even if hitting the AOE cap (5) on all your AOE’s, at high crit rate, its unlikely to generate more than around 10% for a full two weapon set rotation. Compare that to Soul Marks, which guarantees 13% Life Force from 4 abilities on staff alone, regardless if you hit just one target, and we can see a big difference.

I think 50% on the proc rate, or even 60%, would make it competitive.

Reanimator gets a lot of play because its foisted on you and many people have it being so early in its tree. But to me Reaper’s Precision is almost as silly and worthless of a trait. Sure you don’t have to pick it, but it would be nice if you could and would want to.

Curious, does anyone use this or like it?

Reaper’s Precision: You have a 33% chance to gain 1% life force on critical hits.

To me, this trait is just a joke. And its sad, because lack of solid life force generation is I think one of our biggest problems as an attrition class. But this is even worse than the limp Signet of Undeath which gives you a measley 1% Life Force per 3 seconds, in combat.

But Reaper’s Precision, even if you have a high crit build, let’s say 50% crit, this trait is unlikely to give you more than 3% Life Force even in a quite long battle. For example It takes me about a full rotation of abilities, on both weapons, plus Death Shroud to put down the veteran sPVP mobs in the mists. That’s a good 20 attacks or so, this trait is going to give me 3% Life Force generation in such a fight. That’s not even one extra second of Life Force’s natural decay rate.

Please buff this sorry trait Anet.

Heck, even if you don’t want to run the event – as servers that need it are probably map capped, and will summon a zerg in response – at least put enough in the ring to trigger the NPCs running to the tower, as it will create a nice distraction to go do something somewhere else.

The whole event still feels cheap to me though. It restarts way too fast. And he has way too much health.

I sympathize with the opening post, WvW is not supposed to that technical in this game to where you need specific classes to carry out specific tasks, and if you don’t have them, you need to recruit or stop your whole gameplan till you find them. But with both Eles protecting siege, and Mesmer portals, we are starting to get into this area.

You can say just don’t do it, then have your commander and teammates ticked because you are not helping the team. A player shouldn’t be put in that position.

More importantly it overly magnifies the importance of some professions over others to undesirable levels.

I think the truth is there is a certain percentage of migrating players that not only like zerging with overwhelming numbers, but only like zerging with easy victories. And the paid transfers won’t solve this because its going to be extremely cheap, or maybe even free, to transfer down to low pop servers.

So as this group of free riders we’ll call them are on a server that goes up and gets spanked, they will simply eye the next bandwagon server near the bottom, probably tag along with the first good guild that moves down, and then repeat the same cycle again till that new server gets toward the top and gets challenged again.

This would not work because there is too much fluidity in transfers. Last week we played IoJ, and they barely field 10 people on several maps even in busy time periods. Were the other two servers, that did still have healthy populations, then supposed to be locked at only 20 per map too or something? That’s hundreds of people not being able to play the game they paid for in the way they want.

The way to solve it is easy, point scaling. You take objectives when its easy, due to huge number imbalances, you get less points. Harder the objective is to take (more resistance) should be worth more.

Anet’s design really implies that siege is intended for dealing with large numbers (since it has a target cap of like 50), and that not much is really to be decided in open field at all, since kills are not worth points, and there is not good tactical reasons to be fighting over worthless empty space.

They are going the opposite direction apparently and actually nerfing AoE, I don’t really see where that is necessary, except as individual class balancing, but clearly they are trying to push certain kind of combat in WvW.

Adaneshade.2409:

I can see how someone that actually cares about the server rankings would not see the point of what the OP is looking for. There are many of us, though, that play WvW simply for the roaming PvP and care nothing for the ranking system or objectives.

Seems a dumb way to play when you are never going to get a fair fight. Roamers lose to bigger numbers, whine zerg, but seem fine when its them with the numbers, ganking smaller numbers. If you have 5 and run into 8, is that a fair roam fight? Probably only if you win. The odds of however many you have, be it 3, 5, or 8 running into a perfectly even fight, that is completed without more from either side interfering in WvW is miniscule. But yet they still just bleat endlessly on these forums about it as if this is not understood.

Believe Colin talked about instituting custom arena style matches down the line, hopefully, and that can be the solution and end of the pollution about this.

DaoC and WAR had dedicated roaming groups because the core mechanics of WvW in those games were left wanting, I would say failed actually, and many didn’t care about it. That is not the case in GW2.

Sounds like a bunch of people threatening to leave, no one really leaving. Bout as dumb as the don’t join Mag thread.

Think you would definitely find more success in lower tiers.

However, the map design does present a conundrum here. It is true that opening up the maps more would probably allow small groups to accomplish more, but if you do that, how do you prevent the game from becoming musical keeps. Warhammer suffered from this, where a lot of times groups would just circle each other capping the same keeps and never fighting. The tight map structure in GW2 allows an actual front to develop in the warfare, such that you have to advance on the map more as in a traditional war, one step at a time taking territory. Back capping or raids deep into enemy territory is certainly possible, even to ninja a garrison, but it is not easy, nor should it be.

It’s more of a playstyle preference I agree. It’s true once in a while I may not get the second terror tick, and lose a fraction of a second on fears, but I just prefer having the 2k more health, esp with the toughness you naturally have it goes a long way.

I saw in the vid you had 19k something health, and this is about what I had when I was into Soul Reaping, I just felt kind of squishy as this health level. I.e. in long fights with disappearing thieves, I saw my health slowly ticking away, with no way to catch up. So much so that I ended up having to add some power/vitality/toughness gear to get my health where I wanted. This costed me damage. But with the extra 2k from Blood Magic I can put all my rabid gear back on and get back to the same damage I originally had but with more health.

My experience on getting downed, most zergs will finish you off, and it feels odd to take a trait that is built to help you when you’ve kind of already lost.

A tradeoff I also liked in switching things up, I ended up with 80% duration to all conditions, (and 100% bleed which doubles Barbed Precision, 93% just misses this and you lose about 1000 damage every 20 attacks), instead of when I had Master of Terror, I only had 50% on all other conditions (except bleed). So this is a gain for things like poison, chill, weakness, etc.

Also one other preference for this build, I like Master of Corruption over Lingering Curses. Lingering curses is only giving me 3 seconds at the end of an already 10 second bleed (scepter 1) and a little extra bleed and weakness on Enfeebling Blood past 20 seconds, those are usually cleansed long before getting to that point. Having Blood is Power, Corrupt Boon, or Epidemic up 20% sooner I think is a much bigger damage boost.

But I would recommend either of these really for condition WvW builds.

Straegen.2938:

Unless the math has changed points in power directly contribute to total damage output at a much better ratio than pumping points into condition damage. Putting points into condition damage is almost a waste by comparison. Even condition builds should consider power over condition.

It’s not so cut and dry as that. Depends on duration and what % of your base damage comes from condition. Running a condition build on Necro up to 70% of your damage can be condition, and adding equal amount of condition can double the damage of the same power, provided conditions run their full time. Of course in PVP they often don’t and then you have to assess as a tradeoff how much potential damage you want to risk getting removed vs having some more consistent type in direct that comes from power.

But there is also something to be said for straight overwhelming the condition removal of opponents, and you need a lot for that. Bonus of condition over direct to attrition playstyle is its fire and forget, you don’t have to stay in the battle, even in range for it to keep doing damage.

Well we have played both Mag and Kaineng within a week at YB, and Kaineng seems no stronger than Mag to me. Perhaps a bit better Oceanic coverage, but if Mag is having a tough time in T3, I will be surprised if Kaineng can succeed in T2 immediately.

Thread could be outdated as soon as tomorrow.

Duration isn’t really our problem. Most of our bleeds are pretty decent length anyway, and we can get up to the length cap if we sacrifice some damage. The problem with duration is that it just gets cleared off in PVP too easily. If you lose 10 stacks of bleed, you just lost 1000 damage per second, that it probably took the first 5 seconds of the fight to put on, what other class has to deal with that? By that time you can be down to half health or lower against a burst profession, while only having done maybe 1000 direct damage of your own.

What I would like to see have longer duration is Poison, to give us a second source of attrition damage that stays on the target more often so that if they remove bleed, we are still actually doing some damage.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Each axe auto-attack only has a power scaling of .35 per hit (remember, two hits per skill use). It’s no surprise that you’re not getting damage. For comparison, our scepter auto attack is the same ratio for the first two hits of the chain and .5 for the third. Our dagger chain is .45 (x2), .7, 1.2.

Our highest land weapon skill power ratio is Putrid Mark/Necrotic Bite at 1.2. Life Blast doesn’t quite count, but it pops in at 1.4 when life force >50%.

Underwater, it is Frozen Abyss at a 3.0 ratio. Yeah, that skill hits HARD in a power build.

*note: all values above are from my own calculations using a formula supplied to me.

Think you are overcomplicating it.

10% damage gain on any ability seems somewhere a tad over 100 power, between 105- 110, an odd number, but its consistent. If your ability does 500 to start out 100 power will add just under 50 to the tooltip and so on. Adding 1015 power in the mists will almost exactly double every single damage ability you have.

If it didn’t work this way and you added 100 power to scepter and it gained 5 damage on the tootip and Abyss gained also just 5 damage from the same power, fast attacks would be way too good with power.

So the bigger damaging abilities gain more from it but its not really a bigger DPS gain, because they are offset by longer recharge times. In other words, think how many scepter hits you can get in between each Putrid Mark on a 25 sec cooldown. But no matter what combination of attacks you use to deal say 3000 damage, 100 power is going to have provided the same addition in the end.

I ran a build like this for over a month, maybe two, and while it is very good, my final analysis with it was, I do not agree that siphoning is useless in WvW, and I ended up going that way and liking it better. The problem with soul reaping for fear duration is you really have no way to sustain in battles, since this build gives virtually no life force or normal health regeneration.

If you don’t kill someone by the time you’ve exhausted your first few fears, they often will take the upper hand. Especially classes that regen like ele’s, guardians, and BM rangers.

Going back 20 points into Blood Magic instead of Soul Reaping, you can get some sustainability back (siphon traits + regen at 90%) and more sustainability means living longer to cast more fears. The siphoning can easily give you over 1000-2000 health back even in a 1v1, and several thousand more in a siege fight. As well as in sieges and zerg fights your marks will hit multiple people and each crit will heal you individually.

20 points of Blood Magic also gives you 2000 more HP which is also 2000 more HP in Death Shroud, which is better than just the 20% extra death shroud you get from the SR line. The idea in this trade is to stay in main form longer as that is where all your damage is, instead of in death shroud more where you do gimp damage as a conditionmancer, and only need to bounce in for the fear.

The cost of this trade (at least for me) was losing +100% fear down to +80%. But the real trick is even at 80% you will almost always get the second tick of damage from Terror as long as they already have conditions on them.

I also find Reaper’s Proection overrated, the cooldown is just too long. It did save my life at times when thieves jumped me, but in bigger fights it often gets wasted on some trivial ability (even a pet stun) then it gives you nothing for 90 seconds. In most sustained engagements you will not have Reaper’s Protection to help you except for the very first CC. If you like to roam as a necro alone in wvw, god forbid, but then it might be well worth it. But most good players will stun break long before Reaper’s runs 4 seconds.

Anyhow, that is just my comments as someone who has played a fear build, and I encourage people to test what is best for them. Keep up the good work Nemesis.

Not much to say but +1, said all these same things many times over. Hopefully Anet will start listening at some point.

If we are to be attrition we need better survival and sustaining abilities beside just a second health pool which is really a big sponge that reduces your own damage too, such that using it means you stop attrition damage on your opponent at the same time. It’s more like a stall than a way to win.

Several builds you really can’t generate life force back at all, maybe 10% at best through an entire fight, often less. Laughable compared to some of the healing and regen other classes get. To get more more LF regen, means sacrificing damage to absurd levels.

If you can get people to stand in your wells, in a well build, maybe Necro can approximate attrition, but that is only viable in sPVP, nowhere else in the game, you simply walk / roll out of them.

It depends what you like doing in WvW really. Almost any class can be good in a team situation with the right build, and I would definitely recommend Necro for small group or siege warfare from experience. For soloing, yak hunting, ganking, Thief or Ele are obvious.

All around, most versatile, I think Mesmer might rate the highest. Can’t speak from playing one, but I cannot see one area they can’t excel at if played well. And of course portal is extremely useful in numerous team scenarios.