As to the lack of “endgame”, IMO endgame isn’t something thats temporary, its something that stays around and can be done now, later, whenever. Not only in a given time frame (determined by the company). How is this going to be endgame content for future players?
Oh, that endgame. That’s Fractals. I have problems with how they were implemented, but that is the current PvE Endgame. Whether or not Fractals are a good implementation of Endgame PvE is a different discussion altogether.
That said, I’m never going to outright complain about a company giving me more content basically for free (BL Chest gambling aside, as I never do that).
The team that was working on the living story content should really be working on new endgame PvE things. We don’t need temporary things, especially when they end there is nothing that was accomplished permanently and it will just be forgotten, like a holiday.
The living story content IS the endgame PvE.
Adding a bunch of extra gear skins, a bunch of new DEs, a new dungeon, and new achievements and still people are complaining about a lack of “endgame?”
so they don’t want us to farm, so they put legendary with it’s legendary farm, and fixed it with DR?
i would expect “no more farming”, not “u need to farm but we will not allow it”
Or you could buy Gems and get the fuzzy feeling of putting an ANet Dev’s kids through college.
At current exchange rates Twilight is going for about $1,100 US, and you can have it today!
I’ve done numerous dungeon runs since the game’s release, and content that used to be challenging is now trivial. I know the best return on time (as far as gold) is CoF P1 speed runs. What I’m curious about is if there’s a point where equipping full Magic Find and Gold Boost will make any path almost as lucrative if you do a full clear.
I find speed runs very boring gameplay, and miss the playstyle of older MMOs where a full-clear was not only mandatory but desirable because of the increase in drops. I enjoyed building dungeon groups with the intent of spending a few hours inside killing every mob and boss available, but currently that’s just not worth the time.
Is it possible to make it worth the time, while also making it more challenging, by using Magic Find gear? I don’t know enough about the drop tables to say for sure, so I thought I’d ask the forums and find out more.
What do you guys think?
Support isn’t something you build for. It’s something you do. The reason the meaning seems broad is because it is broad. Anytime you do something to keep your party members from dying, or to enable them to do more damage, you are supporting your party. All that AoE Might/Vigor/Fury? That’s support. Guardian spamming AoE Protection/Regen? Support. That Necro that’s keeping Weakness/Vuln/Chill on everything? Yeah, that’s reducing damage taken and increasing damage output. It’s support too.
Oh, and sometimes people heal each other….I guess.
So any preference as to which trait setup you like best yet? Also what kind of gear/trait do you pick? I have tried to run dagger/axe before and failed miserably and just kind of decided it couldn’t be done. Now I see a lot of people doing well with it but they never actually give their gear/traits. I would love to give it a try.
YouTube Comments:Knights w/? all-around jewelry.
Love the idea.
Needs more Siphon.
I got a fever, and the only cure is more Siphon!
As for real advice, I’d say try to work Siphoning Wells in there. I wouldn’t go with ALL wells, but at least one or 2 would help for when you get outnumbered.
Also, I think Dwayna’s runes are overkill since we can get regen whenever we need it from weapon skills. I’ve been playing around with Earth/Grove rune set for extra Protection up-time, mostly to ramp up healing/siphon efficiency. It works fairly well, but I haven’t really run it through it’s paces. Also, I’m terrible at WvW so that makes testing builds a huge challenge.
Ranger is “hard”. Being a good Ranger is “really hard”. However, with that higher skill ceiling comes some really rewarding gameplay.
Furthermore, when people see a good Ranger, I’m pretty sure some of them mess their pants. That is well worth it ;-)
I don’t play a Ranger, but I lurk on your forums because the Necro forums are fairly dead most of the time and you guys have more videos.
The above quote is true, from my perspective. I’m an average player, perhaps below average in skill. I’ve absolutely destroyed bad Rangers. I’ve been handily beaten by decent Rangers. I’ve been totally destroyed by good Rangers. Playing a Ranger badly is very easy to do. I rolled a Ranger alt just to get a feel for how their skills worked, and after reading all the pet abilities, utilities, and weapon skills I still have no clue how to play it properly. I haven’t experienced that with any other profession. It’s normally pretty easy to read the skills/traits list and know how a given profession is supposed to work. Rangers aren’t quite that simple, which has got to make them very difficult to fix/balance. It’s probably the amount of pet options you have, but I don’t know.
If they buff you guys too much then bad players will do “okay,” but good players will be unstoppable. If they don’t change enough (or nothing) then it’ll remain a few die-hards that rock with a fairly complex class, while everyone else writes it off as bad.
You forgot to mention how often you used the Immobilize on your Bone Fiend. Rather how often you tried to use the Immobilize on your Bone Fiend, it went on Cooldown, and nothing happened.
My personal favorite part is me trying to use my Bone Fiends Explosion, and it not landing most of the time because they’re not actually near the target.
Thing is I want to use it as much as possible cause they almost instantly die anyway.
Did you get an answer? As a ranger with a mix of cleric+soldier playing 0/0/30/10/30 with 3 passive regen and lots of regen up-time I like the idea of heavy power builds that have huge HPS.
First Blood minor trait = Regen at 90% Health
Staff #2 = AoE Regen
Focus #4 = Single Target Vuln/Regen that bounces and stacks every time it bounces back to you, so it can be random how much it stacks
We can get a pretty high up-time on regen if we want to. The problem is that every time we enter DS we lose all healing. That can reduce the effectiveness of regen/siphon builds if your playstyle involves a lot of swapping into DS.
You forgot to mention how often you used the Immobilize on your Bone Fiend. Rather how often you tried to use the Immobilize on your Bone Fiend, it went on Cooldown, and nothing happened.
My personal favorite part is me trying to use my Bone Fiends Explosion, and it not landing most of the time because they’re not actually near the target.
Thing is I want to use it as much as possible cause they almost instantly die anyway.
I didn’t notice this most of the time until I traited Death Nova. The fact that there’s 2 minions up makes it even harder because of how often one minion would be in melee, I’d hit the button, and it’d blow up the other minion that was hiding behind me for some reason.
This is the best Lich Form #1 spam I’ve ever seen. Nobody Lich spams like Talentless!
In all seriousness, this was a really fun video. Thanks for posting it. You had some good fights in there, even if your opponents didn’t really know what to do. Maybe it’s b/c you weren’t bleed-spamming them, so they weren’t sure you were actually a Necro.
Random Newbie:WTH? That Necro just hit me, like with a knife! And it hurt! What do I do?!?
(edited by PinCushion.7390)
You forgot to mention how often you used the Immobilize on your Bone Fiend. Rather how often you tried to use the Immobilize on your Bone Fiend, it went on Cooldown, and nothing happened.
I’m stuck at 98% Map Completion, thanks to 2 Vistas that are always owned by another server in EB, and a skillpoint in a borderlands that I haven’t felt like bothering with yet.
I’m fine with this. I don’t mind being patient. It’s a part of a Legendary Item, so it’s supposed to be time-consuming and somewhat hard. The rest of the Legendary ingredients are just farmables, which is the opposite of hard. I’ll either wait until my server has Red and get it the easy way, or I’ll WvW more and participate in sieges until we, against all odds, take those 2 keeps. That would actually approach a “Legendary” accomplishment, which would be fine by me.
Also, I missed my chance when the game first came out to get these vistas the easy way by free-transfer. Part of it was just not caring, but another part was that it seemed like such a cop-out way to doing something that was meant to be difficult.
(edited by PinCushion.7390)
Agreed. We need to figure out how we want to handle this, however, so I can’t say when we’ll do something about it or what the nature of the solution will be.
Put a mini pet in the store that sells for 2k gems. This mini pet picks up all your bags automagically. You would have a gold mine with this.
They used this exact system in another Korean MMORPG I played a long time ago.. they gouged people even more by making them a rental (you had to buy a recharge every month)
The original was a monkey (picture attached) they expanded it to bunny rabbits, squirrels etc.. you could change it to pick up certain types of loot and set the radius, too.
Aion did much the same thing, with vanity pets picking up loot, refreshing your consumable buffs for you, and warning you when PvP enemies were nearby. The pets were too expensive, looked cool, and were generally available in-game if you didn’t want to buy them with cash.
It has to do with the trail and pulses. The trail hangs around and pulses for quite a while, stacking poison. Also your DS 2 does the same thing. It is sad that we don’t have any land skills as awesome as our water skills.
CPC and Death Nova both do this, but the trick is stacking them on top of each other so they pulse together. I think Chillblains does the same thing, but I don’t remember.
Anyway, CPC + explode Bone Minion w/ Death Nova = Very Long Poison/Weakness + Combo Finish for more Weakness.
Putrid Mark the self weakness off of you if you care for even more Weakness duration + another finisher for more Weakness still.
Toss Chillblains on top for some Chill and more Poison so they have to hang out in the field longer, or break the combos up a bit so you can reapply when they cleanse stuff.
It’s a nifty trick that comes in handy sometimes, but I dropped it because it’s not really potent enough to be the focus of so many slots. Still it was neat to be able to maintain permanent Weakness/Poison on stuff so easily.
Soul Marks works much the same way, where you get 3% per target hit with your AoE marks.
except it doesnt. it’s 3% per mark, no matter how many ppl you hit (in pvp at least)
Wow, totally wrong about that. Thanks for the correction. I swap in and out of Soul Marks, so I guess I never noticed.
Why? Because we don’t have enough armor to make anyone need conditions to kill us, even if we invest very heavily into Toughness. Add to this that P/P/Crit Damage scale together, so it’s always a good idea to get more than you had before.
Toughness/Armor are on a diminshing scale, such that after you get a certain amount it doesn’t make any sense to get more.
I think this was designed to promote balanced builds and gearing, but has done the exact opposite because ’Zerk stats are seen as the only “good deal” available.
That said, I still prefer taking Toughness as a primary or secondary stat because I enjoy the playstyle it provides.
I don’t see why we’d need more LF generation on Staff.
We already get 3% per hit on Staff 1, which pierces. That’s huge. In zergy situations or larger PvE fights I routinely get 6-9% per attack.
Soul Marks works much the same way, where you get 3% per target hit with your AoE marks.
Take the trait to reduce minion cooldowns and just let them die.
Nem put out a good healing guide for Clerics and Necro. It looked somewhat interesting from a team perspective, but compared to the ele or guardian version, it was pretty lack-luster. Also it was completely reliant on Lich form for DPS.
I don’t see any healing builds being viable until they allow either a little bit of healing or a little bit of life force generation to work while in DS. Do something about that and I will be the first one in line for a full set of clerics to try it out.
Difference between necro and other possible healers (except rangers) is that while the others can do bigger heals or a stronger burst, you can give one strong timed regenerative boost that is combined with the cc conditions necro naturally has, all on a 32 second cooldown and on that front only getting outshined if the ele has a energy sigil and the endurance regen food with perma vigor (what they can without real problems, but dont seem to for some reason) and when the guardian has his tome out.
The main difference again are that booning your allies is much more obvious than crippling your enemy damage output, in league its like comparing taric, soraka and sona to thresh, morgana and lulu; sure different and better teams will know what each of the characters worth its, but when someone who just wants to win by giving little thought into how each character works for fights, zone control, item/gold/item slot efficiency and actual love for the character/role they play (reason why you see something like 4 adc and 1 tank compositions in low tier games and angry junglers or support in higher tier games making them feel like a chore by not doing the specifics of the role even with communication and if asked politely, “since if they cannot get their role, thus their fun, noone should”).God i really hope that people that read this know league or ill be the fool talking jibber-jabber…
:) I have no idea what you just said
Translation:
Necro have good healing and make up for lack of buffs with debuffs.
People like buffs more because they’re more obvious, easy to use, and consistent.
Stuff in this “League of Legends” game is similar, but if you don’t play League that part is just meaningless gibberish.
It isn’t a siphon build, but Nemesis has an Axe/Life Blast build that does very respectable ranged damage. It’s pretty squishy, but that’s Glass Cannon for you.
@Bas.7406 So you agree that necro is lacking in the reflection vigor block ?invulnerability?, or do Death shroud still make up for all that :>.
Death Shroud makes up for Invulnerability unless you are condition damage specced where you can’t build LF fast enough to make up for the loss.
Reflection is too strong in the current FOTM setup that it overshadows anything else. Since a single bolt reflected back on some bosses or blocked will take out your entire death shroud, it leads to a more difficult experience for a Necromancer
I’ve been wondering about this.
I thought that as long as you had enough LF to activate Death Shroud then you would take no hitpoint damage from anything as long as you were in Death Shroud. So, if a boss hit you for 1 bazillion damage and you were in DS (even if you only had 8% LF left) you’d just drop out of Shroud at full health. The extra damage would be effectively wasted, meaning every 10 seconds you’re invulnerable as long as you have 10% Life Force.
Does it not work that way on some bosses?
2) Boons are generally better than conditions, and it is easier to build an attrition class around boons than conditions. You’d think that boon corruption would solve this, but we all know it doesn’t. Weakness does not compare well to protection. Cripple and chill only really work if you can kite, which often you can’t because of your lack of stability and the ready availability of gap closers and ranged damage for other classes. Siphoning … to get maximum siphoning you’re required to go 20-30 deep in blood magic and use minions. My educated guess (I used to play this) is that such a commitment will net you the equivalent of 1.5 unbuffed regens as long as your minions are up and attacking. Poison is reasonably good in group play, but doesn’t do much when your DS and health gets burst down while you’re chain immobilized because you haven’t gone 30 in soul reaping and don’t have plague form up.
Just a little nit-pick here.
Weakness negates Vigor and reduces non-crit damage output.
Vulnerability mitigates Protection (poorly)
Cripple negates Swiftness and then some
Poison negates Regeneration (with its damage) and reduces all healing output
In 3 of these 4 cases it is worse to have a boon + matching condition than it is to have the boon stripped altogether. Vulnerability is just bad when compared to Protection, though there may be balance reasons for this that I’m unaware of.
Chill is a special condition in that it doesn’t really compare to Swiftness, because it also increases all cooldown times while it’s up. Chill is often doing triple duty because it’s reducing mobility, reducing damage output, and reducing healing output by increasing cooldown times.
This isn’t incredibly pertinent to the current debate (is Necro an “Attrition Class” if such a thing exists). I just think it’s important to how this profession functions in general, as applying lots of conditions is something all builds do in some way or another.
Hello Necro community. I’m helping a buddy get setup to start running dungeons and I’m looking for suggestions on a build that is relatively easy to run and is effective, I have very little experience in this area. Optimization is not a large concern right away but survival with decent damage output is.
What build and gear would you suggest in this situation? This is his first MMO but he is 80 and does possess a decent level of skill.
Are condition builds most effective or are there power builds that are feasible also?
TYVM
I would recommend a wells oriented build with 30 Blood (for the Wells Cooldown trait, 50% Siphon Improvement trait, and Wells Siphon trait). The other points can be put wherever you want, depending on if you want more support or more damage. I’d start off with rare (yellow) Knight’s gear, since it’s got a decent amount of Toughness on it and it’s rather cheap. Condition builds depend on Rabid gear, which can be a hassle to get. They also can be ineffective if your party has multiple condition built players.
Playing the build is pretty easy. Hit things with whatever weapon you like. Dagger/Warhorn is good for single-target damage, has a decent siphon for ducking out of melee to heal up, a single-target root, an AoE Daze, and Locust Swarm which is handy for building Life Force and Siphoning more.
Wells can be changed depending on what you’re doing. Well of Suffering will be your go-to “More Damage” well. Well of Corruption is good vs mobs that buff themselves and adds a bit of damage. Well of Power is good vs mobs that spam conditions. Well of Darkness is good vs trash mobs that hit hard. Well of Blood is great for both team and self healing.
Elite skill is also very changeable. Plague is great for trash fights that have gone wrong (AoE Blind). Golem is good for his knockdown, and can be great for peeling stack of Defiant if a boss is standing next to a wall.
Staff in your swap slot is a good all-purpose choice because near-permanent Regeneration and Putrid Mark are amazing support skills to have on tap. Axe works as well, for a little extra Life Force/Kiting tools. Scepter is fairly bad in non-condition builds.
All that said, I view Wells as a decent introductory build that has a lot of room for improvement and experimentation. There are a huge number of builds out there, and most of them work pretty well in a dungeon environment. You won’t top the charts on damage output, but you’ll bring a good balance of damage, control, and support skills that will help learn the class.
Note: Ele Signet of Restoration is 200heals per hit, so there double the vamp of a necro, with 100% crit… 20 less traits spent. No restrictive gear rules.
Sig of Restoration is 200 hp per skill use, not per hit.
Necro siphon is per hit, with no cooldown. That’s why it’s so low. We have lots of multi-hit and pulsing skills that ramp that number up a bit (Locust Swarm, Wells, Dagger 2, Axe 2, Staff 1 Piercing).
Since you admittedly don’t WvW a lot, there are a few other things you can do in WvW that you can’t do in sPvP that might help. Most of these you might be aware of, but I’ll go down the list anyway.
1) Kill bunnies and squirrels for Life Force. You can be 100% Life Force when you leave the portal keep every time.
2) Use a Sigil of Bloodlust on a spare weapon and farm mobs near the home keep for +Power stacks. You can have 25 stack before you get far away from the home keep, and can have 10 per supply camp flip if you can’t bother wasting the time killing mobs.
3) Use Food/Wrench buffs
4) Use (some) consumable PvE items from your inventory. It’ll take some research and experimentation to find which ones you like that still work, but there’s a Pot of Hylek Poison that gives swiftness and still worked last I checked. Here’s a list.
http://dulfy.net/2013/01/16/gw2-useful-and-fun-consumables-guide/
5) Swap utility skills/traits between fights, or just before you engage.
6) Waypoint out of an imminent defeat if you catch it before combat starts.
7) Use racial utility skills. I play a Norn, and the Snow Leopard elite has saved my tail many times with stealth + huge charge range.
Hes not really QQing. Hes asking if there are any reliable counters to this kind of thief play and well, there isn’t really. The mechanics are stacked against the necro player on this one. It doesn’t mean you can’t win under any circumstances – the other player might make serious mistakes. You might get ganked on very favourable terrain. But these things are largely out of your control.
“*Hes not really QQing.* ". Are you serious? im going to copy paste what the OP said in his/her first post.
“Thieves go to hell… I just spent FIVE minutes in WvW, and I now hate EVERY thief on the planet that even so much as THINKS of heartseeker or stealth. What the hell is this? Stealth every half second? Healing in stealth every half second? This is absolute nonsense.”If thats not QQing then i dont know what is.
Yeah, it’s QQing. But it’s QQing followed by a request for advice. That shows a certain amount of character, which I can respect.
If it were balanced around group play, Thief is horrible, Mesmer is below average, Warrior downright sucks, and Elementalists are OP.
If it were balanced around 1v1, everyone except Mesmer, Thief, and Elementalist are completely unviable.
I’m not sure what this is balanced around, since no one is really balanced. If they wanted to give everyone unique jobs/capabilities, they probably should have done that.
Welcome to WvW. Only Warriors are pretty useful right now because people figured out Leg Specialist works with arrowcarts.
My strategy is to have 2 different builds and gear sets. 1 for traveling and 1 for siege/zerging. My traveling set is soldier’s gear, and my traits are largely about getting more life force, siphoning health, dropping wells faster, and generally taking a very very long time to kill. It’s essentially “burst proof,” and is specifically designed to throw burst classes off their game. It’s not for winning 1v1, though I have vs baddies. It’s for dragging a 1v1 out for so long that they either leave (after which I move on to wherever it was I was going) or one of us gets rolled by a group of roamers. Basically it’s a troll build.
When I get where I’m going I swap to my rabid gear, flip a few traits over, and I’ve got a pretty serviceable condispam zerging build.
Trying to build a Necro to consistently win 1vs1 against the “good” roamer classes is an exercise in frustration, since the good ones will just bail out of the fight when they start getting beat. I’ll settle for surviving.
Why reduce an enemies damage when you can negate it all together, right?
Weakness: Endurance regen decreased by 50%; Also does other stuff.
Handy for getting our slow cast time skills to actually land. I’m always amused when some newbie will bottom out his endurance dodging Life Transfer in WvW. Not that I’m awesome at WvW. I just find it amusing.
This quote is out of context. It is in relation to Plague Form. How are you casting anything when in Plague Form? You can only do 1 of 3 things there. Bleed, Blind, or Weakness/Cripple. Cause someone to completely miss their attacks, or cause them to do half damage 50% of the time? What would you choose?
If they’re hitting me or group members I’d use Blind. If they’re trying to run away from me or my group members I’d use Weakness/Cripple. If I have Chilling Darkness traited (which is rare) I’d almost always use Blind.
You’re forgetting the trait ‘weakening shroud’—it provides a very high up time pbaoe weakness.
This. 10 points in Curses, and you can swap it for Chilling Darkness when you feel like it.
15 second cooldown on 10s Weakness is pretty decent.
When I said “lots of access to Weakness” I wasn’t saying “a lot of our skills cause weakness.” I meant that we can have permanent up-time on Weakness with minimal build altering. 10 in Curses and off-hand dagger is about all you need.
Or, if you can’t spare the 10 in Curses, you can just slot Corrosive Poison Cloud and off-hand dagger. Use the dagger condi transfer to send the CPC self-weakness to your target. No build altering needed. Just keep a spare dagger in your bag.
Why reduce an enemies damage when you can negate it all together, right?
Weakness: Endurance regen decreased by 50%; Also does other stuff.
Handy for getting our slow cast time skills to actually land. I’m always amused when some newbie will bottom out his endurance dodging Life Transfer in WvW. Not that I’m awesome at WvW. I just find it amusing.
(edited by PinCushion.7390)
After reading over and over and over again negative threads on the necromancer forum, I decided to make this thread in Wvw just to see what the community as a whole really think about necromancer : https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/How-good-is-necromancer-in-Wvw/first#post1866857
And let me tell you that I was quite suprised of all the positive responses I got.
I’m not surprised at all. Necromancer is an incredibly well-built class. Most of the negativity you read on the Necro forums stems from the lack of Big Numbers (Warrior Envy), lack of insane mobility (Elementalist Envy), lack of Invuln/Teleports (Mesmer Envy), and lack of “Get Out of Jail Free” cards (Thief Envy). The one class you don’t read a lot of envy over is Guardians, but that’s because Necro is basically a Guardian built backward. They heal/buff their team. We AoE/debuff the enemies. They get Heals/Aegis. We get Death Shroud/Fear.
Honestly, all they’d need to do to get rid of 90% of the crying is give Necros a Greatsword with a Charge, a Big Number skill, and a short duration Invuln/Block on a freakishly long cooldown (call it Deathly Parry or whatever). But then other players would cry because Necro was OP (and they’d probably be right).
And then there’s the monthly thread griping about how the GW1 Necro was so much better. That’s a matter of taste, really. I think the GW2 Necro is a marked improvement over the GW1 Necro, but we’re all entitled to our opinion.
My guess is that Necros don’t get lots of Vigor because we have lots of access to Weakness, which is effectively the same thing. If you have Vigor and I don’t your endurance regens 50% faster than mine. If you have Vigor and Weakness then we’re even. If you have Weakness and I don’t then I effectively have Vigor because my endurance regens 50% faster than yours. Add to that all the Blind/Fear/Chill access we have and it makes sense in a “Looks good on paper” kind of way.
Not that I disbelieve you, but where exactly is the information that supports this statement?
AFAIK damage reduction can be viewed as “addition” to the one’s HP (10k HP, 50% DR = 15k EHP), so from the same HP healed, high damage reduction char will get more than lower one.
OTOH, healing condition damage will be identical regardless to the build as they go directly after HP pool.
This. It has nothing to do with player skill. It’s just how the stats work. If you take 40% less damage, then all healing you receive is worth 40% more.
Conditions ignore armor, so they shift the value from Damage Reduction to Healing Power. Also, they can be cleansed most of the time.
I find it’s often far less hassle when a party is all running relatively balanced builds with a bit of defensive stats rather than all glass-cannons. It doesn’t add all that much time to (perfect) runs, but makes the party far less vulnerable to bad luck and mistakes.
Unskilled people consistently overestimate their own skill level in all walks of life and at all tasks. Highly skilled people consistently underestimate their own skill level, since they are better equipped to see mistakes that others would miss.
That Zerk Warrior in your dungeon group that gets face-planted every boss and then blames lag (or his newbie group mates) doesn’t know that he’s bad, and wouldn’t believe anyone if they told him.
As for stats, well nobody is going to like the answer but here it is. Defensive stats exist to allow you to survive auto attacks. That’s it. Taking NPC auto attacks to the face isn’t “bad gameplay.” It’s just how GW2 is designed. You eat the weaker attacks and save endurance for the big “Special Moves.” There’s no magic super skill level about it. It’s just balancing endurance, incoming damage, and heal cooldowns. Zerker gear doesn’t normally allow you to do this, so the prevailing notion is to dodge/block/invuln everything and DPS the mobs down. This works great in a well-oiled guild group where everyone knows what everyone else is doing. In PUGs it’s pretty awful most of the time. Warriors can get away with being squishy a bit better simply because they get a bit of free HP and Armor from being Warriors , wearing plate, and having lots of access to Vigor.
I hate running full DPS gear because I PUG a lot. PUG Zerkers are rarely as skilled as they think they are, and I find it more useful to still be alive to rally them.
And on the topic of Healing output being bad in this game, I hope everyone realizes that Healing efficiency is based on 2 stats. If I heal my group members the effective healing is based on my Healing Power and their Armor value. Trying to use heals on someone in glass-cannon gear is beyond a waste of time.
My main used to be a guardian, and I really appreciate the variety necromancers have in comparison.
What do you mean? Guardians have plenty of variety! You can put those last 10 trait points wherever you want!
Necro players will tell you you need more skill to be able to play a necro and ele players will do the same for eles.
This.
The truth is they’re both decent classes, and that good players will demolish bad players most of the time. Even good players die a lot to bad players that just happen to run a build that counters theirs.
At the end of the day, however, D/D Elementalist is a very strong build that brings a lot of tools to the table. If you’re comfortable with swapping attunements quickly and all the button mashing, it’s just easy to play. If you are not terribly nimble on the keyboard you’ll die a lot.
Necro is very much a “build” oriented profession. You have builds that are good vs. certain other builds, and if someone is running a build that counters yours then you’ll probably lose because we don’t have a lot of skills that let us reset fights or run away when we’re losing. If you know what kind of builds you’re going to be facing, and can build to counter them, then Necro is a monster. That means it takes a ton of meta knowledge about game mechanics and how other classes work. That means it takes more skill to not be terrible.
Elementalist takes just as much skill as Necro to be “good,” but takes far less skill to not be terrible. That’s because the standard Ele build comes stock with 3 stun breaks, a mountain of condition clears, loads of healing, and several decent options to shake melee and run away. You can start an Ele with the attitude of “If I start to take too much damage I will knock the guy down and run away to heal up” and do fairly well knowing nothing about how other classes work. You’ll be a really mediocre PvPer, but you’ll do okay because you won’t be dead all the time. Necro doesn’t really work that way. You either breeze through a fight and end it with 80% life, or you lose/barely win (get lucky).
Some will argue about which class has the highest “skill ceiling,” but I think that’s a red-herring. It’s an argument that only ends with a bunch of “No True Scotsman” answers, where people say the only reason you win is because your opponents were terrible.
I have roughly 800 hours on my necro and I only play necro highest level other than him is 25 >.>, and i personally found conditionmancer to get boring really quick. Once i was all geared and everything I played as conditionmancer for two nights in WvW and got bored.
Don’t be afraid to put odd numbers into your trait lines just for the minor trait.
0/15/0/25/30 is really fun build.As a necro yes we have a high Health pool, but do not neglect toughness, as you know you played ele and lightarmor well is light lol
I 2nd that CondiMancer is somewhat boring. Also, you lose out on a lot of the Life Force generating skills that the other weapons carry. I ran as Condi for about a month, but eventually swapped to a more siphon oriented build. It was just more fun, but I still keep my rabid gear in my bags for sieges. The Curses traits are nice for a Condi build, but without them my bleeds still hurt well enough for zerg vs. zerg. After a certain number of people get in a battle you really can’t do much but spam Staff marks and hope the skills actually fire when you want them to.
In open field zergy fights I usually end up doing more damage just letting my minions run into the enemy zerg and death nova die in the middle of the enemy group thanks to skill lag, but at that point it’s mostly about tagging more than being super effective.
They don’t pull any more mobs than normal. The issue is they die immediately to any form of aoe. MM is not viable in dungeons or fractals ever.
They have a decent amount of hitpoints and very short cooldowns. They’re designed to die frequently and be constantly replaced. If you’re in fights with lots and lots of AoE you should probably swap to wells, since a wells build and a minion build use a very similar trait distribution.
The problem with wells is that the cooldowns are more excessive, and wells don’t bodyblock for you or grab aggro for you. Every time a minion dies to a melee attack it’s a time you didn’t have to dodge. Meatshield = Ghetto Vigor.
One thing that’s bugged me about Necro, that I wish they’d change, is that Focused Rituals should be 1200 range instead of 900.
Otherwise, you’re watching a vid of a bunch of good players farming a zerg of clueless players.
Elementalist is very good at sieges.
AND
Enemy zerg was remarkably bad.
Both of these can be true. It’s not an either or.
… the good thing about warriors is that the team does not have to communicate and everyone can just click his Skills on recharge.
And that’s the only thing I hate about how Warriors are designed.
Warrior = PvE Easy Mode
Many other classes can provide similar levels of DPS and support, but they require more effort which means more risk to the group that the player might be bad.
Reading the wiki about various boss mechanics, how Defiant works, and learning how to time dodges makes most dungeons incredibly easy. Also, if it’s my first run through a dungeon (especially on a lower leveled character) I tend to pack on more Toughness and Vitality so I’ll be slightly less squishy and have more room for error.
And, just for emphasis, LEARN HOW DEFIANT WORKS. It’s hard to coordinate CC in a PUG, but if your group can really get how to peel Defiant stacks and interrupt a boss’s Big Hit the encounters become brain-dead easy. I’ve run into a few groups where someone in the party just didn’t understand when to use CC and, more importantly, when not to use CC and thus ruined any hope of interrupting anything. I’ve also run into groups where everyone knew how to read and count where this was much less of a problem.
At 80, in full exotics, you can afford to DPS Spam your way to the end. At lower levels that isn’t really an option so you have to do the encounters as they were designed. I enjoy that approach more anyway.
If you know the encounters for the dungeon you’re doing, why don’t you be part of the solution to your own problem.
LFM (blank) Dungeon – Full Clear/Teaching Newbies; Bring 1 of every weapon
Post it on gw2lfg.com and teach people how to run dungeons rather than gripe that nobody wants to carry you. Nearly all the dungeon encounters are doable at the level you can start them, provided you know the mechanics and how to handle them.
@Hydra,
I did the same thing. I liked Elementalist, but got tired of being very squishy unless you use the standard D/D build. One thing I will say is that Necro has a ton of viable builds to choose from, and a lot of room for experimentation and fine tuning.
It does bad damage because it pierces. You can do bad damage to lots of things at once.
I’ve 1v1 D/D eles and won plenty of times. Fights will also take 5-10 minutes, so more likely than not the elementalist hits minute 3-4 and just leaves, and frankly I think we’re both happy with that because the fights get exceptionally boring after the first few rotations.
Beating them depends on your build, but you can try killing their boons, timing your conditions to right after they use their water attunement cleansing, interrupting their rotation (eles are hugely dependent on rotations). It just depends, but generally speaking if you keep them on the defensive they just don’t have the time to sit in fire attunement hitting you like a wet noodle long enough to kill you, and instead hit you like a wet paper noodle because they spend most of their time in water attunement and earth playing defensive.
But really, 1v1ing D/D eles is just flat out annoying, not because of difficulty but because you are both going to be there for ages.
I wonder how they feel during that fight, as they keep trying to set you up for Flame Grab only to have you consume Burning before it hits (or transfer it back to them), Fear them out of it, bleed out half their life, corrupt their vigor/fury/protection/regen off them, dodge the obvious knockdown attempts, fear them out of Churning Earth channels, chill them out of Water attunement so they can’t cleanse as fast, etc. etc.
It’s got to be one of the most irritating 1v1 scenarios for both players.
You mentioned its our stunbreaker. DS doesnt stun break, you can cast it while stunned but you still cant do anything. Would be nice if foot in the grave actually made it a stunbreak aswell as 3 seconds of stability, seeing as we have a lack of decent low cooldown stunbreaks.
Flesh Wurm can be traited down to 32 seconds, which is pretty good for what it does. It does require a modicum of setup, since you have to precast it before you need it. It also has the extra penalty of telegraphing to your opponent that you have a stunbreak off CD (just like the signet). And, lastly, it can be killed.
All in all, it’s a decent option though whether the negatives outweigh the positives is personal preference. Personally, I think it’s one of our strongest skills even if it’s a bit cumbersome to use well. It’s no “Shake it Off,” but it’s decent.
I used to do this long time ago, but I don’t feel like it’s a legit way to be useful at the start of the game. It’s like a mecanism abuse.
You’re playing a Necro. Mechanism abuse is what you gotta do. When 50% of your skills give you a 3% bonus based on 60% of your total health you have to work with what’s there.
Death Shroud. 60% of the time it works every time!
I actually posted about it in the pvp forum.
Without spectral skill, you are stuck with 0 life force at the beginning of a game.
A necromancer without lifeforce is starting 2 step behind.
I feel like they should ether make Life force grow over time when out of combat, or add critter in pvp, or make us start with 10-20% life force.
What ever the solution, starting a fight without life force is awful.
Only solution I’ve heard is to slot Flesh Wurm. You can use him before a match starts to begin w/ 10% Life Force, but then you’re stuck with him slotted the whole match, so you better like him.
Could you post which major traits you picked?
Timing is key. Once you land a decent corrupt boon (with some extra bleed stacks on top of that) you should have doom and reapers mark ready to chain fear him, maybe even golem charge on top of that to knock him down. Just as many interrupts as possible so he doesn’t get a chance to regenerate.
Sure thing, here’s about the build I was using: “http://www.gw2build.com/builds/simulator.php#1.5.2.7.13.0.1.3.21.0.106.123.126.117.129.4.4.21.0.0.0.317.321.326.332.336.0.351.354.0.0.0.0.0.30.20.20.0”. My equipment is a bit messier than that but not by too much (I have five level 80 characters and a level 55 so I’m on a budget for gearing them).
I’m not entirely positive why you’re using a dagger with those trait points, but it won’t help you much in this fight.
Basically, for a nice 5+2 combo to stack up bleeds quickly and 4 for extra condition removal.
Save corrupt boon for armor of earth which gives them stability. Transfer any burning to them ASAP to reduce the effectiveness of their dagger 5 attack. Transfer their big earth 5 attack back to them too if they are dumb enough to use it on a condi necro.
All good advice, but this is especially helpful. I’ll keep an eye out for stability, thanks!
I wonder if “Bait Tanking” would work in this kind of situation, where you let your health remain somewhat low so the enemy thinks he’s winning and doesn’t run away. Necro seems like the only class that could pull that off, but damage happens so fast that it’d be very difficult.
The one time I managed to kill the ele, it happened because I stalled just long enough for a roaming group to show up. We chased that ele halfway across the map but killed her when she was dumb enough to turn and try to 1v1 the closest chaser.
Have you read up on the typical D/D Elementalist build? I highly recommend it. It’s designed to deliver a lot of mediocre AoE damage, heal itself, zip around all over the place, and CLEANSE CONDITIONS! Half of the build is there to do nothing but cleanse conditions and heal. Cleanse/Heal on Dodge (in Water attunement). Cleanse/Heal on Water Attunement. Cleanse on Stun-Breaker Use (one of which cleanses). Cleanse when you get Regeneration. It’s an absolute nightmare to fight them with a Condi build.
2 of them together is even worse because they cleanse each other every time they swap to Water attunement as well.