Guild Wars 2

Anything works, but there’s no reason to take a healing Herald over a Druid. Druid is ‘enough’ healing with a lot of offensive support, whereas Herald has the best healing but provides no meaningful support.

I will say, however, that Magi’s Ventari Herald is the best class for hands and projectile kiting at Deimos and Cairn raid bosses, respectively.

Patrick.2987:

Actually u hit 100% and duration maxed is only for bleeds. So an increase of condi duration is good for poison, burning and torment here.

That’s fair because you have Decimate Defenses. It’s really 3 power versus 2 condition damage, so you’re right. That all said, if you care about duration for other conditions you may as well run 100% Viper’s anyway.

Patrick.2987:

Sadly it is not since sinister helmet and sinister back have same amount of condi dmg. Vipers helmet has more offensive stats than vipers backpack so u stay with vipers helmet and go for sinister back. But i had the same idea :-)

Sinister Helm/Viper Back
97 Power, 72 Precision, 115 Condition Damage, Duration Maxed
Viper Helm/Sinister Back
94 Power, 70 Precision, 117 Condition Damage, Duration Maxed
Difference Between First and Second Sets
-3 Power, -2 Precision, +2 Condition Damage

I guess it’s kind of a wash, but I favor the one with higher precision because you won’t hit 100% crit chance with the build in a normal raid setting anyway and you get bleeds on crits from curses.

Patrick.2987:

Only backpack was sinister

It’s better if you use a Sinister helmet and Viper’s backpack instead.

Primary power and condition damage, secondary ferocity and expertise would be a huge damage gain for Necromancers as it could replace Viper’s and add a lot of power damage to the rotation (helpful since Greatsword and Reaper’s Shroud is already present). This is in addition to the stat combination the OP requested (primary condition damage, secondary power and ferocity), since that’s really competing with Sinisters.

The primary downside to this kind of a build is that it would make soloing with a Necromancer pretty annoying since you’d have a lot of trouble getting critical hits without a team. You’d probably want raid/fractal gear and open world gear (vipers) in that case.

NumenorLord.6539:

It’s been proved several times that optimal damage comes from maxing precision no matter what bonuses come from other players. In the hypothetical-perfect-scenario where a Necro runs alongside a Warrior and a Ranger there’s no way to upkeep Fury 100% of the time and Banner of Discipline has a cooldown interval, also target the weak has a 13% crit chance cap.

• Fury can be easily maintained 100% across a raid or fractal encounter.
• Permanent alacrity reduces the cooldown of banners so that you have effectively 100% uptime of banners (90.2s cooldown).
• Target the Weak has no crit chance cap. The 13% in its tooltip is the condition damage conversion rate you get from precision.
• The only reason classes don’t worry about overcapping crit chance right now is because there’s nothing better than berserker’s gear for power classes anyway. If there were two-stat combinations of Power/Ferocity, you can bet that it would be heavily min-maxed.

vicious.5683:

Sad how necromancers are kitten tier again. It’s the dungeons story all over again.

It would be nice if [qT] actually updated the Necro build and benchmarks though; the old build is quite dated. It would be nice to be able to refer my guild to this website for everything as opposed to having to caveat anyone looking for Necromancer guides.

omgdracula.6345:

If it is only 1/4 pretty much any stealth with restealth you. Since AFAIK the lowest duration stealth is 3s.

That’s not how stealth works.

Shaman.2034:

It’s very straightforward. It applies Revealed for 0.25 seconds. When Revealed is applied, it removes all stacks of stealth and prevents gaining new stacks for its duration. After 0.25 seconds, stealth may be gained again.

This is correct.

These are much better overall, but I still have some feedback about sigils directly inferior to other sigils.

• Sigil of Strength maintains 5 stacks of might in-combat with 100% uptime (10 second ramp-up), whereas Sigil of Battle only provides 4 stacks of might in-combat with 50% uptime. Battle should apply at least 6 stacks of might for it to really be relevant as a bursty might sigil.
• The same issue applies to the Sigil of Frailty / Sigil of Exposure where Frailty maintains as many stacks of Vulnerability as Exposure’s application. Exposure needs to apply at least 6 stacks to really compete.
• The update to Sigil of Escape to remove immobilize, chill, and cripple is a good change. This makes it particularly relevant as a competitor to Sigil of Cleansing.
• The new Sigil of Greater Nullification is pretty weak compared to Sigil of Nullification. 2 boons every 2 weapon swaps (20 seconds) against 1 boon every 10 seconds. Greater Nullification needs to remove 3 boons if it’s going to compete (this is especially necessary if its attack can be dodged/blinded/etc).
• Glad to see the condition duration sigils back with higher numbers. They may actually compete for certain condition-based builds now.
• Happy to see that Sigil of Revelation now only applies once every 2 weapon swaps. I think that’s a good place for it to be.
• Going to miss Sigil of Hydromancy and Sigil of Geomancy, but I think the change is a good change overall so that condition builds lack too much burst on top of their own conditions.
• It’s good that there are some more defensively-minded sigils now, too.
• Can we bring back Sigil of Force instead of the variable damage-boosting sigils? The problem with the multiple proposed damage-boosting sigils is that they can be used on the same weapon set. Force is great because it’s just 5% damage and it can’t add up to more than that. (Imagine the boon-hate and condi-based sigils stacking! Could be as high as a 15% damage boost!)

Overall this is a much better set of sigils than the previous proposal. Good job!

thefinnster.6904:

Rising Dusk.2408 next youl be suggesting i uninstall the game ?

No, next I’ll be suggesting you join a guild with a similar mentality to yours that doesn’t use DPS meters. If you insist on playing in public groups you need to be ready to deal with what the group expects.

thefinnster.6904:

simple question anyone know if theres a way to stop players from useing dps meters on me

All DPS meters that meet ANet’s requirements (arc / BDGM) only work on people in a party or squad with those using the DPS meter. As a result, simply don’t join any parties or squads of people using DPS meters and you won’t give them any of your data.

Iridi.8473:

“Satisfied with necromancer” rofl.

“Satisfy the same itch” is not the same as “Satisfied with necromancer”. English is hard, though, it’s okay.

I watched a few gameplay videos of it and I’m not impressed. It doesn’t play a thing like the Necromancer and sure doesn’t look like it would satisfy the same itch. That’s just me, though.

Arkanakaz.7915:

Druid is the only healing build that contributes to group DPS and also heals (with Grace of the Land), […]

I just wanted to point out that this is not correct. Minstrel’s Chronomancer is very much a healer, and it still maintains permanent quickness and other boons on the team.

Lexan.5930:

Any news if going full shouts and bleed duration gear is better than other combos? Like even running thorns or a general all Condi duration 100%?

I was thinking this too. On meta PvE build you can get away with Suffer, YSIM, and CttB, and if you pack Augury of Death in raids you can get extremely fast turnarounds on your shouts. If each shout applies 3 stacks of bleed in an AOE, that could overcome the damage gain from 5 stacks of the Thorns buff. You’d lose a lot of poison duration, though, but in that build you’d probably want nearly all vipers anyway.

Challenging group content should have real rewards that get used in that challenging group content. They have a really usable, healthy, balanced economy right now in Magnetite Shards. If they were to hamfistedly change it up they would ruin the reward system in-place and do vastly more harm than good. This isn’t like the S5 PvP vendor where you could get an entire armor set in 1 day with 0 gold cost. The opportunity cost alone for spending your Magnetite Shards is immense.

Buran.3796:

As lon gas yoyu remember -and the class you play can provide it- that ultimately you are playing PvP because you find it fun you’ll be fine. If you don’t find it fun you already knwon what to do.

I have a lot of fun in all game modes in GW2 and reached platinum last season. What keeps me playing after 10000 hours, however, is progress towards some goal. With PvP’s rewards being gutted, the progress is stunted and I don’t find it worth my time. Thus, I’ll play something else in-game instead. It may be easy for some people to go “good riddance, pve scrub” in response to that, but if you want a well-populated game mode with a diverse population to play against you need to have good rewards. It’s as simple as that.

It’s a great site and I’m glad that it’s been updated. Congratulations, [qT]! My biggest concern right now is that they still don’t have updated Necromancer builds/benchmarks. I get it, there are other sites for this stuff, but if you’re going to include an updated Revenant you should also include the updated Necromancer. Also I’m pretty sure the Staff Daredevil benchmark is low and using the old rotation.

I enjoy PvP and hit platinum last season, but I’ve played this game for so long that if I don’t feel adequately rewarded for my time I spend that time elsewhere. With this massive nerf to ranked seasonal rewards, I’m definitely spending my time elsewhere in-game for this season.

• No clue, but they’ve hinted that it’s at least possible for them to be done with episode 5.
• We don’t know, but probably not.

To add to this list, I really want a user preference for: “Always show health bars”

SlippyCheeze.5483:

One player doing or not doing that is not anything significant. What matters is the numbers across the playerbase — and that’s something ANet will know, but never tell us.

You’re not wrong, but the thread literally asks if we’re happy with the change, so I answered that question for the only person for whom I can speak: myself. As far as this change goes, I will go from never buying this ascended gear to still never buying this ascended gear. I would be very surprised if I were the only one.

Many of these sigils are useless as listed below. They are either horribly outclassed by other sigils in the list or are so niche that more general effects will always be taken. Even Sigil of Frailty as you’ve proposed it is so much better than any of the damage boosting sigils because everyone on your team benefits from it, it covers other conditions, and many classes have traits that interact with conditions on foes.

- Sigil of Escape
- Sigil of Compounding
- Sigil of Punishment
- Sigil of Agility

I’d also like to call attention to Sigil of Revelation for being far too strong. You can’t effectively counterplay a weapon swap if they know where you are stealthing up. This will hurt a lot of build diversity in thief, mesmer, and even druid gameplay. I think lethargy is pretty strong by comparison to other options as well. Slow is a very powerful condition.

• If all you cared about was the gold cost, the new system is at least cheaper.
• The new system, however, still doesn’t sink a lot of the Fractals currency.
• I wanted to buy ascended gear through Fractals specifically to avoid crafting, since I use those crafting materials for other things.

All in all, the net sum of their changes is that they spent a lot of effort and rebalanced those systems, and I’m still never going to buy a single piece of ascended gear that way. I think they missed the mark pretty heavily.

DuckDuckBOOM.4097:

Sabetha is the “ideal” boss for condi engineer and ranger and yet that’s 4 condi rangers and a condi engineer hitting 18-24k DPS

I agree with everything else you said, but I wanted to comment on this. I can easily hit 30k+ with a non-tryhard rotation and a few mess-ups at Sabetha with either condi Engi or Ranger. That is really the bar that you need to be hitting to compete with those classes, and it needs to happen without reliance on ice fields.

First: You want a buff to be present on a user’s buff bar when they have a sigil ready to activate. This is very important so your opponents know what you have available and so you know what you have available.

So there are a lot of great opportunities to improve sigil desirability here, but I want to keep the “on critical hit” sigils still requiring a critical hit to reward having precision on one’s build. The goal here would be to make the effect result from every critical, but (in some cases) have reduced effect such that it maintains similar overall efficacy. Sigil of Air could probably do with having lower damage, but applying 100% of the time when off cooldown. Example:

Current Sigil of Earth
60% Chance on Critical: Inflict Bleeding (5 seconds) (Cooldown: 2 seconds)
Proposed Sigil of Earth
On Critical: Inflict Bleeding (5 seconds) (Cooldown: 2 seconds)

Chance on hit sigils, however, should always fire on next hit when they are off CD. No RNG involved. Example:

Current Sigil of Frailty
50% Chance Hit: Vulnerability (10 seconds) (Cooldown: 2s)

Proposed Sigil of Frailty
On Hit: Vulnerability (10 seconds) (Cooldown: 2s)

Condition duration sigils are very weak overall. No one runs them over much stronger sigils, and while they’re niche they should reward their niche when used.

Current Condition Duration Sigils
+20% Specific Condition Duration

Proposed Condition Duration Sigils
+33% Specific Condition Duration

On interrupt sigils are great for play and counterplay, but realistically don’t have nearly enough impact to actually sway a fight in favor of someone who successfully lands an interrupt. I would recommend improving the effects for them across the board by a solid percent.

I think that on kill sigils are silly, and either are completely unusable or extremely strong. While they reward good gameplay (not going down), they also largely feel underutilized. I feel like most of these could be made Below are some suggestions for how to make these more usable. Note that these are just ideas and the numbers are merely suggestions.

Sigil of Luck
Gain a random boon every 10 seconds
Sigil of Restoration
On Critical: You’re Healed (~400hp) (Cooldown: 10 seconds)
Sigil of Speed
Gain 5 seconds of swiftness every 10 seconds
Sigil of Stamina
Gain 20 endurance back whenever you dodge
Sigil of Benevolence
Gain +20% outgoing healing effectiveness on weapon swap (7 seconds) (Cooldown: 9 seconds)
Sigil of Bloodlust
Gain 5 stacks when you kill something. +10 Power per stack
Sigil of Celerity
On Critical: Gain Quickness (2 seconds) (Cooldown: 12 seconds)
Sigil of Corruption
On Critical: Corrupt a Boon (Cooldown: 10 seconds)
Sigil of Cruelty
Gain +10% critical damage
Sigil of Demon Summoning
On Critical: Summon a Fleshreaver (30 seconds) (Cooldown: 60 seconds)
Sigil of Life
You’re healed by 50% when you kill something. (Cooldown: 60 seconds)
Sigil of Momentum
On Critical: Gain Protection (2 seconds) (Cooldown: 10 seconds)
Sigil of Perception
Removes blind the next time it is applied to you (Cooldown: 5 seconds)

Evan Lesh.3295:

We also think automated tournaments would be neat. For viewership, we would have to re-implement the authorized shoutcaster program to allow certain people to stream the tournaments.

You should also add an interface to spectate ranked/unranked/automated tourney matches so players can watch other players in-game.

DuckDuckBOOM.4097:

Problem is not that Necro can’t compete. It’s that epi makes it a two or nothing if you want “competitive” instead of just viable dps.

It also means that one of your Necromancers has lower DPS while the one bouncing hits near-Engi-levels. Times this can be avoided are only if you have multiple targets for your other condi classes to cleave, then you can solo-bounce (Sabetha/Deimos). I also really don’t think normal mode Deimos is a great test of practical DPS because Unnatural Signet skews that heavily.

• Make Epidemic blockable. This doesn’t affect PvE at all.
• Give Epidemic a highly visible tell overhead (so it can be seen in the midst of battle) as soon as the Necromancer starts casting. This gives the target 1 second to react and dodge.

Done. You’ve balanced Epidemic and added counterplay without adversely affecting PvE.

Orku.1546:

Okaaaay, so we got new benchmark from Farbstoff ( 30.5 with realistic ) and i think is decent!

• 30.5 realistic is assuming you have no other combo fields other than ice.
• His 28k “in a fire field” test was done with unrealistic buffs and not as much other field uptime as you get in a real raid.
• No consideration was made for the major DPS loss associated with light/ethereal/poison fields in real raids.

Orku.1546:

Today i have made VG, Gorse and entire w4 with my viper necro and we didint have any trouble with dps.

I do this very nearly every week with my guild both pre- and post-patch and you can beat any boss with a Necromancer or two no problem. The problem isn’t beating the bosses with a Necromancer; that has always been totally doable. The problem is that a Necromancer realistically doesn’t even begin to compete with other classes.

Demoria.6745:

Yes, it is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJsQEojjBNQ&t=127s

Regardless of what they record (note, they also still record unrealistic in some cases), they are only reporting benchmarks in their tables that are both with realistic buffs and without racial skills.

Demoria.6745:

And “a fair bit” is ~5% over Flesh Golem, if there’s only a single target.

5% is pretty substantial in my book.

Demoria.6745:

Neither of those things are justifications to bring a necromancer.

Nothing is sufficient justification to bring a necromancer right now, but the utility of Blood Magic is at least better than being objectively worse than other DPS classes in all appreciable ways. That isn’t to say that some of their features won’t make things easier for less skilled groups.

I keep reading this thread title and thinking “I used to raid, but then I took an arrow to the knee.”

maddoctor.2738:

(…)

For awareness, sell order for infusions is 210g minus 15% for TP fees giving 178.5g profit. That gives a single magnetite shard a value of 15.85s. This changes the cost for an ascended armor set by bringing it to a total of 253.55g. That makes it super cheap in cost compared to other methods.

That said, your post is still very good and very informative, but the vendors feel different in spite of that. I believe this is because whereas the value of a magnetite shard is opportunity because it can be exchanged for gold, the value of the marks and things for the Fractal set are direct because it costs you to acquire that stuff. This creates the perception that it’s “cheaper” to use magnetite shards than other acquisition methods, and it’s the same thought-process that makes people say things like “Making my legendary didn’t cost me anything because I already had everything.”

Demoria.6745:

Here you go, ~32k with realistic buffs and 5 stacks of thorns in optimal conditions:
https://youtu.be/KGbHsmaiE4I

Take Root isn’t used in any of [qT]‘s benchmarks because it’s hyper OP for a racial skill and isn’t available to everyone. That alone accounts for a fair bit of your DPS. I also take issue with the new build/rotation that drops Blood Magic, as the utility provided by Transfusion and Vampiric Presence help a lot to justify using a Necromancer over anything else.

Realistically, the new rotation I think relies too heavily on ice fields, especially since they’ll be teamed with condi Warriors / Rangers / Engis that drop other fields rapidly. This is probably the biggest reason why necro is still so unfortunately weak in raids.

TexZero.7910:

Can you reasonably explain why anyone would take that, over a Condi PS which would not only bring the same might capabilities but more damage…..

The idea is that you replace the Magi Druid (1k) + Condi PS (27.4k) with Condi Ranger (33.5k) + Might Druid (1k).

My biggest concern with this strategy is your GotL uptime. You lost all GotL stacks all over that video and contributed poorly to its uptime with very low CA generation, which is a major net raid DPS loss. Magi staff Druid guarantees that your raid has 5 stacks 100% of the time.

Rednik.3809:

Kek, this is golden. So, literally EVERY raid boss can be killed without much problems even with 1-2 guys instantly dying on start (hello low man kills and raid sells), but this somehow magically fails the boss ecounter? I guess, evil anet GM ports to you and taking away your loot? Or “key role” guy cannot be replaced?

Obviously raids can be low-manned and you don’t have a clue what I’m saying. Let me clarify. It’s one thing to 9-man (or whatever) a boss if no one messes up, it’s another thing when your 10th drops a Sloth poison field on top of your group, or when your 10th walks into oil at Deimos, or when your claimer gets spiked at Mursaat, or when your 10th drops well of the profane on top of your group at Matthias, or when all of your condis die pre-split at VG, or <insert other case here where one or a few people screwing up wipes a group>. That’s the difference. Fractals doesn’t have that anywhere.

Xevv.9175:

Most bosses have been 4 manned. Hell the only reason they havent been beaten by less in the enrage timer. Could always add that to fractals. But people would probably whine that they cant use their trashy build/gear setup.

See above.

• No Fractal boss except 100CM Siax automatically fails if 1 player messes up

This is an important distinguisher between the two modes. Fractal bosses, by design, are able to be carried by extremely strong single players. Meanwhile there are mechanics in almost every raid boss where if someone with a key job fails their task, the entire group wipes. In Fractals I can play a build that does respectable damage and will basically never die, and it no longer matters if other players are good. All they do is speed things up in the ideal case. This is in stark contrast to raids where players are critically necessary for a number of reasons.

Like Fluffy.1932 said, raids were really designed with high levels of coordination in-mind. That’s sort of the whole point.

zealex.9410:

what does it say?

“Now, I’m really free.”

Removing GotL doesn’t do what you want it to do. It doesn’t make “other healers” viable, it just makes Druid less viable.

You have to realize that the only reason having a dedicated healer works at all is because it gives so many offensive boosts even with like 1k DPS itself. Taking that away doesn’t suddenly make other healers viable; the reason other healers are horrible is because they do 1k DPS and offer no meaningful damage boosts to the team. They are literally being carried at that point.

If you really want to play Ventari Revenant healer or something, you should appeal to ANet to make Assassin’s Presence add 250 ferocity or something like that.

I’m glad that I’ve hit the daily AP cap and I no longer have to care about that AP source. For the kind of player that I am, it has enabled me to do more of the things I actually want to do in-game and less of the silly “go harvest in some random zone”. I firmly stand in opposition to any suggestion to remove the cap for this reason. I like feeling able to do other stuff with that time.

The push mechanic on the orb has an in-built cooldown of 2 seconds. If you strike the orb with a CC skill that deals damage, and that CC skill activates the in-built push mechanic, it will use the push mechanic instead of your CC skill. This same problem happens if you mistime Glyph of Tides or Mesmer GS 5. The only reason Mesmer Focus pull works reliably is because it does not do damage, which means it never risks triggering the in-built push mechanic.

tl;dr: You mistimed your LB4 and it activated the in-build push mechanic instead of LB4’s actual push.

As for your other issue, there are certain locations on the floor where the orb will get stuck and not push. It can sometimes be hard to avoid these (and knowing where they are just takes practice) and ANet should really fix them to not exist, but they’ve been around a while and can be worked around.

I think this solution is just fine. If you can do them legit once, you can do them legit again. If you cheesed them before, you have to do them legit now. It’s better than them trying to ban people who might have been along for the ride, not knowing their teammates were cheesing in a pub, or who knows what.

Plus, the grey lore text for the new achievement is hilarious.

Comes from the reward chest which you can only get once per week.

Astralporing.1957:

Not on armor though.

Yeah, there are no skins on the armor, but especially now that all other methods of getting ascended gear require crafting the costs are especially reasonable. 400 shards + 15g is great for a chest piece, IMO. The only things I never buy from the Magnetite Shard vendor are non-skin 2H weapons. Those are a little overpriced at 500 shards + 30g.

Spicy.2481:

If revenants find a solid build that can keep up 25stacks of might then rev actually could infact replace the another ps warr.

That’s exactly the problem. If you try to be anything other than just a DPS class then you won’t beat a Warrior. If you try to bring Ventari for Alacrity, you’re weaker than a Warrior. If you try to stack might then you can’t viably swap to Jalis (which is where the increased damage was added) and you’re weaker than a Warrior. The two classes just don’t fill the same role.

P.S. New condition Warrior is super strong. It gets a free utility skill (Signet of Fury is strong), a stronger and more reliable Deep Strike, and bleeding on its filler sword auto attack Hamstring skill.

Wasabi Kitty.8247:

A revenant can replace one of the PS warriors now.

• Herald doesn’t generate enough might alone (~10 stacks)
• Herald does a lot less damage than newly buffed PS Warrior
• Warrior gets an extra utility skill with the change to make banners 10-target
• Empower Allies > Assassin’s Presence

I’d really just love to buy an ascended chest piece for 15g + 1000 fractal relics and some journal pages. That’s all I’ve ever wanted: a use for the account bound currencies that actually makes it reasonable to use the bloody vendor.

I wish it would automatically activate when you revive after a wipe / enter the instance. Every kill I keep forgetting to activate it. #FeelsBadMan

Raid vendor is already balanced right now, and when you buy one of those 600 token items you’re paying for the skin.

Kydar Schattendolch.6879:

Does anyone else has the bug, that the Demonic Heart after killing Deimos did not count towards collection?

You have to activate the Crystalline Heart prior to the encounter’s start for it to count.

We’re still recruiting and are always on the lookout for casual-friendly people who like to have fun. You can be new to the game or a veteran who raids weekly and in either case with the right attitude you can fit right in. Let one of the officers know if the OP sounds like a good fit for you! We’re always happy to chat!