Guild Wars 2

agreed. I feel like there aren’t enough items in game… The available gear in game is very small and pretty bland. Adding unique armor and gear makes the game more rewarding and fun.

agreed. it pisses me off that i can go from foe to foe and kill a few and only get 1-2 loot bags with badges in them, when i kill them 1v1 only.

I just have an idea.
levels 1-30 necromancers have a BASIC Death Shroud f1 skill. This death shroud makes the LF bar serve as the second hp we all know currently, but no replacing or 1-4 skillset. All it should give is retaliation while in that mode. That way pre-30 players can spend more time focusing on how to play the class weapon wise and get an idea of what they want trait-wise instead of dealing with an untraited and foreign mechanic that doesn’t mesh with their build.

at level 30, when the player has at least 20 Trait points, if one trait line has at least 20 points in it, it unlocks a new (and additional) form of Death shroud. It can even have a new animation and name and bar icon.

This new additional DS form would then change you out into a 1-4 skill bar with skills RELATED TO YOUR TRAIT LINE

i.e Spite tree DS has power-effected skills like might blast and such, with a couple types of nukes and #4 AoE mega-well (sort of like a slightly weaker but larger area Well of Suffering) etc.
Curses tree DS has condition-friendly skills that has some corruptions and CC skill,
Death Tree DS has skills that use LF to buff minions/ improve character toughness/ summon an additional minion
Blood tree DS has skills related to siphoning, attacking very quickly, and dazing/immobilizing
Soul Reaping tree DS has skills related to creating close-combat Spectral aberrations (kind of like mesmer clones) that behave differently (ideas: creating 3 aberrations that run at the target and soul-tear on impact and dissipate, can be one-hit individually to interrupt it. another idea is a group of aberrations can appear in a three-point channeling circle that fears every 3 seconds for 1s each and lasts for 12s or until aberrations are struck, dissipated. Another idea is a group of aberrations that appear and absorb 1 type of condition each. Another idea is a group of aberrations that randomly appear standing still in a 1200 range radius area so that when you re-activate the skill, you blink between those aberrations. that gives 1-4 aberration skills that can go on medium-length cooldown (22-28 seconds) with each of them behaving as a channel skill so that if you use a full LF on it, you can get to use about 2 of 4 skills by the time you’re done channeling them.

That way, when you’re at level 80, you have Basic DS, and 2-3 other DS forms in your bar.

It would actually look kind of nice in the UI and would satisfy players looking for DS synergy with their builds and gives Anet a good excuse to nerf current DS when people QQ at it.

Make all the DS forms pull from one LF bar, with a soft-cooldown of 4 seconds (to avoid exploits of hyper-swapping and using every good DS skill) and a hard-cooldown on a just used DS form by a slightly longer cooldown than what the current DS is. That way we can’t just bubble up in a specific form, and are forced to diversify our attack plans and chains.

It also gives fun change of pace when fighting w/ a necro instead of the standard smack around, see the green bar, tank and spank, then finish off mindset.

Onshidesigns.1069:

Don’t meta events require killing champions? If so then they are worth killing.

the OP is talking about standard free-roaming champions that don’t do anything but pose a threat to pathways.

Tbh, i don’t think the selling point of the necro was the soul-reaping trait line or the DS mechanic. People play classes because they like the idea of how the class plays, stylistically. When I first bought GW2, I went straight to character creation and chose the class that tickled my fancy the most, and that clicked with my style. To make every class best at one specific trait line would not be balanced nor enjoyable by a massive community that just wants to play their character the way they want it to. The difficult part is making each aspect of the classes balanced when posed against each other.

I see a lot of predictable builds in the necro communities these days. Many are either power builds with wells/spectral utils, or condition builds that use scepter/x and BiP/epi or corrupt utils. Sometimes I see a minion build here or there to act as a pvp node locker or pve leveling build.

So, I’m just going to ruse on here and try to look into how we build our necros most commonly and how to make the class better and more diverse. (I understand many people will want to ask Anet to “fix” their utilities or mechanics to make their builds more powerful, but that isn’t always the best solution)

For the sake of construction for this topic, I’ll go through how I usually go about building a necro.

Starting with how to deal damage
Like most classes, we are subject to dealing damage through direct damage (power builds), or Conditions (bleeds/poison/etc).
Note that there are other ways of dealing damage (such as “mastering DS” and minions) but those are not based off of what we do with our skills 1-5.
So naturally, most builds we see will have 20-30 points in either spite or curses, or both. Also, a lot of our “active” traits are located in those trait lines.

Taking damage
If at this point, I haven’t designed a glass cannon build, I will be thinking about a source of ablative hp or method of mitigating damage. There are many ways to do this, be it the death or blood traits, focusing either on Vitality, Toughness, Death Shroud regeneration, or siphoning as a central mechanic in their builds.
So, naturally, I see about 10-20 points put into Death, Blood, or Soul Reaping respectively.

Gear selection
Usually for me, choosing gear is related to how I deal damage. I think most players seek to deal a satisfying amount of damage first than to lean towards being a cleric/tank/support based build. In the game, its really feeling like a kill-or-be-killed global mindset. The more time you’re not using to hurt the opposition, the more crucial seconds you’re wasting letting them chain and re-chain everything they have on you. So the following gear choices are what I have in my head: Berserkers, Knights, Carrion, Rampagers. I have yet to see a necromancer toting a set of valk, cleric, or any other armor set (other than cof/arah special armor bonuses) and each of these armor sets focus on either power or condition damage as their main bonus.

Utilities
As I have stated earlier, I mostly see the following utilities being used:

• Well of suffering
• Well of darkness
• Epidemic
• Blood is Power
• Spectral Walk
• Spectral Armor
• Spectral Wall
• Bone Minions (Blast finishers)
• Flesh Wurm (Teleportation use)

We have quite a few more utilities, and some are used in special cases to punch a hole in the opposition when really needed (such as corrupt boon to de-godify guardians and warriors going on boon-sprees) but otherwise I don’t see much viability or motive to use the other utilities seriously. (given, some people use the signets when traited)

It would be nice to see more accessible and logical uses for other gear (valk, clerics, etc.) in our class design. As an example, it would be nice to have life siphoning scale with healing power, that way some players can see some use out of using a Cleric’s set and perhaps building a more blood magic based build that relies on staying alive longer in that sense rather than dumping into vitality or toughness like other more common builds.

To clarify a little more, it would be nice to see the other three trait trees becoming just as primary a choice as Spite and Curses. Because from what I see, a lot of players feel like our DS mechanic doesn’t mesh well with a lot of builds, except for power/spectral central builds.

I’m sure i have more to say about the topic, but currently it doesn’t come to mind. Anyone want to see death/blood/soul becoming more primary in builds?

the signets are very situational utilities that only have a strong side if you trait for them or rely on them to execute a specific chain of attacks.

honestly, all classes should be able to pick up any role and do it successfully— and as well as any other class. this way they truly avoid the holy trinity and leave playstyle to just that— playstyle and class-specific utility differences.

It’s not fair to label necro as “not the one who hits like a truck but is supposed to outlast everyone” because the key is to diversify builds and viable ways to play every class.

in short, i disagree with your statement.

I think the current problem players are having with the necromancer is that they are realizing no matter what build they make, another class is far outperforming them with less or equal effort.

Llywellyn.4635:

Oh Snapalope.1378:

Just let us check other players’ gear.

so you can judge other players by their gear?

do you think you actually can tell if the player knows how to play his char only by looking at his gear?

actually, yes.
A player’s choice of gear can tell you what kind of build they are running and what their strengths are going to be and what to look out for in terms of their weaknesses. i.e Berserkers=glass cannon squishy Rampagers=DPS burster Carrion=Condition stacker Cleric=Support and CC/Tank etc.

if you haven’t maxed crafting yet, farm about 50-100g and effectively recycle crafted items/materials and get master crafter. 40 levels of crafting gives you 1 level’s worth of xp. you can level up 10 times an hour in that way. (and get another achievement, and get a toon that can craft any exotic they need)

edit: 40 crafting = 1 level is a slight misnomer since when you get a craft in the 250+, rares and exotics you craft give HUGE xp. (rares and exos in the last tiers i believe gave me like, 112k xp per item… ridiculous amount.)

penatbater.4710:

TO PROVE YOUR MANLINESS!

just about! LOL

you can make 5 gold an hour alone at level 60. dredgehaunt cliffs. start in the center, work yourself southwest. farm all the mats, dump on TP. profit. 110~ gold is not that far off for a level 80 player who can farm mithril/ori in cursed shore for like, 10-12g an hour. stop whining.

But i’d like to say that Asura T3 is butt ugly and nobody should even want it. WAI YOU MAKE ME INTO ZOJJA CLONE?

the life siphon one was impressive. Stacking might off of ds1 is a good plan to ramp up power, but isn’t reliable tactic in wvw/pvp

On he last tick of DS, hit #4 for life transfer and it will do crazy good siphon healing to your normal hp bar when DS auto-drops out. (Literally regenerated 70% of my hp when executed correctly)

The only signet i ever use is Plague, with the Master trait in spite tree, using BiP, Plague sig, then Epidemic totals to 13 stacks of might. Giving some hardcore Extra bleed/power dmg boost. But i find that i’m always waiting on plague sig to get off cd to use it… very annoying.

they should copy/paste the mesmer clone AI to necro minions. it is actually really believeable

TanMan.1374:

You guys are just now realizing that condition builds are worthless?

hush. we already know that, it’s okay to dream for the other 1/3 of necro players.

Depends on what you want to do..
pve/pvp/wvw necro play is very different and specced differently.

for PvE i’d go full conditionmancer with 20/30/x/x/x with scepter/warhorn or scepter/dagger. rampagers or carrion gear for either AoE dmg or Kite-tank.

PvP/WvW full power build 30/x/x/x/30 with berserkers/knights gear depending if you want glass or dueler. then use Dag/dag or axe/warhorn

^second that. conditionmancers = meatbag turret

try a reall geared power build. consume everything in pvp

signet of power imo is waste on this build. yes, six conditions… but all with crap damage.
conditions themselves don’t drop your foe, damage does.
BiP +scepter auto and dagger5 are going to be your best bet for “stacking a lot of hurt” on one foe. Problem is, everyone has condition removal in pvp/wvw so suck on eggs.

go power built, your utility bar will feel more flexible. 4k auto dmg on dagger1. have fun! 6 seconds later… kill

edit: btw all those pretty numbers you see from conditions aren’t good for real bursting because usually it takes about 30s to completely bleed/burn through them. Sooo… have fun kiting with everything on CD for 20 seconds after you /chain.

was gonna say. the heck? both scepter and axe suck for power builds, axe is only viable for good range and grandmaster spite trait… even the alternative gm spite trait makes that obsolete too..

@ celestina
Go look at the mesmers forum. tell me ONE POST where anyone asks for a fix to the class. you’ll see the light of day and dig a grave for your necro.

“Wow, it is really hard to get close to a necro”

… v. ….v. vvvvvvv!

gear with rampagers for power/cond/prec

Go 20/30/x/x/x (your choice)

utils of your choosing can come from any of the following:

well of darkness, blood is power(recommended), Epidemic (recommended), plague signet, power signet, spectral utilities, any boon<=>condition wells for team playing, and plague/lich for ult.

can go weapons:
dag/dag (power focused)
scepter/dag (cond focused)
Scepter/warhorn (cond kitemaster)
dagger/warhorn (direct damage runner) <-more pvp focused

I would recommend you use Blood is power, use either Dagger4, Staff4, or Plague signet to transfer all stacks of conditions to the target foe
Spread with Epidemic
Use your last util (spec armor, well of darkness maybe) and either sit or kite, pop DS4 or even ult and just Faceroll PvE.

PvP/WvW i recommend focus on dag/dag but PvE i say Scepter/Warhorn or Scepter/Dagger for max AoE damage.

i ran a hybrid build a couple weeks ago, its pretty balanced except for lack of vit/toughness

^- go to 1:38 to see how it will deal PvE damage majority of the time, set up bleeds then spread it.

The key to surviving with necro in pvp/wvw is not by using blood magic traits, its too slow using dagger 2.

Keep DS bar up as often as possible (in fights, i can pop it at full every 7-10 seconds or so) and with 30 Soul reaping, it will allow you back in about that same amount of time.

DS
#3, #2
/DS
Damage/spectral utils/CCchains while damaging

Repeat. by the time they either break your cc chains or even land a hit on you back, you should be back in DS to soak their counterattack and just hit 3, 2 to fear and chill them again to repeat.

spread way too thin. Use your playstyle strengths to cover your weaknesses, drop points in blood magic, since you’re already putting points in Soul reaping just grab a spectral utility (walk/armor) to amp your DS LF gain. powershroud and come out to slam #6 to heal.

in PvP, timing is critical and fast. Dagger2 is simply not fast enough, you’re wasting time you could be using snaring/chilling/dpsing your foe or applying pressure/charging DS to fear and chill.

take the points in blood and use them to max spite and soul reaping, change death magic trait to dark armor so when you DO hit Dagger2 or pop DS and slam 4, your knight’s armor and DA trait make you a stone wall, allowing your cooldowns to drain and let you regain footing.

the key to PvP is not just bunkering and pooping damage from utilities, its from tightly dueling the opposition and applying chills/poison/blindness/immobilize/daze to keep them from attacking you back. 30/0/10/0/30 will max all your CC abilities as well as max your dmg base for high crits (4kish dmg per hit auto on dagger1) and more breathability with spectral utilities or wells depending if you’re going 1vX or grouping

if you’re power/crit consider not bloodlust but Blood, 30% health steal is good for surviving long fights

Also, put dagger in 2nd set to utilize dagger3 which when traited, immobilize lasts 4seconds. great for runners.

drop the 1% LF trait and use spectral armor instead, it will help when you start getting kitten from lack of Toughness. It also generates LF like crazy

I really like your build though, it has some interesting strengths that unfortunately, all of my ideal max dmg builds can’t retain.

I wish i could show you some WvW action with the build i described, doing fantastic 4-6k crits constantly off my auto (dropping foes in about 7 seconds each, farmed about 25 badges in a couple hours yesterday) and even though it is technically a glass cannon build, i was running with spec.walk and spec.armor away from a ranger chaser using axe/shortbow and said “why am i running?” turned around at only about 8k hp and bloodied him to death and popped DS twice in the course of 14 seconds because he decided to burst again and it was easy to anticipate. overall, i only dropped 5k hp from the time i turned around and by the time i downed him i was already 100% hp.

WvW probably isn’t the absolute sole focus for your build, but it proves super useful in a jam when you can just dagger3, dagger 2 to regain 30~% hp and pop ult to run

@danni
just tried your build today! good thing i have the money to test out the rubies.
It’s really good for long standing battles due to the points in blood, which allows me to use Knight’s armor or Berserkers if i want to go glassy.

But for WvW specifically, I dropped the blood traitline entirely and pumped full spite and the last 10 points into Death magic for Dark Armor.

The reason I made that change ONLY for WvW is because i end up using dagger2 much less out there since there is really no time to waste 4-5 seconds only yanking 4k channeled damage. With the full soul reaping line, Blood sigil on my malefec dagger, and Tuning Crystal+Omnom running, I was still maintaining great passive siphoning.

It really comes down to play style. the +200 power and condition duration really help with poison or chills plus adding another 100-200 dmg per hit (and provides a larger base for criticals)

I dropped the rubies (preference, its perfectly viable imo for the build you listed) and used Sup Runes of Rage (Although i really want runes of strength for stacking might on crits)

So the build i crafted from yours (credit goes to you, good explanation) for WvW centric with dungeon alternatives: http://www.bit.ly/Vnzss0

Just go knights/berserkers with runes of strength and blood sigil on main dagger and Sigil of accuracy (+5% crit chance) on offhand. w/e is your choice for staff

in the end, with the soul reaping line and the berserk set, crit dmg is up at + 70ish% and with all the power adds (runes of strength, berserker sets, could even slot out Spite Master trait for the blast might procs…)
it increases the damage base very quickly and exponentially, whilst keeping a static high crit damage multiplier +75% last time i calculated my gear)

of course, less siphoning, but with spectral utilities and soul reaping line with the grandmaster trait i listed, DS can recharge within seconds, and let you pop back in so fast its not even funny.

BUT survivability wise, your build is more balanced. Necro has been designed for longer battles, not powerful ones. So far, these are both turning out to be kitten-thieves.

^ this.
I support the simple change from bleeds to another DoT to avoid caps, but too many runes ans sigils would no longer effect our conditions. i.e Afflicted runes

what armor set are you using? berserkers, carrion, or knights?

I know that pairing main and secondary attributes into one trait line can really overpower a class, but i’m mainly upset over our inaccessibility to real solid healing other than crit blood magic traits or consume conditions.

Healing power really is useless to us, it doesn’t improve anything but regeneration boons which is weak at best.

Toughness, Vitality… They are mostly accessible in endgame dungeons but even those are hard to get into (as of now, kaineng arah is bugged. nobody can get in)

And as soon as you grab toughness/vitality, you either sacrifice precision or power… Either by allocating spite points to another tree and losing a lot of bleed damage or losing crit chance and losing effectivity of Curses5pt. and vamp procs

The conditions in WvW are a little hard to gauge, some people trait for condition removal which can really suck, most others don’t which can guarantee you kills in under 24 seconds or less. I personally rock a power/cond hybrid to squeeze effectiveness from both worlds (because when in groups i swap in some wells or spectral utils) and go full d/d

the weakest part of the vamp build is truly plague signet which can be better slotted for power signet for the extra mainhand damage from d/d.

I really want to redo my toon eventually and try the high power based crit dmg focused spectral D/D necro which sounds amazing.

JonathanSharp.7094:

So, quickly, on the design philosophy at play here (you can feel free to disagree, but this is what I feel):

We want the Thief to be the class that most “slips through your fingers”. Other classes like the Ele and Mes have some of it too (and rightly so), but if anyone is escaping a fight, that should be a slippery Thief.

The Necro, on the other hand, should be the dude you CANNOT get away from. It’s an attrition based class, so the idea is that if you lock horns w/ a necro, know what you’re getting into: you’re fighting a class that’s built for attrition. It can dot you, dps you, rip your boons, and severely hinder your movement. AND it also has the ability to soak up a lot of damage. So the longer the fight goes, the stronger the Necro should get. That’s the idea behind Death Shroud, but little escape ability.

So we don’t want that attrition class to also have great ways to escape. This used to be the case, and we felt the Necro was just too strong if it was great at attrition as well as movement/escape. We wanted the Necro to be more about attrition, and for other classes (Thief, Ele, Mes) to be more about escaping and mobility.

Hope that makes sense.

I would just like to point out that there are way too many other builds and classes that are so much better at using conditions than us. It takes me about 5 skills chained up (including two utilities) to get about 13 stacks of bleeding on my well geared and traited conditionmancer. Please tell me that the mesmer next to me facerolling by stacking 25 stacks of bleeding in 4 seconds does not mean our class is broken.

second note, if the game was designed to be a balanced model that eliminates the holy trinity, and our class is designed with the notion in mind that we’re not supposed to be mobile like all of the other classes in our category (Elementalists, Mesmers..) then we’re quite literally shoehorned into a specific playstyle that does not pick up on Guild Wars 2’s emphasis on mobility to avoid danger. Does it justify our long cooldowns, low durations on control effects, and lackluster condition choice? If we are truly a class that is supposed to be rulers of attrition, wouldn’t it make sense for us to have the properly developed skill set to make up for our total lack of mobility? If we can’t instant portal around, remove all crippled effects by mashing the V button, or just simply be able to /afk after hitting one of our 1-4 skills that auto-stacks bleed to the max… Then what is the point of trying with the necromancer anymore?

The idea that we are supposed to be able to lock horns with another player is just non existent. I can watch endless footage on youtube of non-necro players kiting out, gapping out, and simply being able to de-commission our conditions like it’s all just a minor inconvenience. As a class that relies on conditions to do things, our skills and utilities are easily rendered useless by all other classes.

Just the other day, I was in cursed shore trying to get to the gates of Arah (which is bugged on Kaineng btw, nobody can get in) I could not even get up past the first set of steps for the first 5 tries, because all the crippling, weakness, poison, bleeds, dazes, confusions, and burns were unbearable and there is simply no way to get rid of them easily. Sure, i tried staff 4, and plague signet, but the conditions stacked so fast that in the end I just ragequit and stopped playing guild wars 2 because it felt like all the effort put into developing a good necromancer was useless
Being able to stack bleeds and stuff is cool and all, but with less than 3 seconds of fear total in our reach at any time plus a few seconds of being able to chill mobs, our attrition theme is simply nonexistent. Great on paper, not even implemented in reality.

I tried to write a guide to the necromancer, but with so many people being dissatisfied with the bugs and how unbalanced the class is, people didn’t see it as a positive thing and chose to criticize.

I also would +1 to reworking our traits. I posted a thread about the dumb pairing of trait attribute bonuses and its the reason why we’re stretched thin

We lack vit/tough bonuses on gear related to improving our damage output and critical hit chance, which are the only two things this class is floating on right now. (seriously, imagine if you NEVER critical hit.) Think of all the things that will go wrong with our class.

I’d like to see either more accessible tough/vitality in our gear choices (and not just freaking endgame dungeon sets) or better improvements to our healing mechanics.

Like, can you guys please make healing power effect our siphoning amount, life transfer amount, including critproc heals? because as it is, the attribute is useless.

mesmers don’t even swing their greatsword. they use it for their lazor beam auto. ROFL

screw it, just realized that the necromancer class is really stretched thin when it comes to staying alive + dealing damage and traits/gear points us towards being a bunkerhealer or glass cannon. (wish I could add control support but lets face it, speccing for freeze+fear is a joke, you lose conditions and healing)

looks like i’ll be rolling a mesmer, guardian, ranger, engineer, or thief pretty soon here.

Hey, did anyone notice the weird part about the spite tree giving +power and +condition duration? In NO way are those two bonuses synergetic since we get all our condition damage from bleeds/poisons/crits which are all in the Curses tree…

Also, why is precision in the curses tree? The only traits that benefit from the crit increase is withering precision, reapers precision, and the first 66% bleed proc which is minimally effective. Reaper’s precision is a sad waste of a trait since Daggers or even Axe can generate LF lightspeeds faster than any crits can proc, so really the only benefit in that tree is Withering and Barbed precision.

Why do we have healing power in our blood magic trait line? Did any designers/developers realize that we have hardly(if at all) any skills that actually use that attribute for healing, not to mention how pathetic the numbers scale up at level 80 making it a completely nonviable attribute to the class, making it a completely dead mechanic?

The only efficient ways I have noticed this class ever being able to self-heal or heal in general is through Crit-proc blood sigils, Vampiric precision, and the first 4 trait slots in the blood tree. NO HEALING POWER HELPS US. Ever.

it would help to have Curses tree give +condition damage and +condition duration (doesn’t that sound like common sense?) and give Blood Magic the +Vitality and +Precision since no matter how we try to glue together our broken class with really good armor pieces, we’re either missing All of our power, all of our toughness, or all of our vitality.

Everything in our toolset that uses +Power doesn’t synergize with +condition duration at the same time. If you look at Spite traits, almost all of them give BOONS not conditions.

It would be more efficient if our trait bonuses were arranged as follows:

Spite: + power + critical damage

Curses: + condition damage + condition duration

Death Magic: + toughness + healing Power

Blood Magic: + Vitality + Precision

Soul Reaping: + Life pool % + Boon Duration %

idk, maybe i’m crazy and this may piss off people who have found a niche that lets their necromancer survive in, but I’m tired of trying to calculate numbers that allow us to survive in pve/wvw/pvp. We either go power based, condition based, then we need precision to proc any good amount of healing from blood either way we go… then we have to look for vitality, toughness, or + crit dmg%! Not to mention if by level 80 you pick curses for Condition based you lose 30% of your damage because all the condition duration crap is in the spite tree (no seriously, tried to re-trait, lost 4k damage out of Blood is Power alone.) And if you Go power based you lose most of your precision (7% crit chance) and Withering Precision which keeps necros alive when they are in close quarters combat.

When was the last time we found accessible Condition damage/Precision/Toughness
or Power/Precision/Vitality gear(other than Arah’s) and still have enough trait points to not lose either +30% condition duration, solid healing capability, or toughness?

@wayfarer – Full Exotic Crafted Rampager’s set with a couple transmuted items for looks. I went wine ice because light pink tickles my fancy

/signed also agreed. That trait is so fail, it deserves a funeral… just like the tiny fetus is summons needs a funeral

QSpec.4298:

I mained a Magus in Warhammer.

I also started WoW (super early out of beta) as a Lock which was broken UP. I quit that a few months before they got broken OP, and I rolled a shadow priest… when they were broken UP (and not allowed in groups).

I have also mained a psionicist in Allods ( when it was the suck). Finally, I was inches from rolling a Mesmer, but I went Necro instead. So I’m sorry.

tl;dr Mesmers were almost the weakest class.

WOOHOO someone who played allods.

psionicist is the most OP class on that game now.

But necro is basically strong in PvE, teh suxxors in PvP, OKAY in WvW, and if you’re not rocking a staff with scepter/dagger or staff with dagger/dagger, your damage will be teh suxxors or your health bar will cry for child protective services.

Honestly, I just wish we could choose what skills go into our DS bar. as it is, all the underwater DS skills are trash.

I’m pretty sure all the hard working developers over in ANet are taking in all the serious conversations we’ve had over specific necromancer mechanics and such and are taking it into consideration with all the metric data they grab from PvE, WvW, sPvP and tPvP.
As they said, they are really proud of Guild Wars 2 and its crowning achievement for being a somewhat balanced MMO. Every class suffers its own calamities, they are probably working out the kinks because the reality is that this project is massive.

Xom.9264:

Thats all well and good, however if you ever take the time to level up another class to 80 and pvp wvw even pve you might see while necros can do ok other classes with the same amount of time and effort invested can do outstanding and are just plain more fun responsive classes.

I agree entirely. I’m just one of those ol’ stinky kittens that can’t let go of necromancers despite how hard it is to make them useful.

Noticed i had a warrior in my second char slot

But there is a certain thing about this class that still makes it enjoyable… I think its being able to go from DS to plague form and back and forth with all that extra HP (while it nannies your cooldowns) and being able to sustain for a long time.

I like the playability of other classes very much. But even in something as trivial as Mad King, I was in there with 4 other capped exotic players and the mesmer, warrior, and guardian were all going down a few times despite the fact that I had aggro because even a couple trash mobs harassed them.

as for t/spvp there are some solid builds very close to a power/prec/crit build. There is the mr.freeze build which utilizes our actually large array of freezes to slow down an opponent’s cooldowns to a slog, there are spectral power hybrid builds, which use the spectral interrupts to screw with powerburst and glass-cannoneers… All pretty viable, it just takes a little more focus because the necro has to walk a finer line.

Side note, have you looked into using Blood is Power instead of Well of Suffering? BiP does about 8k bleeding damage, then another 3k if transfer through either a signet or staff 4(plus more if they crit) and that can be spread using Epidemic (much more AoE damage than Suffering, had my fair share of experience.. was my old favorite.

I love the spectral utilities, and I agree that they are pretty much up to personal preference, but Dagger 4 can be used in tight situations to substitute for a spectral grasp interrupt. dagger4 is also a jump-skill.

Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that you’d have a hard time in Orr : )

But Arah can get pretty nasty, and sometimes Long Haul > Dps and staying alive can be more important than being a death nuke. Idk, Its a good idea to read up on how damage is calaculated before trying to finish a toon with Orrian armor (that is, if you plan to)

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Damage

its basically Weapon DMG x Power x Skill Coefficient(commonly ~1) / Armor (includes toughness)

If you run a couple dummy numbers, + or – 400-500 Toughness can mean a lot less incoming damage.
Berserkers is fantastic, I had to choose either that or rampagers, But even with high crit dmg with a nice Dagger1 auto, I still get the sense that necros are really screwed if they get stunned/knockdown/dazed by a large-mob action. And given that a lot of our strong setting-up utilities have a sort of slow cast-time, that moment can really end up fatal in a tight dungeon environment.

Just food for thought : ) Happy hunting!