Guild Wars 2

I have to Agree with smack on this one. MMOs have always been about teamplay whether you realize it or not. 1 person playing properly on a 5v5 map will not beat 5 people playing as a team. If you were unlucky enough to be placed on a team with that oh lol its the same map and mechanics we can just zerg and kill and still win, then i feel sorry for you being placed on that kind of team it happens. Dust yourself off and try again, or form up a premade pug team with some kind of VOIP so you can talk strat and call out what nodes are vulnerable to assault or heavily defended. GW2 yes your player skill does matter, but in the PvP or PvE environment, player skill becomes secondary to overall team skill and tactics.

How to kill a good mesmer.

1). Be a class that can constantly pump out massive AoE damage so they don’t have clones and phantasms to hide behind.

2). Run away as fast as you can until you can get backup from a team member that can perform 1.

Mesmers are exremely difficult to 1v1 against right now, even for another memser it is more of a kite party see who can spam clones/phantasms faster than the other. Best advice, don’t charge the mesmer unless you are the one with the +1 running with you to kill them.

Indeed, it actually counters a few builds of other classes as well. That how the game was designed, everything has a counter it is just a matter of figuring out what your playing against and utilizing proper team composition and strategy to deal with it. Smokescreen is great though, lovely troll button for when those rangers come a quick firing lol, and like i said, when that rifle war wants to fire off a kill shot.

I love it when people think they can just knock a necro off a point, specially when our elite is up, and that elite is plague form. I can pretty much keep howver many people wish to attack me wasting weapon ability CDs with the lovely spam of the 2 button aoe blind in plague form, not to mention the constant poison reduced heal benefits to go with it.

Works perfectly, until I slap a well down that converts every stack of that bleed into time on regeneration. Bleeds and necros are friends, especially the ones that bleed themselves to bleed you and then use the signet to add the bleed on themselves to your stacks, you stack massive bleeds on a conditionmancer they will throw them back at you, and yes you have ways to remove them but it is a trade CD for CD game after all. Also i wasn’t knocking your build was saying it is actually a good one and you use one of the most useful but rarely seen skills in the PvP environment on a thief.

nldixon.8514:

Fynd.4890:

I guess you’ve actually never done sPVP, because if you did, you’d know that when you get teamswapped, you retain your points, and being swapped to the losing team is actually beneficial to gaining MORE points, because usually your team is now 3-capped and you can go on a neutralization spree (10 points each for 3 seconds of neut. time).

I’ve actually done quite a lot of sPvP (around 17 or 18 ranks worth) and have never kept my points. So unless I’m broken, points don’t transfer. Just a few nights ago I was 150+ points on the winning team at 450 to 30 (or near that), got swapped and ended up with FIVE points.

That’s broken.

Yeah your broken, the game i got swapped twice, due to the fact i was a major contributing factor on the first teams getting ahead, and the second teams coming back, i had around 400 points total from that one game. Also, farming points with treb is entirely to easy >.> i’ve played games where the enemies don’t destroy treab and get upwards of 300 or more everytime just for getting 5 treb hits on the enemy zerg constantly and player kills with either defenses or offenses depending on whether or not our team holds the point being bombarded.

I know it doesn’t take away the points you have already earned, but you lose out on points occasionally. There have been times i have been in the stomp animation with the enemy having no more escapes left and get team swapped before it finishes, not to mention tags on all the other players getting ready to die. Thats 15+ points right there gone and the people saying we should be upset about it are really saying you just lost out on 15+ earned points + the match victory bonus, but it’s perfectly ok. Once, one time and I’m pretty sure it was a bug, i got team swapped and got points for a player on the team i got swapped to dying that i was in the fight with I got points for. One player, out of the pack of 3-4 that were getting killed, that is still a 45 point loss plus the 30-60 win bonus loss depending on booster.

Araditus.1526:

I use pistol dagger, and dagger dagger, I never die, am I OP?

p.s. I use shadowstep, weakness venom, smoekscreen, thieves guild, 25/0/20/0/25

Nope, you can deal decent damage and have high survivability, but you lack the massive crit damage that comes from traiting into the second tree. Smokescreen is a great ability to irritate those pesky hunters and is widely underlooked. Even better to use it when you see that rifle warrior lining up that 8k+ crit killshot.

Again, HS was and still is meant to be an execution move scaling with the enemies total hp, before that scale was practically nonexistant with only like a 100-150 damage total difference no matter how high or low the health was. I don’t see a nerf here, I see an ability readjusted to not be lololol faceroll 2 spam and i still win against any new or unskilled player that doesn’t have a clue.

Actually i really agree with the whole stat thing on one item. It sucks, horribly. Often times you get a neck and it gives you 2 things you want but a third that is completely useless for what you are building for. I use the clerics amulet on my necro, He has an amazing +healing and really high survivability with wells/traits for healing from them. The neck however gives +heal +tough and +pow, I would gladly trade the +pow for +vit. On the other hand the other neck has +heal +vit +cond which, with my build Cond is next to useless for me, so the toughness and +pow which at least increases the damage my wells do, though I would trade that for the extra survivability fro +vit instead anyday. Currently with the necks it’s only a partial boost, and a whole ton of a stat thats just kind of meh for the other stats you actually need from the neck.

Carlin.1059

The hardest nuke button for mesmer and rogue, makes them unkillable. They can’t be CC’d at all. When warrior uses earthshaker, the warrior can be interrupted mid-air (Unlike any other class that has movement casts).
What I meant when I said that you can’t burst someone down was that there’s simply a lack of spells for a lot of classes. IE hundred blades (which is a horrible build) makes you stand still, and the auto attack does zero damage at all. The only real burst damage warrior has is hundred blades.
Horrible.

I normally read through all of the forum before making a comment if I do, however, this comment right here is a load of BS. I got nuked down by a war in 5-10 seconds, I looked in the death recap, every GS ability has was used on me, except HB. I got outplayed, it happens, I move on with life and do my best not to let the same thing happen again, funnily enough when you practice and learn the other classes you tend to do better. Play in the competitive tPvP scene on even just a premade pug team with some kind of communication, you usually end up with reasonably skilled players, and playing against them as well, and no skilled player will use a cookie cutter build, because they know it is about 99.9% useless in a teamfight where there damage will just be countered and they will have no cds and be pretty much a walking target.

HS wasn’t nerfed, if you looked it is the only ability that scaled with enemy health, increasing in damage to be a finisher. All they did was adjust it so that it is exactly that now, a finisher. It is no longer a cheap way for bads, or a cheap way to kill bads, by 1 button spam. It is also still a fully functional gap closer, and with the damage you can do on a backstab, just lol at the 9-10k 50% hp sink in one move and HS hasn’t really been nerfed at all has it.

There are people that enjoy PvPing but don’t have the time to spend a week just grinding glory, or running tourneys to get good at the game. The casual players like this who only play for maybe 10-12 hours a week at the most probably get extremely annoyed when they work for what they think is a win, because they either a). Think that a zergfest is how it is supposed to be played, or b). don’t really understand why there zerg outdid the enemies zerg for them to actually win. Still though, reguardless of how your winning if you don’t play for long periods at a time and you constantly keep getting switched to a losing side by force, would you want to continue playing the PvP in that manner.

I understand where your coming from, there needs to be some way to balance the teams, but there should be some kind of limit at which teams get balanced. I’ve been in games where the team i was on had all the points capped and held, which requires more than a zerg, and when it’s like 400 to less than 200, and you get swapped, from the team you were just helping hold all 3 points, yeah, have that happen and see if you still don’t mind being swapped to the losing team.

Minion build isn’t bad it’s just that minion ai is wonky sometimes. Been in combat and my golem just stood there like he was waiting to get his hair done and other times he would run off of his own accord to just go kill some random dude 2 miles away. Minions builds actually do rather decent damage, if you have ever died to a minion using necro, look at the re-cap, bet the total damage done from minions is > than the total damage done by the necro himself. It also doesn’t help that minions scale off of power, and the minion traits just happen to be in the toughness tree, and wells, which do minor damage and massive debilitation, have one of their traits in the crit tree. With the necro it’s either you go one specific way with a build or it is hopeless, with other classes it is still go mostly one specific way, but they have other viable options for that same path. Also, most other classes traits aren’t as bugged out as necros are currently.

The point is sPvP is supposed to be fun for the people that don’t want to play competitively in tourneys. It’s not really fun to work for a win just to get handed a loss. You have to look at it from the perspective of the players that don’t go into sPvP with only the expectation of a zerg glory farm game. Casuals won’t be on the level of competitive players, and probably don’t really care if they win or lose a game, but to get slapped with a loss after (for a casual player) can be a hard fought victory, is just a slap to the face with no punishment for the, i’m in it only to farm glory WoW bg points attitude.

Maybe they changed it, but when a warrior gets up with 3 from downed state 5 without that 5 secs of invulnerability they would just immidiately be dead. My necro has 21k hp and 3k toughness or so, i got revived from down state, only to be immidiately put back in it before i could get a single spell off. Without that invuln the warrior would pretty much just be pressing the suicide button with 3.

Opening up the paid tourneys for premades might actually make the free tourneys horrible right now. With the most popular classes being thiefs and mesmers, and paid tourneys being released, solo que will be pretty much nothing but thieves and mesmers because of how many are being played right now. Or as the Op is saying, guardians because they have really easy to use survivability.

you can’t premade in hotjoin, there is no join as group, only join friend in, and 70% of the time they get put on opposite teams anyways.

Thedenofsin.7340:

You should think a little more before you type. I stated Anet would need to make some substantial changes for this type of play to be viable. Did it occur to you that perhaps one of them would be to change the damage mechanics from holding the item?

I did think before I typed. You should have thought before you put in there that holding an item does damage/ makes you take increased damage as it is. If you have played sPvP you know it is just a giant zergfest and unless you give the items to a thief, mesmer, or guardian, that player will just be bursted down within 2 seconds of having the item because of all the sPvPers and the ever popular cookie cutter build. Also theres the whole, I’m not getting enough glory farm this teams sucks later, with no penalty except to players on the winning team that get swapped to the losing team. Would be an enourmous slap to the face if you were the one holding the item for most of the game and get slapped with autobalance for a forced loss that you gave to yourself. I think the point system needs to be reworked to make people want to play for the win instead of, play for the glory farm before they start putting in other modes of gameplay.

Nkrdbl.8160:

I’m sure its been said in this thread already by somebody else, but I saw another thread the other day about autobalancing and figure I’d say it again.

I do agree that being switched to the losing team near the end of a match when you’ve been on the winning team from the start can be frustrating. That being said, even if you do win several matches in a row, you aren’t netting most of your glory from the win bonus. It’s fairly minimal if you ask me. Most of your earned glory comes from your participation and success in the match itself.

Just my two cents.

It’s true that the glory boost is minimal from a win, but i’ve had it happen to me twice in one game, got over 200 points ahead got autobalanced onto the losing team, came back with that team and got ahead, got autobalanced back to my original team after just capping to points for the other side.

Needless to say i worked my butt off and got a ton of glory points just for the match itself, but it takes away the fun when you play 80-90% of a match, just to get swapped to the other team and have pretty much shoved your foot so far down your own throat you have to have surgery to get it back out.

FrozenDream.1590:

and 90% of those players suck as hell…
i played mesmer from the very beginning and i just own them one after another. just playing an OP-considered class doesn’t make u OP

Of course you did, unless you can AoE down the clones at a rapid rate, which tends to happen when there is a group around, a mesmer can easily beat any glass cannon thief, because glass cannon thiefs, don’t have the aoe to get rid of your illusions, so they just pump damage out on him, or you pump damage out on him when he tries to 1v1 kill all of your clones, because you can spam them faster than he can take them out 1v1.

Mesmer is easily one way to hard counter a thief, even in a 1v1 a skilled mesmer and a skilled thief the outcome will be either the mesmer wins, or the theif escapes.

Fynd.4890:

You only gain glory at the end of a match, so quitting early already hurts the quitter by dumping their current earned points into the nether.

TL;DR: there’s already a nice leaver penalty, a time-out penalty would be excessive

Right because leaving the zergfest that your losing and only losing maybe 20-45 points is really a penalty, where as the players on the winning team that get switched over to the teams losing zerg and stay in the match gain little to no more glory for being slaped onto the losing team.

Winning players get more of a slap to the face than the losers, who, when quitting, already aren’t really losing much at all.

Kierstone.8294:

Please. This is a teamwork-game like WOW’s arena. We need not only the survivablity. Warlocks in TBC had been tanks(2x/3x talent) . Their opponent should put them down first since they has FEAR can control target about 8sec and no CD . If you don’t put a warlock down he/she will fear u to the end of the match. And if u concertrate fire on a warlock. He/She could prove the value of a tank. But how can I taunt opponent attack me?

Relatively easy actually. I use a well spec build and staff for main hand (only issue again with marks on the staff being broke, the only one it seems to increase radius of is the fear mark which has an obnoxiously long cd for an extremely short duration fear in comparison). But with a little above 1200 healing and getting stacks every time an enemy dies, a 21k hp pool, about 3k toughness, if the enemy isn’t taking me down, my wells are not only constantly hampering their ability to kill me or my teammates, but they are also constantly healing me for 200 or more a tick, the exception being the healing well, which has an initial heal of almost 9k, and then ticks for 700 up per second for 10 seconds, while also giving the remove condition with the staff auto attack, or area retaliation with the staff 4.

I have dagger/focus set up for offhand but rarely swat to it because it is rather unreliable. The necro has tons of combo fields to place, and between all of the weapons we can use, 1-2 combo finishers. My only complaint other than bugged traits, is the cast time length on all of the abities, with an exception of using the elite, every skill a necro uses can be interupted entirely to easily. So when getting hit by multiple foes it’s basically use your 2 dodges and try not to be in melee range of well, every melee class that has really easy to use gap closers.

I don’t consider Necro UP, but we could use some minor changes on cast time of wells. It sucks that it is my favorite spec to play but if i get focused by more than one person if i haven’t spammed out all my wells before that happens, i don’t get to cast them at all. I only really have 2 complaints about DS and that is the lack of seeing what boons/conditions we have applied to us, and that although it does give us a 3rd skillset and second healthbar (if you don’t count the thief or war that will just one shot through that entire pool), it gives us 4 abilities at the cost of 10.

[edit for + signs being around things creating underline : /]

The thiefs that just spam heartseeker are dumb lol. If they spam it on people above 50% other than gap closing, it’s basically an auto attack that wastes your initiative. However, the skilled thief that hits you with a 50% backstab with the power signet popped for 150% damage, hits you for a decent chuck with cloak and dagger to get back in stealth, hit you with another backstab and then use heartseeker 1-2 times, all within the matter of 2-3 seconds are another thing altogether.

Thedenofsin.7340:

As someone who played a LOT of Rift PvP, I’d definitely say ‘no’ to Black Garden, or any map that’s based upon a single node / choke point / mcguffin.
Black Garden matches lasted about 8 minutes long. The match was decided in the first 20 seconds: whoever won the first zerg to hold the McGuffin.

Even the Rift developers realized this was a bad map design. This is why their subsequent PvP maps, Library of the Runemasters and Black Garden: Stockpile, created many different objectives to hold.

Library of the Runemasters could be interesting for GW2:
– points are accrued by holding an item by a character
– the more items held, the more points accrued
– holding the item damages players / makes them susceptible to more damage
– self-damage is amplified the closer item holders are to one another
– when a player is killed, the item respawns in set locations

It creates an interesting gameplay: there will be dynamic control points (the players hold the items) and static control points (the respawn locations for the items). This creates various roles (carriers, zone defenders and damage dealers/roamers).

Naturally Anet would have to make some substantial changes to accommodate the gameplay in GW2.

Right because the damage that 2 thieves, 1 thief/1 war, or 2 wars, can just come up and faceroll you to death with already isn’t bad enough. Yes there are escape mechanisms, but there is not enough escape mechanisms for you to be able to break the cc that 2 of either one of those classes, or one of them both put out on you, unless your a guardian and just throw them on their face and let them kill themselves with retaliation.

Dreadspectre.3456

Stop putting Capricorn into the map rotation and I’ll stop leaving servers when it comes up.

Leaving when the match comes up is fine, it’s leaving when your getting stomped by 200+ points so the people working to achieve victory get slapped in the face by having worked against what has become their team, and get nothing but that slap to the face while the horribads that leave because they are losing just go find a new room.

My problem is not the retaliation as much as I just feel like I’m wasting my time trying to 1v1 a survival spec guardian because the match will never end.

Funny thing is my support specced necro is the same way, really really hard to kill 1v1, but when you get a group that just zerg slams you with 3, expecially when those 3 all have way to knock you on your butt any then slap you out of the point, it’s just like lol theres a target dummy at the point.

Leiloni.7951:

I think it’s separate problems. The 3 man zerg I’ve been on the receiving end of and they just need to fix the point system to make that less attractive of a tactic. You could have any 3 classes in that mini zerg and it’d still be dumb. One guardian defending a point is indeed annoying if they’re specced for survival. It takes them forever to be killed. But I guess that’s the point of a build like that (QQ). At least they don’t do much damage.

The guardian them self may not do much damage but you beat yourself to death before you beat them to death with as easy as it is for them to stack retaliation and heal up.

If you play against premades in tPvP teams are usually balanced, I would have to say that it is rare I solo que up for a game and don’t see either one of the follow on my, or the enemies team. 2-3 guardians, 2-3 warriors, 2-3 thieves, or 2-3 mesmers. Solo que should really look into checking what classes are being put on teams, it really sucks when you get bum rushed by any of those combos. Thieves/Wars will just burst you down before you can even use an ability, not to mention all the knockdown/knockback that you can take with 2 hammer wielding wars. Same thing with the guardians, so many ways to just throw you around and put up retaliation getting rushed by multiple of them is a steamroll. A skilled player can spot a mesmer easy, when you get 2-3 of them, sure call a target on one, all the meanwhile there will be in total about 8-12 enemies on your screen, good luck playing call a target on that, especially if your in a solo que group.

My Necro that I love plying on PvE or PvP

HiSaZuL.2843

In reality DS is welfare oh-kitten button. Nothing more. Even the regular run of the mill 100b spammer or heartseeker spammer can chew through a fully specced DS in a matter of seconds. A good warrior can literally blow you out of your DS before you can even use fear button.

If you can’t get your fear off before your entire life force pool is off you are just bad. By the time my abilities even show up in that form which is almost instantly by the way, my fear shows on cd, because you can cast it while transition into it. and yes if you stay in that form your life force pool can be melted rather quickly, however if you pop in while hitting 3 you get an instant fear, hit 4 and drain the life from them, 2 to chill them and put yourself on top of them, pop out and go back to using your other abilities, you essentionally have 3 extra skills constantly at your disposal.

Mathemagician.7314:

See, The thing with Necromancers is that, they can do everything you just said, AND they grant no boons to anyone around them, they are actually easy to kill, and they won’t actually kill you. Sometimes they can perform really well at the removing boons thing, but boons go up so fast, and condition removal is a valuable commodity in tPvP so everyone takes tons of it.

Funny, necros hard counter guardians because of all those boons they constantly put up. Necro has 2 abilities that run any boon on a foe into a condition, and we can fear them out of their projectile blocking bubble. We also have a well that turns any conditions on allies into boons, oh and both these wells grant allies lifesteal. Not to mention these wells will also damage down those engineers turrets and with the aoe from staff and increased mark size, yeah those turrets become more of a minor annoyance.

Actually in tPvP a healing/support well specced necro can bunker down very well, specially when the dps team members come to nuke down the players trying to kill you. I rather enjoy it happening, and the OP is right, Necros are constantly keeping enemies hampered with debuffs, and if you spec into wells and build up +healing, at that 2.6k every 40 seconds and easily become a 7k every 32 seconds.

Angry Flying Squirrel.3041

I have no idea why people are saying Necro was created as a team player. If it was that’s a big problem. I don’t think they were created that way.

Are Necro’s UP? Yes but only because we have so many abilities and traits that are not working correctly right now due to bugs. We have a lot of bugs and that is making it harder to make good builds. Or i should say for good builds to be effective.

The problem this game faces right now is that some Prof are way too easy to play well. And by well I mean get ~80% of the power out of them. Time will fix this but until then, the easy Prof will be the FotM.

We also don’t know how top play will turn out. If the harder Prof are even a little more Powerful than the easier Prof you will see them in top play. They might be absent in Play Now but that hardly matters.

If on the other hand the Harder Prof are equal in Power than they really will have a problem. Time will tell.

I main a Necro PvE and have started maining him PvP as well. The fact that a necro has high survivability, and AoE enemy debilitations is amazing. Funny when i’m just hanging around in the mists debatin on what i want to do and I see "LF1 more tPvP Necro or Guardian. Funny that my friends know my skill level and how I play and they ask me to come join them in dungeons and stuff. Necro is amazing in team play with all of our AoE debilitations we can apply, the traiting that involves our wells all work great btw.

Tony.2150

Finally some other necro on the forum that DOES NOT complain. People Jon is right and if he were on the forum again he would honestly say L2P. But he cant because he would probably get fired. As quoted above thats what DS is for. You dont need it as dps. Its absorbing burst using cc gap closer, etc, As my build probably differes from angry i have no problem 1v1 i come out victorious (85% of the time). I can hold points i can tank 2-3 people on a node before my team shows up. Its Learning the class and how other classes work against you, Knowing what TO DO. People NECROS ARE NOT U.P. AS i will state in many other threads. CONDITION IS A CONDITION BUILD. NOT A DPS build. you want to dps go power. condition is to dot up enemys and assist teammates. Yes there are alot of condition removals. BUT KNOW WHAT THE YLOOK LIKE. then you pop your sig on the then spread epidemic. such and such. If you know what your doing your viable in all fights.

I have to agree. Necro has so many options for survivability, and the whole damage scales when you level up is crap. Yes outright damage might get worse, but as you are leveling up in comparison to some of the other classes you are gaining more survivability than them. Necro is meant to be a team player and in a 1v1 situation a necro can outlast just about any class, not to mention necro is a hard counter to the ever popular defense guardian. When I was leveling my necro I would see other people get downed or killed by a mob, and inished whatever I was fighting without even worrying about going out of combat to kill whatever I just seen kill whichever player and res them. This game is all about mobility and survivability, while necro may lack the mobility some of the other classes have, the skillset and necro can have makes it more than viable on the survivability side of things. We don’t have to be super constantly mobile like other classes to keep ourselves alive. In fact, using the wells, which are some of our most useful utilities, limit the area you are mobile in because of the benefits of keeping whoever/whatever you are fighting inside of them.

QSpec.4298

This is the thing… the game is not necessarily balanced around 5v5. They’ve yet to come out and specifically say what they are balancing for. That said, as an 8v8 player (at least for now), I can and do expect a reasonable amount of ‘balance’ thrown my way.

No it is not unreasonable to expect balance thrown your way for the 8v8 WvWvW side of things. The game is currently being balanced around the 5v5 format though. It’s been said by tons of people other than me, as well, if GW2 makes it to the e-sport scene, the 5v5 tournament format is how it will be taking place. Considering they want it to be an e-sport, and all these professions or builds people are saying are OP, and yet the people that play tourney mode never have a problem dealing with them, I would say it is safe to think that it is being balanced around the 5v5 format.

It doesn’t increase shrouds duration, it merely reduces the rate at which it self drops when using the abilities or just staying in the form. It doesn’t reduce the pool lost from damage, which, drops horribly fast in pvp anyways so if you specced to get that it is kind of a waste of trait points better spent elsewhere. !https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/Fundamental-Problem-for-Necro-s/122873! That is how I play my necro for PvP, works great in tourneys after you get practice with it, Necro is very much a team oriented playstyle, it falls off solo but, with a good rotation, you will never need to auto attack because you will be keeping the rest of your abilities up and your enemies wanting your blood so your team can focus on killing them while they blow cds trying to kill you.

seems to me as if spectral walks return is more of the same kind of mechanic of the IA on a thiefs shortbow. It’s made to get across flat surfaces as more of a scouting mechanic or mob puller in dungeons than a jump off a cliff and teleport back to exact original location to fool your enemies. IMO could do without the vulnerability if you decide you don’t want to tp back, considering that is unless you offhand a warhorn, the only way a necro gets any kind of movement speed boost, other than the signet that is a constant boost/life steal if activated. However the move speed signet is kind of useless as it eats a spot for better utils the necro has available to it.

Necros are only underpowered if you play them for the zerg or 1v1 mentality. I play a necro, I go support/tanky with wells, staff in one hand dagger/focus on the other.

runes: 6/6 dolyak 1/6 dwayna
sigils: Sigil of supeior life on dagger/staff, Sigil of superior restoration on the focus

clerics necklace for amulet

Power: 1,650
Precision: 1,116
Toughness: 1,925
Vitality: 1,266
Condition damage: 200

Attack: staff – weapon 1,111 Dagger/Focus: 932
Critical chance: 14%
Armor: 920+ toughness : 2,845
Health: 21,842
Healing Power: 1,223

Trait points:
0
20: VI, IX
20: IV, V
30: IV, VIII, XII
0
Plague form for elite
6-9
Well of Blood, Well of Suffering, Well of Corruption, Well of Power

Now this build may seem totally useless (and it is if all you play for is the zergfest), however, my ability to keep an enemy team impaired and my own team alive with it forces the enemy to have to focus me down with their CDs. In a nice team setting, with enemies having to blow all their skills on you to kill you while you have team mates killing them, and most of the time it takes 3-4 of the enemies to do so while you have your team with you, that frees your team up to do major damage elsewhere and cap points in a 5v5 tPvP. The well of bloods initial heal goes upwards to almost 8k, and evey little tick per second for 10 seconds, 704 or so = 15k heal and 7k heal for team, plus condition removal. With the other 3 wells, using one as the other fades, constant dark combo field, lifesteal for all the combo finisher moves.

The necro was designed with team play in mind and it excells at it when done properly. The same goes for PvE environments. If you get in a good group you can keep your party alive and not even be the main focus of the mobs. Playing a necro is all about having good team synergy, and while yes, most of the other classes and just be a rampant zergfest killing machine, if the necro could fit properly into this catagory it would be almost completely broken to be used in a competitive PvP or dungeon PvE environment.

It probably is underwhelming in the zergfest that is WvWvW and the 8v8 sPvP, I have been there myself and seen it. But the game is balanced around tPvP and PvE dungeons, and the group synergy a skilled necromancer can bring to a well co-ordinated team is scary. Like I said, if I’m alive my team is practically untouchable, and while no, I have not been turned Moa in lich form, I have been turned Moa in plague, sucks worse when your spamming 2 and next thing you know your channeling some sub par useless ability and being pounded on my phantasms lol. However in a team of 5 environment a good support/conditionmancer brings alot to the table. Sure our auto attacks with weapons blow, but, I for one, could care less, with the rotation of skills on staffs and wells, and the use of death shroud for a fear slight health buffer to pop back out, you are constantly using every ability to hinder your opponent anyway so auto attack become moot.

Our elites our underwhelming huh, go condition with plague and spam one and watch the bleeds stack up, be supporty with it and spam 2 and keep the enemies blinded, need to escape spam 3 and keep them crippled. Go power with lich form, auto attack crits for 3-4k, get a mesmer with time warp on your team and melt the entire enemies face off, that 3-4k crit hits multiple enemies grouped up. Our only minion that regens health, though the cd on the ability may be long that knockdown is quite useful. DS is not useless unless you just stay in it. As I said with traits specced into the extra 1 sec on fear, and fear does damage, 3 in it becomes a useful cc. 4 is great for providing a short health buffer against an enemy team pop out of it or swap weapons if your skills on the wep are on cd, and so is your swap. The necro is not a useless class by far, neither our the elite skills. Yes some classes excell at 1v1 or quickly bursting down 1 person in a group, after that they become relatively useless until all their cds come up. With the necro if you play it right you can keep a sustained support for your team, i tPvPed as a support necro and it got to the point where the enemy would focus me on sight because they couldn’t do squat to my team if i was alive near them. Also a necro may not be able to out tank a guardian, but they can sure make a guardian wish they weren’t at the same point you are. fear mark on that ground gets rid of that lovely little projectile bubble they hide behind, well that turns their boons into conditions makes them wish they didn’t spec to boon up every couple of seconds.

A good well/toughness necro can pretty much keep all of the wells up on a rotation, add to that that the traits affecting wells are not broken, they can also grant you more toughness on cast, and health on pulse. And if you pop 3 out in a row properly that is a 15 sec dark (lifesteal) combo field you keep in play, with a heal light (condition removal) for ten secs. Two of these wells do damage, one also stack up vulnerability to 10, the other converts all boons into conditions. Ok so they are easy to avoid, big deal, they take up the entirety of a point, if they are avoiding the damage and conditions from the constant well upkeep, they are not on the point to get the win. Couple this with the staff AoE condition damage, traited fear to last 1 sec longer and do damage + what you can do in death shroud which, you can weapon swap in even if your weapon swap is on cd, you are a deadly force when partnered with your team. Necro are not as bad as people make them out to be, they are just not the heavy hitting bleed you do dealth in 5 sec warriors and thiefs you want them to be. As for eles, eles have it rough but i have faced off against a few really good eles that used a rotation that could melt a face off just as easily as a thief could if you didn’t use escape utils perfectly on point.

Necros have to be somewhat tanky due to their lack of mobility, it is part of the learning curve that comes with them. They are not really meant to be a class you solo with but a class that has survivability, damage, and some obnoxious quirks all at the same time. It has always been like this for the “dark art” using classes. Look at the warlock in WoW, sure you could spec it to be a mage using shadow pre wrath, but it shined when specced affliction and putting down the DoTs and curses hampering the enemy. Go back to the black mage way back in FF1, certainly it had some nice damage spells, but it also had so many options to just cripple and take enemies out of the fight weakening them to the point of uselessness. It’s the same thing with the necro here, you play it properly with your team and you have a higher chance of succeeding with all the buff/debuff control you can bring to a fight.

Right so the ability to put down a well that constantly blinds the enemy doesn’t mitigate damage, the one that pulses and turns theirs boons into conditions also doesn’t mitigate damage, the one that turns your conditions into boons isn’t mitigating anything either, nor the fact i’m traited to get toughness upon casting a well and leach health with each pulse of them either. I’m not trying to say a necro will out tank a def specced guardian or warrior, but with the mitigation I can pull of all the while dealing a decent amount of damage and having an extra pool of health with a teleport and refiller on as well as fear and weapon swap reguardless of whether your swap is on cd or not.

No damage mitigation, with a toughness/vitality build necro with at least a semi decent focus on damage I have about 2800 toughness with 21k health, couple that with DS and ground targeted wells on a 20% reduced CD you have plenty of damage midigation, not to mention plague form practically doubles your health, can spam blind, cripple, or bleed with a poison also raises my toughness up to over 5k. No sir, we have no damage mitigation whatsoever.

not sure if it blocks the 6-10 abilities in tourneys or not, sPvP though !http://s1155.photobucket.com/albums/p549/xxxbonezxxx/! Screenshots while holding the repair kit

it is a bit op but those portals are also on the 7-9 skill slots as well. they don’t just conjure them up from no ability, and they may have disabled 6-10 while holding the kit I don’t know, like i said in tPvP as a thief it’s not my job to handle our treb and in sPvP, treb is only good if the whole team doesn’t come to zerg the one person on it, which they usually do.

Yet the elementalist can pump out the same kind of damage we can with this build and they have to use an even harder rotation and timing of the enemy to do so. Necro’s aren’t bad or kittened it’s just like with the elementalist it’s more of a learning curve on a multiple ability rotation, than say a thief or warrior ready up a couple utils charge in hit a couple of buttons get out glass cannon build.

Meh like i said, if i want to play for real skill testing it’s tPvP, but i’m to lazy to form a premade and most the time i solo que i get stuck with a team that consists of like 3-4 of the same profession and nobody wants to change or communicate so whichever team I end up on generally just get’s steamrolled as a whole no matter the skill of 1 player. Even in tPvP 1 player can’t beat a 1v5 on their own the game was intended not to be like the whole, WoW i’m a rogue and with all my stunlockness i can be my own arena team mentality lol.

Not entierly certain which ones he was using, or i think he might have been bugged like crap because or some other guardian learned to stealth. Think he was smacking me around with an invisible hammer while carrying it, and i know the summon hammer could have been used before hand but with how slow a guardian runs and the damage that came from it, i think he was actually using 1-5 abilities while holding the kit. But I have never had a problem using 6-10 with a kit on my thief. Of course it was in hot join, in tPvP i’m never the one on treb duty with my thief, unless it is killing the enemies.