Guild Wars 2

Kimbald.2697:

If I look at posts about WvW I see the opposite being said by defenders: level fast, rush to 80, gear up, WvW is end game so don’t expect something unless you work for it…

Maybe that’s why I would like it to follow pvp gear rules, instead of pve.
It tends to go directly opposite to what the idea for pve in this game should be…

If you can get to 30, have most of your slot skills good to go, some ‘decent’ gear you should be fine if you hang out with people who know what they’re doing on a community VOIP of some sort (most established servers have one for wvw). Yes, you will die… its pvp, don’t do it if you cant take a joke once in a while.

Aside from that, there is a lot of karma and xp to be gained, cash is not great, repairs and siege can be expensive so don’t over-spend if you can help it, always carry supply. There is something a learning curve as well, I’ve been playing for 100s of hours in WvW and discovered 2 new things today which I’d not seen done before, quite a lot of it comes down to not just what you can achieve but also realistically what your group can do and where.

The condition spec is ‘just’ viable for covering large areas in a lot of dots, unfortunately minion or power-melee is severely lacking.

Either a ranger with a variety of single pets which are not great (they’re fun to collect though as you travel around), but neither are you using a valuable slotted skill for them either to do your ‘tanking’. Or pick up basically one of the heavy armour classes do melee extremely well, can be very durable and much more forgiving of mistakes.

Basically, there’s a lot of complications to an already complicated class that is overwhelming for a lot of people, if they fixed the bugs we’d have a much better idea of what it was truly capable of.

Well said, I’ve no interest in PvE unless I ‘have to’ do it for gear. As a condition necro (Tou/Prec/Condition Damage) none of the WvW badge armour or many of the weapons are any good for me, so we don’t even have variety there. 1600 badges, 750k Karma (after 2 full sets of Orr armour) and nothing to spend it on.
(I’d sooner drill a hole in my head than have anything to do with a legendary weapon!)

Despite that, there are two things I roll out for after a work day.
-The people I deck (and sometimes deck me) are a real challenge I will not find anywhere else.
-I am proud of my server and the people I play with, win or lose we play hard and I’ve been here since early release

Kind of funny though, looking at my character, you’d never guess its destroyed over 14,000 people… including some Anet dev’s this arvo that made the mistake of not staying in the happy carebear land of dumb mobs, pumpkins and shiny loots
(get off my lawn)

Early days yet.
Been fairly much constant and fun so far, the night crews on SOR are pretty tough.

You get 3 choices fellas…

1. Bang away a bit longer with a busted class, which ‘may’ one day be brought up to par and ‘make do’ with the single-spec, half-dozen skill-slots which work and just get by. Necros are busted, don’t let me tell you anything otherwise!
However, they just creep over the playability line by about a fingernail, you can play one, it will be very, very hard!

2. Give up, roll a Warrior, Guardian, Mesmer or Thief and go kill some scrubs in PvP or WvW. None of those four are ‘perfect’, however in terms of playability and crossing the line… they have lapped everyone else. You get to keep you in-game friends, in-game guild, move cash from the necro onto them and start over from scratch.
One day, they might fix the necro. It won’t be this week or this month, play-on.

3. Quit, go play another game. I dunno which game, I don’t know what you like, I do know you don’t like Necro’s, so its not going to be GW2.
Anet doesn’t really care if ‘you’ or me don’t log on for a month or 10, they might notice if you and 30,000 others didn’t, but neither am I in the mood for inciting a global rebellion because its entirely too much work.
In the best tradition of 1st World Problems, we just say screw it and go watch TV.

There’s a lot in the patch… and there’s ‘not a lot’ in the patch for us, is sort of the feeling I get from reading it!

Couple of little #% buffs which you’d be pressed to notice really, lot of things with changes, things that I never made any use of because they where rubbish and continue not to bother with because its now ‘changed rubbish’.
Few other bits like Moa-Morph knocking us out of deathshroud, think to myself… well thats ‘not’ the actual problem I have with mesmers, (something about dying a lot instead) if you’re into minions though, I guess you’ve got it even worse! Another punch in the junk I guess.
Some aesthetic bits.

Crux of the matter is there are some fundamental design issues aside from being a “Tank-in-a-Dress”, without the “Tank-Damage” that need to be addressed at some point by Anet.
That is major work to overhaul and to be honest, when I see this whole big shiny new zone full of pve mob-ginding, which must have taken many hundreds of man-hours of labour. They can’t extend at some point, some of that labour into knocking out some flaws in a number of classes that structurally don’t work with any kind of synergy/play-style, aren’t popular because they’re busted- I really do worry where their focus and energy is going.

That’s not an easy thing to write, sounds like I’m unappreciative entirely of what they do, (they do a lot- that is a big patch) and being negative for many reasons.
I’m just not sure exactly sure why when I go home this arvo, that I’ll bother looking at the necro, which has a lot of sentimental ‘value’ and just get on enjoying leveling my warrior a bit more.

I found builds & specs that revolve around durability and manoeuvrability tend to win out as a soldier that is downed or dead does no damage and doesn’t get to where they are needed as soon as possible.
That may mean you have less focus on ‘raw damage’, but it also means you’re the last man standing and the last man standing- wins. Or in worst case scenario, run away to fight another day

As a personal preference, I support my group with large amounts of AOE conditions to cripple, damage and incapacitate the enemy, that also means I don’t have a lot of single-target focus either. But you cant have everything.

Many of us play WvW as our ‘end game’ in so much that PvE isn’t really a challenge, you figure out how the mobs and any map features work, get the shiny things and move onto the next step. I have a few friends that are ‘hardcore raiders’ in our allied guild that play other games that feature a lot of PvE and I can respect their focus.
But, that’s not really a challenge to me, so I’ve not invested much time into dungeons.

Facing a ‘thinking opponent’ in my opinion is far more challenging, add to that, things like badges are automatically put into my bank. I must constantly out-think, manoeuvre and come up with different angles to achieve my objective. Likewise, they’ll be coming up with their own, be it the blunt hammer of a mass assault or ninja attack on a keeps weak spot and undermining supply to cripple a zone’s defences.

That is the difference between a ‘PvE Dungeon’ player and a ‘WvW Combat’ player, we look at the wider scope and think on our feet. We are different and have different needs, all of which are poorly catered for in the current situation.
Our currency is Karma & Badges of Honour, theirs is Cash, Drop Loots and whatever badge-type they have spent time hacking out over time.

IMO, Badges of Honour should buy you any equivalent gear from any dungeon, they are by far the hardest to get and taken by combat against people that are NOT mobs.

I expect it’ll also murder minions, if you’re crazy enough to run them.

If thats the case I’d like Deathshroud (and Lich/Plague) to allow us to use our utility skills, like seemingly every other career gets to just keep doing what it does normally, except us.
For example 2 classes and their specials- Warrior & Thief, they don’t have to re-learn their playing style when they punch out Adrenaline or Initiative, all it does is make what they’re already doing, temporarily better.
Even a complicated class like the Elementalist have a better synergy with their class-special, swapping to different elements, but still doing what they do.

Us, we get 4 buttons for as long as the (currently kittened) power pool lasts for and have to not do what we where doing before and flick over to a different play method to reflect that.

Way I see the make-up of careers in WvW with the people I usually play with breaks down to about:
40% heavy armour roughly split between warriors & guards, 50% medium armour with more thieves than parliament, 7% Mesmers, small handful of Elementalists and the other 2 semi-regular necros I know usually do borderlands & I lurk in EBG most of the time.
Any other necro I see in wvw, is either new, lost, inebriated or looking for the jumping puzzle or something.

Where am I going with this? As a business case as most things are including games, you have to look after your regular customers and most popular product lines first because they’re the earners so to speak.

The blokes that make up your minor services for dented, scratched, hail damaged and wobbly factory seconds, every now and then… aren’t really something you’re going to invest a lot of time into. We’ll get the apprentice to buff the scratches out so it doesn’t look too appalling, but otherwise the rest isn’t covered by warranty and if some of the buttons don’t work, then you should invested in what everyone else is using.

Ouch

Main problem we have is that a lot of what is there, doesn’t work, so we’re kind of boned in that we can’t really find a lot of viable alternatives between lacklustre > complete junk. If you’ve worked with application developers in the past as well, I found the more you get them to add stuff to something (which needs a decent debugging) the more of it they break until you’ve sufficiently put a stop to the shenanigans and make them roll back to the last working version!

Except in this case, there isn’t a last working version…

Raven Paradox.1860:

I haven’t had a chance to even play WvW this week. That’s why we’re losing :P

So lazy!
Leaving the fate of the realm in the hands of a midget elementalist with no hit points and a kittened necromancer. (Actually I haven’t had much time this week either, at some point I do have to work to keep the electricity, rent and internet on)

Aside from that, it was fun when I did get to play, the original BG pro’s in EBG can still get stuff done or stop it turning into a completely catastrophic mess (most of the time…) we even ventured out the other night to borderlands and took back some stuff when we had some numbers to spare.

One of the mentalities myself and others who have been here a while do try to share with new people trying out wvw and others we play with, is that we do play to win and aim for first place.
Logistically, that might not always work out for whatever reason, but its easier to log off knowing that 100% was given by who was there.

I spec fairly heavily into getting as much condition damage as possible, so the synergy off Undead runes are worth the investment there. Also some of the toughness-line skills like Greater Marks and Staff mastery I still place some value in.

The vitality-line, if they fixed a lot of the vampiric-siphon stuff to return health at a worthwhile amount, I’d try and look at doing again, but I dont use wells much or have a lot of use for the skills there otherwise.
But for pure hit-points, no, there is a tangible amount of damage reduction from running a lot of toughness.

The sheer death toll from these other guys has been fun over the weekend, you get props for dying that often. Thanks very much for the lootbags, badges and stuff.

There has and always will be a fairly sizable group of core-BG wvw players that have been here since day one and will probably be around for some time yet to carry the flag regardless of winning, losing or having murdered everything- end up farming the grub and jump puzzle for 2 weeks and talking about making the other team eating whole bags of bacon wrapped… stuff on mumble.

We’re not flashy, don’t brag, often not very nice people because quite a lot of us drink (some more than others) and don’t get a lot of sleep or sunlight. But regardless of how this plays out or whoever thinks they’re “special” moves on to the next shiny thing, we’ll still be here, breaking your stuff and violating your noobs.

My diplomatic solution to this is to give them a valid and tangible reason to hate, by killing as many of them as possible.

Violence really does solve everything in WvW.

Part 2.

4. Pressure
Applying pressure is the key to being a successful Necro, you must constantly have the enemy looking to remove all the crap you put on them, while your team does the big-hits that down them. BIP, Epidemic (and now to some extent, Corrupt Boon) Staff-Marks are excellent ways of doing this.
However, at that point-plank range where YOU WILL GO DOWN, the other ways of applying pressure are not good.
A: Death Shroud, at best it delays the inevitable, I actually mostly use it to soak ticks of condition damage in between Heal cool-downs, it is terrible at an offensive or defence level because at best, its a slightly improved ‘Downed’ line. Im sorry, but it is junk.
B: Plague & Lich Forms, completely remove all our other traits, including healing, (which in the case of many other careers, they still have all access to their elites) so their application is very subjective. One makes you a huge target with slightly improved DPS, the other does minimal damage with an improved damage absorb.

Having things like Wells that move with the character as a PBAOE pulse, would improve this career drastically to the point people would NOT want to come near you because its LETHAL. We are currently not lethal.

5. Weapons
Sceptre-Focus/Warhorn/off-Dagger work ‘ok’, they have terrible baseline damage which limits their application against inanimate objects and sometimes, you just need to beat something to death.
Raw, unadulterated damage and a lack of it, is career and interest-limiting for most players because it does have its place in the game and it does have a place for the Necro.
Axe, horrible weapon which makes you close to a range, with any melee character that will actually make you dead in short order. Combined with its rubbish damage is just not an option. If it was an ‘Actual Axe’ that worked at Melee range with a cleave ability with improved damage would be great.
Dagger, possibly the most disappointing weapons on the whole line, which is even worse than Axe, because the return rates detailed in many threads for the vampiric-drain abilities just don’t Scale-up. getting 180-200hp back out of a 20-22,000hp class with terrible armour is just a ludicrously infinitesimal amount!
It would literally have to be 5x more to make it worth considering.
Staff, the marks are good, to the point you will want one of these for ranged stand-off, the Attack 1 is just so bad its not funny and that’s very disappointing. We all know why, we’re not going to cover this again.

6. Minions
Hey mate, I know you think the little skinned rabbits and other stuff are cute, but let me help you here because I don’t actually want you to end up ‘hating’ your career.
The great necromancer secret is, they don’t actually work at all and you need to (Insert Spec-Traits) to actually be viable.

Thats not being mean, thats what I tell people, because otherwise they don’t enjoy the game and I have to res their dead remains whenever another career bends them over and donkey-punches their lights out without any resistance!

Minions have reached an appallingly bad level, where if you even gave them away to me for-free, without have to put skills into them, I would have to say no thanks. Cheers, but I don’t need that kind of crippling handicap in-game, I’ll be ok on my own.

Part 1.

With respect, the idea of an ‘attrition class’ needs to be thrown out for a number of reasons:

1. It has pidgeonholed the career into being a Condition Spec only, at the cost of both the Minion and Power lines of alternative play- sadly this specialisation it also means the option of being a hybrid of one and bits of the other two are also returning mediocre to very low performance.
The fact other careers do the Condition-Spec line so much better than we do, even with all the specialist transfers and so forth, has just sidelined so many potential players. Not being lazy and I have stuck it out longer than most to accept the challenge of playing this career, but I see no reason why ‘doing things the very hard way’ is appealing to anyone?

2. There is no dedicated support mechanisms currently working which will let my necro survive in a stand up fight against dedicated melee or ranged burst-dps classes. To the point I have submitted bug-reports every time someone blows half my 22200hps off in less than 3 seconds. Thieves, Engineers & Warriors have and will do that.
Against full glass cannon thieves I have dropped in under 6 seconds because of being:
A: Im feared for 3 second +5500hp of damage from the Steal of my 1sec fear no less!
B: Stabbed for 11,000hp and a couple of 2500-3500hp
C: By the time I’ve recovered I have about 15-20% health left and down before I can fire off a heal.
(Pinot is running as much Prec-Tou-Condition Damage gear, +tertiary gear in Vit-Power stats with 30pts in the Toughness line… she is as tough as Necro’s can come)

3. Avoidance is highly effective against being dead.
We have low armour levels, the stability we have is often just not working in Plague Form (which IMO is as ‘bunkered down and tanky’ as it gets) and its very easy from many classes to stack up to 10+ levels of Vulnerability on us without even trying very hard.
Having logged a lot of time on this character, 85-90% of the time in WvW against other players, staying static is a dead necro, I must constantly move and position myself exactly as an Elementalist does to keep arms length ‘distance’ to both avoid dying and get the time required to get some ticks of damage in.

I think they’re horrible, annoying and rubbish because they do absolutely nothing except keep you in combat, when often all you want to do is run like heck. Putting it into perspective, fairly much every other class has something reasonable at 5pts into their toughness line.

Ele’s get +1Tou per level when attuned to Earth. That’s actually quite nice having 80pts of toughness!
Warrior, extra armour when above 90% health, not great, but better than a poke in the eye.
Ranger, +50% endurance regen! Oh yeah, who do we have to murder to get something like that? Heck at 15pts it’s still a bargain.
Guardian, get Aegis at 50%, which is not bad at all and stops you getting a poke in the eye.
Thief, Blinding dust at 25% health on a 90% cooldown, that isn’t a bad defence ability really and meant more than once the little buggers have gotten away…
Engi, 10sec of regen when under 25% health and being attacked, ok so thats not likely to help much in some cases, but its not completely horrible either.
Mesmer, same stuff but at 75% unconditionally activates with a 30sec cooldown

Raw damage
It may be simple, but IMO it would make a world of difference to the career because at the going rate of bug fixes it’ll be well over half a year before they’re all looked at. (Bearing in mind, there are actually other classes like Ele’s that have a hard time too getting theirs looked at and are far more played than necro’s)
The other reason is, conditions and necro’s being the manipulators of conditions just simply isn’t true, other classes can and in some cases exceed our ability to do it, also while maintaining a much better DPS output than a necro’s.

We very much need a power and a minion line worth investing into as neither are exactly viable at the moment.
Deathshroud also needs to be more than just an ‘Enhanced’ downed state.

Anet has the response time of a ‘days’ to investigate reports, they do actually need active CSR’s ‘in-game’ to make much of a difference to stop cheats, many times I reported the HoD hacker last week buzzing around the keep, but it didn’t get stopped for days. Same with bots, see the same ranger-brown bear crews in pve in the same spots, but despite reporting them many times, they’re usually still there.
At some point, they must make a best practice of responding live to a set number of reports or risk a disenchanted player base not enjoying their game.

Mesmer portals, they’re extremely useful to the point I don’t see any reason to adjust what they do, sometimes they kill me too and I swear a bit, but I appreciate the effort into actually bothering to co-ordinate the attack.
Again a lot of that comes back to Anet making their game engine work to fix their rendering issues so people aren’t appearing, thieves not exploiting the stealth aspects of their class and the joys of running into what you thought was 10 people actually being about 30!

As for the current match up, both SBI and JQ are still very much in the match after what I saw tonight, I hope it to be close all the way up to the last hour.

If I end up with one it’ll be entirely self funded ‘vanity item’ as I don’t have a large guild to pony up the gold (I have 71G on me, WvW doesn’t pay well) and to be brutally honest with myself.
There is usually a commander on EBG where I mostly play, even with 11000+ kills, 380+hrs in wvw, well known as I’ve been on the server since pre-launch, more badges than I know what to do with (please give me something useful to spend them on Anet…)
-I don’t know if I’d be a good commander or want the responsibility, plus I spend all day yelling at 20-30 people to do their job, so its kind of like taking work home!

That is something people should give consideration to if they’re planning on dumping gold, is it just going to be a vanity item or are you actually capable of making a difference? Plus, you’re really only as good as your last job, if you screw up very badly don’t think people won’t notice.

Otherwise, just spend it on siege and keep upgrades- which do make a difference. Then just go murder a few hundred people a day because its fun.

You can get all the necessary armour from the Karma merch in Orr, except the Chest and Shoes, which you will want the Khilbron stuff- but can “make do” with the Karma pieces as the latter tend to be anywhere between 7-16 Gold for each piece which is headed to the ‘pricey’ side of things.
Undead Runes, they’re cheap and there’s a good synergy there, durations tend to be ‘so-so’ with so much removal around.

Jewellery- Carrion Neck, Ear and Ring with a Rampager Ear and Ring
Bit of a mix of precision, hit points and quite a lot of condition damage.

I run a 0-30-30-0-10 spec which gives a large amount of toughness & precision.
Traits:
Hemophillia – Master of Corruption – Lingering Curse
Staff Mastery – Greater Marks – Spiteful Vigour (sometimes swapped out for Reapers Protection)
Spectral Mastery

Slot Skills:
Consume Conditions, Blood is Power, Epidemic, Spectral Walk, Plague Form

Weapons:
Sceptre-Dagger (with Focus and Warhorn when req) and Staff

‘Zee theory ist’ that I dump out as much stuff over as large an area as humanly possible, all the time and often as possible when running around with a group, to ruin other groups of people. If an area isn’t covered by a Mark, sprayed down with Grasping Dead/Enfeebling Blood and the enemy isn’t running around shrieking full of of conditions and dying… you’re doing it wrong (Switch sets as soon as your cooldowns are out, by the time you’re done on the 2nd set, all the 1st will mostly all be back up and online)

For ‘single-target’ focus, swap out the dagger for Focus and load out Corrupt Boon or Well of Darkness, maybe even Spectral Armour. Comes down to personal choice

Travelling to new an interesting places far away, to meet people and kill them, swap out the Focus for the Warhorn for the speed buff, the daze is ok, but I prefer either the focus for single targets and dagger for hurting lots of people.

Lot of the titles seem to be very hard to achieve, even for people who play a lot. eg: Ultimate Dominator seems to be a very… very long way off!

Better quality of the loot drops off people and maybe some kind of auto-pickup for badges would also help

On the subject of badges, it’d be nice to see some additional vendor items in terms of diversity of stats on them similar to the pve dungeons, maybe some fancier Invader specific skins and so on.
Sitting on well over a 1000 of them and nothing to spend them on suitable for my current characters

Overall the cost and difficulty of WvW is much harder to ‘achieve’ things compared to pve and pvp matches. That should have an exponentially reward overall so people aren’t out of pocket after making upgrades and purchasing war essentials.

Haha, but that actually kills people!

Arreyanne.2683:

Are you guys on BG having tons of fun?

No, it forces me to sometimes pve and I really hate pve.

However, I have been with Blackgate since the game opened on early pre-release.
I did not leave or ever give up wvw when we got a severe drubbing a couple of times, often I was the only oceanic and a handful of sleep-deprived yanks when we had no presence to speak of, and nor will I leave when we’re winning for whatever reasons. Some people will come and go, but this is where my guild and other friends are.

Both ET and HOJ fielded yesterday, so there’s still some fight in them and respect for that.

Everyone is sick of swinging the sceptre.
I actually went out and spent some of the 300 odd skill points I had lying around (none invested in minions except the Flesh Idiot… boy, that was a mistake) and bought the Snow Leopard Norn skill the other day for a laugh :p
Sneaky cat necro!
(Ok it doesnt kill much either but I did laugh)

Yeah, but I don’t think any guardians I know actually use it for that and tend to use their #1, 3 and 4, sometimes 5, then go cane the pants off someone with a big hammer or sword.

Technically I think the glowy tennis balls also do more damage as well but they don’t pierce.

Mesmers are truly awful creatures to level-up in pve, to the point I’m thinking of levelling mine through crafting or just not wasting the matts and finding something else to do. That is offset by my Necro, who admittedly is tooled out with shiny gear, but even when it wasn’t, was relatively steady to level and I did 75% of it in wvw without feeling inordinately disadvantaged.
Part of that I would put down to being in early release, everyone else is running around in crap gear with crap skills, barely any traits and no hit points, so lighting them up with dots tended to cause them a lot of pain…. In the contemporary period, 10,250+ kills later, its still causing a lot of pain, I’ve found a few more ways to keep people dying and I don’t die that much so its not completely boned to the point of un-playability.

Dunno about the little instanced matches as they don’t interest me, people do play them there, but they do complain a lot more than I do. That is also, not to say they are not unwarranted complaints either, necros have “the most” bugs in the game that are getting fixed at roughly the speed of continental drift, (we’re still finding a couple more from time to time) and calling minions anything less than complete and utter morons would be an insult to village idiots everywhere.

You get one of ‘the best’ self-heals in the game, lots of hit points and a couple of dual-purpose skills like Spectral Walk, Blood is Power and Epidemic which are also excellent and I spray them about like an excited puppy (ok, thats really only because everything else is factually bugged or completely mediocre imo)

Specs, there’s a mediocre but mostly functional condition spec, the power spec is either love it, hate it a lot (consensus is mostly hate) and then there is the minon spec which is something of a liability to your own sanity and safety.

Depends just what you want to do I guess

I think on a downhill run with +33% speed I’ve actually kept up with the bolt and anyone I’ve inadvertently hit with it is either mob, unlucky or clumsy. Trying to think of a #1 button 2h attack in the game, ranged or otherwise which is worse, but I can’t as it is just that memorably terrible and only offset by spraying marks all over wide tracts of land.

Most of what the other two fella’s have said will see you in the right direction. There are some decent synergies in the Death Magic line which will net you 5% of toughness goes into power. Personally, I like the 30 Curses, 30 Death Magic and 10 Soul Reaping build Im running as its extremely hardy and I do wvw exclusively with a tiny bit of pve.

10 in Soul Reaping gives me Gluttony which is important to tank up as often as possible with skills to the ‘damage soak’ that is Death Shroud, being I use a lot of Spectral Skills, I also take the IV for 20% quicker recharges.
Plus, if you’re aiming to crit a lot, make it hurt that bit more.

30 in Death Magic, I don’t use pets so I ignore the traits associated with them, I run V Staff Mastery for 20% faster on the ol stick, as much as I hate it sometimes, I use it for a lot.
Also is VII Spiteful Vigor, an often little used ability that gives you Retaliation, so when Mr Thief/Warrior/Ranger unloads, you’ll probably pop a heal anyway, so the next load of incoming pain they’re going to do… all glass cannon builds utterly melt when they hit it.
Last one, II Greater Marks, because it will cover an entire zerg with all kinds of pain in short order and very useful for spraying around everywhere against ‘invisible people’ until they explode or delaying actions. Sometimes I swap that one out for Reapers Protection which isn’t a bad trait either and useful for buying that extra second to get a heal off when you’re CC’d.

30 Curses, same as everyone else with Hemophilia and Lingering Curse, I pop in VII Master of Corruption, which gives -20% on Corruption skills as I’ll also pop BIP and Epidemic in there for blowing up anyone else who isn’t covered by the 2-3-4 from the staff or sceptre-dagger beating.

Sigils, you’ll want the Corruption ones, I tend to stick one in both the staff and sceptre so I can build it up as quick as possible and for the off-hands of dagger, focus and warhorn (they all have their applications) Accuracy for the +5% crit chance.

Runes, seeing as theres so much toughness there, Undead ones are just fine, cheap and do what they say on the can.

Skills,
Consume Conditions- by far ‘the’ best multipurpose heal in the game in my opinion.
BIP, because it hurts… and hurts a lot, if you dont want to dump the bleed on yourself when low on hitpoints, it will still charge the 10 stacks of Might without selecting anyone.
Epidemic- for when you must down/kill every kitten in a massive radius, in conjunction with BIP and a few other conditions, they will not enjoy it. Collect bags, rinse and repeat.
Spectral Walk- Its a stun break, teleport and gtfo of town with a long +33% move speed when the crap hits the fan, the utility and applications are very handy anywhere. Combo it with a warhorn and you’re 100% up-time at that movement rate when you must get somewhere in a hurry.

Plague form is a zerg buster under the right conditions a last ditch survival strategy and a way of getting through mobs of enemy at the gates so to speak. In pve, the tanking potential is also very good.

I ‘like’ Corrupt Boon and Spectral Grasp, however, their reliability is extremely questionable most of the time. Wells are also fine for what they do if you must occupy/deny a location, but they have fairly lengthy downtimes for short duration, I use them a lot in PvE.

The key to condition necros is applying constant, aggressive pressure to the enemy, you must constantly dictate to them that they will be crippled, chilled, bleeding, blind and force that tempo of conflict to your pace. They want to rush in, make sure they can’t, they want to range you down, take the fight to them.
You must also pick your positioning carefully all the time and make sure, their position is manipulated with wells/marks and other AOE, keep your #5 on staff handy as a last resort to keep them well out of range.

Lastly, you biggest enemy is people with lots of crowd control and knock downs. There are not a lot of things which will end you quicker than someone able to inhibit your mobility or ability to act. Necro’s don’t have a lot of stability options, hence why you have to be very careful with your positioning more so than others who do.

NoxInfernus.2361:

I’m not sure if you played GW Factions, but what you describe sounds similar to the Ritualist class in many ways.
Maybe if a GW2 expansion comes out that focuses on Cantha, we might see this vision of the ‘spirit focused’ class you describe come to pass.

Never played the original Guild Wars, my line of thought was leaning towards the ‘4 horsemen of the apocalypse’ and their respective properties.

1536 is about as high as I get and using- Bowls of Mushroom & Asparagus Risotto
I prefer using that because its +80 CD , + 60 Precision +10% XP for 30min
(All the things a WvW mass murderer needs! :p)

Spec is 30curses, 30 Death Magic, 10 Soul Reaping and wearing all the Prec-Tou-CD-Vit gear I can get. Mostly a 50-50 of Carrion/Rampage Jewellery with Temple armour and 1 piece of Khilbron Chest gear… the boots elude me and I’m not paying 21G for them on the trading post.
That, with 25pts in Superior Sigil of Corruption is around 130-ish a tick and spiking it with 10 stacks of Might from BIP is around 148 or so.

Make the bonuses only apply ‘after’ being in the realm for 2-3 weeks, that way it sorts out the “Flavour of the Day” crew of hoppers from the original server members.

In my opinion the significant WvW bonuses to stats from them are also extraordinarily good and could probably be cut by 50% and still be worth fighting for

There’s not much very ‘necromancy’ about the GW2 necro, its more like Dr Frankenstein let loose in a pet store with a vegetable peeler, sharp knife, super-glue, armed with a collection of mostly ad-hoc melee/ranged weapons left over from other careers with rubbish skills & traits and wearing the worst armour available.

When I think of Necromancy, there’s a couple of things that come to mind.

The RPG ‘D&D’ necromancer that raises zombies, skeletons and ultimately aims to cheat or better understand the process of ‘death’ via undeath. Ok, so they ditched the cliche and that is fine…

The ‘Classical’ necromancer that summons the spirits of the dead in order to plumb the mysteries of the afterlife, life, the universe and next weeks lotto results. IMO this would have been the more interesting route to go with career design, yes, keep them as the scholar career with the goofy weapons and so on. But something more like the Ranger Spirits of the wild which give buffs and bonuses to various more material things like the body, mind and helping make stuff die instead of the elements.

Could of had a lot of fun with something like:
Spirit of War- various fightyness
Spirit of Pestilence- swarms of bugs biting people
Spirit of Disorder- confusions and dazes
Spirit of Blight- cripples and weakness

Instead your stuck with skinned bunnies, weird scorpions, flesh worm (lol), floaty amoebas and the pinnacle of being mostly useless- the violent kitten ape with a rhino horn who;
1: Does nothing
2: Picks a fight with anything you don’t want it to and are nowhere near
3: Can’t swim
4: Sometimes punches what you want it to

Oh well…

Actually IMO its a mix of a couple of things, the bugs and gear.

If they fix the bugs we can start looking outside the condition-spec box that many (myself included) are locked into.
For example if the Vampiric’s traits and skills with daggers worked to scale with healing you could look at power + healing + whatever kind of gear and make something that ‘works’. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work yet as much as I’d be interested in trying something like that if it ever does.

One theory I have with this is that their detection radius is on a narrow horizontal plane, so if you’re slightly higher or lower than the mob/player that’s probably beating your kitten like you owe him money and they do nothing, it might be why.
Of course, when they run off and bite the biggest, ugliest vet/champ mob they can find when you’re already fighting something else… I dunno, that’s why I avoid any kind of minion!

Its sort of the ‘swiss army knife’ of our weapons, lot of utility for various things, but you’re not really going to kill anyone with it unless they’re 90% dead already. I’d like to say something nice about the auto-attack, but there really isn’t any, it is as truly awful as others have described.

We bagged one of them dev varmits the other day, had to chase him around half the map and murder a few clueless zerglings along the way, but we got him eventually!

Slightly more seriously though guys, I know all too well how bugged, busted and pootacular this career is, but at least the people making it have the decency to play it (even if the above case was our nemesis, the guardian) and they are fixing it. Fairly much no other MMO I’ve played in the last 10-12 years or so seemed to really invest much interest in the community past selling the box and collecting the subs, so I will give them credit for that.

- Maneuverability is extremely poor without wasting skill slots.

See, I consider it not a ‘waste’ of a skill slot, if it provides the utility to get you where you need to go and get you out of where you don’t want to be. With Spectral Walk and Warhorn you can keep nearly 100% up-time +33% speed.
I don’t actually like the warhorn very much in combat, so I switch over to sceptre-dagger prior to engaging.
What I do consider a waste of skill slot is minions, throw them away, they are fundamentally kitten at every level!

Wells, are mostly terrible in WvW open-field, people will simply evade right through them or stand outside the radius and shoot you in the face, the only people who won’t are the million flavour of the month thieves too stupid to figure out what they are and tanks, who have lots of HP-Toughness and don’t care about a pissy 5-sec tick or debuff. Where they work however, is static situations like a door or portal, then you switch out spectral walk for them, then dump a few more aoe-effects from the staff and blow up the most infected with a BiP+Epidemic.
Ever seen what happens to a zerg when their tank gets loaded up with 20 bleeds (at 140+ a tick), chill, fire at a keep door with arrow carts and other aoe spam raining down on them?
They all die, if they can’t cleanse it, if they do, do it again, your timer will beat theirs.

The other thing to consider is, the majority of new players and everyone else is going for the ‘Big Numbers’ glass cannon builds focused on with barely any vitality or toughness. In any kind of protracted attrition, you will persevere and win, if you survive the initial big numbers. Remember, most glass-cannons- guardians and ele’s out there are running around with 11-13k or so hp, the adventurers with 15-17 or so and tanks with 20-22 at the most usually.

For people who do have a clue, then you might be in trouble and then that comes down to how you position yourself, learn to cut and run, cripple and kite them through to friendlies who can assist. This is not so much a game of numbers, but teamwork where even 2-3 people with a clue can change the way a fight pans out and you shouldn’t consider yourself a simple, single entity.
Team up, get some communications going and make a difference.

- Most bugged class in game not enjoyable at all.

No, it isn’t fun. It isn’t fun when we’re locked into a couple of proven specs and not much else, but we’re not the only ones. Ele’s are pretty busted in a lot of ways as well and its pretty hard to just persevere when you see lots of other classes like warriors, mesmers, rangers and thieves just doing it all so easily.
Your choice really, if you don’t feel effective then you can switch to one of them and keep playing or go hide out in pve and hope at some point Anet makes the necro a more diverse, debugged and viable career.
Personally, I can work around the bugs by taking the ‘least-busted’ of them and going as far as I can with them, but it does frustrate me too that there are no real viable specs outside the condition one. I’d like to bury someone under a swarm of pets or hack them to death with an axe, but neither work very well at the moment

I have 1346 base condition damage add up to 250+70 from food and Superior Sigil of Corruption. I tend to load up both those sigils on the staff and sceptre to generate the most in any WvW encounters if I get downed. (That will end up 138 a tick if I also popped BIP on someone, they will be unhappy and after an epidemic goes off, everyone will be unhappy)

Off-hand, mostly Dagger and sometimes Focus, they both get loaded up with Superior Sigil’s of Accuracy for +5% crit chance and that’ll proc a few more bleeds off on the sceptre.
Thats all done with PC crafted mix of Carrion and Rampager jewellery, Karma Armour from Orr region (look them up, figure out the mix which works best, it’ll probably be the same as mine), Mystic Wand and Dagger, Invader Focus and Horn and some exotic stick I found on the merch for a couple of gold which is a Str 985-1111 (128 power, 128 vitality and 178 condition)

Not really out to re-invent the wheel, 30 Curses, 20 Death, but 20 in Soul Reaping for the benefits that it has.

Overall, its easy enough to do and achievable for someone like me who has a working week, on late nights in a US guild without a lot of assistance, hates PvE and spends most of it in WvW giving zergs ‘teh aids’.

That was a pretty fun match-up, we learned a lot from the other teams and the the chase from last to first will stick in my mind as being one of the best I’ve been in. To be honest if we’d come in 2nd it would have still been considered a decent achievement given the running start from DB and FA.

I used to trot out BIP a bit for open-field WvW, pre-patch to fill the ‘75% useless’ void that was Corrupt Boon (that I hoped would be fixed) which always missed or just didn’t work.

Its a lot better in its current incarnation than previously, so I’m not disappointed at all.

Just that there’s so much to do to bring the Necro up to speed as a ‘defined’ career which has an identity aside from ‘Deathshroud’, which reeks like a set of downed abilities given a HP bar and increased from ‘sub-craptacular’ to mediocrity.

Gee, that’s actually kind of disappointing as I thought they where giving it a look-in.
Guess my nice shiny dagger will stay in off-hand a while longer.

I charge big clumps of players in WvW under Spectral Walk, dump a well, a couple of marks on them, thrash about with life transfer and pop back to where I was.
The other similar variation on the same trick is when they enemy are all over a champ mob loaded with conditions is to do the same, except epidemic the area and run off laughing as they all die of ‘teh aids’

I think I’ve thrown about 180+hrs of play into my necromancer, despite being well geared and if I’m modest about it, wrung the heck out of the class as a whole to fine tune and play as best I can. I’ve hit a wall which means it’ll be shelved for the remainder until repaired because the whole career is essentially ‘doing it the extremely hard way’ when other’s don’t have to do so nearly as much.
Which is sad because its a cool concept for a class but the simple facts of the matter are:

1. There is only really one viable spec line with a slight amount of deviation.

2. Close to 50% of the Utilities are fundamentally busted, 25% are essentially worthless and the remaining 25% do what they say on the can.
2a. Many utilities require you to disable yourself in some manner, yet their effects are mirrored on other classes that don’t have to do this. Why?
2b. Worse yet, the utilities on some other classes just click and work better overall than the necros!

3. Staff or Sceptre + (offhand) or go home, daggers are just as terrible as axes- which is very sad as they’re infinitely more interesting.

4. Survivability, despite the HP buffer and the Deathshroud is just awful. If I come across a Ranger, Thief or Warrior one on one with my level and gear = I die. Sometimes its a close run match that might see them at 15-25% health assuming I don’t make too many mistakes and capitalise on them making some. But I will die and there is no ‘out’ options of avoiding this despite several load-outs of utilities tested.

5. Damage over Time, is good and perfectly viable for PvE and ‘some’ WvW applications. Unfortunately Damage Per Second, which is what works in PvP is awful and there just isn’t any way of speccing your character for that, if you wanted to.

6. Minions… they are fantastically awful, to the point of forehead slapping the keyboard as they either
a: Do nothing, while you get your junk kicked in
b: Die worthlessly, using up a more viable utility slot in the process
c: Run off into mobs and get aggro from something they could never hope to beat!
I played a lot of ranger in Beta, back then I liked to think it was pretty terrible sharing space with what was essentially a drunken, violent idiot that stood in front of vendors I wanted to click on when it wasn’t causing aggro. But most of the time they could punch their way out of trouble long enough for me to deal with it… or run.
I now refer to minions as ‘those guys’

7. Its lonely out here, I think I see one regular necro on my side in WvW, a few lower level tourists, a couple bopping around in PvE and that’s about it.
Which is disturbing as most people have also realised that the class is not competitively viable in its current form, note that it’s not unplayable by any stretch of the imagination.
There are some great points to the class that have made me smile, unfortunately they’re countered by many insufferable lows.