Guild Wars 2

lucky I have the wonders of running faster then they do, perm cripple, ample cc and stability on DS then.

if you haven’t played your necro at all, go into pvp and get a feel for different builds before throwing your money at something you may or may not like.

It’s actually pretty easy to escape a thief (assuming you have perm swiftness, but this is wvw after all), since thieves’ gap closing is based around burning init with the heart seeker or sb 5. Other then that, thieves don’t have much swiftness, only the movement sig, so dropping marks in your path, dooming or goem charging him as he tries to chase, and he won’t catch up.
If he does decide to waste all his init to chase you, then you turn around and kill him because now he can’t use most of his weapon skills.

Of course I wouldn’t try disengaging once he’s in melee range, thats just asking for hs spam in the back usually.

Once upon a time wells ticked once per second and lasted 10(I think) seconds.
Anet however disapproved and made it tick every 2nd second. Necro’s were upset.
Anet then made it 5 seconds, but tick every second, and everyone was happy again.

I don’t think they should have longer durations as they’re rather good, but I don’t think well of power deserves the 60s CD, when comparing to well of corruption and suffering on their shorter CD’s.

By default a necro has enough LF (when it’s full) to absorb a full mug/C&D/backstab combo.
Sadly I don’t record myself in wvw much because fraps makes obese file sizes, but I might to prove my point if I can remember to.

I won’t comment on other people’s builds because I don’t use them, but my build does 8k or so each auto chain, well of suffering ticks 2k something. Combined with dagger root, cc from warhorn, DS and golem most thieves are safely dead before they can get more then a brief combo off. Except P/D thieves, but that’s a whole different kettle of fish.

dangerdoom.3862:

You guys are missing the point and undoubtably never came across good players.

Yes, I’m sure I’ve never come across any good thieves ever since release unlike you. I apologize for my dreadful ignorance, and my foolish belief that it’s possible for a necro to kill a thief.

I kill most thieves just fine and I’m in berserker. The damage you offput from having soldier gear isn’t enough to compensate for the lower damage, if you can’t kill the thief fast enough they can gib you, or safely cloak and survive.
Not that I’m saying berserker is the best, but higher damage has its uses.

It works. if you use mesmers runes + banshee’s wail that’s a 4 sec aoe daze. But Anet cannot into tooltips, so those never update.

Yeah, you have to be quick to avoid/negate the big combos like that, but if you do, then you have the advantage.

My build is heavily built for solo roaming, I wouldn’t recommend it.

Blood magic has great traits for some attrition through life steal and regeneration (also faster well CD’s are nice), but with thieves, or at least the ones you’re mainly concerned with the fight is going to be over pretty fast, one way or another (unless you want to be some very tanky build, but I don’t find that interesting, and you are unlikely to be able to hold a thief down that way anyway)

Don’t run from the them, that just opens you up to a few heartseekers in the back. You have to focus on being the aggressor, they can’t take much punishment. You can. Kill them, faster then they can kill you.

At least this is how I deal with thieves. Other people might have different opinions.

The main part is to immobilise them before they stealth. Well of suffering and just 1 or 2 auto attack chains will kill a glass cannon thief.

If they try to cloak with their heal, Doom them, that gives you 5 extra seconds to punish them before their heal cloaks them, which should be more then enough.

If they shadow refuge then drop a well(s) dead in the middle and auto attack around the edge, usually the far edge. When you start hitting them your auto attack will go from repeating the first part of the chain to doing the full chain. You can also spectral grasp them once you’ve found them since they’re dead in front of you. Also a golem charge/staff fear (and the other marks of course) are useful for refuge.

If they have dagger offhand make sure you burst them down from behind once you immobilise them, or they’ll C&D you then shadowstep/trait condition cleanse and make some space.

If you see a thief cloaking up to go for a backstab, you can make them waste it with spectral recall, use of marks, positioning and timing a golem charge correctly, or even a well placed dodge or two. Axe 3 is also useful here, as it will tell you if they’re close, and cripple them, letting you run away, and they won’t catch you until they decloak.

And when all else fails, DS is enough to sponge a full mug C&D backstab combo, but basically put pressure on them. Do a lot of damage, and they usually panic and try cloak and run. We have plenty of tools to interrupt cloaks, slow them down and gank them.

Yeah, if they remove shroudstomping I would drop it as well.

I know, I do it as well, but it’s never been clarified as intended, even though we’ve asked many times.

It’s 2 seconds without the trait, with banshee’s wail it’s 3 seconds. Throw in runes of the mesmer and it’s 4 seconds. Happy days.
Although the tooltip never updates, but that’s Anet for you.

I also have this problem with the 13.2 beta drivers, tried with two different video cards. It only seems to happen on the 2nd SS, and when I check my screen shots, the last SS (the one where the game, and sometimes my computer temporarily freeze) is simply a copy of the previous SS.

Bhawb.7408:

It can be assumed that if you have a 10% chance to remove a boon on hit, you will remove 1 boon every 10 hits, on average. Obviously random chance doesn’t work exactly like that, but over a sustained period of time you will remove, on average, 1 boon per 10 hits. It is no different than someone who uses on-crit effects.

Yes, taking CPC in a minion build is a great idea… except it is a terrible idea because you should never be using condition damage with minions, and should be using only minions as an MM (heal excluded).

And every minion build will go 20 into Spite to get it, because it gives a bonus to power (more retaliation damage, more personal damage), more condition duration, and spite has decent 10 point traits.

Over 10 hits you have a 65% chance of clearing atleast 1 boon.

Vekthor.8914:

Of course that’s not a bug. It’s right there in skill description.
The thing is that Lich Form triples your Power and doubles your Precision and Vitality. Also the skills are very strong. That’s a very big boost. In order to balance it out, you lose the ability to weapon swap and lose your utility skills. Your minions are summoned by Utility Skills. If you could keep them while in Lich Form it’d be the same as, say, being in Lich Form and having wells and signets and whatnot. It’d be too strong.

I’m looking at the numbers right now in pvp.
Power increased by 95.42%
Precision went up by 71.38%
Vitality went up by 56.54%

Then reduce durations. It works fine as is for how I use DS, I just think on principal it is inconsistent with other ‘entering DS traits’

Hm, decaying swarm does give swiftness now? I used to use it when I could proc it off any attack while in DS, and it didn’t give swiftness back then. Good to see that fixed, but I still hate those low self HP triggers (like siphoned power, which I really dislike because of it).

The only DS trait I really disagree with is weakening shroud, it’s a great trait, but why on earth does it have a 15 second CD and not a 10 second or no CD at all?

Unless you’re doing the high end fractals anything is viable in PvE, and short of doing mes x4 warrior speed runs, builds and even classes ultimately don’t make a great difference.

but rangers are competitive in PvP. So are necro’s.

The notion that you only use DS at low health is sadly laughable, and means you’re wasting most of the value of DS, and seriously hope they don’t balance DS with this in mind.

Sadly we do know they read these forums CHIPS, since they were aware of the ‘the cake is not a lie’ thread getting brought back up to reveal some old promises. It seems they just avoid posting, for whatever reason.

Ironically I think the build I run in PvP is probably the/one of the best counters to PvP, due to the simple quantity of AOE’s we have access to. (I have like 10 or something). Also thieves with shortbows can usually chill at range and spam their bouncing auto attack/cluster bomb/choking gas until they’re thinned out a bit.

LastDay.3524:

Banjal.7328:

I still lol at the part about Necros have alot of builds to use.

I don’t know about sPvP in particular, but in general Necros do have many different builds.

Meanwhile think about how many Thieves you’ve seen who went Traps instead of Stealth.

To be fair that example is more because stealth is very strong as opposed to their traps aren’t good.

“Necro: DS weapon swap change was not intended but is likely going to stay. According to devs necro has tons of build options and they want to bring other classes close to that.”

So they accidentally removed a simple piece of functionality, and now don’t want to (or don’t know how to) change it back. We already have multiple restrictions on functionality while in DS and I don’t understand why they are putting more limits on it. This makes DS less interesting and simply dumbing it down, lowering the ‘skill cap’ of using our class mechanic.

Functionality they have denied us in DS include:
*Stomp
*Revive
*Heal (be it from regeneration, allies or where ever)
*Use spectral buffs (you completely loss the buff when you go into DS, why don’t it just not function if they don’t want people using it in DS?)
*View our buffs and debuffs
*See condition damage ticks (this applies to the guy casting the conditions as well, they removed the visible ticks in some patch a while ago, gods know why)
*change weapons

Some necro’s already don’t enjoy DS as much as they could (mainly condition builds) and this lack of functionality only punishes people for using our class mechanic, they should be making people want to use DS more, too enjoy DS more.

And I’ll just leave the statement about lots of viable builds as ‘debatable’.

It bounces between targets, transferring a condition each bounce. This seems great, until you realise you can only transfer 1 condition if you’re facing one person.

The problem I have with this skill is that it truly is a slow projectile (atleast it homes), making it very easy to dodge. Also it fails to cast really easily.

It’s a well known phenomena, basically using spectral recall resets your fall, so it will calculate your fall damage from where you recall to.

Damage from a single attack will not effect health while you are in DS, at most you’ll lose all LF, which is why we can survive great falls with DS.

that’s 30% of the initial 60% (or whatever the exact number is), so it would be around 78%.

Of course investing in crit damage without any investment in power is a poor idea, but as long as you are cirtting it does at least something. So from purely a game design view crit damage is dependent on precision to function. That’s why I like a lot of the ideas in this thread. (The last time I bumped it it got a dev reply, although was only about the UI issue, which of course still isn’t resolved…).

The problem with Soul reaping is that crit damage is a unique stat in that it is completely useless without another stat, specifically precision. This means that if you invest into Soul reaping your crit damage is wasted unless you’re also investing in precision in some reasonable way. This makes it a significant disincentive to invest in soul reaping for a lot of builds. This is then compounded by the fact that DS isn’t the best tool for condition builds, who have even less reason to invest in precision (and therefore crit damage) because it doesn’t directly effect their primary damage, which is conditions.

This means you have to build in a specific way to take full advantage of the stats you’re getting, thus limiting variety. This is why I think it’s a bad idea to have precision and crit damage on different trees, although this isn’t a necro specific problem, warriors, guardians and engineers (I’m not missing anyone am I?) also have the same issue.

Also more related to your discussion on crit damage vs precision in terms of damage, it depends on the source of the stats, as they don’t have an equal exchange rate across all gear and traits. For example, 30 in SR gives me 1.2% more damage compared to 30 in curses (a 10:1 ratio of stats), while some things are on either side of that ratio such that it changes the comparison quite significantly. (the ‘jewel’ in ascended stuff is closer to a 5:1 ratio).
Of course at lower crit chances, precision gets better returns, but there are still plenty of item types that can swing it crit damage’s way.

That’s what I mean. I compared my HP and LF when at full, then went into range of the seigerazor buff. My original max hp was 79% (or whatever I said in the other thread), and the LF% matched that number, meaning there is a linear relationship between the two.

I posted it in the other thread, it’s a linear relationship between HP and LF.

Oh? How kind of you.

To be fair they never said it was a ‘full extra life bar’ (that I know of, wouldn’t be surprised if they did actually), but you’ll looking at the whole ’130% LF thing the wrong way.

130% would mean you could withstand more degen sure, but by having it the way it is now means that since all LF gain is percentage based, you gain more LF then someone without investment in soul reaping in terms of exact numbers, and frankly I never stay in DS long enough to be terribly worried about degen anyway.

Also I’m not terribly upset about it being 60% – if damage bleed through DS into HP, then I would be upset.

OK so toughness works normally (steady weapon doing 44 damage to me in and out of DS), conditions are a little trickier because even they guy casting conditions can’t see the ticks while you’re in DS, but I see no reason why they would do double damage, but I’m sure people can properly test it if they wish.

I quite like this build actually, but one thing to note, shrouded removal (and all condition/boon removal as far as I know) remove conditions in a set order (although this order seemingly differs between skills). I know for a fact bleed is removed first by every single condition cleanse, and confusion is also very high up the list, so it really is an amazing trait, and is why the thieve condition cleanse in stealth is so OP (as it does the first cleanse as soon as you go into stealth), so it’s a pity I can’t quite justify cramming it into my own build.

Edit: It seems it is random, whoops. Not quite as good a trait as I thought, but still rather useful.

The toughness thing is very easy to prove (I’m almost certain it uses your toughness normally though), just go into pvp, and get a friend with a steady weapon, and to poke you with it while you’re in DS, and without. If the hits do a different amount of damage in DS or out (keeping in minds crits, so best to have a low crit chance) then we know there is some sort of armor scaling.
Conditions should be just as easy, get a friend to put a single bleed/poison/burn on you, then go into DS. If the damage tick they see increases, then we know it does more in DS. Also probably best to check with the same condition applied while you’re in DS, just to make certain there isn’t some odd thing like it only doing more if it was applied in DS.

I went into SPvP to test this. I got to full Life force off my thief friend, I then went into DS, where he backstabbed me (also did an autoattack chain by accident). You can see exactly how much damage he did, 8352 damage exactly. This took him about one second, so a tick or two of degen, yet it brought me down to 43% life force.

I had 25k HP here – if I had 1.2 LF for every HP, then I should have 30k LF, give or take a little, yet 8352 damage does not strike me to be 50% of 30k.

I don’t know if they changed it, but it’s certainly not x1.2 HP now.

I had assumed for a long time that DS was somewhere around 100% HP as well, I don’t know if it was changed or if it’s always been like this, but someone pointed it outto me recently when I quoted your thread, I then tested it myself and found that it agreed with his point that LF is close to half your HP.

I went into DS long enough that I took a single tick of degen because he said that the first tick happened so fast. I did this repeatedly to make sure it I was getting a single tick of degen and only a single hit.

Believe me, I’d be happy to find that LF was 120% of HP, I just think that it no longer is, or never was.

For this test, 19541 HP, 30 soul reaping, and the number I gave was after accounting for degen. Because we do know for a fact that soul reaping bonus is a flat % bonus, without soulreaping that would mean I would have 10262.51313 LF, which is 52.5%, give or take a little due to rounding on the LF percentage.

Edit2: Additionally, the seigerazor buff increases my health by 21%, that is to say, my regular health is 79% of the buffed health, but this increased the LF pool, turning 100% LF to 79% full, so it’s safe to say that there is a direct/linear relationship between LF and hp.

Edit 3: It was supposed to be 10%, not 11%, so I’ll be generous and say 1500 was 10% to keep it simple, and making it a slightly more generous 59%, although anet will probably have it set at a neater point, like 55% or 60% or something.

Have someone use a single attack on you in pvp, make it something with a visible cast. Go into DS, take the hit, leave DS. It’s quite easy to do that fast enough to get no degen. Look in the combat log to see how much it did, and compare that to the percentage lost.

A single hit from some random npc in wvw did 1466 damage, and did 11% of my life force – that’s with 30 in soul reaping. You do the rest.

We have consumables that changes the finishing move, giving you a animal above the dead player, this is found in pvp and is basically based on your rank. Why don’t we have a guild finisher, creating a little copy of your guild emblem above the person you just stomped?
Anet could chuck it in the cash shop or sell it for gold, or make it a guild researched banner or something, but it seems like a fairly simple idea to implement and would probably be quite popular in PvP and WvW, to further rep your guild.

SupahSpankeh.8452:

So Necrobusted guys, fancy testing this for us all?

1) Is the amount of HP available at 100% DS equal to our normal HP?

2) What impact does toughness/armour have on direct damage taken?

3) What impact does condition damage (bleeds, burn, poison in particular) have on DS? Does it do double damage, or are ticks rounded to the nearest full %?

That’s what I really want to know.

1) LF is 50-60% of your HP (I’d have to do much more detailed testing to get a more accurate estimate).

2) I’m assuming you mean while in DS. As far as I can see it works exactly the same as when you’re out of deathshroud.

3) People thought conditions did double damage while in DS because they assumed LF = HP, so it makes sense that it appears like that we you know that we have roughly half the LF compared to HP. So yeah, conditions don’t do more in DS.

Deathly invigoration actually heals for a lot, although I’ve never been in a position where I can justify using it. Well of blood can be very good for a number of reasons, first is the most obvious, it heals them when they’re in it. There are two other benefits however, the first being you can give all your minions protection if you have ritual of protection, and the 3rd and more practical use is nuking bone minions, or any other blast finisher to give all your minions retaliation. People tend to get a surprise when they try AOE all your minions then.

I would honestly advise roaming as a glass cannon necro. 30 in soul reaping is a must to ensure you can stomp people even when fighting multiple people. High base HP and DS means you have a natural advantage over other fragile builds, as the difference in damage you can take is rather high, while the damage you dish out is comparatively closer; simply put, you can kill most people faster then they can hope to kill you.

It’s easy to get permanent swiftness with spectral walk and the warhorn, and simply having perm swiftness lets you outrun a lot of people, sure you won’t be outrunning a d/d ele anytime soon, but if you say see 3 thieves coming towards you they’ll be hard pressed to catch you even if they burn all their init chasing you.

Carry CC. Lots of it.Your combat mobility is the worst in the game, there is no way around that. Instead, you can carry loads of CC, lots of cripple and chill and destroy your opponents mobility instead.

The golem I have found after a long time of experimentation is the best elite (snow leopard is probably better, if you’re fortunate enough to be a norn), as even though it’s AI is a junk, it’s on demand charge is exceedingly useful in both combat and chasing down, or running away from enemies. What I’ve found when running away from a fight, is that the golem’s speed is roughly based on how far away it is, if it’s quite far away it starts moving at above normal speeds to catch up to you, slowing down as it gets closer. What this means in practice is that is usually running with the main group of people chasing you. So when you command it to charge the person closest to you, it rams down pretty much every person following you. This combined with doom and perm swiftness makes escaping very much viable, if you do it at the right time.

Abuse high falls where ever possible, you can sponge any fall with both DS, or spectral recall, giving you two more hard escapes in the right situations, as even if the fall isn’t high enough to kill you, anyone that follows is going to be a very low health or death, and knockdowned, letting you smash them before they get up.

The main thing about roaming as a necro is knowing when to fight, and when to run. Running after you’ve commited to a fight isn’t impossible, but is quite difficult, where as most zergs or groups won’t bother/can’t catch you if you run off in a direction where they’re not going, with full swiftness.

As a melee necro, it’s all about making them waste their stun breaks as fast as possible. Keeping them chilled or crippled, keeping them in range with dark path and spectral grasp and punishing them with the dagger usually forces them to expend their stun breaks. Once they’re out of those you can usually just root them and take them down, although you’re best to kill the clones with a life transfer before bursting them down to stop him from using them for extended daze or invulnerability.

One thing I have real trouble with is mesmers with a staff, in particular, the skill called phase retreat. This is 1200 range teleport that produces a clone, has no cast time, can be used while stunned, and has a 10 second untraited CD. Also it’s a leap finisher for god knows what reason. This ability, in my humble opinion is OP as hell, and it makes it somewhat difficult to stay on a mesmer.

flash into deathshroud while at full just long enough to take a hit from a mob or something (I used a deer in wvw), and see how much damage it does to your LF. I found that with 30 in soul reaping my LF was close to 60% of my HP, as Rennoko mentioned.
It’s important to note that a single hit won’t do both LF and HP damage to you, which to give an example makes it very useful against gank thieves, as you sponge the steal and CnD easily, and as long as you still have any LF left (which you should), most thieves will then completely waste their backstab on you, leaving their heartseeker spam to hit you while at full health.

alternatively they’ve simply moved out of range, the fight is alright started between other people, or you’ve just switched from staff at long range, but yeah.

but if you’re using it reactively then you’re in range to begin with so that ‘cutting down the range’ doesn’t matter, no?

the wurm active will activate at any range (I haven’t actually tested massive ranges but I don’t see why not), you’ll just get teleported towards it instead of to it when you’re out of range. But yeah, as I said, it’s only great in certain situations, such as in tpvp where you can put it somewhere out of the way like half way up a cliff or invisible wall by the point you’re contesting, then people can feel free to waste time killing it.

Also yes, Anet greatly overestimate spectral armor compared to what you mentioned, I’m just telling you what their logic probably is behind it.