Guild Wars 2

Gluttony.2017:

I want to be able to buy new skins for minions. Like having a flying cheesburger instead of a bloodfind, or a potato instead of a boneminion.

^THIS

Abigor.4952:

Yeah, just recently changed to warhorn/spectral walk +some traits for CD = almost permanent swiftness (<5sec of non swiftness). Makes me wonder why I didn’t use it before, now running normal speed makes you feel like you’re crippled x)

Swiftness from Runes.

Stomp in Plague Form works fine. Hitting F1 twice isn’t a big deal either. TAP TAP done.

Stealth stomping will likely be nerfed over time. Performing any hostile action from Stealth should break Stealth. That included stomping. But whoever is in charge of PvP balance plays a thief so no nerfing of thief is going to be allowed to happen until Thief Master ProBalance is replaced with someone who doesn’t have a bias towards any specific class.

Oh and use your Heal at the start of 1v1s for the 5 seconds of retaliation. This combined with Blood is Power truly eliminates any threat from quickness burst classes. They can’t cut through 21k + loads of toughness in a single cooldown and in trying just make your job easier. With Axe, Healing Retaliation, and Lyssa, you can pretty much garuntee retaliation up the entire fight.

Any melee using quickness will kill itself before you can even target them. I constantly drop thieves from steath to downed state before they can get that dodge roll in. They just die and I keep going like they were never there. I don’t even down them so they think to themselves, he didn’t even notice I attacked him.

I like to make butts as sore as possible.

Sheobix.8796:

On top of that, given that minions are NOT tailored/tuned (AI is slow in reaction) for competitive play, many pvpers and players with other highlevel alts can be dissatisfied with what they perceived the class was supposed to be when they rolled one.

Hey Spinmaster Flex. Save the justification. Number of Traits devoted to Minions determines their priority. Not imagination or player expectations. The simple fact of the matter is Minion functionality does not express the reality of a large pool of trait points dedicated to enhancing them. Neither does their performance justify the method and length of cooldown on them.

However, just to remind you and everyone else, Necro IS minions with additional features. Not the other way around. That is the purpose of Necro. Always. Every Necro in every game ever made. Minions.

Even before you respond. Minions.

Minions.

I GOT A WHOLE BAG OF MINIONS WITH YOUR NAME ON IT.

Spite Death BM sounds like the most horrifying way to die. Death by spiteful deuce…

But, I wouldn’t waste points on minions. You get much more bang for your trait points by using Wells, Marks, and Corruption skills. Minions even when they work (only in PvE has this ever happened to me) are not powerful enough to warrant such small health pools and such long cooldowns that end on termination preventing recast options. If they are to be used as traps they need to be as powerful as Wells are to warrant using points on them and taking up priceless Utility slots.

Necro are heavy dependent on Utilities. Wasting them on Minions that don’t do much of anything for you is not gonna result in your happy fun time hurray being enhanced.

This is before you consider how wildly erratic minion behavior can be in dungeons where pulling adds will result in mounting repair bills.

Kithzyan.5034:

XiL.4318:

I don’t really see a use. I use DS as a reactive skill and only use as much Life Force as I need to stay alive or Chill port, Fear, and Life Drain.

Theres no reason why it can’t be added as an option though, you don’t see any use for it but others do and an option is by far the best way to accomodate everybody. There is no mechanical reason not to just replace 1-4 (grey out 5) on the weapon hotbar and nothing else UI wise when we’re in death shroud if an option is toggled to do so. On a related note, having our UI stay visible on the surface of water would be a nice option to, grey out abilities but let us still see (de)buffs etc; I mention it as its kind of the same thing

I’m not suggesting it would cause any harm either way. But I couldn’t justify it to someone paying the bills to devote resources to it. There are also mods that won’t get you banned (according to Anet) that do the things you are asking for without Anet spending money on it.

There just isn’t any way to justify something like changing UI flavor to suit people who don’t want to use 3rd party mods.

I say use mods and make every UI your own. I won’t confirm or deny that I practice what I preach in the off chance the Anet personality responsible for saying aesthetics won’t get you banned was a liar liar pants on fire… But mods are probably your answer.

You can make spectral skills last longer and give yourself permanent swiftness.

Mindx.9610:

XiL.4318:

Mindx.9610:

And your link doesnt work for me

It works for me but maybe its the custom URL giving you an issue.

http://tinyurl.com/ae5v58k

Also this build is meant to show how to maintain survivability without having to rely on Life Siphon which does not scale correctly. I actually find my power/Roamer to last longer and recover faster than my support wells builds. There is just no Rambo in Team so it’s impractical in tourny.

The trade here is Crit Chance and Damage for Healing and Vitality. But this build leaves you sitting on 21k health so Vitality is not essential. And with the additional toughness healing can be handled with Consume Conditions and/or escaping combat.

It’s highly active and extremely potent roamer. Short cooldowns (other than plague), and lots of weapon swapping for channeled skills.

also: Staff 4 can crit for 4k+ and transfer conditions AoE, So I wouldn’t really say Staff is hard to down people with. You just need to use the combo finisher and some synergy.

Your build confuses me a bit it has signet power with no signet…mistake? I promise you, if you may give it a try Valkyries will yield better survivability…..all it takes is coordinated stuns and burst to take you down with zerkers…its not a necro amulet. I don’t deny your success with this build……but im going to be completely honest I dont think there is much competition right now in Gw2 at least in NA…. pvp seems as dead as can be.

Yeah that should have been VI for Might on DS 1.

And yes Valkyrie will give more survivability. But I found you don’t really need it if you use Spectral Walk and your Worm right you can essentially escape anything. And for those times you cannot escape you have Lyssa Runes that cures all conditions and gives you all boons for 5 seconds when you use your Elite skill. You can use Golem for lots of Lyssa Procs or use Plague for zerg penetration and yet another emergency escape.

Seriously I understand this is not intuitive. If I thought it was intuitive I would never have posted it.

Give it a try. See how you like it. I think you will be pleasantly surprised by how durable you are using this build without giving up a single stat point of damage potential. I don’t die anymore unless I purposely suicide against a zerg just to show some kitten ranger that no matter where he is in the zerg I can smash him and stomp him before his friends can save him or stop me…. But that’s a personal hold over from Rift. Many H8 for Huntards.

KirinDave.6451:

XiL.4318:

So while I can competitively play Necro against the best PvP players in the game, within reason (bunker and burst being what they are to Necro…), new players cannot without frustrating themselves into playing something else. And that has to be fixed.

Guides and/or videos, pleaseplease… sticks hands out in the universal “gimme” motion again

I barely have the time I want to play let alone make videos and guides. That is ArenaNet’s Job.

kKagari.6804:

XiL.4318:

kKagari.6804:

The best way to leech hp as a necromancer in gw2 actually involves a whole bunch of minions. That master major blood trait that lets minions leech, try it.

Minions can’t Siphon Life from boxes or mobs they never engage in combat. Also the Ranged Minions don’t Siphon Life on hit so… yeah. No.

It heals you, its good enough, it’ll get you more hp from attacking than whatever OP suggested.

No it doesn’t. You should probably play Necro and use the traits yourself before you tell people who play Necro all the time how Necro works. Reading tooltips is not “learning necro”.

Life Siphon heals are very very small. A single hit from a minion every 5 to 10 seconds (if they ever attack at all) will give you almost nothing for the points spent and the major trait used.

The only way to currently use Life Siphon effectively is to stack rapidly hitting abilities and never stop attacking.

kKagari.6804:

The best way to leech hp as a necromancer in gw2 actually involves a whole bunch of minions. That master major blood trait that lets minions leech, try it.

Minions can’t Siphon Life from boxes or mobs they never engage in combat. Also the Ranged Minions don’t Siphon Life on hit so… yeah. No.

VladimirLem.5894:

Half the people who complain about the class… and losing in 1v1.. just dont know how to play the class.. period.

Yeah… 4v1.. you obviously aren’t going to win… esp to people who know how to play their class even halfway decently.

Most of the people that i see that complain… dont know a decent rotation of either bleeds or burst… they dont run plague signet or BiP.. or even how to counter bulls rush/100b/heartseeker builds.. also dont know how to use DS properly…. plague signet should be used in every build… regardless of the build you’re running imo.

The only class you should be having any issues with are hybrid spec Guardians… even then it comes down to the skill of the Guardian…

Necro is a high(er) skill capped class… kills aint gonna come easy.

This thread is full of “i want to win every fight, with little to no effort, and without spending much time learning my class”

Ive got over 700 hours spent pvping with a necro… and im still learning… the rest of you should do the same.

This mentality is not productive. Mastery is not the goal for the vast majority of players. Some classes like Thief and Warrior have extremely tardeasy mechanics that allow even the biggest noob in the random match to smash a couple buttons and get a kill when they get all their cooldowns off.

Necro has no such mechanics and instead relies on a series of complex skill chains as well as extremely active gameplay. Where that Warrior is hitting charge, quickness, hundred blades, and /dance, the Necro is dodging in, stacking conditions, building Life Force, setting up channeled skills that can easily be dodged from or miss entirely…

Even if I can take any class I play and push it to its max potential without more than a few hours messing around, the majority of people playing this game haven’t been playing MMOs since March 1999. They don’t have my experience. They don’t have my drive to develop mastery. And pretty much none of them care either.

These games don’t thrive without New Players. All the classes need to offer some sort of reward to new players otherwise they will just avoid them. They aren’t here to learn, they are here to play.

So while I can competitively play Necro against the best PvP players in the game, within reason (bunker and burst being what they are to Necro…), new players cannot without frustrating themselves into playing something else. And that has to be fixed.

Sprawl.3891:

says the guy who pugs and only qps come from beating other pugs and has zero experience actually playing other classes. meta is necro for rez signet more than anything which Ian why they are first target many times. did you not listen to the spvp q and a session with the top players?

Stop exaggerating. Rez Signet is OP right now because of down timers, but Necro is not the only class with Rez. So yer just being dramatic.

The only options not competitive for Necro right now are Burst and Bunker. Everything else is bauce. And they are only not competitive because minion AI doesn’t work in competitive PvP.

Condition control and support are not optional in tourny. Necro has the best condition control combined with monster support. Pairing Necro with Mesmer in a team fight guarantees victory against any team that does not counter with another Necro/Mesmer. Period. Time Warp combined with AoE Chill is game over.

So pack up the tiny violins. It is not like it’s Dec 21st yet.

Nyorai.1630:

XiL.4318:

I like that Death Shroud has no UI. It gives the skill a sense of blind urgency. There is really no valid reason other than the serenade of tiny violins to remove the DS UI.

Aesthetically I really like Death Shroud as well but I think gameplay should be priority. Seeing that you’ve got confusion, tons of bleeds or some other conditions really might change if I want to stay in DS or maybe jump out and deal with the conditions. Same goes for not displaying % life force number. 50% is an important threshold and a number would be much clearer to me.

I don’t really see a use. I use DS as a reactive skill and only use as much Life Force as I need to stay alive or Chill port, Fear, and Life Drain. In that regard my boons and conditions have zero impact on what I am doing during DS. I either get my skills off in time to use my Boons or I do less damage which is evident immediately and I drop out to get the cooldown as quickly as possible.

Having a % on the Life Force bar would really only help for popping out for Spectral Armor if you traited for it. So it is so situational that it also serves no practical purpose. You can just as easily eyeball it or train memory through repetition to eyeball it. It feels a bit like putting cup holders inside an ice chest. Just a little redundant. Sure you can hold yer drink in its own holder inside a cooler. But you coulda just let it sit in the ice like everything else.

This never works out.

Also Necro is not a current priority because no one at Anet can justify them as a priority to the people who decide where to spend resources, and in what priority. The majority of issues Necro players have revolve around Minions. And that is only really in PvP. In PvE even the loopy AI isn’t much of an issue because Necro is so overpowered in most content.

The PvP balance aspects are the only real concern and that concern is not shared by very much of a player base currently. PvP is still being developed. Without rankings and custom tourny, the populations just aren’t high enough to warrant high priority to minor balance issues.

Mindx.9610:

And your link doesnt work for me

It works for me but maybe its the custom URL giving you an issue.

http://tinyurl.com/ae5v58k

Also this build is meant to show how to maintain survivability without having to rely on Life Siphon which does not scale correctly. I actually find my power/Roamer to last longer and recover faster than my support wells builds. There is just no Rambo in Team so it’s impractical in tourny.

The trade here is Crit Chance and Damage for Healing and Vitality. But this build leaves you sitting on 21k health so Vitality is not essential. And with the additional toughness healing can be handled with Consume Conditions and/or escaping combat.

It’s highly active and extremely potent roamer. Short cooldowns (other than plague), and lots of weapon swapping for channeled skills.

also: Staff 4 can crit for 4k+ and transfer conditions AoE, So I wouldn’t really say Staff is hard to down people with. You just need to use the combo finisher and some synergy.

I have never noticed an issue getting loot with Necro. Sometimes it has taking as much as 8 seconds for a loot bag to spawn after a kill, but I always get loot bags.

I am pretty sure anyone not getting loot is either doing too little damage to each target or is not in the area long enough to catch loot bag spawns.

I run lots of builds in WvW but the one I use for farming is a Crit Damage and Death Shroud focused power/Roamer.

I like that Death Shroud has no UI. It gives the skill a sense of blind urgency. There is really no valid reason other than the serenade of tiny violins to remove the DS UI.

All Necro really needs is functional Minion AI and Siphon Heals that scale. That’s it.

Necro is really fun in PvE because you can pretty easily kill Champions and large groups of anything less powerful. Necro can even clear some Dungeon Bosses solo if you know what you are doing.

You don’t need stability as a Necro. If you want to run a powerful escape roamer with control all you need is Spectral Walk and your Worm combined with an offhand warhorn and trait for longer spectral timers. You get permanent Swiftness and the ability to mist stomp using Plague and Lyssa runes if you ever need to down something without being CCd. But otherwise, to be an effective roamer and get away you need to be able to survive and kill.

http://tinyurl.com/PowerNecRoamer

^is a power/Roamer you will like that doesn’t offer any healing other than Dagger 1, but it is one of the only builds that you can run without a Staff and not feel the painful weight of not having Staff 4.

To be honest I would never run without Staff in a Competitive Scenario. But this build is fun for Hot Matches and WvW because you can channel for Toughness and teleport away between kills. And you can do it while being zerged for the most part. You have to use your Elite like a save with the Lyssa gear to prevent getting locked down by all the rambo huntards, but you can easily destroy about anything you target without worry of death.

Xom.9264:

Still waiting for those screen shots showing all of you claiming Necro is ‘fine’ have actually done a fair amount of tpvp.

You people have the nerve to post L2P crap when you dont even play.

Regarding the argument of some top players on teams using necro, they are getting carried or have comps that kind of fit the class but another could class could fill the role with no problems and probably do better.

Just post your tpvp wins with necro already or admit what we already know… you people saying necro is fine dont tpvp.

Thanks.

I have participated in a very large amount of tPvP with Necro. My clan quit because tournaments and rankings aren’t in and it does no good to practice with broken classes and troll groups of mesmer/guardian in paids.

But they stuck around long enough for me to figure out Necro on a competitive level.

So what the hell do you want to know about Necro in tPvP? Do you want to know how extremely beneficial Necro is to anyone using conditions? Or how about how Necro can ground target rez up to 3 people at once… or keep permanent Chill on even the most tenacious conditions curing guardian/engi combo? Or would you like to know how a Necro built for support can also dance together enough burst to break bunkers and/or spike down roamers before they can pop their cool downs and get away?

What exactly is confusing you sir? Yes Minions, Siphon Health, and a couple Life Force generators don’t work right. One of those things should be fixed in the next patch. Everything else works just fine though. I can still keep massive stacks of conditions on the other team while turning all my ally’s conditions into boons, and at the same time offer support healing and chain chill/blind/cripple/poison…

So what exactly should we bust out the tiny violins for?

Wells and Staff destroy Thieves. Especially wells that turn their damage mods into conditions. That basically makes it impossible for them to kill something with 20k + health. 400 Toughness while channeling also makes a huge difference. Just start a channeled spell and Thief can’t do anything before you load them with conditions and send them off to die because they specd all that Rambo and no Band-aids.

lettucemode.3789:

XiL.4318:

Generate Life Force, Stack Vulnerability, Blood is Power, touch their butt, epidemic if you want to touch their friend’s butts too. If they try to touch your but, use Plague and quickly ctrl+mouseclick plague 2 so it auto-attacks. (this makes you clench like those female body builders, no one can touch this butt)

And if for somehow your butt gets touched anyway, Spectral Walk and run away while building more life force if people chase and attack… etc.. so forth, wink wink nudge nudge.

Basically, I touch butts without stability. And if you really need to get that stupid vengeance kitten greatsword Rambo down, Plague Stomp.

I like this post.

By the way, all the plague skills act like a switch. Your plague pulses once per second, and will use whatever ability you clicked last on each pulse until you press a new one. No need to autocast.

You do this to dance in cripples without having to click another button.

I played RTS for years, a button press is an eternity.

Bleed duration is good against people who have no condition removal or that rambo. But the real kitty-kitten is in the stacks. You want to pile on as many bleeds as fast as you can so that you do the maximum damage between condition removal cooldowns.

In competitive play you won’t even have time to use Epidemic before all your stacks are gone, or better yet put back on you with the other Necro mid channel to epidemic and put your super long duration bleeds on your whole team.

You want those stacks tall and ticking as quickly as you can stack them so the damage is applied before they can reasonably react to it. You will be lucky to see 3 to 4 seconds of any bleed. Don’t build for luck.

Xom.9264:

Again there is a reason Necros are underplayed in Tpvp.

That reason is because only 1/10 of 1 percent of the player population cares to expand mastery. They care only for the guided tour. And why should they have to put forth effort to enjoy the money they just spent of effortless entertainment? Sound logical reason to not care one way or the other.

Necro happens to require effort to figure out how to play well. Mostly do to minions, but because traits are dedicated to them, that makes it important. If very few players give a kitten to try and figrue away around Necro bugs, very few Necro will be seen in ANY focused analysis. Whether it is tournament PvP or making food for fractals, every specialized aspect is going to show Necro as a minority. Period.

There is no other mystical influence. Some of the very best players in the world play Necro competitively and they win. Against other competitive top skill teams. So save the energy Watson, already got this one wrapped up.

30 points in Healing gives you Wells Siphon Life, as well as every time you hit a mob, you Siphon Life, and Siphon Life is 50% more effective. Combine these with Retaliation, Warhorn 5, and quick hitting Axe, and you can make all those hits, really add up. No matter how much damage you do or how you do it. Just never stop hitting things and you never die.

Xom.9264:

Still a ton of walls of text from casuals saying the class is fine.

My win rate in Tpvp pure puging is 30% higher on my mes then on my necro, thats a large gap and im still fairly new to mes while I have hundreds of games under by belt as a necro along with WvW farming, yet I’m doing much better on mes in tpvp.

Why? Its simple Mes has game changing power that wins maps I wont go into theory crafting detail what the mes and other classes bring that wins games because i dont think any of you casuals care about the details in tpvp. I will again say there is a reason Necro is so underplayed in Tpvp and its a low percentage of top teams setup.

Show a few hundred games on another class in a screen shot because right now I dont think all you saying Necros are fine have played other classes in Tpvp or Spvp much.

Only a low % of top teams run necro.
Only % top teams run necro.
Top Teams run Necro.

kitten pants walk awkwardly away as to avoid unnecessary smearing on the inner pant leg.

Necro is extremely powerful in Tourny. Necro can control who has conditions and who has boons for more than long enough to end any coordinated team fight. The only thing Necro can’t do is use Minions or get fully scalled up Siphon Heals making both Top Burst, and Top Survive/Support outside the competitive ballpark for Necro at this time.

It is not nearly as bad as it seems. I can hunt and peck as well as any Thief using a Roamer Burst build, support Team fights from a safe distance with a Power/Condi Juggle build, or stack abilities that hit quickly and focus on our broken Siphon/Condi BiP that still manages to heal pretty well, and do significant damage as long as you have something to hit.

Yes there is plenty wrong with Necro, minions being kitten makes it seem even worse because Necro is supposed to summon minions, but things are not Ranger bad. Or Longbow Warrior bad.

I main a roamer Necro. Its not shortbow thief or jumptard warrior, but a consistant 33% ain’t bad at all. Especially when you got Death Shroud to juggle.

Generate Life Force, Stack Vulnerability, Blood is Power, touch their butt, epidemic if you want to touch their friend’s butts too. If they try to touch your but, use Plague and quickly ctrl+mouseclick plague 2 so it auto-attacks. (this makes you clench like those female body builders, no one can touch this butt)

And if for somehow your butt gets touched anyway, Spectral Walk and run away while building more life force if people chase and attack… etc.. so forth, wink wink nudge nudge.

Basically, I touch butts without stability. And if you really need to get that stupid vengeance kitten greatsword Rambo down, Plague Stomp.

I am assuming the point is each mark should look distinctly different so people know how to use them at a glance. In which case I approve this message.

Recycle.5493:

Ranger would like to have a word with you.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iK-QnDSKys

Ranger pets scale with stats and will hit stationary targets or crippled targets just fine. They even run long distances to get around terrain and attack targets. Necro minions are lucky if they get a single attack off, and usually that attack will devistate the bucket they are forced by broken priority to target ahead of the Necro’s target…BUT no. I did not buy this game to be a bucket slayer.

I bought it because Minions looked amazing in their ad campaign and they made a ton of promises in beta to get the AI polished.

I’m just curious what the hell happened. And why is it that no one at Anet plays Necro? Or better yet, why is Anet not investing in Necro at all when it was such a shining jewel in the advertising campaign. Publishers need to start being held liable for their “editing practices” in advertising. I kitten sure did not see any Necro fighting hostile targets while Minions run off killing Lightning Bugs and Buckets of Dew only to return and die without ever landing a single point of damage. I missed that part of the campaign.

Its just a power build. 30 in spite 30 in death shroud + 10 anywhere you want. Just DS juggle and stack vulnerability with BiP to burst single targets. Everything else is pretty much generic necro no matter what build you run. Swap utilities and use what’s needed, etc…

I use Dagger/Focus for the Power/DeathShroud roamer build and Dagger/Warhorn for my bunker version.

Manticore Five.9867:

You see, this is exactly what I’m talking about.

Necro fights like a ninja, because it DOESN’T invis and backstab? Because as we all know, ninjas never go into stealth and they would never backstab anyone.

It’s true that mindless necro-haters exist, but they don’t compare with the literally demented will-to-believe found in mindless necro-boosters.

The point is you aren’t helping your cause by matching crazy hating with a triple-helping of your own crazy. People shopping for a class are more likely to be turned off by rampant dishonesty, so it’s better to let the opposition hold that distinction.

I would highly advice you submit anything you wish to post on the internet to a 3rd party for, what I like to call the “Once Over”. Basically I tell them, tell me if this is stupid or not. Usually they will not let me post anything epically stupid, or weird and nonsensical to frame this context to a descriptive.

Cause what you said is surely in english. And I do speak and write english fairly well. But… I don’t meaning your understand. Popsicle Unicorn Rainbow.

striker.3704:

2. When Anet tried it they found that minions were simply too strong on non-minion focused builds.

This is blatant kittenery. Preventing minions from being too powerful would be as simple as making two traits in MM focus 20 and 30 required for scaling. Tardswaggle. Don’t make stuff up and offer it as advice. That’s not fair to people who don’t know any better.

Does not scale with our stats correctly.

/thread

Mammoth.1975:

Manticore Five.9867:

So we are… not broken… we are just not working?

You’ve got to understand the language.
…

Can you break this one down for me?

The entire NA meta is all about necromancers right now.

Come on now. That’s a leap.

Mine usually doesn’t nothing. Sometimes it procs like a reactive as soon as an ally gets hit with a condition but if they already have it, usually nothing. I use it to transfer self conditions to target before epidemic and/or DS4. But I have never seen it remove a condition from an ally in PvE or PvP.

Yeah, Necro minions even after whatever fixes come for AI are going to suffer in extreme ways to scaling later on. Hopefully they have more than a band-aid worked out for that. It has only been a major issue with every Necro in every MMO that has had Necro… And even a bunch of single player RPGs… Minions no scale. No one cares. People mad. Rant on forums. Six months later plan to make up for minion scaling is announced. Farm for 15,000 hours to get a weapon that summons you another pet that doesn’t scale, BUT IS AWSOME FOR THE TIME BEING.

Sorry having flashbacks.

I am pretty sure the fix you are talking about was made already…, to the tooltips. They say “destroy minions” in the description now right?

Thresher.3049:

Gryph.8237:

Honest feedback (with my opinion), this class is a patchwork, poorly designed class. It is my opinion that the devs could not decide on the design and over-comprimised to add both their desires/designs and ended up weakening the class entirely. It should not be called necromancer, but maybe corruption mage, or bleed/blood mage. Has nothing to do with necromancy, and is boring.

Correct.
The design principles that they seemed to want, reading at development notes here on the forum, was that the class was a ‘lock-down’ specialist which was hard to escape from, hard to kill, but not necessarily the fastest killer.
That’s fine as a concept.
Except that it doesn’t actually work in principle!
Also, if it was actually implemented that way, that’s all it would be and no provision for the alternative play-style options that ALL other careers get. In our case it would be Minion Masters and Single-target/High Damage

If you want to be tough to kill, lock people down be hard to escape from and kill relatively slowly, I’ve got 4 mates I play regularly with that combination… and they’re all Guardians!

My Necro pro/cons?
I’m a highly speed, light armour class that practices being cautiously positioned on the battlefield, condition-specialist AOE and CC in my WvW guild.
I don’t do well at single target damage
I don’t soak up a lot of damage myself
I have very limited escape capability
I do have a very good personal heal
I do have great area denial
I have some damage-offset in Deathshroud
I do have decent amounts of personal +% speed

That is what I bring to the table as a ranged-standoff class, played fairly much exactly the same as a Staff-Elementalist would, instead of being an ‘up in their face damage soak’ that they seem have thought we where apparently going to be. Statistically, THIS WORKS (I have an 18-1 kill/death ratio because of it) and Anet deluded in thinking that we are currently anything else in its current form.

You can build for extremely potent single target damage using Vulnerability stacking, Blood is Power, and Might stacking. Gear for Power Crits and Crit Damage, while you trait a healthy blend of power crit/conditions and death shroud. Dagger/Focus or Axe/Focus for even more vulnerability.

You can put 20+ stacks vulnerability down in 2 seconds. How you use those stacks is up to whether you are ranged or melee focused. Blood is Power, Plague Signet, and Epidemic combine extremely well with stacks of vulnerability x20. So does everyone else’s, everything…

So yeah. Necro single target damage can be created and you can spread that epicness to everything in range and benefit all allies in range at the same time. You just have to perform a perfect keyboard dance of motions like a Korean RTS player and give up all your tankish survivability. Max payoff is around 30k damage and takes 2-3 seconds to build, but you can build on the run, from 1200, and AoE as well so… its functional single target DPS between cooldowns.

Disclaimer: Even following the above advice you will need to dance carefully to avoid wasting cooldowns, or you are gonna spend most of your time running back to where you died.

The only thing Necro is really missing is functional Minion Builds. To get the proverbial Heartseeker Spam between Backstabs, Necro need functional Minions. Then the single target usefulness will be where it should be if you build for it. Too many long cooldowns on skills that don’t really do anything magical to warrant them is creating a void. Minions should be filling that void with something more than hilarity and bucket slaying.

Not everyone can drop epic deuce my friend. You jealousy is far from misplaced.

The issue here is you need to use Necro and experiment (with all weapons and utilities) until you have a better understanding of the mechanics. You can’t use the forums like some kind of mastery development cheat code. You have to know the basics first.

DS = Death Shroud, its a fundamental part of Necro. Basics. I gave you a place to start, Dagger/Focus + Wells. Go start.

I feel like whoever designed Necro, never actually played it. It just feels like Necro is a compilation of pen and paper notes thrown into the lap of someone who would rather play a Warrior.

Everything seems reasonable on paper but the whole summoning part of being a necro is the base of the model, not an addition to it. So the train of thought that brought us to long cooldowns on temp minions that have no impact even when spending every available trait point on them… does not seem to have come from someone who plays a Necro. At least not any Necro in any game I have played since Everquest.

The loot bag disparity is all server lag. Those bags need share maximum priority so they appear instantly every time. On nights when the populations are low I see bags on near every kill. On nights when populations are high I see lots of bags appearing in places I used to be as I am running away from them.

gamefreak.5673:

Sheobix.8796 has a very good build on the forums. I was running a very similar build to his for sometime. With practice you can do a decent job at 1 vs 2 players with his build in wvwvw.

I strongly wanted to be a minion master like from gw1 but gw2 are a complete joke because of long recasts, cant have more then one of each one out, die to easy, and the AI is a major factor in then failing. Now if the ai gets fixed and they make it so recast wasnt so long i think a minion master would be a good build. They already do good damage its just with the AI they do not work right.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/Update-28k-HP-3k-Armor-3-4k-Attack-Necro/first

Sacrificing crit chance with a power build just doesn’t sit right with me. Sheobix build is just a combination of core components without and focus.

Changing to Staff and Dagger/Focus, using Vulnerability Well, Blood is Power, and Epidemic and Death Shroud 4 provides massive burst without so many wasted points and if you want to really focus burst damage you can also achieve that with a semi survivable Glass Cannon build with no vitality or toughness.

30 0 0 10 30 is one of my favorite DS builds. I use mainly Life Force Traits and Damage mods and I gear for power and a 35/35 crit/crit damage build. Making it a cannon you could just 30 30 0 0 10 and focus mainly power and crit damage on your gear. That is not a solo build but if you have support you can tear through whole zergs of people.

Don’t try to Hybrid though. Without minions working there is nothing to make up for the top end loss.

^ Epic projection. Clear description of my first post which you didn’t even read, since it starts with a hypothesis, Ranged wells have strong merit, is bridged with a clear description of that merit, and then closes with advice that should have left you with a new sense of perspective, which when seeking advice is what people are usually seeking.

Instead you wanted me to marvel at your giant poop. Seems like you are projecting your own emotional instability on to me in the hopes that I will react to it?

Gear depends on traits used. Minions currently count to POTATO!!! so traiting for them is not going to benefit you much. Everything else is just gearing for the traits you are using. If you are trying to do single target damage you go dagger or axe with a heavy power focus, if you are going epidemic builds you want max conditions damage and duration. Wells builds benefit from both power and conditions. Death Shroud Builds focus power/crit and crit damage. etc…

Gear for what your goal is. And you will likely need at least two sets of gear just because with minions mostly broken, and all their traits being subsequently useless, the options are to min/max or die alot. Sometimes you will need to outlast something rather than outdamage it.

vicious.5683:

please, oh please stop with changing the name of the class.

It’s getting more and more stupid each time. Maybe the next one will be kittenomancer.

I agree with this.

Spikedadragon.6015:

Meh he’s welcome to his opinion but not going to justify it with a reply. Obviously somebody has their mind one-sided.

But anyhow, seeing how Necro’s are not that tough. Their down-state is pretty abysmal (by this I mean they are masters of the dead, why must they suffer? lol) Okay maybe not so much but seriously it seems like, even with the trait on, their downed state is the less ‘impacting’ then any others. Fear is the best here, but you won’t be able to res yourself with a horde around you and only sending one off fleeing. You need to kill someone first and that isn’t at all as powerful as any of the other professions. Or am I wrong?

To counter-weight this properly, it would be nice if fear was removed from the downed state to something that allowed the Necro’s to fade into the mist’s like F1 does, and be invisible for a short time to get away from the enemies.

This is a reply, making my post now fully justified, by your own brand of white knight trolling. Bravo. Bravo.

Also you are wrong. 50% to damage in downed state is extremely powerful damage + tug-o-war downed HP, without considering fear.

And both of you fail at humor, coming and going. Just sayin.

When you ask for advice it is customary to close your noise emitting orifices long enough to at least digest it when received. When you solicit advice it usually means you are not able to figure something out. Clearly though you don’t want advice as much as an opportunity to argue the epicness of the poop you just made.

But I am here to tell you, I have downed a Little Caesar’s Family Box solo. You don’t know what epic is.

And you also don’t know about how extremely powerful ranged wells are when you used them to set up 20 stacks of vunerability, blood is power with epidemic, and Death Shroud 4 on everything around you. All safely from outside melee range, on the run, enhancing mobility…

Are you picking up what I am putting down here? The point is I poop way bigger than you.