Guild Wars 2

Necromancer is fun for a multitude of reasons, dependent on game mode:

In PvP, Necro is fun because it generally demands a higher level of rotational knowledge, matchup knowledge, and positioning simultaneously than most other classes. In order to be optimal to your team, you need to do all of these things well, and be thoroughly adept in understanding when to get aggressive, when to get out, and where to be. It feels great to prosper as a Necromancer in PvP, because it generally means that you did something better than your opponents, be it rotations or winning fights.

In WvW, it feels great to be an exceptionally strong profession due to our ability to stat-balance and fill in our holes. When we’re able to get just the stats that we want in just the amounts that we want them, it makes us feel stronger than ever. It’s also refreshing to be one of the few classes in the game that is able to play a truly hybrid build in a PvP role and not get punished in any specific regard.

In PvE, there isn’t any other class that can quite match our single-handed sustain; we are able to survive where just about no other class could, and we do it in DPS style. Through traits like Parasitic Contagion, Master Of Corruptions, Blighter’s Boon, Vampiric Aura, and Augury of Death, we can gain a ton of free healing and sustain without sacrificing any major amount of damage or stats. It feels great being able to 1v4 your T4 fractal group by carrying them through fights that they manage to wipe in, after one of them complains about how “he’s not trying to take an hour to complete fractals”.

Warhorn for control, Focus for damage, and Dagger for utility.

Warhorn has an unblockable daze, life force generation, and both pro- and counter-kiting power. Focus scales well with Power as a stat, applies large amounts of Vulnerability, scales per boon on the target, and has synergy with traits such as Bitter Chill and Chilling Nova. Dagger gives you additional weakness uptime, a ranged blind, greater condition management, and an AoE boon corrupt.

Hey guys, here’s the next installment in my collection of different Necromancer build videos, this time playing Signets Condi Reaper with Blood Magic instead of Soul Reaping.

Click here for entertainment

Copypaste from video description:
The purpose of this build was to create a build that was disgustingly corruption-heavy while still having good sustain, even without Soul Reaping. I ended up trying out Blighter’s Boon instead of Deathly Chill, since I’m already running Spite with all of the Might generation, and I found it to be quite decent, if not a refreshing take away from SR. This was designed to be a group support spec; Without Deathly Chill the damage output of this spec is rather low, and with no Foot in the Grave and only one stun-break, we are quite susceptible to heavy CC trains. It has 1v1 potential, but that’s not what the Necromancer is there for.

As always, hit me with likes, dislikes, questions, comments and the like!

Grizzlefist.6549:

Yannir.4132:

Have you tried Strength Runes? They not only give you might, they also allow you to keep it up for long time periods. Axe is excellent for might generation, you may want to try it. Drop the staff, power builds don’t really benefit from it. It was only used before because there were no better options. Now there are.

SotL is not really useful if you run Wh. You don’t need a 100% uptime on the speed boosts. I’d rather go with Well of Corruption/“Suffer!”, depending on what you are facing.

Death Perception is less mandatory when you alrdy have +50% crit chance, I’d rather go with Foot in the Grave. You may also want to swap Signets of Suffering to Spiteful Spirit for more synergy with Blighter’s Boon.

Strength runes in my opinion redundant when reapers poop out might like no tomorrow, axe is still a terrible weapon (dagger is superior because of the cleave and better boon rip and lf generation). Staff should be universal to almost all necromancer/reaper builds, it provides unblock able fears, chills, and condi transfers when easily traited. This build is bruiser based hence the war horn and SoTL are needed, wh for lf and SoTL for aoe boon corrupt and a secondary heal.

Why would anyone take foot in the grave? The build already has two stun breaks and two sources of stability its a waste of potential damage. Signets of Suffering i more important for clutch situations corrupting stability or resistance. The trait you spoke of shouldn’t even be a grand master trait, its weak.

If you’re one to think that Foot in the Grave is weak, then you’re probably one to have not spent any real amount of time playing with it. The trait is fantastic for given situations.

I agree Strength Runes are redundant; there are plenty of other decent options, but if you want Strength there’s nothing wrong with it.

Axe is not terrible, I assume that you haven’t taken the time to learn how to appropriately pressure with it. It certainly lacks cleave, but it’s focus and usage are both perfectly reasonable. Dagger most certainly is not “superior”, especially not for boon corruption like you say, but it still has greater raw power level than Axe by virtue of being melee instead of ranged.

narcx.3570:

Zero Solstice.9754:

I honestly can’t really give you any one Condi Reaper build because not only are there many marginally different flavors of it, but I also personally play some of the stranger ones well, which I wouldn’t really go out of my way to share with people. I guess when in doubt, this one is always fine for 1v1s:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vRAQNBmWD7kGRoyGszGw2GgeTsgLYUph2wXA6qFAWAxXxu4YE-TZhHwACuIAHLDA4IAUe/hAPAAA

I think for condi-dueling you’re better off going with Corruptionmancer than Signetspite. Signetspite is definitely a lot more powerful, but you’re kind of locked into using your signets and trying to burst them down in that limited window where their boons are corrupted and your might stacks are still up.

Corruptionmancer allows for a lot more flexibility in your utility skill choices as it’s strength comes more from trait combinations. And being able to swap to the right utilities is what dueling is all about.

I dunno tho, I think if you really want to get into dueling you should stick with a power build… One vs. One, condi is pretty easily countered (unless you’re fighting a rev) and even if you do win, the other person will just laugh you off with “condi is cheese.” And let’s be honest, dueling is all about the e-kitten—you don’t want to give them any outs.

Don’t get me wrong, my personal favorite Condition builds are always Corruptions variants; to be honest I generally dislike the Signets build. However, even with that said, I understand that from a brute force dueling perspective Signets will generally go that extra distance. Corruptions have a ton more flexible utility and better teamfight, but Signets are better at simply getting them dead.

Cecilia.5179:

Zero Solstice.9754:

I don’t have any one specific story about dying while having Stab, because that just happens regularly, but I do have a great story about surviving without Stab, and it goes a little something like this:

www.gfycat.com/TenderUnsightlyJaguarundi

They’re going to nerf that. Necro stealth is op.

I don’t think it’s possible to nerf “Being unable to see opponents that don’t move”, but I’m sure ANet will find a way.

You really don’t; you have 60% crit chance base and roughly 50% Fury uptime, so you don’t need Death Perception. This build thrives on the fact that natural boon corruption gives you really nice control elements even without being a Condition base. It also easily transitions between ranged and melee pressure. The reason for all the stun breaks is because all you really need to deal damage is an ability to not get trained out by things like Mace warriors or a frontloaded DH burst.

I honestly can’t really give you any one Condi Reaper build because not only are there many marginally different flavors of it, but I also personally play some of the stranger ones well, which I wouldn’t really go out of my way to share with people. I guess when in doubt, this one is always fine for 1v1s:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vRAQNBmWD7kGRoyGszGw2GgeTsgLYUph2wXA6qFAWAxXxu4YE-TZhHwACuIAHLDA4IAUe/hAPAAA

Rolisteel.1375:

Good against bad players, bad against high mmr good players. 1v1’s are hard for you already against most classes and your 1v1’s also will get +1 +2’d a lot while you also have to face the everyone focus necro thing.
so no matter where you position every enemy is in your face at higher mmr almost every match.
especially the classes that can do high burst to necro, some of them going for you thinking oh im going to kill this pve mob it will be like a free kill. they are so confident because of the burst they class able to do and the survivability they have.

It’s not your job to be 1v1’ing, it’s your job to +1 and teamfight.

This one has been good fun and quite strong for me:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vRAQRBHbhG2IHNUcjd2gtNwejDchKu157HQ7i24LgDQAcAA-TZBFQBC4EAUj9HAwTAIglBewBBAA

Don’t knock it until you try it. Otherwise, you can play one of many different iterations of Condi Reaper.

Being completely factual with you: Yes, the players you’re playing against are bad. When you first start PvPing, you need to build up a Matchmaking Rating (MMR) to get placed with better players. Starting off, your MMR is low, so the players you play against are also low MMR, and low MMR comes from either being inherently bad at the game or being new to it. That said, Necromancer can be very punishing to people that both don’t know how to play against it and don’t know how to play their own class. This is exacerbated even moreso by the fact that low MMR means that you’re very likely playing against people with very low-quality builds that are way weaker than they should be.

Ranked is going to be delayed for this coming season, so it won’t be around for quite some time.

Berserker’s is still valid for point-blank DPS, although as always you could balance out other stats among the steroids that you can get in your traits to find setups that are less fragile.
As stunning as it is that you don’t enjoy Reaper as compared to Necromancer, it isn’t necessarily required if you’re playing Power in PvE, although GS is technically an upgrade to Dagger since it has a larger cleave limit and Reaper Shroud is a DPS increase over Death Shroud. If you intend to play Condi, then Reaper is more-or-less required for the additional damage you get out of Reaper Shroud and Deathly Chill. None of the core level content of the game really requires you to use Reaper though, so if you don’t want to you really don’t have to.

I don’t have any one specific story about dying while having Stab, because that just happens regularly, but I do have a great story about surviving without Stab, and it goes a little something like this:

www.gfycat.com/TenderUnsightlyJaguarundi

Why not go out dressed up as a handicapped WvW Roamer?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZcOy6z8BY4&feature=youtu.be

This latest video is roaming on Core A/F+D/W Power Necro. I wanted to challenge the old ways and see how this lesser-known DPS build of yore had aged with a lot of the equipment to come out of the content & changes over the last year.

Copypaste from description:
Core Necromancer still has a place in the game, albeit a rather small one. The class has reasonable damage and good control elements, however without any positive defensive capabilities it gets outscaled quite easily. The build is powerful for small scale skirmishing, but not much beyond that. That isn’t a bad thing, as long as you go in with that knowledge and don’t expect to have a great time in a large number of typical WvW scenarios. In general, though, it’s nice to go back and play around with the old-school stuff and see how changes to the rest of the game has affected it.

As always, feel free to ask questions, let me know what you think, and I hope you enjoy!

I think your build is generally fine; I’m a big proponent of playing whatever you want and making it work, and I’m decently known for doing such shenanigans, so I don’t really want to say you should change X, Y, and Z since that will change the “identity” of the build you’ve created. My only points of contention would be Spiteful Renewal and your crit chance being a little low. I like to shoot for 40% in general, and Spiteful Renewal doesn’t have great uptime or consistency, although without running Focus you have both marginal Chill uptime and no use for Spiteful Talisman, so it’s an understandable pick. You could probably trade off some of that extra Vitality for some more Precision, maybe even a touch more Power, but it’s all up to you.

As you yourself have stated you finally found out through the insights of someone else, a major component to Necro success is making sure that you have suitable methods of generating Life Force, creating sustain for yourself, or both. A lot of my builds utilize traits like Parasitic Contagion, Master of Corruptions, and Blighter’s Boon because you need to be capable of filling those gaps. A “bad” build can even be made reasonably good by taking some of these traits over others, even if it feels incorrect or simply wrong. A big thing about Necromancer performance, in my opinion, is understanding exactly what your build falls flat to. Necromancer’s might honestly have the greatest number of useful/viable traits and utilities in the game, but that’s because in general there are no catch-alls on our class, and you have to actively decide what you need for the job. We have Spectral Armor as a good catch-all, but that’s mostly it; everything else has drawbacks of some sort. Understand your good and bad matchups and where you are weakest at a given moment, and learn to be flexible.

Mikhael.2391:

flow.6043:

Mikhael.2391:

I will never give another necro condies so he can sent back at me. I save my transfers for him when he gimme condis. Till then is just straight up damage.

I won’t go into how it’s practically impossible to not apply conditions as a necro without severely limiting yourself.
But for the sake of the argument let’s say you actually do wait and only transfer until you have all the conditions.
So that means you are using your transfer first. You’ve used yours, the other necro still has his. Guess what happens next… right, the other necro sends all those condis back to you. Do you have another transfer? Alright, but so does your opponent.
Transfering or cleansing first comes at a high price in a necro mirrow matchup.
You could of course try to bring more transfers and cleanses than your opponent, but still, this game of hot potato comes down to luck much more than skill, especially when you factor in Plague Sending.

Anyway, the way you discribed how you would fight a necro is just another clear indication of how much you could still improve on your necro, rather than blaming the alleged op-ness of other classes for your losses.

Ok.

He’s not wrong, you know.

They’re pidgeon-holing us into a very specific role of anti-support, where our best job is bringing enemies down rather than bringing allies up. The problem is that type of role, at least in the current implementation of the game, means that we’re below-average/average damage dealers, squishier than we should be, and incapable of achieving prime potential without a friend. The matter of the fact though is that this makes Necromancer unfun for a large majority of people, because no one wants to go out of their way to feel slow, clunky, and incapable of defending themselves. Necromancer is only optimal with a team that understands how to play around you, and if you understand how to play around your team, and even then the class is a punching bag for literally everyone in the game.

Just look at Worlds from this past September. According to ANet, Necromancer is in a “good place” and its role is pretty well defined, however that apparently means that Necromancer, even at the highest levels of competitive play, is a downstate corruption spambot that downs dozens of times in a single game, numerous times in a single teamfight. The entire game revolves around which team is able to train down the other team’s Necromancer faster. Why does ANet consider playing a glorified game of Pin-The-Tail-on-the-Donkey(Read: Necromancer) to be a fun and positive role/gamemode to have in the game?

As an aside, even if you’re out of combat and have swiftness, Flesh Wurm will still teleport you ~300 range. Value :P

I’m going to be completely honest with you, most people that still don’t like Axe either haven’t actually tried the weapon anytime in the last 6 months or have no actual idea how to posture with it. If you are playing Power Necromancer, you have bad matchups, just like everyone else. Axe on its own, however, has pretty much gained a very nice niche of being a weapon that applies respectable ranged pressure whenever an opponent tries to peel off of you to sustain and reset. However, it folds heavily to melee pressure. It has its strengths, and it has its weaknesses, so you as a player need to learn how to most properly posture yourself to gain maximum effectiveness out of the weapon. All in all I’ve been pleased with its power level, as well as how fun it is to play Axe/Focus+Greatsword.

Muchacho.2390:

Zero Solstice.9754:

Muchacho.2390:

DTATL.9641:

Zero Solstice.9754:

DTATL.9641:

Zero Solstice.9754:

DTATL.9641:

While axe may not be the best dmg-wise(typical necro problem), all I want is to make skill 2 actually follow foes like ranger longbow 2. One dodge/sidestep and the whole thing misses which is pretty terrible.

It does track targets, in stealth and everything.

Maybe I make it bug then because it sure don’t always do that for me. It just seems like the “cone” in front of you where it hits is just really narrow in comparison to LB2

Just make sure you aren’t holding right click if you want it to track perfectly; the skill will get cancelled mid-channel if they break camera:player model interaction (i.e. they run through your character to get behind you).

Yeah I know that though I find it strange that it does as the skill doesn’t require a target to activate. Not that it matters much and all the other channelling skills that I can think of works that way too.

Actually no. Life siphon (dagger 2) only needs facing at the start but during the channel facing isnt required. That why it is annoying to go from dagger to axe. You are so used to the fact that you channel works no matter the facing and then with axe it suddenly interrupts the channel.

Channels don’t require targets to cast; you can easily use Life Transfer, Spinal Shivers, Rapid Fire, etc. without actually targeting anything. In fact, I highly recommend the Allow Skill Retargeting option if you aren’t using it already, as it allows you to maintain a channel and use the ability on a different target than originally selected.

I know but what has that anything to do with what i said?

I was talking about facing. For example lets take a golem in the mists as target. So if you channel life siphon and run though the golem during the channel it will not stop the channel. However if you do that with ghastly claws it will stop the channel. Hence life siphon doesnt reqire facing during the channel but ghastly claws does.

It doesn’t have to do with you because it wasn’t directed at you. It was a quote chain leading back to DTATL.

Muchacho.2390:

DTATL.9641:

Zero Solstice.9754:

DTATL.9641:

Zero Solstice.9754:

DTATL.9641:

While axe may not be the best dmg-wise(typical necro problem), all I want is to make skill 2 actually follow foes like ranger longbow 2. One dodge/sidestep and the whole thing misses which is pretty terrible.

It does track targets, in stealth and everything.

Maybe I make it bug then because it sure don’t always do that for me. It just seems like the “cone” in front of you where it hits is just really narrow in comparison to LB2

Just make sure you aren’t holding right click if you want it to track perfectly; the skill will get cancelled mid-channel if they break camera:player model interaction (i.e. they run through your character to get behind you).

Yeah I know that though I find it strange that it does as the skill doesn’t require a target to activate. Not that it matters much and all the other channelling skills that I can think of works that way too.

Actually no. Life siphon (dagger 2) only needs facing at the start but during the channel facing isnt required. That why it is annoying to go from dagger to axe. You are so used to the fact that you channel works no matter the facing and then with axe it suddenly interrupts the channel.

Channels don’t require targets to cast; you can easily use Life Transfer, Spinal Shivers, Rapid Fire, etc. without actually targeting anything. In fact, I highly recommend the Allow Skill Retargeting option if you aren’t using it already, as it allows you to maintain a channel and use the ability on a different target than originally selected.

DTATL.9641:

Zero Solstice.9754:

DTATL.9641:

While axe may not be the best dmg-wise(typical necro problem), all I want is to make skill 2 actually follow foes like ranger longbow 2. One dodge/sidestep and the whole thing misses which is pretty terrible.

It does track targets, in stealth and everything.

Maybe I make it bug then because it sure don’t always do that for me. It just seems like the “cone” in front of you where it hits is just really narrow in comparison to LB2

Just make sure you aren’t holding right click if you want it to track perfectly; the skill will get cancelled mid-channel if they break camera:player model interaction (i.e. they run through your character to get behind you).

Tobias.8632:

Zero Solstice.9754:

If you need to use a cheesy strat to account for a majority of your damage, then there’s a larger overarching problem here that needs to be addressed.

This problem has needed to be addressed since 2013. The problem is that necromancer is a completely broken unusable trash class that the developers ignore.

I’m getting the impression you don’t raid, which makes you not qualified to comment on pve balance.

And I’m getting the impression that you’re judgemental and entitled. I raid with Engi and Necro, and I have a fine time when I actually feel like doing it. The biggest thing that leads to an inability to succeed the raids isn’t class builds and structure, it’s having the capacity to successfully perform the mechanics; a capacity many players lack.

Necromancer in concept works almost exactly how ANet wants it to work, the problem is that it doesn’t work the way the community wants it to work.

DTATL.9641:

While axe may not be the best dmg-wise(typical necro problem), all I want is to make skill 2 actually follow foes like ranger longbow 2. One dodge/sidestep and the whole thing misses which is pretty terrible.

It does track targets, in stealth and everything.

I’m sorry, but these suggestions are entirely broken; A one-attack auto chain that strips boons on a ranged weapon is absurd, Necro Scepter and Mesmer Sword have it on the last attack of a 3-attack auto chain. There’s no comparison. Giving Unholy Feast unblockable just makes an already loaded ability even more punishing for no good reason; making abilities unblockable is generally anti-fun as it reduces counterplay for other classes, no class should have access to too much of it. The concept of Unholy Feast isn’t necessarily to be offensive at all times, but defensive/reactive to help you peel/kite or go fully offensive on your target.

Your very first statement is fundamentally wrong, you’re only saying it because the thing you care about is getting nerfed.

Second, maybe 5% of anything put in this forum outside of the BWE’s has been taken seriously by Big Guns. There isn’t even a real value in posting here for the sake of balance anymore; ANet truly, and at this point and in this current scenario I mean truly, does not care.

Until ANet ever decides to make Necro into a class that doesn’t rely on other people to perform regular mid/high-value tasks, you will never see us get high personal DPS output in PvE, and you will never see us get improvements to personal mitigation or sustain. They want the class to be a pocket rocket that has to have a babysitter to perform functions that other classes mitigate easily when not under pressure from anything else, and otherwise melt to (Refer to: Boon Corruption).
The last time we were able to perform a highly damaging and heavily punishing role all on our own, we got nerfed the very next balance patch.

Druid and Berserker are painful matchups, especially if you’re Necro, but that isn’t news. As for the build you linked, you’re pretty soft to melee pressure due to your weapon choices. That’s something that comes with the package of playing Power Necro and needing to pick weapon sets, unfortunately. I’m just pointing it out. I don’t like Strength on the Staff; the weapon is generally too slow and utility based to get a lot of value out of it. You’d be better off with Agility or Energy. You can drop some amount of Precision and Power to increase your Armor by a bit, since you’re super glassy. The thing with Power Necro is while Hesacon is correct in that a lot of our damage comes from spike, if you simply build glass then you fold to a lot of the classes that frontload all of their damage, like Dragonhunter. You can make the argument that DH and Berserker are bad matchups anyway, so you might as well just go full glass to try and “cheese” (read: simplify) the encounters with surprise burst, but I’m not personally a large fan of the philosophy.

Both are passable, but you need to maintain some semblance of mobility for optimal WvW play. If you’re Reaper, great. If you’re base Necro, however, I highly recommend running Spectral Walk and/or Flesh Wurm. The mobility is not only thoroughly entertaining and allows you to do fun things like S-Walk Stomp, but being capable of getting out of situations about to go bad is something that core Necro desperately needs. Another thing is keep your eyes peeled for ambient creatures; they are, in fact, valid Dark Path targets.

I’ve been using both Power Reaper and Necro in roaming to good effect for quite some time. It’s in the approach more than anything else.

Take your rage, make it coherent, and then delete it rather than posting it. Also, try not to overreact to everything, it makes you look less accountable for your opinions when you make polarized statements like that they “destroyed” one spec by changing a single ability. tl;dr chill.

If you need to use a cheesy strat to account for a majority of your damage, then there’s a larger overarching problem here that needs to be addressed. Nevertheless, the nerf-without-replacement is in-line with Necromancer’s supplemental nature: We use stuff like Epidemic in tandem with other players’ high condition output to create absurd scenarios. Necromancer is forever a class that relies on other players to be around to achieve its potential.

Axe is decent as a weapon; has good burst potential, plays well with others, and has cooldowns that line up well with weapon-swapping and entering Shroud. The major functional issue with Axe is simply the fact that it deals very poorly with melee pressure, so if you get aggressed on with minimal Life Force and no friends around, then you’re in for a rough time. That said, you can just swap to a second weapon set like Dagger or GS and start pressuring your opponent right back. This tends to highlight a separate issue with playing Power: You always lack something. If you try to play A/F+GS, then you lack a reliable way of dealing with melee pressure on your own due to slow cast times and facing restrictions, while also having questionable condition control. If you play D/X+Staff, then you lack a reliable method of dealing with ranged pressure.

As for Greatsword, I’m still a fan of the weapon for my own pet reasons, but they still have yet to fix what in my opinion is its only major flaw: The aftercast on Gravedigger is too long. It’s exceptionally clunky to cast and chain. Otherwise, I honestly don’t have large complaints about the weapon aside from how generally bad its Master trait is.

Depends on how you want to play the spec: Because of the fact that you have to balance between a large number of different stats (Power, Precision, Ferocity, Toughness, and Vitality) it is most optimal to create a Power build for a specific purpose, such as running in a WvW organized group or for Fractals. In general, I like to aim for 2400 Armor, 30% Crit chance, 2300 Power, 22k HP, and 210% Crit Damage. All of the leftover points can go wherever you want them to go, like getting yourself up to 2500 Power, 40% Crit Chance, and 230% Crit Damage.

As for Runes, you can’t really go wrong with Pack, Strength, or Scholar, but I’m a pretty big fan of Durability to help shore up the defensive stats. Also has good synergy with Blighter’s Boon.

Both are fine, the major issues coming from the fact that Power is more punishing and is naturally countered by its Condi counterpart. Otherwise, they both play well in most all forms of the game.

This is one of my comments from a Condition Roaming video I put up a month ago (found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6AiSAu9JDo):

To be completely honest with you, I never looked at Perplexity as a real contender for the rune slot on Necromancer. When playing Base Condi Necro, it used to give a very decent amount of extra burst damage to the Shroud rotation, but for Condi Reaper it doesn’t contribute enough to what we are already capable of doing.

With the Nightmare 6 “nerf”, it becomes an okay option for us to take as a sort of “Condition-based Leadership Rune”, although I’m not that sure that the little bit of extra utility is worth the permanent bonus of Trapper 2.

Krait are secretly better than people really think, because Bleed is actually the last condition to be cleansed or transferred, given a multitude of other conditions on the target, which means that front-loading the condition can potentially pay dividends. I personally don’t like to put all of my eggs in one basket, and there’s a lot to be said for improving the durations of our other more debilitating conditions, such as Cripple and Weakness.

Thorns are Pretty sweet, but for the same reason as Krait, they can feel a little too All-In at times, however the synergy with Corrosive Poison Cloud is very nice, and the potential for a blowout is greatly reduced, since even if your opponent cleanses the Poison, you still get to keep your accrued stacks from Thorns 6.

In general, I greatly appreciate Nightmare 4 Trapper 2 as it is purely constant, and never gets “outscaled”; Whether you are alone or in a group, you can always rely on its effects and performance.

Undead are pretty much always a powerful and super cheap option, since they are good for most of the same reasons as Nightmare 4 Trapper 2. You can also always make the argument that front-loading Condition Damage is worth more than increasing Duration. However, the Toughness itself is mostly a wasted part of the rune set except for the Undead 6 calculations, because Toughness scales on an inverse-exponential arc, meaning that the more Toughness you get, the less effect it actually has on damage mitigation. Since you’re already breaching the 3,000 armor threshold, the Toughness you get from the rune gives you maybe an additional 3-5% damage mitigation.

Svarty.8019:

Svarty.8019:

Alex.6483:

Hi there,

I’m new to necro and want to focus on playing power reaper in wvwvw – both roaming and zerging.

Roaming reaper?! This I have to see!
Are there any videos of these pwning Thieves, Mesmers and Berserkers?

I’m just going to quote myself just to ask again for these videos.

Well, here’s one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RODHl_y6O7E

You can use Death’s Charge (RS2) with no target as a dash for some easy mobility. I like Spectral Walk a lot when roaming on Power, and if you combine it with something like Flesh Wurm, it gives you a lot of general mobility both in and out of combat.

Ravezaar.4951:

Hesacon.8735:

Revs should never kill a CONDI necro 1v1.

corrected it.

This is actually a misconception. At high level, a rev can make very easy work of a Necro in certain situations.

Condi is more AoE in regular terms of the concept, but Power has a lot of cleave, which means its abilities hit multiple targets simultaneously. It also does have some of its own AoE, though.

For Condi, you’ll traditionally find that the most common weapon sets are Scepter/Dagger and Scepter/Warhorn. You can easily use a Staff instead of the warhorn if you prefer to. The reason is because Scepter is the highest Condition-based DPS on the Necromancer, mainly from the auto-attacks alone, so you never really want to swap away from it except for a bit of additional utility.

If you have the impression that Condi will be more fun than Power because Power is simply mashing 2 on Greatsword, then you’ll find that Condi isn’t much better, since Condi is literally spamming Scepter 1 and using Scepter 2 and 3 off cooldown.

If you prefer the GS/Staff playstyle, then just make some good old fashioned Berserker gear. It’s perfectly viable in PvE to simply swing your Greatsword around at groups of enemies, and spam Gravedigger whenever any of them drop below 50% HP. If you want to be a little more durable while playing this kind of build, I recommend balancing some amount of Cavalier’s and Valkyrie pieces to increase your toughness and vitality. As for traits, you can run Reaper with any combination of Soul Reaping, Spite, and Blood Magic.

I haven’t been having any problems with it on my end.

A major thing you need to understand about Dragonhunter is how reliant they are on nailing you with the Spear of Justice-Trap Stack wombo combo to get off most of their spike damage. Something noteworthy is that while the animation and flight speed of Spear of Justice is very fast, the actual pull is much slower with a distinct animation. What I like to do is let them hit me with the Spear, and then use a stun break as they pull me. It’s an easy way to put the skill on full CD (The pull has a separate and much longer CD than Spear of Justice itself) without it actually having a major effect on you.

mazut.4296:

A/F?! I only saw Reaper shroud ;D

B…But

Then check out my latest roaming video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RODHl_y6O7E

Read the description for major information on the weapon set, and let me know what you think. Feel free to discuss/ask questions here or in the comments section.

Cheers!

To play Necromancer successfully in this meta, you need to be mechanically proficient, you need to know your matchups, and you need to be willing to make changes and try different things. Builds for Necromancer are not static, and Necromancer has access to a number of good utilities and traits to help you deal with different compositions and situations.

Open your eyes a bit and try not to be biased, many other classes got nerfs this season. Engineers and Elementalists are in similar scenarios to us currently from the sustain reductions they got. It is much more difficult for a Necro to survive in this season without a pocket Engi or other support, which in a solo queue setting you can mostly forget about. Currently the meta build for Necro is Signets with Carrion and Rune of Krait, although it’s a build which was made with the concept of always being a +1 or always having a Sidecar Engi to hyper-ress you.

Basically, if you’re not great at mechanics like kiting, positioning, and team awareness, then you’re not going to have a great season.

For power base, you should try to stat balance towards 2400 power, 40% crit chance, 23,000 hp, 2300 armor, and 220% crit damage. It’s good to be moderately tanky to be capable of eating damage, since you inevitably will, and you don’t need to dump fully into precision like other classes because of the number of modifiers we have for it.

For condi base, the sweet spot that I have found for balancing Rabid and Dire is exactly 33% crit chance. After that, make the rest of your pieces Dire. When playing a “slow burn” build like condi, durability stats go a long way, and by the nature of conditions only scaling off of two stats, you get a lot of leeway in where you put your additional points.

Zintrothen.1056:

Scepter is fine….yeah freaking right. The third attack applies a bleed and poison stack and corrupts a boon. Three conditions with one attack. I don’t care if it’s the third attack and it can’t be used under pressure. No AA should ever be powerful enough that you may need to dodge it.

If Anet wants Diviner’s and Seeker’s Amulets to be used, they need to fix boon corruptions because those amulets have no vitality to ever help against conditions.

If Anet wants to keep a boon corruption on Scepter, just add it to skill 2. That way it’s more reliable, more skillful, but also less OP. Win/win.

Now let’s start putting our focus on the rest of a Reaper’s methods of condi bombing. Staff 3, especially with 4, and Staff 5 applies fear which applies chill which applies bleeding. Corrupt Boon corrupts 3 boons and therefore applies 3 conditions. With Curses, entering shroud corrupts a boon and if traited, Shroud 2 corrupts 2 boons, and Shroud 5 with 4 applies insane poison and bleeding with chill. With Signet Spite spec, Plague Signet transfer up to 5 conditions and corrupts 2 more, applying up to SEVEN conditions with one, instant cast skill.

If you want Reapers to be balanced, you need to nerf their corruption and condi bombing ability. However, you also need to give them better ways to survive under pressure. One way could be giving more ways to receive healing while in shroud. I’m sure you have someone on your team who is smart enough to find a solution, but has no power to enforce it.

TL;DR: Reapers can condi bomb too easily, but take too much pressure. Nerf condition pressure, buff ability to take pressure.

You need to remember the conditionality of every single thing you’re saying: You’re describing an entire Necro build with all of your traited conditions, in fact you’re actually trying to combine two builds into one for the sake of trying to point out how many different possible sources of boon corruption there are. If a Necro needs to devote all of those slots to exactly all of those things, then they have weaknesses elsewhere, and trust me, Necros have plenty of weaknesses.

On top of that, Boon Corruption requires a very significant resource to function: Boons. If it weren’t for the fact that most people now a day lean so heavily on boons to shore up their weaknesses, then Necromancers wouldn’t be as powerful against them. Sure, it’s also partially Anet’s fault for frontloading so heavily on boons after HoT, but the thing to remember is that all of the players/classes that kitten about the boon corruption are the classes doing absurdly powerful things; Warriors complain even though they have a possible 16 seconds of invulnerability, 14 seconds of resistance, and some of the highest Over-time sustain in the game, all being almost entirely passive and requiring no real input from the warrior. Revenants are the single most indomitable power spec in the game, only losing to thieves. Druids have some of the most redundant sustain tools, cleanse, and CC in the game for a single character. Engineers have some of the most polarizing tools in the game when combined with HGH, giving them perma-might and other boons while also being able to carry a near endless supply of condition cleanse.

As a final point, Necromancer is to this day one of the slowest ramping condition specs in the game. Engineers, Warriors, and Mesmers can all bomb faster than a Necromancer, all while also providing other stabilities or upsides that Necros lack: Warriors apply conditions while heavily locking down their target through mass CC and having access to blocks, invulns, stability, and resistance, Mesmers apply their conditions evasively with stealth, invulns, blocks, and CC, and Engineers apply their conditions on low cooldowns while also having access to kits, lending them other tools such as blocks, invulns, cleanse, sustain, mitigation, stealth, and other utilities. Necromancers make up for this lack of other active utilities by bringing you down hard, rather than building themselves up.

Lucred.1802:

Saiyan.1704:

Lucred.1802:

Saiyan.1704:

SneakyTouchy.6043:

I’ve been playing guardian religiously since this patch hit. It’s unstoppable right now.

Rev and Rangers shuts out DH on point.

Thieves in +1 situations. You know, the good ones who actually wait 5 seconds to burst knowing DH just used a cd.

Burn Guard DH is less effective than power DH. This proves that op is playing with lower mmr players.

Players can abuse DH windows-of-opportunity. It’s why we needed the virtue changes amongst other items because we would get blown up without cds or stability.

TL;DR
Players have to play more as a team now that DH is on a higher competitive level. Sad thing is, players never play as a team in soloQ. So while players may be struggling vs DH, we’re finally “ok” in the higher tiers but even then…teams can still abuse DH opening defence through cc+bursts.

“abuse” opening defense?

So, what, you want them to be perma-invuln? That they should never ever have their defenses down? Do you want them to be like the nigh-unkillable cleric ele in S3 except doing even more damage?

There should be NO class that absolutely requires being +1’d to drive off a point regardless of what it’s facing (assuming roughly equal skill levels), much less killed. Period. Right now DH is that class—the only way to beat it 1v1 is to outplay it or jump it at low health after it just killed a squaddie or 3 of yours.

Fortunately, due to a long history of being both noobstompers and unviable for high-end PvP, most guards are bad enough they can be outplayed, routinely. That’s the only reason they haven’t completely taken over sPvP. And as it is, from what I’ve seen over the last 2 weeks, I went from having 0-2 guards per match both teams combined to an average of 6. If that isn’t a blatant endorsement of them being a very powerful faceroll class, I don’t know what is.

Depending on build (they have 4 viable builds with 3 of them being tied as very good), yes most ranged classes (including the odd hammer-rev) can beat them. But not before they’ve been parked on a point for several minutes (out of a <15 minute match, or roughly 20% of it). For a rev to beat one on-point in melee range requires a rather significant skill gap (either a very good rev or a very bad DH).

You misread..i’m not asking for buffs and you’re wrong on many accounts.

I’ve been beat by
War (Rosales in Fear),
Necro (forgot name, was in KotH
Thief (Min),
Ranger (Lettuce),
Rev (Rain, Ash, and many others cause Rev is not our favoritable matchup)

Duel them yourself as a DH. 4 are in guild FEAR.

Also the classes dh can’t beat 1v1 (ranger & rev), War can. Rock/Paper/Cutters

Necros, Rev, & Rangers all stack better than Guardians on a team. Otherwise, sure, SoloQ players have issues… with everything because they’re soloQ players.

Guardians are popular. Not overpowered. Same thing happened post patch when they were nerfed too soon due to popularity and brought out of meta (ironically enough, Thief & War were bad so turnef to DH). Now here we are, traps are suddely OP again…

So…seems to me you’re the one with reading comprehension issues
-“Just 1v1 these top-100 hardcore PvPers!”
Of course most DH’s would lose, there’s a significant skill gap. Like I said people who can SIGNIFICANTLY outplay a DH beats DH’s (pretty much regardless of class) in the post you quoted.
If you have to resort to name-dropping known/famous ESL-tier PVP players, the class is broken

Not only are none of these individuals on ESL teams, but most of them don’t even actively PvP, they only duel. Also, while the game is balanced more-or-less around the center of skill of the player base, the top tier of players is 100% the place to look for how matchups are supposed to go. Mid level players may find a matchup intolerable, while high-level players show that the matchup should actually be good. A prime example of this was the semi-common misconception that Condi Chrono had a bad matchup against Condi Reaper, while in reality the matchup is roughly 60-40 in favor of the Chrono, if not even slightly better than that. For DH, most people don’t realize that while some classes do actually have terrible matchups against them, many classes have a perfectly reasonable time dealing with a DH, if not while being purely favored.

Tobias.8632:

Zero Solstice.9754:

I would love to know where you got this statistic, considering Staff has been included in just about every single Necromancer build for the last 3 years, with the exception of the Viper Horrors PvE build, which uses Sc/WH & Sc/D

What are you even talking about

PvE Power necromancer from launch until HoT used dagger/warhorn with offhand focus, maybe an axe

PvE Condition necromancer used nothing because it was trash and nobody played it past leveling until they changed bleeds to stack past 25, and even then it didn’t use staff because switching away from scepter is a colossal 10 second dps loss

PvE Nemesis’s kitten rampager hybrid build used who cares lol I feel so sorry for all the new players who got tricked into using this but also not staff which is odd because hybrid condition/power damage seems like what staff is supposed to be for but it’s so trash it couldn’t find a place even there

Necro staff does not offer even 1/4th of the utility or damage that even a single attunement of ele staff does.

Seems to me like all they need to do is make the autoattack actually worth using ever in any situation, and pick a godkitten single stat for it to scale with not have auto be power and everything else be condition, and we might have an actual weapon here. As It is, it is like many other things from the necromancer toolkit back when GW2 launched in 2012, an interesting idea (a weapon that is most area denial and condition ‘traps’) that they couldn’t be bothered to balance so they threw it in the trash and went to go work on making some other class blatantly OP.

1) Every build you just listed was PvE. Necromancer was never optimal and barely viable for PvE due to its lackluster damage output in comparison to every other class. You can’t pull the “what are you smoking” card when Necro builds in PvE practically didn’t even exist in PvE prior to HoT.

2) You spent 4 paragraphs trying to prove me wrong, but 2/3 builds you listed were “This build that could have been used for Necro that didn’t use staff WAS TRASH LMAO XD” so I fail to grasp your point.

3) You kinda cherry-picked the best part of Staff Ele in PvE for comparison purposes, since the Ele build was almost literally LavaFontMeteorIceBow.exe

The thing that I’ve noticed while being a Forum Monger for this class/game for the last 3 years is that while the Necro forum is usually filled with the most “X is bad” posts, it’s also the most non-hostile forum on the entire Official. There are a vast majority of times where, for all the negativity you may observe, the discussion is reasonable and peaceful, while on other forums there are threads upon threads of people completely detonating at the sight of certain balance changes, bugs, upcoming releases, etc. etc.

TL;DR Necro forum is generally more pessimistic, but a whole lot less polarized and toxic than just about every other forum here.

Well, toughness loses effectiveness on a sort of inverse parabolic arc, so after a certain point toughness just does less for you than vitality does. With that said, since you’re trying to go for a sort of “crit proc” concept, you probably can’t really afford to shed much precision, and there’s no other option with Condition Damage and Precision that doesn’t have undesired stats as well. Personally, I would say to balance Dire with Rabid until you get to about 33% crit chance, as that’s more or less the mathematical “sweet spot” that I’ve found between the crit procs and defensive stats. Otherwise, the build seems fine, although I might replace Unholy Martyr with Transfusion to help keep all of your goons alive longer.

Hello fam, here’s a video of some roaming clips from one night last week. Hope you enjoy!

Build is in the description for those curious.