Guild Wars 2

I can think of a few reasons. Maybe they should FIX somethings before bringing in NEW stuff. Dont know anything about lore, maybe it just doesnt fit? I think there are enough weapon types and skills. Even profs getting new weapons is kind of too much as most likely, some weapons will become sub-par to others in almost every aspect. Think about off hand axe for warrior as an example, You dont get more DPS or utility or defense from wielding it with a main hand axe cause AA is too kitten good. You would be better off with a shield mace or sword. Similarly a land spear, would replace rifle or longbow if it is ranged. Or it wouldnt be used at all if it is just subpar.

I guess it is a matter of preference. You like more active gameplay so you should go for guard, I too like hard rotations and situational skills. But some people may enjoy laying back and supporting thr whole party. For instance I never play bunker builds in pvp because I think it is boring (except d/d ele to some extent). But others like surviving all that crap being thrown at you and rez allies. We are getting off topic here so I wont comment anymore. Any class can do damage on their own, some also provide utility and support more than others. Some are hard to pull off and some are noob friendly. The warrior is definitely not bad when you consider all this. Honestly, it is just a consequence of not having the trinity system (which we are better off without). Balancing a class between pve and pvp, that uses same skills and traits is tough.

Well mesmer and necro rotations arent that fun either. You press 1 90% of the time. Either in the shroud, lich form or dagger. It is true that most buffs are passive but my point is you can’t have it all. Although ele is just too OP in all aspects and needs some changes.

adozu.6398:

the other side to it is that any more than 1 warrior in your party is totally useless. As someone who pretty much only plays warrior in dungeons since i started almost 2 years ago i’ve never been so bothered to see other warriors join me as i am now.

i already provide 25 might, good fury, banners, vulnerability, empower allies all on my own, taking a second warrior in dps build or even worse another phalanx is just a big drop in dps, if you run the same dungeons and fractals everyday you become quite keen at noticing how X would have been faster with another thief/ele instead…

warriors really are in a sad state in pve. (not like they are the worst, but really i’m “sad” to see what they have become)

“Sad state” You are kidding right?
Half the nerfs we received were necessary. Class is easy to play, forgiving about not dodging and rotation mess ups thanks to high stats. You bring 1000 power to the party with phalanx build. All this while cleaving surviving and appliying constsnt vuln. Sure ele is god now but look at mesmers necros and rangers. If warriors are in a sad state, I dont know what those guys are classified as…

Quick question: Does Curse GM minor trait increase condi damage by 2% too? I have tested it out on golems and bleeds hit same with 7 condis and single condi. I’m not a huge path of corruption fan either so i run with 04406 for reapers protection +1/4 sec stab for FitG flash safestomp and +20% LF from deaths.

I run minionmaster with celestial in pvp. 40640 or 40460 with staff + dagger/wh or staff + dagger/dagger. You get some pressure from condis from DS2,5 and staff marks. DS1 and Dagger1 also hit alright but you definitely need pack runes for it. I take all minions, flesh wurm over blinding guy. Chain immobs are just hilarious and pretty decent passive healing, also if you get the full Dagger2, will hit 4k and steal 4k hp too. If you go d/d make sure to take cooldown reduction but i like warhorn with siphon trait better.

Must admit cele is not made for necro, however it is easy to play on small scale fights.
For wvw however, i dont think its worth gearing cele pieces for necro, but if you have weapons+amulets already, shouldnt be too bad with zerk armor.

Condi builds use +40% condi duration food anyway which balances your food. Personally I went for Hoelbrak and not regretting it. Even in sPvP I take it unless my team already has 2 bunkers or the enemy does not have a necro or engi. I really dont miss the 5% bonus from strength.

Yeah I wouldnt like this cooldown as I flash DS to get stability and stomp enemies. (I dont stay in DS cause then I get no LF obviously). However I do feel you guys with high ping and potato-like routers. They should give us a choice though.

Bhawb.7408:

Master of Terror actually is fine now that they added partial ticks. It can still lose its damage/CC because it was removed, but it will always add damage and CC doesn’t rely on ticks. Still not worth it over FitG though.

Last time I checked, Fear did not tick for 75% damage if Iinflicted 1 3/4 seconds of fear. Unlike burning which sometimes ticked 600 or 200. Did they actually fix this?

pepper.6179:

but death perception why can’t we have both!

a class with 100% crit chance, and almost on demand stunbreak stability sounds wrong on paper. But in practice may not be as bad given the LF requirement and our lack of escapes.

Plot twist: This is the april fools joke. They’ll revert it tomorrow.

Yeah ITS A STUNBREAKER NOW! Thanks all, seems like we have another proof (besides revenant) the devs read our forum.

You want to keep ride the lightning off cooldown so its ready to use when a target decides to flee. You can use water 3,4 for chill and earth 3 immob and earth 2 for cripple. Fire 3 Aur 4 and lightning flash are your best gap closers (also leap from earth 3). Unless your enemy is a thief or warrior, you should be able to catch them easily without FGS.

Yeah it is really unfair. I also think necrotic traversal fails more now because of no available parh but that might just be placebo kicking in.

Personally I am driven away from my main, FitG is another reason. Its just too difficult in pvp to not havea safe escape and Im not self sufficient anymore in WvW zergs. Playing ele more now, it is OP and also fun. Dont get me wrong, necro isnt completely dead just subpar and requires more effort to play.

Thanks for the replies. I switched to 06206 and it seems more useful in pvp. I still overextend sometimes and get too aggressive which results in me being focused. Also how do i decide whether to rez an ally or gtfo? Sometimes i get cleaved to death and sometimes i can pull it off.

I play a variation of 40640 Minionmaster build. Instead of meta, i take cele amulet, pack runes, flesh wurm instead of blinding minion. Its pretty easy to play and you can keep an enemy immobed for years (8seconds). Kitten dagger 2 leeches 4k HP. Lifeblasts dont hit low either so yeah.

Im about to hit rank 80 now and looking at my pie chart I can see that thief is my 3rd most played prof after necro and warr. Yet I feel like I am worse at thief than my 6 other chars. I can sorta play s/d but d/x builds seem too difficult. I also like to roam wvw.
So I need some basic advice and maybe video guides on how to play effectively. What build do i need? 26600 26006 006206 ? I couldnt decide but mostly played with 26600 cause it seemed more survivable. My other problem was running out of initiative for BP HS combo. And most importantly i seem to backstab from front like a third of the time.
I really appreciate any help, links to guides or maybe in-game help.

Seems like another troll that got rekt by a competent necro with full LF in 1v1. Everyone knows necros are easy targets in teamfights and most of the time, a liability to your team. Although when left alone to free-cast, they are a huge problem but isnt that true with any ranged prof?

If you really want to go conditions in open world, the optimal would be a mix of dire and rabid. The precision lets you proc barbed precision (curses adept minor) and things like frailty and earth sigils which you might take if you go wvw roaming. Scepter is a far better condi weapon so should probably replace axe. Warhorn could be ok but usually its dagger off hand and you might wanna take signet of locust for speed on world bosses.

But power necro does a pretty good job in world bosses too. As for runes and stuff, idk, the closest i came to pve condi was a hybrid build.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKcDOIgEGLU&list=FLcOtAKNyo6G6ms-QwHuEMNg&index=3 It is outdated but uses axe as wall as some rampager/celestial gear. Definitely NOT the most optimal DPS but hey, if you have fun with it, nobody is gonna notice the less DPS on tequatl because of you :P

Anything but rifle should be good enough. Whatever you enjoy most will be best. I liked Axe5 so I played GS + axe/axe for instance. Sometimes I swapped axes for longbow when i wanted to pew pew. But GS should pretty much be fixed.

Upvoting. Fix please.

Bhawb.7408:

DS enter/exit doesn’t interrupt res/stomping I thought?

Also I think this trait would be much better if it pulsed X stability every Y seconds. I’m becoming more and more a fan of rewarding staying in DS.

Edit: making it the DM 3 trait is a great idea too.

So far we have seen that the pulsing stability method is only available to elites, which makes sense. Of course hallowed ground is an exception but that was like that before the patch. Maybe it could give us 1 stack of stability every 5 seconds as long as we stay in the shroud.

High stats, 5 second weapon swap and most importantly HAMMERSTUN!

Since the last patch that allowed stability to be stripped simply with CC, many skills and traits lost or gained value. After reading the forums for the last few days it seems that all the necro community is in agreement that FitG is definitely not worth the opportunity cost of Death Perception. Some even said they would not take it even if it was an adept trait! I made this thread so we can discuss how the trait can be brought back from the grave, and hopefully devs will read it and not buff revenant but look at necromancer. (in b4 you must be new here comments). Anyways I thought of a few ways it could be made viable, any one of these would be a sufficient buff:

1) Simply increase the stacks to 3
2) Make death shroud enter/exit not interrupt resurrects and stomps. This may bring other problems that I haven’t given thought to but it would be a MAJOR Quality of Life improvement for all necro builds.
3) Add a stunbreak to the trait (would not be OP as you either have to save your DS for stuns or be stunned while in it.
4) Remove it to master trait line
5) Your suggestion?

Yeah, pretty much a counterplay issue. AA or skills that target through stealth like Life Transfer, are commonly used to find thieves. But in unranked and wvw about 50% they wont look for the thief.

Would be nice, but I doubt we will get it on GS. The best Anet will do is put it on corrosive poison cloud. (not reflect, block projectiles, for 3s max)

It should be an uphill match for you. Keep low profile at start of the game and get aggressive as your LF builds up. After 150 points on each team, you should have near to full LF making you almost unkillable in 1v1. But yeah if your team fails to protect you and enemy targets you, not much you can do about it. Have you tried the recent downed-state build?

This may be against your principles OP, but you should roll one and learn the 2 core builds they use. This will not only allow you to exploit their weeknesses and make you a better player overall but also make you realise how careful you gotta be with thief. I play all chars in pvp except engi, thief is my 3rd prof with games played yet its my worst class. I cant handle the zerkiness of d/x but s/d is a bit easier. Point is its a high risk high reward and it will counter some builds (like shatter mesmer) and be countered by some (like medi dps guard).

Ever since the introduction of “amulets” in pvp we have very little optimization on stats, which pushed some to duel in wvw.
Why can’t we have all combinations? For instance dire amulet is not present in pvp. Not having it is against Anet’s support of whole build diversity thing.

As you said, it’s too early to say. Will I roll one? Sure, I think it looks cool and Im not gonna buy a slot for engi so yeah. But don’t know if I will like it more than my necro. Sadly, these days I am actually having second thoughts as my main since the stab changes and flesh wurm. Skinny fella never left my bar, now it fails more. FitG is something to laugh about.

I mainly played necro for stripping 20sec stability from rampage as one or other liches. Now they are justreappliedand boon removal is less valued. I’ll still be a backliner in WcW but for other aspects I’ll opt for my 6 other tunes.

Teefs can spam blasts, eles get up to 8 consequtive out of combat blasts without sacrificing too much utility slot.

But we are necros and cant have nice things. Life blast can be reflected but is not a projectile finisher, logic?

Which skill are you even talking about? Savage leap? That works pretty well already. Rush? Not even a leap, but with the fix it has much more value now that you can safely combo with bladetrail immob (leg specialist). Landing bladetrail is a different issue though. Guard and ranger leaps arent perfect either. They dont work on targets at lower elecation just like earthshaker.

What mainly screws you up is their signets. Activation time is about 1/2s so you wont be able to blind them upon cast, but you need to dodge burning and immob ones. Other than that you want to keep pressure and maybe pop up zerk stance when you dont have adrenaline, ele is on fire attunement and you want to finish him. ? didnt play condi ele but I know they are somewhat squishy unless full dire I suppose.

Unfortunately your little chill support does not make up for lack of DPS (not killing enemy team). There were however, discussions about a chillomancer build that dynergized with spectrals. Your build over-focuses on inflicting chill, to the point that you get perma chill but loose too much DPS.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fRAQNAW3djc0UUbrNG3wfbCchCyBIAicDKBqPj44ZB-TZBFwAPuAAy3fYxTAoaZAAHEAA

I believe people agreed on something like this main idea is to kite while hitting hard lifr blasts as well as on point pressure from well and plague. You will still get a decent amount of chill. Rune can be switched for pack. Sigils can be swapped too but energy helps. Also i dont like hydromancy on 600+ range weapons as you will usually be away, kiting.

Flesh wurm’s problem isnt the range, its the buggy naturr of teleport mechanic due to height and line of sight. It fails me like 20% of the time do the buff would not at all make it OP.

As for spectral walk, there is already a trait that makes it last longer so that could be OP. What they need to do is buff unused utilities like Corrosive poison cloud, not ones we actuallly use. This is from a balancing perspective

HoT is far away, you can take a break from the class and play others. The main reason people even play necro is because they like the concept of darkmagic/vampirism/minionmastery/DS mechanic. Personally, it feels very clunky and not-mobile that I lost some interest in mine after playing other classes. Nonetheless I still comeback to it every now and then, only to reck celestial builds and bunkers because they annoy the heck out of me when I’m on something else. Also lich form helps too ^^ (afterall lich form is what got me started to necro and gw2)

OP is correct. All necro weapons except for axe and staff feel terribly slow. Especially scepter/dagger set which has ridiculous delays. Heck, people throw dagger 4 to remove conditions but you can get insta-blinded /thieves&guardians etc) while projectile is in air. A-net needs to address many issues about necro including mobility and clunky skills. It just feels so underpowered and less fun compared to other classes.

At the moment all we can do is let Anet know about this problem which is one of the main factors of why most people don’t play necro anymore or rarely visit it. Other than that with some skills you can pre-cast it while behind line of sight. For example dagger 3 and focus 5 can be cast behind a pillar or while running away, then you turn 180 to your enemy and voila 4 seconds immob nobody saw it coming :P

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fRUQNBmQDbkjmabLqx4G+bTgMIS+pTkBOQdzg/A-TFTEABQcQAYRdnmU6BlyAAuAA9s/gWKBL4BAwmmAGVJwhjAQb6EIDAzWA-w

This is what I use when I (rarely) command with my necro mainly because we lack leap skills. The build is still experimental so there is room for change, for instance I would like to know how much Vampiric trait (blood magic 2nd minor) changes survivability or if unholy sanctuary is absolutely mandatory. Nonetheless you have plenty of stability, HP, armor, LF regen, stunbreaks and ofc plague and well of darkness to make things easier for your melee train. As for runes and sigils, I don’t think they are the best, just using them cause I’m broke

So I tried FitG with the standard terrormancer. I sacrificed path of corruption and chose traveler runes for speed & boon duration. You get 4 solid seconds of stability which i found to be more useful than 2% damage per condi + patch of corruption. It may just be my playstyle but it works well and dealing with downed bodies is much easier now as a condi spec. And I only need 1 stunbreak (wurm or spectral armor). I highly recommend you guys to test it out!

Them minor traits tho! Basically they are like tankier and more effective necros :/

I will give my opinion about this change and its effects on the necro in 3 areas of the game.

PvP: It’s too early to speculate, we do not know how many stacks our elites will give. Other than that it does not seem too bad or too god. But I haven’t given much thought to this aspect yet, simply cause we have no solid numbers. We might be focused on even harder so they strip our stability obtained from our guard but that is the case for any high DPS squishy class. (On a side note I’m curious if thieves will spam pistol 4 to strip stability)

WvW: I am very worried about this. A backliner necro does not have a huge deal of CC or party support. Why you bring necros to your zerg is for well nuke/spike DPS and boon removal (with high cooldown). With this change boon removal won’t be a thing in WvW anymore as long as they don’t give ridiciluously high stacks of defiance. Elementalists will basically do everything we do, they have 3 great CC skills (realtively low CD) which will strip defiance and support party and be mobile at the same time. Necros do not shine much outside of zergs and I am very worried about us becoming inferior to elementalists.

PvE: I don’t think the stability change will make a difference here. Other classes will keep doing stuff more efficiently than us. We just have our fingers crossed for the specialisation and mighty Greatsword.

Personally I don’t like how this change sounds but you know, if Anet decided to do this after 2.5+ years, they must have a good reason behind it.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/revenant-the-master-of-the-mists/

As you can read from the post above quickness is getting a slight buff, at least for channelled skills. People that tried to make GS work in sPvP arena often experimented with the sigil of rage, and I am one of them. There were two main reasons it wasn’t viable:

1) We could not always predict the cooldown to proc it
2) It procced while casting 100b but did not speed it up

With this upcoming change,, our 100b will speed up mid-channel making it much more useful as we will probably land the last hit or force opponent to waste a cooldown.

Skullcrack, throw bolas, bulls charge and unsuspecting foe might see some more love hopefully. I have actually sent a bug report 3 months ago while testing 100b with sigil of rage and was sad cause it procced mid channel but didnt speed it up and finally they are implementing this suggestion.

Do you guys think roamer warriors will find their places in teams? Or do you still think GS will be outplayed most of the time?

Death shroud elite skill: use life force revive allies by applying self-torment.

There are a couple of changable things with your build. Some of my suggestions are based on playstyle and personal preference. So here we go:

Equipment: Im not a fan of battle sigilanymore but should be still fine. Other things are viable. I personally prefer pack runes as I like AoE fury and precision. I’m also not a fan of might stacking on warrior and I do not often activate sigil of rage so I can build up adrenaline faster. I will use it if an enemy is about to die and i need to catch and finish him off. Of course this is just my style. As for the amulet, I really thing soldier is limiting you vey much on landing evis. Your two ways of landing it safely are bow and mace 5. A good player usually dodges bow 5 or will cleanse it directly unless you bait stow weapon. If you take valkyrie however, your evis will hit like a truck! But you will still be dependant on it. Now this works fine against few players, but if you want to smack some decent players i think the way to go is shield and zerk amulet. You will lack armor but have endure pain at 25% HP and block to make up for it. Instead of mace 5 you now have shield 4 to cc which does the same job since you need to be in melee range to land evis anyway. Zerker amu will buff your axe1 and bow3 a lot as well.

Traits: If you use signet of rage for passive like me, warriors sprint is decent. But if you use it actively than u need signet mastery for sure. 33% overwrites 25%. Dodged march is another trait I like. If u are using shield and enemy has 2 ranged like power necro and ranger ill swap it for reflect. The offhand trait is pretty useless. I mean you could take great fortitude instead. Or allocate 2 points to tactics for leg specialist so you can land eviscerate after axe 3.

Utilities: seem pretty solid overall. Depending on enemy balanced stance could be seitched for dolyak. And stamina for endure pain.

The reason people QQ so much these days is cause warrior is now dealing less damage and penalized more for missin burst. Which happens a lot in high level play. So you dont typically see zerker warriors i tourneys.

Cogbyrn.7283:

Bhawb.7408:

There are a few skills that have issues like that. Axe 3 can be blocked by aegis despite being a boon removal, something none of our other boon removals have issues with.

I specifically remember Focus #5 being blocked irregularly against Guardians a while back. Maybe they fixed that inconsistency though. Some Aegis it would remove, some would block it (I’m pretty sure the profession mechanic aegis was the one that blocked it fully).

I remember because it’s extremely irritating to see a player with Swiftness and Aegis running away, you use your 1200 range Chill + Boon Removal, and it gets blocked while they continue running.

If I recall correctly Aegis will block everything, including corrupt boon and DS #2, WH #4 and wells which are supposed to be unblockable. Only exception would be a traited thief steal.

So we all are aware of the necro community complaining about how we get hard cc’d by other players in matches. Lack of stability and movement skills are pretty much are only weak spots. In this topic I will be adressing sPvP Powermancer (with wells) but some problems may apply to terrormancer and wvw backliners too.

We give up 50% crit in DS to get 3 seconds of stability which is a tremendous amount of DPS loss as it affects our wells too. Now of course we CAN’T have it all, that is why there is a trade-off but the question remains, is foot in the grave worth it?
I don’t do any competitive pvp and I know powermancer is almost never used in weekly leagues because our role is done better by other classes.

Firstly the trait’s stability is not even enough by itself to make a safe stomp. Thus we need to go 60206 for boon duration and rune of the traveler. This does result in 3.75s which is just enough however we loose even more DPS! giving up something like rune of the pack and focused rituals. Also for this to actually be useful you need to take near to death trait over vital persistence so you can stomp on demand. But wait, it gets better. Because we stomped in DS, we don’t get life force from nearby death. Isn’t that just convenient? Technically speaking we have 62.5% uptime on stability but at a cost of high DPS and sustain.

Regardless of the issues I have tried the trait with zerker amulet and it was pretty useless. So my question is, can this trait be actually useful in any kind of necro build? Do the devs need to buff it? Or should they revise the other grandmaster traits that never get picked ever?

Yeah so many complaints lately. Good montage (:

You have great mobility so u should abuse it to break line of sight when under pressure nd heal up a bit.
Bait them to burst on you then pop shield 5. Also you can make someone chase u than shield bash backwards followed by evis.
I feel like option 2 above is much better than others because of how telegraphed our skills are. Leg specialist kind of takes care of that. The only weakness is against warriors who have condi food and dogged march. Immob wont last long enough for you to burst.
Lastly an obvious tip, you dont wanna pop shield stance when you have endure pain active. You also dont wanna waste a dodge then.

With eles its always about countering them. You anticipate getting CCd, pop up stability, if ele is on fire pop up zerkers stance. If you have a bow burning hurts them a LOT and try to keep some distance as they are full melee. If you run a condi/hybrid build spike them when they leave water. You may still not kill the ele if you outplay them as they have a ridiculous amount of vigor heals and gap openers.

Thieves. Well it depends on what build you run in wvw. If you like to roam with hammer/gs then a thief will easiliy counter you. Its just the way it is. Axe shield or a condi build has more chance. You want to bait them to open on you and securely land evis. Pretty hard to land unless you have leg specialist trait. Whirlwind also does a chunk of damage. If they use their stolen ability you can pop up endure pain and counter attack with axe autoattack but it wont work against decent thieves.

Against mesmers you wont stand much chance. I dont play mesmer so i dont know how to counter them. However i run mobile strikes trait which gives me 4 escapes from their sword lockdown. Still ill lose to a mesmer with skill equal to mine so perhaps someone else can help you there

Yes you desperately neesd the soup to some extent mitigate condi pressure on you. Also it tastes way better than mango pie. (sorry mom)