Guild Wars 2

I’m stuck as well, for about 30 min by now.

Henry! One month afk and you come back in full emo-mode? What happened? :o

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

This is directly against what boons are supposed to be.

And the very same logic applies to healing.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

What Necros need most is for the traits that only heal yourself to function in Death Shroud.

*all healing

I know you’ve (wrongly) been adamant about only self healing in the other thread as well, but since we’re at it again: why would you make an exception for regeneration? Or should regeneration only work if applied by yourself? And what happens if several people stack regen on you, would it work for a few sec in DS and then stop again once your part of the regen duration expires?
And how is becoming immune to a boon “downright stupid” but not healing in general anyway?

If there’s one skill that fits the “whirl” description it’s Ghastly Claws. And I always thought we could use one of those. The only non-necro dark field in the entire game is Shadow Refuge. So basically we’re the only class that has dark fields on which people are actually attacking on. But: we – the class that supposedly sustains itself by siphoning hp – can’t use a combo finisher to steal life on our own fields except with minions and a 20% chance on staff.

On the other hand, the addition of underwater wells was pure gold. We have 3 (!) whirl finishers on our spear, one of them even pulling our foes closer to make sure every whirl projectile hits.

All that being said, yes, I would really like to see a whirl finisher on Ghastly Claws.
As to the origin of the projectiles, it shouldn’t be on your target because that way you can’t control the positioning on the combo field. If by “standard” you mean your own character, I’d argue that it doesn’t really fit the animation. However, the axe itself is spinning right in front of the necro, so maybe that could be where the the finisher is triggered.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

…You really don’t get it, do you?

it’s how life force generation is balanced.

I do get it, and imo you’re wrong. Healing should be allowed in full while lf regen could use a buff as well. Simple as that. And I’m quite shocked to see so many necro players making such a big deal out of it.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

I do feel I should remind everyone that, up until this point, Necros have had their survivability balanced on the assumption that they are not getting healed while in death shroud.

Don’t make me laugh.
First of all, you can’t really balance the timing of aoe heals in team fights from players other than the necro. How would you even do that? Just assume necros spend 50% of the time in DS, therefore healing received should be X? And even if they did, that’s not necro balancing, that’s balancing other classes’ heals. And it would imply that ally healing is way to strong for other classes who can receive it all the time.
As for the self heals, please… like vamp traits are balanced or even remotely viable at this point.
Secondly, the patch history of Death Shroud itself just seems to be a mess: if you recall it started out as a modification of a pre-release down state. In 2 years since then they still couldn’t iron out all the weird stuff. Only recently we got DS interaction. Stuff like 50% damage reduction unless you’re taking overflow damage still exists (which most necro players don’t even know).
As it appears, DS is in a place where it just happened to end up after receiving 100 little bandaids to the weird down state iteration it once was, rather than being purposely balanced to not allow healing.

Liewec.2896:

well i play a power necro primarily tailored towards sustaining and recharging death shroud for as long as possible, in 1v1s with a whole life force bar (which i regen quite quickly) i can turtle my whole heal cooldown

To your benefit I’ll assume you’re using Vital Persistance. That means even if your lf pool was full before going into DS you’d lose 50% lf by natural degeneration, and only so little if you healed right before going in and immediately leaving after the 25 sec cd was up. Of course you could regen some lf while in DS but for the sake of simplifying the whole thing let’s just say your opponent in those 1v1s has to damage you for about 50% of your total life force pool in 25 seconds.
I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this by now: your opponent sucks hard.

Liewec.2896:

now imagine throwing in all of the healing from support eles, or healing springs or healing turrets or spam water field blasts, it would be ridiculously OP.
small heals from life syphons are ok (and would add a reason to go deeper in the blood trait tree), giving the necro a little bit more sustain.
large heals would be game changing, deathshroud becomes a fight reset button.

Why? Other classes benefit from ally healing just the same. And like I said earlier, a few waterfield blasts is by no means resetting anything. What most people consider a “large heal” is somewhere in the range of 3k or more? Big deal, you go into DS with 1k hp and come out with 4k. That’s not game changing at all, you’re merely 2 hits away from being downed instead of just one.

Also, since your argument was about a 1v1 originally and then I was supposed to imagine a support player comes and heals you, you must at this point assume that it’s at least a 2v2 now. I’m sure you’re not suggesting that anyone is op because they won an outnumbered fight.
So in that situation, again: every other class always get the full amount of ally healing while having defensive abilities that scale a lot better in team fights than just a high health pool. So please, really think about it, why on earth would any of it be op for necros?

Liewec.2896:

i don’t agree that things like water field blasts and outside heals should heal the necro,
that would be OP.

Care to elaborate on that?

I really don’t get why people would want to make a distinction between different sources of healing when it comes to Death Shroud.
Every source should go through DS 100%, period.
Only allowing self heals not only overcomplicates the issue (again), but it is an even worse discrimination against necros than not being able to heal in DS at all.
Why shouldn’t necros get the benefits of ally healing at all time? Aren’t all other classes able to do so as well? Are you suggesting that if this was possible everyone would do nothing but heal necros once they see black smoke? And even if they would, do you think necros wouldn’t be the first target in any team fight anyway because of their lack of stability and disengages? If anything, necros need it the most.

Also, I think most people completely overestimate how much healing it would take to really sustain a necro.
Half the time necros get those heals anyway, so we’re really just talking about a part of of those heals that are wasted on a time frame when – ironically – necros are trying to defend themselves. So the next time you’re on a necro and get focused (or you are the one killing the necro), ask yourself: how long were you/they in DS and how much hp would they have had to heal in order to survive a little longer?
And keep in mind, we’re talking about hp pools in the 18-25k range for a class that has no blocks/invuln/stealth or other means of defense but that big hp pool. In that context 1.4k hp from a waterfield blast is almost nothing.

Blackmoa.3186:

your post has exactly 0 value

There’s some entertainment value here.

Blackmoa.3186:

do you want to say something and forgot to put it in your post

The title would suggest he forgot to put in a build.

lorndarken.3702:

the only cloth wearing class i have ever played that did melee damage great ….

You do realize that “cloth” or light vs medium vs heavy is a meaningless distinction in gw2. Its only purpose is access to different armor skins.
As to the necro, for all I care they could be called the marshmallow-class wearing lingerie type armor. Yes, necro in this game plays differently than in other games, get over it.

It is a big whoop. First of all, healing of any kind is never useless for necros. Secondly, faster Grasps is incredibly good. Both buffs are a really nice sustain increase.

I think it’s funny how they emphasized that those changes are not “feature patch” big, but it’s pretty much on the same level if you think about what we got last month. The only really significant buff was DS interaction.

A moa in DS? What skills do you have then?

Why so hostile, NeXeD? :o

@ awse:

I watched the video, you’re mistaking Spectral Mastery for a trait that would reduce scepter skills (which doesn’t exist). What you’re getting with this one is a lower cooldown on your Spectral Walk.

manveruppd.7601:

So it’s clear that getting condition damage just for barbed precision procs isn’t a great use of your attributes.

To be fair, staff marks and shroud skills add some more conditions. And his Barbed are 2.2 sec long so they’re likely to occasionally tick a third time.

manveruppd is right though. You’re basically playing a regular power build with a different amulett which provides much less synergy than a berserker amu.
The bottom line is: you sacrifice a lot of damage for 438 toughness and 107 vitality.

Max.1204:

Is there a chart of evade priorities somewhere? Like – all the weapon setups in all classes, 2-3 evade priorities next to each one of them? Would b cool.
A chart of the big most impactful cooldowns would be great as well.

There’s a reason why such a chart doesn’t and will never exist. It would have to include all builds, all sigil and rune variations, all possible combinations of certain skills already being on cooldown, the way you’ve positioned youself (for example avoiding something by line of sight), your own and your opponents remaining hp and endurance, all possible condition combinations already applied. Not to mention the rng factor of crits and passive procs which are hardly possible to factor in at all.
Also, all of that would imply that everyone has the same style of gameplay, which they don’t. Even players that are both on a top skill level and play the same or a similar build will have different reflexes and muscle memory, different keybindings, different experience with their own and other classes. That means that even if they seem to both have a flawless mechanic, one of them will have an unconscious bias for dodging to the right more often and the other to the left (just an example), stuff like that will create a ripple effect that will inevitably make you have completely different fights with those two players.
And the whole thing would get another 100 pages longer if you add more than one opponent or ally.

Simply put: it’s impossible to make a general formula of when to dodge what.

The only advice I can give you to improve your mechanics and knowledge of classes is to practice duels. Either in PvP or in WvW, doesn’t really matter, but get someone who can give you constant feedback in a repeatable trial and error scenario. This will improve your personal skill a lot faster than playing actual pvp matches.

Anchoku.8142:

As groups or blobs get larger, wells get more effective because they have better odds of affecting the maximum of five targets each pulse.

But wells are useful even if they don’t hit 5 targets with every pulse.

If you want to use wells you should keep 3 things in mind:

1. Cosume Conditions > Well of Blood.

2. Well of Suffering is the only well that has more synergy with power builds. Every other well can be used by any build to its full effectiveness.

3. Resist the temptation of using any well-related trait. The one expection being Focused Rituals for zerg fights, but generally you want to avoid stuff like protection, life leech or cd reduction. Those traits are just not worth the point investment.

Generally, a regular condi build with Well of Darkness/Corruption/Power totally works.
You might get more out of other utility skills in some situations (Epidemic and Corrupt Boon comes to mid here) but it’s not like you are compromising your solo- or group-roaming effectivness by using wells.

Fun fact: the only non-necro dark field in the entire game is Shadow Refuge.
Naturally people wont attack when they are stealthed, so the benefits of that combo field are barely ever realised. And you rarely ever see teams consciously doing combos with a necro’s dark fields, but arguably they’re the most underrated and useful combo fields in almost any team fight. Either you blind or you steal life for a very good amount of extra damage and healing.

Btw, since the last patch we’re able to use wells under water. And we actually have two whirl finishers on spear, one of them pulling all foes closer to us. It’s like half of a main heal if you combo both finishers in a dark field.

So yeah, pick any build and just use some wells. It works if you’re solo despite not being able use the combo field to it’s full potential. It can only get better when allies are with you.

Tao.5096:

flow.6043:

Blood to Power when you could have an extra Soul Reaping trait instead?

Blood is Power gives you 10 stacks of Might and you don’t need target to use it, …

Blood TO Power, the 5 point trait in Blood Magic.

Tao.5096:

Quickening thirst allows you to chase people you want to fight or run away from blob – as I know they stack swiftness, but still, you have a chance to flee.
….
What’s more we also have almost perma Swiftness in combat which allow us to be faster and not allow others to run away.

Do you even notice how you’re contradicting yourself?
Either way, as a necro you can’t run away from zergs unless you’re so far away to begin with that it doesn’t matter if you have swiftness or not.

Tao.5096:

you always want to be as close to target as possible because our main attack comes from Dagger.
…
As I know that Life Blast hit hard, but can be easily evaded, and if you’re fighting someone with Vigor boon spam, like S/D thieves which seem to spawn lately like no tomorrow, then LB is kind of useless.

How are you staying close enough to someone like that to hit with the dagger auto attack?
And fyi, Life Blast is homing.

Tao.5096:

Vital Persistence in Soul Reaping work greatly with Unholy sanctuary because it allows us to stay in DS much longer
…
While in DS we recover additional 3k HP

3k hp with Unholy Sanctuary – with your additional 250 healing power – means you need to stay in DS for 19 seconds! Including natural decay with Vital P you’re left with a little over 60% life force, should you’ve gone into DS with a full lf bar. So are you really telling me that your opponents suck so hard that they can’t do enough damage for that amount in 19 seconds??

Besides, what are you doing that long in DS anyway?
I thought you’re all about daggering your opponents. Don’t tell me you’re actually using that “useless” Life Blast?!

Tao.5096:

Mark of evasion deals damage and put regen

I know what it does. However, I just pointed it out because you originally complained about how I suggested Weakening Shroud. Enfeeble deals a lot more direct damage than Mark of Blood and it applies weakness, which can mitigate far more damage than you could ever heal with regeneration.

Tao.5096:

Thanks to Rune of Pack set, we have almost perma Fury in combat which makes us to run on full 50% crit chance.

How about you ditch those pathetic Blood Magic traits for Deathly Perception and get 100% crit chance in DS?

Tao.5096:

At first glance this build sure looks bad, but it’s extremely effective because it provides high Damage output along with high survival.

No. Bad build at first glance, even worse at seconds glance.
Play a proper build once in a while and you’ll change your mind.

Tao.5096:

when someone is running around you and dodging all the time – good luck hitting with Life Blast.

l2p

Tao.5096:

- Near to Death – let’s camp cliffs, maybe someone will not stun break.

Maybe look up the trait next time. It’s reducing your Shroud cd.

Btw your general aversion to cd reductions is rather weird. What you see as “just 3 sec” here or there is what actually makes certain builds viable and strong.

Tao.5096:

- Weakening Shroud – yep, let’s invest into condition for 2 seconds Weakness and before that, for a chance on crit to cause bleed.

That trait is not exclusive to condition builds, actually it’s pretty standard for power builds as well, which you would know if you had the slightest clue about necros.

Let’s look at your build then, shall we:
You definitely don’t need Shrouded Removal when you have both a staff and an off-hand dagger.
lol @ Unholy Sanctuary.
super-lol @ Quickening Thirst.
Blood to Power when you could have an extra Soul Reaping trait instead? Yeah, not a waste at all. -_-
Mark of Evasion: please, tell me again how Weakening Shroud is a condi trait that doesn’t fit power builds?

I didn’t want to belittle you at first, dear, but your trait setup is absolute garbage.

Tao.5096:

how to waste trait points, that’s it.

I hope you’re refering to your own link.

Tao.5096:

Tim.6450:

Tao.5096:

67k from 2 stacks of Bleed in 1 min.

how is that possible? That requires like 10000 condition damage.

it’s total damage after 1min.

Bleeding conditions and some other show total damage dealt during it’s full duration.

Easy to achieve with 2 000 Condition Damage.

lol
67k damage with 2 stacks of bleeding in 1 min. So 120 ticks, each doing ~558 damage. That means your condition damage is ~10317.
With 2k cond dmg BiP will do about 17k dmg.

Tao.5096:

If target doesn’t cleanse himself from conditions, then I even rarely can stack 12~15 stacks of Bleed, since any target melt down before I reach such stack amount.

If you can only rarely reach more than 12 stacks of bleeding you’re doing something wrong.

Blackmoa.3186:

flow.6043:

There’s already a 3 stack cap on immob.
But why shouldn’t fear be allowed to stack? It’s not like you can’t be stunned when you’re already stunned.

You can, but that overwrites the old stun so you lose stun time if you stun too early, fear should be the same.

But then again, you can stun break and cleanse it so it somewhat evens out.

Blackmoa.3186:

Parasitic Bond
What’s wrong with this atm is basicaly that it helps you after already winning, the only thing you would realy need after a kill most of the time would be some Swiftness or Super Speed, in this case it would probably need a rename aswell.

No thanks, I’d rather keep my 1k healing every now and again.
I hope you see the irony here, discussion about attrition: take away a source of healing for some swiftness! xD

Blackmoa.3186:

Withering Precision
Lower icd

And lower the trait down to adept tier where it belongs.

Blackmoa.3186:

Spiteful Vigor
Vigor on healing skill maybe?

But… that way the name would make sense.

Blackmoa.3186:

Ritual of Protection
Pulsing protection, lower base duration then aswell

Ok, why not. Keep in mind, this trait is only ever taken by zerglings, so I doubt this will have a huge impact on necro sustain overall.

Blackmoa.3186:

Unholy Sanctuary
This trait is rubbish right now. Sugegsted change: Losing Lifeforce refills your energy bar at a 1:1 rate (making full deathshroud worth an additional 2 dodges)

Even natural decay or just damage taken?
Either way, it would still be a waste of trait points.

Blackmoa.3186:

Parasitic Contagion
Bloodmagic Line

Before any changes are made to those traits you need to allow all healing to go through Shroud. That should be the basis of any further heal trait balancing.

Blackmoa.3186:

Staff

Putrid Mark
Transfer 2 conditions from you and 1 from each ally in the blasting radius

How dare you suggest a nerf to staff!?!
And how does reducing our cleansing abilities increase attrition?

Blackmoa.3186:

Scepter

Feast of Corruption
remove dmg part, heal for each condition on enemy

That would be nice.

Blackmoa.3186:

P.S.: remove fear and immobilize stacking

There’s already a 3 stack cap on immob.
But why shouldn’t fear be allowed to stack? It’s not like you can’t be stunned when you’re already stunned.

Tao.5096:

Just saying but
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fRAQNAoYWjc0Ubb1Nm3wfbinhS6HIAa2ZDhLgufA-T1CEAB+pPIKlGE8AA2SJoBnAAmUGMp6PScIAaSJWO7PAwRAgMA6bB-w

…?

nacario.9417:

I’m having various results fighting good warriors in WvW as they always time their stuff vs my DS 4 and 5. Im also feeling that Im not putting enough pressure on them, the fight can go on but I have issues getting them low.

Pressure is all about timing your skills right, so I’d say that’s just a matter of practice.
DS4 and 5 aren’t the most important ones to land btw. Life Blast does a lot more damage than both of them.
If warriors are your biggest threat I’d consider changing up skills a little bit. Like getting another well instead of Spectral Wall. Or Spec Armor instead of Walk.
@traits: I wouldn’t use Chilling Darkness. If you’re set on staying in Curses there’s pretty much just one choice: Weakening Shroud. You could also move those 2 points and get Staff Mastery or Dagger Mastery.
Also, I’m not a fan of Soul Marks. Unless you’re desperate for life force (which you shouldn’t be as a power necro) I’d drop it for Unyielding Blast, Path of Midnight or Near to Death.

Zardul.3952:

leech per food deals 800 dmg and heals you for 900 ( omnomnom pie)

All life leeching food steals 325 hp, same damage, unaffected by power or healing power.

Shaogin.2679:

Technically this same build can be achieved on any profession, seeing as how the only worthwhile leeches come from your gear. Kinda sad really.

Yes, sad. Especially when you’re a thief with Signet of Malice.
Actually other classes can generally do it better because they won’t prevent the healing when they’re in Death Shroud.

First of all: an ooc refill to at least 10% would be nice, but it has been suggested a million times already so I doubt it’s ever going to happen.

Secondly, disabling the minion-trick would mean either of two things:

1. Minions no longer give any life force when they die.
That would be a pretty hard nerf to the class overall only for the sake of giving necros the same amount of life force at the start of a pvp match as they are able to get with a few clicks already.

2. The 10 seconds before the start are reworked to no longer make any build changes possible. Or they’re removed entirely because that would defeat the purpose of having those 10 seconds in the first place.
Either way, a lot of classes do some last second weapon switching etc in order to stack swiftness or stealth.
So I’m pretty sure this isn’t going to happen either.

But as usual fear would have the lowest cleansing priority, and fear is almost never the only condition you have on you.

It would be a nice change, but I’d make it cleanse at least 2 conditions and bump the trait up to grandmaster.

Anchoku.8142:

Damage seems fair for a 900 vuln-stack weapon, too.

*600 range?
I’m not sure anyone would ever specifically ask for an axe-necro when it comes to vuln stacking.

People who didn’t use the axe before the patch won’t pick it up now, but for those who already had it it’s a decent buff.

leman.7682:

Let me repeat myself once again so maybe another batch of pve heroes learns the truth – necro design is non-universal making necro either fare amazingly or fail miserably depending on number of factors that are by and large out of the necro’s control. This is why some people think necro sucks and others think it’s OP. No one’s right, most of you are painfully short-sighted.

This is true.
Also, it’s a bummer that you left. Imo you were one of the very few true masters of this class.

Blackmoa.3186:

so necro atm:

worst mobility
worst support
worst survivability
worst damage
3rd best boon removal

discuss

The only thing I can agree on is the worst mobility. The rest is somewhere between debatable and definitely not true.

Narkodx.1472:

Ignoring Conquest the meta 0/6/4/0/4 Necro build can defeat anything in a pure 1v1 duel

This build isn’t even the strongest 1v1 build among necros. And there are lots of builds on other classes that can give it a very hard time.
Ultimately it comes down to the player’s skill anyway.

Justin.5231:

Why would perplextiy runes be the best choice? I run those on my condi mesmer, but that’s because he can apply confusion. Necro doesn’t have access to confusion…. Do we? O_o

Even before they fixed fear to actually “interrupt”, Perplexity was the highest damage rune option for condi builds simply because it had a 3 stack passive proc on the 4th bonus. If you didn’t have a warhorn or Spectral Grasp back then you’d just take 5 runes and one Orb or Crest.
And this was during the time when people still raged about how op those runes are. Now they’re even stronger due to the fear fix, but complaints seem to be getting fewer these days.

Also, we always had access to confusion. Usually by corrupting retaliation and transfers, the latter of course not being affected by any extra condi duration. And as mentioned already, we could use Spectral Wall with either projectile finishers or blast finishers to trigger Chaos Armor.

Kurama.8453:

How do you guys deal with swiftness without travel runes or wh#5? Sounds a bit dangerous to roam wvw with such low movement speed.

In combat movement speed for necros is overrated. It’s nice to have, but you still won’t be able to run away from other classes.

What you can do though is get a second weapon with a sigil of speed. Swap it in when you see a pack of wolves or whatever and enjoy up to 3 min swiftness (or more if you have any boon duration).

Sagramor.7395:

The crit isn’t high enough in this build to make good use of Barbed Precision

Barbed Precision is actually a big damage boost when you do certain combos. It is among the reasons why I use rampager stats on axe/warhorn. With fury from Furious Demise you temporarily have a ~50% crit chance which will make Ghastly Claws alone proc a few bleeds, not to mention any additional hits from other skills.
It’s even more potent with Mad King runes. They cap your bleeding duration at +100%, making Barbed 4 seconds long. And the 6th bonus triggers a 16-hit attack, on average this will add about 4-5 stacks of bleeding.

But of course you’re right, a permanent precision boost at the cost of condition damage or power is probably not worth it when crit chance is rather low to begin with.

That should work well enough.
I’d probably take Tuning Crystals as the best overall choice. Ultimately it depends on the situation though. Sometimes you might get more out of some extra direct damage, in which case I think stones are better than oils.

Random number… from 2 years ago? xD

And yes, it’s 20% now.
Not sure why this guy needed a “steady weapon” testing this when he could’ve used any channeled skill with several hits to get a target below 50%.

I guess it makes sense in regards to cooldown consistency, but still: really unnecessary nerf.

Sagramor.7395:

I’ll definitely be trying this out this week.

If you have any questions or need help, don’t hesitate to whisper me in game. In case you’re playing on EU I’m also up for a little sparring session.

Wyrden.4713:

r u the charr w the guildtag [BOSS]…

Yes.

That’s pretty cool actually.

Like fear is the only way to make people fall off cliffs…

Seiishizo.7162:

but on the other hand i’m like the only power necro hanging around in top 100

Just off the top of my head: leman and leeto come to mind, as long time power build players. And I think at this point there are more power necros than other necro builds in the top ranks.

Bhawb.7408:

First thing I would do is just flat out remove the stability and make it instant cast.

I sometimes actually time that 1 sec of stability to avoid being stunned in the first place, so I’m not sure removing it would be an improvement.

Zefrost.3425:

If life siphon on dagger was the same channel time as ghastly claws then I would most likely change to main-hand dagger. Life siphon is total garbage with that channel time.

It’s not just the channel itself, the precast time is about an hour long as well. Ghastly Claws doesn’t have that at all.
Also, the cooldown is bigger, and to get a reduction you’d have to spend points in Blood Magic (which would just give you cd reductions and no damage buff like Axe Mastery).

Avigrus.2871:

Axe 2 is still so easily avoidable by opposing players – once it starts spooling they’ll dodge negating about half the damage – this is the issue i have with Axe, even though i have been using it since beta.

Of course it can be dodged like any other skill. However, either you use it specifically to bait dodges or you make sure they can’t dodge it when you really want to land the entire channel.

AirWick.1769:

Does anyone even give a dam about the vulnerability on axe aa?

When I “stack” vuln with the auto attack it’s usually too little and too late for anyone to care. Rending Claws is a filler skill, you use it when you don’t have anything better to do, so at best you’ll provide the occasional ~3% damage buff for allies. Sure, you can now get more than 15% if you attack long enough, but it takes forever to get there while doing very low damage youself.
That being said, I’m rather happy with the post patch modifications to the auto attack, but it’s a mere byproduct of using an axe which you only do because of skills 2 and 3.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

Lopez.7369:

I’d go one step further than Bhawb: we’re not just fine in PvP; we’re amazing in it. The only reason we’re rare in tournaments is because none of the good necromancers participate in them, even in the more active European scene.

I wonder why that is.

I wouldn’t say “non of the good necros”, but this is actually an issue for all classes. There are hundreds of awesome players who aren’t part of a pvp team.

Imo out of all traits in Soul Reaping, for a power build Unyielding Blast is the most important one after Death Perception.
Out of the 3 mentioned here Soul Marks is the worst.
So if you really must have VP i’d rather drop Spectral Mastery even if you go full spectral.

ionix.9054:

The point of chilling darkness was for the chill speed reduction. Good catch on the Weakening Shroud cripple.

There’s no cripple on Enfeeble, but that’s not the point. The trait is good, more damage and some extra defense with weakness, that’s all there is to it.
You shouldn’t have problems keeping opponents in range through other means.

ionix.9054:

Do you suggest Valkyrie for the Ferocity (b/c ferocity is low) or the vitality (to deal with conditions)? Since the necromancer has such a large health pool would you consider the vitality < toughness? How about Caveliers (Toughness, power, Ferocity) instead of Valkyrie?

For necros vitality is better than toughness. You should mix stats to have a little extra armor but overall you just get a lot more out of vitality because it scales with you life force pool as well.
Most of your defense comes from mitigating damage in DS, and since lf regen is always percentage based you can generate a lot more hit points if you have a lot of vitality.

You want valkyrie because compared to berserker you can sacrifice precision for vitality. A worthwhile trade considering you get +50% crit chance from Death Perception.
I’d aim for 80-90% crit chance in DS.
If you feel you need a higher chance out of Shroud you might wanna take pack runes, they give you some precision and a nice fury uptime in combat.

a) yes, it’s ok. I’d take Unyielding Blast over Vital Persistance though.

b) If you go with Strength runes you should definitely take Reaper’s Might as well.

c) *Precision.
And no, bad choice. The trait itself is weak and you don’t really need Furious Demise with 93% crit chance in DS.

d) kinght’s/zerker, sure that works. You might also want to consider some valkyrie as well.

I assume Well of Blood is a mistake? Consume is the only viable heal.
Weapons: also a mistake? For power builds you can basically choose any weapon except the scepter.
Also, I wouldn’t use Chilling Darkness. If you go 2 points in Curses the trait to pick is a no brainer: Weakening Shroud.

Jelzouki.4128:

Reapers protection is an aoe fear; are you stupid?

Yes that must be it… I’m just stupid. -_-

Jelzouki.4128:

It’s most definitely not a bad trait at all, and I would rather take that than greater marks. Marks are easier to land.

Greater Marks is certainly not about making marks “easier to land”.

You know, you could actually read the entire thread next time. You’d have noticed that several people made some arguments that are a little more elaborate than “…it’s an aoe fear”.

It’s not about that very same trait slot. It’s not mandatory to have 4 points in Death Magic, so you might as well point out that any other trait you’d get in a different line is better than Reaper’s Protection.
However, I’m not a fan of Soul Marks myself. But I guess it’s ok if you’re really desperate for lf regen.

moi.4398:

Greater mark is really usefull only on guard while RP will be ok against everything imo

More like the other way around.

The unblockable part of Greater Marks is good against anyone who uses blocks… so basically everyone except necros and thieves.
And then there’s the size: hugely underrated! It adds almost 80% extra surface area. It means higher range, more hits in team fights, better area control, bigger poison field and blast finisher area.

RP on the other hand doesn’t work against everyone at all. If your target happens to have stability or any other form of immunity against conditions it’s wasted. Also, you can’t control any part of it. You don’t know when it will trigger and when it’s off cd again. It will likely trigger when your target is out of reach and you can’t follow up with any pressure properly. The situations when this trait has a great impact on a fight are really very rare.

Bhawb.7408:

The build is considered one of the strongest 1v1 specs in the game by many high level PvPers.

I know there are some people who believe that, but they’re wrong.
That necro build is strong (-ish) for reasons other than those 2 fear procs, but it would be even better without Reaper’s Protection.

Bhawb.7408:

It was basically the sole thing that kept us in the highest tier meta.

Not in EU, and certainly not because of Reaper’s Protection.

Still bad.

You’re pretty much guaranteed to “use” the procs when you least need them. You give up a trait slot for either Greater Marks (which is a million times better) or a trait in a different line. And fear is counterable in so many ways.

It’s a weak 1v1 trait and it get’s even weaker in team fights.