I would like to preface that just because you hopped onto a necromancer one day and started to pub it up in hot join 8v8 and hot a high score does not qualify you to comment on them or their viability. The very nature of necromancers as an AOE class makes it easy to rack up high scores in SPvP without actually being a strong contributer. The build you prefer, I assure you, is NOT something the rest of the community has accidentally overlooked and you have not stumbled on the silver bullet spec, please stop posting these as if you are our savior.
That said.
I’ve been playing MMOs a long time and was very active in learning the ins and outs of classes in many such as World of Warcraft (yes hate me as you will the games classes were very fine tuned and very well understood by the community). I understand the tendencies communities have towards persecution bias, where they think their class is the worst because they can’t kill everything all the time, and I am quite certain this is NOT the case with Necromancers, especially in SPvP where we have the luxury of playing every class with equal gear and level.
I can easily say without a doubt that whatever my necro can do, whatever I spec them toward, or try to focus into, I can find another class that will do it stronger – unless it’s something unique to necros which isn’t particularly useful like spreading conditions to a large group of people so they can then remove them and proceed to role over us with their higher sustained non-condition based damage.
First off, we’ll start with what necros are best at – conditions. What makes us so great is that we have them tied to our Scepter, and we have abilities to return conditions to our enemy. There are several problems with this scenario.
The most obvious being that most other classes have a way to shed, or in some cases, return conditions to us. Others being bugs in our abilities that return them. On top of that is that creating a build around conditions requires us to make some sketchy, dijointed trait choices. Obviously we would take Curses as our primary condition tree as it gives us damage, directly via the stat, and duration via the increased bleed and scepter condition traits. (I will not name traits by name as I for one memorize them by what they do, not what they are called, and this makes it easy for both those like me and those who are new to necros.)
Next we have to choose a secondary tree.
Spite is tempting for the condition duration, however often anyone that pays attention to their conditions will notice, a long duration simply increases the chance that your condition will be cut short when the enemy’s removal mechanic comes off cooldown. The ideal situation would be to have short, powerful conditions and couple that with either raw power damage or survivability. Spite gives us the power damage, but leaves us extremely squishy.
The problem with an all-in offensive glass cannon necro build is unlike virtually every other class who can build full glass cannon and get away with it we have none of the things that makes this viable. These are as follow:
A- “Outs”, as they are often referred to, these are hard survivability abilities that allow us to escape, avoid, or heavily mitigate enemy damage long enough to escape their direct focus. These would be things like Thieves’ stealth, Ele vapor form. A quick way to diffuse a train on us. You might say ‘death shroud’ to which I would chortle as death shroud is still just an additional health pool and without appopriate mitigation they will simply eat all that HP up very quickly and you’ll be back to your normal HP bar.
B- Hard CC. This is similar to outs but more offensive than defensive. Things like warrior’s AOE fear shout, Guardian’s knockback bubble.
The closest things we have are the staff fear, which is tied to a weapon unfortunately making us bound to that weapon as an escape. At a mere 1s fear, it’s also pretty laughable.
C- Scarey burst damage. This would be like warrior’s 100b + quickness, when you go to train him and he uses this, you’re forced to be defensive or else face plant on the ground. We don’t have such potential.
Because of this we rely 100% on defensive mitigation to keep us alive, that is hitpoints, toughness and protection when we can get it. You could argue we rely on life siphon as well, to which I would chortle and remark at how guardian healing would like to have a word with you, which I will discuss later when I address more class comparisons.
To be continued due to length restrictions…