Guild Wars 2

kKagari =)

I think she has a little Agni’s Philosophy vibe about her. Maybe its the shoulders.

Your video is blocked by youtube but given the topic title I’m pretty sure I’ve seen plenty of the same type of video before.

The wurm is my favorite minion also, but its ‘extra’ effects are completely useless-

Poison: A necromancer who needs to poison you is likely running a condition spec, with either a scepter or staff, or both, with more reliable ways to apply it. Not to mention most would run with a staff for a secondary anyways.

Combo: Its a nice touch but that would also mean the combo field needs to be at where the wurm is, which is a very conditional situation at best. Enemies are gonna go after you, and that’s where you’ll be dropping your fields. Your wurm is likely to be at a harder to reach location to constantly dps.

Breaks stun: is truly meaningless when it requires precasting.

Hologramx.6402:

You are missing the point.
Game design should be focused on balance in the first place.
Failure of an easy event leads to an extremely hard event never makes sense.
It is like if you fail to kill an easy first boss in a dungeon, you are given an option to kill another boss which is much more difficult in all aspects. That’s dumb.
Why must it be a champion? Why not a veteran?
Looks like it is based on some individual thoughts like ’I want a champion here. So be it!".

Actually, difficulty is contextual and subjective. I may have a build that has no problem soloing a champion, but that doesn’t mean I have the dps to take down several enemies that are running off with the event objectives. That said, many champion mobs aren’t really hard anyways. 1 person might be able to solo, 2 makes it a cake walk, 3 is a guaranteed kill + snoozefest.

I kinda like it this way. GW1 was always played primarily single player, and this gets that feeling back. Once in a while you’d actually party with someone and theres a delight in that. They should make zone chats combine throughout several zones though.

the Gnarled Walking Stick from the HoM is very necro-y

I’ve always had my flesh wurm next to jormag every right. It almost always survives through all fight.

Necromancer is easily one of the best PvE classes.

Good players play good regardless of the circumstance. Sounds like you’re not that OP.

Subject alpha is a really fun fight. I think his imprisonment skill needs a bit of a tweak though, theres no warning, apart from that microsecond in which he jumps.

My preference is focus or warhorn. Focus 4 is great for err…burst vulnerability, with well of suffering and a good dark pact.

Rukia.4802:

LOCO.1785:

bwillb.2165:

it promotes bad play

Actually, it punishes bad play. It’s what is commonly referred to as a pubstomper build: extremely effective against low-skill, unorganized opponents while tapering off sharply in the higher end gameplay.

Exactly.

Only people having issues with this build are average players (not trying to be harsh).

Most of the guys that have been playing for a while like myself actually relish the free kills these builds usually are. Not only are they free kills, but they’re quick kills, because they’re so squishy.

Indeed, like I said, dodging BS is easy. I faceroll over these kids all day. Watch their first “burst chain” fail and some will just stand there going lolwut I didn’t expect him to dodge hurrdurr now my pure damage build is useless. They may as well just stand there.

Same goes for bulls charge HB warriors. Utility out of immob and just watch the tears flow.. I have a feeling most of this forum are just WoW immigrants that have no clue how real pvp works.

It promotes bad play because the ease of doing high burst damage is incomparable to other classes. That’s the sales pitch. What new players don’t realize is that the downtime is the bad play it is promoting. When people start use a build that is only effective 1 out of 45 seconds, and said build gets popular, that is bad play. The teamwork the build can offer is shallow, yet it still appears lucrative because of big numbers and ‘k/d’ ratios.

The limits of a backstab build has been reached. Its time to bring it back down to earth again, and reworked into something more viable.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fQAQNArdWjQaV6pbub07JAJFX/8kivHP6xxGPMA
My general all purpose build. I use it when I’m trying out a dungeon for the first time, and for general PvE. Its great for delivering lots of AoE, mainly for use with staff

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fQEQNArdWlMa61muRvGD3ExkCvxNIFvXaRPImxSGA
This build is for dungeons that require more focused single target damage (e.g. CoE path 3)

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fQEQNArdWlMayrnuxdD92EgkirfGSxtSH9gYjPG
This is also a variation of my all purpose build, higher damage, less tanky.

I use traveler gear for the magic find, which is very similar to Carrion. Also pirate runes, so you can get whatever rune you fancy really. I also use magic find sigils.

Protip: Your downed state, with the 50% more damage when downed trait, is much better than your regular state when you are up against the boss of HotW ex2. =)

For some dungeons, I constantly change out my skills depending on the fight ahead. Much of this comes down to preference, but if you have a query about a path that I have done before, I can tell you how I like to change out my skills.

War Mourner.5168:

well there’s a trait (deathly swarm I think its called), that triggers it on 25% hp, which is terrible, but because of the DS hp trigger bug, you can effectively trigger it on demand. I haven’t checked to see if it will stack in duration with the war horn though. Also fun fact, the swarm this trait causes, it’s duration is effected by the war horn trait.

Edit: it’s called decaying swarm, trait 8 of soul reaping.

Haha yeah i know of it, but my statement still stands, more ways!

With reference to SPvP, regardless of whether backstab does too much damage or not, I think its hard to dispute it is a FotM build of the worst kind; it promotes bad play, is generally worthless to a team due to its down times, and for these reasons alone, should require balance.

You have the camp of people who will swear by using the FotM backstab builds because they aren’t skillful enough to move out of that playstyle, you have the decent players that notice that other builds are not as viable and will only play this build. Either way, balance will do it well. Which camp are you in? No one wants to admit they are bad, so if you are a decent player, it shouldn’t matter how backstab is changed.

Personally, I think backstab should be changed. It should be made more viable, even outside of its SPvP homeground. I think it’d do it a lot of good if it was actually something you could base a build around for TPvP, if it had great utility in place of its damage.

I’d really like more ways to trigger locust swarm effect, it feels very unique to the class and the sort of thing that promotes the ‘philosophy’ of the necromancer.

Ichishi.9613:

I am sorry, but without a solid reasoning behind every suggestion it is not valid.
Most suggestion are either grossly overpowering or ridiculously downcutting.
I’ll agree with just ricochet

This. I think suggestions should be the product of a successful discussion on the faults of the weapon in question, not something pulled out of thin air.

As requested, the area I disagree with most is the lifestealing section and the general populace of the necromancer community throwing in the ‘does not scale with +healing’ argument. Whilst in a lore sense I see this is perfectly logical, gameplay wise 25hp stolen base is actually quite decent when using a dagger but subpar when using a Staff. But that would merely be my opinion, and if I was to approach this issue and offer a suggestion, I would think an adjustment to the base amount should be different depending on the skill used, and similarly, though I wouldn’t expect you to include that in your post.

TLDR: with reference to lifestealing; highlighting that 25hp base lifesteal from Vampiric is subpar is good, suggesting that it should scale with healing is bad (IMO).

Again, I’d like to thank you for your effort in putting this together.

Introduction
Wanted to make a compilation of easy to use builds that are suitable for WvW, to help beginners ease into the game. I invite everyone to post up a link of their build, and a small description of how it is run. Lets promote WvW everyone! It would be best if these builds didn’t require a strict requirement in regards to gear, so that the player can learn what is suitable for their playstyle themselves.

Builds
Guardian
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fUAQNAreSlYgCCnEyLEfIFS2DRKBXQLFEkBhVgjuK4QA

This is primarily a support guardian with a focus on snaring enemies that have overextended. The damage output isn’t excellent, so you will need to rely on a allies to down the target. The build is rather durable, so dipping your toes into the frontlines is not too dangerous. Wall of reflection can help your team push the enemy back in field skirmishes as well as cover your retreat when running away, or saving a downed ally.

Swap out the hammer for the staff for swiftness boons as well as Line of Warding shenanigans. This build can become really effective as early as level 30, giving your character access to Radiance II, Virtues VI, and Renewed Focus elite.

Oh, I just wanted to make sure before I vendor it. I don’t really mind, its nice to even get an exotic. If it was actually the exotic helm my necromancer would be ecstatic though.

Because I wasn’t able to. I’m not sure if I need to be level 80 in order to do so or if its just like Karma gear…

Funny, I don’t agree with any of it except number 1. And even then, I’ve rarely run into a bug in the dungeons I frequent.

As much as I appreciate a dedicated writer to put out concise information for the devs, I think its best if the information is only firmly rooted in facts. I think the suggestions you put out are very debatable in some areas.

Omgawd I hope you are on Sea of Sorrows, I’d love to run Arah with you!

I felt this way the first time I ran HotW, but for some reason it feels nice and reasonable now. Its one of my favorite (and fastest to complete) dungeons. Even Balgren isn’t too bad.

Most of the time fights just feel long because of the amount of time you spend downed. When you are downed, someone else stops dpsing to rez you and you’re a lot less effective.

Fun fact though: as a necromancer with the +50% damage downed trait, I deal more damage to Wollam while downed than alive, and I usually just stay in downed state all fight.

In my experience of doing the death run back to a boss from a waypoint after a wipe, blood is power tends to keep the boss in combat for an entirely long time, enough so that it doesn’t reset thanks to the base 30 second bleed.

However, I can’t seem to replicate this effect ALL the time, so i’m wondering if bosses have an innate ability to wipe bleeds when everyone is dead, or just glitchy?

You’d be surprised how the Flesh Golem will turn into your best friend after you give it the +50% hp trait, or the +30% damage. Even without them, I still use Flesh Golem as my elite simply because it stays with you for high lengths of time. Use Well of Blood to heal yourself and itself, and you’ll do very well.

Can you tell me how retaliation works? There’s all this debate on whether the wiki formula is correct or not, and from your video, are you getting 364 retal ticks? (against thief in second segment)

Weakness works differently in different areas IIRC. I’m not sure why you’d be surprised if this didn’t. I wouldn’t put all your money on what the developers say either. The latest patch changed a bug for our elite skills into a feature, only to have a dev reply to me stating that this shouldn’t be happening.

kinderghast.8501:

Plague and Lich Form now correctly state:

“Entering this form destroys all minions and removes spectral effects”

And you guys thought you could use minions, as a Necromancer! What a silly idea!

JonathanSharp.7094:

Three things. <———— Edit!

1) The cake arrived. Thank you.
2) I agree that minions being killed when you go into an elite form is not good. We’re going to find ways to fix it. It feels bad to lose your minions (utility skills) just because you use your elite. We did that change to fix skills being unslotted by going above/below water (which WAS a bug), but we’ll need to find a different way to fix it so that minions, if you just use your elite above water, remain.
3) Death shroud is still good, but not a panacea. We do not feel that, “Oh, it doesn’t matter, they have Death Shroud!” So please don’t think that.

Best matchup for sure; I can’t help but think we SoSer’s are gonna get crushed. SoR would love to win a rematch for 2 weeks ago and IoJ won’t want to get humiliated again.

frans.8092:

I didn’t realize you could go anywhere and complete everything by just being mobile and evading and stealthing your way passed every end boss.

There’s nothing left to discuss if you’re gonna be daft and presume I’m saying that the devs think thieves should do NO damage at all.

To clarify: In the statement about design philosophy, which may not be the one and only, nor conclusive statement, thieves are supposed to be slippery, which they are, but it does not state that they are supposed to deal the greatest chunk of damage in the shortest amount of time. Which they do. You don’t need to ‘slip away’ from corpses.

If you can drop 25 stacks of bleed and run away, I’d say that’s slippery. But that’s to counter your point about condition damage.

No, I don’t agree at all with what you said. A slippery thief would be one that impedes the opponent from delivering damage, just in the nick of time, every time. If I got blinded mid jump during my warrior’s burst attack, I’d think to myself, this guy is slippery! (actually I’d never use that word, but you get what I mean).

So yeah, in MY interpretation, been slippery has NOTHING to do with damage. All classes can do damage, that’s a given. A thief, going off Jonathan’s description, IMO, does not shine in dealing damage, but rather, in preventing others from dealing it.

From the necromancer forums, a nice read:

JonathanSharp.7094:

So, quickly, on the design philosophy at play here (you can feel free to disagree, but this is what I feel):

We want the Thief to be the class that most “slips through your fingers”. Other classes like the Ele and Mes have some of it too (and rightly so), but if anyone is escaping a fight, that should be a slippery Thief.

The Necro, on the other hand, should be the dude you CANNOT get away from. It’s an attrition based class, so the idea is that if you lock horns w/ a necro, know what you’re getting into: you’re fighting a class that’s built for attrition. It can dot you, dps you, rip your boons, and severely hinder your movement. AND it also has the ability to soak up a lot of damage. So the longer the fight goes, the stronger the Necro should get. That’s the idea behind Death Shroud, but little escape ability.

So we don’t want that attrition class to also have great ways to escape. This used to be the case, and we felt the Necro was just too strong if it was great at attrition as well as movement/escape. We wanted the Necro to be more about attrition, and for other classes (Thief, Ele, Mes) to be more about escaping and mobility.

Hope that makes sense.

Whilst he didn’t say “thieves aren’t supposed to be bursty”, Arenanet’s design philosophy seems to edge more towards a character with many ways of escape, rather than the iconic phrase thrown about in the thief subforums, all too often “we’re supposed to be bursty like that!”

The thing is, whilst you might be able to chase someone down with Dark Path, why does it have to be melee range? Its not exactly desirable for most necromancers against melee folks.

OMFGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG IM SO HAPPY IM WILLING TO GET AN INFRACTION!!!!!!!!!!!

I came out of the event about 8 gold poorer, but I spent it on things I liked/needed/wanted. If you think of it as going to the carnival that arrived to town, it all makes sense. Its a festive event, and I’m happy to spend gold during it.

Rising Dusk.2408:

Josh Foreman.8250:

Rising Dusk.2408:

You know, no matter what happens, Josh, someone is going to have a tough time with it due to their own inability to complete the content.

This is true. But I have to keep in mind the proportions that our game mechanics have created, and work within that framework. We have platforming and swimming, but these are ancillary mechanics compared to the emphasis that defines the game. Think of a mixing a song. You might really love cowbell, but if you keep turning it up louder and louder, to the point where people who want to hear the singing can’t, then you haven’t mixed your track well. You’ve forgotten the core of the song for a detail.

I DO think that it’s a pretty small percentage of people who couldn’t manage the jumping in the boss map, and I’m not going to go in and make wheel chair ramps everywhere. But there are other spatial design tools I have at my disposal to communicate the way down and ease them along without significantly nerfing the whole experience for everyone.

It’s reassuring to hear you say that, and I agree with what you’re saying. I do think that it’s important to keep a healthy balance of secondary mechanics to support the core combat mechanics. I definitely don’t think that these secondary components should overtake the core mechanics, but I think that much of the current content in the game forgoes these secondary mechanics altogether, which is a travesty, for they add a great deal of diversity and excitement to the combat. I think the MK boss battle is, perhaps, the first true instance in the game where the two have blended together seamlessly into a stellar experience, and if you should take anything away from this, it’s that you’re on the right track.

Thanks for all of your hard work, as always.

But that’s exactly it! The secondary mechanics didn’t overshadow the core mechanics, I think Josh did an excellent job! The only thing that would have made it better is if the Mad King goes down to the next area via the jumping platforms as well! That’d be hilarious!

This issue is locked away in Arenanet’s Area 51. They refuse to comment about it. I’d like to know too.

Burning Guardians are quite fun, AoE wise. I love mine.

i.e. Focusing on one class at a time, and giving them a nice good set of fixes. It’s hard to be on the developer’s side on whether patches turned out great or not if they are so hard to look at in the grand scheme of things. GW1 had some really good, very focused patches that took the problems of one specific class and reworked them. I think if patches are done this way, even the classes that didn’t get patched, will think ‘oh, our big one is coming soon’.

Right now, when you give fixes for 6 out of 8 classes the effort feels a bit scattered and insignificant, and its hard to give proper feedback when so little change is made.

IMO.

What is wrong with taking some effort to do many packets of damage rather than effortlessly doing one large packet? Every other class has to do this, so should thieves.

Arenanet made some good changes to the Assassin in GW1. It kept the bad players away because they can no longer do 1-2-3-4-win with their eyes closed, and the great players still did well with them.

Reduce damage (maybe by 1/3rd), inflict 10 stacks of vulnerability.

They always run back to the ‘path’ after a kill, instead of taking the shortest route, even when they are no dangers present.

Mr Smith, regarding your response to point 4: A quick check on www.gw2spidy.com will indicate not only are most items sold at cheaper than the cost of crafting, even the ones that can ‘make a profit’ experience high risk to benefit ratio (I’m not sure if this is the exact economics term for it), i.e. You spend 3g crafting something for a chance to make 10s profit.

I gave up after failing to get into the clockface 5 times. I read that there is a bug related to this, and that I’d have to change ‘rooms’. The thing is, every time I changed, the latency seemed to have changed, sometimes I got back into that annoying ‘stuck in the cutscene’ problem and died instantly before I could move. I endured this for about 10 runs on the first day it was available. On the second day I made it to the clockface over 10 times but was never able to get in, no matter how I changed my timing.

Heres some feedback for you Josh. IMO, the clocktower is very fun, but it is marred by technical issues that made me give up and hope by the time we can try it again next year (fingers crossed we can still do it next year) it’d be ironed out by then.

Josh Foreman.8250:

I worked way too hard on that thing to throw it away! That would make me cry. Haha… spent a lot of my free time on it actually. You know it has 4,000 frames of animation, and I had to hand track every single frame that a splash happened on every single fish for the audio guys to sync it up. Not that we will never permanently destroy anything. In fact… well, I can’t say more than that. But NOT the lion statue. It’s the symbol of LA. Like the Statue of Liberty is for New York or the Eiffel Tower is for Paris.

This just in: Memo for Mr Josh Foreman from the Arenanet overlords: The lion has been replaced by a skunk.

Mr Foreman: “Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo”

Well, the pet is definitely keeping me in combat, regardless of it aggroing random enemies or not.

Malediktus.9250:

I dont know how he can 1 shot you? I didnt move out of anywhere when I soloed him and never got even close to dieing.

He has a skill that throws 3 orange projectiles at a player in a fan shaped path. If you are right next to him when it happens, all 3 projectiles will hit and kill you.

I guess it happens for melee characters mostly.

Grimbread.7426:

@Ixa – Yeah because stealing a legendary weapon would cause 0 rage. Yup.

Well to be perfectly honest, I’m not sure if anyone was taking this topic seriously. At least I wasn’t.