Guild Wars 2

I’m testing it in the mists right now and shroudstomping still works fine. If I were to set up a keyboard macro for it, it would be: “press Enter DS key -> press Interact key” with no time delay in between those two actions.

Softspoken.2410:

Raf.1078:

Swagg.9236:

This list depresses me and I don’t even play Necromancer. All of my whys and hows. I commend you for the work you put into it, though.

None of the listed bugs in any way make the class unplayable.

I’ll admit, there’s only a few of these bugs I personally would call major, but regardless of how much they do or don’t alter your playstyle, I’d like to document them here.

I wanted to add: I left out a lot of the HP% Rune Effects from the last thread that used to mess with death shroud, because I was led to believe that category of issue had been solved. Would anyone with more experience like to weigh in on that?

Yep, it’s been solved. I’m running 6/6 Vampirism and it only triggers when my real HP is below 10%.

Aesa.4819:

lettucemode.3789:

I have – along with 6/6 Runes of Vampirism (the 2nd and 4th bonuses heal for 1k)

How is the 6th bonus working with DS, isn’t it bugged?
(Necros are considered to have very low health % in DS)

Nope, it was fixed. It will only trigger when your real health bar is below 10% now. Though if you take a hit in DS while your real HP is below 10%, it will trigger. And you can still cast the DS abilities while in the mist form

Sifu.6527:

Necro (can someone fill this out for me? Haven’t fought too many necros)

On my necro it’s about 1 immobilize, half a Well of Suffering and two dagger autoattack chains. Can’t speak for conditions.

Rennoko.5731:

Just out of curiousity, have you tried to stack all three of those at the same time? I would be curious what kind of overall healing that would output. Reduced damage output aside, it would be interesting to watch in a video. I have long held the life steal food, much like the condition duration food, trumps most other foods hands down.

I have – along with 6/6 Runes of Vampirism (the 2nd and 4th bonuses heal for 1k). There are a LOT of little green numbers flying around, let me tell you. It’s enough that you can basically ignore any conditions on you since you can just heal through them.

I ran a very siphon-heavy build for a long time. It’s pretty good at what it does. I always put 20 points into Blood Magic, taking Bloodthirst and Vampiric Precision, then went full Knight’s gear (tough/pow/pre) as that seemed the best way to gain crit for Vampiric Precision and have good defense for melee range at the same time. The advantage is that you can outlast anything in WvW – dagger 2 heals for over 3k, and with 50% crit chance (ez to get with full Knight’s) you gain an average of 63 hp per hit.

I switched away from it a while back, though, for a few reasons. (1) I wanted to experiment with other trait setups, 20 points is a fair bit to invest in defense. (2) Omnomberry Pie is a food that will siphon about 350 hp to you, 66% of your crits. With 50% crit that is an average of 115hp per hit, almost double what 20 points in Blood Magic will get you. (3) Sigils of Blood also give comparable healing to your siphon traits.

It is still definitely a super fun build, and the extra 2k health from Blood Magic is nice. I have simply moved on in favor of other stuff. I am considering going back to it though since picking up some Berserker’s gear to replace some of the Knight’s.

Hey dude, thanks for reviving the list.

If you get transformed into a Moa you can’t leave DS – this was fixed somewhat recently by making Moa Morph just remove DS.

Spiteful Talisman – In PvE and WvWvW, the cooldown and range of Reaper’s Touch (Focus 4) are not changed. This trait works fine in sPvP.

Spectral Attunement – Spectral walk’s duration DOES change when using spectral attunement, in fact I’m using Spectral Attunement in my build right now. The swiftness doesn’t change, the tooltip doesn’t change, but the length of time you have the “Spectral Walk” buff on you and can teleport to your original position is increased from 8s to 12s. The wording may be slightly confusing but I think this is working as intended.

Greater Marks – as far as I know the bug where Guardians could still block the marks was fixed a while ago, it shouldn’t be a problem anymore.

Again, thanks for bringing the list up to date. Mods, replace the old sticky with this thread, please!

Oozo.7856:

Even if it’s been fixed, you can toggle in and out of ds and retain the stability. The problem is the length of stability doesn’t cover the full stomp. ;(

You can cover the whole animation with 20% boon duration IIRC.

Parasitic Bond and Spiteful Removal – Why would you nerf these? With your versions, if you tag someone from a distance and they die – such as in a zerg vs. zerg fight – you no longer gain life or cleanse conditions. So now all necros need to be up close to take advantage of these skills, when not all necros are built for that. Maybe I am taking this personally since I like diving into a zerg, dropping someone, then retreating and letting the rest of the zerg finish that guy off, and gaining the life anyway. Additionally it’s not hard to stab enemies with a dagger a few times to tag them if they are downed and you haven’t tagged them yet. Those traits should be left as is.

Reanimator – same as above, forcing all necros to be up close to gain the benefits of the trait when they are not necessarily built for that.

Confusing Retaliation – too strong, way too strong. We can apply confusion to nearby enemies every 5s when combined with Near to Death and Spiteful Spirit. That’s not balanced at all.

Ritual Mastery and Ritual of Protection – Wells are strong enough without also applying Weakness. I view your changes as an overall nerf since wells would only get 10% cooldown decrease when traited.

Having said all that, I like some of your suggestions, and there is some good potential here. Conditional Might is cool. Siphoned Power is cool. I think Dark Armor is kind of bad for a Grandmaster minor trait, though, maybe swap that and Protection of the Horde?

Depending on how much crit you want you should be able to mix in some Valkyrie’s – Power, Vitality, Crit damage. I have knight’s armor and berserker’s jewelry, which both have Precision as a secondary stat, plus 20 points in Curses and that adds up to 39% crit. That plus 70 precision from food plus Sigil of Accuracy (+5% crit chance) brings it up to 48% crit chance, which I am satisfied with given my build. There are lots of tradeoffs you can make and many ways to improve crit chance, if you have the money you should experiment.

I would gladly trade Lich Form for a siphon signet.

Passive – increase all siphons by 50%.
Active: – increase all incoming healing by 50% for 10s.

It’s single target, but the area in which your target has to be for it to not miss is cone-shaped.

Hey Gaudium,

The necro power build is based around stacking lots of vulnerability on your targets. Your mainhand weapons will be Axe, Dagger, or Staff, and your offhand weapons will be Focus or Warhorn. You could use dagger offhand if you wanted to, however it is more focused on conditions. I think Dagger/Focus + Staff would be the best combination for leveling. But feel free to try them all out and see which ones you like best, that’s the most important thing.

For utilities, use Spectral Wall (make the mobs run through it a few times for easy 20 stacks of vulnerability), Well of Suffering, and something else, doesn’t really matter which, maybe Blood is Power for the huge might stack.

Traits are flexible. 30 points in Blood Magic, taking Vampiric Rituals, works really, really well in PvE because you can take on 5-6 mobs at once and your wells will siphon health from all of them. If you do this use Well of Corruption as your third utility, and maybe Well of Blood as your heal, too.

Other good traits: Close to Death, Greater Marks, Weakening Shroud, Reaper’s Might, Banshee’s Wail, Ritual of Protection, Bloodthirst, Ritual Mastery.

Melee necro is a really fun build, enjoy it!

Plague form. It shouldn’t turn him white but sometimes the animation glitches like that.

The range for Corrupt Boon is in the shape of a cone in front of you. So if people are too far to the left or right it won’t work. Additionally if you are strafing and turning at the same time, your front-facing cone is often in a different direction than you are looking, which will cause Corrupt Boon to miss. If you take the additional half a second to line it up it won’t ever miss.

Hey Rislo. The biggest necro problem is that the minion AI, especially for the Flesh Golem, isn’t perfect. They will occasionally stand around while you are fighting something, and the Flesh Golem is always picking fights when you’re standing around.

Other than that the class had the most bugs at release compared to other classes so that contributed to the negative atmosphere. However, I have been playing a necro since the game released and love it! It is my favorite class. I was able to find interesting, viable builds mostly by ignoring the conventional wisdom on the forums and experimenting. So don’t get too down on what you read around here, official forums are notorious for that sort of thing anyway, for any game. You will definitely be rockin’ at level 80 if you invest some time into your build decisions.

Some high-level sPvP players have some problems with the profession as well, but unless you are looking to join a high-level team that will not affect you. I don’t understand those complaints too much since I don’t play tournaments.

The class has only been getting better since release with bug fixes and buffs. I suggest you stick with it.

1v2 for me. 1v3 is just too much damage, plus the additional support when trying to stomp them.

I am of the opinion that shroudstomping might be too strong. The counters to stomping are: (1) interrupt them and (2) do enough damage to the stomper to make the stomp not worth it. Shroudstomping with Foot in the Grave lets a necro stomp while ignoring both of these.

I don’t care either way really. It either needs to be fixed along with a note so we know the fix is intentional, or necros should be allowed to interact with things while in DS. Right now it’s confusing as to whether or not it’s an intended thing.

There’s another thread discussing reviving the bug report thread, actually.

Agree with Rennoko. If your heal is off CD and you don’t use it, you are wasting it. Obviously you need to judge how many conditions are on you, how much health you’re missing, etc. But the sooner you use it, the sooner it’ll be off CD again.

I want the downed state to stay in the game, in all modes. It is a new mechanic (AFAIK) in PvP type games, and contributes to the unique feel of GW2’s combat system.

In large-scale fights, downed state is all about pushing for position. Whenever someone goes down, there is a little mini control point spawned, and whichever side is better at capturing/defending these control points has an advantage. This gives a very dynamic feel to fights. Yes, some builds are better than others at taking these points, but that is a choice one makes when creating a build.

Removing the downed state would create more incentive to go glass cannon builds, not less. I cannot tell you the number of times in zerg vs. zerg I see some thief down someone with HS spam, then retreat back into their lines, then HS spam to down again, then retreat again, wash rinse repeat. As the system is now there is a chance to revive that person and continue to fight. If downed state is removed all zergs will become a front line of guardians and a rear line of thieves (I exaggerate).

Same thing for small fights. If it is 2v1 or 3v1 against a Thief the group of players can simply revive their friends every time he goes down while the thief is in the stomp animation. If the downed state is removed the thief will just burst 1 player then stealth for a bit to recharge, then burst the next player then stealth again to recharge, etc. You think thieves are good against small groups now? Imagine how it will be when there is no opportunity to come back at all.

Having said all that, I do think the downed system could use some changes. Adjusting the amount of downed HP or revive speed, being unable to revive stomped players, things like that.

I was thinking about doing this too, an up-to-date bug thread would be very helpful. I am willing to help you out with testing each of the listed bugs in that thread and starting a new one.

Nay of the Ether.8913:

The good part of my build is with a few major traits reshuffling and weapon/utility swap you can very easily slip into a support role without having to reassign traits (via buying a new book).

Off topic: You don’t have to buy a new book to reassign traits. The trainers have another dialogue option that will let you reassign your traits for 3s 50c at level 80.

On topic: Yes, 30 points in Blood Magic works really, really well in PvE. I ran it some time ago and found that I survived better the more mobs I took on at once, capping out at around 6 or 7. In Orr, no less. Your health bar will jump up and down, it’s fun to watch and play.

Hey Ascii, I bookmarked the video for later since I’m at work right now, but I have a question about your build/gear. How do you compensate for the lack of toughness? Good positioning + overwhelming offense? My experience in WvW is that I need a lot of toughness to stay alive. Maybe I’m just bad :-) haha.

So it sounds like soul reaping trait would be okay for a glass cannon necro, but personally I’m power/toug/vit and have a crit rate of 5%

I’m similar – almost full Knight’s (Toughness/Pow/Pre) with some Valkyrie’s (pow/vit/crit. dam) thrown in. So I crit a lot, but I’m not a glass cannon :-) the build has less HP than straight PTV, but more toughness and lots of crit to work with for sigils and whatnot. The soul reaping line is amazing for me. With 30 points in that, 20 in Curses for Spectral Attunement, and all Spectral utilities, I never enter a fight without 50% or more life force, so I can afford to use it just to wear people down at the start of a fight.

If you can get the gear, I suggest trying it out – it’s a cool variant on the Juggermancer, and the strength of DS really shines. I understand where you are coming from though

1b is already in the game. Whenever I run by Umberglade, the dolyaks are always getting attacked by wolfs or ghosts. If I get them to fight me, then run away so they leash, they despawn after running back to a certain point.

Good potential in this list, thanks for writing it up.

1b is already in the game. Whenever I run by Umberglade, the dolyaks are always getting attacked by wolfs or ghosts. If I get them to fight me, then run away so they leash, they despawn after running back to a certain point.

Good potential in this list, thanks for writing it up.

1b is already in the game. Whenever I run by Umberglade, the dolyaks are always getting attacked by wolfs or ghosts. If I get them to fight me, then run away so they leash, they despawn after running back to a certain point.

Good potential in this list, thanks for writing it up.

1b is already in the game. Whenever I run by Umberglade, the dolyaks are always getting attacked by wolfs or ghosts. If I get them to fight me, then run away so they leash, they despawn after running back to a certain point.

Good potential in this list, thanks for writing it up.

1b is already in the game. Whenever I run by Umberglade, the dolyaks are always getting attacked by wolfs or ghosts. If I get them to fight me, then run away so they leash, they despawn after running back to a certain point.

Good potential in this list, thanks for writing it up.

So you say that life force takes a while to build up unless you put trait points into it. I agree. But then you say that in order to put trait points into life force regeneration you have to sacrifice damage. What the what?? The Soul Reaping line gives critical damage and Spectral Attunement is in the Curses line, you know, the one that improves both direct and condition damage?

I think the problem is that you have a build that does not take advantage of these things, nor are you a power build, or maybe you have had some bad experiences fighting other players and thus you feel DS is weak. My own experience runs counter to everything you say in your posts. I’m gonna go through your second post point by point to show you what I mean.

Yes, but as I previously mentioned if you are going into a 1v1 fight with no life force already build up then you will not always go into DS with the highest possible damage on the autoattack, and even if you do have 100% by continuing to fight in DS you are weakening your skills. – If you don’t have a good way to build life force from scratch, then that is a choice you made while designing your build. Life force generation is insane with the Spectral skills. With Spectral Attunement, one cast of Spectral Grasp is 15% life force. Fifteen percent! You get 5% from Wall and Walk, plus Armor activates automatically below 50% hp, and both Walk and Armor give you 3% every time you are hit. PLUS the 10% additional life force from Gluttony. If you are a condition build, then a staff with Soul Marks works well also. I wouldn’t call fighting in DS “weakening” your other skills, either, you are just saving them for later.

Also, while crits with the #1 skill can reach up to 3-4k that is assuming you are always crtitting and have very high crit damage, if you scaled other weapon autoattacks such as dagger so that it always crit and had high crit damage it would still scale to be higher than the autoattack for DS, and the power of DS autoattack diminishes significantly over time making it’s DPS even worse compared to other power scale autoattacks. – Sure. But it’s ranged and homes in, while dagger isn’t and doesn’t. And once you go below 50% life force, you can simply drop out and go back to your other skills. The cutoff is 50% between high and low damage, it’s not a sliding scale.

Also it can be easily countered, it takes one second just to cast one auto attack so that gives your enemy more than enough time to see it coming dodge, knock you down, daze, get out of range, etc. – If an enemy wastes dodges on my life blasts, I laugh a little inside, then drop out of DS and immobilize or snare them because they can’t avoid it anymore. Same thing if they waste knockdowns or dazes while I’m in DS, it means I’m not taking that to my actual health, and they won’t interrupt my normal attacks – which you admitted do more damage anyway. You should WANT them to waste all their avoidance while you’re in DS, then you can have your way with them when you drop out of it.

On top of that a lot of necromancers consider CD to be the most viable build for a necro, and DS doesn’t give CD necromancers a whole lot to work with. – True, but I saw a stream of a high-level condition-spec’d necro use it to great effectiveness. He didn’t use it for damage, he used it to kite. Whenever anyone got close to him, he’d enter DS (which triggered the auto-cast of enfeebling blood), dark path, fear, exit DS and dodge backwards. Now they are chilled, have weakness, some bleeds, and there’s space. Every 15s. Point is, DS has uses in any build.

as I said reduced to a 10 second stall that doesn’t do much for the outcome of your fight. – DS is a pressure/attrition tool, not your main source of damage. The opponent has a decision to make: does he dodge the life blasts, and thus be unable to avoid stuff later on? Should he spend a utility or two to burst even though you could just absorb it with life force? And if he waits too long to make these decisions, or decides incorrectly, you have a big advantage.

I’m not saying DS isn’t useful I’m saying it isn’t useful enough that anet can say it makes up for our DPS and is this amazing skill that necromancers can use to be an amazing class. – Again, it doesn’t make up for our DPS because it’s not intended to be a DPS tool, I don’t think, but a pressure/attrition tool as I said above. Right now it is very good at that, and really makes the necro unique to play as and against.

Yeesh, that’s a wall of text, ain’t it….

So many of you probably already know that you can enter and exit Death Shroud while under the effects of CC. Well, there’s a 10-point trait in Death Magic, Shrouded Removal, which removes 1 condition from you when you enter Death Shroud. So combining these two things, with one press of F1 you can get out of any fear effect placed on you.

 I considered not sharing this tip, as at first I thought it might be a bug, and then it’d get fixed. But after some thought I’m sure it’s either intended or is the natural result of intended game mechanics – after all, it’s intended for Necros to be able to enter DS while being CC’d.

It’s not guaranteed – if you have more than one condition on you, the others might get removed instead. Nevertheless, using this trait has gotten me out of several sticky situations in WvWvW. I encourage you to give it a shot, and see if you can work it into your builds.

Notice how CHIPS hasn’t posted in this thread since the arguments started going. Notice how his post history is mostly negative stuff. Notice how CHIPS’s tone changes from irrationally saying that necro is the worst class at everything, to more reasoned, polite arguments as soon as he drew someone in. You guys, this is a troll thread and we should not post in it.

Necro is far better than the first post claims. Necro still has problems. The end.

You should put 20 points into Curses, and take the Spectral Attunement trait. Use Spectral wall, grasp, and walk as your utilities. Spectral Grasp will give you 15% life force, and the others will give 5% just for using them, plus the 3% per hit from walk. This is what I’m doing for my wvwvw build right now and it works like a charm. I get between 2 and 3 full life force bars every fight.

If you are using Staff, take Soul Marks in the Soul Reaping line.

The problem with what you are saying is that you are evaluating the other classes based on their strength in one thing. Thieves, damage; Guardians, bunker; etc. The necromancer is not designed like this. The necro is not the best at one particular thing, you’re right. But the necro is the best class at doing more than one thing at a time in the same build.

Why do you think our power line also gives condition duration? Why does our crit line also give condition damage? And why does the Death Shroud line, our way to play tanky, give critical damage? It is because the necro is supposed to combine these things into one build. A necro is supposed to play hybrid.

A necro isn’t the best bunker, but the necro bunker build does more damage than any other bunker build. A necro doesn’t do the most condition damage, but a necro condition build has the most direct damage included with it. And a necro doesn’t do the highest direct damage, but the necro’s power damage is consistent and sustained throughout an entire fight (that’s why our power weapons each have a low-CD channel on them).

I do primarily WvW on my necro and have had the opposite experience as you :P I kill way more than I die, my build has perma-swiftness so I can run, and I’m not spec’d for support so I can’t help, you’re correct there :-)

Oh, and Spectral Wall isn’t a bad skill. 14s of protection on a 32s CD? Yes please.

Rennoko.5731:

As far as running a PVT build, I tend to disagree with that being a doable fight. Your damage is too low to really account for their regeneration, and their regeneration will outpace yours. Necro regeneration is very lack-luster compared to every other class (thanks DS form). Last PVT fight I had against a DD ele lasted about 5 mins, and I eventually ran out of HP.

Was this directed at my comment? If so, I disagree – it’s very doable in my experience. My build isn’t straight PTV. All the 1v1s I’ve had against a D/D ele are either (a) lasts a few minutes but I eventually win or they run away (b) I take them down in two brief skirmishes, separated by them popping mist form and healing to full.

You don’t compete with them on regeneration, because you’re right, theirs is better. But our life force generation is better than their healing with the right build, and it lets us last longer.

Pretty sure it’s just you. I used it for a while and never noticed it healing anyone else.

In my opinion, improving poison length or accessibility would make it “too easy” to counter heals. As it is now you are encouraged to save your poisons for the right moment, and I like being smart about my skill use rather than spamming staff 2-3-4-5 one right after the other whenever I swap to it.

Could we use more/longer poisons? Maybe. Do we need more/longer poisons? No. Given the strength of the condition I don’t think it should be able to be kept up all the time.

My toughness/power/spectral necro outlasts D/D eles, so the best tip I can give you is tweak your build until you are comfortable with how it performs against them. I do have some smaller tips:

- Dodge / use stability right as Ride the Lightning hits to to avoid the Updraft.
- Cleanse the Burning off of yourself before they use Fire Grab (2x damage vs. burning foes)
- If they start Churning Earth when you are obviously not in range, they probably have Lightning Flash as a utility. Don’t bother running, take the time to do some free damage since they’re standing still, then dodge it at the right time.
- Don’t “commit” to trying to kill them until you’ve seen Mist Form used. Save whatever burst you may have until after.
- Corrupt Boon helps. Well of Suffering really helps since they have to be close to you to do damage. Wait until they use a gap-closer to drop it.
- Keep Chill and Cripple up as much as possible. In addition to limiting their mobility it also reduces the distance that Ride the Lightning travels, I think.
- D/D eles rely on many (relatively) small hits to do damage, so Retaliation helps a lot.

Zenith.7301:

Corrupt Boon is easily predictable, and has a cast time that experienced players will dodge

Corrupt Boon cast time is like .25s. Are you thinking of Spinal Shivers?

Use warhorn or focus as your offhand instead. Personally, I recommend warhorn. Each hit of the Locust Swarm gives life force, procs siphons, and stacks cripple, so people have a harder time getting away from your #1 spam. Use the 4 to interrupt heals.

I don’t understand why people go D/D on necro, really. Dual wielding daggers is cool thematically, but just from reading the skills you can tell that mainhand dagger is for a power build, and offhand dagger is for a condition build.

XiL.4318:

Any Necro not throwing Wells is only half a Necro. This is undeniable fact. You will kill slower and die more frequently without Wells in any build and in pretty much all content.

In PvE and to some degree in WvW, I can pull every single mob within range and kill them all at the same time no matter what they are. Champion, Veteran, scores of minions, does not matter. Wells destroy them all and keep me alive at the same time. My HP will rarely dip below 90% in any PvE content. It just doesn’t happen.

+1 to this, wells are beastly in PvE, especially if you spec for them.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Omnomberry buff and Sigil of Blood both scale off of healing power, though. On average your Omnomberry Pie is stealing 97.5 health per hit before healing power kicks in. That is significantly more than your siphoning from traits.

Ooo, I like math. With that logic, the Sigils do 64.5 health per hit, and the siphon traits do 63 health per hit.

…you know, I’m beginning to see the point…

Other responses:

I tested out Death into Life yesterday…you’re right, it’s not very good. Should be higher, especially since any heals only use a fraction of your healing stat anyway.

Fair point about Spectral Grasp. It’d be cool if it made the Chill last longer, I know that when using it with Spectral Wall the protection boon you get lasts longer than stated on the tooltip. Will have to test this too.

I guess Gluttony is better-than-nothing, but it’s 5 points on the way to really valuable stuff, like Last Gasp, so whatever.

I still think that Parasitic Bond/Spiteful Removal are fine as “throwaway” traits. Maybe you are a condition-based WvWvW build, you have used 60 points and are looking for one last 10-pointer that will serve you well. If you want more universally-applicable traits, that’s fine. Personally I don’t have a problem with niche traits, though the necromancer does seem to have a lot of them.

War Mourner.5168:

The problem with the vampiric traits is you can simply use life steal food, and put those traits somewhere more useful and you’ll have better life steal anyway. So yes, the traits aren’t useless, I just can’t justify using them, in sPvP I find them even worse.

I have about 50% crit chance (full exotic Knight’s armor, some points in Curses). My normal hits siphon for 38 and my crits siphon for 51. So a single channel of Axe 2 or Dagger 2 will get me 508 health average. Omnomberry Pie heals for 325 30% of the time, Superior Sigils of Blood heal for 430-ish 15% of the time.

I disagree that the food is better. Even with 50% crit the blood magic siphons are more reliable. I use the sigils and pie in addition to the siphons, and at this point if I ditched the Blood Magic traits, I’m cutting my lifestealing in half, or worse.

I’ve been thinking about swapping those points out, though. I’ve been pretty committed to 20 points in Blood Magic for maybe two months now, and I have a hard time deciding whether to take Foot in the Grave or Close to Death b/c I can’t have both I have several days off work to test it, so we shall see.

Hey QSpec, I do very little sPvP, so my statements are coming from an almost exclusive WvWvW experience. You disagree with several of my points, that’s fine, I defer to your experience in sPvP. My Vampiric build is definitely less effective against burst classes like thieves since the fights are much shorter (though I still often win), and from what I understand sPvP is rather full of burst builds, so I agree it wouldn’t work as well there. I haven’t tried my build in sPvP at all actually, mostly because the Knight’s trinket is different (vitality instead of toughness).

Hey Karl, do “on kill” effects (i.e. Parasitic Bond) only trigger if you get the killing blow on something? Or do you just need to tag the mob or enemy? I’m at work, otherwise I’d go test this myself.

Thanks for the post/info, btw.

There is another thread on the very first page of threads in which someone pointed out that it’s fixed now. Thanks for taking the time to search for similar threads before making this one. :P

Parasitic Bond and Spiteful Removal trigger when you gain credit for a kill, not just when you get the killing blow. At least, I’m pretty sure about that. If it is true then the traits are fine, you can gain health and lose conditions just for tagging in a zerg. Will test and report back.

EDIT: Yep, you just need to tag. So I disagree with OP’s assessment, these traits are fine. https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/Parasitic-bond-FIXED/first#post1052091

Death into Life is fine, it gives power necros more uptime through regen or dagger 2.

Siphoned Power is good on paper, and it’s useful when you have high toughness and can take lots of hits at low HP. Could use a buff.

Axe Training is outclassed by Close to Death, I see very little reason to ever take it. It should be moved elsewhere.

I’ve seen Reaper’s Precision used in condition builds that lack a lot of life force generation, and I think that is its niche. Could use a buff, though.

Spectral Attunement works with Spectral Grasp, I tested it last night. Not sure what you mean when you say it’s wasted.

Reanimator is fine now. They reduced the degen rate and remove the cap of only 1 at a time. Someone posted earlier this week, saying they could have 3 – 5 out at a time. With 20 extra toughness per minion I’d say it’s quite good now.

Greater Marks used to have a bug where it could still be blocked. That was, like, months ago. They fixed it. When was the last time you checked?

I use Vampiric and Vampiric Precision extensively. I find that they allow me to make a build that is very defensive and offensive at the same time, and really plays into the strength that Anet touts concerning the necromancer – attrition. All those siphons basically act like bonus toughness, mitigating some portion of the incoming attacks. They are not intended to be used to nullify all damage, except maybe for the channel on dagger 2 (heals over 3k with my build). I run a knight’s power build with these two traits and Bloodthirst and I’m pretty untouchable in WvWvW. I am working on a simple video to show the build off, might post that in the next day or so depending on my motivation.

Vampiric Rituals only works well in PvE, and believe me, I’ve tried using it everywhere. It needs to be affected by Bloodthirst or otherwise buffed.

Gluttony is fine now. Only an extra .6% from dagger 1 chain, yes, but an extra .3% from marks, .8% from axe 2, .3% every time you take damage while under the effects of Spectral Walk or Armor…it adds up. I have trouble using all my life force on my necro, believe it or not.

For Last Gasp, you keep the protection boon when you go into DS. The reason the buff is removed is because they don’t want you gaining life force while in DS simply for taking damage. Which makes sense.

Spectral Mastery is a solid trait. You can get perma-swiftness more reliably than taking Banshee’s Wail, there’s more leeway in between casts to keep it up all the time. The other spectral spells really shine when using this, especially combined with Spectral Attunement. Fine as is.

Speed of Shadows is almost useless, as is Quickening Thirst, forgot about that one earlier. Agree.

I think the reason Axe is relatively weak is because of how good it is in minion builds. Every single attack from your minions hits harder b/c of the vulnerability. In fact, I think minions scale off of vulnerability better than normal. I’m not a MM, but I use Flesh Golem as my elite, and he usually hits for about 600 on mobs. However, with 4 or 5 stacks of vulnerability that shoots up to over 1000. I haven’t done any formal testing with this but that’s what I have noticed happening.

Right now Axe is my backup weapon in my power build, and it serves me better than a Staff or Scepter would, so I’m happy. I would welcome buffs though.

They fixed the bug with some things still blocking the marks some time ago. After that I’ve never noticed the marks getting blocked. It should be fine now.

Tons and tons of bugs in that bug list have been fixed…it’s woefully out of date. I’ve been thinking about starting another bug thread, actually. Not sure where hashes has gone to.

We don’t get a lot of red posts but they do read the forums and they are fixing stuff.