Guild Wars 2

okay thanks for all the various responses guys!

For the #magswag guys out there, for some reason, my guild really doesn’t like mag, I’m not really sure why.

@springbrook, I’ll message you when I can!

And just in general, based on the votes we have so far, SoS will probably (actually almost definitely) be our new home. Part of that is because we have our joke raid nights on wednesdays sometimes, and last night we had our minion master necro zerg night. FA sent 3 guilds after us pretty much the whole night, so there was a good deal of animosity towards FA when our poll went up last night.

I don’t think giving us a single fire field from a torch would really help. Rangers already have the exact same torch skill, and in general Eles and Engis can provide all the fire fields a group would need. Its a good idea, but it wouldn’t give us a unique way to compete with the other classes in terms of viability, since other classes can do that.

Iris Ng.9845:

How’s about the Mistforge skins?

After all, keep calm and waiting. You’re almost there. Good luck!

Thanks Iris!

And yeah the mistforge skins seem like a pretty solid idea, so hopefully they’ll release more ways to get tickets, since I couldn’t finish the achievements in time to get them I’m afraid.

Well if you play ele in WvW its easy enough to get a full celestial set, but thats as cohesive as it gets I’m afraid.

Lets not forget that nerfing power necro autoattacks would wreck the viability of the necromancer in other game modes, especially PvE where its already the weakest class and depends on the high damage autos to do anything at all.

And I think its fine for PvP. It is powerful sure, but necromancers are easy enough to incapacitate and burst down so its not much of an issue for smart players. As to the OP, unless you play meditation against a glass necro, necromancers in general do really well against guardians.

Yeah basically what Drarnor said.

If you ever do organized WvW, you’ll have a person called a driver who will generally tell you whether to push in or peel out. In general you’ll want to be relatively close to the driver as hes usually a safe spot to be. And then in general as a peripheral, you don’t want to be all the way in the back, as thats where gank squads can pick you off, and you don’t want to be in the hammer train ever, unless you have plague up. The most important thing is to avoid, usually through dodging and running along the sides, the enemy hammer trains and AoE bombs (basically a combination of ele/guardian CC and necro wells). Other than that if you’re relatively near you driver you can be in axe range and deal damage while your marks or deathshroud is on cooldown. And besides that time your wells and place them with your driver, and deathshroud is such a power defensive tool for wading through light/medium fire to get back to safety, and #5 and #4 skills are very strong for extra AoE pressure. I also like lifeblast any stray targets or Axe#2 them. In my build, my lifeblasts can crit thieves for 5K, which is very very cool.

Hello, I’m part of a WvW guild on dragonbrand, and right now we’re voting on a new server to transfer to, but the reason for that is complicated, since DB is a really great server.

The primary choices we have discussed are SoS and FA. We really don’t want to go to Mag I’m afraid, and we think that T1 servers would have too many long queues.

For those of you on SoS and FA, what are the WvW communities on those servers like, and just in general how do things on those servers operate in general? Like are people generally nice, are there lots of pugs to recruit and train? What can you guys tell me about these servers from the experiences of being there?

If you want to avoid the TP fees, just sell it to someone you can trust from your guild, or someone who is a trusted friend. Even better if you sell it to them for a much cheaper price, since that would pretty much make you the best video game friend ever!

Hahaha yeah thats true. Basically WvW with my guild is my primary source of fun in this game. I really need a break from PvE for a little while though, and I plan on grinding out the champion phantom title from pvp, so that should be fun!

Other than that, since I’m probably not going to make another legendary anytime soon, I’m going to finish buying T3 armor/cool dyes and weapon skins. Oh and I need to get an ascended axe, dagger, staff, focus and maybe scepter, since I took a long break from the game, came back in May, and hadn’t made any ascended weapons when they came out.

Also, another struggle for me is picking an axe skin and a dagger skin that goes well with howler. Since I’m sylvari I feel like the dreamthistle axe would work okay, but I feel like the fractal axe (for the extra fogginess) or the tequatl axe skin would look a bit better, but those aren’t really skins you can farm for.

Yup, as the owner of an infinite continue coin, I’d love for this to be permanent, so I could get more skins for my asuran mesmers techno look, I only managed to get staff, scepter, and torch back then.

Theres a necromancer commander on my server, and he’s not very well liked by the WvW guilds, but thats not because hes a necro, but rather because hes annoying.

Anyway, you can be a good driver as a necromancer, as death shroud can make you nearly as tanky as heavy class, although you will be inhibited by being unable to leap up into a group, and to a lesser extent, pretty much unable to blast water fields, but thats okay. You also have to know when to anticipate the enemy’s bomb and be able dodge it yourself and tell your group how to dodge it. You need to be able to stand at the edge of the enemy AoE and call for wells right in front of you. It is totally doable on a necromancer, however you’ll just want to build as tanky as possible since you won’t be the usual peripheral damage dealer.

ArrDee.2573:

Hello frands! Vee Wee here, retired #1 Engi NA and world first rank 80!

Ring of Earth is Sigil of Geomancy! Many Necromancers run this sigil!

Hope that helped! Wahoo! Bye frands!

Oh my god, VEE WEE!! I remember listening to you talk exactly like this in kaineng’s lion’s arch last year :O

Pregnantman.8259:

What can you say about my setup then (above)?

Your set up sounds fine to me. I don’t care if everyone in a pug runs the exact max damage set up in terms of traits, as long as its relatively close and that overly defensive/condition gear is not used. I might also add that I’m fine with people using some valkyrie too (but zerker trinkets) if they want in pugs, as that is essentially zerker training gear and their damage won’t be too much lower.

What I am not okay with is PVT, knights/cavalier (too much toughness), clerics, rampager, rabid, carrion, dire, nomads, settlers, apothecary, magi or sentinels, and celestial.

Basically I’d just like people to heavily prioritize power damage. If your build takes slightly more defensive traits with the offensive gear, thats okay for pugs, if you use suboptimal runes, thats okay, like for example ruby orbs suck now but thats fine, but you shouldn’t bring dolyak runes or something like that. I’ve actually been using flame legion runes as making howler has left me with 6 silver to my name (and I’m still just waiting for the precursor buy order to go through 0_o) and I plan on getting a scholar set next.

Hmm I’m so impatient now. I’ve finished all of the other gifts, so literally I just need the precursor. I even raised my buy order with the 5 gold I have left, and 3 people put orders only 1 copper or 1 silver above mine((

Its just so frustrating to see someone put a buy order up only one gold above mine, or maybe 5 gold above mine, and then to come back later and see that the slightly higher order is gone, so they probably got the order fulfilled. If I had raised my buy order to 465 gold (now with 12 silver too) earlier, then I could have superceded the person that got it for 460, and I’d be done..

I have a feeling that some people could be flipping the precursor, which as controversial as it may seem is okay, but still frustrates me because I’m actually on the very final step for making this weapon and others might just be trying to make a bit of gold, and it just bugs me that I have to compete with that mentality for this one item.

This is a really nice guide. If we opt to use warhorn instead would you still suggest using a different rune set besides traveler’s? And how would you change the one rotation that uses enfeebling blood?

Morte.5916:

nearlight.3064:

if that means kicking out every condition necro, every bearbow ranger, every cleric guardian, and every othe PVT fail hero I come across when I advertise and join ZERKER parties, then I will do it

How would you feel about a dagger nec (or reflect mesmer) in assassin’s armour? Kick on sight?

Don’t be facetious. Of course that is okay, and spoj’s guide suggests using some assassin’s pieces mixed in on his dagger build for maximum effectiveness. Its still full glass gear, just the optimization is a bit different which also helps you to maximize DPS, albeit a bit differently. The point is that gear that prioritizes defenseive stats instead of or not including the main power offensive stats of power prec and ferocity in some way causes lower DPS, so therefore assassin’s is fine.

As for mesmer, thats perfectly fine too. But if they use a GS in melee range and not in one of the few encounters in the game that can’t be meleed, I’d probably at least inform them about how ineffective that weapon is compared to the S/SorP/F set up.

nagr.1593:

keep in mind this was many months ago, when Howl was like 300g or so (dont remember exact price). I hope you understand Howler has always been one of the cheaper legendaries.. when I was starting out it took me 3-4 months to get enough gold to craft Sunrise. Twilight which I crafted like a month ago was easily about 2000g. of course I wasn’t counting sell orders for all t6 mats, I know it would be much more if i did that. I had some mats already, promoted some and got others from clovers.. otherwise Howler would’ve been over 1000g for sure.

Yeah, and I’m totally fine with it being one of the cheaper legendaries. And one of the reasons I like it so much is that many of the other legendaries are too common and overrdone, at least to me, but the offhands are more rarely made, so I like those a lot more. I actually almost made the minstrel, which I would’ve been done with already, but since Necro is my main (I play ele and mesmer too but they’re kinda meh to me) I figured I shou;dn’t make a weapon that would look totally out of place on it, and the foggy aura is what really sealed the deal for me.

Anyway right now I’m literally just waiting for someone to sell it to me, then the struggle will at long last be over!

Pelopidas.2140:

Nearlight dont take things so seriously, its a game.
Also i believe this guy was ironic on his last comment. A good thing since most of his comments are usually bullkitten.

Yeah I know, but I don’t care if he was ironic. He personally insulted me and I just wanted to defend myself.

A wolf in timberline pass dropped a key… so yeah I’d say this is concrete irrefutable evidence.

proviticus.4183:

given your situation and how you explained it… you should be patient because straight up buying the pre isn’t going to get you howler any sooner, as you said, because you wouldn’t have more money for everything else that remains.

So, as I see it, you have three options:
1) buy the howler for more gold, which forces you to grind more gold or do a boring mat hunt until you have enough to finish.
or
B) be patient. Do any content you find fun. When someone sells you the pre, finish the legendary. Smile.
or
III) Go all in on being patient (remove your option to be impatient). Spend all your gold on the runestones and everything else you need (except the gold on the buy order, of course). Now you have to wait and might feel freed from the pressure. This may make you more anxious, though.

Should be an easy enough choice. Good luck, and congrats on making it so far!!

Thanks, I think I’m going to go for choice, 3, its the most rational thing for me to do!

And nagr, if you bought everything from sell orders right now, it would cost 1885 gold. although thanks to mats accumulating over time and whatnot, I probably will have spent about 1000-1010 gold on it when its done. I sold almost everything in my bank that I didn’t need every two weeks, converted almost all of my account’s skill points to gold by promoting various cores to lodestones, salvaged expensive runes from old character’s armorsets from last year that had valuable runes/sigils, ie 2 strength runes, a hoelbrak rune, a perplexity rune (I’d have sold 5 more if WvW armor could be salvaged…). And I’ve ran 5-9 paths per day for the last month or so. Before then I didn’t run as much PvE, usually just a daily fractal, but then I got serious about farming gold. I also flipped exotic inscriptions for a while in the beginning which REALLY payed off, but its not really profitable anymore now that demand for them seems to have increased. I also WvW most nights with my guild, which is my biggest source of enjoyment and another although minor source of income

Yeah I know, its just that its so hard to be patient when its literally the last thing you need to be done with this quest!

Everyone uses standarized gear and is set to level 80 in pvp. Yoi can customize stats by changing the amulet, runes, traits, and sigils of your build while in the heart of the mists, under the pvp build heading.

And yeah pvp can be difficult, especially for necro, so I’d go to the necro forums and try to do some research there about what is and isn’t effective and how to play well in general, which does take some time to get god at.

An alternative condition build is 0/6/2/0/6, which gives up stability for shroudstomping and extra boon corruption, but without the burning, you may have a harder time getting kills as easily.

And apparently right now, carrion amulet with nightmare runes is a tad better than rabid with undead runes, and I’m pretty sure theres no dire amulet for spvp yet I’m afraid.

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Necromancer is a good solo class due to their absurdly high health pool and decent self-buffing, but they are pretty much worthless for any group content. “Kick necros on sight” is a common rule for a lot of dungeon pugs.

I’m not going to let you spread misinformation, especially to an impressionable new player. Necromancers may objectively be the worst class, but “kick necros on sight” is not a common rule for PUGs.

You just have to not be an idiot when you pick a party. If the party only wants heavies and eles, yeah they’ll kick you on sight. If its a zerker party and you bring a condition damage necro, yeah they’ll kick when they realize you don’t match the zerker description they advertised, but that goes for any class not running purely offensive gear. I have never been kicked from any pug group for bringing my necro, and I mainly join zerker gear parties.

I’ve actually been kicked more times on my elementalist, usually for raging when people steal lightning hammers and when I tell them to not spam symbols and feedbacks before I can stack might, or simply for disagreeing on strategic methods on encounters.. ie, I wanted to use Deykeyz’s uncategorized fractal video strategy for old Tom, which is essentially blocking his projectiles with the earth elemental while we all burst him down. A warrior in our party said that I was kittened, had no AR, and no DPS, simply for suggesting this strategy, and he tried to kick me for that. Needless to say though, despite all of this, he was kicked instead.

Anyway, I am in no way suggesting to use necros for speedclears if you’re into that, but it is fine enough when pugging and deathshroud lets you survive and carry a group much better if everyone else wipes. I like it because I also don’t have to worry about people mucking up my strategies and gimping my DPS, which is why I don’t pug with ele anymore.

Well, I’m finally 98% done with making Howler, the legendary warhorn, but there is one problem I’ve yet to overcome. And that is being patient.

I have enough gold to buy the precursor outright from the sell order of 569 gold, but that would essentially leave me impoverished, and I still have the icy runestones, recipes and ancient/hard/seasoned wood left to buy. So I placed a buy order for 459 gold and 25 silver yesterday afternoon. During that time, someone placed a buy order for 460, which disappeared an hour later, indicating to me that the buy order just above mine was fulfilled. Then my order was the top order for the item in the evening for 3 hours before I went to bed. I checked when I woke up, and now there are 3 orders above me, and the highest goes up to 480 gold. I really don’t want to spend more than 460 gold on this precursor (which btw was 380 gold in may until it spiked for some reason in june to where it is now) so that way I will have exactly 120 gold left to buy the runestones and legendary gift recipe.

How can I be patient, and how much longer can it be expected to wait? After 2 months of hard work and awful pug attempts I’m so glad that I’m finally this close to making my first and quite possibly my last legendary. Until it goes through, I’m probably going to go through a deforestation romp through tyria, to get the last of the wood I need, and since if I have to pug AC one more time I’ll probably vomit, I guess deforestation, pvp, and wvw are my only options while I deal with this wait.

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

I think the goal of reducing the overall number of necromancers in PvE is a good one.

Oh look what I found!

Here, you said on this thread that the overall goal of reducing necromancers in PvE was a good one. That tells me all I need to know about you. You’re no better than I am. The difference is, for whatever reason, you’re standing up for all the crappy pve players out there, and you act like they’re entitled to good parties despite how they’re basically sponges. I on the other hand will always stand up for zerker power necros in PvE, as I’ve said before on these forums, I will do all I can to improve the image of necromancers in PvE, and if that means kicking out every condition necro, every bearbow ranger, every cleric guardian, and every othe PVT fail hero I come across when I advertise and join ZERKER parties, then I will do it, even if it makes life harder for the uninformed players running those inferior specs.

Its survival of the fittest to an extent. Adapt or be chewed out, but always uphold the reputation of your profession, or else you just make it look bad in the eyes of everyone else. Its the only way that the metagame can truly evolve and move forward, when bad builds are shown to not work and are punished for that, and that the guild builds are rewarded and move on to become popular and effective.

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

nearlight.3064:

Basically what Bhawbby said ^^

If you’ve ever had to grind and goldfarm for something expensive, such as legendary, and you have the reasonable goal of running lets say 9 dungeons paths per day (which is about 20 gold with dungeon token gear salvaged) and lets say for AC p1, a condition necro joins your party with the intention of bleeding and tormenting the burrows to death. Perhaps you don’t have an ele too, and another player doesn’t have power based gear. You may even wipe on the burrows multiple times because of too little DPS.
Suddenly, before you know it, you’ve spent an hour of the 4 hours you can allocate to running dungeons per day, just failing and wiping to the burrows. Now you may only be able to get 5 or 6 paths in that day, which is an estimated loss of 8 gold if you run 5 paths instead of 9 because poor builds kitten it up.

Now that is an extreme example, but thats how some players such as myself think. The PvE content in this game is already horribly repetitive and soulsucking to begin with, lets not make it worse by making it take longer. Zerker necro is 100% fine for casual yet fast runs, despite all its PvE problems regarding the speedclear meta, but for those just looking to do dungeons for money and tokens, its DPS is fine enough to not hinder your group significantly. I have never once been kicked soley for playing zerker necro, and I join zerker groups all the time, I just avoid stupid groups that only want heavies and eles. Anyway, time is money, and suboptimal builds cost us as players time, which in turn costs us money.

tldr: condition necro = less money, not just less for your self, but less money for your party.

You have to realize that by excluding them from your party, you’re forcing them to run with non-zerk groups with builds similar to theirs, which means they’re going to be wiping even more and losing even more gold. A group with 4 zerks and a PHIW can clear content easily, a group with 5 PHIWs will wipe constantly.

By denying PHIWs the opportunity to PHTW in a speedclear group you’re basically stealing gold right out of their pockets. You’re literally the cancer killing the GW2 community.

I’m cancer? How lovely. Thats a new one. Well in that case I hope I metastasize to all crappy pug groups in the game, so they can learn from their crappiness. And honestly, you could be right about how I’m forming a toxic disease in the PvE community, and I’m okay with that 100%.

I don’t think you understand my logic. If people who played how they want were serious about making money via dungeons, then they wouldn’t play such awful specs unless they’re new and haven’t done any research on how to do well in PvE in this game. In that case, when someone informs them about how their playstyle makes PvE content be completed several times slower, they’d readjust their playstyle or their priorities, ie. they would go zerker or they would realize they cared more about having fun than making money, even if its less effective.

Sometimes you can have both, but that depends on what fun means to you. I used to run ele just because its the top dog for DPS, and that made me hate the class so much I don’t really want to play it anymore, because it just wasn’t me, and I was frustrated with how little attention people were paying in regards to fire fields and conjures, regardless of whether the party was offically zerk or not.

I’ve always mained necromancer in WvW, and it was always my favorite class. I didn’t run it in PvE for the longest time because it was suboptimal. But then I decided to use Spoj’s build and use it anyway, for casual zerker pugs, and it works fine enough for the level and speed of the content, and rest assured I am meeting my gold requirement goals that I have been setting for each day, and I’m honestly happier and having more fun this way, so it is in a way possible to play how you want and make money, but only if you’re content to find the most efficient playstyle fun.

Yeah essentially, the point is that in this instance I don’t care about getting ectoplasm and whatnot from these exotics. I want flexibility with what I choose to do with my expensive gear up grades. Now they’re literally stuck on a mule character, when I could sell them for a lot of money, or just put them on a class I actually do use, in which case the upgrade extractor would still be too expensive. The extractor would only be worth it if the runes costed more than 18 gold or so.

I don’t understand why Anet can’t put a warning on upgrading the gear for something that shouldn’t be as permanent.

I’m just honestly depressed about this situation. I’m so close to finishing Howler, and I only need 50-80 more gold to finish it off, depending on how my buy order for howl goes.. Oh well, back to destroying the spider queen with RAGE.

Jim Hunter.6821:

Ranger rapid fire isn’t a burst, it is a long channeled skill that does the same amount of damage as if you were auto attacking. It is best saved for fighting thieves and mesmers, or if you still have a longbow out and someone is in close range to you.

At long range there really isn’t any reason to use any skill on longbow other than the auto attack. Depending on the other players armor you can easily hit from 1-4k without even going full glass. Most fights are over before the enemy gets in spitting distance of you.

Yeah that makes sense. I only have like 10 agonizingly bad hours on my ranger, so I in no way claim to know that much about them lol

Okay thanks for the input guys. After asking the other necros in my guild, most of them run 1200ish toughness as well, so I’m actually tankier than them ever so slightly.

I don’t find it to be too much of a huge problem unless our group as a whole is getting murdered by blobs. If we’re doing well the survivability seems to be no issue at all, and I feel like the 1300ish range is enough to mitigate any random damage I take, since DS and plague give me so much health the enemy has to burn through.

innocens.1582:

looks like not everyone plays games for the same reasons.

some play to have some fun and escape real life
some play for just rewards, time is money, and every minut in game equals gold.

we wil never agree on whats best im afraid

Hahaha true, which is sad But thankfully, I’m basically in the last week or two (depending on things selling on the TP soon) of grinding for my legendary, so I can go back to not doing PvE as much or intensely for money soon. And I am having fun grinding for it, but it finally feels a bit too repetitive, but only a little bit more to go, then I’ll basically only do WvW and get back into pvp, and maybe just do a few dungeons here and there to slowly ascend the rest of my character’s gear or buy cool non-legendary skins.

I actually did spend over an hour in AC p1 a few days ago, but that was due to cleric guardians more than condition necros lol, but I have had issues with them in practice in TA, CoF and fractals before.

yup and if you’re enemy is clever, and has the right class, plague’s stability can be stolen removed or corrupted into fear, but then again one can do that with any class that uses stability to stomp/rez, making invuln skills the best trump card for that scenario.

I have good experience with Ele and necro, and a bit with ranger, so I can give you my opinion.

What are you look for in burst? Some people define that as a huge spike of damage happening in the span of one second, so that it lands before an enemy can react. Of those choices, fresh air Eles are the only ones that can truly burst if you use that description, but just so you know, that playstlye is not fully ranged, and that many of the S/D burst combos can start from a distance, but many use lightning flash, ride the lightning, and a hydromancy sigil, in melee range, to maximize burst potential, youtube S/D ele burst combos to see what I mean. Some combos can be performed at range, but those offer less damage and can be a bit harder to use on a moving target. Basically earth 2 (hurl) into phoenix into an air burst is probably the best purely ranged burst I can think of, but I haven’t delved into that playstyle too much, because I’m more into larger scale WvW fights, where S/D ele can function well on a gank squad, as can D/D, but most guilds would prefer you to run support staff for water fields for recovery or glass staff periphery for damage.

Moving on to power necro, it can work in the envrionment you want, but I wouldn’t say it fits the definition of burst, but rather high sustained single target/piercing damage, but power necros also bring burst AoE to the table in the form of wells and life transfer. For small scale, it can work but condition is usually more optimal for that purpose, as with power necro you rely on being glassy as kitten, doing absurd damage with your dagger auto, although warriors can literally 3 shot you that way, while life blast hits really really hard, (In WvW I hit a gank squad thief for 5K with one DS auto, which is like half of his health lol) its a slow and clunky attack, but it is fun and you feel like a dark magical firing squad while doing it. If you want to get into large scale WvW, power necro provides some of the best AoE burst damage from mid- high range, especially in organized groups where your driver (commander for your group) can coordinate and time bombs (wells mixed with guardian binding blade pull and ele CC).

Rangers I’ve only worked with a little bit, and the longbow provides decent burst with the number 2 skill, but relying on the pet for so much damage is crippling, and overall the class as a whole isn’t in a truly great place for any metagame.

So basically the point of my post is, most burst isn’t fully ranged, its typically melee, and S/D ele needs both to be bursty, while S/F can do that from ranged with less burst and more team support and defense. Necros are best for AoE burst and mid ranged nuking in large scale wvw fights, and rangers have tons of problems with being viable in either scenario, but can provide good ranged damage if glass using a longbow.

The person above me suggesting killshot warrior is probably correct about that. Also shatter mesmer can work, but its really hard to set up, clunky and buggy burst that is completely ineffective in larger scale fights.

I agree that we should be able to do this, 100%.

but you also forgot to mention that we can start a stomp or rez, and then go into plague to use that as a defense for those actions, which is arguably a better and longer lasting defense mechanism, however that has a long cooldown, so you have to use plague wisely if you use it for that purpose.

I’d only recommend necromancer to you if you want to do a lot of organized WvW, as that is where necromancers are one of the strongest classes, in addition to warrior, guardian, and elementalists.

And don’t think that necromancers are a condition only class. Our power builds are many times more effective against zergs, and in dungeons, you won’t make friends playing with conditions, but it can give you hilariously easy 1v1 matches in pvp.

BurrTheKing.8571:

dancingmonkey.4902:

bigmonto.4215:

You do realized that you just proved my point, right?

This is the typical response from this forum…. hmm warrior got a lot of versatility, but few others has it…… wouldn’t it be better in the long run if everyone has it? Nah, let kill the warrior class instead, so no one has any options.

Actually, posters are just following the devs statements of avoiding the power creep. They have very specifically stated that they will weaken a profession long before they will beef up others.

Versatility =/= Power Creep

The whole point of this game not having a set trinity is so what class you choose decides the flavor of how you do something. Playing one class doesn’t necessarily mean you HAVE to fill a certain role. Sure some classes are better at some things than other classes, but there are many roles that can be filled equally well by multiple classes.

• Most classes have some sort of Power-Based DPS build

• Many classes can run a condition build

• Around half can play some sort of bunker even if Guardian is the best at mid bunk. Those other classes however can gain either greater control or better offensive power making them good home bunkers

• Almost all classes can run some sort of support whether it be shouts that heal and remove conditions or stealing boons and giving them to allies

Warrior falls into most of those categories but never all in one build. The problem is that there are several classes that severely lack that versatility. Warrior is the most well-designed of all the professions if you ask me. No matter what you want to do chances are there’s a build for it. It may not be the BEST option but chances are there’s still a place for it somewhere in the game. A Guardian is going to have more sustain but a Warrior can give some sustain in addition to a ton of control and condi removal. A Necro or Engi will provide better AoE conditions but a Warrior can focus down one target with tons of bleeds (and then cry when they meet a DS Ele).

You can see this design philosophy with pretty much all the classes, it’s just that some are too weak to bother using. Rather than tearing one class down I think most Non-Warrior players would rather see themselves get more options.

I also find those saying “I can beat Warriors easily (this is an attempt to avoid being told to l2p) but they should totally nerf XYZ because it’s OP” to be pretty funny.

Another thing I’ve been saying for a while. Most of the time when something in this game appears to be OP it’s due to the design of the game mode itself and not the class in question. High sustain and AoE are always going to be strong when PvP is designed around fighting on tiny circles and one person can deny a cap. Stacking food and other buffs that give flat increases are always going to be strong on classes that already have high base access whatever it is the buff is improving.

I agree with this and I think thats where the problem may lie. Warriors can run so many vastly different builds, while most other classes are more restricted in their viable choices. Its just that the other classes tend to share a common weakness based on their class regardless of build, while for warrior, this is not the case, as each different build may have a different weakness, and those weaknesses may not be as pronounced or exploitable as one’s that are common to every memeber of a class. As an example, necro’s are basically always CC weak and eles and gaurdians are almost always weak to boon theft/removal/corruption. Warriors lack an obvious weakness, even if a “hidden” one for their specific build exists, and I think that is a huge problem. It makes it overly easy for bad players to do well with warrior because their weakness is kept secret, which can make great players a bit too strong.

This can be counteracted with lots and lots of research into this class, but thats still more effort spent countering one class that lacks obvious weaknesses, whearas this information is more readily available for the other professions.

zaxon.6819:

oh.. you are saying that there is only 1 spec that is top tier when you min max your team comp.. that is called min maxing and not really build diversity.. what you are talking about would requier 2 differnt specs to have the exact same usefullness. what you are refering to isnt even top tier tpvp it is tournys. because in top tier solo/team pvp there are people playing these specs(but i can agree that when you wattch the 5v5 tournys you may not).

I’m just going to let you win this argument now because I honestly don’t care anymore and our differing beliefs and perceptions are meaningless in the end, and honestly I don’t care that tourney and tpvp cannot be used interchangeably, but I guess you learn something new everyday.

I’ll leave you all with one final, parting idea.

Imagine, just for a moment, how much more build diversity would exist if most or all of a class’s bad traits were somehow made to be objectively good traits. We run most ele builds with evasive arcana because we all believe it to be such a useful trait. But what if the grandmaster traits in other traitlines were altered to match the overall usefulness of EA, while providing a different type of important advantage. Just think about how diverse the viable metagame actually could be.

Basically what Bhawbby said ^^

If you’ve ever had to grind and goldfarm for something expensive, such as legendary, and you have the reasonable goal of running lets say 9 dungeons paths per day (which is about 20 gold with dungeon token gear salvaged) and lets say for AC p1, a condition necro joins your party with the intention of bleeding and tormenting the burrows to death. Perhaps you don’t have an ele too, and another player doesn’t have power based gear. You may even wipe on the burrows multiple times because of too little DPS.
Suddenly, before you know it, you’ve spent an hour of the 4 hours you can allocate to running dungeons per day, just failing and wiping to the burrows. Now you may only be able to get 5 or 6 paths in that day, which is an estimated loss of 8 gold if you run 5 paths instead of 9 because poor builds kitten it up.

Now that is an extreme example, but thats how some players such as myself think. The PvE content in this game is already horribly repetitive and soulsucking to begin with, lets not make it worse by making it take longer. Zerker necro is 100% fine for casual yet fast runs, despite all its PvE problems regarding the speedclear meta, but for those just looking to do dungeons for money and tokens, its DPS is fine enough to not hinder your group significantly. I have never once been kicked soley for playing zerker necro, and I join zerker groups all the time, I just avoid stupid groups that only want heavies and eles. Anyway, time is money, and suboptimal builds cost us as players time, which in turn costs us money.

tldr: condition necro = less money, not just less for your self, but less money for your party.

Warning: This is purely a QQ type thread

Last summer when perplexity runes first came out, I got a set for my thief. To gear said thief with condition gear, I used the WvW merchants exotics. Little did I know nearly a year later, that this gear cannot ever be salvaged. I have no intention of seriously playing condition thief ever again, and now I am stuck with 60 gold trapped in a character, just rotting away for all time. It wouldn’t be an issue if the upgrade extractor didn’t remove all the profit salvaging in the first place.
he
Now for the depression. If I had sold all of those runes, and the 120is gold worth of stuff I had on the TP sold in the next few days, I’d be able to complete my legendary, provided the precursor doesn’t double in price over night.

Honestly, why can’t ANET put a warning label for stuff like that? I mean it makes perfect sense so you can’t get free melandru runes from karma armor, but WvW badge armor? That doesn’t come with a rune to begin with, so I can’t think of any reason why this absurd bullkitten is inplace.
Oh well. I guess its time to rot in the catacombs of ascalon and the embrace of sorrow for just a few days more.. a few days that could’ve been avoided if you could salvage WvW badge armor….

Hahaha thanks. I guess I can never really break the mold of 6/2/0/0/6 builds, since close to death would help a lot more using your probably correct reasoning. Most of my guild’s necro builds take transfusion if they’re not condition, but I guess the extra damage helps a lot more. Plus my guild only has 3 eles on at one time usually, since most don’t like being water bots. Or I could go 4/2/2/0/6 but then I’d feel really unspecialized.. hmm

I haven’t been playing necro in WvW all that long, so I’m just finally getting the hang of the playstyle and positioning and how to be useful, so your advice is greatly appreciated.

In particular, if I drop the points from blood and or death magic, I’m not sure how to maintain the precision and crit damage while adding more vitality and toughness, so I guess reducing power from the gear could be effective.. but I’m not really sure.

How much health and toughness would you guys say is ideal for necro?

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fRAQNBHhZakjmWarpx2G+bUMMUSlCTWDxQUBA1RxVkrA-TFDBABbpUoLlEjqaRlqpIxRAAr9HlBppEEgTAgXKxyTfwGHCgAeAAAA-w

After playing around with the numbers, I made this build that can reach up to 48% crit chance meaning 98% crit chance in DS. I took a tankier trait spread with only slightly less power and more group healing potential with deathly invigoration, but it could be changed to the well recharge trait or the vampiric precision trait should the group heal prove useless for my group in WvW. It only has slightly less power than the other builds I though about, and a decent bit more toughness and a bit more HP and only 5% crit damage..

Anyway, before I buy gear, I’d love to have comments to fully flesh this out before I commit to it!

zaxon.6819:

fresh air/staff/powerranger/power necros etc.

i dont play guardian so someone else can comment on thier specs.. but just knowing the classes i play compared to the list you gave.

but if you are that far off on just the classes i know then im sure the rest of the list isnt 100% either..

We simply have different definitions of build diversity. The builds you mentioned are niche specs, most of which require significant team support to be effective in pvp. And of those, glass staff ele is the only one of those that is truly viable. I main necro, and I know that if I go up against a hambow warrior with a dagger and a berserker amulet, I’m going to get murdered before I can get any damage off.

Like it or not, with the exception of the brief interlude of fresh air, pvp eles have been running very similar builds since the game launched, glass staff is probably the only other one that stuck.

Power Ranger, I’m not going to even comment on that.

In addition I suppose you could say that condition/PU mesmers make mesmers have as much diversity as the other professions when you consider them in addition to shatter. But the truth is that in a truly competitve environment, PU mesmers, as well as glass necro and glass ranger and whatnot aren’t commonly used in that setting. My friend has a spectral tanky power necro build that got to the top of solo queue. Its great for him, but his playstyle hasn’t caught on to make that build contribute significantly to build diversity. Oh and he says that basically all he sees at that level of solo queue is engineers :o

The problem with Mai Trin is that we have no control over whether or not we get to fight her due to the 1/3 chance of having a considerably harder boss.

For example, If I’m in a bad PUG group and my goal is to make 1.5 gold, should I go to arah p3 or should I do AC p3? I can go to AC p3 and make the same reward as I could by doing Arah p3. If I’m in a fractal, I can’t make that choice for the pristine fractal relic/chance at rings or skins or whatever… and like before with my AC/Arah example, I get the same reward whether I get Mai, molten duo, or the jade maw, however I can’t choose the easier way to get the same reward as before.

And while I’m glad that Mai is more challenging, its simply not fair that her encounter is tied to RNG. I’d have no problems with Mai Trin at all, and I’m sure the rest of the community would agree with me on this, if we could choose our fractal endboss and have a reward that scales with the difficulty of the boss. If mai trin was guaranteed progree towards a fractal weapon skin of one’s choosing or maybe damask/deldrimor for making ascended weapons, I can assure I’d actually rise to meet that challenge.

In general rewards with fractals in particular, as well as other PvE areas to a lesser extent should be revamped to scale better with the difficulty involved.

This is why I don’t really pug CoE anymore! Especially not path 1, I remember so many botched 1-4 attempts on the golems that fail because one person couldn’t read or communicate with us and would just call more and more golems on us until we were forced to wipe against them every time

That coupled with the frequent golem glitches before they fixed it turned me off of the place.

I’ve had some really bad subject alpha experiences too, mostly on either the first one of the dungeon where its harder to position him in a good area, or the last one in p2, especially if your group doesn’t have enough DPS to break the crystals in time..

And thats a shame because with a good group its a really fun dungeon!

zaxon.6819:

nearlight.3064:

How much build diversity to you see in other classes?

Most eles are D/D triple cantrip with 0/2/0/6/6 or 0/0/2/6/6 with celestial/strength runes.
Most thieves are either S/D evade spam 2/0/0/6/6 or or some D/P build.
Most warriors are hambow or eviscerate/100blades burst.. actually warriors seem to have the most diversity
Most guardians are balls to walls bunker or meditation.
Most necromancer are condi nuker terror bombers or Minion Masters
Most rangers are celestial spirits or traps with a shawtbow.

And then most mesmers that are “good” are staff/GS shatter with the trait spread you provide. So I’d say in pvp theres not a whole amount of build diversity, but engineers and warriors seem to have far more viable options and thus appear to be more diverse.

NO. bad info!

Care to explain? I don’t really know all that much about the medium and heavy classes builds especially trait wise, so thats just how the warrior/guardian/engi/thief builds that roflstomp me on necro or ele seem to be, but if you have better info, I will not be embarrassed if I’m proven wrong

How much build diversity to you see in other classes?

Most eles are D/D triple cantrip with 0/2/0/6/6 or 0/0/2/6/6 with celestial/strength runes.
Most thieves are either S/D evade spam 2/0/0/6/6 or or some D/P build.
Most warriors are hambow or eviscerate/100blades burst.. actually warriors seem to have the most diversity
Most guardians are balls to walls bunker or meditation.
Most necromancer are condi nuker terror bombers or Minion Masters
Most rangers are celestial spirits or traps with a shawtbow.

And then most mesmers that are “good” are staff/GS shatter with the trait spread you provide. So I’d say in pvp theres not a whole amount of build diversity, but engineers and warriors seem to have far more viable options and thus appear to be more diverse.

Yeah Arah depends on whether or not you group can handle Giganticus Poopicus. I suck at it, so I usually depend on someone to carry, and for that reason I don’t run arah that much anymore. Arah p1 and 2 can be very smooth though if you have a good thief or engineer to whisk you safely path the cheap trash skips that are honestly pretty brutal without one.

I typically run 5 or 6 paths per day, which is AC all paths, CoF 1, SE 1 and then CoF 2 or SE 3 depending on my mood. I also add TA up and fwd to that if I have extra time and sometimes CM 3. Doing 5 paths a day yields 11.2 gold roughly when taking token exotic salvaging into account, but not accounting for champion loot bag drops. Bumping that up to 9 paths in a day nets you about 19 gold, which is enough to buy all of your runestones in 5 days or so.

I’m close to finally finishing howler and I only need another 4 days or so of running these dungeons to get the gold I need to finish off the gift of howler, assuming my howl buy order for 450 gold gets fulfilled, and its frustrating to be patient for that.

Also hopefully you have a nice guild that likes you. You need the gift of wood for quip right? For my guild, if I asked them for any of their extra wood lying around so that their wood could be part of my legendary forever, they’d chuckle and definitly help out with that relatively easy part hahaha. But if they don’t I’m skipping our WvW to go on a massive deforestation romp throughout tyria!

I’m on dragonbrand right now, and I wouldn’t recommend it, as its kind of a dying WvW server, as all the guilds freaked out and went to FA or SoS when we dropped to T3 last weak and SBI and Yak’s Bend were a boring joke with infrequent overly easy roflstomp fights. My guild will probably go to SoS or FA (since Maguuma is a clusterkitten server that we have animosity towards) but we may go JQ depending on how our guild votes when we pick a new place to go, but we’re worried about T1 being too blobby.

Hopefully this helps!

Yeah divinity was sort of a cop out rune for the stats. For now, since I’m still on the legendary grindfest for the next couple of days (I’m only 24 dungeon paths away once the 111 molten lodestone I converted using skill points sell at 83.98s, soo close) I don’t want to buy strength runes as they’re too expensive. I was heavily considering scholar runes since they give a ton of extra damage, but I was sort of hoping I could get enough precision to hit 50% crit chance between an accuracy sigil and precision gained from runes, but besides eagle, the only other runes that give precision and either power or ferocity are pack runes (which give fury, making having 50% crit chance a waste) thief runes, which give a redundant condition damage boost, ranger runes which would need a minion active, and then lyssa/mesmer/golemancer/rata sum runes which are all rpetty meh in terms of what they can offer.

And yeah I’m running death perception because I run in an organized guild group where I pretty much always have stability when it matters from having a guardian in my party. While I do like the well recharge traits, the other necros in my guild usually don’t run it so we time our bombs assuming we have the same cooldowns, so the well recharge wouldn’t benefit us too much. As for axe mastery, its what my guildmate who’s very knowledgable with necro in WvW recommends, and it allows me to maintain high damage life blasts with the trait, and I already have force on it from PvE, making it even stronger. But yeah as I explained before I basically open with marks, switch to axe, drop wells and go into DS while players melt in them.

If I were to drop axe training, I’d probably go 0/2/4/2/6 or 0/2/2/4/6, and I’d be afraid of that having too little power before the sharpening stone and too little damage, plus I’d have a lower crit chance from not having accuracy on staff unless I switched those around.

So I’ve been toying around with gear choices and runesets to try and get a great peripheral well necro build for WvW to use with my guild. The traits were recommended to me by one of the leading necromancers in my guild, however I’ve been playing around with the gear to try and get some passive survivability since he usually just goes full zerk when he plays power, but I basically just want enough toughness to survive pushing through moderate groups and to be able to survive enemy gank squads long enough to get away from them and back into my guild’s heavies. I’m aiming for close to 50% accuracy when using axe/wh using an accuracy sigil to make that possible. I’ve been messing around with a gearset with comparable numbers, but less crit damage (have a ton of guild commendations I’m sitting on to buy the cavalier trinkets) and so far that has been working out pretty well, I just thought I should get second opinions. I typically open with staff to spam marks until my driver calls for a well bomb, then I switch to axe/wh, drop the wells and go into death shroud so that the wells pretty much fully crit, and then I send out piercing lifeblasts into the fray or back off with tainted shackles and life transfer for the AoE damage and to help with my group’s recovery. I switch back to staff if I feel pressured or in need of it’s utility, and also if I need a 3rd dodge.

Anyway here’s the more defensive build
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fRAQNBHhZakjmWarpx2G+bUULUTFFQOnBQUdA1txcUtA-TVDBABxs/ghaB6SJxoqZUpqJScEAwSZQaKBB4EA4lSt80FsxhAIgHAAA-w

It caps out at 48% crit chance and uses divinity runes to help out with passive defense a bit. 2.4 K armor and 20K health seems to givea pretty good amount of survivability, and 220% crit damage is strong. For food I usually take lemongrass or saffron bread defending on how much I trust the guardian I’m with for stability, and I always slot a sharpening stone, but for this build template, I’ve left those slots blank.

Here is the second build
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fRAQNBHhZakjmWarpx2G+bUULUTFFQOnBQUdA1txcUtA-TFDBABdpkYU1EqU1GJOCAYpMINlgAcCA8SpGN7Pkn+gNOEAB8AAAA-w

It is more offensive and reaches the 50% crit chance thanks to eagle runes, which lets me run less assassin’s and more zerker. Since I’ll have howler in the next week or two, I can switch between zerker or assassin’s depending on which build I make. It only has 2327 toughness, and 19.3K health before vitality stacks from guards, but it also has 2% more crit damage, and a bit more power.

Which of these builds would you recommend, and do you guys have any other suggestions for runes or sigils that will help me be a true cannon in WvW, but not totally glass?