Guild Wars 2

I’m posting a build review thread in a little bit so be sure to check that out, but in general the most popular and effective build for zergs is a power well build. Theres flexibility with what exact trait you can run, but I’d recommend 0/2/2/4/6 (with the DS stability trait) for beginners. Axe/X and staff is ideal, and I like warhorn offhand personally, but dagger OH works well too as a more defensive choice. I’d also use knight’s gear or PVT until you get the hang of positioning and then you can build more offensively as you learn how to handle yourself in a zerg.. especially if you start running with in organized guild group that can provide you with stability and might for critical moments.

yeah my guild’s WvW ranger build is such a joke. It takes all the traits that activate as the ranger loses health or becomes downed. Basically the circle of life trait which is a free water field for bringing rangers where can’t do well at all

Yeah the only thing they’re good at for this outside of veilng is the gank squad, which relies on hoping that a necro or staff ele gets out of position so you can focus and kill them. I wouldn’t say that its too much weaker than thief for that role as you can keep the pressure up from ranged from GS and shatters, but at the end of the day you’re only killing a few players at time, you can’t bomb and you can’t melee train. Thieves while being better gankers, are overall less useful because they don’t have veil and shadow refuge doesn’t sync well with zergballs, although they do have a really good spammable blast finisher.

So overall I’d say that mesmer is probably the most useful WvW class of the TREM classes, but it lacks the area support/CC skills and raw AoE damag bombs that the GWEN meta needs to function.

maha.7902:

gvg doesnt even exist in this game

Well yeah, it doesn’t formally exist as a recognized game mode, but guilds in higher tiered WvW servers do make teams, typically 15vs15 or 5v5 and challenge other guilds from servers that their server is up against, usually in either the obsidian sanctum or in the plains at the southern end of a borderland map.

While Anet does not officially get involved with it, it does exist as a community driven concept, much like the PvE tournament that you guys had, although anet did show support for that. The community does have an arbitrary ranking system and can have some rules such as no stat stacking sigils, and you have to link your weapons ahead of time to verify that.

Apparently you can let the bird kill things on mid while you go cap other things and the bird doesn’t port to you while its in combat, so I think thats another thing thats broken about them!

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

This is a great thread, and it also makes me a little sad, because it’s true. The necromancer has a ton of terrible traits that simply don’t work well with the class and how it is played.

And Nearlight is also right that the staff having 4 different traits in separate trees is really bizarre. I feel like maxing the effectiveness of the staff takes such a heavy investment trait-wise, that I might as well not bother.

My own pet peeve is “on fall” traits. Traits that activate their effect upon landing, such as “Toxic Landing” are absolutely garbage, and have no use in the game what so ever. They don’t need to be garbage. I’ve made suggestions before to change Toxic Landing so it actually provides a team benefit (which would be great in WvW for example), by reducing fall damage for any allies landing where the necromancer did. Right now however, it is a filler trait. A lot of necro traits feel like filler. I don’t feel like a decent amount of design went into them to make them even halfway decent or useful.

Yeah I agree with this. The only really decent fall down trait is the ele’s arcane abatement for solo roaming, in which they bait people into falling off cliffs to lower their enemies health while falling in water attunement so they don’t lose as much health.. Its a tactic that I saw excala do in his youtube videos that over populazrized D/D ele at the start of the game.

Necro is the worst dungeon class, but if all you want to do is PUG and have fun they work perfectly fine, and its a lot easier to carry bad groups in easier content as a zerker necro if you run spoj’s 6/2/0/0/6 build, since you can facetank a bit with deathshroud. If you want to do speedclears though its best to play any other other class.

And while you guys are mentioning how bad necros are in PvE which I agree with in regards to high end PvE, you don’t mention how they are one of the best classes in WvW and GvG. Well bombs are simply amazing, and the combination of deathshroud and plague surviving is very easy if you position yourself well. In addition staff marks supplement your burst AoE from deathshroud and wells to make tagging remarkably easy.

I’d say that mesmer (and ranger too) is probably the worst class overall right now if you look at all areas of the game. In PvE they can have very high DPS, but that is wrecked by AoE and long start up time to reach their top DPS with phantasms, while guardians can provide all the reflects that are needed. Colesy would be able to tell us more about that though, since its his area of expertise.

Mesmers (staff/GS shatter) can’t really compete in high level tpvp right now since they can’t stay on a point and aren’t as fast or as evasive and can’t burst as well as a thief, and D/D ele basically fulfills the teamfight support role that they could have once filled. And PU is terrible past hotjoin and maybe solo queue. In WvW, groups only need one mesmer for veil, unless they have a good gank squad to pick off backlines with thieves, which is a niche roll that does exist.

Ranger is similarly bad for WvW as all it can do is provide one water field and not much else, and can’t even really be on a gank squad like a thief or mesmer. They do seem in a decent place for pve other than their sword auto as their damage buffs for the team are nice. In tpvp they have been pretty much replaced by D/D eles for the teamsupport role that spirit rangers once filled.

Crysto.7089:

Comedy Tier-
Necromancer: A good source of entertainment for your engineer and the rest of your party.

And as for this.. as an engineer, unless you fight bad players continually, you should know that condition necromancer is viewed as a hard counter for engineers in tpvp as engineers have relatively poor condition removal and CC counters and a slight reliance on boons, making them weak to condition necros that avoid engineer CC.

Although your post seemed to be referring to PvE, I just thought I should mention this when viewing the necro in relation to the engineer in other game modes.

Hmm, this is an interesting read.

The weapons that seem to best represent specific roles seem to be offhands in my opinion, but even then its not fully specialized

For example take the necromancer, that has 3 offhands.

Focus is the offensive weapon that offers a damaging vuln stacking skill and a form of offensive control, which is the ranged chill and boon removal.

OH dagger, while usually though of as a condition weapon is actaully more of a defensive weapon in general, with the AoE weakness and AoE blind/condition transfer.

Warhorn is utility weapon through and through, with swiftness, AoE cripple, and an interrupt that an hit multiple utilities.

For me it makes sense when viewing the weapons as offensive, defensive or utility, with smattering of damage, support and control, but trying to find similar analogies for the mainhand weapons or twohanded weapons is a bit tough, unless the weapon is already etremely specialized which is rare. To use necros again, their staff is probably the most specialized 2-handed utility weapon in the game, because its all about area control, while the types of area control vary between each skill. 3 marks can be offensive, 2 marks can be used for control, and 2 marks can be used for utility.

Looking at other classes its a bit harder. Mesmer offhands seem to fit an offensive (sw pist) defensive (torch) and utility (focus) pattern, while for rangers, thats less obvious, in part because the OH axe has both a purely offensive and purely defensive skill on it, while the warhorn has a purely offensive and a purely utility/support skill on it. Their OH torch though is purely offensive/condition unless used to might stack, and their OH dagger is a defensive weapon that provides evades while also giving offensive poison/bleeds and a control based snare.

One of the things I dislke the most is that we have 4 separate traits in separate trees to max out the effectiveness of one weapon (staff). Most other classes have one trait per weapon, which for most classes is the 20% cooldown reduction and then either some stat/damage bonus while using the weapon or some additional range or utility added to the weapon skills.

A fully traited staff can do quite a bit more than most other fully traited weapons particularly with unblockable life force generating marks, but it seems bad design to have so many traits for one weapon.

If necros got a redesigned trait line to allow for the team damage support buffs we need that could be gained from traits, I would probably merge spiteful and soul marks, and merge staff mastery and greater marks, and in the spots that open up add traits that could be a passive ferocity boost to our allies or some other type of damage buff, which would be a step towards making us more desirable in PvE.

The main one I disagree with is foot in the grave, because it was very useful for me when I was learning how to position myself as a Necro in WvW. If you get CCed in WvW, you’re probably done unless you have melandru runes and saffron bread to bail you out (must buy those runes!!) While its a bit suboptimal since a guardian should provide you with enough stab to survive the first push, its a good utility to fall back on, kind of like WvW training wheels, since once you do get better with positioning, deathly perception lets you contribute a lot more to the fight by making sure your bombs have a 100% chance to crit,, just in some matchups the extra stability is very nice. Its basically a toss up between extra damage or extra survivability if you think you could make mistakes or if you don’t trust your teammates to support you in that regard, since guardians can provide you with so much stability that you barely need the trait, but if you’re guardians suck then obviously taking the trait would be more beneficial.

And as we all know, Anet please give us useful PvE + team damage traits so we can stop being the annoying band geek of PvE.

And as for the people defending chilling darkness, it has a niche but its base chill duration isn’t long enough. With tanky frontlines running melandru or hoelbrak + lemongrass, you are forced to gain ludicrous amounts of weight off of scarfing down koi cakes and rare veggie pizzas, especially taking condition food for a power build, which detracts from the focus of your build. Similarly, you have to give up more useful runes/sigils for ice/grenth runes etc, which is also a bit of a negative. Hydromancy sigils are fine though. I used to run a chill build in WvW, but after moving those 10 points from curse into DM for the the staff mastery and the significant extra toughness in DS, I feel like my utility and tankiness has been a lot better, especially since I can run lemongrass or saffron bread now. I also feel like I contribute more damage and utility by using WoC over WoB as well, which is another positive in my eyes.

HHR LostProphet.4801:

The stability on Lich Form does last longer than the actual skill, atleast for me. However, when Lich Form ends, the stability gets removed aswell.
Is this intentionally or a bug?

Warning: sarcasm approaching

Well it wouldn’t be very elite if you could gain that much stability whenever you wanted without having to be a giant undead reindeer. This is the necro we’re talking about…

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

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

I disagree with this. We all know that Necromancers need some pretty drastic buffs for PvE, and what is the point of doing that if people stop bringing necro to pve and play a different class instead?

We all know its the worst in that game mode, but if we don’t stand by our class and do everything we can to improve the reputation of necromancers in pve, then we might as well just roll a warrior and faceroll through all of the game’s content. I believe that the necromancer will one day get the buffs we need to be competitive in pve, but until that day comes I will play my necro to its fullest potential to show people I come across that there are good players out there that really care about this class and want to do the best they can with it.

Thats my thought process regarding this issue, and I do agree that condition necromancers need some guidance since their build is 100% bad in pve and a bit less effective in WvW when you’re fighting blobs with a 15 man group on a T2 server (it kittenes me off that we have 2 necros that always run condi even if we’re going up against ginormous groups). Similarly to bearbow rangers, or melee GS mesmers, or cleric guardians, condition necros should be informed politely why their build is suboptimal in that environment, so we can encourage a higher standard of play for this class that can potentially improve our class’s image in the community.

DonQuack.9025:

nearlight.3064:

Still though, its really kittenty for someone to kick me like that in pug, when they could’ve explained what you just expained. And if its not a speedclear, then why stack and risk wiping at all?

Firstly in a pug you risk wiping no matter what.

Firstly.fively its not someone its some people as said person wasnt alone in his wanting to kick you.

Firstly.sixly Just because pug doesnt mean I want to have to teach every single party I join or that I want/ have the time for a 15min-20min run to turn into an hour.

Secondly I can only presume but

8/10 people I give advice to berate me for telling them how to play their profession.
2/10 are newbies with less than 500ap who think I am some sort of God because my advice works.

Rather than stopping and spending 5minutes arguing with someone I rather kick em.

On that point. Until someone on the forums said so would you have believe said guy if he told you how to do it? You seemed awfully sure of yourself before.

Or perhaps he may have thought if you didnt know how to take on the first mediocre boss of the dungeon how on earth would you know the rest of the dungeon?

Another strat is simply let the puller lure out her spit. It has like a 13s recharge. More than enough for 1 ele+1 other to melt her down much less a full party.

btw if I hadnt said anything( assuming no one else here picked up on what you said) I doubt you would have double checked.

nearlight.3064:

I got into a conversation with this one guy who posted an LFG for SE p1 saying heavies only, and had 1 guard and 3 warriors waitingfor another heavy. I asked one of them why they said heavies only, and he said because he could and because a guardian with 4 warriors is best DPS in the game because of empower+100blades. I mean, that was absurd to me that people can be so uninformed. I explained to him that 2 eles, a warrior, a guard, and then a thief, would definetly out DPS that party comp no questions asked. He said I was stupid and wrong and then blocked me. Yey.

I personally would have to say he is more correct. Majority of thieves I meet are sb p/p crap builds. Majority of guards are staff AH campers. Ele’s rarely drop conjures and dont blast might much less anything else. 9/10 I will hit get a warrior running a meta or close to build. as evidenced by sheer number of the same banners.not only

Non-pug premade group. Oh yea youre right but I doubt he was talking about that or you since pugs are your primary topic.

Said person may be inflexible but you are equally inflexible as evidenced by posts.

I do believe the word is

nearlight.3064:

Why do people who make such bold claims say so without doing any research to back up their claims?

nearlight.3064:

Its baffling how toxic and unintelligent the PvE PUG community can be… I mean, that was absurd to me that people can be so uninformed.

Irony

Don Quack, I don’t know who you are to be honest, or whether or not your a prominent member of this PvE community, but still I admit that I was wrong, can you please try to not push the rest of my words into the ground?

And I do agree with much of your post, other than the cold slap of irony part at the end. I don’t pug with ele anymore because no one cares about the reasons you just said. I do dungeons because they give money, plain and simple, theres all that is to it, and I play the “meta” spec on whichever class I use. Its just disenheartening when 1/10 pugs will stack the spider queen adamantly, when I really don’t care about getting a world record time, when killing her legit takes all of 15 more seconds. I don’t play heavy classes, and I’m honestly sick of balance in this game makes them feel OP in every game mode.

Anyway Don Quack, thanks for making me feel completly unwelcome in these forums. There were only a handful of PvE posters here before that actually did make me feel welcome. I’ll refrain from posted my wrong and stupid experiences on this forum so you or any other like minded person doesn’t alienate me out of what is probably GW2’s worst game mode.

Jahroots.6791:

I’d go with Slyvari for Necro too because you can actually make them look pretty creepy.

Oh yes you can make sylvari necros look pretty creepy and kitten. This is my necro, and she still needs some dye adjustment, but for now I really love this appearance.

Also, I’m really bad at taking cool screenshots

Jerus.4350:

nearlight.3064:

Its baffling how toxic and unintelligent the PvE PUG community can be. For example, in AC I got kicked for explaining why I wouldn’t stack the spider queen after explianing how without 2 eles you really can’t do that anymore. He asked me if I were on shrooms and kicked me. Disgraceful.

I agree with most of your post, but this is just wrong.

Ice bow 5 as the queen hits the corner, she freezes, Ice Bow 4, unleash the Fiery rush, and boom clean kill, as long as you get that freeze it’s clean every time, otherwise you need luck that she does the old melee attack first, at least from my experience.

Only time we wipe is when we fail to freeze and don’t dodge back out of the poison and finish her at range if she even gets that attack off.

Oh I see. I’m not really all that great of an ele to be honest especially with compicated button pressing, so I always assumed that you’d need one to freeze the spider and while the other one fiery rushes, but I guess you learn something new every day! Thanks for at least explaining to me why I was wrong, the other two people that singled out that comment weren’t as courteous about that.

Still though, its really kittenty for someone to kick me like that in pug, when they could’ve explained what you just expained. And if its not a speedclear, then why stack and risk wiping at all?

Nick.6972:

Fractals, especially high level ones, were supposed to be difficult.
I’d gladly see them buffing Mai even more along with all the other laughably easy bosses.
And make the reward appropriate.

Get better. Don’t whine.

If the rewards were in any way appropriate, then I might agree with you, but as it stands, unless you’re part of an intense PvE guild, running fractals is now a complete waste of time.

I like PvE in this game because its so accessible to everyone, but now fractals are too hard for the casual player to really get into, and I think thats a problem. If we had some way of choosing the endboss for the fractal and the reward that goes with it, it would be great.

Say choosing the jade maw gives you the normal possible loot table. Your odds for doing molten duo could be a loot table with a better chance for skins/ascended. Maybe make mai trin reward you with a new type of fractal relic used for choosing fractal skins after 15 runs or something like that.

Ferocity is a relatively new stat they introduced to keep us from adding too much crit damage and having too much of a power creep. But yeah it increases crit damage by 1% for each 15 points of ferocity.

And thats a good gear set for PvE content, as its max damage, but I think mesmers benefit a bit more from having a few assassin’s (++prec +power +feroc) pieces mixed in for more crit chance.

Theres a pve build guide floating around here somewhere but I think its 6/4/0/0/4 with empowering mantras and sword/sword/focus no GS.

I’d love for an expansion to take us to Elona and save them from Palawa Joko and whatnot.

And for said expansion to give all classes new weapon or two, which would be nicer imo than having a new class.

Veckna.9621:

I just wouldn’t say Necros are more desirable than rangers for 2 simple reasons:
1. Necros don’t have cleave damage in their optimal berserker’s builds;
2. Necros hardly have anything that contributes to the group’s performance, their best skill in this regard might be Well of Power and it still is easily outclassed by other professions’ similar skills.

But I’d take a ranger over a necro any day of the week

This is the exact mentality and problem I was talking about in regards to necromancers being discriminated against as much as rangers even though ideal ranger builds bring more to a group than a necro can. If we keep saying that its okay to just take another class over necro, or over ranger for that matter, we are gimping future progress for the balance and inclusion of all professions in high level PvE. Rangers just need maybe a minor DPS increase and their sword auto to be more dodge friendly and better pet management mechanics to be amazing in PvE. Necros just need a way to cleave besides their burst AoEs and they need some form of unique group support that boosts the damage of the entire party in a significant way, and perhaps some way to allow their group to avoid damage in a significant way other than blinds, but the damage reason is much more needed.

But until then we can’t run bearbow ranger builds or condition necromancer builds when we PUG. We need to show the pug community that our classes can contribute in a meaningful way and that we aren’t useless leeches. If I carry a bad pug on my necro, it contributes positively to the reputation of necromancers in PvE. If I run bearbow in a level 30 fractal, it detracts from the image of rangers in PvE. Basically we need to lead by example, until Anet introduces the much needed balance changes to shift the paradigm more in our favor. I believe these classes could be easily improved in obvious ways for PvE, and until that day comes I will play their best PvE builds to try and fight the discrimination on pug at a time.

Thank god you guys have frostspotter. I’m just sad that in newer players I never really see it in PUGs, but I think rangers are perfectly fine if they run frostspotter.

Its baffling how toxic and unintelligent the PvE PUG community can be. For example, in AC I got kicked for explaining why I wouldn’t stack the spider queen after explianing how without 2 eles you really can’t do that anymore. He asked me if I were on shrooms and kicked me. Disgraceful.

I got into a conversation with this one guy who posted an LFG for SE p1 saying heavies only, and had 1 guard and 3 warriors waitingfor another heavy. I asked one of them why they said heavies only, and he said because he could and because a guardian with 4 warriors is best DPS in the game because of empower+100blades. I mean, that was absurd to me that people can be so uninformed. I explained to him that 2 eles, a warrior, a guard, and then a thief, would definetly out DPS that party comp no questions asked. He said I was stupid and wrong and then blocked me. Yey.

Why do people who make such bold claims say so without doing any research to back up their claims? Its as toxic and harmful to the community of this game just as the unjustified hate towards rangers and necromancers because they only ever see bad ones. The good players of those classes suffer because people who see rangers and necromancers, unless they are educated about those classes and their potential in PvE, only see useless bearbows or leeching conditionmancers. And every time I see someone running a bearbow or conditionmancer in a pug, I feel like it only contributes to the bad image even more.

Also on a side note I saw a few days ago a longbow axe/warhorn ranger with a bear pet, 2K AP and both frostfang and howler somehow. It was baffling to see someone with so much shiny expensive stuff run a ridiculed build. I told him about the frostspotter build though, so maybe there is hope for him.

Iris Ng.9845:

I used to have a necro in my regular group. It’s pretty much an unspoken rule for us to cover her disadvantage during Mai fight. I always favor Earth Shield because of that.

Thats a pretty good idea. Its just sickening to me that one class would be so much more disadvantaged defensivly in this fight where it actually matters, because Anet balanced necros in PvE so poorly, and this change is only making it worse. I mean for the class that is supposed to be the attrition class, and that barely works with deathshroud in pvp because other classes can focus fire necros, because they can only soak damage not mitigate it, which is a crippling flaw with the scaling change. Granted I only do fractals into the 30s, and I haven’t done them in a quite a few weeks, and surviving on necro without straining all of your team’s damage mitigation options was at least feasible back then.

IceVyper.6810:

Nearlight, you can always play necro until you get the Mai Trin fight, and then relog to another class that makes the fight easier for you….. The Mai Trin fight is a minor part of the fractal run…

Thats another great idea, except since I typically do fractals in disorganized groups, I doubt I want to continue doing fractals anymore for fearing of being unable to complete mai trin in a reasonable time frame.. unless I really want to grind out a fractal skin in the future, but now it seems like too much of a pain, especially for rewards that are rarely ever considered good.

And for class balance reasons, one class shouldn’t be forced to swap out in disorganized groups because their class design makes it impossible to survive in such a fight. Its completely counfounding why arenanet doesn’t realize how much they have kittened necromancers in PvE from day one and I don’t get why they don’t do anything at all to fix it in any way. A cleaving weapon would be amazing, since we cover that with burst AoE and locust swarm, and just some way to make a group stronger in a similar but different way to a warrior or ranger would be amazing too. But to make a fight more difficult by leaps and bounds because necros can only soak and not nullify, when in higher level PvE you must nullfy to survive since thats how it is designed?

Oh good point, I forgot that other people who hadn’t made the clovers/mastery still need skill points… but for someone with 500 skill points after those gifts, converting them is decent money.

spoj.9672:

The stack limit is the least of condition builds problems in PvE. The main problem is the lack of synergy and build up time for damage.

I tried conditions recently just to see how it worked with my current group. It was horrible. Everything died before i could even epidemic trash mobs. And bosses barely lasted long enough to get a good amount of damage aswell.

Thats what I was afraid of as well.. I mean in PUGs where people don’t run efficient set ups, separate condition stacks could make condi necros do comparable DPS due to build up time, but in any group of competent players with zerker gear then nothing will last long enough to make it worth it.

A friend said that in other games like WoW, which I never really played, damage over time builds like on thier “warlock” class were viable because it kept doing sustained damage when other direct DPS classes had to back off their damage due to boss mechanics or threat or whatever, but I never played that game to endgame or similar games to endgame, so I don’t know how true that is.

Pelopidas.2140:

hmm gimme a video or talk more about the circumstances/period of that dps
I hope you dont mean that all 4 wield fgs and do rush with mob against the wall, and at that moment the dps jumps to 70k

I just know this from experience from when I tag along with my friend’s speedruns on my ele. The bosses melt. As for videos I can’t look for one right now but maybe check out the DnT tournament videos on youtube for a general idea.

OOOH I just remembered, Deykeyz has a comprehensive ele fractal video guide, where they melt everything, and use more complicated tactics, and utilities than just fire staff, but I think she might have a max staff DPS video there too on her guide somewhere.

I’ll link it here in a second.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/Guide-DPS-Elementalist-for-PvE/first
Yup this should have all the videos you need to understand ele DPS.

This change is an utter disgrace. All this does is increase the gap between the PvE elite and the casual people who just want rings or a time-sink ascended back and also widens gaps between the meta speed clear builds/compositions and causal PUG groups and classes. I’m all for giving us a good reason to not use zerker gear, but this is the wrong way of doing it.

For example, if I have a good group and bring my mesmer or ele, I might be able to use blocks, and ele focus to survive if the rest of the group is okay. But if I bring necro, my personal FAVORITE class and the least viable PvE class in a CASUAL group, I am absolutely kittenED, because Anet decided to give us no blocks, no evasion, and no mobility, and that deathshroud life force will be gone in seconds and do nothing.

Thanks a lot anet, while its OBVIOUS that necros need a buff in PvE, this fractal change now means that I am kittened if I bring my zerker necro to fractals. A good game without the holy trinity shouldn’t PUNISH you for bringing a specific class. Why not buff her damage but make her ludicrously vulnerable to conditions so we don’t have to strip her shield with my WvW condition set? Oh thats too much work for you Anet, you might as well just push necros out of PvE altogether and further increase the stigma against PvE necros thats already in place. Honestly, you ignore balancing PvE for the professions that needs it the most, before this change power necros wouldn’t contribute support or utility but at least had great single target damage, now they are unable to survive in this fight due to the necro’s class design, and now I’m a kittening liability.

Besides the fact that this change kittens up one class a bit more than the others, a class that was already in a bad place in pve to begin with, there are other reasons why this change is bad. The RNG can and will kitten you if you want to run fractals daily to get rings or a backpiece or even skins.. and that is simply not right. I can avoid arah PUGs because I know I suck at Lupi, and I can get similar quality rewards for doing all of the other explorable dungeons. With fractals, the rewards can only be replicated with time gated laurels or an expensive mystic forge backpiece. I love GW2 because it is so accessible for new players, and now with the scaling change, new players or going to have a much harder time gearing up let a long getting into fractals to begin with.

Lilith Ajit.6173:

I’m wondering which rare sword “Espadon” is.

espadon means swordfish in french… So I have no idea!

Pelopidas.2140:

Keep 13-15k dps ? Maybe for 3-5 seconds, no more…wat 15k dps…

Most bosses with easy mechanics (not fractals or arah) will be dead or almost dead in 5-10 seconds, if its in a party with 2 eles, a guard, a warrior, and usually a thief or ranger, just stack max might and fury out of combat and you’re good to go.

The focus is an amazing ele weapon for pve in every possible way.

In PvP S/F is a useful glass build that requires more team support to function well than glass S/D or celestial D/D but it is still very much viable with a fresh air set up. Glass staff outshines it a bit right now though, but many of the focus skills give very clutch support that are super nice! Focus builds just aren’t the “meta” right now, but that in no way means that they are bad. S/F in WvW is an alternative to staff in less coordianted zerg fights since dragon’s tooth is essentially a low cooldown bomb. But if you’re in a coordinated group you might as well go play well necro for much stronger and easier to use bombs and more survivability, and guild groups will probably want you on staff in a water rotation unless they already have at least 3 or 4 staff eles.

The main problem I have with warriors is that their achilles heel so to speak isn’t obvious, even if it is there, because as mentioned before, different builds have different weaknesses and different strengths.

If you fight a guard or ele it will pretty much always be weak boon removal/corruption. If you fight a necro it will pretty much always be weak to CC, burst, and focus fire. If you fight and Engi, thief or mesmer, it will almost always be weak to conditions while exceling at CC, or burst/mobility respectively.

With warrior, you don’t know until you’ve fought it and identified its build, what its weaknesses are, whether CC works best, whether conditions work best, whether burst works best, or whether running away and hoping your team saves you works best. To me thats a problem, because there isn’t an objective kyrptonite for warriors in every situation, while for most other classes there is.

And yeah the disengage speed is honestly ludicrous. That should be something only thieves, mesmers, and rangers should be able to do that well, and as it stands some warrior builds can disengage much better than a ranger, and with more speed than a mesmer.

I remember when I played the game over a year ago and warriors were considered bad for pvp due to their actual condition weakness, but I can’t remember exactly when or if I am right about this, isn’t cleansing ire getting added or changed or buffed back then what changed all of that?

tldr: warriors need a single weakness common to all builds. Not many different weaknesses that vary from build to build.

BobbyT.7192:

Now we need something that makes nercos mesmers and rangers op,

Please no. We don’t want more people whining about dhuum-terror builds and everyone calling them the ultimate cheese when its just as easy to CC and focus fire a necro.

Mesmers I think could use some buffs, since right now they can’t hold onto points and their overreliance on illusions makes them predictable and a bit easy to kill once you realize which one the real one is, which is typically pretty obvious anyway :/

Gyler.8150:

Staff is at 14.5k, close enough :P.

Ah yes now I remember! And I do think that having that DPS on ele is really fair since they’re so uber fragile, and for staff builds they need enemies to not move around and out of lava fonts. They also can’t take as many blasts so its a tad more selfish, but still amazing amazing DPS, even if it is kinda boring sitting in fire all day.

Anyway as for necros, I think they’re general DPS is in a good spot, but like everyone says, cleave and some DPS support options are needed so badly. Its bad game design when a class is objectively the worst in a game mode in nearly every situation, and when some members of the community create stigma towards necromancers (and rangers as well even though there shouldn’t be as much of an actual reason to), it means that Anet has created a very flawed game environment, and changes need to be made to make more accessible and less toxic overall community in regards to these classes. I don’t recall playing other MMOs where one class was objectively the worst. And especially for a game that prides itself on breaking away from traditional MMO conventions and making content accessible for all classes and all people, there is no reason why one class should be considered the worst.

Yeah Spoj, I personally wouldn’t write a condition build for the reasons you mentioned, and for the good of necromancer’s reputation in general PvE, we need as few people running a condition spec as possible.

I brought my necro to CoF p2 yesterday and another necro joined who was condition spec. I asked him why he ran it, and he said because Anet made this game so you could play it however you wanted.. and he also said that if player’s had separate condition tracks on enemies that condition builds would be great for PvE. Do you think that a solution like that would make condition builds as viable or more viable than power builds right now?

Also, that necro also said that he saw/heard of leaked information about necromancers getting scythes in the 4th quearter of this year (and other professions getting new weapons as well).. which would probably be a cleave and outperform dagger builds.. but this is the first I’ve really heard of that, so I wouldn’t say it’d be likely.

Flinxe.1623:

I threw dungeon token weapons a while ago into the forge and suddenly got the storm (pre-cursor for meteorlogicus). I didn’t expect anything really.

I was about to give up with incinerator cause I can’t play my thief properly so I bought the bard (pre cursor for minstrel) for my mesmer 2 days ago. Now I am confused what to craft lol.

But the real problem is the T6 mats. They are so expensive right now. I’ve got some from making the clovers but the amount I acquired is much less than the needed mats.

How do you get T6 mats easily? Is transmuting the materials worth it for making T6 mats? Thanks!

Wow, congrats, thats exceedingly lucky for someone who started playing GW2 only 2 months ago! I came back to the game a little less than two months ago (after finishing the gift of mastery and my clovers last summer) and I finished the gift of fortune last week when T6 mats were starting to increase again, and also bought 250 extra fangs needed for howler, so all in all I spent about 550 gold last week to finish it. Now I’m back to almost 300 gold from medium term investments finally cashing in, and I still have a bunch of skill points, dungeon tokens, and a perplexity runeset on my thief-mule to sell, so I basically just need the precursor (380-460 gold atm) the runestones, the recipes, and the gift of deforestation.

As for promoting T6 mats, this resource may be helpful
https://docs.google.com/a/elmira.edu/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0As-wCpIszrT9dFB3YjVUVFhfenlDUUpXTVBIdm5qWmc&usp=sharing#gid=12

I use it as a guide to convert my hundreds of unused skill points into gold, typically through lodestone promotion, since there is essentially no risk involved, but it makes less money than more tedious methods like kitten T2. This assumes that you want to buy all the materials and sell them for profit though, so without taking that into account promoting most mats to T6 should be cheaper than buying them outright if you have the skill points, but there is some luck involved.

As for what legendary you should craft, thats up to you. I think the minstrel would be a bit easy to finish in the next few weeks, and it will definitely provide you with instant gratification! I also personally believe that incinerator (along with bifrost, sunrise and twilight) are a bit too common and bland these days because so many people have them. The legendary offhands and main hand legendaries are cooler to me, in part because I don’t see them every day. You can also use focus on a huge amount of classes, as you can with incinerator, and if you’re a human female mesmer, it looks so kitten good with the chaos of lyssa and infinite light, which one of my friends has on their mesmer!

Oh also, I once wanted to make meteorlogicus, but I only really use it on ele, and since I main necro in WvW cause its basically an AoE death machine there, howler became a much better and more obtainable choice for me (once its done in the next couple of weeks).

Gyler.8150:

Tim.6450:

Your post is so full of crap.

Since when did players have a dps of 15000 damage a second.

Actually elementalists, thieves and possibly engineers can mantain 15k dps in a fully buffed group.

By fully buffed, I assume you mean with war/ranger buffs? Deykeyz’s ele calcsshow different builds hittin 12-13.8K or so DPS with just 25 might fury and max vuln. The ice bow4 and FGS 4 (although an exploit) are much higher bursts.

grizzlygrezzo.7654:

i want create a pg with jack sparrow appareance,is possible to have pirates skin??…for weapon a gun and a sword….in th other game i play dps class like gunner or ranger or sin

I think the aetherblade skins can get you that look depending on light medium or heavy, but thats gemstore so you may have to buy it or farm the gold.

For guns and swords though, thieves can use swords and pistols (as can mesmer) and engineers can use rifles and pistols but not swords.

Also you won’t make a lot of friends in dungeons if you run minion master necro there, necros aren’t really a pet class per se, but can run a minion build, which is only good in some levels of pvp.

Rangers area true pet class since theyre forced to use pets and have many options for controlling them and customizing them that necros do not get.

NeXeD.3042:

What’s risky about using scholar runes? Staying above 90%?

Yup, basically staying above 90% for the bonus can be considered risky, but totally doable if you’re a good player and in a good group. And regen from focus 4 in your rotation helps mitigate that a bit, as does using deathshroud!

If its a pug running all over the place and people don’t stack right in the encounters that are best done as stacked then you can get hit and lose the bonus. This is mostly a problem for me with Leurent in TA surprisingly, and lupi in Arah, since with lupi especially, if you don’t stack on a reflect wall or time dodges right while in melee his AoE will be much much harder to avoid, if that makes any sense.

Message me ingame and we can discuss pretty much everything about how to gear yourself up, craft, level andplay effectively in GW2.

I hope they come out with a melandru backiece soon. It would look so so so awesome on a sylvari if they make it naturey enough xD

Oh a European Server! I’m on NA, so I don’t really know much about the EU wvw scene (off-topic post).

ZeftheWicked.3076:

Just want to add that necros do have party sustainability aid. Not as obvious but they do.
First off all wells but well of blood = all dark combo fields, which means hp drain on projectile & whirl finishers and blids on blast and leap finishers.

Secondly we got that trait adding short protection when a well is casted.

And signet of vampirism is our “tag’em and drain’em” skill. Also there’s that blood magic trait that heals allies when using life transfer in death shroud.

Not saying they make necro a boon machine, but he’s not totally naked in terms of party support.

These support options aren’t good enough to have an important place in PvE. Defensive support in PvE isn’t about healing and recovery, its about active mitigation through sources such as aegis and projectile deflection/reflection, as well as individuals using dodges appropriately to not take damage in the first place.

Transfusion is also a bad trait for PvE, even though it works on pvp MM builds and more support oriented WvW builds. Going into blood magic (and death magic) at all is bad for a necro’s DPS output in PvE, and the support gained by transfusion or ritual of protection is certainly not enough to justify giving up any of our must have traits from the current meta necro builds (6/6/0/0/2 for good groups 6/2/0/0/6 for bad groups). A few seconds of protection and an AoE heal are basically useless in PvE, that you are basically gimping yourself by running any of those traits.

In PvE being able to kill a boss as fast as possible, or to nullify its attacks so you can kill it as fast is possible is what is important. Any changes for the future must provide a way that the necromancer can allow his entire party to kill a boss faster, and whirling dark fields and AoE heals don’t accomplish that. Signet of Vampirism is also too weak to justify actually using. If a blood magic or death magic trait provided the type of offesive support that we actually need to truly be viable in PvE, then it could be worth it to go into those traitlines.

You did however miss out one of Necro’s only party support options, which is blowing up bone minions to blast fire/smoke fields before an engagement starts.

What is your server Leo? And yeah I think they promoted every player rank 50 and above back then but I can’t remember exactly.

And the ToL placers can pick the legendary or precursor they want, and choose between the gift they want if they get a choice between fortune and mastery (hah such a hard choice) or between might and magic.

Mystic.5934:

Charak.9761:

meanwhile flame legion is still 7% and only costs 6 silver

cough

except foes are burning 1/5 as often as you can maintain a single might stack. So str would be more average damage: 7/5 vs. 5/1 = 1.4% vs. 5%

1/5th as often? If you have a guardian and an ele in your party, then most mobs should be burning almost all the time.

The hate on necromancer is even worse, and more toxic and debilitating. At least rangers have a meta build with good cleave damage and group utility. Necromancers have probably better single target damage, but the lack of utility makes them an objective worst class for PvE. No class should be the worst in something like PvE. Necro suffer from a similar bearbow mentality due to all the condition specs you’ll see, so the dedicated power necros experience stigma in finding groups that is as bad as and probably even more justified than rangers.

Yeah it makes sense. All the professions makes sense for most of the races. My sylvari is a necromancer and I think it makes sense for more reasons than just the existence of trahearne.

In the S2 living story missions, an NPC says that scarlet only left her room in dry top for supplies and food, so I guess that means sylvari need food.

LeoWolfish.8917:

Agreed. Daily would make them too easy to get but there is also a danger currently of the gold price getting too ridiculous levels. Perhaps tying them into pvp rank is an option? So say when you reach tiger rank you get one at random and the again when you get to the final (dragon) rank you get to pick one of your choice.

Or we could link it to the badges of Honor in some way? It might encourage people to do WvW more than just for map completion on servers with lower populations. If any such servers exist of course.

Well for pvp, its already somewhat implemented by the tournament of legends prizes, as 1st place team gets legendaries, 2nd gets a precursor of their choice, and I think places 3-8 get some choice or combination of the gift of fortune, mastery, might or magic, which is a great addition, but only accessibly to top tier teams obviously.

It takes a huge amount of time to get to dragon these days, so I think it could be a fair idea, but tiger would be far too low.. I casual hotjoin and I’m 2 ranks away from tiger. And also for the many people who were promoted to dragon when rank got reworked, some controversy could arise.

And for WvW, badges are already incorporated into the gift of mastery. And as a primarily WvW player (although I like the other game modes too), people who are serious about WvW don’t play on low population servers. Right now, the other main NA guild on my server DB is going to SOS most likely this friday, and my guild could be next if DB drops from T3 (which we are dominating atm).

Axelwarrior.9084:

Wasbunny.6531:

nearlight.3064:

Bhawb.7408:

You missed the biggest and most important change: 4th bonus on Strength runes had its might reduced from 5s to 10s, and 6th bonus is down to 5%.

I’m giddy with joy about this nerf

Now the ele/hambow/shattermes power creep is a bit more managable, and these runes may actually become cheap again!

Here here! Very warranted nerf. No one rune set should rule them all.

Yay, now we can go back to Scholar runes ruling PvE, when before you actually had a second option.

There always the absurdly cheap flame legion runes, which are a poor people’s alternative to to strength runes for PUGs, since it works as long as you have a guard or ele in the party

Yeah scholar is still supreme for top tier pve, but it has more risk associated with using it compared to the relatively risk free strength runes, so I think scholar is fine the way it is. Its a question of whether or not you want higher-risk more reward, or lower risk and less reward.

spoj.9672:

Axe with axe training deals the same damage as staff. So i would stick with the axe for the life force regen. Basically staff has a weapon damage of 1100 and axe has 1000. When you have axe training it becomes 1000*1.1 = 1100. So its the same.

I didnt include hybrid builds because they dont work. To put it simply we dont have a hybrid weapon. Life blast, axe, dagger all benefit from pure damage. Scepter benefits from dedicated condi. When you go hybrid you lose too much effectiveness in both to justify the option of having two sources of damage. Basically if you are in rampager, your life blasts / dagger do terrible dps and your scepter condi damage is also quite bad. We would need a different type of rampager stat for hybrid builds to work on the necro.

The only classes that i feel work with rampager/hybrid is sword warrior and nade engi. Because they have decent direct and condition damage on the same weapons.

So does the axe trait also raise lifeblast damage as well? Cause I think you’ve just made me a happy camper spojy spoj.

Also what ideas would you have for unique group utility that could be added to the necromancer in the future? I posted a thread discussing my ideas among others in the profession balance forums, mostly because I feel motivated by the stigma and borderline discrimination happening in many PUG groups regarding necromancers (like taking much longer to join a party, or getting kicked out of zerker groups for not switching to ele etc.), and I feel spurred to campaign for changes that help out with the image of necromancers in PvE. No class should be considered the worst in a metagame in every situation, and I want to dedicate myself to improving our reputation and functionality, so that maybe a team will take a necro in the next PvE tournament

Until then though I’m going to keep discussing this topic when I can, and I’m going to use my zerker necro in PvE (mostly pug) exclusively to try and and break the stigma that necromancers are bearbow ranger bad through example, so that people in the casual pve community don’t face as much stigma towards us.

This a pretty big change for me since I posted the “WTB competent PvE necro” thread a few weeks ago, and I’m sick of seeing condition necros trying to solo the gate in CoF p1 for ages.. so I might as well lead and advocate for change by example instead of complaining behind my old wall of FGS exploits and icebow 4 elitism.

Tim.6450:

The only way to get an uptime of 100% (which would be practically required), Is too take epidemic and another corrutpion skill with the two corruption traits. Which means you have to sacrifice a well and the warhorn trait. The enemies also need to have at least 8 conditions on them all the time to equal a frost spirit/spotter ranger in terms of group support. So I don’t think this trait is the solution.

Ah now I see, I read the posts and thought you mentioned something about vulnerability, which you did in a separate post, so I apologize for that.

Anyway as for my corruption trait idea, the warhorn trait wouldn’t be a huge loss to sacrifice for the benefit of the party, as would making the choice between signet of spite or well of suffering, which I now realize could be a problem because the other classes typically don’t have to give up personal damage utilities to offer support in PvE. Anyway, the duration or magnitude of the traits effect could be tweaked to make it better, and it could be merged with master of corruption to be even stronger, however I don’t want a utility that is too brokenly overpowered, nor do I want something overpowered in other game modes, which this wouldn’t be. My orignal reasoning behind the trait was that you could use blood is power for a great self buff (although redundant in organized groups) for one proc, and then epidemic (probably over signet of spite) to maintain the proc and also spread conditions to enemies so that our burst AoE skills and our ally’s cleave could do more damage.

The overall point of my idea is to simultaneously give us significant group damage utility, while also giving the party a reason to apply as many conditions to enemies as possible. I think your non-condi debuff idea has merit as well, however it depends on the numbers and uptime potential that will determine whether or not any of these ideas can be viable.

Besides that my only other ideas atm are making well of darkness a smoke field for stealth blasting, or some trait that makes wells destroy projectiles, but neither of those utility changes really make sense.

What we need to do is show the developers that fixing the necro in PvE is a relatively simple task and that the benefits for the community would be considerable. With all the elitist pugs out there avoiding necro made parties or kicking necros in even casual runs, let alone our inability to play necro in high end speedruns, it is time for us necros to stand together and let the balance developers of this game know that we are not to be ignored, and that change will happen so that necromancers can join any dungeon party and feel like they can contribute to making the party better, at least as good as they could on any of the other classes.