- Dr Ebola
Play a staff / wells build. 30/20/20/0/0, full staff talents, targetable wells, close to death. The 10 point traits in Spite and Curses is up to you (personally I like Terror in the Curses tree). Gear in a mix of soldier’s and berserker’s (skip runes and go with stat orbs), weapons are staff and scepter / dagger with sigil of blood. Talent into consume conditions / signet of the locust / well of suffering / well of corruption / lich or plague depending on the situation. Food is omnom pie and sharpening stone.
Mix soldier’s and berserker’s gear until you feel like you have enough survivability. Scepter / dagger is usually regarded as a condition damage weapon, but I don’t entirely agree – besides staff, it is really the only other weapon set with good range and AOE potential. Don’t sit there casting 1 with it, switch into DS instead if you can until you can go back to staff.
- Dr Ebola
The way to level necromancer after level 40 / availability of 20 point traits is to 1) wear MF gear and eat MF food; 2) spec minions; 3) as a weapon use staff with MF enchants to keep regen up on your minions and AOE the packs of mobs you will be pulling.
Pre level 30, just have fun and do whatever you want; there is no best thing.
Edit: As mentioned above, Signet of the Locust is a must. Drop one of your minions for it; personally I’d use Blood Fiend / SoL / Shadow Fiend / Bone Minions / Flesh Golem.
- Dr Ebola
(edited by sas.6483)
1) Increase necro projectile speeds (staff #1, corrupt boon, etc) by 25%.
2) Increase cast times and execution times of many necro abilities (ex. scepter 5).
3) Make fundamental improvement to death shroud. Possible examples: Healing through death shroud. Removing life force decay while in death shroud. Stability on death shroud baseline.
I know people will argue that some of (3) is OP, but I think not, considering that we are expected to tank damage through DS.
- Dr Ebola
I took a siphon minion build out tonight to check it out.
Fleshy AI is still terrible, entire fights with veterans and he stood idle multiple times. Sometimes he stood there right next to us sometimes he stood 100 distance away.
using his knockdown didnt help, he didnt even make it back to us before the vet was killed.
He would attack sometimes using staff AA sometimes not with dagger AA and never using life blast.
When they did attack the healing was great and damage was good too.
Again, not to make this a minions thread, but 1) the minions do attack most of the time, but they seem to have a knack of choosing not to at bad times; 2) minion AI could use some improvement, especially Flesh Golem; 3) Flesh Golem knockdown is godly; 4) you can fairly easily solo camps with a MM build, as well as handle a human add (if they suck bad enough). I used to do it all the time, and I have seen other necros do it. The trick is to not let the camp boss smash all your minions at once… some camps are more amenable to soloing than others due to their layout and attack angles.
In comparison, using an offensive power / wells build my experience has been that camp soloing is faster but more difficult.
- Dr Ebola
Without going into whether / how schizophrenic the trait tree is: Your best option for 1vN in WvW is probably either
1) 20/0/20/30/0 or 0/0/20/30/20 or 0/0/25/30/15, full on minions, staff and scepter / dagger or dagger / whorn or focus. Axe is garbage and should be avoided, the decision of second weapon set depends on whether you feel like you need range or not. Go with some combination of retaliation and minion damage in the spite tree; staff traits in the death tree; bloodthirst, vampiric minions and fetid consumption in the blood tree; persistence and soul marks in reaping. Go with power gear, either soldier’s or knight’s or a combination. If you have enough crit go sigil of blood, otherwise force. Go with 2 or 5 vampiric runes. Go with Omnom pie if you have crit, regen food if you don’t. I have played similar builds; you can battle 1v3 and win (but probably won’t).
2) A well-based power / DS spec like 0/0/20/30/20 or 0/0/25/30/15 with either full soldiers or healing power gear, utilizing as much siphoning as you can get. I have less to say here, except that Melandru’s runes might be useful, as might -condition duration food.
Basically, I think you cannot damage your way through a 1vN as necro. You need to bunker to stand a chance. Also, necro is not great as a 1vN roaming class, but it doesn’t need to be, because it is good elsewhere. Last, videos are usually cherry picked. (But we love them anyway. Check out Leeto I and II, very fun.)
- Dr Ebola
6 minions, 7 hits (see below), 10% chance for each to remove a boon.
48% chance of zero boons stripped.
37% chance of one boon stripped.
12% chance of two boons stripped.
2.3% chance of three boons stripped.
Negligible chance of > three boons stripped.
(Binomial probabilities if I remember right.)
Edit: I used this skill in a WvW MM build for a while. I found it pretty underwhelming too.
Edit: Adjusted slightly for two projectiles from the Bone Fiend.
- Dr Ebola
(edited by sas.6483)
I have found after using it more extensively, that the dodge/blind/block is very painful to deal with now. Before, the cast time was hard to time right because of targest going down, well now warriors/guardians/mesmers/engineers are going invulnerable near 25%, and it no longer connects. No graphic, no spread. I am not opposed to blind preventing the skill from hitting, but immunity shouldn’t matter for this skill, seeing as how it doesn’t actually DO any damage/effects to the target.
I am seriously considering wells for WvW at this point as a go-to skill setup.
After playing WvW for a couple of days, I’d say that post patch my epidemic is successful about 1/3-1/2 of the time in open field combat and wall defense… I guess it’s reliable if I’m targeting a downed player. In wall siege, it is almost never successful unless I’m targeting an NPC.
Epidemic was reliable and powerful, but not OP, pre-patch. I’m not sure why Anet made this change. Did they even test it, and if so how could they let it go live in its current state? Is there even a point to playing condition damage heavy build / gear setups in WvW without it?
- Dr Ebola
How disappointing. I don’t really see a reason why heals shouldn’t work in death shroud.
Because we would become incredibly difficult to kill. It would basically be you can’t hurt my health, I am recouping my health, and you are being hurt in the process. If you traited for the 5 percent CD on DS, you would essentially have invulnerability with regen while dealing damage every 5 seconds. Considering Life blast can hurt and you could use fear and Life Transfer to heal. You would be next to impossible to ever kill 1v1.
1) A class that plays like “You can’t hurt my health, I am recouping my health, you are being hurt in the process” is an attrition class. Like necro is supposed to be…
2) You’d have to spend 30 points in Soul Reaping to do a 5 second stance dance like this, so it should be good, and you only get to do it if you’ve got enough life force. Life Transfer is up every 40 seconds (ish, memory fails me). Over 5 seconds you’d get what, 750 HP healing from a regen?
3) If you did this, you’d be forced into a power build so you could actually do damage, you likely wouldn’t have full staff talents, if you went into blood for siphoning and more regen you’d be gimping your damage, etc.
Health regen during death shroud would hardly make us invulnerable. We should have it. It would add just a little bit of additional survivability to what is supposed to be the attrition class.
- Dr Ebola
… so, no more casting Epidemic on wall defenders I guess.
The problem is this was one of the areas where the Necro was really viable in WvW as a preferable class, in sieges, both offensive and defensive, this severely nerfs our ability to contribute to area control in those situations.
The more I think about this change, the worse it seems. I guess I’ll have to see how Epidemic plays now, but I have a feeling that Anet just turned it into another Corrupt Boon – unreliable to the point where it is unusable (in WvW).
- Dr Ebola
… so, no more casting Epidemic on wall defenders I guess. It’s a bad change, but I could live with it if our cast times / projectile speeds got sped up 25-50%. Maybe next patch…
- Dr Ebola
Once you hit level 30, get +20% health for minions, go full minion build and just wear all MF gear. As you continue leveling, get +20% damage and vampiric master, in whatever order you feel comfortable with. Use staff to keep regen up on your minions. Leveling and doing your personal story will be a breeze.
- Dr Ebola
So, in a full 30/30/10/0/0/ build with full rampager’s and coral, I would lose about 1/3 of the effective health offered by a rabid build; I’d be looking at 5% damage reduction from armor instead of about 25%. In exchange, I’d get about 1/3 more effective power. Regen from siphoning might be a wash given the increase in crit, condition damage is roughly a wash, etc.
Here’s the build, which you could compare with the above:
It is possible it comes down to skill, but I feel the need to maintain a respectable amount of upfront defensive stats in WvW. There’s just too much aoe damage, rogues floating around, etc. to run with a glassy build. Having said that, I’m feeling more comfortable with the idea of rabid / carrion. This has been useful.
- Dr Ebola
So the difficulty I have with the Nemesis build for WvW is that there is as far as I can tell no survivability in the gearing, and it’s likely that 30/30/-/-/- builds are out for similar reasons. I think it’s a choice between rabid or soldier’s with carrion gemming and roughly a -/20/10/15/- core build with well targeting and additional points allocated based on the particulars. Soldier’s with carrion gives obviously more power and more raw survivability. Rabid gives more crit and more sustainability through vampiric talents and on crit blood sigils / omnom pie.
After thinking it through I suspect the loss of direct damage with rabid will be made up for via siphoning damage, crit bleeds, etc. although I’m a little unsure about the use of wells with rabid gear. Roughly:
for rabid; something like the previous for soldier’s. In any case, I’m playing around with both, hopefully I’ll get something I like better than full minion bunker.
- Dr Ebola
I was wondering if anybody could advise about building / gearing / playing a condition damage / power hybrid for wvw play. I’m thinking about a 0/30/20/20/0 or 0/25/25/20/0 build, wells and epidemic, and a mix of soldier’s and carrion gear. Something like:
My thinking is roughly to use soldier’s armor and jewelry to get baseline power and survivability, and then supplement that with condition damage from runes of the undead and carrion weapons / gems. I can maintain a trickle of continuous health regen from bloodthirst and vampiric, and aoe with staff, wells and epi.
In comparison, I’ve thought about going with a rabid / carrion mix using more vampiric traiting, blood sigils, and omnom pie to get more survivability, but I’m not convinced the loss of power and vitality would be compensated for by the increase in condition damage / siphoning. Currently I’m playing a minion-heavy bunker build, but am getting a little bored… so, any advice would be appreciated. Thanks!
- Dr Ebola
Though I did run into a MM the other day who was running 0/0/30/30/10. 30k health and 2800 toughness and was a pain in the neck to kill he didn’t do much damage though.
That might have been me. Here’s about what I currently run, if anybody is interested:
For skills, usually I use Blood Fiend, Signet of the Locust and all the melee minions. Sometimes I will swap in Bone Fiend for Shadow Fiend. Sometimes I will use Necromantic Corruption instead of Death Nova. I spend the vast majority of my time in WvW, swapping between zerging around with whatever commander’s available (I am a filthy pug player) and soloing / small grouping supply camps.
- Dr Ebola
I’ve been playing 0/0/30/30/10.
Greater Marks, Flesh of the Master, Necromantic Corruption.
Transfusion, Vampiric Master, Fetid Consumption.
Vital Persistence.
Armor: Soldier’s. My runes are a little up in the air right now, currently I use 5x Vampiric and 1x Crest of the Soldier, but I’m thinking about 6x Dolyak, or 6x Melandru, or maybe 2x Vampiric and 4x Earth, or something like that.
Jewelery: Soldier’s with Knight’s slotted.
Weapons: Knight’s; staff, axe / focus. I am thinking about swapping axe / focus for dagger / warhorn. Currently I use Force and Accuracy offhand; I’m thinking about Blood and Accuracy offhand.
Utility: Blood Fiend, 2x Minions (usually Shadow Fiend and Bone Fiend, but I swap back and forth), Signet of the Locust, Flesh Golem.
I end up with about 3.2k power, 3k armor, 28k health, 20% crit. I mostly play WvW, and my goal is to not die or take as long as humanly possible to die. I go back and forth about whether or not the 10 points in Soul Reaping might be better elsewhere, or whether or not to use Carrion jewels instead of Knight’s. I’d love to find a place to put Minion Master, but I can’t give up Greater Marks and am very hesitant to give up FotM. Any advice is welcome.
- Dr Ebola
I would go with MM for leveling, full minions (no Flesh Wurm, and if you want to give one up for Locust, give up Bone Fiend – it constantly dies anyway), and use staff for regen on minions. Priority one is to get 20 points in Death Magic for Flesh of the Master. Priority two is to get another 20 points in Blood Magic for Vampiric Master. After that, it’s up to you – the next 20 in Spite, or reallocate to get 30 points in Death Magic for full staff skills and 20 in Blood magic. Wear as much MF gear as you can get, and you will never die even in the worst of multipulls.
- Dr Ebola
For what it’s worth, full on minion builds that move into 20/0/30/20 with survivability skills (flesh of the master and vampiric master) obtained first, and that use staff are ideal for leveling. You will brute force smash through everything but champion level mobs and you can wear full magic find gear.
- Dr Ebola
I’ve used Plague form quite a bit in WvW recently, both to support point taking / zerg v zerg, and as a damage tanking / escape tool. I think I concur with Kilger. Plague form needs to grant both the “unstoppable” buff from PvE and swiftness. Otherwise, it’s uses are point taking support and a 20 second death postponement while you’re crippled and immobilized, which seems pretty weak for a 3 minute cooldown elite skill. Zerg v zerg support only really works if you can keep up with your meleers, which again you often can’t effectively do.
- Dr Ebola
Can somebody explain this to me? If I understand right, T1 and T2 are massive zergs with close to 24/7 coverage, T6 and below are small unit game play, and T3-5 are a mix of the two?
If I’m a NA player who likes to avoid culling issues, weird exploitative gameplay, and silly game politics, but also likes there to be a decent number of people playing organized WvW that I can tag along with (commanders, etc.), where would be a good bet?
- Dr Ebola