Guild Wars 2

Yep it’s terrible.

Animation and pathing fix is good for Flanking Strike and that’s all that was needed. It’s too much now.

I’ve thought the previous balance adjustments were generally steps in the right direction. This one is certainly a bad one as they nerfed a lot of class strengths into unplayability and boosted things that didn’t need boosting as per this sword thief discussion.

For wvw I play my hybrid condition/zerker rifle with mace/warhorn. This build won after trying quite a few other things for sustained damage and burst. For guild zerging I would go with hammer/gs. Don’t forget to try shout/heal builds and see if you like them.

For spvp I use zerker rifle now and gs which I get out rarely. You have to know how to keep range, play off other people and time kill shot. Not going to give away the tricks but I have a lot of thieves lol me after I down them with a 10k kill shot and my highest was almost 15k last week. I will say however that the very best spvp/tpvp warrs I’ve seen play gs/sword and know how to key gs off other player’s knockdown and such and generally abuse the mobility. Too much work for me after a long day though.

Also for some reason not many warrs say this, but I almost always use Mending and Restorative Strength.

Yep. Earth/fire staff combo is the easiest and how I leveled my ele. Use earth pet on vets etc.

Yep, my wvw build is this now and I’ve even been using it in spvp.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fQAQNAW7djMaV7Jbib07JApHPfN0RFCm6h5pfOA

Normally I wouldn’t read much of this thread because rifle autoattack is not going to be changed.

I think it’s important to point out though that a good thing about rifle is that you don’t need to change your build much or at all to take advantage of the bleed, just add the 50% bleed duration trait and +condition.

For wvw roaming I have a mix of zerker and enough condition to get to 1100 condition. My volley and kill shot (when I can get it in) are still pretty good and in between I’m stacking 11-12 100 bleed ticks. So what if they remove them? It’s autoattack and will go right back on.

For spvp I use pure zerker rifle. I already have a vuln (that admittedly is so slow I rarely use it) and autoattack crits non-mitigation builds for around 1100 and with 57% crit is pretty good even without the bleed.

For right now my only complaint about rifle is that for me, either hybrid or zerker rifle builds are the best for pvp that I’ve found since the frenzy nerf and I didn’t roll a warrior to sit at 1200 range.

The main features of zvz are aoe cc, aoe damage and lag. GW2 has no diminishing returns or CC immunities other than stability and few escapes. So even though CC are not that long in duration they can be endlessly chained. This is especially a problem for necros defensively because they are also slow. Offensively epidemic is ok for smaller scale but not so much zvz anymore. As pointed out conditions are cleared rapidly. Powermancer is not generally good for zvz except for lich form but gawd do they need to make that guy smaller. So I still feel the best a necro can do for zvz is a marks/terror build that contributes to damage and cc and you might as well go condition then.

Yeah 8 months later …. Mmo companies need to start bringing in a complete new set of devs at release to fix all the things the originals got wrong and do it in weeks, not years. GW2 at least has no subscription because the servers would be empty otherwise. Necros can pick random combinations of traits and come out with something not much different than any min/max builds. Is this really something good?

I get 12-13 stacks of bleed with my build in another post and have been more effective working in some + condition. I get something like 105 ticks unbuffed.

I run a rifle roamer. It’s ok. I tried everything else I could think of for roaming and in the end it’s the only thing that was working for me. I can kill some people at least that don’t realize what a rifle can do (never a guardian though lol). I do use mace/warhorn. Again just ok but warhorn is a must for roaming and mace is good for camp guards so it’s a decent offensive/defensive combo. My gear is a combination of ruby orbs with power and condition (45%crit, 1100 condition unbuffed).

I swap traits and skills around a little but current build is:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fIAQNBJhRaE0J5tFSGiJSAYZYURXGJRlqQbpClB

Notice a decent number of escape skills. I am trying the Owl instead of Endure Pain right now but it kind of sucks.

Sigil of Earth on the rifle.

Sorry man that was @Rennoko. Your comment was fine. I deleted my thief but have 4 other 80’s and play them all.

Do you actually play a necro? As thousands of badge farmers will attest to it is quite possible to play staff only in wvw. Not that it’s great but you will miss mark of blood if you try to weapon swap so this is in fact near continuous.

All classes have roughly the same cooldowns on utilities. Game design is what it is, ie not 3 skills that you button mash.

Mark of Blood cooldown is 6s and with Staff Mastery you can almost cast marks continuously.

Two of the non-healing wells have significantly shorter cooldowns than the other two. Use those.

Thanks for keeping the thread going Khalifa and I prefer Eagle on my power builds (on ele too) but I think you’re nuts for not using 6 for that bonus …

Yep I use a spectral power build in WvW when I’m not condition/terror. I’ve settled on 1 well and 2 spectral utilities which I swap around but 3 spectral is ok too. The build again is:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fQAQRBHbhG2IjWoe3m1GDnCY+Q2QFyNSRxKTzwc4B

I don’t read this forum diligently but it sounds close to what Talentless does – the only other person I’ve seen doing something like this.

I liked it (for WvW) with pre-nerf Frenzy but as per above it’s too slow and lacking in utility for PvP otherwise.

Correction, you can have a versatile condition or hybrid build for wvw but it’s a lot more difficult with a power build.

This is my roam/havoc power build that I like. It seems to be similar to another JQ necro Talentless who posts here, has a video and I think his build is around too. I sometimes swap the well to Suffering or Corruption and Spectral Grasp with Walk or Armor.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fQAQRBHbhG2IjWoe3m1GDnCY+Q2QFyNSRxKTzwc4B

That build is ok but I’d sure put those 15 blood magic points somewhere else and take Spectral Walk on every map other than maybe Forest unless you plan to sit on points.

I like Staff Mastery a lot these days (underrated) and 5 more in Curses gets you Terror or Chilling Darkness and more crit.

You can get a lot of things to work with necro and I haven’t tried scepter/axe/terror, but that’s got to be a challenging combo. A key point here is that you’re really shooting yourself in the foot by not taking staff with a terror build.

“and base their entire decisions on 100b ability to hit for 20k”

100b can actually hit for 42k plus. That’s why I’m playing my warrior.

Actually the balance is closer than ever imo and it really is more about gear, skill and build vs build than class now. So people saying necro is overpowered or underpowered are both wrong. A big thing I’d like them to sort out for necro is getting easier access to stability and along those lines is death shroud stomp/rez an exploit or not? Fix it either way anet.

As per above don’t even think of going full power/crit zerker for wvw in general. While I get away with 30/30/10/0/0 for condition with staff/scepter and being able to keep range, it’s a lot harder to pull off as a power necro. As for weapons that’s a difficult decision. Staff is a given and I love dagger 3 (immobilize) but otherwise axe main is easier to use especially for chasing and with focus was my favorite combo. Spinal shivers with the range increase is unreliable but better than anything else offhand imo. I’ve gone back to condition though, like my scepter too much.

Just a month ago I was more of a critic too. I said “Fixing the broken classes/builds ie thief, mesmer and d/d ele and exploits are the first needs (for necro)”. Although d/d ele is still a little too strong the devs have in fact seen the light and reduced burst damage and nerfed stealth. Some ridiculous exploits like 100nades are gone too. Meanwhile necro has slowly gotten better in comparison with the only real nerf being to epidemic which was understandable. I still have problems with the whole melee heavy philosophy in general but I’m not paying a subscription and like the game balance more than I have in months. Have to say the one class that still needs attention is warrior more than any other. They have been forced into the shout heal survivability builds for general purpose use and need more than that.

They aren’t all beastmaster bunker, the new thing seems to be 0/30/30/ or 0/30/25/something condition/trap roamer. I think most of them are using shortbow or gs and s/d. I’ve run into lots of them in wvw and tourney this past week. I’m about 50:50 against them 1v1 which is worse than against anything else in that time. I use scepter/focus staff condition/terror build for wvw and the second build here for tpvp. You need to plan for something against entangle or it’s going to ruin your day. Keep running at them so you can at least get marks on both of you.

I agree with the chill build probably not being suitable for tournaments though I haven’t tried it. That’s why I mentioned spvp thinking that implies 8v8 hotjoin, where any decent build can work or fail miserably because you run into all kinds of players and builds. It’s fun for that, the mobile classes hate it lol. I will say in my opinion if you’re going to do a chill build you need to add duration. Keep in mind that this is a LOT of chill too. Every weapon swap, the well, staff 3, dagger 4, focus 5, DS 2 and I probably missed something. Oh plague too if you want to do that. So no big deal if it’s wiped because it can be on again in 5 seconds or less. I also think this is a lot more playable build than the Mr. Freeze ones I remember with d/d and d/f.

The second build was really good in one night of tournaments. I held home point great, was good to attack mid and only died 1v1 to a ranger that got the jump on me when I was trying to backdoor their home point and that was still a close fight. You can actually just run any normal MM build like 30/0/20/20/0, 20/0/30/20/0 or 20/0/20/30/0 and swap in well of suffering or corruption. I used only corruption but I think suffering will be good too. The main idea is to explore what can be done freeing up one minion utility slot and adding a well certainly does the job for me. I like it better for tournament than any all-in MM build that I’ve tried.

I am liking the MM with well. The control build above is good for some situations but lacking in damage for 5v5. I used this 20/10/20/20/0 with well build last night and it’s great for point defend or assault. Staff and d/d with well of corruption though well of suffering would work too. Full eagle runes which despite what you might have read should give the most damage against opponent under 50% health including sigil of air. Minions are bone minions, bone fiend and flesh golem. Fastest I’ve ever killed a thief …

Bunker necro is the king of badge farming. Best part is you never need to swap out of staff. :P

You don’t have to spec full minion. Just dropping 1 minion for a slot opens up all kinds of possibilities as per my chill blind build no comments lol.

On vacation but this is a fun build for spvp that I thought I’d throw out there for people to try. It’s 20/10/20/20/0 with the obvious minion skills and chilling darkness. Use freeze duration runes as per other chill builds and hydromancy sigils on both weapon sets. I’ve used various weapons including staff with greater marks axe or dagger main and focus or dagger offhand and well of darkness so 1 less minion than minion master. I prefer staff and a/d or d/d so far. It’s worked far better than I expected based on a few days of testing.

Yeah best class vs worst with the expected result. Anet’s biggest mistake – 1v1 does matter. Bull you need a golem. You could have flattened him when he made some mistakes near the beginning and maybe had a sliver of a chance. BTW, best build for me against thief and d/d ele is my chillmancer when I ran that. It helps a lot to slow the attrition in and out dance. Thanks for posting guys.

Hah more wvw vids. I would have one shotted all of them on my warrior.

Pros: I like the way you play with some different stuff to what most people do. Use of spectral wall is great and people running from the Godzilla Lich with jaggies chasing them is hilarious.

Cons: It’s still a WvW video where you’re mopping up scrubs.

I just got my warr to 80 a week ago and outfitted with exotics but no cash for Lyssa runes yet and still figuring out runes, sigils and food in general. I’ve played 5 other classes and still play 3 others right now – this is the fourth and last one for pvp. I’ve actually played warr since release but got distracted with other things.

Anyway I pvp’ed the past week with lots of wvw: solo, small group and follow the random commander zerging.

The two builds I like the best are the extremes that people mention above. 20/20/0/0/20 GS/rifle zerker and 0/0/30/30/10 shout heal, GS and other weapon yet to be determined but prob mace mainhand.

Funny thing is I got about 3 times as many badges as I did the previous week on my necro. I like both builds, I just wish there was something more in between. Anyway they are perfectly fine for WvW and it’s actually nice with the shout heal build to be able to fight in the front lines.

WvW videos lol. You can find plenty of youtube vids of anything rolling WvW. Post spvp or tpvp please.

Anyway the new thief thing is endless dodge w condition. It’s hilarious. In most spvp games last night there were at least 2 or 3 running around doing this. They dodge and heartseek and … that’s all.

I just so happened to be playing a tanky necro with Darkness and Power wells so I could fight off one but it was a handful when 3 of them were doing this on a point.

Anyway it’s funny now but it might not be so funny when they refine it more.

thread and vids

All classes have plenty of build options. The problem is a few classes have builds that work a little too well, in particular for dealing damage or at least burst damage, and necro does not have this. You can be killed in 5 seconds as a necro and you will never kill anyone else in 5 seconds. At this point there are not going to be major changes to the game so everyone needs to just deal with it. If you want to work on anything for necro it’s to stress things that don’t work well and that no one uses. Like the falling damage poison cloud trait lol. They still seem willing to address these kinds of issues, as per SOTG and warrior kick and banners.

I’ve played 6 of the classes extensively and still play 4 of them. I play a lot of spvp. Even though it’s pretty terrible now it’s still a good way to battle test your builds against equally geared players without coughing up gold.

My still favorite pvp necro build is the same for all pvp, though I swap the skills based on what kind of pvp and what map ie how much mobility is needed and do I want Epidemic.

It’s 0/30/20/0/20 with Reaper’s Protection, Terror, Greater Marks and Master of Terror and staff/scepter, usually with focus and usually with Nightmare runes. If you want range I think this is the best Necro can do. Condition + terror is a LOT better than just condition. A tradeoff is that Death Shroud is mostly defensive with condition builds.

I see Khalifahaze posted the similar one for dagger, pull the scepter skill and put the 10 somewhere else. Axe works ok now with these builds too.

Yeah thief is tough and in general roaming ones will always be targeting necro because they are looking for the easiest kills. Note that necros are consistently ranked last or second to last as 1v1 opponents.

Hopefully you are 80 and in at least exotics right?

Step 1. If you see them coming have a mark or blind well up. I prefer Staff 3 (chill) and or Staff 5 (fear).

Step 2. If jumped and you have life force hit Death Shroud (remain stunned though). If you have a wurm up, teleport. Spectral Walk breaks stun including Basilisk Venom. Other stun breaks that you are less likely to have are Plague Signet (bad since need to have target and face it now) and Spectral Armor. You won’t always be stunned initially but it’s their strongest opener.

As per above you need to mitigate the initial burst and hurt them some yourself.

The tankier you are the better against thief though smart ones will avoid and dodge marks and stay away from wells. Thiefs prefer to target other GCs + necro and ele. MMs are bad against GC thief because minions react too slowly. Most thief will have decent condition removal.

I prefer axe to dagger against thief. If you start a skill against a thief and they stealth the skill will continue so Ghastly Claws (axe 2) is really good to hurt them and vulnerability is good for if you can land something. If you start dagger 3 (root) against them while visible it will root them.

Flesh golem is really the best elite just for the knockdown. Any good one will move away from plague and hit shortbow until plague is done.

Unfortunately this is just a bad matchup. Most well played good thief builds can beat most necro builds, d/d or d/p / shortbow with a good thief is nearly unbeatable by anything necro, especially if you don’t see them coming.

I think softspoken got at least part of it right. It used to be easier and now seems harder because you need to be on the wall and inside the mark to get the combo indicator. But you might be out of range of the combo message and it could still work when triggered – needs testing!

+ duration on at least some runes wasn’t working as of a few days ago still. The link:dev post was 11 days ago.

I would actually say that probably every necro has tried MM. Why wouldn’t you?

I leveled as one and played one in spvp a lot early on when they were a lot worse. I’ve never really liked the design after playing necros in other games. You do need to wrap your head around the idea of dumb, bad ai minions that don’t work at range, sometimes don’t work at all and take up utility slots but as a whole MM can be effective. They are good pve and good in certain situations for pvp. You are extremely tanky and can do decent damage in static situations while the minions are up and you can see what’s coming.

Thanks for the comments. I’ve played quite a few DS builds over the past months before I settled on this one. Some more:

I didn’t specifically say it but the Eagle runes and Zerker amulet are to stay close to 50% crit chance and 50% crit damage. You will be cutting your damage using anything else.

The 10 in curses is more for the 100 precision than the skill. If I could put 15 in Curses for the Fury with Death Shroud skill I would. This is the best offensive DS skill that I couldn’t fit in.

Have you all actually used Near to Death (5s DS recharge?). When you do you’ll find DS is up faster than you can cycle through your 2 weapon sets and unless you have a lot of life force generation it’ll be even more pointless. DS is just not good enough to skip your other skills for in an offense based build. Don’t forget that there is a bug/feature that prematurely resets DS cooldown also. After many 30 SR builds to get Near to Death, I like it, but it was the first DS ability to be cut. The high life force pool and Near to Death is much better suited to defensive builds.

About Life Blast. The main 2 reasons to use DS are damage absorb and Life Transfer. Dark Path is sloooow and unreliable, Doom is easy to use but a 1s fear without Terror does pretty much nothing in the grand scheme of things. After many builds trying to max Life Blast (usually 30/30/x/x/x) my conclusion is again that it is an ok filler if I need the range, but my time is better spent getting back to marks and Axe 2 or dagger so that I can use Life Transfer again when it’s up. With this build it still does ok damage when I do use it.

Axe Training vs. Close to Death. No contest in this case because a main purpose of this build is to leverage Life Transfer and some Life Blasts.

Kindran – your build will have the same problem most necro builds have. Simply not enough damage. Golf clap for the last to die usually goes to necro though if that’s what you want.

I hope none of that was insulting, I do like the feedback. As we know from our beloved devs necros are solid because they have many build options, none of which are overpowered. This is not good and I’ve been reaching for necro builds that can put up some offensive pressure. Condition is still the easiest way to go for necros for this but power builds have the opportunity to and should leverage more out of DS.

Old Man Voice

Back when the game went live I was playing my thief and warrior and the necros were all complaining about the nerfs from beta. I didn’t try a necro in beta so had no idea what was going on. One of the devs responded to the effect that the key to playing a necro was to use Death Shroud.

This got me intrigued. What is this Death Shroud? I had rarely seen it since in fact almost no one used it.

I played spvp heavily from the start to mess with builds, worked in a necro and he wound up being my first 80. Along with all the other min-maxing everyone tries I’ve worked on maxing Death Shroud right from the start. What a long road this turned out to be – months later I finally have a build that I like. This is obviously a PVP build – I don’t care about kitten PVE.

What is Death Shroud?

I’ll try to keep it simple and will probably fail because DS is not really that simple. Death Shroud can be thought of as a separate weapon set with a separate health pool (that needs to be charged in combat and includes nearby deaths) with the huge utility that it can absorb spike damage, that is if you take damage that exceeds your life force Death Shroud just ends and you go back to your normal health pool. A main point is that it is a separate set of skills including the powerful aoe Life Transfer that should be rotated in on cooldown, hopefully also timed to absorb spike damage ie. 100blades, 100nades, thief.

What is a Death Shroud build?

For me the idea is to have a build that allows me to have Death Shroud available as much as possible and have it be effective which means some kind of power build.

Min-maxing a Death Shroud build

Death Shroud damage is from power/crit so is more effective with a complementary power build.

There are too many Death Shroud traits, most all good, and too many in the Soul Reaping line. This meant a lot of trial and error to get to this build.

After playing many 30/30/x/x/x builds it was painfully obvious that none of them were quite good enough. Glass cannon, not enough life force, and using only dagger and/or axe for mainhand is limiting and overall these builds simply cannot keep up with other class PVT builds if you discount well builds.

Generating life force to always have some on tap wound up being the most important aspect of a DS build for me. Death Shroud is available enough without traiting Near to Death.

With only DS skills 2-4 being really useful there is generally no reason to stay in Death Shroud after using them other than continuing to soak up especially spike damage. If possible then you keep your DS stints limited to save life force and to allow it and the skills to recycle. This means you don’t really need the Vital Persistence trait (life force drains 25% slower). It’s actually better to have consistent life force generation than the bigger life force pool.

After giving up on 30/30/x/x/x and realizing that life force was painful to acquire via any other method, I gave in and went for Soul Marks – 3% life force when marks are triggered. This of course also means Greater Marks would be highly desired. This was the key turning point for me having a Death Shroud build I liked and I am so comfortable with staff after all the necro play that it’s easy to take advantage of what it does well even in a power build.

Adding in the obvious Path of Midnight (DS skills recharge 15% faster) this leaves 40
points. I went 30 Power to get Close to Death and 10 in Curses mostly to boost precision.

The Curses skill to take was obviously Reaper’s Precision to add even more Life Force generation.

In the end I went axe/focus although dagger is ok too and Spiteful Talisman to help the focus leaving just the Master level Spite skill. I currently use Spiteful Spirit to go with the DS theme but the might generation ones are tempting too.

Death Dancer Build

Spite: II, V, XII
Curses: V
Death Magic: II
Blood Magic: None
Soul Reaping: III, X

sPVP Crit/Gear: With Eagle runes, Superior Force Sigils and Berserker Amulet – 47% Crit, 48% Crit Damage.

The Play

Make no mistake – it’s still a glassy build hence the “Dancer”. A sublime reason for picking axe over dagger is that Life Transfer also has a range of 600. It is important to maintain this range with Life Transfer to avoid interrupts, circle strafing works well, and running around with the axe will keep the range fresh in your mind. As per above – rotate skills. Drop your marks on something then axe it up to get your life force started and you should have it available anytime after that. For group play try Well of Blood and Staff 4 for your aoe retaliation combo.

I use staff in my power builds a lot. As per above a big reason is these builds are often not so tankey and it’s good to have the option to back off. Ground target aoe for brawling is annoying but the marks are useful enough that it works.

Other reasons not listed are Well of Blood and Staff 4 are realistically the only self combo for necros (gives aoe retaliation) and Soul Marks is good for generating Life Force so nice with Death Shroud builds. I don’t know why I don’t see Death Shroud builds here maybe I’ll post mine.

This seems like a non issue compared to many other things … like say invisible engineers killing you in 3 seconds.

I’ve hot joined games and gotten as much as 40% life force immediately which is nice but also usually means I’m on Team Suck. Anyway, I have no problem with this particular facet of GW2 as I’ve played lots of games where better skills need some kind of buildup and this is no different.

Well to stay on topic … minion master is great for pve. I leveled mostly as a MM. It can be good for pvp against non-aoe peeps but has the huge drawback of your skill slots being taken up by minions. As I’ve posted before for me at least necro does have a best all purpose build and that’s staff/scepter/focus condition/fear/terror with Spectral Walk and I also usually have Signet of the Locust. 0/30/20/0/20 obvious build.

Bas.7406:

30/30/0/10/0

I run 30/30 a lot. You’re a glass cannon and need to use dagger a lot to get life force. I also use Eagle runes but can do longer boon too if you want to chill. A few skill sets work well together. For the 10 I usually go Greater Marks now but Path of Midnight, Vampiric Precision and a couple others work. After many times playing this I feel forced to use a Focus for Spinal Shivers then Spiteful Talisman and Chill of Death go well with that. I still feel like Necro damage is subpar and the utility of marks and all the chill help make up for it.

Have to say, I’ve always thought axe should be a 900 range weapon from the first time I used it.

You can’t kill anyone because necros are the worst class in the game. The patches have helped a little but not nearly enough. Thanks to Kravick and SupahSpankeh for an accurate assessment of the class. Skip the “I killed this lowbie once in pvp” posts. The one thing necros are good at is supporting dedicated groups. They are not good at too many things including mobility for chase and escape, burst damage, finishing and lack of stability is a glaring problem. Unfortunately a lot of pvp devolves into 1v1 fights which necros are not good at unless you’re fighting those lowbies or got very lucky in your build matchup. You best bet is to stay with the herd, go condition/fear/terror staff/sceptor and hope the people you run into are weak against condition. Use spectral grasp and a focus to keep the ones you can actually kill close by.

Hah that’s a funny wurm story. I’ve gotten it on ledges in time once in awhile. I always have teleport on my ele and don’t use the wurm at all now on my necro – that’s how different they are in utility to me. Spectral walk is a given for most pvp though and I often have Signet of the Locust too.

Necro is not the best roamer. Lack of a good teleport and mobility in general, lack of front loaded burst damage and no great way to finish downed people are all problems. Check this out WvW Guardian Roamer though, it has good tips about building and having a plan of attack.

I really like 1h sword for pve too, but somehow that doesn’t translate into good for pvp. It’s just harder to get the burst when I need it in pvp.