kendro1200

Hey all, I've been working on this necromancer build over the last month, and it really came together with the axe and focus buffs in the last patch. This build uses two weaponsets -- axe/focus and dagger/warhorn, and swaps between them. It focuses on stacking might and vulnerability on the target while maintaining enough melee control to stay alive. This is NOT a WvW build or an open world PvE build, and I'd assume it sucks at both. I'm calling it the wraith because you phase in and out of melee range on a target as you swap weapons.

The core of the build is +70% condition duration and +80% might duration which lets you stack both might and vulnerability on the target up to around 20 stacks consistently. A long standing sigil bug (shared CD between swap sigils and on-crit sigils) prevents it from getting to 25 stacks in either.

Some terms I'm using in this guide that you may not be familiar with:

BUILD: (30/20/20/0/0)

As usual with many necromancer builds, the major trait picks are very flexible. There are a few required picks though, and so I'll explain what they are, and what options are available.

30 Spite

20 Curses

20 Death Magic

Gear/Runes/Food:
You want to wear as much berserker gear as you feel comfortable in, and soldiers or split picks of knights/valks to make up the difference. Necros are in the relatively unique boat that their HP and Armor are well balanced (HP ~= 10*Armor), and this build doesn't put out much healing. I'm currently sitting at 45mil effective HP, which is the minimum level for meleeing a dungeon. Less than 45 million is considered more or less glass cannon, while more is increasingly durable. We're going to toe the line with this build, and count on dodges, well timed heals, party support, etc. to stay up. If you feel less comfortable playing squishy, don't hesitate to wear more soldiers gear to bring yourself to a comfortable level. Remember, dead = 0 DPS.

As for runes, take 2 sup. strength, 2 sup. hoelbrak, 2 sup. fire, for a total of +75 power and +60% might duration. This provides the bulk of your might duration, and without it, the build kinda falls apart.

For sigils, you want a sigil of battle on each weaponset. The other sigil has some options. Ideally, we want the sigil of strength on your other weapon, so we can get up additional stacks of might. Or we'd like the sigil of fragility to get additional stacks of vulnerability up on the target and help out our party. But both are on-crit sigils, and due to a longstanding bug, on-crit sigils share a CD with on-swap sigils. So the 9-10s CD on the sigil of battle permanently locks you out of any on-crit sigil, or any other on-swap sigil. The sigil of battle provides 9 stacks of extremely consistent might, and so dropping it is inadvisable. So that leaves us with less desirable options. First, we have the sigil of force which increases our damage by 5%. Second, we have the sigil of bloodlust which gets us 250 additional power. From a pure theory stand point, the sigil of bloodlust is better. However, because stacks are lost upon entering an instance, and upon going down, it's difficult to keep 25 stacks of bloodlust up at all times. Since the sigil of force gets you most of the way there (for me, the sigil of bloodlust is a 6.8% boost to EP, while the sigil of force is exactly 5%), and requires no upkeep, I'm currently favoring it. The sigil of bloodlust is the better option though if you can keep the stacks up.

As for food, there's no option but to take Rare Veggie Pizzas. It gives you +40% condition duration, which takes your total condition duration bonus to +70%, allowing you to maintain 20 stacks of vulnerability even while weaponswapping constantly. For this build to work, you have to ensure the food buff is on you at all times. Otherwise you'll lose most of your vuln stacks every time you swap weapons, and be starting from scratch. This makes you less effective, both in terms of damage output, and party support.

Weapons:

Your sets are axe/focus + dagger/warhorn. I'm playing with the idea of a variant that drops the warhorn in favor of just 3 weapons (axe/focus + dagger) so you're always on focus when you swap. This of course sacrifices an interrupt and some aoe damage, and it'll take some testing before I'll have any recommendations on the matter. But for now, here's how you play the weaponsets you have available with this build.

Axe

Spoiler

Stack vulnerability with axe 1, and burst with axe 2 whenever it's off CD. Save axe 3 for trash fights where party wide retaliation and aoe cripple are most effective. Back off to range when you're on axe so that your heals have a chance to come off CD, and you absorb less damage. You also lack the melee control that dagger/warhorn gives you so you're less able to avoid damage coming your way. So get out of there! This dual nature is where the name of the build comes from, since every 10s you're phasing in and then out.

This is probably the tougher weapon to master because when you're on axe, you want to be both dealing damage and stacking vulnerability, but they're somewhat contradictory tasks since axe 2 and axe 1 are so vastly different. Balancing your usage of these two skills is key to mastering this build.

Dagger

Focus

Warhorn

Utilities
First, Blood is Power. It's the necro's best friend. I can't imagine a PvE build that doesn't run it. And we're built to make it as awesome as humanly possible. 10 stacks of might for 21s on a 24s CD, it doesn't get much better than that.

The other two slots are very open and you can pick your favorites. You can help your AOE situation by running epidemic to help the party out by spreading vulnerability around. You can run wells. You can run signets. It's really up to you. My favorites? I run wells when I'm in a party that doesn't coordinate fields. I've always loved wells, and love dishing out that aoe damage. And they do massive damage with this build. But some groups are well coordinated and very good at this game, and so they'll have noticed that dark fields are pretty much always superceded by some other field. For example, a scepter/dagger support ele is gonna be dropping blast finishers on a fire field for party-wide might to clean up trash extra quick and burst bosses when it's important. In this case, a poorly timed well can *ruin* the entire party's effectiveness. And besides, who's a dick to their dungeon group and *doesn't* bring signet of undeath? So what I do now is generally run the signet of undeath, and swap my utilities for every fight. Sometimes I just want a little more power, other times I want to clean up trash. I'll come back to this section later and fill in more details on how to pick situational utilities.

Combat:
This build is focused on single target take down, i.e. boss fights. The idea is to flash death shroud and swap weapons every 10 seconds, on the nose. Death shroud gets you ~6 seconds of fury, and swapping weapons adds 3 stacks of might for nearly 30s. The result is a 60% fury uptime, and 9 stacks of pretty much constant might after 30 seconds into a fight. This means you're not at peak performance in short fights, and you have a 30 second warm-up period. It's a definite downside to this build. But you can get most of the way there instantly, and so you're not worthless in short fights. You're more like 75% effective after a well placed cast of Reaper's Touch (RT) / Blood is Power (BiP). Maintaining peak effectiveness takes practice to get the hang of. This is *not* an easy build to master. You need to get into the habit of popping death shroud and weapon swapping every 10 seconds, on the nose. While keeping up your damaging attacks (dagger 1 / axe 2), building vulnerability while on axe/focus, and keeping BiP on CD at all times. And you need to keep yourself alive.

Against trash you want to walk in with dagger equipped. Flash death shroud, pop focus 4, BiP, swap to axe, and hit 3 early in the fight. This will give you 13 stacks of might, put vulnerability on as much of the trash as possible, and pass retaliation out when it's most important. Then pick the strongest target, auto attack to build vulnerability on him (and use epidemic if you're running it), and start weapon swapping when it's off CD.

Against bosses, it's less important which weaponset you open with, since the fight is much longer. Get your might up, start stacking vulnerability, and start swapping weapons as appropriate. The idea is to phase in and out as appropriate for the fight and the weaponset you're on. While on axe, build vulnerability with axe 1 / focus 4 (keep focus 4 on CD against single targets), and burst as often as possible with axe 2. When the 10s are up, flash DS/swap weapons, and dart in there really put some numbers up with dagger 1. Use the other 4 weapon skills to keep yourself alive. It's more important than doing damage, I promise. And when the 10s are up, swap back and retreat to 600 range. In some fights, melee range is just too dangerous. Hell, sometimes axe range is too dangerous. Keep a staff handy in your inventory just in case. Again, dead = 0 dps. Play smart, maximize vulnerability, maximize might, maximize damage dealt, minimize damage taken.

Be the wraith -- deadly, but untouchable.

I'll add more as I see fit, and as I tweak the build.

Thanks for reading!

chefwaffle, on 22 February 2013 - 01:26 PM, said:

Everyone CAN do it. Just not everyone that can START it.

GW1 had a combat system that emphasized managing bars: health bars for healing, skill activation bars for interruption, (your own) energy bar.

GW2 is much more about watching what happens in the game instead of the GUI.

I prefer GW2, but is it better? Hard to answer, seems like an apples - oranges thing.

it isn't a step backwards because it's a different entity altogether, they don't walk the same tangent

plus GW1's combat, and I mean strictly combat, is a relic of an old age, standstill combat RPG style. GW2's combat at least has a semblance of being more modern, ability to move while casting, no "mana" (besides initiative), etc.

If you're talking about designing builds, then yes it is a step backwards, they stripped their skill system of it's customization and added traits, which aren't adequate enough to replace what was taken away, which sucks hard because I loved designing builds and teams in GW1, it was half the fun for me.

yep jumping is useless, except for jumping puzzles of course, but it's still extremely limited in function.

Dodge is okay, it's not impressive sure but it definitely is an interesting mechanic and adds dynamic to combat.

However, I like that they took away dedicated healing classes, though sometimes I do miss the holy trinity, having everything spread out like this has it's perks. Teams are no longer synergized by class but rather by build, which allows groups to be able to substitute certain classes with others that are slightly different in functionality but still retains the same motif to builds teams that are varied but still equal in effectiveness (replacing 1 class with a control build with another class with a control build, they both serve the same general purpose, but bring different things to the table in the end). this would've been even better than it is now if GW2 had the proper customization, but unfortunately it doesn't.

JACK the Somnolent, on 09 February 2013 - 09:51 PM, said:

There's absolutely no difference in "gimmicky" content between Guild Wars 1 and Guild Wars 2. You mention Urgoz's warren. Um...room effects? Binding Chains and near-instagib aoe that swarms every player regardless of being targeted by the objective? Oh, and the two adds with the boss that heal him. Yeah, that's totally not gimmicky. UW: forcing the split of the group to deal with four boss-level mesmers with tons of mesmer and AoE elementalist adds. Not gimmicky at all.

Give me a break. All "challenging" content in a video game NEEDS to be due to gimmicks. So either you can protest the gimmicks and instead run around killing bunnies and moa birds all day, or you can adapt to the content and learn how to overcome the chall....I mean gimmicks. Or you could quit. But you'd be a hypocrite for quitting this game and not your other games.

I honestly feel that those who have such angst about GW2's "gimmicks" that they'd spend hours whinging on a forum about it are simply those who refuse/fail to adapt to the new playstyle of GW2, which the gimmicks were built around. There's nothing in this game that's impossible to finish. It's only impossible to finish something if you refuse to learn how.

Puandro, on 08 February 2013 - 09:59 PM, said:

Tested and confirmed. The damage difference was an awe-inspiring 4%, as the axe has relatively high base damage to begin with. Add in a focus for Reaper's Mark vulnerability stacking and this difference shifts to about 8% in the axe's favor.

Amusingly, the axe's base damage is higher than the dagger's, so that's another pro in favor of the axe over the dagger. Also, the OP was asking whether he should choose the axe or dagger for the alternate weapon, and I am fairly sure that a staff is neither.

Regardless, point well taken, but this discussion is axe vs. dagger, not axe vs. dagger vs. staff.

Rule number one: Never compare your damage to a Warrior.

Conditionmancers have so many options to handle conditions on them that speccing into Vitality is rarely worth it. Stick with Rabid.

So you are annoyned because you can not abuse broken shit and that "correct" class you picked is not going to get you invites to party?

Door is that way, please close it from the othe side so that you can cry behind it.

I had a bit of free time so I thought I might as well slap together a list of changes I thought up for some of the more underpowered Necromancer skills and traits.

SKILLS
Axe
General: Increase range of all axe skills except Unholy Feast to 900m.
Rending Claws: Increase damage by 1.4x.

Dagger
Necrotic Bite: Cripple target for 1 second upon attack hitting. (Mimics Flesh Golem)
Life Siphon: Decrease duration of skill to 3 seconds (down from 3 1/2) but do not decrease overall damage.

Death Shroud:
Doom: Increase duration of fear to 1.5 seconds.

Dagger (off-hand)
Deathly Swarm: Improve tracking to stop it from being obstructed too easily by terrain.

Staff:
Necrotic Grasp: Increase projectile speed.

Warhorn:
Locust Swarm: Decrease cooldown to 25 seconds.

Utilities:
Blood is Power: Increase duration of self-bleed to 15 seconds. Increase initial damage of skill by 1.5x.
Corrosive Poison Cloud: Decrease cooldown to 30 seconds. Decrease duration to 8 seconds (currently 12) but have the time interval between application pulses be 2 seconds instead of 3. If an opponent dies or is downed while standing in the Corrosive Poison Cloud a Jagged Horror will be spawned. (If an opponent dies and is downed they will spawn 2 jagged horrors.)
Plague Signet: Fix bugs on Plague Signet.
Signet of Spite: Reduce cooldown to 60 seconds. Improve condition damage instead of power. Spell no longer inflicts Cripple. Also applies fear upon activation for 2 seconds.
Signet of the Locust: Decrease cooldown to 50 seconds.
Spectral Armor: Reduce cooldown to 60 seconds. Reduce duration of Protection and Spectral Armor to 4 seconds, but also have skill grant Stability for 4 seconds.
Spectral Grasp: Fix tracking on skill.
Spectral Walk: Make shadowy "trail" invisible to all but the user. Current function of Spectral Walk is too flashy, allows for opponents to punish use of skill, and punishes enemy players playing on low graphics options due to it.
Well of Corruption: Have Well of Corruption inflict Poison for 1 second per pulse.
Well of Suffering: Reduce overall damage to 0.75x that of current but have it inflict Cripple for 1 second per pulse.
Well of Power: Reduce cooldown to 45 seconds.
Lich Form: The activation time of Mark of Horror is decreased to 1.5 seconds. Deathly Claws will now steal 150 HP upon hitting an opponent.

Minions:
General: Allow minions to move while attacking.
Improve AI by having minions focus on whoever you are attacking.
Minions will no longer stand idle in combat.
All minions will automatically focus on your target if you command a minion to use a skill on the target.
Cooldowns on minions (with the exception of Flesh Golems) will start the moment they are summoned instead of counting down upon death. Jagged Horrors will also not trigger the death-of-minion voice line.

Summon Blood Fiend: Blood Fiends, like Jagged Horrors, will now slowly lose HP via two unremovable Bleeds. The health-stealing of Blood Fiends will also heal the Blood Fiends. Increase health of Blood Fiends by 1.2x.
Taste of Death: Now has an inbuilt cooldown of 20 seconds.
Summon Bone Fiend: Increase cooldown to 35 seconds. Bone fiends now do 1.2x more damage. Upon a bone fiend's death it will spawn a jagged horror. Increase health of Bone Fiends by 1.2x.
Rigor Mortis: Decrease cooldown to 40 seconds. Also applies one Bleed to Bone Fiend for 10 seconds upon activation.
Summon Bone Minions: Increase damage by 1.1x.
Putrid Explosion: Applies poison for 2 seconds upon detonation.
Summon Flesh Wurm: Attacks now inflict 2 stacks of vulnerability for 3 seconds. When a Flesh Wurm dies it spawns a jagged horror.
Summon Shadow Fiend: Increase cooldown to 35 seconds.
Haunt: Also fears foes for 1 second. Increase cooldown to 30 seconds.
Summon Flesh Golem: Upon death, the Flesh Golem will spawn two special Bone Minions. These Bone Minions will behave like normal minions but cannot use Putrid Explosion. Upon their death the Bone Minions will spawn two Jagged Horrors each. Increase cooldown of Flesh Golem to 80 seconds. Cooldown on Flesh Golem will start as the Flesh Golem dies, when the Bone Minions are summoned.
Jagged Horrors (general): Upon attacking an opponent Jagged Horrors will inflict one stack of bleed for 3 seconds.

TRAITS
Spite:
Spiteful Removal: Change effect to "Whenever you strip a boon from a foe you lose a condition." No internal cooldown.
Spiteful Spirit: Grants retaliation for 4 seconds instead of 3.
Signet Power: Now gives 5 stacks of might instead of 3. Also grants Fury for 10 seconds.
Axe Training: Increase axe damage to 1.25x instead of 1.15x.

Curses:
Terror: Fearing an opponent also Blinds them for 4 seconds. This blind will not trigger the extra damage from Terror.

Death Magic:
Reanimator: Reduce cooldown to 25 seconds.
Dark Armor: Change functionality to "Gain 400 toughness while channeling or while in Death Shroud."
Ritual of Protection: Change functionality to "Wells apply protection for 1 second for every pulse."
Staff Mastery: Also increases damage of Necrotic Grasp by 1.1x.
Shrouded Removal: Change functionality to "Lose a condition every 4 seconds while in Death Shroud."
Flesh of the Master: All minions except Blood Fiends and Jagged Horrors also regenerate health outside of combat.

Blood Magic:
Dagger Mastery: Dagger spells recharge 20% faster instead of 15%.
Deathly Invigoration: Also grants regen for 4 seconds.
Fetid Consumption: Change functionality to "Whenever you remove a condition from yourself you apply 5 seconds of poison to enemies within 250m. 5 second cooldown."
Vampiric Rituals: Increase life stealing by 1.2x and also apply 2 stacks of bleeding to enemies affected for 3 seconds.

Soul Reaping:
Fear of Death: Life Leech also cancels out downed state's HP degeneration while you use it.
Decaying Swarm: Activation of this trait also breaks stun.
Master of Terror: Trait also applies to blinds.

They aren't the easiest opponents to fight, but certainly not impossible. Keep an eye out for shatters - if you see all the clones start running towards you it's time to dodge. Stack conditions on the mesmer, use aoe to deal with the illusions and keep your distance.

Also, if you want to play dirty, call a target on the real mesmer. That way you'll always know which one to aim for.

I seriously dont understand what anyone who has played any other mmo has to bitch about at all about GW2 economy or its TP. Its been one of the easiest and most lucrative I have come across in any MMO and I dont play the market at all. Everything you want to buy is there and most of it is extremely affordable. Making money is easy. I see all these posts about how its so hard and scratch my head assuming they either A. dont want to put forth any effort what so ever to make money or B. sit in WVWVW all day and expect to make tons of it. (which by the way you still can if you farm the nodes / mats and what not.)

There are those who have extreme amounts of money yes. Show me a MMO where that is not the case. I assure you I am not one of them, play 3 hours a night about 4-5 days a week, dont go out of my way to "play the market" at all and have made enough to buy full Tier 3 and build back up to a comfortable amount in short order. Simply runnig dungeons and gathering mats as you run about nets you MORE than enough to bounce all over the map, repair and generally get whatever you want so long as your willing to do it.

What ever you put up for a reasonalbe price sells. Always and usually quite quickly. What ever you want to buy is there for a price for you to be had. Whats not to like?

I've seen it written in this thread multiple times that crafting is useless and a money sink. You guys must be playing a different game then me... I make 10-15g a day by buying things off the TP, crafting and then selling the final product. There are currently over 500 items that you can craft for a profit.

I personally see nothing in that massively article that's worth paying any attention to whatsoever.  We have a self proclaimed "economy junkie" (no other meaningful credentials) who makes a totally unsupported claim that the economy is "bad" and who goes on to provide no specifics about what that means.  There is no form of objective measurement presented, nor is there even any detail given the what it is about the economy he views as "bad".  

Judging by most of the comments, I have little faith that the average MMO player (let alone the crazy obsessive ones who write articles like that one) has any real understanding of what goes into an economy or what a successful economy should entail.  Let's face it, if you're spending 40 hours a week playing a video game, its not all that likely that you have the training or experience to understand the minute details of economic theory.  If Warren Buffet or the Koch brothers make a comment on the GW2 economy, we should probably listen... but when "xXx Legolas the tall xXx" starts spouting off (and there's no other reason to believe he knows what he's talking about) we should all do the smart thing and simply ignore whatever Sarah Palin speak is coming out of their mouth.

I'm speaking from my experience with my main, a lv 80 Necro, and my alt, a lv 80 Mesmer.

Necro is amazing for melting faces with AoE, be it epidemic transferring 25 stacks of bleeding, poison, burning, and anything else that tickles your fancy, or multiple wells and Life Transfer. Necros always have options when it comes to damaging something. However, where Necros fall short are in burst situations, Necros have a lack of burst healing or damage, and next to no access to stun breakers or vigor, often leaving Death Shroud to act as a psuedo-stun break/burst damage sponge.

On the flip side, Mesmers have access to a lot of stun breakers (Blink/Decoy are amazing) and nearly constant vigor with a few points in dueling. This allows them to spec quite heavily into damage and still be relatively sturdy. Currently I am running a pow/crit build, have 3200 power, 45% Crit Chance, and 95% crit damage, and I'm quite enjoying it, especially since with Blink, I can get out of many a sticky situation and Distortion (With the roll-clones) + the perma-vigor from my traits make me quite survivable.

Both are good, and while both can "overlap" occasionally, they fulfill different roles to be sure.