OChunx

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!

Purpose:  In effect, what I intend to do is expose ArenaNet of lies, deceit, and otherwise facilitating or spreading  false information for the sole purpose of garnering favor, attention, and playtime from the general public and its customers.  I intend to do this relatively systematically with use of direct quotes from the company, a list of facts, occasionally brief personal experiences and commentary, and a logical conclusion.

(This was originally designed for the official forum, although due to length I am posting elsewhere and I hope to have an abbreviated form on the official site soon.  I have taken careful consideration to keep this post from being incendiary or rude to the community, the players, and of course, the ArenaNet staff.  Any names cited, were for sole purpose of attributing ownership to used quotes and not meant to insult, or be otherwise disresectful to anyone.  I hope you agree, that I have followed the Code of Conduct to the best of my ability, to keep this thread from being deleted and to inspire useful discussions by all parties involved.)

Let’s start with something small.  It’s the moment to moment details that reveal the work ethic of a company and its concern for its players.  For those who don’t know Final Rest was a staff discovered in the game files that is visually unique and appealing to many.  However, for months the staff could not be found in-game.  Many player’s attempted to go to the forums, ask questions in interviews/AMAs, and even message employee’s in-game to discover it’s location or to show ArenaNet that it was indeed bugged.

Final Rest:

“I can’t give away any spoilers, but I can confirm that I’ve looked at the loot tables, and it is in the game. It’s a very rare reward from defeating a boss in the open world.”

"Just a quick note—I said the odds of it dropping was closer to .005 than the 1 in a million or so that was tossed out. Those aren’t the exact odds, but if my math is correct, 10 players running the event every day might expect one staff to drop after about 7 months. (And we haven’t been out that long.)"

-All from Jeffery Vaughn

The Facts:

-There are easily more than 10 (albeit likely different) people who participate in the event daily with various amounts of magic find.  

-We were told it was not a bug, but a rare spawn that would take 10 players 7 months to see a single staff drop.

-In six months post-launch, we have not seen a single Final Rest.

-March patch = boom hundreds of Final Rests.

Logical Conclusion:  When you said you “boosted” the drop rate in a recent quote, you really meant included it in the drop table bug free, and decreased it’s rarity several logs.

Question in a Recent Interview: Where's Final Rest?

Colin: Someday you will all discover it and everybody will be really excited.

How does a bug fix on a staff dropping from an event that many people do daily, make us all “really excited”?

As easily surmised, it’s not only easy, but probable a company will be make poorly worded quotes without malicious intent.

Ascended Gear

Let’s move to the now infamous ascended gear debate, albeit briefly.  There are many arguments for either side that has been said and heard hundreds, if not thousands of times. I intend to avoid it, and expose direct quotes which are plainly “wrong.”

Ascended Gear Quotes:

“We absolutely design everything we do with minimal grind and will continue with this principal moving forward.”

-Chris Whiteside

What is your/ANet’s definition of grind?

Repetitive game play that is not fun. –Chris Whiteside

These quotes were taken from a Reddit AMA in November of last year.  At the time Ascended gear could only be achieved through Fractals, a mistake that was later admitted to by the company.  We have since moved to several, yet still unachievable in major features of the game like WvW, options of achieving them.  You can do dailies for approximately a month for each ascended piece of gear. You can farm guild missions and commendations, and achieve them through a combination of gold and commendations, or 40 laurels and 50 ectoplasms. Or you can simply gain some from Fractals, or a combination of materials (gained from Fractals) and craft your own.  The problem is that these are largely out of reach by a majority of the playerbase without investment of significant “grinding.”  Dailies are often the definition of “do these things every day” and achieve a small reward.  ArenaNet has now provided a diversity of things that we can do to achieve a daily, which has only missed the point.  If you kill 20 rabbits one day, and then are asked to kill 20 underwater creatures the next, that doesn’t suddenly change the nature of the daily. It’s intended to be a short repetitive activity that is completed daily or nearly daily to artificially create a form of progression for an item.  It’s still repetitive…and as one of the few opinions in this thread, is not fun.  I have yet to find myself, friends, guildmates, or anyone exclaim “I’m excited to do my daily today!”

Recent Events

Let’s move to the current January/February Release window and talk about a quote that has been thrown around quite a bit by the community, and examine the recent releases of content.

January/February Release Quote:

"But January and February are actually our biggest updates to date. They’re even bigger than all the stuff we did in October, November and December. And I think that when people see how much stuff they’re gonna get for no monthly fee in January and February, they’re probably going to be blown away. These two months combined are basically an expansion’s worth of content for free."
-Colin Johanson

The Facts:
-The WvW patch that was slated for January, was pushed back to February, and then moved back to March was originally intended in the “expansion worth of content” Colin was referring to at the time.

-There are usually around 5 major features in each patch, which typically include, for lack of a better word, content.

-2 of the 5 for February’s patch were “Choosing Your Own Daily Achievements” and Previewing on the Trading Post.

-The only additional content increase in February were a couple of cash shop items, a new sPvP map, and essentially the addition of portals and non-unique enemies in the Living Story.  

-January included guesting that was intended to be included at launch, an improved achievement system, and bug fixes to WvW.  

-The major points of a patch should not include bug-fixes and revamps of existing, broken content.  

Logical Conclusion: What we have seen is nothing even resembling an expansion worth of content.  (Even if you want to include March’s content, which admittedly has yet to be fully revealed, it would not resemble an expansion.)

WvW

Let’s move to WvW, arguably one of ArenaNet’s most popular features.  In six months of release, the only thing added to WvW were bug fixes.  Instead of attempting to stop hacks and exploits by single players, ArenaNet chose to simply remove the orb system.  Before everything was incredibly dynamic, due to mismanagement in realm populations (free realm transfers for roughly five months again due to guesting), and no, we see the opposite side of that coin, it’s static to the point of decay.  Realm ranks are hardly changing, and each week the story seems to remain the same.  The same realms place 1st, 2nd, or 3rd each week, rarely changing tiers.  No forms of progression or reward have been added in six months, and we are holding on the promise that the WvW patch will come out next month.  Even with the promise of new content, it’s the length of time that has passed that is discouraging for many of us.  

We have seen dungeon revamp after dungeon revamp, waiting for you to finally get it right.  We have watched you include temporary content again and again, without adding to the core of the game.  We have been waiting for ArenaNet to wake up and improve on their original design.

Let’s examine material that has yet to be fully made, that holds the potential of promise, and a return to original design principles:

The Living Story

We have seen two installments of the story, with the promise of much more exciting material to come in March.  

The Facts:

-The first installment included random NPCs walking towards two major cities in two zones that “needed” aid.  

-It included collecting mementos, fixing signs, and curing the cripple condition off them, with less than 5 unique dynamic events and a single title to come with it.

-The second installment now includes two main objectives, fighting portal-spawning enemies, and providing refugees with lost items.  

Logical Conclusion:  There are not a lot of content or interesting things to do in-game involving the living story.

An addition of twenty dynamic events would arguably have more content than these last two installments of the living story.  There is nothing that makes it special, unique, rewarding or even interesting to the average player.  And once again, we are relying on a promise by Angel McCoy, a chief architect along with Ree Soesbee and Jeff Grubb that created the lackluster personal story.  Even worse, it appears as though ArenaNet is making the same mistakes.  

“In order to make this easier on ourselves, and on you, we’ll be introducing a set of characters specific to the Living Story, at the end of March. Hint: one’s a norn, and one’s a charr.”
-Angel McCoy

The Facts:

-In both the Lost Isles Patch and the Halloween patch,the ArenaNet team was largely criticized for a lackluster, initial phase of events because there weren’t many things a player could do.

-The Personal Story was largely criticized for revolving around a NPC rather than the player, making the player feel less than heroic.

-The Living Story appears to have the same flaws as both the previous patches and Personal Story.  

Logical Conclusion:

ArenaNet is not learning from past mistakes.



I could use this remaining time to talk about the blatant lack of additional skins to the game.  The large majority of skins released have been temporary releases.  I could elaborate more on the failures of the Personal Story, and the complete reluctance by ArenaNet to address or fix it.  I could address the growing concern by sPvP players that ArenaNet is not doing enough for the e-sport community.  However, I think by now you understand my point.  I am not satisfied with the games progress post-launch, nor do I find it acceptable for ArenaNet to continue to make false claims nor learn from previous self-admitted mistakes.

In conclusion, this post is meant to raise public awareness of ArenaNet’s past remarks and errors, and enact change to the game to make it better.  ArenaNet, you can do better.

-Aeneas
Sanctum of Rall

In a couple of weeks I'm sure they will elaborate it a bit more and call it "expanding the existing features."

Basically we will get 2-3 new events in Orr, another useless NPC who runs around and drops crap items, and a reform of the WvW achievement system.

2/3 of these features will be broken, obviously, and they will have no ETA on when it will be fixed.

Add to this a couple of nerfs to drop rate that are called bug fixes, along with a nerf to ranger Longbow damage by 10% and we are ready to call it GW2 version 2.1.

they should focus on the trading post exploiters,who make thousands of gold just because they have thousands of gold.A person can buy 100 $ worth of gold from gold farmers and double that money in an hour,arenanet doesn't do anything about these people who are creating artificial prices,they ban some poor sucker who tried to get 50 ectos to craft some backpiece.

Thanks for posting, Chunx! I updated the OP with your suggestions.

As for Terror, since it does more damage the higher your condition damage stat (30% of the stat), I was getting 779 and 1169 (with a condition on the foe) damage from terror at 1389 condition damage. This scales with the Pizza, the Sigil of Corruption stacks, and the might from Blood is Power.

With a base of 1389 condition damage, from the Mists tests, you get:



Now I just started working with Terror (well, since the update that made it possibly good) but so far I'm liking the numbers I'm seeing. It gives another incentive to use a fear and has some of the best "burst" we can do as condition Necros.

Welcome to my guide!

I will be updating constantly, so be sure to check back

periodically to catch all the new additions!

2 Feb - Latest Update: Updated the Runes section under Gear and Stats

• 20 Jan: Added link to my hybrid build topic
• 10 Jan: Added all the minor traits and a small sample of a build discussion.
• 8 Jan: Added section on Curses minor traits and a special section about Target the Weak. Changed format to include the use of [ spoiler ] tags to make things a little easier to navigate.
• 7 Jan 2013: removed the "legacy" section. Will be incorporating parts of build and trait discussion into the main, and now only, section.

This guide focuses on the Necromancer reaching +100% bleed duration through traits, runes, and consumables. This topic will serve as an analysis of what it means to have +100% bleed duration, and how this affects your play as Necromancer.

Because of the way bleeding does damage, having +100% duration is the only way to ensure that all your bleeds from all sources are never denied some damage because of a fraction of a second.

In this guide I will go into some degree of depth with some ways to achieve +100% bleed duration and what that means for you as a player. There will be math and spreadsheets. I like spreadsheets.

In this section I will explain how bleeding works and how it is affected by doubling its duration.

In this section we look at what skills the Necromancer can use to put bleeding on its target.

In this section we look at exactly how to go about increasing your bleed duration, and gear synergizes well with a focus on bleed duration and damage.
In this section we will go over some select minor and major traits. Let's take a look at each trait line individually and see what benefits we can get from investing our points.

In this section I want to talk about some basic build templates you can use to take advantage of your new-found extra bleed duration. These are my suggestions for build ideas and are really just templates. Use them more as a jumping-off point than something set in stone.

• Finish the Traits section
  
• Add some build suggestions and ideas
  
• More pictures!

Thank you so much for reading. If you have any comments or suggestions please feel free to leave them below, I will try to respond to all of them! Remember this guide is constantly evolving, and your contributions help shape it.

more game less gambling

The number of people that complained about how hard it was to pull this off (especially with it being hotjoin...you could jump into a game that already failed the achievement) on these and the official forums makes it pretty clear to me that your 90% stat falls under the "90% of all stat listed on the internet are made up" category.

And, really, just why are you so butthurt over it, anyhow?  Since there is no title associated with it, it's not as if it helps your e-peen.  Get over yourself, you're gonna hurt something patting yourself on the back so much.

Careful, any method of farming not intended by A-net will be nerfed (and some methods intended)

Arduin, on 20 December 2012 - 05:43 PM, said:

I had to turn off my dialog sounds just for that single npc... the most annoying voice in game

The Metrica Province Fire Elemental in the Thaumanova Reactor.

Jason Seven, on 19 December 2012 - 07:48 PM, said:

my,my what a pro player we have here,so you're the noob pug i pick up from time to time who spends all his time on the floor?

Castaa, on 14 December 2012 - 10:03 PM, said:

Does this count as a trinity?

i won't wonder if this scavenger hunt will require you to turn over 2000 vials of powerful blood and 1000 corrupted lodestone to an npc to carry on.

CoF mixed with T3 racial and TA legs