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GW2 Necro Condition build

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Bhak

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I am thinking of running with this in pvp.

Updated build 7/30 using the suggestions below. I did something crazy and picked the Rune of the Soldier to boost toughness and vitality. With this I have almost 29k health and condition damage is respectable.

http://www.gw2build.com/builds/cursing-vamp-necro-cond-condition-bleed-1253.html

New Stats
Power :1560
Precision :1291
Toughness :966
Vitality :1975
Attack :2586
WeaponDamage :1026
ConditionDamage :1098
CritChance :31.86
CritDamage :20
Armor :1886
Defense :50
HP :28962
Healing :200

Focus is conditions for damage. Following is the summary of build abilities.... Highlighted bleed benefits in red which are my primary source of damage and life siphon in yellow.

Critical hits cause bleeding
20 % increase bleeding duration
Gain fury in Death Shroud (increases your chance to score a critical hit by 20%.)
Cast Enfeeble when entering Death Shroud (applies weakness and bleeding)
Increases damage for each condition on a foe
Conditions from Scepter skills last longer
Gain 5 seconds of regeneration when your health reaches 90% (30-second cooldown).
Siphon health whenever you critical hit.
Siphon health whenever you hit and enemy
Move faster when wielding a dagger
Life Force fills faster
Life Force drains slower
Gain Spectral Armor at 50% health (60-second cooldown).
Surrounded by a Locust Swarm at 25% health.

60% chance to do a 5s bleed on a critical hit
Bleed nearby foes when switching to 2nd weapon set.
 
If condition damage is your goal, would Spite be better than Soul Reaping so those conditions deal damage for longer? Signet mastery would certainly directly contribute to that end. I just don't see soul reaping being that useful to your current goal.
 
Valid points.

I chose points into DS in order to counter spike damage builds (via the second health pool) while my bleeds tick and my skills are on cooldown. I automatically cast Enfeeble (via a trait) when I enter DS and it also automatically casts Spectral Armor and Lotus Swarm when things are going tough. It also adds a minor buff to Critical Damage and the Life Force pool.

Spite provides an increases to direct damage and condition duration. Since I am a DOT type build the direct damage bonus is not useful to me. I have condition durations expanded through Hemophilia (+20%) and Lingering Curse traits. I also based the build on my conditions being wiped every 10 seconds. So buffing duration beyond that did not make sense. With in 10 seconds I estimated I can get 98 ticks of bleed damage worth 11.2k damage. In reviewing a lot of the builds in the videos posted here I am not seeing condition removal skills with less than a 30 second cooldown. That means in a best case scenario (which would be rare) I can get off 33k of damage before my bleeds are wiped.
 
Yeah, that's good justification. I can't go any further until I test your build at launch unfortunately :)

I expect the overall effectiveness of long term condition builds will be based on the metagame post release. We can probably get away with hideously overbalanced condition damage build for the first week or two until people find their feet and start the condition hate builds. Knowing what's out there, I plan to be early to that party...
 
I'm not sure this is an effective build, mainly because as of BWE3, the life tap abilities were completely worthless. And with the nerf to Deathshroud, it's very difficult for a Necro to be in melee range (Dagger) and survive for long. A couple seconds of burst will drop you completely out of DS now.

Also, if the changes from last BWE remain, the maths suggest Vitality is far superior to Toughness on your amulet. Besides only mitigating against Direct Damage, Toughness is inferior to Vitality because Deathshroud now appears to be based directly off your hit point total, seemingly roughly 80%. Thus, if you stack Vitality, you have the high hit points to offset any type of damage as well as increasing your DS hit points.

Also, I'm not sure why you're stacking crit % with no Spite. The bleed that occurs from criting lasts one tick. I believe the exact length is 0.6 seconds. And while I don't remember the life tap heal off crit exactly, I do remember that it was very minimal. You're also going with Plague, which is fine for a Condition build, but Lich Form really takes advantage of Crit. Conditions do not crit.

I do think you are set up fine as a Condition oriented build goes in terms of damage. I don't really have a problem with the 30/20 in Curses/Soul Reaping. I do think you could do better with the other 20 points though unless/until Arena Net fix the Necromancer's life tap abilities. Also, the major downside to this build is that you will be extremely weak with direct damage, meaning you are a one-trick condition pony. It all depends on what you want to do, but this looks like a heavy support oriented build where you need to stay on the back lines to be effective, which probably suggests switching the dagger out with the staff.

Again, we know ArenaNet knows the Necro needs fixing, and we know they are going to do it before launch, so the trait build could be excellent at that time with the life taps. As of now, they suck. Regardless though, my recommendation would be to change your Amulet to Carrion. Vitality is better than Toughness for Necros. Precision doesn't really help your build at all, so change that to Power. Now, you have a lot more versatility. Life Blast in Deathshroud will hit pretty hard, you could consider going with the Axe for some strong upfront damage as well instead of the dagger. Lich Form also becomes a pretty hefty front loaded DPS option, especially if you're running with a Mesmer that uses Time Warp. It just gives you more options if a Guardian, Engineer, or Necro is shutting down your bleeds.

Anyway, those are my thoughts.
 
Guess we have to wait and see. My Engi build was meant to be tanky when I created it for BWE2 - after the changes for BWE3 it was tanky AND high DPS...
 
I have faith that Life Siphon and/or Death Shroud will be buffed if not I will have to adjust as you said.

I agree with you comments on the Carrion amulet and will change my build to use it.

I can not find where trait crit bleeds are only 1 second. Can you provide a link for that? I've seen other analysis that give it a 5s duration. http://www.gw2bnc.com/2012/07/guide-to-bleeding/

May I ask what build you will be going with at first?

Thanks for the feeback!
 
Bhak said:
I have faith that Life Siphon and/or Death Shroud will be buffed if not I will have to adjust as you said.

I agree with you comments on the Carrion amulet and will change my build to use it.

I can not find where trait crit bleeds are only 1 second. Can you provide a link for that? I've seen other analysis that give it a 5s duration. http://www.gw2bnc.com/2012/07/guide-to-bleeding/

May I ask what build you will be going with at first?

Thanks for the feeback!
Click to expand...

The author of the article you linked, Ragnaruss, is actually a very good friend I've gamed with since Vanguard. I usually run in the same guild, but I didn't want to focus just on the E-sport tournament pvp for this game like his GW2 guild is, so I joined here to play with my RL family more casually. He's a phenominal player and very smart.

The trait crit bleeds were reported in the beta forums. There was no mention as to whether the one second duration was correct or not, but it was not changed. Therefore, I'm assuming it will be the same at launch. As always, any changes will result in re-evaluation. You might be confusing our trait Barbed Precision with the Earth weapon runes. Those do last 5 seconds when they go off.

With so much obviously in flux with this class, it's hard to lock down a build. Until I see the changes, this is what I anticipate I'll be running:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/en/?fQA...A;TIBgyyuEcJ5S1liLKfMzImxCjzHJMLOGFcKY7xzjZBA

To me, this gives me the most flexibility with the most predictable results. Between Armor Runes, Traits, and Expertise, my bleeds will last 75% longer. I feel I can reliably stack bleeds quickly. (Blood is Power plus Deathly Swarm is 4 bleeds, Scepter attack is 2 bleeds every four seconds or so, DS is a bleed, my dodge is 2 bleeds, Spite is a bleed, Grasping Dead and Enfeebling Blood are bleeds), so I feel more comfortable going with the +10% damage rune duo than trying to hope an Earth rune procs after hoping my crit rate procs. Too iffy for me to run that type of build. I do have an automatic AoE bleed on my weapon swap to my axe I will make good use of as well. I figure the two +5% damage runes on the weapons equate to roughly 10 more damage per tick per bleed. And that should equate to approximately 200 Malice (Condition Damage). That same math led me to move 10 points from Curses and invest into Death Magic for Close to Death. That's essentially turning 100 Malice into an effective 200 Malice, albeit only below 50% health, and of course that damage bonus applies to all damage, not just conditions.

I feel like I have a strong Deathshroud build, even with the nerf, because I did focus on the Vitality stat along with 20 points in Soul Reaping. If my Hit Points in this build are 28,812 than my Deathshroud should be roughly 23k plus a 20% bonus from Soul Reaping for a Deathshroud total of 27kish, which gives me roughly 50k hit points between a full health bar and full life force bar. I also have a strong lineup of life force gaining abilities with Blood is Power (Insta 20%), Signet of Spite/Feast of Corruption (12%), and Ghastly Claws (12%) which should allow me to be in Deathshroud often. Spectral Armor is capable of filling up a life force bar by itself, and I have that option twice including the 50% health trait.

I also made sure to invest heavily into power for front loaded direct damage. The idea here is to spam the primary attack (Life Blast) in Deathshroud, which also provides a 15sec Might buff per attack which stacks. Ten stacks provides 35 additional damage per condition per tick or 35 damage per nuke. I've also made Life Blast an AoE ability via traits. It's basically a skinny cone now and with proper positioning can do significant damage to multiple targets. When not in DS, I have the axe as a secondary weapon with an auto crit rune for Ghastly Claws upon switching. The axe is our best damage weapon and the base attack stacks vulnerability for added damage. The high power also allows me to go into Lich for machine gun damage via the primary attack, especially with a Mesmer using Time Warp.

I plan to run this build in all aspects of the game. I would transfer out some conditions based on what I'm doing. If it's PvE soloing, I'm using some pets to tank. If it's WvWvW, I'm cycling abilities in depending on the situation, Spectral Walk to get where I'm going, Spectral Grasp to yank people off walls, Epidemic for sieges, etc...

Anyway, my playstyle is to dot em up, then turtle up in DS and nuke em down, essentially a Tank Mage. This is pure damage/AoE build, no support.
 
I Spvp'd the entire 4 hours for the stress test today. They made a quite a few changes to the Necro, most of which were positive. The only nerf off-hand I remember is that they lowered the 100% bleed on crit down to 66%. But that didn't really matter with what I was running.

I did make changes to my normal build because of the changes to the Necro. I removed the 10 points from Death Magic, and invested 5 into Curses (25 Total) as they changed Target the Weak to increase all damage by 2% per condition on the enemy. I also invested 5 points into Soul Reaping (25 Total) as they changed Strength of Undeath to be +5% damage as long as you have over 50% Life Force.

I actually used the runes and amulets listed above this time, and they worked quite well. Stacking two of the three types of runes for the +45% bleed duration does actually work. And I found that to be invaluable for pvp.

Also Mark of Evasion is a must have in my book. The free Mark of Blood pops up where you roll to, meaning you can roll into a player and it pops the double bleed on him. Loved it. The mark does only last about 3 seconds before fading away, and only one can be out at a time with a short cooldown before you could dodge and drop another one. The act of dodging drops the Mark, you don't have to actually successfully dodge an attack.

Finally, I was very happy with the auto crit upon switching to Axe. Ghastly Claws appeared to be buffed, now you launch a twirling axe that does big damage over 8 hits. And it crits every time if you use the auto crit rune. It would do around 4K damage when it crit and all attacks hit. I had roughly 2k Power, which was glorious when using Life Blast and Lich Form. The basic attack in Lich Form was hitting around 2k, my Life Blasts fluctuated but were almost always over 1k and with the piercing trait, it was always fun to target someone across the battlefied and light up everyone in the way.

I really enjoyed the build, felt powerful, and felt like I could play the condition game or go nuke happy and put out good damage. Most of the time, I stuck with Scepter/Dagger and stacked bleeds. This involved always kiting players and dodging. I normally kept up around 10-12 bleeds. I generally ranked at the top of my pvp matches, usually over 200 points per round, which is solid. A lot of that is just knowing to fight on nodes and how to use the terrain to your advantage. I also was able to solo kill Svintir and Chiefton with this build using pretty much the same evasive tactics. The last note is that I had a few 1v1 opportunites against other Necros. I annihilated the Minion Master Necro every time, though he might just not have been good. Almost every other Necro I saw was staff oriented, those were pretty easy as well. AoE'ing killed the MM's pets and he was cake. The Staff necro's just didn't have an answer for stacking bleeds and then pounding them with Life Blast and the Axe. They were pretty much always condition-mancers, which are easy to neutralize between Consume Conditions and Deathly Swarm. I did not see another Necro using the axe.

If I'm critiquing my build, the only area I might tinker with is the 10 points in Spite. Moving the points to max out Curses and Soul Reaping instead. Increasing the length of the Scepter conditions is very enticing as is making DeathShroud un-CCable, which drove me nuts this time around. I'll have to test this out at launch, I'm really hoping for one more stress test.

Anyway, to conclude, I was happy with the Necro changes. Nothing too major, but they did make going deep into the Curses and Soul Reaping tree much more appealing. Deathshroud remains too easy to be bursted out of, especially with all the warriors running around, so stacking vitality is definitely key.

Any other Necros have thoughts from the stress test? Would love to hear them.
 
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