Any decent damage builds with okay survival?

[Oxstar.7643]

So. I'm trying to turn my necromancer into something decent. A but of pretext, what I'm looking for is something that can dish out good damage, but also not be a pure glass cannon. Those just die too fast for my taste, so I want a bit of survival as well. I also don't have legendaries, or the means to make them. So something with exotics. I'm trying to suss something out myself, but while I do that I might as well see if you all have any good ideas. Also, it would be great if it didn't involve three digit amounts of gold in expenses.

[KrHome.1920]

PvE? Marauder is all you ever need there. The rest is a matter of your selection of skills and traits.

Blood Magic for healingDeath Magic for damage reductionCurses for critical hit chanceSpite for damageSoul Reaping can be selected for damage or sustain

Spectral Armor and Walk have a ridiculously low cooldown in PvE and grant a ton of sustain.

(I didn't take condi builds into consideration as condi necro isn't that great in PvE - huge ramp up time and then even not that great damage.)

[Wuffy.9732]

frankly, with reaper shroud I just run full zerker lol.

[Downstate.4697]

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?PSwEcEWoMB2BrjxxOxR26tZD-zRIYhipBPC+HA-e

rune is your preference. Feel free to play around with traits. That is gonna give you the most solid dps increase with decent lifeforce generation

[Blood Red Arachnid.2493]

I'd still wear berserker gear.. All of the bonus crit chance that necromancers get make it so the extra precision from Marauders does almost nothing for DPS. The easiest way to be durable is to change utilities and traits for it. For example, take the standard Spite/Soul Reaping/Reaper build, and go with the following traits instead:

Spite: Spiteful Talisman, Signets of Suffering, Close to DeathSoul Reaping: Unyielding Blast, Vital Persistence, Eternal LifeReaper: Chilling Nova, Soul Eater, Blighter's Boon

Utilities: Signet of Vampirism, Rise!, Well of Darkness, Signet of Undeath, Flesh Golem

The amount of self-healing and life force generation is unreal with this setup. You'll get:

195 Health Per second with Signet of Vampirism. Twice that with two or more enemies.192 per boon or 1% life force per boon. Remember that the Spite traits give a lot of self might, including on shroud attack.1.77% life force per second from Signet of Undeath3% Life Force per second from Eternal Life up to 66%. Each 1% of Life Force is roughly 174 health.5% of damage dealt while out of shroud33% reduction in damage with Rise!Protection upon entering shroud

If you're facing an enemy that is immune to blind, you can swap out Well of Darkness for Spectral Armor to gain even more protection and life force.

[Agrippa.1693]

If you really want to change your build/gear and still diss out a lot of damage, you're probably better off choosing a different class. Any DPS Thief/Daredevil/Deadeye build with Invigorating Precision in combination with Marauder gear for instance!

Necro is capped at the lowest max. DPS of all classes. You're pretty much expected (if you still want to do a lot of damage) to go with full Berserker/Viper gear.

[Dadnir.5038]

@"Agrippa Oculus.3726" said:If you really want to change your build/gear and still diss out a lot of damage, you're probably better off choosing a different class. Any DPS Thief/Daredevil/Deadeye build with Invigorating Precision in combination with Marauder gear for instance!

Necro is capped at the lowest max. DPS of all classes. You're pretty much expected (if you still want to do a lot of damage) to go with full Berserker/Viper gear.

It's better than it used to be thought.But yeah having a decent damage/survivability ratio is kinda the necromancer's thing. Having optimal damage isn't it's thing though (or when it is, it somehow end up being an unforseen exploit of an obscure mechanic).

[Oxstar.7643]

That's fine. Like I said, I don't even want to be a glass cannon. It's no fun to me to be downed in a few hits, and this does tend to happen since I like to fight a lot of enemies at once, and meta battles are so full of visual clutter anyways that it's hard to tell what is even going on well enough to dodge all the things that can squish you.I guess you could say a casual damage build or something. Thanks for the input, berserker gear is not cheap but also nowhere near as expensive as viper of trailerblazer. I don't mind more suggestion though, class crafting is fun =)This said, necromancer has a lot of conditions. You are not supposed to get condition damage? I find it tends to be more reliable than direct damage since some enemies are well armored.

[KrHome.1920]

What makes marauder so good, is that you are flexible in your trait choices.

E.g. not picking soul reaping on berserker gear hurts. You end up with 13k shroud and a poor instant crit chance (no death perception). Decimate defenses needs a vulnerability ramp up. And curses is useless for a power based build in pve besides the crit chance traits.

With marauder gear you can play any trait combination without having to worry about losing too much life force or crit chance or damage.

@"Agrippa Oculus.3726" said:If you really want to change your build/gear and still diss out a lot of damage, you're probably better off choosing a different class. Any DPS Thief/Daredevil/Deadeye build with Invigorating Precision in combination with Marauder gear for instance!

Necro is capped at the lowest max. DPS of all classes. You're pretty much expected (if you still want to do a lot of damage) to go with full Berserker/Viper gear.You are missing the topic. He didn't ask for a meta dps build.

[Egrimm Van Horstmann.7921]

It depends on the game mode, that said the one I find super useful in general is scourge minion master. I'm a rolling tank most of the time and can down most things with ease. Staff/ Scepter, torch. With Plaguebearer set it really shines, however for exotics it's easily usable with a shaman set. You can dish out damage and take it.

[Axl.8924]

@Oxstar.7643 said:So. I'm trying to turn my necromancer into something decent. A but of pretext, what I'm looking for is something that can dish out good damage, but also not be a pure glass cannon. Those just die too fast for my taste, so I want a bit of survival as well. I also don't have legendaries, or the means to make them. So something with exotics. I'm trying to suss something out myself, but while I do that I might as well see if you all have any good ideas. Also, it would be great if it didn't involve three digit amounts of gold in expenses.

Go reaper man pve reaper is super tanky and get ferocity gear and precision.

GS is recommended weapon for reaper, good CC good dmg hits really hard.

[Boh.4568]

I'll just use this thread since I had a similar question about using marauder in PvE, and I have these conditions: mostly solo play or with small group of friends for dungeons, bounties and low level fractals. We just play casual, so this means everyone goes for DPS and there's zero support. I'd like to be self sufficient as much as possible, I barely even use foods.

That said, I want to use power reaper specifically, using the standard spite/SR/reaper traits. With full berserker (exotic atm) I can almost cap crit chance with just eagle runes, death perception and sigil of accuracy, and that lets me trait soul eater instead of DD, meaning no waiting for the crit ramp-up on vuln, and a free 10% damage while in melee range (GS and Rshroud) and some nice healing outside of shroud while in GS camping on wells and nightfall ticks while building up LF.I was thinking of making only my ascended trinkets marauder instead of berserker, while leaving everything else berserker. This hybrid build makes me lose around 110 power and 150 ferocity, while giving me 19k>22k health increase (around 20%) which means additional (16-17%?) life force as well.I can also get that lost damage back: hybrid berserk/marauder makes me overcap crit chance, so I can swap sigil of accuracy for another damage sigil. I already use force so I was thinking air, or strength to get to 25 might as fast as possible (easy in shroud, every hit is a crit, permaquickness means a lot of attacks per second, and sigil of strength as a very low CD). Secondary weapon set will have bloodlust to build up damage on trash mobs before swapping to GS, and I like cleansing as a reliable condi-cleanse option that can be triggered both during normal weapon swap and with the good ol' in n' out of shorud.

Here's my desired mid-term build while I have access to "easy" ascended LW trinkets and work towards the ascended armor:http://gw2skills.net/editor/?PSyAc2FlJwOYKMG2IOSXltaA-zRRYBKJMVgYwlSTJQghQvFQFRgJDA-eIs it worth it for 3k more HP? If I want to add survivability I prefer to use stats (vitality) rather than switching traits to defensive ones, which means losing 10% damage here, 20% there, and it adds up quickly.Is there any downside to this build other than "when in the future you play with competent parties you'll have free crit boons and only power/ferocity will matter"?I'm - partly - already keeping that in mind, for when I switch from eagle runes to scholar (when I get ascended armor), I will lose a lot of precision.

edit: forgot to adjust the support skills in the build, wells are a staple, and then I switch back and forth from signet of spite (raw power and CC) to Rise!! (just for the 33% damage reduction when needed).

[Anchoku.8142]

Marauder is good. You can use berserker, too.

Necromancer has more ability to trade damage and sustain in traits (and trait lines) than it does with stat's. For example, you can be a berserker Minionmancer with lots of sustain despite the aggressive equipment or be very glassy while equipped with bunker gear.

Always think about the trait line interactions before the equipment.

[Agrippa.1693]

@KrHome.1920 said:What makes marauder so good, is that you are flexible in your trait choices.

E.g. not picking soul reaping on berserker gear hurts. You end up with 13k shroud and a poor instant crit chance (no death perception). Decimate defenses needs a vulnerability ramp up. And curses is useless for a power based build in pve besides the crit chance traits.

With marauder gear you can play any trait combination without having to worry about losing too much life force or crit chance or damage.

@"Agrippa Oculus.3726" said:If you really want to change your build/gear and still diss out a lot of damage, you're probably better off choosing a different class. Any DPS Thief/Daredevil/Deadeye build with

Invigorating Precision

in combination with Marauder gear for instance!

Necro is capped at the lowest max. DPS of all classes. You're pretty much expected (if you still want to do a lot of damage) to go with full Berserker/Viper gear.You are missing the topic. He didn't ask for a meta dps build.

Well, that's exactly the point here, OP is indeed asking for a non-meta build (i.e. good damage AND survivability) and I'm responding with the answer that Necro is the worst class that you can choose then! It's designed with innate survivability in mind, so you're only choices left when you want to deal good DPS, is going full Berserker/Viper: in other words: full-meta. And it's pretty much the only class that has that lack of a choice, really!And it's even worse than that, cause it's also hard capped in precision/crit-chance when it comes to the power Reaper. Taking Marauder gear instead of Berserker gear will give you a crit chance above 100% (in shroud), which is useless! In other words, you relatively lose more DPS when switching from Berserker to Marauder gear on a Reaper (because of the useless extra crit chance above 100%), than say on a Daredevil, where the extra precision in combination with: Invigorating Precision gives you even more survivability! The synergies are just a lot better when combining gear stats and builds on other classes than on a Necro (in the DPS area)!

Another example: the Ele. Yea, you can go full glass canon (META) and deal insane amounts of DPS (up to 40% more than a Necro can ever touch, really), but a beginner will have a hard time surviving in full Berserker/Viper gear. But go full Trailblazer (Toughness, Condi dmg, Vitality, Expertise), you still diss out a lot of damage (comparable or actually still more to that of a Necro/Scourge), AND be very tanky! You have that choice as a Weaver/Tempest, but not as a Necro.

[Lan Deathrider.5910]

Run Valkyrie Reaper or Soldier Reaper. Take Death Perception in Soul Reaping, every vulnerability trait you can find and Decimate Defenses. You'll have a high crit chance, and high HP, which also makes Shroud last longer while tanking hits.

Soldier Variant:http://gw2skills.net/editor/?PSgAEZlVwOYKMH2JW0WrteA-zRIYSUxXINFBlWCVkA2OL6vpB-eWith 17 stacks of Vuln on the target you cap crit while in Shroud, and have over 200% critical damage.

Swap Curses for Spite for more vuln stacks, more might and an out of shroud source of Fury.

Valkyrie will have less toughness but more damage on a crit.

[Shroud.2307]

For what area? PvP/E/WvW?

For WvW you can check out my Vitality core build here: Sinister Embrace

Damage is moderately high, more than enough to kill people anyway. It has a metric ton of health, and in turn a lot of Shroud. And Spectral Walk and Spectral Armor allow for a lot of tanking despite having no Toughness.

Precision is slightly overcapped on Shroud entry (52% puts it right at 100) so you can adjust the stats a little if you care enough to min max. And certain traits/utilities aren't entirely necessary. You could go with Soul Barbs or Fear Of Death instead for example.

This isn't a build I frequently use, but it does well when I do. Usually I'll use it when I'm being hard targeted by a lot of Rangers/Thieves in small/large groups, or when I'm finding the majority of my fights while roaming are 1v3+ and need the extra health.

[Obtena.7952]

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?PSwAEd3lRwwYOMGWJOSXpNfA-zRQYRUT4PhOMINDhIJQlKw/kIYGA-e

I run this because:

1. I don't like being slow out of combat ... if your cool with that, flip out the sigil of locust for whatever you prefer
2. I prefer passive damage mitigation so I can focus on reacting to what's happening around me
3. I always give myself a ranged/melee split for general PVE - it works in this case to build power with Bloodlust sigil and vuln stacks fast.
4. I always have a stunbreak - ALWAYS
5. It's easy to cap your crit rate allowing you to pump up Vitality (which is BOTH a sustain and DPS increase because of longer duration Shrouds)

This is particularly easy. With two trait flips you can significantly change your dps output/sustain profile if you like.

1. Flip between Soul Barbs (dps) and Vital Persistance (sustain) - this is a minor impact
2. Flip between Decimate Defenses (dps) and Soul Eater (sustain) - this is a more significant impact

The best thing about necro sustain is that it's dependent on your DPS for some effects and Vitality works double duty for you. Most classes are primarily relying on fixed- amount healing effects.

Gear-wise, I only advise you deviate from berserkers using Valk's because it would be a shame to not take advantage of that easily capped crit rate without as much Ferocity as you can.