What are we running now?

[Legend of Rogue.5394]

Been playing harbinger for a week now and just curious on your feed back on how it will be played or if it will at all?

 

Survivability is obviously an issue in PVE, WVW but what builds do you think will flourish or will Harbinger not see any play? Scourge still does better in PVE, I haven't tested it in WVW but I still see more Scourge players in WVW still.... Harbinger get's "Danny DeVito" level blasted in zergs. So what are yall's thoughts on upcoming meta for Necro? What builds do you think we will be using and are we going to go up in WVW or just fall off completely?

 

 

[Morde.3158]

Power Boon Share or just Condi I will say this though in wvw I find myself reverting back to reaper just to fight blobs, everyone has reflects and bla bla its annoying lol.

[Shroud.2307]

Power Harbinger is mostly for memes. If you play it well, it can do okay in certain 1 v 1's. In larger scale fights, it might have a place in a small organized group if it's getting Stealths and heals because it can bomb super hard. But it also means going melee so, most of the time it won't be practical unless the group you're against is very disorganized or not paying attention to you. You can get similar spikes in damage with Catalyst from a safe ranged distance.

Condi/Hybrid is quite good. Strong 1 v 1er and can even have a presence in team fights (10 v 10/15). But in general, it doesn't do very well as player numbers scale up. Scourge or Reaper are almost always a better pick.

The problem with Harbinger is that it doesn't do anything other Necro specs don't already do, and better. It has some unique strengths, and certain builds are good for dueling or very small scale fights, but that's about it.

It definitely needs some changes to make it worth using, but for now, it's fun at least! So if you like using it, don't let the problems with it stop you.

[Tobias.8632]

For PvE, full ritualist with tormenting runes is a decent way to give 5 man quickness and do okay dps, there are more minmaxed ways to play quickbinger with full vipers but I prefer the simplicity of having more quickness then you know what to do with. If you want to be a selfish dps then it's basically like viper scourge except with elixir heal and might instead of epidemic because epi is trash now and then you do ye olde harbinger meta of camp shroud and hold down the 2 button

[Wintermute.5408]

Survivability is actually less of an issue than I would expect. Regen is very formiddable, especially when compared to non-barriers of scourge. And the blight itself behaves in a weird way - it doesn't actually cut 50% of your health. With 22612 HP (full viper, 100 vit from bot core, and inbuilt from harb), on 25 stacks I lose only 8478 HP in blight. I assume health gained from vitality is unaffected?

[LucianDK.8615]

1 hour ago, Tobias.8632 said:

For PvE, full ritualist with tormenting runes is a decent way to give 5 man quickness and do okay dps, there are more minmaxed ways to play quickbinger with full vipers but I prefer the simplicity of having more quickness then you know what to do with. If you want to be a selfish dps then it's basically like viper scourge except with elixir heal and might instead of epidemic because epi is trash now and then you do ye olde harbinger meta of camp shroud and hold down the 2 button

Camping shroud? Then what about soul barbs?

[Legend of Rogue.5394]

4 hours ago, Tobias.8632 said:

For PvE, full ritualist with tormenting runes is a decent way to give 5 man quickness and do okay dps, there are more minmaxed ways to play quickbinger with full vipers but I prefer the simplicity of having more quickness then you know what to do with. If you want to be a selfish dps then it's basically like viper scourge except with elixir heal and might instead of epidemic because epi is trash now and then you do ye olde harbinger meta of camp shroud and hold down the 2 button

In PVE or Strikes I've been running Vipers. WVW I haven't decided, most likely will run scourge and Vipers. I think they transfer pretty well.

[Dadnir.5038]

3 hours ago, LucianDK.8615 said:

Camping shroud? Then what about soul barbs?

people often forget that it is an important part of the necrmancer's rotation.

[Magnuzone.8395]

Quite underwhelming in WvW. Do good damage with trailblazer/dire armor and in a small fights pretty fun to play. But lacks mobility and stability because the elixirs punish you with hp loss. Full shroud takes a whopping 10K hp. It's like a playing a condi thief with a limp and no stealth . 

 

 

[KrHome.1920]

Hybrid Damage Regeneration and Barrier Spamming Harbinger - one of the best roaming builds you can run for necro:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?PSAFcs1aYZosUmFzj1in90V0E-z1IY1onvMyMF6tCs7kEG7hHA-w

Trashes all the glass canon harbingers in WvW. Unfortunately still worse than speed rune reaper variants... but nice to finally have a viable necro roaming alternative, for the days reaper bores me.

Edited March 8, 2022 by KrHome.1920

[Nimon.7840]

23 hours ago, Wintermute.5408 said:

Survivability is actually less of an issue than I would expect. Regen is very formiddable, especially when compared to non-barriers of scourge. And the blight itself behaves in a weird way - it doesn't actually cut 50% of your health. With 22612 HP (full viper, 100 vit from bot core, and inbuilt from harb), on 25 stacks I lose only 8478 HP in blight. I assume health gained from vitality is unaffected?

Yes. Survivability is not too shabby. 

There's one big problem right now: your dedicated group healer can't see your health while in shroud.

 

And a minor one: on encounters like dhuum you will go down if you get the bomb before Soulsplit, because the build has no way of self removing condis, and and using the heal skill for the DPS rotation, which is needed to go all out makes you rely solely on the passive Regen Tick+the passive blight regen, if the timing is really bad.

 

 

Edited March 9, 2022 by Nimon.7840

[Peterson.5172]

8 hours ago, Nimon.7840 said:

There's one big problem right now: your dedicated group healer can't see your health while in shroud.

As a healer, this is annoying

[Shaogin.2679]

On 3/7/2022 at 12:27 PM, Legend of Rogue.5394 said:

Been playing harbinger for a week now and just curious on your feed back on how it will be played or if it will at all?

 

Survivability is obviously an issue in PVE, WVW but what builds do you think will flourish or will Harbinger not see any play? Scourge still does better in PVE, I haven't tested it in WVW but I still see more Scourge players in WVW still.... Harbinger get's "Danny DeVito" level blasted in zergs. So what are yall's thoughts on upcoming meta for Necro? What builds do you think we will be using and are we going to go up in WVW or just fall off completely?

 

 

Scourge is not better in PvE. Harbinger is better in every aspect of PvE.

[Asum.4960]

On 3/13/2022 at 2:00 AM, Shaogin.2679 said:

Scourge is not better in PvE. Harbinger is better in every aspect of PvE.

And what are those aspects it's better in? 

 

Harbinger has decently higher DPS, but is highly reliant on melee through Approaching Doom (180 range) and somewhat Dark Barrage split, meaning Scourge being fully 600-900 range has higher DPS uptime in non DPS golem fights. 

Scourge completely negates projectile mitigation, while Harbinger is almost entirely shut down by it.

Scourge with Shades has much higher cleave, esp. now that Epi is virtually useless.

Scourge is more survivable through higher health, Barriers as well as passive damage reduction from Traits. 

Scourge offers more personal utility as well as group support via built in AoE Barriers and Condi to Boon conversion. 

Scourge is more flexible in terms of Utility skills to bring/sacrifices less DPS for Utility. 

 

I'm having my fun with Harbinger (despite many grievances about it's underlying design), but it's pretty much objectively worse in every regard - golem benchmarks (and now fairly crippled, but still slightly improved mobility) aside. But I'm curious about your perspective if you'd like to explicate your claim.

Edited March 14, 2022 by Asum.4960

[RabbitUp.8294]

On 3/8/2022 at 3:08 PM, LucianDK.8615 said:

Camping shroud? Then what about soul barbs?

Soul barbs is just 10%, staying in shroud is a bigger damage increase. In any case, you will drop out a couple seconds later anyway, once you run out of life force.

[jpsssss.7530]

On 3/8/2022 at 1:03 PM, Magnuzone.8395 said:

Quite underwhelming in WvW. Do good damage with trailblazer/dire armor and in a small fights pretty fun to play. But lacks mobility and stability because the elixirs punish you with hp loss. Full shroud takes a whopping 10K hp. It's like a playing a condi thief with a limp and no stealth . 

 

 

Except condi thief now can stack 25 stacks of might reliably with scepter 2 and rune of aristocracy (9/cast)

[Raught.3294]

I spent days theorycrafting my build before release, and now that its here its been a huge success. I run a Celestial Harbinger of Death with Weakness Spam + Aristocracy runes. Has been fantastic in WvW and sPvP so far. I specialize in cleaving. It's pretty much impossible to revive allies if I'm on you. Which is exactly the playstyle I wanted.

 

http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/?PSAFoslaYZoMPmCjl1ilszb8H-zZx8MiXBExEwdDA&fbclid=IwAR331TR5Fkgd4EkVfijIL1Au5duYo3soTG5M7sRNLUDaqTVpj0vt4A_lLl4