Design Philosophy of the Necromancer

[Raye]

Source: https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/foru...rst#post612396

So, quickly, on the design philosophy at play here (you can feel free to disagree, but this is what I feel):
We want the Thief to be the class that most “slips through your fingers”. Other classes like the Ele and Mes have some of it too (and rightly so), but if anyone is escaping a fight, that should be a slippery Thief.

The Necro, on the other hand, should be the dude you CANNOT get away from. It’s an attrition based class, so the idea is that if you lock horns w/ a necro, know what you’re getting into: you’re fighting a class that’s built for attrition. It can dot you, dps you, rip your boons, and severely hinder your movement. AND it also has the ability to soak up a lot of damage. So the longer the fight goes, the stronger the Necro should get. That’s the idea behind Death Shroud, but little escape ability.

So we don’t want that attrition class to also have great ways to escape. This used to be the case, and we felt the Necro was just too strong if it was great at attrition as well as movement/escape. We wanted the Necro to be more about attrition, and for other classes (Thief, Ele, Mes) to be more about escaping and mobility.
Hope that makes sense.

[raspberry jam]

The Necro, on the other hand, should be the dude you CANNOT get away from.
(...)
We wanted the Necro to be more about attrition, and for other classes (Thief, Ele, Mes) to be more about escaping and mobility.

GW2 is too high mobility for that, you can just run away from a necro.
Also why make an attrition based class in a game without a ramp mechanic, as someone in that thread say there are classes that stack up the things that the necro uses much more quickly.

On the other hand, interesting. I'd want to read the design ideas for each class.

[Raye]

I am really curious about the design philosophies of the other professions as well. I am enjoying necro a whole lot more than I originally thought (was never fond of necros in gw1) but I also never got the impression that things couldn't escape me. I just felt like I was more durable because I have 3 hp-bars instead of 2 like everyone else. Also, Death Shroud is incredibly powerful when timed appropriately... but again, it's not that they can't get away from me, it's just that it takes them longer to bring me down, and most of the time that's enough for me to bring them down. The self-heals are so weak, but even then I feel like I am a pain in the butt to bring down.

(By "them" I generally mean 4+ enemies of my level or even a couple of levels higher)

[The King of Dust]

They managed to make it work relatively well for PvE, but like Jam said, as far as pvp is concerned, it's really not that hard to get away from a necro. Or at least it wasn't when I played sPvP during the beta. Pretty much never lost 1vs1 when playing my necro (except against that one guardian that could kick my butt in about 6 seconds without giving me a single chance to retaliate), but the only time I'd manage to kill anyone is if they were stupid enough to stick around instead of leaving.

That being said, they're pretty decent when defending capture points.

Edit: Maybe I'd have done better if I had gone dagger/dagger + axe/warhorn instead of axe/warhorn + staff, and used flesh golem for the KD. Too bad the chilling darkness trait (apply chill for 1 second each time you blind someone) doesn't work with Plague's Blind. That would have made Plague really interesting.

[Alaris]

I guess the question is whether you can keep someone from leaving if specced that way. When I play necro (barely so far) I certainly didn't pay attention to that... but going into PvP I might actually consider doing that now that I read that article.

[Hersir]

You can certainly slow people down with chills and cripple but you are also quite slow yourself so it's not quite as easy as they make it sound. DS Dark path is of course useful to catch up again.

One issue with PVE with this kind of design philsophy is that it's suicidal in dungeons if taken to its extreme. The problem is NOT stopping bosses running away. The problem is loads of damage and knockdown which is a real pain for a necroamancer with stability only through a Grandmaster DS trait. It is useful but not readily available without some serious timing (you need to be able to enter DS and it's quite short duration for a serious invesetment in points). Instead I use fear or other interrupts but again that's harder to pull off than stability.

As a condition/death shroud build I find I'm very good at managing conditions by piling them on perhaps not fast but steadily and with 2 skills on my skillbar that removes them and dark path and spectral walk for breaking locks. I'm also very effecient at killing crowds with Sceptre and dagger which have two AoE skills that synergises very nicely with blood is power and epidemic.

So pull the biggest one to apply some bleeds (1) cripple them (2), Enfeeble them (5), Bleed the big one (Blood is power), spread the love (Epidemic), remove the selfbleed and send it to the big one (4 Deathly swarm) and to add insult to injury Death Shroud and press 4. If not enough go into plague form. Rinse and repeat since there's pretty low cooldowns on the above skills. Alternativly add some marks with the staff if you have time to prepare to really start off the AoE love. Good survivability with teh right gear.

What I lack is pure damage so killing turrets and the like requires Death shroud or long range with the staff so for that you need a different build.

[sorudo]

you can use wells against objects, well of corruption works perfectly that way.

[Hersir]

True but then you'd need to trait for and to use wells thus loosing the nifty stuff above. It's a tradeoff.