So what can this Necromancer guy/gal/thingie do for my raid?

TL,DR: getting bored of q.q about necros being useless cuz omg there is no cookie-cutter build and they're not good at one single thing at a time. Necros do a lot of things at the same time, that's what the class is built to do right now and if that's not your cup of tea I guess reroll.
If you're not a necro, read the long version below as it will benefit you and everyone else in the raid.

So, a necro says:

Necro2 says:

Despite being considerably gimped by the "over9000" bugs, necro is still one of the classes with the highest utility in game.
You say you can't heal with a necro, but:
- Well of Blood with healing gear does over 6k healing in the aoe (10 pulses 600+ each)
- traited Life Transfer adds up to 1.5k heal (not limited to number of targets)
- there's also a trait that heals for ~600 when you exit DS
Add that up you get 8k healing on your raid in 10 seconds while..

..Doing some damage and gimping the enemy with: aoe bleed, vulnerability, blind, chill, poison (field) and any conditions you may happen to have on you or your allies when casting Putrid Mark, aoe boons->conditions, aoe fear), in-line <insert number of targets in a line here> knockdown and at the same time..

..Supporting your team (healing aside) with aoe condition transfer from allies to enemies, aoe conversion of conditions to boons and dark fields (5 of the 6 available dark fields in the game are Necro skills, 6th is shadow refuge which isn't really used in the situations where dark fields are most useful)

So yeah necro has a lot of bugs that don't really allow you to be an effective full-out <insert holy trinity role here> in particular, but if you put together all the things that it does do while being natively tanky, you'll end up with more impact on a raid than some glasscannon dps or full-out healer or tank.

Food for thought: Which other class can make up a skillbar of 10 aoe skills that are all actually useful in a WvW group fight and still have 1-2 more just as useful as the other 10 to swap in?

All of the stuff I listed above (minus 1-2 things that are swap-in/out are packed in a single skillbar).Yep..necros are so useless in a raid, let's all reroll.

LE: just tested Vampiric rituals on a bunch of mobs, it does not heal enemy NPCs at all in fact it damages them (slightly), not sure about players (yet), but it looks like it's fixed since the thread on the official forums showed mobs being healed by it. Gonna run it tonight although I personally think Deathly Invigoration (heal when exiting DS) is better for the simple fact that it heals the entire raid as opposed to just me.

Spoken like a true leader

i find the best way to trait a necro is to pick 3 must have traits....(at teh mo trying a build that gives staff mastery, greater marks and placeable wells with some DS utility, i think the slow 50% less LF use in DS is one of the best tanking skills we have) only 2 of them can be tier 3 of course. I hope the test passes as i really like the vampire concept and i rarely died when using it especially on battlements/chokepoints and could tank them as the well heal syphons from unlimited numbers..... for turtles it is perfect i would survive getting pulled in which i never did last night.

Tumbles. in one post you started about 3 topics that can be a thread in their own right!

Healing though is a hot topic, we all know this game is anti trinity, as DPS will always be far greater than any amount of healing, so the question should really be is should all players be responsible for thier own healing? It seems clear to me the players in the guild that are used to playing tanks in other games, they are the ones we rez most often! haha

The question is which is most effective for the raid?

Consume Corruption ..... bigger burst heal,, completely clears all curruption which is essential at the initial burst of a charge and a faster cooldown, or well of blood. lesser burst, useful ticks but doesnt clear debuffs.

The perfect answer i use them both, one for open field and one ofr confined sieging. So the choice is what is the greeater good, we save ourselves or we try to save others..... in my opinion if everyone specced into a healing build then it could be interesting, but as only a few do then that is DPS/utility wasted IMHO. In terms on mass PvP then i would urge that we keep it simple with staff as primary, wells for sieging, with epidemic on standby for turtles.

We may well be a jack of all trades, but among the AOE classes, we have the most we can put down and that is offset by the weakest damage, plus everyclass in the game has a anti condition option. In my opinion our strongest skills are in fact blind and chills, but thats another discussion.

Here's what I'm running tonight:
http://www.guildhead.com/skill-calc#mVVm0Mc9MoGMxmoGMxm0GGx0csMVoRb

I also use Consume Conditions when I'm running alone, it's obviously the most powerful self-heal (probably in the entire game), but with the raid WoB is fine coupled with WoP.
Well of Darkness is what I swap to get the Spectral Walk buff when I know I'll be running for 40+ seconds
In case of turtle, I swap Well of Power for Well of Corruption

I'm clearly noticing that Vampiric Rituals does help with keeping yourself alive in the fight, it also adds a bit of extra damage to your wells (negligible tho). My personal preference for big raids I think will remain Deathly Invigoration because it helps keep the other guys alive (the ones that die faster usually) and because my self-heal is already buffed with all the "vampireness" that comes as a given with this trait line (heals on hit, bigger heals on crit etc). It helps A LOT when you are blocking a gate (btw if you're a necro you should be standing right in front of it, shooting through with staff 1 when everything is on cd), that chilling darkness trait also shines in this scenario.

About healing in general I think we had a problem 2 weeks ago where we would rush enemy zergs, down loads of them but they would outlast us as we'd get downed too, now it's not happenning as much with 2-3 people healing instead of 1 so it definitely is helping, but ofc we don't need everyone to heal everyone now, there has to be a balance and this is a big + for tje necro style of healing cause we can do it while doing other things at the same time, unlike ele and guardian.

Not sure how many people are running condition removals in wvw but regardless, they will be on a cooldown way longer than our ability to apply them. Blind, chill, weakness, cripple and poison usually achieve their usefulness before they can be removed, especially blind

That right there ^^^^^ is pretty much the ultimate WvW build in my opinion and very much what i had in mind.... question is healing gear or condition?

It has utility, survivability with power gear those tick will add up, so greater marks plus placeable wells means 7 or 8 AOE down at any one time, switch to Sceptre/dagger and you get 2 more, plus if a burst class tries to pick you off the scepter/dag combo will stack bleeds on them very fast and if in trouble we can pop DS and plague form and wait for the cavalry.

I would consider spiteful vigor instead od staff skills, i do not think the cool downs on staff are bad enough to use a trait, however gaining 5 seconds of retaliation may be more useful as we pretty much have perma heal ticks happening in this build.

OR worthy of testing are dark armour (400 tough when chanelling) as we channel more than we realise and would help prevent interrupts ( not that we have much burst to interrupt) and ritual of pretection ..... cast wells staggered by 3 seconds then thats 9-12 seconds of protection which is a long time in pvp.

This is the good thing about theorycrafting, makes you look into other ways you haven't look before.

I've been improving my condiotionmancer build so i haven't tested much of the other «out of focus» skills, so i have to ask about Focused Rituals that is not clear in the tooltip, what's the range? 900?

Although i agree that Staff Mastery shines on this build (because the focus is all about spiting aoe fields like crazy), it could be used for something else like Spiteful Vigor or even Reaper's Protection (Ritual of Protection might be "overprotection" imo).

In the matter of armor choices, condition imo is not the way to go on this. You would like to improve cond. duration with this build, not cond. damage.
Healing would make more sense to improve the healing bursts although if i'm not mistaken healing stats wont improve the siphoning damage.

I beg to differ a) you are necro - meaning you "play" with the dead. Keeping the living alive is not your bussiness. b) wells are not reliable imo!

I dont like these wells builds at all... they seem more like point holding abilities for sPvP fights. CDs seem too long. Everyone is moving around and you have quite good chance to either miss to hit your foes AND to heal your mates. Oh,and I dont understand why is everyone going for heal specs?... Firstly, take care of your HP. Secondly, necros are merely the last class created to be sort of (aoe) healer in this game. And as I told ya in-game 10-second heal for 6k in total is nothing - no one is gonna fight for 10 seconds in that very area,you are either owned or you owned them and moved forward. Can you count up how many percents is 600 and 6 000 HP out of your total bar?.. IMO,you have better/higher chances to stand up from downed state if you increase your downed dmg rather than expect random aoe heals to keep ya up. I tried the well heal of ours... naaaaah better consume all my conditions and get as much as possible HP with lower cd rather than try to heal nearby allies with higher risk to kill myself due to lack of heals.

One more thing. Anyone can elaborate the difference between 15 trait points on Blood Magic - Vampiric: Siphon health whenever you hit a foe. and 30 trait points on Blood Magic - Vampiric Rituals: Wells also siphon health every time they pulse erm?... wells dmg is not counted as hit?... Anyone actually tested this? Vampiric siphons health only when you use daggers?...

I personally use staff in wvw as well but I totally dislike it. Apart from the range and the cool Death look is kinda useless and unreliable to me. I prefer axe/horn and scepter/focus (not fully tested s/f yet tho) and corruption skills and going first into the fight doing either full or partly strip of boons on those standing infront of the enemy zerg,then going with AOE retaliation followed by DS (+400 thoughness <3) and spamming (4) Life Transfer and keeping myself alive and at the same time hitting as many as I can (loot bags! ). When the aoe is over you either have your utilities back (ok,almost back) or just roll back to your zerg and try to strike more of them from range. Keep trying to strip boons and fill DS to repeat all this again.
I also use the flesh golem due to its cd and kd but unless you are being severely hit Lich Form seems cool too.

I would even gladly post few pics of builds I came up with to farm in the day and respectely do some wvw in the night w/o changing traits every time BUT cant do that atm coz of the severe stupidity of the guys I bought my PC from. :|

Cheers.

Placeable wells range is 900.
36s/48s is NOT a long cooldown in wvw, you rarely have more than 1 fight within a minute.
Vampiric siphons health of any kind of direct hit, including staff marks, its awesome when you hit 3 ppl with staff #1 . LE just tested the stacking with wells: Vampiric Rituals makes all wells deal a small direct damage (the life siphon) which in turn triggers Vampiric, so you get 2 life drains per target hit by a well tick.

The fact that the word necromancer makes you think of playing with the dead doesn't mean that minions are effective in WvW and we're not making roleplaying builds here

As for what 600 heal means, I think that most heals in the game tick for 200-300, 6k x5 = 30k healing and yeah people move around but if you're aware enough to place it in the right spot it will always heal 5 people (not entirely sure if it's limited to 5 but think so). The aoe of the wells isn't as small a circle as the placement reticle makes them out to be. Also, the rest of the healing is not static, as life transfer "moves" with you and if you were to use the heal on DS exist trait that's also happening where you are at the time.
Nobody here's saying that necros should be healers, just pointing out that you can actually heal for a considerable amount while doing damage and condition control at the same time and being tanky as f***.

I'm sure that condition builds can be tweaked to work in WvW and obviously there's no problem rolling that way, though I'm not convinced they're as effective at sustaining aoe.

Also keep in mind that we're talking about builds to increase the group's effectiveness and win fights as a guild not just to keep ourselves alive, personally I don't give a shit if I'm the one that ends up dead in the enemy zerg as long as we win the fight (not that it'd happen very often to die as a necro when we win the fight anyway lol).

Im not saying that.
I am not saying that in your last post you are wrong either.

Playing for the group effectiveness is a really good point. But that's not what is happening atm in WvW. Playing as group in my understanding is like 5 of you coordinated to push/capture or defend a point in wvw,acting seperately under commander's orders to help the raid in general. This cant happen in a big raid due to many reasons. And again if you are still trying to achieve that Im pretty sure necro is going to be with sort of debuffer role. Pretty sure a guardian can play a good role to protect and heal the whole group,while necro can do the "hard" task to weaken the enemies and IMO! as second healer elementalist can do a great job. Put two more classes specced to kick-ass-builds and voila!

What I meant about the cooldowns is that you can easily achieve ~30 secs cd in the worst case of corruption build which I value most as you can use your utilities at least twice in one battle.

PS: Writing this I kinda came up with this idea... Why not a static group to be formed of a... Guardian,Elementalist,Necro and.... 2 high end dps - like warrior and thief for instance. Group up always together in wvw to get used to each other and try to act as a group. This would effect the gameplay by alot imho lol.
Imagine such a grp while defending a tower to go out in stealth with constant marking and focus, aligned aoes and heals can pretty much do the job of 20 randoms and push away the attackers.

Disagree, condition builds are effective at sustained dmg, they just aren't so effective in combo fields as Wells builds.
And although we are hard to kill, surviving should always be kept in mind when playing, because you aren't helping anyone when you're dead

I know condition builds can sustain dmg on a target, that's what conditions are but can you keep your conditions up on loads of people for a long time, having in mind some of the ppl you spread it to in the first place will die before others?

In all the earlier posts by "group" I meant the raid. At the moment we are not running much in terms of small groups (party-sized), the only use I've recently seen of parties as a standalone unit are to defend a tower/point with siege built or run off to cap a supply camp, so sPvP style synergy isn't really a hot topic atm (assuming that's the kind of thing you were hinting towards Jinx).

Yes, every 15 seconds. And i'm not trying to be a smartass when i say that
Can a wells build keep sustained damage on loads of ppl for a long time?

Yep, you never really run out of aoes to cast. You can also force people off battlements
Post your current condition build in the builds thread if you can keep refreshing them in aoe every 15s, sounds like an interesting alternative to sucking the life out of your enemy.

the ultimate lol could well be all necros group, select one target to assist, all hit signet of spite followed by epidemic and watch the screen fill with numbers..... if 5 of us did that at once...................

well,yeah... Seems kinda easier to me to control one organised group rather than, you know,just grouped up guild mates. And my point was that you can actually adjust your builds according to your group needs too. I mean,look at the mesmers... they already are organised due to their specific role in wvw... such organisation can happen with the other classes and members,you know. It's just how many people actually want that to happen and who will put some efforts to lead.
Ideas like 5 guardians on bunker builds being sort of meat-shield in front of the raid sound thrilling or as Spud suggested 5 necros in a group spreading conditions all over the enemy zerg or even 5 necros with staffs with Wells builds and max aoe can be pretty deadly too.

erm... I didnt play Aion as Elyos with ya but from my poor raid/siege experience there... the asmo raid leaders were deviding the alliances into groups which should have had 1 cleric,1 chanter (if possible) and/or mages/tanks depending on the raid purposes and tactics. As well as chanters being rotated between the groups to give cast speed quickness and attack speed quickness to the specific groups. Well,since in this game there are no such things... roles can be specified depending on your build and role you want to execute in wvw.

In open area fights (camps e.g.) I didnt really see Boon to have any troubles with the enemy zergs no matter the numbers so Im not sure if this is even thought over.... mostly KC goes nuts coz we get wipe at some gate or near the boss wasting lots of gold and efforts...

My overall point is that Mesmers' organisation should be an example for the rest of us. With pre-decided moves and ideas, of a single or few groups, raid's effectivness can be raised.

mesmers where about to all get banned from raids for fucking up that badly.... thats why, necros dont fuck up we just absorb damage, and deal damage at a low level haha!

To be fair and seriously Jynx i see what you are trying to say, but a mesmers roll in WvW is defined and easy to trait and gear for but for a necro:

Tank - Yep DS spec + vampire builds + tough/vit gear = one of the toughest classes in the game.

DPS - AOE on a mass scale yes, Burst - No unless you go dagger but even then not enough burst to make up for cloth armour and thief/warrior 2 button spam you WILL face.

Healer - Yes but limited compared to Guardians and ele's.

Trouble is we can do all this but excel at none of it like other classes do.

This is the reason why i focus on wells/marks and vampism/DS its the one thing none of the other classes has and sets us apart ....just looking for that cutting edge and synergy to extract maximum from it is hard because the trait variables are massive and i am starting to think 30 points in one trait tree is not the way to go but looking at tier 1/2 traits throughout the tree, in fact if there ever was an anti nim/max class then necro is it.

Ask yourself this question, if you could only take 3 classes into WvW how many people would pick necro?

Is epidemic still unlimited target? Or did they finaly fix that to max 5 targets? If it unlimited... Full raid of necros is OP as fuck .... U can rape any oponent raid in 10 secs with even bad coordination

As far as i know yes it is unlimited still but the range was rightly nerfed IMHO. Trouble with epidemic is a decent raid that is spread out then epidemic is taking a more useful slot, but situationally epidemic is awesome when used right.

My times for using epidemic (if i can drop agro long enough to slot it)

Attacking a keep lord, tower camp boss etc that is opposed. - target the boss that is stacked with conditions, hit epidemic and watch the players in the boss room melt. especially in hills

Turtles - Epidemic at its best. target one player stack bleeds (25) hit signet of spite then epidemic and watch the turtle crumble

Situational sieging- by this i mean defending a door that is being turtled - but in terms of wall or door breaches then wells are far more reliable in my opinion.

The biggest argument for necro coordiantion in my opinion is for the epidemic skill, other than that its not really required as timing of cooldowns is not really an issue.

When it comes to open field i just pop Death shroud, make sure i am next to the melee at the front, pop the DS gives a goodish open burst fire or fear or jump depending where i am, and then i just pop the heal skills, leave DS to get another heal and spam wells, epidemic effectiveness in this situation is negligeable.

0... ya,I know. But that's not really our fault that the class doesnt look so 1,2,BOOM! Easy and flashy win. Ofc many ppl will play Thiefs for instance coz they are pretty straight forward and easy to pwn pretty much everything and everyone...or at least that's what I've observed around

Im not fond of the idea of ,you know, our class leader (whoever might be) just pops up here and says you will play with this and this and if I see you using this ima tell KC and we will get your ass kicked As you play with Wells and suck HP with this I can prove you I can play as well as you with another build even if Im not skilled with the class whatsoever and I'll keep my role/support for the raid and be as vital as you might be.

Overall,I dunno who and how will be decided what necros will do in wvw and what build they are going to use. Unless we got sort of static groups for wvw and know what is expected by us to be done so we can adjust our builds I dont think we can come up with a conclusion for this thread.

Uh, you need to get that idea out of your head. You're debating over things that aren't true. Already said on the organization thread that's not what a class leader is. Not sure how you've even got that idea.