Playing an effective Necro in GW2 (Updated)

Update: Since writing this blogpost, I have played with the necro up to lvl 80. Please find my experiences about it at the bottom of the post, under the Update label.

I am not sure what I expected from the Necromancer when I started to play GW2. Possibly something relying heavily on pet usage and kiting.

Reality is actually quite far from it.

It seems that the necromancer is designed to be able to utilise life leech to make up for the far from strong protection provided by the light armour. This makes us a viable class for melee, especially when there are a group of weaker enemies around. In the last few days I participated in a lot of dynamic events and ad-hoc teams working for some common goal, and I had the feeling that I am often one of the most effective damage dealers. One very relevant experience from yesterday was when at the end of an event there was a boss fight, which - combined with the adds - was too much for our small ad-hoc team, and we wiped. The reason why I think I was excellent is that I was the last one standing and fighting back for about one more minute after all the others died, and I was still able to eliminate some of the enemies before I ran out of everything I could use. Necros are definitely great at surviving..

So, here is how I do it.

My selected weapons are a staff, and double daggers. For the necro, staves give one damaging spell, and four different marks. A mark is a kind of magical trap: you place it on the ground, and when an enemy goes near it, it "explodes", affecting every enemies close to it. Some marks will only damage the enemy, while others cause bleeding, fear, etc. This itself is already very good for damaging and (to a certain level) controlling enemies, but it even gets better: Some of these can form combos, basically adding extra effects when used together. There are some marks which will heal the player together with damaging the enemies. Of course, these marks can be used in the middle of the combat, not just as a pre-set trap, so when you put a mark in the middle of a group, it will be triggered at once. 

Double daggers are a new thing for me. Previously I used scepter + focus, because of the relatively long range, but then I learned a skill which can grab an enemy from further away, and can take it to me (also adding a very useful condition to them) which is great for picking enemies and killing them with the short ranged daggers. Daggers have a fairly good damage, a very useful and strong life leeching skill, and some others to daze and blind the enemy, which are always useful.

As for extra skills, previously I used the leeching pet to heal me, the tier 2 pet for additional damage and blinding, an aura that turns boons on the enemies to conditions, and the skill that will grab the one enemy and take it to me. But lately I started to experiment with some other interesting combinations.

One of these relies on Epidemic, a tier one skill. Necros use a lot of conditions - bleeding, crippling, chilling, blinding, weakness, just to name a few. Often these are applied to one enemy only - but with epidemic, it is easy to spread them around to a lot of enemies at once. There is a fairly short cooldown for epidemic, so it can be used often. In addition to this, there is a signet skill, with a very slow cooldown (90 seconds) which adds 6 or 7 different conditions to the enemy. This might be a good combo for boss fights. 

I am now even considering to use a petless build, in hope of getting a better deal with using some direct damage or protection skills. 

All of this is very good, but there is one extra trick that makes the necro even more effective and better at surviving: the shadow form. While killing enemies, necros collect life force, which is not to be mistaken with the health points, at least not directly. Necros has a shadow form, where this collected life force is used as health (but it slightly degrades even when the necro takes no damage) and in this shadow form they have four preset skills. Although they are not able to use the normal skills in this state (they are not even able to revive others) the four skills are pretty useful themselves. 

One is a long distance direct damage skill. The second one has a casting time, after which it teleports the player to the current target, and applies a chilling effect on it. The third one is a fear spell, and the fourth one is an AoE life force leech.

I usually switch to shadow form for one of two reasons:

• While my skills are on cd, I use the form for biding some time until I can use them again. This is very important if the skill I am waiting for is the one that heals me, because my normal health is not affected at all, while I am in this form.
• If there are a lot of enemies around, I use the life leech skill to damage them. The area is quite big, so the skill usually leaches life force from a lot of enemies at once, while causing considerable damage to all of them. Combining this with the staff marks, I can practically kill a group of 5-7 weaker enemies in less than a minute.  

This, of course, doesn't mean that my character doesn't have his share of deaths. Sometimes I get much more damage then what I can replenish. In long, continuous fights, I usually find that I used up all my resources and most of my skills are on CD, and all I can do is running away, or dying, or both. (Usually, both.) But I think, this happens much less frequently than it could, and I am very satisfied with the playability of the class.

Update:

So, a lot of time has passed since writing this post, and I frequently see incoming searches about how to play an effective necromancer in Guild Wars 2. So, here is some extra info:

Traits: At lvl 80, I have had the following traits: 

• Spite 30: For Power. Was experimenting with precision, but power is more reliable. The powers you pick are up to you, I learned a Spiteful Removal, Reaper's Might and Spiteful Marks, but I was switching these to others often.
• Blood Magic 30: Vit & Heal are very useful. I learned Bloodthirst (better life leech), Vampiric rituals (Wells siphon life), and Transfusion, I think. Leeching life is great for survivability, so pick something along those lines.
• Death Magic 10: Because of Greater Marks, to make the staff more useful.

Weapons: I kept the staff to the end of the game, but switched between Axe+Something and Double Dagger as secondary all the time. Axe has a very high DPS, and it is very quick, daggers have a lower damage, but they leech life. 

Skills: I learned all of the healing skills, and kept switching between them, but most of my healing came from leeching life, so there was no big difference there. For normal skills, I used bone minions (because of the explosion), and two Wells (great for combos). My chosen elite skill was Plague: It is invaluable for crowd control (especially combined with wells). 

PvP: The staff and the minions are useless in PVP, Sceptre + focus and double daggers are better for weapons, and the revival signet is better for skill. All others can remain the same.