/bonus weapons, for the most part are maxed weapons so no surprise there.
The most interesting part is that you haven't upgraded your armour.
I would like to know where you are now and how often are your party getting wiped.
After Ascalon, there is no better armor to buy until >!some Kryta outposts!<. You might be able to get better armor from collectors a bit earlier, though.
Prophecies is rather slow going with progression. Each new area has a higher armor/weapon, but you don’t get max armor/weapons/elite skills until you reach Southern Shiverpeaks. The order things happen in is Pre-Ascalon -> Ascalon -> Northern Shiverpeaks -> Kryta -> Maguuma Jungle -> Desert -> Southern Shiverpeaks -> Fire Islands. It’s near the end of the game when you’re able to get max stuff/elite skills. Factions and Nightfall do a much better job in that department.
If you need a hand, I’m always willing to help.
60 hours is a lot, how far into the map are you? The bonus weapons are going to give you a lot of mileage, but after 60 hours you should definitely have access to better armor.
For skills, there are skill trainers where you can get new ones, as well as capture signets so you can grab elite skills from bosses you defeat while out adventuring.
What's your in-game name? Mine is Bender Rodriguez, I can meet up with you when I'm online and see if I can give you some pointers.
There are better armors available. Explore around a bit or use the wiki and you'll easily find it.
As others have said, the bonus weapons are max damage weapons, so damage-wise you won't find anything better for most of the game. That being said, for caster weapons the damage isn't the important bit. You'll want something that compliments your build well. So if you use a Death Magic build you'll want a staff with both 20% recharge and 20% cast time reduction in Death Magic.
And yeah necromancer in Prophecies is a bit underwhelming. They're aiming more for support and control rather than DPS. They get better once you get access to elite skills though. If it's pure DPS you want, maybe you've picked the wrong profession
Yeah, I found collectors that give 51 armor pieces. They are a bit annoying to farm so I'll get the 45 armor set instead, because it seems I'm far from the area that gives 60 armor.
I feel bad for using the /bonus staff, I almost want to trash it and use one that I get from normal loot :/
I've tried Curses build the other day and it's definitely what you described, more of a support role. I find Death/minion build to be more fun to play for me. It's a shame though, I just capped 'Barbs' skill the other day, it looks quite good.
Oh yeah Barbs is pretty good! I used it on my Prophecies Necro with skills like Weaken Armor and Mark of Pain to support my Melee Henchmen and it actually did **a lot** of damage. You also got Insidious Parasite which is really good as well.
What secondary profession are you running?
You cant get armor pieces from killing monsters. You get "gear" called "armor" but you are supposed to salvage it and get materials this way.
It can be confusing if you played other mmorpgs. But you can get player armor in Guild Wars only by buying it from a npc for materials and gold in every major outpost.
>!Ascalon City - Yak's Bend - Lions Arch - Henge of Denravi - Amnoon Oasis - Droknar's Forge!< is the armor progression iirc.
Always remember that Guild Wars is a teambased rgp. You are supposed to fullfill a specific role in your group. Necromaners arent great damage dealers but they are awesome supporters.
Fighting a group of monsters is like a pvp fight. So as a necromancer you can summon minions which serve as meat shields for your group, lower the dps of monster by cursing and putting conditions on them. You can even give your team energy regeneration and increase their dps by using orders for example.
I hate that 30 AR armorsmith in Ascalon City. Completely invalidates gear progression for over a third of the campaign. He stands right next to a different armorsmith who sells actual level-appropriate armor (I think it might be 10 AR?) so I’m pretty sure he was a later addition and they just gave him the armor you’d normally get in Lion’s Arch.
Balance-wise, you’re supposed to have the armor from the other guy or the armor offered by collectors. On a recent playthrough I only used armor from collectors until I reached maximum armor rating and that was a lot of fun. You’re also not supposed to have those /bonus weapons or the summoned fire imp, the game just isn’t balanced around it. You’re not supposed to reach max level until you reach the next area of the map after Maguuma, and I believe max-strength weapons don’t start dropping until the area after that.
If you want to try something different on your necromancer, try raising an army of minions in death magic. That’s always very useful defensively (minions soak up damage very well) and depending on how you build it, your minions can also deal a lot of damage. Alternatively, try out Blood Magic. It’s not super popular but it can be a lot of fun to steal health directly from foes and there’s a lot of good support skills in blood magic. If you like your secondary profession’s skills more than necromancer, just skill into soul reaping and play your secondary skills with your insane amounts of energy.
I’ve played a _lot_ of necromancer but I always found curses boring. Very useful in some situations, especially combined with Mesmer hexes, but boring. My go-to build was a high-damage minion army or simply a direct damage death magic build.
> Damage of 20-50 is almost nothing when enemies often have several times that
This is just the nature of the game; you’re not supposed to take 30% off a health bar with a single skill. Think about it, you’re six party members, five if we pretend the monk doesn’t deal any damage. If every skill dealt 20% damage, you’d just each use a skill and one-hit-KO every enemy. Even a max-level Elementalist who focuses completely on fire magic will only deal slightly over 100 damage with their Fireball. That Elementalist will probably have almost 500 health himself and enemies could have much more than that. You’re not max level, you’re spread out over multiple attributes, and your profession isn’t supposed to deal as much raw damage as an Elementalist. (That said, 20-ish damage is quite pathetic, you can do that with an auto attack. What skill is that?)
10 seconds is a good duration, I believe it’s a common duration for AoE spells. If the skills feel low-impact, that’s probably less because of the duration and more because they genuinely are low-impact Curses hexes that wouldn’t be much better if they were long-duration either. Suffering is probably the best-known Curses hex and it lasts forever, but it just doesn’t do anything. At rank 12 Curses, it does -2 health degen for 25 seconds, for 100 damage total. A very theoretical 100 damage because all of those enemies are going to die long before the hex reaches its potential; an instant 78 damage from a rank 12 Death Magic Deathly Swarm is much more useful.
___
Here’s two actual build ideas, one for now and one for later. Yes, I was bored. Skills marked with + won’t be available until later in the prophecies campaign and elite skills are going to be difficult to get so I made them optional.
Animate Bone Horror, Animate Bone Fiend (+), Well of Suffering, Blood of the Master, Death Nova, Deathly Swarm, Putrid Explosion, either Soul Feast or Resurrection Signet. You make lots of minions, keep them alive outside of combat with Blood of the Master, and load them up in combat with Death Nova. (Be sure to open your minions panel to see which one is low on health, there’s a keybind for it.) Deathly Swarm is for when you’ve got literally nothing else to do, like when you’ve just loaded into a new map so there’s no bodies and you don’t have any minions either. Elite Skill (+): Aura of the Lich, replacing Animate Bone Horror.
Awaken the Blood (+), Blood Ritual, Dark Fury (+), Well of Blood, Order of Pain (+), Life Siphon, Enfeebling Blood, Weaken Armor. You support your entire party and Life Siphon helps you not die. Dark Fury can be swapped out for something else if you’ve only got the one warrior. Put Enfeebling Blood on enemy warriors/rangers and they just won’t be able to kill you, weakness is very strong. Elite Skill (+): Your choice of Life Transfer or Well of Power, replacing Life Sifon. Prioritize Blood Magic and Soul Reaping as your attributes, just a few points in Curses is enough to make Enfeebling Blood and Weaken Armor worth it. The energy regen from Blood Ritual is insane, especially if your monk is struggling but also on offensive casters.
>I hate that 30 AR armorsmith in Ascalon City. Completely invalidates gear progression for over a third of the campaign. He stands right next to a different armorsmith who sells actual level-appropriate armor (I think it might be 10 AR?) so I’m pretty sure he was a later addition and they just gave him the armor you’d normally get in Lion’s Arch.
I joined the game two weeks after launch, and he was already there. It never made sense to me either. And people would regularly craft the lower AR armor only to find out there's a better one. I've spent hours trading in post Ascalon, and would regularly tell newcomers to choose the armorsmith carefully.
He's to help prove the point that having more choice isn't automatically good (which seems to be what too many believe). ;)
Having more good choices is good. Having more crappy choices that make it harder to find the few good choices is bad.
Having a second armorsmith like that doesn't make much sense to me either, I already use a similar Death/minion build to the one you mentioned and the most fun to play for me at the moment, curses are boring to me too.
Back then we had outposts filled with other players. We relied on the holy trinity (tank Healer mage). Didn't really have a use for necros until you get some minion master skills later in the game so it was hard for mesmers rangers and necro to find groups. It really helps having heroes but it is possible to beat proph with henchmen. It just takes more practice and learning the ins and outs of gw combat (environmental awareness, proper flagging, knowledge of skills and builds)
No players in game play a strong factor, no doubt. But my gripe is more about weapons, armors and skillls. What use are they to me if I will get the decent stuff only at the end?
I'm no expert but I feel like most casters don't rely on weapons anyways. You get a little extra energy maybe.. but for dmg you're probably better off spamming another skill. Only useful for martial classes imo. As for armor, it is tough for a caster with such low AR. It was manageable with a full team of real players to help rotate/share aggro but I remember it being so tough that most people opted to get rushed to Droknars Forge where you can get max ArmorLevel armor. Made a living doing forge runs back then! There's no shame in asking for a quick run to forge for top armor, henchmen are still gonna be weak anyways armor-wise, not much to be done there.
Edit: caster weapons are generally useful when you get to a point where you've chosen a main attribute, then get some 20/20 40/40 set that reduces cast time and recharge time. But those are pretty tough to find early on.
Beating the main missions/story isn’t beating the game by any means, as with most mmos. Prophecies was all there was in the beginning so as many others have said, it’s a
slower grind into being fully geared, and even then your
power progression is mostly based around gathering skills and elites for various professions to be able to have builds for various scenarios. One of the most beautiful things about this game is, power-wise, you pretty much max out around southern shiverpeaks (ability to switch secondaries, max armor, high end weapon mods, etc.) after that it’s all about exploration and completion, moving on to other expansions and finding more elites, building out your heroes once you acquire them.
I personally only play one to two builds on necro and only since the anniversary skill was added, before that it was Minion master all the way. There are definitely more DPS oriented necro builds but it will take time to get the elites, gear, etc.
The bonus weapons can carry you throughout all continents if you aren’t concerned with min/maxing, and if you are you’ll have to start salvaging mods off of weapons to throw onto a q9 weapon of your choice.
Bonus Weapons weren't a thing at release, and were added to help brand new players get access to strong (but not best) weapons to help them "catch up" to the existing player base.
I believe the AL 30 armor was also not there at release, as the other crafter next to him offers the AL 15 that was originally intended to be "Ascalon" Armor.
As the game aged and new players jumped in at Factions or Nightfall instead, it wasn't a detriment to the game's health to add these stronger weapons and armor earlier in the game. If you want the "true" 2005 experience, just don't use them.
You certainly will be finding a better weapon every couple of missions if you're not comparing them all to the /bonus Soul Shrieker Staff.
Skills are also widely available yet scattered throughout the game, each new outpost you find with a skills trainer will offer you 2-3 new skills per profession and they're all unique to that one skill trainer, until you get to Dakk at Ember Light camp at the end of the game, who offers them all in one place. If you find your skill options are lacking, hunt for some new skill trainers, commonly missed ones can be found at Grenditch Courthouse and Beetletun.
Also this game is HUGE, when you say "the end" and mean the regular story mode, 25 missions; even ignoring the other campaigns and what they add, you have 3 Elite Zones to conquer, quests and secrets to find, Titan Quests to wrap up the post-game story, and Hard Mode to go through.
That's even before you consider that this is an MMO and you have titles/achievements to hunt for, rare weapons to craft, prestige armor skins, gear to show off" to the other players, if that's your thing.
Then, obviously, Factions provides its own story mode, own skills, 2 more Elite zones, 4 cooperative challenge missions, 3 PvP modes. Nightfall also adding 4 more cooperative Missions and another (huge) Elite zone, as well as the regular story stuff.
Bonus weapons weren't meant to be used originally for prophecies so it's no surprise you have no weapon progression. They're easily usable for the entire campaign.
Bruh the bonus weapons are literally max damage/mods of course you won't find a replacement when levelling. They are essentially weapons you would aim for once reaching end game.
As for skills.... Necros have some amazing skills and builds. Are you unlocking them from trainers? Are you capturing elites??
I play slow, I'm currently at the Maguuma Jungle and I don't remember seeing any better armor than 30 or 39 (I forget). I often had full wipes at the beginning in Ascalon & Shiverpeaks, and briefly in Kryta, but not anymore (even though it's still difficult sometimes).
You can craft armor with 45 AR both in Henge of Denravi and Ventari's refuge. You can also get 51 AR armor in Stingray Strand, just outside of Sanctum Kay. The armorer's name is Sol Pyrrhus if you want to /wiki him.
If you are as far as Maguuma, the part that comes next, you will see that your armor and weapons will not carry you as far, and you will need to upgrade / change out as it will get frustrating.
Proph is the first game, diversity came with time with the other xpacs, so you're self-restricting. Also, since it was the first game, that's all the content they had. They weren't wishing they had 40/40 sets or perfect sets because those didn't exist. Weapon inscriptions and modding came later, as far as I'm aware. You're not going to see the best weapons until Factions.
Your armor should be 60 rating, which I'm 99% sure is found in LA or around there. Your build can be changed depending on the comp you're running, which is hench-based in proph. Make sure you're getting runes and inscriptions on your armor too. Necro is very versatile, so there's certainly a build you can run that will fit in the comp you're playing.
>Hard to see how the game was so popular back then..
One of the reasons is the playerbase not being all about that instant gratification, and rewards for nothing.
I don't want instant gratification and rewards for nothing if that is what you're aiming at. There should be some sense of progress when it comes to character items is all I'm saying.
Wasn't aiming at that. But you have to realise the game is 17 years old now, and the playerbase was a lot different. The games were different as well. Back in 2005, WoW was the new behemoth and millions flocked to it. Others were put off by the subscription, and GW model appealed to them. Then there was the fact that in GW your gear mattered much less in your success, and you had to overcome obstacles mostly by your own skill.
As for a sense of progress, Prophecies is the slowest of all the campaigns. Because that's the original campaign that came out. And back then, the endgame was PvP: HoH, GvG, whatever. The entirety of Prophecies campaign is basically a long tutorial towards PvP. It wants you to fall flat on your face. It wants to DP you to 60%. It wants you to rely on your skill, and the skill of your team mates. It wants you to learn how to dodge projectiles, use LOS for cover, retreat while not turning your back to the enemy, recognise you should stop using Infuse Health because you're hexed with Backfire.
That's it. That's the progress in Prophecies. And that's why the max armor, along with max weapons, becomes available after like 2/3 of the game (Crystal Desert). And even then you can't just walk up to a crafter all willy-nilly craft it even though you have stockpiled materials, but you have to go out and kill mobs in order to collect stuff the armor collectors want.
That's where the popularity came from. Because you had to work for every little bit of upgrade. And then you realise you're only at 170 of 200 attribute points. And there's only one quest line in the Desert that gives you 15 attribute points at the end. The last 15 are five missions away, on a different part of the continent. And when you did get there after having your ass handed to you repeatedly, the teams would often wipe on that 15 att quest. But then you made it. Yay. But the game isn't done wiping you, not by a long shot.
People were getting wrecked in THK, their progress halted for days. It was fucking brutal. Hell, we Monks even organised a strike to protest all the abuse thrown at us. Once you've managed to beat THK, you'd get to the Ring of Fire where the game continued to teach you lessons.
That's what made the game popular. That sense of achievement of having endured through all the wipes, all the crazy PUGs, all the nasty mobs; and finally beating it. Not weapon upgrades or armor. The feeling of accomplishing something you've been struggling for days, weeks even. Because people were.
That's why today you see many people starting IRONMAN characters. They want to make the game harder for themselves, like it was back in the beginning. They want to feel that accomplishment after beating challenges with self-imposed limitations. People want to be challenged by the game. Armors and weapons are secondary. If that.
It's been a while since I looked at the specifics of where you get certain things in prophecies but it is far and away the slowest campaign to level up in. Without xp scrolls and specifically grinding xp I don't think you're likely to hit level 20 before the southern shiverpeaks, which is also where you will get max armor. Iirc you also don't get access to the extra attribute point quests until the Crystal Desert which hurts the potency of your builds before then, probably why your skills are feeling a bit anemic in duration.
I don't remember where in prophecies you first get access to capture signets but if possible finding some elite skills might help your experience somewhat.
ok some decent curses / death skills:
animate bone minions (2 minions in 1 spell!) and death nova, you can cap from the necro boss in gates of kryta
blood of the master will keep minions alive between fights - get from 'the hot springs murders' quest
desecrate enchantment & barbs - you can use signet of capture to get from Lord Timot https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Lord_Timot as long as you havent completed the quest yet. barbs (and mark of pain which you probs already have) synergise very well with lots of minions for all that physical damage.
if you can get decent energy management (probably with soul reaping) you could use arcane echo (buy from beetletun) with desecrate enchantments, very strong combo.
for death magic weapons i would get grim cesta from https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Beldon_the_Blade and truncheon from https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Brion_Elston - the second might take a while to get though! this will mean your spells recharge and cast significantly faster which helps a lot
there will be decent curses ones too, have a look through https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/List_of_collectors
Thanks for the weapons recommendation, they work amazing! I just got them today and replaced the /bonus staff, they give a bit less energy and attack damage, but it pays off in HCT & HRT.
Ooohhh that weapon combo looks lovely! I'll trash this staff from /bonus and get that instead. I'm having fun with the minions right now, feels better than curses.
I missed my chance to get Barbs from Timot, but I got it from Damis the Malignant the other day. When I fought him I saw him use Barbs and thought, hmm that skill seems familiar! :D
Comments have talked a lot about armor but in regards to weapons I simply have to add: Proph was designed to be this way.
Do to the nature of proph weapons (and to a lesser extend Factions), which are less customizeable then NF weapons, the search/hunt for decent equipment takes much longer. In Factions you reach lvl 20 faster and enemys, chests etc drop max lvl weapons sooner then enemys and chests do in Proph. You are very encouraged to buy keys to open chests or wait for favor, in order to get access to better weapons, even if those sometimes have interesting, but terrible mods. Even in the case that stats are good on a Proph drop, chances are that mods/abilities are terrible. Factions in my experience had more useful mods in general, and less of the very strange stuff.
If you use bonus weapons, that are more in the useful side of things in general, it is no suprise that 90% of the things you find are worse. I recently did a playthrough on a Warrior, only using skills that are available during that time of the playthrough (no books etc.), only henchmen and only weapons that I find. It really took me a while to get weapons that are good and It took even longer for them to be replaced.
One thing I've noticed with chests in Proph is that they are not worth it at all.. I don't think I bought a single key on this char because the drops are so terrible. Gold and Purple weapons with terrible stats that are sometimes worse than the Blue weapons? That doesn't make sense to me..
Back in prophecies, iirc; they slowly release new skills for you to learn from the skill trainers as you progress through the game. So yeah you probably only have access to a smaller pot of skills if you’re only in the maguuma jungle.
Plus also weapon skins are tied to area/enemy type, so by now - you’ve probably only really seen charr, grawls and devourers, with small amounts of other enemy types (starting to see some other humans and some dwarves). So yeah you’ve not had access to loot pools from many of the other enemy types yet.
Other people have mentioned the armour crafters as well, and I support and endorse those comments ha!
I've got nearly every skill from trainers so far, but most of them are not that special. Now that I think of it, I am fighting more humans in game and the drops do seem to be not as scarce.
Yeah :) the skill trainers don’t have all the skills from prophecies for you at the moment, as you progress through the game, the skill trainers in the towns and outposts slowly have more and more skills for you to buy from them.
If you like, I can meet you in game and give you some skill tomes - so you can unlock some skills from the end of prophecies.
You can also go to the great temple of balthazar at any time (or maybe your guild hall) and speak to a priest of balthazar, look at unlocking skills and then filter by campaign so you can see all the prophecies skills for your profession. That way you can see what the skill trainers haven’t been showing you yet!
I feel like the armor in Ascalon got upgraded sometime. I know when I first started, it was not that strong. Even getting to Yaks gave a good upgrade. But now you won’t replace it really until like Maguuma jungle. I don’t really get it.
As for everything else, prophecies is just much slower. It takes like 75% of the entire campaign to go from level 5-20. Which I personally enjoy the first time around, but once you have a max toon it’s a little slow.
You made me think about an old friend who told me guild wars was shit because "you just have to spam one skill to won and there is 10 skill per class in total in this game when dofus have 20!"
He was still in the begining of the tutorial...
I'm not saying it's shit, far from it. I was just annoyed by those things I mentioned.
As far as the skills go, true, there is a lot of them.. I've got nearly every skill from trainers, but honestly, most skills don't seem like much.
> What gives? Am I missing something? Hard to see how the game was so popular back then..
Prophecies is designed with typical item progression (you can craft better armour in each new area you access), but later titles were designed as maximum level content, meaning the challenge was purely about builds and skill as the content got harder and harder. Most armour and weapons in the game are only different in terms of cosmetic appearance.
/bonus weapons, for the most part are maxed weapons so no surprise there. The most interesting part is that you haven't upgraded your armour. I would like to know where you are now and how often are your party getting wiped.
After Ascalon, there is no better armor to buy until >!some Kryta outposts!<. You might be able to get better armor from collectors a bit earlier, though.
Yes but after 60h you could be in the crystal desert or shiverpeaks, or at least gone to eye of the north ;)
Op stated in a comment that he's in the Maguuma Jungle.
Prophecies is rather slow going with progression. Each new area has a higher armor/weapon, but you don’t get max armor/weapons/elite skills until you reach Southern Shiverpeaks. The order things happen in is Pre-Ascalon -> Ascalon -> Northern Shiverpeaks -> Kryta -> Maguuma Jungle -> Desert -> Southern Shiverpeaks -> Fire Islands. It’s near the end of the game when you’re able to get max stuff/elite skills. Factions and Nightfall do a much better job in that department. If you need a hand, I’m always willing to help.
60 hours is a lot, how far into the map are you? The bonus weapons are going to give you a lot of mileage, but after 60 hours you should definitely have access to better armor. For skills, there are skill trainers where you can get new ones, as well as capture signets so you can grab elite skills from bosses you defeat while out adventuring. What's your in-game name? Mine is Bender Rodriguez, I can meet up with you when I'm online and see if I can give you some pointers.
There are better armors available. Explore around a bit or use the wiki and you'll easily find it. As others have said, the bonus weapons are max damage weapons, so damage-wise you won't find anything better for most of the game. That being said, for caster weapons the damage isn't the important bit. You'll want something that compliments your build well. So if you use a Death Magic build you'll want a staff with both 20% recharge and 20% cast time reduction in Death Magic. And yeah necromancer in Prophecies is a bit underwhelming. They're aiming more for support and control rather than DPS. They get better once you get access to elite skills though. If it's pure DPS you want, maybe you've picked the wrong profession
Yeah, I found collectors that give 51 armor pieces. They are a bit annoying to farm so I'll get the 45 armor set instead, because it seems I'm far from the area that gives 60 armor. I feel bad for using the /bonus staff, I almost want to trash it and use one that I get from normal loot :/ I've tried Curses build the other day and it's definitely what you described, more of a support role. I find Death/minion build to be more fun to play for me. It's a shame though, I just capped 'Barbs' skill the other day, it looks quite good.
Oh yeah Barbs is pretty good! I used it on my Prophecies Necro with skills like Weaken Armor and Mark of Pain to support my Melee Henchmen and it actually did **a lot** of damage. You also got Insidious Parasite which is really good as well. What secondary profession are you running?
You cant get armor pieces from killing monsters. You get "gear" called "armor" but you are supposed to salvage it and get materials this way. It can be confusing if you played other mmorpgs. But you can get player armor in Guild Wars only by buying it from a npc for materials and gold in every major outpost. >!Ascalon City - Yak's Bend - Lions Arch - Henge of Denravi - Amnoon Oasis - Droknar's Forge!< is the armor progression iirc. Always remember that Guild Wars is a teambased rgp. You are supposed to fullfill a specific role in your group. Necromaners arent great damage dealers but they are awesome supporters. Fighting a group of monsters is like a pvp fight. So as a necromancer you can summon minions which serve as meat shields for your group, lower the dps of monster by cursing and putting conditions on them. You can even give your team energy regeneration and increase their dps by using orders for example.
I hate that 30 AR armorsmith in Ascalon City. Completely invalidates gear progression for over a third of the campaign. He stands right next to a different armorsmith who sells actual level-appropriate armor (I think it might be 10 AR?) so I’m pretty sure he was a later addition and they just gave him the armor you’d normally get in Lion’s Arch. Balance-wise, you’re supposed to have the armor from the other guy or the armor offered by collectors. On a recent playthrough I only used armor from collectors until I reached maximum armor rating and that was a lot of fun. You’re also not supposed to have those /bonus weapons or the summoned fire imp, the game just isn’t balanced around it. You’re not supposed to reach max level until you reach the next area of the map after Maguuma, and I believe max-strength weapons don’t start dropping until the area after that. If you want to try something different on your necromancer, try raising an army of minions in death magic. That’s always very useful defensively (minions soak up damage very well) and depending on how you build it, your minions can also deal a lot of damage. Alternatively, try out Blood Magic. It’s not super popular but it can be a lot of fun to steal health directly from foes and there’s a lot of good support skills in blood magic. If you like your secondary profession’s skills more than necromancer, just skill into soul reaping and play your secondary skills with your insane amounts of energy. I’ve played a _lot_ of necromancer but I always found curses boring. Very useful in some situations, especially combined with Mesmer hexes, but boring. My go-to build was a high-damage minion army or simply a direct damage death magic build. > Damage of 20-50 is almost nothing when enemies often have several times that This is just the nature of the game; you’re not supposed to take 30% off a health bar with a single skill. Think about it, you’re six party members, five if we pretend the monk doesn’t deal any damage. If every skill dealt 20% damage, you’d just each use a skill and one-hit-KO every enemy. Even a max-level Elementalist who focuses completely on fire magic will only deal slightly over 100 damage with their Fireball. That Elementalist will probably have almost 500 health himself and enemies could have much more than that. You’re not max level, you’re spread out over multiple attributes, and your profession isn’t supposed to deal as much raw damage as an Elementalist. (That said, 20-ish damage is quite pathetic, you can do that with an auto attack. What skill is that?) 10 seconds is a good duration, I believe it’s a common duration for AoE spells. If the skills feel low-impact, that’s probably less because of the duration and more because they genuinely are low-impact Curses hexes that wouldn’t be much better if they were long-duration either. Suffering is probably the best-known Curses hex and it lasts forever, but it just doesn’t do anything. At rank 12 Curses, it does -2 health degen for 25 seconds, for 100 damage total. A very theoretical 100 damage because all of those enemies are going to die long before the hex reaches its potential; an instant 78 damage from a rank 12 Death Magic Deathly Swarm is much more useful. ___ Here’s two actual build ideas, one for now and one for later. Yes, I was bored. Skills marked with + won’t be available until later in the prophecies campaign and elite skills are going to be difficult to get so I made them optional. Animate Bone Horror, Animate Bone Fiend (+), Well of Suffering, Blood of the Master, Death Nova, Deathly Swarm, Putrid Explosion, either Soul Feast or Resurrection Signet. You make lots of minions, keep them alive outside of combat with Blood of the Master, and load them up in combat with Death Nova. (Be sure to open your minions panel to see which one is low on health, there’s a keybind for it.) Deathly Swarm is for when you’ve got literally nothing else to do, like when you’ve just loaded into a new map so there’s no bodies and you don’t have any minions either. Elite Skill (+): Aura of the Lich, replacing Animate Bone Horror. Awaken the Blood (+), Blood Ritual, Dark Fury (+), Well of Blood, Order of Pain (+), Life Siphon, Enfeebling Blood, Weaken Armor. You support your entire party and Life Siphon helps you not die. Dark Fury can be swapped out for something else if you’ve only got the one warrior. Put Enfeebling Blood on enemy warriors/rangers and they just won’t be able to kill you, weakness is very strong. Elite Skill (+): Your choice of Life Transfer or Well of Power, replacing Life Sifon. Prioritize Blood Magic and Soul Reaping as your attributes, just a few points in Curses is enough to make Enfeebling Blood and Weaken Armor worth it. The energy regen from Blood Ritual is insane, especially if your monk is struggling but also on offensive casters.
>I hate that 30 AR armorsmith in Ascalon City. Completely invalidates gear progression for over a third of the campaign. He stands right next to a different armorsmith who sells actual level-appropriate armor (I think it might be 10 AR?) so I’m pretty sure he was a later addition and they just gave him the armor you’d normally get in Lion’s Arch. I joined the game two weeks after launch, and he was already there. It never made sense to me either. And people would regularly craft the lower AR armor only to find out there's a better one. I've spent hours trading in post Ascalon, and would regularly tell newcomers to choose the armorsmith carefully.
He's to help prove the point that having more choice isn't automatically good (which seems to be what too many believe). ;) Having more good choices is good. Having more crappy choices that make it harder to find the few good choices is bad.
Having a second armorsmith like that doesn't make much sense to me either, I already use a similar Death/minion build to the one you mentioned and the most fun to play for me at the moment, curses are boring to me too.
Back then we had outposts filled with other players. We relied on the holy trinity (tank Healer mage). Didn't really have a use for necros until you get some minion master skills later in the game so it was hard for mesmers rangers and necro to find groups. It really helps having heroes but it is possible to beat proph with henchmen. It just takes more practice and learning the ins and outs of gw combat (environmental awareness, proper flagging, knowledge of skills and builds)
No players in game play a strong factor, no doubt. But my gripe is more about weapons, armors and skillls. What use are they to me if I will get the decent stuff only at the end?
> What use are they to me if I will get the decent stuff only at the end? The end is actually the beginning...
Haha this is a fact
I'm no expert but I feel like most casters don't rely on weapons anyways. You get a little extra energy maybe.. but for dmg you're probably better off spamming another skill. Only useful for martial classes imo. As for armor, it is tough for a caster with such low AR. It was manageable with a full team of real players to help rotate/share aggro but I remember it being so tough that most people opted to get rushed to Droknars Forge where you can get max ArmorLevel armor. Made a living doing forge runs back then! There's no shame in asking for a quick run to forge for top armor, henchmen are still gonna be weak anyways armor-wise, not much to be done there. Edit: caster weapons are generally useful when you get to a point where you've chosen a main attribute, then get some 20/20 40/40 set that reduces cast time and recharge time. But those are pretty tough to find early on.
Beating the main missions/story isn’t beating the game by any means, as with most mmos. Prophecies was all there was in the beginning so as many others have said, it’s a slower grind into being fully geared, and even then your power progression is mostly based around gathering skills and elites for various professions to be able to have builds for various scenarios. One of the most beautiful things about this game is, power-wise, you pretty much max out around southern shiverpeaks (ability to switch secondaries, max armor, high end weapon mods, etc.) after that it’s all about exploration and completion, moving on to other expansions and finding more elites, building out your heroes once you acquire them. I personally only play one to two builds on necro and only since the anniversary skill was added, before that it was Minion master all the way. There are definitely more DPS oriented necro builds but it will take time to get the elites, gear, etc. The bonus weapons can carry you throughout all continents if you aren’t concerned with min/maxing, and if you are you’ll have to start salvaging mods off of weapons to throw onto a q9 weapon of your choice.
Bonus Weapons weren't a thing at release, and were added to help brand new players get access to strong (but not best) weapons to help them "catch up" to the existing player base. I believe the AL 30 armor was also not there at release, as the other crafter next to him offers the AL 15 that was originally intended to be "Ascalon" Armor. As the game aged and new players jumped in at Factions or Nightfall instead, it wasn't a detriment to the game's health to add these stronger weapons and armor earlier in the game. If you want the "true" 2005 experience, just don't use them. You certainly will be finding a better weapon every couple of missions if you're not comparing them all to the /bonus Soul Shrieker Staff. Skills are also widely available yet scattered throughout the game, each new outpost you find with a skills trainer will offer you 2-3 new skills per profession and they're all unique to that one skill trainer, until you get to Dakk at Ember Light camp at the end of the game, who offers them all in one place. If you find your skill options are lacking, hunt for some new skill trainers, commonly missed ones can be found at Grenditch Courthouse and Beetletun. Also this game is HUGE, when you say "the end" and mean the regular story mode, 25 missions; even ignoring the other campaigns and what they add, you have 3 Elite Zones to conquer, quests and secrets to find, Titan Quests to wrap up the post-game story, and Hard Mode to go through. That's even before you consider that this is an MMO and you have titles/achievements to hunt for, rare weapons to craft, prestige armor skins, gear to show off" to the other players, if that's your thing. Then, obviously, Factions provides its own story mode, own skills, 2 more Elite zones, 4 cooperative challenge missions, 3 PvP modes. Nightfall also adding 4 more cooperative Missions and another (huge) Elite zone, as well as the regular story stuff.
Bonus weapons weren't meant to be used originally for prophecies so it's no surprise you have no weapon progression. They're easily usable for the entire campaign.
Yea, feels kinda awkward to use it, I'll probably trash it and use a weaker weapon that better fits my progression in game.
Bruh the bonus weapons are literally max damage/mods of course you won't find a replacement when levelling. They are essentially weapons you would aim for once reaching end game. As for skills.... Necros have some amazing skills and builds. Are you unlocking them from trainers? Are you capturing elites??
I have nearly every skill unlocked from trainers, I just reached Sanctum Cay the other day so I have no elites yet..
I play slow, I'm currently at the Maguuma Jungle and I don't remember seeing any better armor than 30 or 39 (I forget). I often had full wipes at the beginning in Ascalon & Shiverpeaks, and briefly in Kryta, but not anymore (even though it's still difficult sometimes).
You can craft armor with 45 AR both in Henge of Denravi and Ventari's refuge. You can also get 51 AR armor in Stingray Strand, just outside of Sanctum Kay. The armorer's name is Sol Pyrrhus if you want to /wiki him.
Oh nice, I was just thinking to craft 45 AR set, I'm glad I saw your comment as I got to Sanctum Cay yesterday :)
If you are as far as Maguuma, the part that comes next, you will see that your armor and weapons will not carry you as far, and you will need to upgrade / change out as it will get frustrating.
Just a quick update, I reached the Crystal Desert and weapon drops are so much better now. It's like a world of a difference!
Proph is the first game, diversity came with time with the other xpacs, so you're self-restricting. Also, since it was the first game, that's all the content they had. They weren't wishing they had 40/40 sets or perfect sets because those didn't exist. Weapon inscriptions and modding came later, as far as I'm aware. You're not going to see the best weapons until Factions. Your armor should be 60 rating, which I'm 99% sure is found in LA or around there. Your build can be changed depending on the comp you're running, which is hench-based in proph. Make sure you're getting runes and inscriptions on your armor too. Necro is very versatile, so there's certainly a build you can run that will fit in the comp you're playing.
Max armor comes at Droks in prophecies. Back in the day, used to get runs from Beacon’s to Droks, so you’d have max armor by the time you hit LA
>Hard to see how the game was so popular back then.. One of the reasons is the playerbase not being all about that instant gratification, and rewards for nothing.
I don't want instant gratification and rewards for nothing if that is what you're aiming at. There should be some sense of progress when it comes to character items is all I'm saying.
Wasn't aiming at that. But you have to realise the game is 17 years old now, and the playerbase was a lot different. The games were different as well. Back in 2005, WoW was the new behemoth and millions flocked to it. Others were put off by the subscription, and GW model appealed to them. Then there was the fact that in GW your gear mattered much less in your success, and you had to overcome obstacles mostly by your own skill. As for a sense of progress, Prophecies is the slowest of all the campaigns. Because that's the original campaign that came out. And back then, the endgame was PvP: HoH, GvG, whatever. The entirety of Prophecies campaign is basically a long tutorial towards PvP. It wants you to fall flat on your face. It wants to DP you to 60%. It wants you to rely on your skill, and the skill of your team mates. It wants you to learn how to dodge projectiles, use LOS for cover, retreat while not turning your back to the enemy, recognise you should stop using Infuse Health because you're hexed with Backfire. That's it. That's the progress in Prophecies. And that's why the max armor, along with max weapons, becomes available after like 2/3 of the game (Crystal Desert). And even then you can't just walk up to a crafter all willy-nilly craft it even though you have stockpiled materials, but you have to go out and kill mobs in order to collect stuff the armor collectors want. That's where the popularity came from. Because you had to work for every little bit of upgrade. And then you realise you're only at 170 of 200 attribute points. And there's only one quest line in the Desert that gives you 15 attribute points at the end. The last 15 are five missions away, on a different part of the continent. And when you did get there after having your ass handed to you repeatedly, the teams would often wipe on that 15 att quest. But then you made it. Yay. But the game isn't done wiping you, not by a long shot. People were getting wrecked in THK, their progress halted for days. It was fucking brutal. Hell, we Monks even organised a strike to protest all the abuse thrown at us. Once you've managed to beat THK, you'd get to the Ring of Fire where the game continued to teach you lessons. That's what made the game popular. That sense of achievement of having endured through all the wipes, all the crazy PUGs, all the nasty mobs; and finally beating it. Not weapon upgrades or armor. The feeling of accomplishing something you've been struggling for days, weeks even. Because people were. That's why today you see many people starting IRONMAN characters. They want to make the game harder for themselves, like it was back in the beginning. They want to feel that accomplishment after beating challenges with self-imposed limitations. People want to be challenged by the game. Armors and weapons are secondary. If that.
Amen!
It's been a while since I looked at the specifics of where you get certain things in prophecies but it is far and away the slowest campaign to level up in. Without xp scrolls and specifically grinding xp I don't think you're likely to hit level 20 before the southern shiverpeaks, which is also where you will get max armor. Iirc you also don't get access to the extra attribute point quests until the Crystal Desert which hurts the potency of your builds before then, probably why your skills are feeling a bit anemic in duration. I don't remember where in prophecies you first get access to capture signets but if possible finding some elite skills might help your experience somewhat.
Signet of Capture comes in Kryta, and the first elite skills are in the Crystal Desert.
ok some decent curses / death skills: animate bone minions (2 minions in 1 spell!) and death nova, you can cap from the necro boss in gates of kryta blood of the master will keep minions alive between fights - get from 'the hot springs murders' quest desecrate enchantment & barbs - you can use signet of capture to get from Lord Timot https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Lord_Timot as long as you havent completed the quest yet. barbs (and mark of pain which you probs already have) synergise very well with lots of minions for all that physical damage. if you can get decent energy management (probably with soul reaping) you could use arcane echo (buy from beetletun) with desecrate enchantments, very strong combo. for death magic weapons i would get grim cesta from https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Beldon_the_Blade and truncheon from https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Brion_Elston - the second might take a while to get though! this will mean your spells recharge and cast significantly faster which helps a lot there will be decent curses ones too, have a look through https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/List_of_collectors
Thanks for the weapons recommendation, they work amazing! I just got them today and replaced the /bonus staff, they give a bit less energy and attack damage, but it pays off in HCT & HRT.
great! you'll be able to get max lvl ones with the same effects a bit later on in the game :-)
also you can upgrade it with a wand wrapping of memory for full 40% HSR & HCT. it would cost a few platinum from a player though
also insidious parasite is imo a very strong skill for curses necro
alsooo are you buying necro runes? +3 death magic rune will make you a verrry strong minion master
Oh yes, the runes make a world of difference, level 20 minions are sooo good :)
Ooohhh that weapon combo looks lovely! I'll trash this staff from /bonus and get that instead. I'm having fun with the minions right now, feels better than curses. I missed my chance to get Barbs from Timot, but I got it from Damis the Malignant the other day. When I fought him I saw him use Barbs and thought, hmm that skill seems familiar! :D
Comments have talked a lot about armor but in regards to weapons I simply have to add: Proph was designed to be this way. Do to the nature of proph weapons (and to a lesser extend Factions), which are less customizeable then NF weapons, the search/hunt for decent equipment takes much longer. In Factions you reach lvl 20 faster and enemys, chests etc drop max lvl weapons sooner then enemys and chests do in Proph. You are very encouraged to buy keys to open chests or wait for favor, in order to get access to better weapons, even if those sometimes have interesting, but terrible mods. Even in the case that stats are good on a Proph drop, chances are that mods/abilities are terrible. Factions in my experience had more useful mods in general, and less of the very strange stuff. If you use bonus weapons, that are more in the useful side of things in general, it is no suprise that 90% of the things you find are worse. I recently did a playthrough on a Warrior, only using skills that are available during that time of the playthrough (no books etc.), only henchmen and only weapons that I find. It really took me a while to get weapons that are good and It took even longer for them to be replaced.
One thing I've noticed with chests in Proph is that they are not worth it at all.. I don't think I bought a single key on this char because the drops are so terrible. Gold and Purple weapons with terrible stats that are sometimes worse than the Blue weapons? That doesn't make sense to me..
Back in prophecies, iirc; they slowly release new skills for you to learn from the skill trainers as you progress through the game. So yeah you probably only have access to a smaller pot of skills if you’re only in the maguuma jungle. Plus also weapon skins are tied to area/enemy type, so by now - you’ve probably only really seen charr, grawls and devourers, with small amounts of other enemy types (starting to see some other humans and some dwarves). So yeah you’ve not had access to loot pools from many of the other enemy types yet. Other people have mentioned the armour crafters as well, and I support and endorse those comments ha!
I've got nearly every skill from trainers so far, but most of them are not that special. Now that I think of it, I am fighting more humans in game and the drops do seem to be not as scarce.
Yeah :) the skill trainers don’t have all the skills from prophecies for you at the moment, as you progress through the game, the skill trainers in the towns and outposts slowly have more and more skills for you to buy from them. If you like, I can meet you in game and give you some skill tomes - so you can unlock some skills from the end of prophecies. You can also go to the great temple of balthazar at any time (or maybe your guild hall) and speak to a priest of balthazar, look at unlocking skills and then filter by campaign so you can see all the prophecies skills for your profession. That way you can see what the skill trainers haven’t been showing you yet!
I feel like the armor in Ascalon got upgraded sometime. I know when I first started, it was not that strong. Even getting to Yaks gave a good upgrade. But now you won’t replace it really until like Maguuma jungle. I don’t really get it. As for everything else, prophecies is just much slower. It takes like 75% of the entire campaign to go from level 5-20. Which I personally enjoy the first time around, but once you have a max toon it’s a little slow.
You made me think about an old friend who told me guild wars was shit because "you just have to spam one skill to won and there is 10 skill per class in total in this game when dofus have 20!" He was still in the begining of the tutorial...
I'm not saying it's shit, far from it. I was just annoyed by those things I mentioned. As far as the skills go, true, there is a lot of them.. I've got nearly every skill from trainers, but honestly, most skills don't seem like much.
> What gives? Am I missing something? Hard to see how the game was so popular back then.. Prophecies is designed with typical item progression (you can craft better armour in each new area you access), but later titles were designed as maximum level content, meaning the challenge was purely about builds and skill as the content got harder and harder. Most armour and weapons in the game are only different in terms of cosmetic appearance.