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[Haschel]

I switched to a Norn Necromancer.  Are necromancers overpopular?  I feel like I see them more than anything else but maybe it's just the pets making them more visible.

Not that I mind.  I always end up playing overpopular classes in MMOs and being the surprise "oh, that one's actually good" wild card.

Someone showed me a graph of class/race statistics, I believe Necromancer was like 4th or 5th highest- so basically right in the middle.

[Leyic]

Except you have to pay attention to when the data was collected. What's popular now might not be popular after the next patch and its set of buffs and nerfs. That said, I do remember someone being surprised by finding a good necromancer a couple months back.

I just remembered by number one complaint with mesmers: They have no decent direct damage aoe, so you get almost no credit in large event zergs like Maw, unlike every other class.

[Niveras]

I initially tried a necromancer when I first picked up the game and was disappointed. Disappointed in one major way, a way that I wouldn't expect a third (fourth?) generation MMO to fall for: lack of scaling. Pets don't scale except by level. Their damage output does not change no matter what stats you have. Pet control also kind of sucks; a lot of the times they simply don't engage (especially when swimming). It could do with a kind of mini-RTS interface to give you better, tighter control over your multitude of pets. At minimum give them a pet bar to command all pets to attack or follow or whatever (even if you can't control them individually). Similarly, the potential of a DoT-based build is weak. While you can try to stack DoT power (I forget what the stat is actually called), your efforts are completely in vain when more than two or three people are fighting the same mob, because bleed stacks cap too low and are shared across all combatants. I can get up to 11 stacks by myself if I focus on it; why not just build for power, where my contributions are always functional and don't just vanish into the ether because of an arbitrary cap?

The other big disappointment I had was that there just wasn't enough Stuff To Do in combat. I'd rather have 3ish abilities to cycle between needing to be pressed, a couple that are longer duration but longer cooldown that are important to press, and then a few really important cooldowns. From what I can tell so far, the only thing that even comes close to this for necromancers is a staff build, and even then I spend 50% of my time waiting on cooldowns. And guess what? I go dual daggers, press nothing and still do more damage than a staff in anything short of a WvW zerg.

I've considered trying other classes, but my issues with number of active abilities seems inherent to the game. I can see where this could be good game design, but it still just feels boring. I had way more to do even on my EQ1 ranger, where 70% of my damage came from autoattacks. Never mind how active playing a bard was, or any class in WoW.

[Cthulhu]

I do think that setup's a little strange.  I'm dagger/focus with a staff backup, with well of suffering and signet of spite for the passive (don't have my third slot yet).  Packs my level last like two seconds and I always get gold in zerg events.

[Niveras]

My necromancer is 71, and combat is definitely slower at higher levels than at lower.

[Greiger]

I don't have a necromancer myself, but I'm told that a necromancer set up with boon removal fields is some kind of god of war.

[Jelle]

Only in pvp mind you, pve monsters rarely (never?) have boons. In pvp boons are the one driving force behind bunkers, get rid of those and they buckle.

I don't see why you'd need a specific build for pve anyway, it's so incredibly easy you could have a trained monkey play pve. At least your open world pve you'll be doing whilst leveling, dungeons are another story. Hell you can solo most group events if you're half competent.

[Greiger]

Those flying space squid monsters like to use boons, but they are pretty uncommon.  Yea that whole boon removal thing is more player vs player.  Probably specifically WvW since it was somebody in my WvW guild mentioning it. Apparently some of the Sanctum of Rali and Blackgate guilds like to spam buffs to insane levels right before a fight, and a necromancer turning them all into conditions can do quite a lot of harm.

And I agree you don't really need a specific build for most PvE.  But you really don't even need a coherent build in dungeons if the majority of the people involved know the encounters. 

For example, I play a spirit ranger in WvW, and sometimes do dungeons on the side.  Spirits are practically useless in dungeons because they die so quickly, so I switch to some other utility skills while dungeon running.  Because I'm traited for spirits (and I'm too lazy to reassign my traits for a single dungeon run) nearly half my trait points are sitting around being useless, and I still do just fine.

[Cthulhu]

I'm a bit of an Altoholic.  I almost want to delete my level 18 necromancer so when I inevitably remake him I can induct him into Team Battlemage.

Asura Elementalist named Traumaturge
Norn Necromancer named Hexecutioner
Human Mesmer named Charms Dealer
Sylvari Ranger named Soothslayer
And the Charr.  Any suggestions?

EDIT:  Sylvari Mesmer, actually, and Charms Dealer was too awesome so it was already taken.  I'm The Charms Dealer.  So far I've done nothing but sPvP using the shattercat build.  I like it a lot, there's a lot more to it than shattering.  I mainly open with a big mind-wrack and then a frustration, then just kind of flail around.  That's only mostly a joke, I've actually been doing pretty well, I just can't seem to remember what I did, except the obvious clone swap to stun the enemy inside a big blur frenzy.

[Greiger]

Charr Guardian? Guardians are still very Magic-y and are great battlers.

Choosing charr last though?  Charr are awesome!  Both my characters are Charr, they are obviously the best race.

http://img.ie/k81qe.png
I mean look at that, even with antialiasing off and near minimum settings she looks awesome!  How can others compete with the sheer Charr-ness of the charr?

Rainbowdash Charr is best pony race.

[Cthulhu]

The pony reference just turned me off Charr forever.

[Greiger]

Then you can continue playing as Goblins, Salad elves, Drunks, and politicians.  I will continue to play the most dwarven (not-endangered) GW race in the game by myself then.

I mean come on, the charr built a cannon that killed all of it's operators in it's first test firing!  How dwarven is that?

P.S. The charr cultural heavy armor also menaces with spikes, how does menacing spikes not make everything better?

[Cthulhu]

I don't care about dorfs!  While none of the actors in this game are especially good the Charr are some of the most painful, especially the lady-charr.

EDIT:  One thing that's really bugging me about the game is the targeting system.  Namely, it's fucking awful.  I've gotten a little better about dealing with it and I'd bet it actually works in my favor when I'm blinking around with clones as a mesmer, but still.  It feels like the game is just randomly picking targets every few seconds sometimes.

[Vespulan]

On an unrelated note, does Bay12 have a specific Guild?  I wouldn't be looking for a major commitment, because I mainly prance around as my Norn guardian a couple o' days every month, but I imagine a Bay12 Guild would be pretty awesome. 

[Leyic]

There was a guild formed at launch, but everyone moved on to larger guilds or other games shortly thereafter. That said, it's trivially cheap to start a guild in this game; you just need some people to keep it interesting. If a new B12 guild were to start, I'd likely swap over from the dead one.