Do you want to know the best open world build for your gun launcher death master in Guild Wars 2? You’ve come to the right place, let us show you how to turn your necromancer Harbinger into an unstoppable and unholy outlaw, tailor-made for your open-world adventures.

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The Necromancer is a tanky class, already great soloing in the open world, but this build is fantastic and takes the destructive potential to a whole new level, as well as being a blast to play.

The warning sign explained

The Harbinger is the third elite specialization variant added to the Necromancer profession in Guild Wars 2. He focuses on using ranged attacks with a pistol, while imbuing himself with various buffs or debilitating enemies with elixirs. The Forerunner doesn’t have the same level of support as the Bane or Warden, but what it lacks in support it makes up for in damage and survivability and is a particularly good elite spec for the open world.

The two main changes the Harbinger Elite Specialization brings to the Necromancer profession are the elixir utility skills, the flail mechanism and the Harbinger Shroud.

How does the Harbinger shroud work?

The Harbinger Shroud is different from the normal Death Shroud because instead of acting as a secondary health pool, it instead gives you access to high damage and mobility skills. It also gives you access to the burn, each stack of blight decreases your health pool by two percent, but also grants you a small heal. Blight can reach a maximum of 25 stacks.

While many MMOs follow a strict rock-paper-scissors formula, Guild Wars 2 is known for breaking the mold. You can take any profession and fit it into a damage, support, healer, or tank role. Although a particular profession may not be the best in the slot machine, they will still be able to fulfill this role well.

Best Omen Traits for the Open World

The image above shows you where you should place your stroke points, but we’ll look at the choices in detail below to help you understand the construction. We’ll take a look at Harbinger blood magic, curses and traits and explain how these choices all add up to the build. This build will focus on condition damage.

blood magic

Blood Magic gives this build a ton of survivability. The traits chosen in this line are, Quickening Thirst, Vampiric Presence and Blood Barrier. Overall, Blood Magic is all about self-sufficiency – granting you and your allies the ability to steal life. You also get the bonus Last Rites perk, which can prevent your allies from bleeding out during big open-world events.

Curses

Curses give you bonus damage and extra support, choices for this line include send plague, path of corruption, and parasitic contagion. The Curses line increases your damage per condition by allowing you to convert boons into conditions, it also synergizes with your Shroud and gives you critical hit chance increases through the Furious Demise perk (which you’ll unlock simply by putting dots in Curses).

To finish, Parasitic Contagion gives you a bit more sustain (50% condition damage as healing) which will allow you to survive hard-hitting attacks from elite enemies.

Presage

Finally, the Harbinger trait line gives us access to the weapons and mechanics that tie this build together. You’ll want to choose the following traits, Septic Corruption, Dark Marksman, and Fate’s Approaches. These traits all combine to help increase the damage of your condition.

Septic Corruption adds Poison to your second Shroud attack, Dark Gunslinger reduces the cooldown of your pistol skills, allowing additional uptime on conditions, and finally, Doom Approaches causes you to torment and weaken around you and inflict additional condition damage. These traits all mesh well with your damage output skills, greatly increasing your total DPS output..

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The Best Harbinger Open World Building Gear

Correct gear selection is vitally important in Guild Wars 2. Gear stats are determined by the descriptor used at the start – for example, some gear will be called “Berserker’s pants”, meaning that these pants will have power, precision and ferocity. as a combination of statistics. This is great for power-based builds or dealing damage with direct attacks instead of conditions.

Omen Armor – Celestial

The Harbinger will want to use a full set of Celestial Armor – this gives us a boost to all stats which is great for the Harbinger as they have a bit of everything in their toolbox but it gives us enough stat power to be both tanky and have respectable damage. You will combine the armor with a full set of undead runes. These runes give you a boost to condition damage and stamina, further increasing damage and survivability. For other gear slots, use any combination of Trailblazers and Celestial.

Omen Weapons – Pistol and Dagger

You will use a pistol in the main hand and a dagger in the left hand, these two pairs well together because the dagger and the left hand pistol share the same range (900 meters) allowing you to operate well at medium range, this too you grants the ability to kite enemies around the map a bit, but avoiding damage. You’ll want to use Trailblazers stats on your weapons and pair them with a Sigil of Bloodlust and a Sigil of Generosity, meaning you’ll steal health and transfer a condition on critical hits.

NEXT: Guild Wars 2: How to Harness Karma