Guild Wars 2

I have tried a few times against the Vale Guardian with some friends, but haven’t managed to beat him yet. I then started looking at how much damage I was giving out per 9s (time between blue teleport circles) as a Reaper and I concluded something around 60-70K (with 25 stacks of might). When I compared my damage to my friend who plays a Greatsword Warrior, she could do up to 90-100K within that time period in the best case scenarios. That is a huge difference! And as a Reaper I can only maintain that damage size while in shroud, which means every 30 seconds or so I will have a downtime of 10 seconds.

Here was my setup at the time:

Traits:
Spite:
Spiteful Talisman/ Rending Shroud/ Close to Death

Soul Reaping:
Unyielding Blast/ Vital Persistence/ Death Perception

Reaper:
Chilling Nova/ Chilling Victory/ Blighter’s Boon

Equipment:
Berserker stats (not all ascended)
Sigil of Force and Air
Strength Runes
Plate of Roasted Cactus (+100 Ferocity, 33% Chance to cause might on critical)
Superior Sharpening Stone (Gain power equal to 6% of your toughness, Gain power equal to 4% of your vitality)

Utility skills:
Well of Suffering
Well of Corruption
Rise

Elite:
Flesh Golem

So my question to you all, how can we as Reapers reach higher heigths with our damage?

The first thing that came to my mind was of course getting full Ascended armor for those few more stat buffs. Also putting power infusions into the armor, weapons, rings, amulet and backpack would give an extra 12*5=60 power.

What about the trait Close to Death? After the boss has hit 50% health, will it compensate the damage difference in the end (20% more damage)?

Could the use of more minions increase the damage more than wells does?

What else could we tweak?

I don’t know about warrior in same situation, but I was hitting 27-33k gravediggers every 2 seconds when the boss was below 50%. Assuming nothing else and 4 whole gravediggers in that time frame, it would already be on scale of 120k. From what I see, your problem is that you focus too much on reaper’s shroud instead of your weapon skills (Mainly dagger auto and gravedigger).

I just read that weapon boosting traits also covers DS, so in this case Unholy Fervor in Spite could give 10% damage boost to the build! The vulnerability loss won’t most likely matter due to having so many players in a raid. An axe would then be the primary DS weapon, but what about the offhand? Warhorn for Locust Swarm for that extra damage in DS and Wail of Doom as a stun?

Targuil.3741:

I don’t know about warrior in same situation, but I was hitting 27-33k gravediggers every 2 seconds when the boss was below 50%. Assuming nothing else and 4 whole gravediggers in that time frame, it would already be on scale of 120k. From what I see, your problem is that you focus too much on reaper’s shroud instead of your weapon skills (Mainly dagger auto and gravedigger).

Wow! That’s massive damage! How were you able to keep up the critical chance to ensure every Gravedigger hits home? I relied on DS due to the 50% extra crit chance.

Decimate defenses ?

If you want to maximise your damage in shroud you should take Decimate Defenses instead of Chilling Victory, Dhuumfire instead of Death Perception, and Reaper’s Onslaught instead of Blighter’s Boon. Any decent raid party should be able to cap up on vulnerability, so Decimate is all you need for crit chance.

Also worth mentioning that when the boss gets below 50% you’ll be receiving a big damage boost from the Close to Death trait, and your Gravedigger attack on greatsword will instantly recharge on a successful hit, making it spammable.

If you want to further optimise I’d suggest taking Blood Magic instead of Soul Reaping. You’ll lose some of your shroud damage, but the cooldown reduction on wells and the vampiric aura will make up for it. Your party will most likely be able to still cap on vuln without your shroud anyway, and Decimate Defenses will keep your crit chance capped. If you have Phalanx warriors and revenants might shouldn’t really be a problem for you either.

Edit: Worth adding – if you go for Blood Magic you really don’t need Reaper’s Onslaught anymore, making Deathly Chill the best option. Even with no condi damage it still ticks quite high when you have might up. Signet of Spite is also a nice damage boost you could consider over “Rise!”, and Chill of Death trait instead of Rending Shroud.

Well there’s the issue of you taking SR over BM, which leaves you and your squad without vampiric aura and reduced well cd. Vuln should also be capped, then there’s no Decimate Defenses, you focus too much on shroud since most of the hardest hitting skills are outside of it, your party should give you enough might + scholar runes are better for Necro.

I use something like this in raids for power -

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vRAQNAodBDt0YNN4YDs3YBXwmyCNhqQ8V8LOGhGABgWAA-TJRBwAX3fgcZgHnCAAPBAA

Well close enough. Using weapon skills for damage, and Shroud for CC phases, getting places fast with skill 2, and doing damage with 2 and 4, and going back to pressing Gravedigger and Nightfall below 50% and Dagger AA and Focus 4 above 50%.

Sometimes you can time it so that: (Starting on dagger)

Focus 4 → Wells → Weapon Swap → Nightfall → Gravedigger → Reaper shroud
→ RS 2 → RS 4 → Exit Shroud → GS until Gravedigger → Weapon Swap → Focus etc etc that kind of line of working.

It’s pretty decent damage, definately more than enough for the Vale Guardian.

Thanks for all the feedback! I’ll go through it more in detail over the weekend. Just one question though. Decimate Defenses, I understand that it stack critical chance, but for how long are the stacks active? Is it until the enemy is dead or do they decay over time?

Decimate Defense increase your crit chance based on the current number of vuln on the target you hit.

So if you hit a target with 25 vuln stacks your hit would have 50% increased crit chance
if you hit a target with 20 vuln stacks your hit will have 40% increased crit chance.

So with Berserker Gear 25 vuln stacks on the target and in Raids mostly 100% fury uptime you are far over 100% crit chance.

Decimate Defense changes everything O_o. I’ll definitely start using it together with gravedigger. Thanks for all the great answers!

Decimate defense is necro’s life.