Showing Posts For CCLegion.5936:
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You do start with 3. But then you use 2-3 and then after 15s you get 1 back. By the time you get the second one back, your first set has expired unless you get a lot of alacrity.
Be aware though that you can’t keep up 3 shades indefinitely as they got a 15s CD per charge and 25s duration. With alacrity, you’ll be able to keep up 2 permanently though. If you go for Sand Savant, it is possible as to keep up the equivalent of 3 shades permanently but that loses you the increased torment damage and burning from Demonic Lore.
The elite is a dark field. Saw nothing else so far.
Also, I don’t think we can say much in regards to how everything will look as we are getting a fairly big balance patch in less than 48h from the looks of it.
Looking at WP’s barrier video, Berserker’s Power stacks now at 7%/14%/21%.
Also, Myxam, that is because primal bursts count as level 3 bursts while still costing 10 adrenaline. The first minor for spellbreaker specifically states that spellbreakers are incapable of bursts higher than level 1. The same video shows us that primal bursts are getting a nerf to level 1 as well.
If you start watching here, WP got only 1 stack of adrenal health upon landing an decapitate. A few seconds later, he lands another decapitate and he gets another stack of adrenal health.
One of the minors could be seen in WP’s video. It’s 5% damage reduction for each shade you control IIRC.
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I’d like to see a source for that, please.
You doubled up on stacking sigils(bloodlust). You don’t need to do that, it does very little. Having 1 on either of your land sets and the other one on your underwater set is what you should be aiming for. I’d personally replace the one on the A/Wh set with a force sigil. This change will mean that you will only gain stacks while your staff is out but your ability to keep stacks is unaffected.
For your rune choice, I don’t think you are getting much value out of trooper runes. Try an offensive rune set. Pack is a good choice for that. If you got reliable fury access in your groups, you can drop some knight/captain pieces for cavalier.
Slot skills are fine, though I prefer Lich for the unblockable AoE boon strip and cleanse on its 5. Cooldown is significant though.
For your traits, swap Decimate Defenses over to Chilling Victory. You are massively overcritting in shroud and with fury, you got decent enough crit chance outside of shroud. DD is also the less reliable of the 2 traits and CV allows you to properly utilize Blighter’s Boon, which currently does very little for you.
Rest of your traits are good. Your statblock looks good as well, though you might want to add some toughness or vitality, should you choose to drop trooper for pack.
As with Justine’s build, you can use Blood over Spite. Both are good for this type of build. Though I’d use Vampiric Presence over Banshee’s Wail.
And a question to finish this part, what food are you using? If you are looking for added survivability, I recommend the 10% damage reduction foods. Especially curry mussel soup(-5% condition damage taken) and fried oyster sandwich(+70 power). Otherwise, any food with power in it will work.
Alright, gonna take a look at some of your solutions from a WvW perspective.
I’d argue your version of Soul Comprehension should be baseline. What could be done with SC is make it an effect similar to Signet of Undeath, turning it into passive LF generation in addition to its current effect, which would be kept purely for flavour reasons.
Beyond the veil is strong enough as is. It gives you protection when you are most vulnerable, right as you leave shroud. Death is also a personal survivability line and throwing in a bit of support seems weird to me.
Putrid Defense does not need increased poison duration, it needs a way to reliably trigger on weapons outside of scepter and staff. MH axe, GS, dagger, focus and warhorn can’t actually utilize it without either using CPC or getting a regen corrupt.
Your variant of Shrouded Removal would basically make Reaper immune to condition builds when fighting in any kind of group. Suffer and Plague Signet would remove even the strongest condi applications and the latter can go down to around 13s CD. Stray condis inbetween cooldowns can easily be handled by either group cleanses or you pressing any of your other buttons.
Deadly Strength removal kills the Master tier of Death for power builds.
Unholy Sanctuary would be better off with a new effect altogether. How about this, gain health whenever you gain life force. When struck while below 50% health, reset the cooldown on shroud. 20s ICD on the second effect.
As for the healing and lifestealing bit, necro needs the skills to operate in a support role first. Right now, the only thing Blood really changes is Shroud 4, due to transfusion. Outside of that, you are still a necro, doing necro things, but you provide some passive sustain to your group. I’d also argue that Blood Bond needs a change to how it works. Maybe “Allies steal life from targets suffering from your bleeds” because right now, it has the same issue that Putrid Defense has in that most builds can barely use it. Even if you get the bleeds, which is possible with condition transfer, you can’t control where the trait itself goes. Would also mean that we finally have a healing option in the adept tier.
The changes to SR’s master tier would not improving trait diversity much, I feel. Spectral Mastery is good but only when you are already taking a couple spectrals. Having both it, double armor and full Vital Persistence might also be a bit much.
Cultist’s Fervour is a neat idea but I’d rather see this as an F2 for an elite spec.
Also, squallaus. Minions are bad. Some have some use in PvE but that is pretty much the only place where they are used effectively. The entire skill category needs to be reworked from the ground up.
It’s not about the ice field and soul spiral. It’s GS+shoutspam from what I’ve seen. Suffer alone can easily get an instant 9 stacks in a generous AoE if it procs Chilling Nova. Toss in more shouts for more chill, thanks to Reaper runes and you got an alright bit of damage going with no tell. Chilling Darkness, Hydromancy and Ice sigil, and your own ice field helps as well. And if you add in Frost Aura, kindly provided by your own finisher or a friendly ele, you apply a fair few bleeds under pressure as well.
Honestly, it’s not as big as it appears, with the build being easily countered by anything bigger than a duo roamer assuming your group is competent and knows what to watch out for, but it could stand a reduction still. 1 bleed was underwhelming but 3 are too much.
But Epidemic has been used pretty much for the life of the game.
Yes, it has always been used in PvE.
But in PvP? I haven’t seen anyone use Epidemic in years.
In WvW, a long time ago, there used to be that small group roaming niche where people took it. But obviously it’s useless in 1v1s and almost as useless in big zerg fights. So pretty much the same here, haven’t seen a necro use Epidemic in WvW in years.
Epi has seen more widespread use among both small scale and large scale for quite some time now. Never ran it because it was really easy to shut down in small scale but I still saw it used a fair bit. Pretty much after boonshare died, epi took over and lots of large scale guilds have been complaining about it since.
Interesting news. The ingame tooltip lists Infusing Terror’s damage resistance as 33%. Crits in the 2.7k-2.9k range consistently reduced to around 2k damage in initial tests.
Serkit, your assumptions about shroud are correct.
However, if we assume outside damage modifiers and do some other changes to the build, we can reach a total of 37k ePower even while leaving some damage mods, such as burst mastery, behind, making it entirely possible to be hit by a 15k Arc Divider at 3.3k armor, even on the lower strength hit. I was using a fairly simple gunflame build as base with a druid, GotL but no glyph, and glass rev around him. And yes, I’ve seen people run around like that, especially towards the back of a zerg.
Since Shroud DR does not apply to the numbers shown on screen or in combat log, you’ll see a 15k crit but be hit for 7.5k, we can ignore that.
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I was just looking at this with a couple guildmates. Specifically, Shrug it off is still only cleansing one condition and also does not work with trooper runes.
Does Deathly Chill work in WvW with the new buff?
Yes, wvw counts as Pve for balances.
Hmm, do you think its a bug and anet will fix it?
No, WvW has always counted as pve.
Incorrect, WvW has its own ruleset. PvE only buffs generally do not apply to WvW. Most significantly, Blurred Frenzy does not get its PvE 100% damage increase, Druids have 15s cooldown on CA instead of 10 and retal is on the same level as PvP retal, instead of being the stronger PvE version.
As such, this is most likely an unintended change.
A necromancer can win against different players in wvw (still depending on the skill level of enemies you find), but other classes can do way better. In wvw we’re not asked for roaming, we’re only asked to be mindless glass cannons into the zerg. To roam there’s better classes, with mobility skills, stealth, huge burst damage and more.
Someone say that the necro do his best while supported by a ele or a ranger, but the necro is the worst class ever to be supported, just because while in shroud we can’t be healed, making our ally waste his skills for us and obtaining no effects.
Actually the necromancer is in a “good” state, as ANet told us time ago. That’s the problem. That “good” state make us unable to be high dps, good supporter or a real dangerous enemy in pvp (unless few exeptions).
For small scale WvW, a necromancer offers unrivaled downcleave, beating warrior due to access to poison, and a combination of strong AoE damage and fairly high durability that allows them to shine in a bruiser role.
And yes, a necromancer synergizes incredibly well with Tempests even without them using heals. As you may realise, support can come in ways other than healing. For the Tempest-Reaper setup, they compliment each other in quite a few ways. Power Reapers especially can make good use out of every aura. Fire aura fuels Blighter’s Boon at crazy rates(1 stack of might per attacker per second), magnetic aura helps with people trying to pew pew a Reaper, shocking aura is just overall good as it basically makes them ungankable by thieves and mesmers. I shouldn’t even need to say anything about frost aura but the damage reduction is beautiful and chill on hit in combination with people focusing Reapers ensures a steady stream of chill applications, gaining the benefits of Cold Shoulder and Chilling Victory more often and obviously keeping targets within the Reaper’s reach.
Their combination of AoE stuns, soft CC and damage also compliment each other very well, allowing one to keep enemies within damage of the other.
Reaper-Druid is much more basic but based more on Power Reapers.
Druid healing is very bursty. Compared to other healers, such as guardians and the occasional mesmer, which are more heavily based on constant ticks of low to medium intensity healing, it has no issues with shroud and allows them to easily cover a necro while shroud is on cooldown. The same also applies to the Tempest but to a lesser degree.
As to what the Druid gains, it’s very simple. Vampiric Presence. Every single vampiric proc that a druid gets counts as them healing something, namely themselves, thus granting them astral force. So by just being there, a Reaper can enhance the healing abilities of a Druid by a significant margin.
And it just so happens that Druid and Tempest also work together very well as long as the Druid is not full support. Reaper-Druid-Tempest is actually a fairly solid combination for a WvW 5 man group.
Honestly, I’m not sure why they would. I haven’t raided but is Viper Necro incredibly dominant there? Pretty sure no one touches it in PvP and while some use it in WvW, that’s mostly for running over unorganised groups. Not really something of outstanding effectiveness if your enemy knows what condi clear is.
For large scale, go power wells. Condi works ok-ish against unorganised groups if you can land good epis but it’s a waste of space against organised ones.
For small scale
Power is a good general purpose build that does not require as much support as condi variants, allowing it to fit into varying group compositions without many problems. That is primarily due to its better self peel and stronger health and life force recovery, allowing it to endure focus fire for longer even with less defensive stats than condi builds. Problem here is that Blood Magic variants lose out on quite a bit of damage whereas Spite builds are basically worse warriors.
Condi features quite strong AoE damage with epi and great anti boon capabilities but requires the team to support it with heals, peels and ideally additional conditions for epi bombs. Without that, it’s easily trained down and killed as its ability to sustain its own health is insufficient at best. As with all things condi, they also don’t work too well against organised groups, as you are either fighting against either AoE cleanses or trying to prevent your own death. It’s also easier to shut down as you can negate most of its damage pressure by simply hitting it due to lack of condi application while in shroud.
Most of this is somewhat mitigated by most groups not being very good so they don’t know how to handle condition necros. But against a competent enemy, condition builds are more of a liability than an asset.
Picked it up for my small group WvW(around 5 people) power reaper build a couple days after HoT release. Dropped it only during test runs of condi builds, none of which lasted longer than a couple days before I swapped back to GS.
Looking at this change list from the perspective of a small scale WvW(around 5 players) player.
That change to NCSY would be a giant nerf that the skill has no need for.
Removal of Vampiric Presence would be one of the biggest nerfs that a power necro could see in this content and would severely lower their viability. Currently, a power reaper can establish himself next to warrior and scrapper thanks to it. It is easily one of the strongest passive auras in the game and synergises beautifully with certain teammates.
Transfusion buff is meh. It’ll be some nice emergency healing for friendlies with BM minors but it won’t cause people to suddenly grab healing power.
Pull into immob on a single skill is too strong, simple as that.
Soul Eater with +25% attack speed is far too strong.
No to the Spinal Shivers conversion change. You basically turn it into Corrupt Boon with a load of damage attached. Not to mention that boon hate is not the problem focus has.
Putrid Defense change would be a huge nerf in most cases. Most cases being everything but during RS4 whirl and while standing inside CPC.
Spectral Mastery buff is kind of eh. Not really much either way.
Death Magic and minions would need more work to be useful in groups without also being overbearingly powerfuly in solo encounters. For groups, they are useless to the point where my group ignores MMs very often because they simply don’t do anything. Unlike power or condi necro, they don’t really hurt you when left alone. They are a free kill at best. A detriment to the team who just eats the cooldowns of their friends.
Just the first couple things that went through my head when I read it. Gonna give it a second read later.
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Alright, lets go through this.
I’m not saying that you cannot use Reaper in zergs. I’m saying that people shouldn’t because the roles it can fill are better filled by other classes or its own base form.
The entire point of bringing necros along is to play the role of magical artillery and generate downs to exploit, something which Reaper is worse at compared to necro, due to its lack of Life Blast.
So why should I go Reaper and jump into the meat grinder when I can fulfill my own role more efficiently by staying out of both melee and the Reaper traitline?
The lifesteal part, I’ll give you that one. Heavily depends on group though so I’d recommend to check first. In any case, VP takes priority if it’s not already provided by others.
I disagree about it being the best defensive stat for necro. For solo/duo roaming or sPvP, alright. But once you go into havoc or above, any point in vitality could be a point better spent in toughness unless you are playing a low HP base class. It does not amplify heals the same way toughness does, making it weaker past engagement. It’s also weaker against power damage in general, even with the extra life force generation it offers.
Basically, you are working with less EHP and lower recovery vs power. In exchange, you get increased EHP vs conditions. But why take it for that when a single guardian or mesmer can basically make a 5 man group immune to conditions in the first place?
It does have the advantage of being available in more offensive stat sets(marauder, valk) compared to toughness(cavalier, knight) but that’s about it.
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Focus is a viable alternative to warhorn for zerging and flat out better if your group provides enough swiftness.
Reaper should not be used in a zerging build. The only useful thing in there is RS2 for additional mobility but it comes with a significant loss of ranged damage. Use SR(all middle) instead.
Always use Vampiric Presence over Banshee’s Wail if you are running with any kind of group. Lifesteal on every attack is far too strong to ignore.
Other than that, drop the marauders. You are getting barely any survivability(3k HP is nothing unless you are using a low HP base class) benefit out of it while also losing damage, even with the vit→ferocity oil. Not a tradeoff that’s worth it in my opinion.
Running anything other than zerk or valk on a well bomber is a lot like running more defensive gear in PvE. Sure, it’ll allow some mistakes but you are sacrificing efficiency.
Ultimately, whether you get onepushed or not is barely a matter of gear, it’s a matter of proper positioning.
Reaper is such a minor upgrade for builds like this, it’s not worth mentioning.
When running backline, the only thing I sometimes want from Reaper is shroud 3 for DH cages.
Meanwhile, you lose access to one of your best sources of ranged damage(Life Blast), the cooldown on your bomb is higher and you have to get much closer to the enemy to deal the same amount of damage.
tl;dr A lot of risk for very little benefit.
I also disagree with simply swapping out a few utility skills for running with a small group instead of a big one.
Due to being a new player, he’ll already be a primary target for competent enemies because he’s likely to panic under pressure. Being on an easy to train down class does not help. So they’ll train him down hard to force an early down they can exploit and to stress enemy cooldowns.
So he’ll likely need additional survivability from traits, food and gear.
As for actual builds.(Sidenote, while metabattle is a good source for PvP and PvE builds, the WvW builds in there are bad and haven’t even been updated properly.)
For a basic backliner build in big group fights, old school S/BM/SR is what I prefer to run. Both damage wells. Third utility depends a lot on fight, composition and enemy.
From a stunbreak to things like spectral wall or corrupt boon, a variety of things can be used to great effect.
For smaller groups, Reaper is a necessity.
Spite/SR/Reaper is a solid starting ground. Experiment with marauder, knight and cavalier gear in addition to zerk and valk.
Traited staff is a must have.
As for skills, shouts are great and a shout heavy lineup is my personal preference. Spectral Armor and walk are also good choices. Signets are good to great with exception of Undeath and Vampirism. Wells are generally a bad choice, as are minions.
My 2 cents on a certain topic. That topic being the stability fix.
Basically, there would be a ton of issues if you go back to duration stacking. Several things that were introduced or buffed after that change would dramatically increase its effectiveness beyond what we remember.
Due to the introduction of concentration as armor stat, reaching 100% uptime on would be easier than ever.
With the popularity of boonshare mesmers, which would only increase if such a change were to happen, and the amount of resistance the bring it is also unlikely that soft CC has the desired effect.
End result being groups with very high if not perfect resistance to all forms of CC.
And I’m not sure whether boon corruption would be a good answer to all that either.
Overall, it’s a concept that is, in my opinion, very dangerous when all that’s needed is a few nerfs to certain skills and a buff to stability to protect it against massed CC.
Agreeing with Drarnor here. GS is not a 1v1 weapon. It does however shine in teamfights to the point where I can’t see myself using a dagger while running with my WvW group anymore.
Now that quickness rez is gone, I also found it much easier to punish careless reviving. Love it when I see more people drop in a 5v5 because they ate a gravedigger while going for a quick revive.
There is no need for a revert. In fact, a revert would make it far too strong, resulting in immortal Reapers in any format where basic team interaction exists.
It would also slave them to guardians/heralds/elementalists because without them, we are basically back to current power reaper.
What this trait needs is higher baseline effectiveness because on its own, it just adds a bit life force gain to some skills(Unholy Feast, YaaW, BiP and CttB being the notable ones) and HP recovery to RS3.
Either it or one of the minors in Reaper should gain a throwaway boon on a somewhat reliable trigger, freeing up choice in the master tier, leaving CV as a strong choice but making it no longer required for effective play.
Personal preference going towards retaliation, a boon which I think should be much more common in the necromancer skill set due to the entire “necros want to get hit” philosophy. So at least let us repay the favour.
GS is superior to dagger in a small to medium scale WvW engagement(3-15 people per side) in almost every way. Dagger got only access to offhands going for it. You can even make it work in engagements larger than that but it takes more player skill than simply using an axe.
Far stronger AA(higher LF generation once you cleave+chill on last hit), high damage down control that also consistently downs everything bar frontliners, an amazing survivability+setup skill, even more down+area control and a really nice pull.
In fact, I’ve been using it since HoT launch for this kind of fight and so far my only complaint is that Grasping Darkness is completely absorbed if someone in its cone blocks(even projectile blocks) or invulns, meaning that I have to run “Nothing can save you!” to reliably pull in many cases.
Outside of that, its reliability, which many people complained about, has been nothing but stellar for me with only user error preventing a few pulls from working correctly.
Ah, there are a few more differences. Mostly because my group prefers to have me run Blood Magic instead of Spite for the additional group sustain from Vampiric Presence. So I end up run a more offensive gear setup to compensate for the lower damage.
Would probably switch to pretty much the same setup you are running for solo and duo stuff but I barely run like that nowadays.
I must say though, the festive food+great cleave really makes Blighter’s Boon shine.
And since I haven’t said it so far, very good video. Enjoyable watch.
Oh nice. Currently running a similar build.
Has proven very effective so far.
As someone who has played necromancer for a long time in 5-10 man WvW combat, I disagree on the WvW aspect of your post, Zefrost. Not to mention that 10v10 is in no way large scale. It’s mid scale at best.
Now, the 2 major problems with base necromancer in these fights are lack of sustain due to subpar recovery and lack of stability, personal or otherwise.
This forces a group to babysit all but the best of necromancers and takes away resources they could otherwise use for pushes. They still work amazingly well if utilized properly but their resource drain is massive.
Reaper fixes this by massively improving recovery, improving self peel capability and giving access to tons of personal stability, making the class far less greedy than before.
It’s also a completely different beast from standard necromancer. Don’t try to play or even build it as one. Mostly because Reapers actually have fairly amazing survivability.
Blocks and invulns are not the only measure of that.
Now for some other statements.
Mediguards of all kinds are bad in this kind of combat. In fact, it hasn’t been a good choice for anything for over 6 months now as mesmers, thieves and elementalists massively outshine it in everything it’s trying to do.
I’m actually appalled that you’d compare any class to medi guard in usefulness. It utterly fails at everything you want from either a guardian or an initiator as it has no support to speak of while also having bad burst and disengage.
I can get more team support on my Reaper by slotting blood magic.
If you notice that the in combat signature has faded away. Its only for a split second that it happens, but regardless if i’m taking damage, dealing damage or what have you, I can’t trigger my sigils because of this and lose a bit of momentum.
Ah. this is where you’re mistaken.
Shroud isn’t dropping you out of combat. It’s just known and acknowledged that you cannot interact/activate sigils while in shroud. You also do not get healed or reap the benefits/bonuses from sigils in shroud.
Anet has addressed this already and its working as intended. Not a joke.
And there you are mistaken. I proc on swap sigils by switching to Reaper shroud and back all the time. This is also a change that made it to the basic shroud(was in the patch notes a while ago) because it was widely requested after it worked with RS.
You can also do a quick test with Strength sigil in the sPvP lobby and it’ll give might while in shroud.
Healing sigils(renewal, water) have no effect because of the healing limitation but that’s it.
This looks like a strange bug.
Are you sure that you are facing the target? This skill is set to only fire if you are facing your target. It won’t turn you around for that.
Reviving this because I think this trait needs a bit more attention.
Having it heal through shroud(it doesn’t IIRC) and upping the threshold to 33% would be be enough to make it viable for some builds even if the heal has to be reduced.
Just tested it in the HoM on the invincible target golem. Guildmate on his ele helped me. If it is indeed bugged, it’s a bit more difficult than that because it worked perfectly fine for us. Using Berserker amulet with pack runes, which gives base 52.8% crit%. Lightning Storm+dagger water auto to keep up vuln while I autoattacked the golem with my dagger. Crits on every strike until vuln dropped off.
I too am surprised that it went unchanged for this long. Expected something like this every BWE so far.
Old BB had several problems. You weren’t able to allow Reapers to take proper advantage of it by themselves as it, together with allied boon output, would result in Reapers with far too much sustain. And yes, it worked. I tried it. An allied guardian was enough to make you immortal even in outnumbered fights while using a build that was far from optimised. This took agency away from the Reaper, which is bad while also making them far too powerful in certain situations.
And no, you can’t nerf everyone else to compensate. Because at that point you have to look at how to nerf them for necromancers only or how the nerfs affect builds and matchups for at least 3 classes. Not to mention the effect it has on potential future elite specs.
It’s only logical to remove the source of both problems and allow Reapers to control their own trait. And that’s really the only thing that’s missing here. Some more scaling boon generation is needed so that Reapers can trigger their own trait reliably without being forced into other traitlines or Chilling Victory.
Now ANet has the chance to properly balance it. Given that Chilling Nova and Soul Eater are currently somewhat lackluster, those are good places to start. Maybe even give some to Shivers of Dread to have some baseline effectiveness. Personally, I’d like to see some fury and retaliation somewhere in the Reaper set.
This trait only really sucks in sPvP because Necro is still lacking in scaling ways of getting boons. It still provides great sustain in WvW but it is no longer broken beyond belief.
Close to the rally point northwest to the noble ledges, west of the blighted tree. There are also a bunch around Teku Nuhoch in Tangled Depths.
Finally, one of the areas in Dragon’s Stand that only open up after a meta event has several veteran smokescales. If you are there already, you might want to kill them while opening pods.
Agreeing with Cephas here. Found that the D/D ele style provided good results.
There’s one place close to one of the rally points on Verdant Brink. I think it was in the west? Close to the broken airship WP(Mellagan’s Valor). Spawns a vet and 2 smaller ones. That’s where I got mine. Coztic Grounds also has 1 or 2 spawns.
Toughness would be better as you are more likely to eat power damage on frontlines. So yeah, I’d say they should keep it.
Personally, I prefer to have a dagger with a warhorn in my offhand. Staff as second set for some AoE. You’ll unlock the ability to equip a second set at some point before lvl15. Can’t remember the specific level though.
As for point spending, getting wells is helpful, as are putting points into spite and soul reaping. Can’t really go wrong with those. Leveling up will provide you with all the points needed to completely unlock everything for your class. Doing hero challenges for additional points just speeds this up.
That should get you to lvl70 or so with lots of points to experiment with. Others are probably able to add more to this but it’s a decent enough guideline.
Just go do stuff. Open world PvE levels you pretty quickly if you completely explore maps. Mix in a few dungeons if you can get a group as uplevel Necro.
And I do mean complete exploration. Gives a sizable experience boost and chance for some loot. If you want to play PvP, no leveling is necessary but you can level through the tomes collected through it.
Gravedigger spam starts around the marked time.
As for its cast time, I’m going with the numbers DEKeyz posted a few months ago. It’s still the most up to date information I have regarding this.
The wiki now has a list of items needed for it listed. Look for “Dark Harvest(Achievement)”.
Ah, you won’t be able to unlock it until you are lvl80 as the elite spec is locked until that as far as I know. Don’t worry though, most of it is HoT stuff. The only weapons needed for it are the Reaper’s Greatsword, a Mystic Greatsword and a Machined Greatsword IIRC. You also need 2 event items from Kessex Hills and Metrica. Rest is locked behind masteries on HoT maps. I cannot check it ingame right now but that should be it.
You should unlock it by getting the Reaper’s Greatsword, which you get by unlocking Reaper. If you did not get that, you should visit the elite spec achievement repair NPC in Heart of the mist.
There is video evidence of gravediggers going up to 33.5k against Vale Guardian. It’s in LOD’s raid footage. Lots of hits for 28-29k too.
Which, given Gravedigger’s total cast time of 1.7s, pushes our DPS quite a bit when the enemy is below 50%. Likely not enough to save the class for PvE but it’s something.
EDIT: The hits against the legendary wyvern shouldn’t count for much. It takes massive damage when the breakbar is broken.
Same thing happened with Signets of Suffering when the June 23rd patch hit and that got fixed pretty quickly. Don’t count on it staying for more than a patch or 2.
Reaper runes have interesting interactions with chilling victory.
Since the chill from the rune is procced first, it ends up giving you a stack of might for 5s and 1% LF for every enemy hit in that range. The same interaction also applies to Hydromancy sigils. Can also proc Chilling Nova when it crits.
About the toughness on it. Condition or even just chill duration would’ve been interesting. Vitality is nice too but unless you are fighting condition builds, toughness is better.
While I like Focus, I agree that it needs changes. Not large, sweeping ones though.
Faster cast for Spinal Shivers and a different boon for Reaper’s Touch should be fine. I’d also take a look at the cast time of Reaper’s Touch. It feels pretty slow.
Regarding the MB vs RT comparison. RT deals around 44.5% more damage when fighting alone against a single target and he does not evade/block any hit. Not including might gained from MB.
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