Guild Wars: Reaper's Mark

I'm sick. But I did some digging into things to see just how good Reaper's Mark is at the moment. It's not the only problem Necromancers have but it is, in this blogger's opinion, overpowered. During the test weekend it was rebalanced to give back a lesser amount of energy. Forget the energy (Most people do, after all. Since it's in Soul Reaping you'll be getting a massive influx of energy if you actually kill someone with this skill up 33 at the SR 14 breakpoint or a lot more than you can probably use immediately. But the real reason to use it is for the degen.) - by causing up to 6 degen over 30 seconds that skill deals a massive 360 damage for only 5 energy. And it's relatively spammable (And interrupt proof) with a 10 second recharge. Not only can you drain away 360 damage from one target, you can do it to three before you need to worry about reapplying it.

Now, if you told an Elemenatlist, say, that they could cause damage at a rate of 72 per point of energy, they'd probably have a heart attack. That's extremely good compared to, well, anything – it's an energy burden of roughly half a pip for each copy of Reaper's Mark you have flying around. What keeps it in check, so to speak, is that it takes 30 seconds so you only has a damage per second of 12. That's a bit misleading because with it up on three targets you have an effective DPS of 36. Still not exactly stellar but not bad for the amount of time and energy you're spending. And very effective because while it's not going to kill anyone in and of itself most degen works best when coupled with some raw damage to push people over the edge. Adding that constant 36DPS to the opposing team with only one skill with whatever else you're throwing at them means they're much more likely to break spectacularly because their health is riding so low.

That's from just Reaper's Mark itself. Since you're going to want it to stick you're likely going to be covering it with other hexes. There's nothing as good as Reaper's Mark you can fit on your bars but burying someone under a pile of them hurts. Especially since hex removal is in a pretty sorry state. Putting aside massive removal options like Divert Hexes everything is expensive, slow to cast, or slow to recharge – meaning it's easy to interrupt and takes you away from doing other things. Look at, say, Convert Hexes or Remove Hex – those two second casting times are deadly to a Monk (The best profession as far as hex removal is concerned? Mesmer. They not only get fast casting which makes those longer cast skills playable but they also have plenty of removal skills in their lines – like Expel Hexes which used to be the best hex removal in the game.). Against a good team or a good player you either have massive, inefficient hex removal built into your own team or you're not going to be getting rid of that damage.

So, Reaper's Mark is a really good degen skill then because it does pretty much anything you'd want from one while being attractively priced. The problem is that it's far better than any other degen skill – even the elite ones – around. Take Life Transfer, for instance.

I remember that was the first elite I ever captured/learned while in the test – and I had an absolute blast with because at the time that swing of degen (I don't believe was linked then but this was also before I, at least, understood about things like pressure and cover hexes and the like.) was about as good as you could get. These days? At the Blood 16 max you're going to get 12 seconds of 8 degen out of it. Or, in other words, a total of 192 damage. For the same cost of 5 energy that's about 38 points of damage per energy spent which is a lot worse than Reaper's Mark. That's also returned to you as healing but that doesn't really enter into the discussion (It's probably why Life Transfer's worse than Reaper's Mark, though. Like a lot of blood spells, it pays for being dual use by being mediocre in each area.) and I'm cheerfully going to ignore it. You get the damage faster than Reaper at 16DPS. What really makes Reaper's Mark a far better option is the recharge – Life Transfer has a cooldown of 30 seconds meaning you can't keep it up constantly to pressure the other team. That 192 damage is only going to show up every 30 seconds which is piss awful compared to the 720 damage (If you're starting from scratch so you get Reaper's Mark on someone for a full thirty seconds, on another for twenty seconds, and someone else for ten. If you've got it up already and you're reapplying then you get 1080 damage.) that Reaper's Mark will kick out during that time frame. Rather than being something you cover to cause a team to crack, Life Transfer's something you throw at them when they're cracking to ratchet up the tension – that short burst of relatively large and cheap degen can be an excellent finishing move but it's not going to help you get there.

Either Reaper's Mark needs a nerf or Life Transfer needs a buff, then (Or, you know, what I think – they both need some work.). Looking at other skills, though, it's clear that it's Reaper's Mark that's pushing the power level to higher limits. Tainted Flesh, for example, will cause 16 seconds of Disease which is equivalent to 8DPS (And it's condition based and caused by an enchantment so it's working in a completely different removal environment.). It will spread around the opposing team (though you can suffer from blowback) and since it has no recharge you can spread it around. But on each target that works out to only 128 damage total. In the rare event you can get the entire opposing team infected that works out to 1024 damage (in 8v8 play) but triggering it is very conditional and any sort of condition removal will bite into that. Reaper's Mark is a much surer bet – the only condition you have to meet is that the hex stick around which is easily done in any hex heavy build.

Granted, most hexes are pretty weak and a nasty one like Reaper's Mark is good to see. But it rests on a level far above everything else I can see. It needs toning down itself but it also points to the fact that most other hexes, especially elite ones, are relatively underpowered for whatever reason.

I'm not sure how to fix Reaper's Mark except, of course, to gut the spell(And I'm really not sure that needs to be done. Good hexes are good for the game and all.) but, like Spoil Victor (Another hex that's at once so nasty and effective it makes everything else look bad – again, I'm not sure if this is so much a problem with Spoil Victor itself as it is with every other Necromancer hex.) I think the answer lies in tweaking the duration time. If Reaper's Mark only lasted for 20 seconds, say, and you could only keep it up on two targets at a time, it probably wouldn't be quite so bad while still being a good way of pressuring the opponent's healing.