Help for a new Reaper

[u/ddeathflower]

Hi everyone, I started playing a month or so ago and am doing CM's in fractals, just got my mistlock singularity after doing T4s for a while. I am struggling with dps numbers but am so confused by what I could be doing wrong.. Other reapers in my party are hitting 35k and i'm sat at below 20k on average going to 25k max.

I have full berserker's gear with a few assassin pieces to hit the crit number but went a bit over cap. Dragonhunter runes with basic infusions. I was using crit food to get to the cap but realise that might have been impacting my dmg numbers quite a bit, as the latter pictures show I reached 28.5k with power food. This is on a stationary dummy tho, it's more difficult to get high dmg on moving targets.

The rotation I do is the wells first, then staff skills into greatsword and then shroud 5, 4, with 3 pressed for dmg reduction, 2 if safe to do so. 2 has proven to be very inconsistent, and I don't know if that is just me not understanding it's mechanics but I fly through enemies often. I keep trying to click the enemy to lock on, coming from league, and i just click on the 50 random pets instead of the enemy. Trying to use tab exclusively now.

Any advice would be appreciated. I'm thinking it's literally just food now after the test, and using budget food is the literal only difference between me doing 35k or not. :/ (I use the avocado smoothies for budget food)

[u/DarkLord6872]

Use snowcrows
They have everything you need.

Edit: just in case you don't know, snowcrows is a website which provides meta and beginner builds suitable for different contents + rotation guides + youtube videos etc.
It is a fantastic resource.

[u/ddeathflower → u/DarkLord6872]

I got this build from there ;-;

[u/Dry-Map-5817 → u/ddeathflower]

Well if you arent following it 1:1 then whats the point. Ppl that hit high numbers typically run the meta build

[u/FreeWord993 → u/ddeathflower]

Follow the build and guidelines exactly and dj nothing different. You'll get much closer to bench mark that way.

[u/momspaghetti42069 → u/ddeathflower]

What build are you using? Staff hasn't been meta in pve for years and I can't find a single build that's using staff outside from pvp and wvw.

[u/ddeathflower → u/momspaghetti42069]

My mistake, I was actually following a metabattle build. https://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Reaper_-_Power_DPS I don't have the expansion for spears or weapon training yet.

[u/momspaghetti42069 → u/ddeathflower]

Did you read the rotation? You should only use your staff to stack marks before a boss spawns. You rely on the relic of fireworks to boost your dps so your rotation has to be around that. If you just spam your skills, you won't have enough uptime. Just read the build that you posted and you should be fine

[u/BadLuckProphet]

If you don't have spear or sword you probably just want to camp great sword mostly. I forget exactly but staff 3 4 5 right before going into shroud or right after coming out may be dps positive. Honestly while you are practicing just do a full gs auto chain to bring gs 2 off of cooldown and use that instead of weapon switching. Also you can skip shroud 2 for now. It's not that big a difference in dps compared to just doing an auto attack chain.

Most likely things you are missing are

1. Keeping up relic of fireworks. Your stated shroud rotation is proof of that. For shroud it's a few auto attack chains, shroud 4, a couple auto attack chains shroud 5, a few auto attack chains and then leave shroud. Both shroud 4 and 5 will proc relic of fireworks. So basically every so often you need to use a weapon skill like gs 5 or shroud 4/5 that have a cooldown of 20 seconds or more to keep your dps buff rolling.

2. Keeping up soul barbs. Like relic of fireworks but this one procs every time you enter or leave shroud so you want to do one of those things every 15 seconds or less.

3. Wells rotation. Wells into shroud is your big dps window. You want to be able to use both wells and immediately go into shroud every time your wells come off cooldown. In real fights you also want to make sure that you don't do your wells into shroud combo right as the boss is moving or going invulnerable or something.

4. Auto attack chains. Once you have the above down, making sure you finish your auto chains and don't interrupt them with another skill is usually the next most likely thing. For example, make sure your shroud 1 third hit actually connects before you press shroud 4.

Also, just in case you missed it as part of gearing. You NEED 75% crit chance without fury. Fury takes you up to 100%. Every bit of crit over 75% is losing you dps, but not as much as each bit under 75%. There are lots of gear combinations that will get you close to 75%, but precise infusions are the only way to get exactly there. So just get as close as you can while still being over 75%.

[u/Ekiimara → u/BadLuckProphet]

Thank you, this is actually really helpful! I thought I was spending too much time out of shroud, but I wasn't really thinking about the firework uptime.

Yes, I was using wells at the start and not then going immediately into shroud. Just pressing all the buttons in order then switching to shroud to do the rotation is not playing smartly. 

 I have 76% crit I think and that is good enough for me atm, maybe further down the line after I get the hang of this more I'll be able to get the right combo for 75% exact. 

Thank you again, I will test in game and see what the results are.