Scythe Mastery less useful?

I dunno about anyone else, but after the update I've been dramatically less interested in the scythe mastery attribute, or the skills themselves. I mean with earth prayers I can do large amounts of spike damage that aren't dependent on my scythe damage, wind prayers gives me a ton of life steal really easily, and hell with mysticism I can light someone on fire and disease them by simply juggling enchantments.

So I find myself only using scythe attacks as enchantment removers, and that's it. I dont even look at the elites there ( though honestly Reapers sweep + rending aura does interest me) cause I find that I can do a lot more aoe damage with my enchants.

Is this just me? Or does anyone else think the same? Or am I missing something?

( just in case you are wondering I'm speaking for both pve and pvp) I hate you.

Well no, not really. It's just that your post more or less forced me to go do a crapload of math.

Anyway, I tried to test your hypothesis (that more wind/earth prayers > more scythe mastery). I decided to do this by making the best builds for those two attributes that I could and compare them to Pious Spam. The wind ones all failed, but I was able to make an earth one that beat it (though it required two superior runes, sacrificed FGJ and WS to do it, and only managed it because it could inflict cracked armor and Pious Spam couldn't, the application of which should be the necromancer's job).

Now, what does this have to do with your hypothesis? Nothing, on it's own. But then I started playing around with the attributes to see whether more earth/wind was better or more scythe was better. It turned out that no matter what build I tried (including the ones that couldn't beat Pious Spam), more scythe mastery always resulted in more damage (it wasn't very much, but it was definitely more).

The main reason for this is the recharge times of the enchantments. Unless you are using a Pious Spam build (remember, Pious Renewal has no AoE of its own), most of the time you are going to be autoattacking. So scythe mastery ends up being more important.

That said, I need to thank you for inspiring me to create yet another Pious Spam variant. When I discovered that one of the builds I had made could outdamage Pious Spam because it could inflict cracked armor (and I assumed that there wasn't someone else in the party inflicting it like there should be), I wanted to see what would happen if Pious Spam had the same edge. A couple skill changes later, Pious Spam was on top of the damage heap again.

Disclaimer: The above statements refer to PvE. Reaper does not do math for PvP.