I’ve seen allot of people saying that condi reaper won’t be a thing and or wont be good. And I’d actually say otherwise. I see it having much higher potential for condition then the base necromancer. Now of course you lose out on somethings when going from death shroud to Reaper’s shroud. A terrormancer might prefer the ability to run Death shroud in order to push people off points or fear people off cliffs. And this is a legitimate reason not to run reaper. But other styles of builds might very well function far better with reaper than the core necromancer.
So lets say you trait fully to damage with conditions in Death shroud. We don’t yet know much blood magic will change so I’m just going to use what we know at this very moment to compare. So lets say you go full terrormancer. You run terror, corrupted path and weakening shroud. You can run the same traits on reaper so no real difference there. Blood might give you a boost to your dagger skills or death could give you some damage reduction, but none of them really provide a whole lot for the necromancer in terms of condi outside of Curse and Soul reaping. But soul reaping really only provides a grand total of ONE trait that directly impacts your damage with conditions without being comboed with another trait. Master of Terror doesn’t directly cause damage.
So what does that have to do with Reaper? well, first of when we look at the trait line its in the same boat as Soul reaping. It only has ONE trait that directly impacts your condition damage, Deathly Chills. But like Soul reaping it has traits to support Itself. Unlike Soul reaping you don’t need to take another trait line to benefit from the damage boost. Chilling Nova works with Deathly chills rather well as does Chilling Force giving you might and life force to further benefit your damage. It works well in a vacuum.
Although the Argument I’ve heard has mostly been about the fact it doesn’t inflict damaging conditions. Which isn’t true. The reaper’s shroud inflicts Poison, which sure is the only condition that directly deals damage while in the reaper’s shroud. But combining it with traits you suddenly have your auto, the poison, the fear and the chill all dealing damage. Not to mention the bleeds you get from barbed precision which will be triggering more often with the reaper because of the reaper’s shroud having more multiple hit attacks to trigger it.
When you compare it with the base Necromancer they get torment, terror, dark path’s bleed, Dhuumfire and of course barbed precision. So each of them can inflict the same number of Damage conditions as the other. But the disadvantage of the Core necromancer is how slow it is on activation. It has some range advantage on reaper which will always be a factor. But its raw condition damage potential is far lower. Especially when we take dhuumfire into consideration.
Life blast is slow. I mean, really really slow. It has a 1 second cast time and an after cast delay. The life rend cycle is much quicker in comparison. at 1/2 a second cast time per strike and the last strike hitting 5 targets, it has the potential of applying 3 stacks of burning by the time life blast is ready to strike its second time. This also means that barbed precision has more chances to trigger as well, thus higher damage from that as well.
I could go on and on about the comparisons. I know there are a few advantages for Condi necro over condi reaper and its hard to determine the damage output that Deathly Chills will provide as well, but even without that the damage potention for conditions is much higher then with the basic Necromancer. Some have said “Running Great Sword is a bad idea as a condi weapon” and I agree. Its a terrible condi weapon. Thats why I wont be running it. Scepter/dagger and perhaps scepter/focus. But that’s up in the air. Personally, I like the idea of Hybrid condi reaper for PvE. And I’ll be having a blast with my condi reaper with my high stacks of burning along with heavy bleed application and I’ll finally be able to go in melee as a condi spec on my necromancer. Something I’ve been longing to do for a while now.
(edited by Lily.1935)