Thinking about how Reaper is a monster in close range combat and suffers trying to deal with ranged enemies, I came up with this build. The idea is to use Bone Fiend and Flesh Wurm to punish ranged enemies and snare/pull them to you to deal massive damage using GS 5 and Spectral grasp. Flesh Golem also helps by allowing you to knock them down therefore letting you walk up to them and keep striking them.
Death Magic also gives you some really nice survivability and DPS by giving your minions more damage, more health, condition removal, condition transfer, health regen while in Shroud and an automatic death shroud if you’re about to die too. You also get a tiny bit of toughness for each minion which is a nice bonus to have but not a total game changer.
Pick up Soul Marks for more life force generation, Vital Persistence synergizes well with Death Magic by giving you more time to regen health in Shroud and Foot in the Grave also makes Unholy Sanctuary a stunbreaker if you are being heavily cc’d and about to die plus also acts are your primary stunbreaker to preserve your Flesh Wurm for as long as possible.
Finally, Relentless Pursuit, Soul Eater, and Reaper’s Onslaught let you stay on your enemy, gain additional life siphon healing combined with sigil of blood, and lets you annihilate your enemy in close range with Reaper’s Shroud by giving you increased attack speed.
Greatsword is obviously good to run with this set as you can provide aoe blinds to help you and your minions stay alive, gives you fantastic cleave and good damage(after BWE changes), and allows you to pull your enemy in for the kill as well as generate good life force with Auto Attack and skill 3. Staff is secondary as it lets you play defensively should you need to as well as provides chill which is great for a Reaper, weakness, fear, and some decent ranged damage as well which is necessary, imo, without Death Shroud and just overall synergizes better with these trait lines.
You can run your choice of Marauder or Berserker amulet though I prefer Berserker as it gives me better damage and doesn’t sacrifice too much considering Necros already have a huge lifepool.
So far, I have tried this build in PvP running Spite instead of Reaper for the time being to see how well this concept performed and I used Dagger/Focus instead of Greatsword. It’s great! I’ve defeated Signet Necros, Burn Guards, Interrupt Mesmers, Condition Mesmers, and Dagger/Dagger eles all in 1v1’s. I am really looking forward to try this full iteration in the next BWE and update the build if needed. I’ll also probably update this thread with a video after the next BWE.
