Guild Wars 2

Hey. I’m too is on board on the reaper bandwagon but since my current necro build is condition heavy (Carrion and corruption build) which proved to be ineffective as a reaper from the first beta (haven’t had time to played it again at the second beta), I am evaluating my current build.

I’m just wondering what setup you going to have to adjust or made ready for the expansion?

Before you asked what I used my necro used for, it’s pretty much PVE.

At the moment, I was just thinking of making my Necro make tanky and with far less condition damaged and much more power! Also no I am not a fan of berzerker especially when the Moderm enemies has been hitting hard during the beta.

Have you tried Carrion (or zerker, but sounds like carrion would be more up your alley) with SRS Reaper? (soul Reaping / Spite) for easy capping of might, and dhuumfire equating to some decent damage. Couple this with Flame Legion runes, I couldn’t imagine you having tons of issues in open world PvE.

Could take Reaper’s onslaught for dps or Blighter’s Boon for a good bit of healing while you’re whacking away in Shroud.
Note: This isn’t fully optimal, in larger group content you would probably still want full Zerk, but this would provide good cleave damage with a mix of power and damage with enough sustain to make content a bit easier when alone.)

Imho and i dont think its diffrent if u Condi or Power, but tho I only run Power I go from that, basicly Reaper is Melee so for PvP,WvW perspective u need to buff up abit. And I will buff up both Vitality and Toughness and will loose mostly on Precision due to not being in so much need of it with new Trait.

Melee as a “Lighr-” armor class is a nice Idea but it requires u to actually adapt cuase u are gonna get hit more… alot more.(takeing in dmg from other sources then just the 1 guy u fighting such as AoE, GT-AoE and basicly being stuck in there)

You can go full condi on reaper but you better skip the GS and the shouts^^. At least if you want to go full condi.

On BWE3 I will try a hybrid build because RS1 AA is really fast and you can manage to stack burn and might without problems. RS4 bring poison and RS5 chill. And with the right spec ice can do “damages” and you can manage to make a good chill with GS, I think this could work.
I haven’t done the “maths” because I’m sure we’ll find this kind of build quite fast after HoT release and someone else will do the maths for me^^.

Personnaly I run physical damages and not much condi damages. but I think a hybrid reaper can be strong and fun to play wich allow physical and condi to be happy.

If anything, reaper shroud is pretty good at conditions… Don’t see how you could be ineffective as a condi reaper.

From what I’ve done in the BW2, I can say that a rampager gear was pretty effective. I used a very poor build taking BM/SR/RP and I still had very decent condition damage. (well anyway, I’ve got a thing for rampager gear, I find it pleasant to play since the condition overhaul)

If you use the Reaper trait line with scepter, consider prioritizing LF generation or condition management in other traits and weapons. Reaper running through LF faster than DS and scepter of greatsword are not great at generating it.

I rocked full valkyrie to stay in reaper shroud all the time. Paired with spite I could smack things pretty hard .

Since you said you only tried it on BWE1, it may have been reaper holding you back and not the gear you were using. Reaper is way better now. Valkyrie is probably the way to go in PvE because you can easily get 50-100% crit with just traits.

There seems to be a common misconception that you need to run power as a Reaper, Reaper augments both power and condition builds alike. Of course the play style changes between normal Necromancer and that of the Reaper.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vRAQNArYWjc0QzN2dDW3A/NWMGs4dYQ8IS1EiC1qofWAYAA-ThyCABAcCAsU9H82fgYlYkfIAwS5xEPAg80HM9RAYMlgkCYRxWA-e

With the build posted above, you can play the new Reaper specialization without having to change out much, if not any, of your gear.

Condition Necromancers use to deal most of their damage through bleeding stacks, after several nerfs to our ability to apply bleeding this is no longer the case. Treat bleeding as your auto attack, it’s there constantly but not dealing your primary damage. Poison, with the recent changes allowing it to stack, is now the main damaging condition of the necromancer, this of course is completely my opinion. Reaper allows you to consistently apply more poison than just the base Necromancer alone.

Using Soul Spiral ( Reaper Shroud ability 4) and a poison field grants you an added burst of conditions onto your target, as well as the 12 stacks alone on the skill. Combining Soul Spiral and Corrosive Poison cloud will net you around 30 stacks of poison in 3 seconds. Coupled with Epidemic and you could have an aoe poison stack of around 60 stacks. ( As a reminder, Chillbains on the staff will also apply a poison field that you may combo off of).

A conservative stack of poison will damage a target for 120 a second. With the Reaper it will be very easy to apply large stacks of poison to a target, that means with a poison burst ( 30 stacks with Soul Spiral paired with a poison field, preferably Corrosive Poison Cloud) your poisons will be doing 3,600 damage a second, 7,200 a second if you chose to use epidemic on multiple targets. Keeping in mind at the same time that conditions are not affected by the toughness of an enemy, pretty useful against high armour targets.

Not only will you be able to apply lots of poison with the build but burning is a lot easier to apply also. Reaper Shroud attacks twice as fast as our Death Shroud which means double the amount of burning applied by Dhummfire.

Hopefully this was helpful in making a decision, Reaper doesn’t mean you have to go power if you don’t wish to.