Guild Wars 2

I decided to try out MM reaper in BWE2 and I gotta say, it feels a lot more solid, but there is an issue with reaper as a whole.

Reaper as a trait line doesn’t play nice with blood magic. There simply isn’t enough sustain to make it work. The blood magic trait line requires many small hits and healing power scaling to function, and the reaper trait line relies heavily on chill application.

Now, the adept and grandmaster traits are fine. The issue lies in the one “linking” skill between reaper and blood magic, soul eater.

Soul eater doesn’t give enough siphoning to make the greatsword sustain you properly even in a heavily crowded fight. When you do successfully land an attack through all of the blinds, interrupts, dazes, and stuns; you only recover a very measly amount for the difficulty of the attack to land.

While you recover about 40% more health than a dagger attack, that simply doesn’t cut it when the dagger hits 8 times as often within the same time span. Soul Eater should siphon about 200% more than it currently does. Even this will still leave the dagger way ahead in siphoning sustain (especially with the dagger 2 skill) but it would give blood magic reapers more of a chance.

The cooldown reduction is also a bit on the low side when you hit with grave digger. It should at least reduce cooldown for all the other skills by 5% per hit with how hard it is to actually hit someone with the skill.

The main reason I argue that Soul Eater needs to siphon more, was that in my experience you got a LOT more sustain and survivability from running spite or soul reaping instead. Spite being the damage line, it shouldn’t out sustain blood magic, our dedicated sustain line. This doesn’t mean spite needs a nerf, but it does mean that blood magic doesn’t work well with reaper, which is why I think buffing soul eater could give it a good supplement.

Rise works really well, and I don’t really think it needs a change beyond maybe a 5 second cooldown reduction.

I’m not sure you really understand why you take Blood Magic in a Reaper MM build.

Blood Magic is not taken for personal siphons, it is taken for keeping your minions alive as well as letting them provide you with a steady influx of health. Your personal Vampiric procs are not that important, though they do help. No, Blood Magic is all about the AoE healing you provide, and Soul Spiral Transfusion is sick.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vRAQBdysJ0UD2XD4tJweDWmGsJvsKg0AoAEAi/gWhA-TZwZAAQZAA

This is probably the basis of the best Reaper MM build. Notice it avoids Soul Eater completely. Frankly, right now, ALL good Reaper builds avoid Soul Eater completely. The trait just doesn’t do much.

Reaper MM has a lot of potential variation, but I definitely would not use the shout heal, the heal doesn’t scale with healing power even remotely well, and MM doesn’t want to face enough people to make the heal very strong. However what Drarnor said is correct, Blood Magic is used on MM because the AoE healing is absolutely mandatory, otherwise the minions die quickly and you would be better off not being an MM at all.

The problem with Soul Eater is Greatsword isn’t amazing on MM already, and the CDR sucks; the life stealing isn’t too bad since it doubles up for a fair bit of healing per hit. However, my best MM duels by far were with a standard build but with Reaper over another line . Rise! could be used in an Unholy Sanctuary build that used Rise!/Bone Fiend/Flesh Wurm though, basically Reaper can substitute into either the Spite or Soul Reaping versions, with slightly different choices depending on which style you’re after.

Fair enough on the heal. That’s just what I was using personally.

Agree with Bhawb.

My impression is that only Rise will be useful to a MM. Reaper is melee AoE. Minions mostly just target your (single) target. So, until they die, they do not do AoE and will keep switching to the mob of the second. They need leadership and focus. It is difficult for me to explain so I apologize if it sounds wierd or incomplete.

Yeah I tried out the shout heal since I was running augury with Rise, but it wasn’t very useful, and overall consume conditions just felt more useful, even if I had almost twice as high of a cooldown as the traited shout heal.

I had a surprising amount of success using the shout heal, though I do agree it needs more actual healing. Main thing I was using it for was life force at the start and between fights.

You can pop it twice before you can realistically be expected to be in a fight and have shroud available immedietly upon entering combat. It will be up again before you need a heal.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

I’m not sure you really understand why you take Blood Magic in a Reaper MM build.

Blood Magic is not taken for personal siphons, it is taken for keeping your minions alive as well as letting them provide you with a steady influx of health. Your personal Vampiric procs are not that important, though they do help. No, Blood Magic is all about the AoE healing you provide, and Soul Spiral Transfusion is sick.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vRAQBdysJ0UD2XD4tJweDWmGsJvsKg0AoAEAi/gWhA-TZwZAAQZAA

This is probably the basis of the best Reaper MM build. Notice it avoids Soul Eater completely. Frankly, right now, ALL good Reaper builds avoid Soul Eater completely. The trait just doesn’t do much.

That’s the thing though, If you’re a minion master and you run reaper/blood magic/death magic, your reaper shroud gets torn through easily (life from death only procs if you exit DS manually, the same goes for beyond the veil). Not only that, but by running a blood magic build you will be targeted heavily, and that trait set doesn’t have much to offset that focus.

I found the most success using
http://dulfy.net/gw2traits#build=AgQB-AZkA1g~
with soldier ammy and axe+focus/great sword

The flat damage reduction bonuses you get from cold shoulder, corruptor’s fervor, dark bond, and all the toughness you get makes it so you hardly take any damage (65% damage reduction before toughness, let alone condition damage mitigation which gets to 85%). It’s also incredibly easy to maintain 25 stacks of might on yourself and 25 stacks of vulnerability on the enemy most of the fight, especially whirling in an ice field. Then on top of your beefiness, it’s easy to up-keep retaliation which makes trading blows with you bad.

Mind you, my play style interferes with my use of the blood magic tree as I’m using axe+focus and GS. However the reaper trait line relies so heavily on chill, that only having focus as my source of chill doesn’t seem substantial enough, so I don’t want to use axe+focus/dagger+warhorn, and I hate double melee, so I won’t use dagger+warhorn/GS.

All in all though, if GS gave enough siphoning with soul eater, then there could be a more definitive and efficient ramp-up time for gathering life force, allowing you to utilize reaper shroud to heal yourself and minions while still being able to keep yourself alive outside of it.

The issue I find with cleric MM reaper, is that there simply isn’t enough self healing to keep yourself alive. It doesn’t matter if your minions are alive if you get downed from spike easily. I feel like a cleric’s MM, in their current iteration, is better off using base necro. The benefits from the soul reaping trait line (death shroud cooldown reduction, vital persistance, foot in the grave) greatly outweight the benefits of using reaper. by using soul reaping and unholy sanctuary, you can flash death shroud to heal and protect minions consistently while also getting mad siphoning to yourself to keep your health up, and unholy sanctuary will be there to catch you when you get spiked hard, allowing you to heal again.

Hopefully, the inability to flash death shroud for minion healing gets resolved before HoT launch. Definitely the part of Reaper I hate the most right now.

The only real reason to use Reaper for MM is for better scaling into teamfights than base Necro can manage. Between Blighter’s Boon giving vastly improved sustain and Rise giving either greatly improved survivability or a massive Death Nova nuke, you also bring stronger Transfusion heals to your allies (since Soul Spiral pulses 3 more times than Life Transfer).

Anchoku.8142:

My impression is that only Rise will be useful to a MM. Reaper is melee AoE. Minions mostly just target your (single) target. So, until they die, they do not do AoE and will keep switching to the mob of the second. They need leadership and focus. It is difficult for me to explain so I apologize if it sounds wierd or incomplete.

I actually think Rise! will see more use on non MMs than MMs. MM doesn’t really need the added tankiness, though it can use it, whereas a lot of our other builds could totally want it.

As for LF, not particularly hard to gain enough to jump in and out of RS if you’re using abilities right, especially Locust Swarm. Non-US MMs don’t need to stay in RS for long, at most you want enough time to use 2/4/5 in some order, and that doesn’t require a ton of LF to accomplish in a small fight since you’ll have Chilling Force giving LF. RS should be treated more like a weapon swap, at least for MM, than as a long-lasting measure.

Also, if Cleric isn’t healing you for enough, you aren’t doing it right. Each use of dagger is a massive heal, Consume Conditions is easily an 8k heal even if you aren’t cleansing many conditions, plus the incidental healing from minions, regeneration, Blighter’s Boon procs while in Death Shroud, sigils, etc. Cleric is more than enough self healing, though once again the most important part of Clerics has nothing to do with self healing and everything to do with keeping minions alive; a dead Flesh Golem is around 50% damage loss off all your minion DPS.

Excellent points, Bhawb.

For the MM builds you described, greatsword, Reaper, and shouts do not seem, to me, to add appreciable value, except that Rise could potentially spawn up to 5 putrid explosions.

Do you think the Reaper trait line will join Death Magic as must-have MM trait lines?

Relax guys, I’m here to provide the one piece of feedback I feel needs to be heard. This is particularly important for Reaper MM builds.

Anet, please. Rise produces Shambling Horrors, but they6 do not look much like their namesake. Allow us to summon zombies already. You already have the models!

Cheers,

A new Necro only here for Reaper treats.

Anchoku.8142:

For the MM builds you described, greatsword, Reaper, and shouts do not seem, to me, to add appreciable value, except that Rise could potentially spawn up to 5 putrid explosions.

Do you think the Reaper trait line will join Death Magic as must-have MM trait lines?

Greatsword can work as a dagger substitute, though I don’t think it particularly adds much, and yeah shouts don’t add much. The big things for Reaper over other setups is the new Shroud, which in my opinion is a massive improvement for MM builds over base DS and the trait lines which are a nice mixture between Spite and Soul Reaping. Primarily though its RS imo being vastly better than DS for MM builds, the trait line is just mostly an equal trade off, just offering a different playstyle that isn’t better or worse than current MM. Overall, MM is pretty power-neutral with Reaper, neither better or worse than before, it just adds effectively a variant on both the current builds (as it can run similar builds to both SR and Spite).

Lemondish.3268:

Anet, please. Rise produces Shambling Horrors, but they6 do not look much like their namesake. Allow us to summon zombies already. You already have the models!

They do need new models but we don’t summon zombies.

Bhawb.7408:

Anchoku.8142:

My impression is that only Rise will be useful to a MM. Reaper is melee AoE. Minions mostly just target your (single) target. So, until they die, they do not do AoE and will keep switching to the mob of the second. They need leadership and focus. It is difficult for me to explain so I apologize if it sounds wierd or incomplete.

I actually think Rise! will see more use on non MMs than MMs. MM doesn’t really need the added tankiness, though it can use it, whereas a lot of our other builds could totally want it.

As for LF, not particularly hard to gain enough to jump in and out of RS if you’re using abilities right, especially Locust Swarm. Non-US MMs don’t need to stay in RS for long, at most you want enough time to use 2/4/5 in some order, and that doesn’t require a ton of LF to accomplish in a small fight since you’ll have Chilling Force giving LF. RS should be treated more like a weapon swap, at least for MM, than as a long-lasting measure.

Also, if Cleric isn’t healing you for enough, you aren’t doing it right. Each use of dagger is a massive heal, Consume Conditions is easily an 8k heal even if you aren’t cleansing many conditions, plus the incidental healing from minions, regeneration, Blighter’s Boon procs while in Death Shroud, sigils, etc. Cleric is more than enough self healing, though once again the most important part of Clerics has nothing to do with self healing and everything to do with keeping minions alive; a dead Flesh Golem is around 50% damage loss off all your minion DPS.

I was saying reaper mm doesn’the self heal enough with greatsword. If you want to heal minions, you’really much better off taking soul reaping instead of reaper for the death shroud cooldown so you can use beyond the veil and life from death more frequently. Conditions should never be a threat to an mm, especially with rise! Taking off condition stacks through necrotic corruption.