Guild Wars 2

As a WvW main player who usually plays Guard in ZvZ situations (T1), I’m loving the reaper’s abilities and power and just the insane dps it could potentially bring to big fights, but since wvw is kind of dead at the times I’ve been able to get on I haven’t got to test it in any large scale fights yet. (at least 25v25)

Has anyone got some decent time in WvW with their reaper yet and is there any idea of how a reaper will fit into compositions?

It’s pretty apparent reaper’s aoe dps output is really good, but is it able to effectively frontline long enough to get that dps out without going down too much? (no block/invuln still) Or will it’s role be closer to say thief’s and go for the backline or groups that split off? I know there hasn’t been a lot of time to test yet but I’m curious if anyone’s put time in to do some comparisons?

I want try a soldier reaper with shout and trooper rune for the frontline, but i’m not sure about that. As you say without a vulnerability or block it’s difficult stay alive.

Ya Reaper might need to sacrifice some damage to go frontline it seems like, I’ll be interested to hear how the tankier builds work like soldier stats / rune etc

I did try reaper frontline soldier + rune of trooper during BWEs. First, it needs to be paired with a guardian. It has good stability in shroud, but out of it, it is more difficult. The sustain is good too. It has some interesting utilities: I went blood magic, soul reaping reaper, so I gave vampiric aura to the party, + some healing. And of course, it has high damage, especially since I went with the 50% crit in shroud.

It mostly has 2 problems:

• no form of invulnerability. This very annoying in cases where you just want to get inside your keep, passing through the enemy lines. Very often, it was just impossible. Even in plague form, you still take immobilizes and others, so it’s hopeless
• a bit part of the reaper working for frontline was blighter’s boon. It gave good sustain during the pushes and allowed to go back to nearly full shroud during the regroups. This trait has been slaughtered and just does not work anymore.

So in conclusion, it is doable and even fun. Definitely something you can enjoy in a mildly (dis-)organized group. But I don’t think it’s “good” to the level of a warrior, a guardian, or probably a revenant.

@Silverkey

Ya definitely the lack of invuln hurts from a frontline perspective, I’m kind of thinking maybe a midline tank/dps hybrid type setup might be good, with blighter’s boon being what lets us go in and out, maybe they’ll tweak numbers on it but none of the t3 traits are very helpful atm it seems.

Imo what would be ‘good’ about reaper is the huge aoe with poison/chill spread ofc, so maybe having high damage stats is actually not desirable unless you’re doing other stuff (not zerging).

Any opinions on what runes complement reaper the best? atm I still have my pack runes, haven’t looked into switching yet

I’ve been using scholar runes simply for not knowing what runes to get.

For wvw though scrapper runes are looking nice. power/toughness and -7% damage from anything within 600 range.

I’m just not sure though. Without sacrificing ALL my damage, I have around…2700-2800 armor.

o_o I wish enhanced toughness was baseline for shroud

but I’m also using spite tree, because the might is just too good to ignore.

I decided to go with scrapper runes and from the zerg fights in Eotm it seems to be working pretty well.

Currently Im sitting at 2.7k pwr, 2.3k armor (almost 3k with Blighter’s Fervor and +180 from death) 40%cc / 200% dmg with 24k hp

Still going to need to do more testing in fights but it seems like this is working pretty well as a mid/frontline dps build