First of all… no matter how cheesy this sounds (no… not Reaper is so “cool”.. even though it is. I know I have to “chill” out but… just kidding. Ok… that was bad) but I just wanna give a nice thank you to Robert Gee and the team behind the design of the Reaper because the profession is just… kittening awesome. It’s brilliantly designed.
Second of all I wanted to talk about some of the crazy, crazy synergy that the Reaper will have so I’ll just jump in.
Locust Swarm
Gives lifeforce per enemy hit normally. If you’re specced in Curses and Reaper, you’ll get more crits with your locust swarm the more condis the enemies have, and the more you crit, the more bleeds you’ll cause with Barbed Precision. This ties in Chilling Nova. When an enemy is chilled and you critically hit them, they will cause an explosion which will chill nearby enemies (you also take less damage from chilled foes). Basically, Locust Swarm will become a huge bomb which generates life force, bleeds and cripples enemies and now causes chill. If you grab Bitter chill to the mix, vulnerability is added to the mix.
-Back to Reaper. So with this Locust Swarm, you grab Chilling Force, which grants you life force per enemy hit which is chilled. It also gives you might. Now back to the scenario. You are in the middle of enemies, you trigger Chilling Nova and chill everyone. Now you are hitting everyone that’s chilled and generate even MORE lifeforce (total of 3% per enemy hit. 5 enemies = 15% lifeforce per second) and MIGHT. This can be made even MORE crazy if we look at the new spin-to-win skill in DS: Soul Spiral. Each chilled enemy you hit will grant you a stack of might and will give you 1% life force. So basically, Soul Spiral would give you 11% life force per enemy. 5 enemies = 55% life force. Ok, hold that thought.
-Now add in Blighter’s Boon (gain lifeforce when you get a boon). The might will give you another 1% life force, but you are inbetween 5 enemies. So you will gain another 1% life force on your Locust Swarm (total of 4% life force per enemy hit, 5 enemies = 20% per second from Locust Swarm alone) and now we add in Soul Spiral which is … you can instantly go from 0 lifeforce to 100 and remain there for a long, long time.
-Now add in Banshee’s Wail Locust Swarm lasting for 15 seconds? Generating up to 20% life force per second… with might to top it off? Oh my.
-Edit: there will have to be a choice between chill-does-damage trait and boons-give-lifeforce trait. So you grab more lifeforce, then chill will deal no damage, but if you pick up chill-does-damage, then less lifeforce generation. With chill-does-damage trait, Locust swarm would give 15% per second instead of 20%
-We can also add in life stealing. If we pick up blood magic (which now heals you through Deathshroud)… and you do Locust Swarm in a group, which will give you health for each enemy you hit. If you pick up Vampiric Precision… If enemies have more condis —> more crits --> more heals. Now add Soul Spiral on top of the mix…. MASSIVE healing. Now if we add the auto attack from DS as well… even more siphoning. Even if we just look at the DS auto attack alone (which hits multiple targets) the life siphoning through deathshroud will be very, very nice.
Deathly Chill
Chill deals damage. Boy oh boy. This scales with condi damage, from my understanding. So basically… staff gets another damage condition. Chill of Death becomes a nice spike for condi Necros, Focus could become an option, Dagger off-hand —> chilling darkness causes chill causes bouncing damaging, chilling, condi transferring ball of goodness, then also ice sigils/geomancy sigils, grenth runes?
- This has excellent synergy with chilling Nova…. especially with Locust Swarm. Locust Swarm will cause cripple, bleeds, generate lifeforce, and cause AoE chill which will deal damage.
-Also… Fear will chill targets. If you grab terror… your fears will now cause damage from terror… but additionally, they will cause damage from CHILL. Infusing Terror in DS will become a huge AoE spike with condi damage (Fear people around you. Terror + Deathly Chill).
-Reapers Mark will fear targets (terror damage) and chill (Deathly chill damage).
-Nightmare runes, reaper’s protection…
New DS auto attack
While the above mess is happening with Locust Swarm, mow down the enemies with your auto attack —> Dhuumfire --> AoE burning and bleeds from Barbed Precision. Also: additional life force on 3rd attack.
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(edited by MethaneGas.8357)