Guild Wars 2

When Reaper was originally revealed, the developers spoke about trying to design a “movie monster”, like the bad guys from campy 80’s horror movies: slow moving but relentless, brutal and hard to escape once it catches up to you. It’s a wonderful theme that didn’t really pan out.

There’s no reason we can’t get to that point, though. Reaper should be a spec that you do not want to stay in melee range with unless you’re specifically designed to handle large spikes of damage, significant debuffs, and powerful crowd control.

The spec should focus on a few advantages:
1. Slow, heavy-hitting attacks that have high innate critical hit rate and cause Vulnerability (or other advantages beyond just damage).
2. Control through Chill and Fear.
3. Self-defense through damage reduction and Stability.

The spec should also have a few glaring disadvantages:
1. Low access to mobility and Vigor.
2. Talents that don’t work at range.
3. No support for damaging conditions or self-boons (beyond Stability).
4. Low group utility.

There should also be a heavy focus on the greatsword and Reaper’s Shroud as the ideal way to play the spec.

We have some of this already, but the themes need to be strengthened.

I’m not going to go into many specific changes, but I’m going to present a few criticisms about the spec as it stands:

The power damage on both greatsword and Reaper Shroud is sub-par.
The Reaper spec gives up a lot of utility, both for a group and for itself, and gets very little in return. Part of this is because of the long cast time on abilities, which aren’t counterbalanced very well in terms of damage or debuffs.

The low mobility on Reaper is not balanced by being difficult to control or innately tough.
For reasons that are not well-understood, the Necromancer in general has never had good access to stability, protection, stun breaks, and other similar effects that make a character tough. One would think that poor access to evasive abilities, Vigor, swiftness, teleports, etc. would be balanced by the capacity to absorb large amounts of damage, but that isn’t the case.
I believe that there is a misconception that Shroud is a powerful defense mechanism, but that’s really only the case in the most basic of PvE encounters. Having extra health is only of use if you can escape from the source of overwhelming damage.

Poor group utility requires compensation for the spec to be useful.
This is a tough one. Reaper is a spec that, in a power setup, outputs damage similar to a condi Chronomancer, but the Chronomancer dramatically increases the group’s damage and utility at the same time.
I’m not sure what to do here. Perhaps the right answer is to just give Reaper some decent group utility.

I understand that the condition damage build is going away from Reaper so that it doesn’t tread on Scourge territory, but if nothing else is altered then Reaper will be a build that does middling damage with no group utility and poor self-defense.

bump, i agree, this is so true

how would you increase the Reaper’s effectiveness for raid content?

vicious.5683:

how would you increase the Reaper’s effectiveness for raid content?

I say we take off and nerf all the other dps specs from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.

A power-based DPS spec needs a few things for good raid damage:

1. A 100% critical hit rate, or darn close to it. In general you can get 50% to 70% from gear, but the more you get from gear the worse your overall damage will be because you have to sacrifice Power (by using Assassin’s). Fury generally goes on top of this to provide an extra 20%.

2. Extra damage and critical hit damage. This is usually conditional (i.e. “More damage to a target with no boons” or “More damage to a target that is below 50% health”). These traits are very important.

3. Good weapons for both melee and ranged damage dealing.

Everything else after that is helpful but not necessary. For example, it’s common for a raid to be able to maintain 25 stacks of Vulnerability on the focus target and 25 stacks of Might on the damage-dealers. Quickness and Alacrity are powerful but hard to acquire outside of a raid, and the classes that provide it to others are typically not damage powerhouses in their own right (because they are upping the entire raid’s damage). Combo fields are also helpful but, again, will usually come from classes that are in more support-oriented roles (unless you’re an Elementalist; those guys seem to have everything).

The thing to keep in mind is that damage-dealers in a raid will typically be on an even playing field in terms of Might and Vulnerability, but not necessarily in terms of Quickness, Alacrity, and Fury as those effects largely depend on raid composition.

Part of the problem that Reaper has is that it is VERY selfish. It can’t provide many buffs to the raid and can’t spam out combo fields. So when you have a situation like you do now, where Power Reaper has damage output similar to Condi Chronomancer but none of the group utility, you end up in a situation where it’s actually a sub-optimal choice to bring a Reaper over a Chronomancer.

Of course, many guilds will bring their Reapers anyway because they aren’t terrible people, but for a PROGRESSION fight they may ask the Reaper to sit out.

In short: if you are going to have a class that provides little more than damage, it better do a TON of damage while being very self-sufficient. In other words, you would bring that class for the same reason that vanilla WoW Rogues used to be taken to Molten Core in as large of numbers as the raid could support: Rogue damage was so immensely better than any other class that as soon as you met the requirements of tanking, healing, and utility there was absolutely no better source of damage. IIRC, the world-first Naxxramus clear used a raid that was 1/3 Rogues.

But Reaper — especially Power Reaper — can’t make that claim. The damage is middle of the road at best, and gets worse if you can’t spam Gravedigger once the target is below 50%.

Doesnt matter.

All anet devs are part of an extremist casualist cult, which duels on keep with bad builds to determine balance.

They also rather fund the cult than hire new workers, who could do real work like animation speedups and skill functionality changes.

Remember,
a number tweak a year
is what poeple gonna hear.