Guild Wars 2

As someone who loves the necromancer but has stopped playing it because of the general state of the class, I followed the announcement of the reaper specialization with great interest. My first impressions when taking a look at the skills were mixed: Ok, they give us some chills but, at first glimpse, the access to chills seems very limited. SEEMS, is the keyword here. Because hidden in the traits of the necromancer, there is a lot of potential for high chill uptime. The idea was to take the spectral powermancer as a base and combine it with the power of chills and the reaper traitline. This build is for spvp/small scale wvw.

Runes, sigils, utilities and weapon sets can be found at the link below. The missing weapon and elite slot will be greatsword and “chilled to the bone”. Please note that there are no traits selected so the tooltip of the spectral utilites will look a lot more impressive ingame.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vRAQJAoNjc0QvN2aDG3AA-TJhBABA8AAgvMwQ7PkxJAAA

The traits will look like this:

http://dulfy.net/gw2traits#build=AgQGqALkBdQ~

For food in wvw, we will take Prickly Pear Pie (+40% condi duration, chance to steal life on critical). Along with sigil of chilling and the cold shoulder minor trait, this gives us +80% chill duration.

Explanation

Access to chill:
Please note that all durations given here are including bufffood.

- Spinal Shivers from focus: 8,5 seconds of chill on a 20 second cooldown

- Spectral grasp: 6,75 seconds of chill on a 24 second cooldown

- Chilled to the Bone: 15,75 seconds of chill on a 120 second cooldown

- Death Shroud #2 blinds a foe and therefore chills (chilling darkness master trait) for roughly 3 seconds on a 6 second cooldown

- Executioner’s Scythe creates a chill field for 5 seconds on a 30 second cooldown

- Spectral wall will at least hit the opponent(s) once and applies 3 seconds of chill through Shivers of Dread minor trait on a 36 second cooldown

- Nightfall (GS #3) creates a chilling field on a 25 second cooldown

- Spreading of chills to nearby enemies with reaper adept trait

This looks like a lot and it actually is. Now lets take a look at benefits and synergies from chilling opponents (aside from the standard effects):

- chilled foes deal 15% less damage
- chill deals damage to foes with deathly chill from reaper grandmaster
- striking a chilled foe grants life force and might

Quite a lot if you ask me. Now lets take a look at some general build categories: Damage, Sustain, Mobility.

Damage

Our high damage skills, especially greatsword #3 and death shroud #5, are slow and therefore need the help of utilities and weapon skills to land them. Luckily, we have two things that help us a lot.

1) Dagger #3 every 25 seconds: A 4,25 immobilize that is immune against stunbreakers.
2) Spectral Grasp every 24 seconds

Imagine, for instance, a spectral grasp into Executioner’s Scythe into Gravedigger combo with berserker stats.

With our chills and tremendous life force regeneration from spectral skills, we can enter death shroud every 10-15 seconds, gain 5 seconds of fury and unleash the full power of shroud knight on our opponent who will have a hard time moving away from us. Every 10-15 seconds, we will be able to try and catch the opponent with a big blow like warrior does with stun into eviscerate.

Sustain

Every 10-15 seconds, we may enter death shroud. This will trigger Enfeebling Blood which causes AOE weakness around us. Additionally, we apply weakness with every critical for about 7 seconds on a 10 second ICD. Plus we take less damage from chilled foes.

Everytime we enter death shroud, we break out of stun and gain stability. When caught in a stunlock without having death shroud ready, we have spectral walk to break out of stun twice. Finally, our elite gives 10 seconds of stability on a 120 second cooldown.

Our life force regeneration is boosted to a very high level which means we get a lot of extra hp.

Mobility

I divide this into 3 categories: Roaming speed, gap closers, escapes.

1) Roaming speed:
- 39 seconds of swiftness via spectral walk on a 48 second cooldown. Meh, but it’s something.
- 25% movement speed while in death shroud

2) Gap closers:

- we have a chill with a 1200 range that is unblockable (focus #5)
- A leap with 600 range every 6-7 seconds (death shroud #2)
- Spectral Grasp with 1200 range (24 second CD)

3) Escapes:

You’re a necro, better choose your fights wisely….

Although you might get away with spectral wall (fear and chill) behind you into death shroud with +25% movement speed and death shroud #2 spam. And then there is of course the spectral walk juke.

Weaknesses

Condition cleanse..

Conclusion

This build exists solely on paper. But the synergies from chills and spectral traits combined with the pure power of the reaper elite specialization seem very promising to me. Please post your feedback.

This is probably something like the theoretical joke build the devs nerfed us for. Chilling Darkness, Chilling Nova, and Spectral Grasp are all in states in which using them is actively crippling yourself.
By choosing Chilling Darkness, you sacrificed plague sending and the potential to spec into Spite, which comes with a trait for Spinal Shivers, as well as damage boosting traits that a power reaper wouldn’t want to pass up. Overall, there isn’t a good reason to choose Chilling Darkness as it is.
By choosing to run Focus, you are not using Warhorn, which is arguably far better.
By choosing Greatsword, you have 0 ranged options and will be kited to death like nobody’s business. GS 4 is a Dark field, not an Ice field, it has a big windup, and it will at best get one chill off. GS 1 has a very tiny chill that is telegraphed like it is trying to be churning earth. Realistically, you’d be better off using staff, which comes with two far more reliable chills, and it can do some damage at range.
Spectral Grasp will often miss no matter how well you aim it. Better choices for the utility slot would be Plague Signet, Corrupt Boon, or almost any Well. Even some of the Reaper shouts would be better choices than Spectral Grasp.
Choosing Chilling Nova means you didn’t take Relentless Pursuit, which is extremely important if you ever hope to touch certain foes. It also means that you chose a trait that Sigil of Ice outclasses. Think about that.
From a power perspective, it seems like you chose all of the wrong traits in Soul Reaping. You all most certainly want Vulnerability on Shroud 1, Vital Persistence, and Death Perception. FitG can be used, but you’re giving up half of your crits in RS to do that.
I only see +50% chill on your build, Cold Shoulder is not a 40% increase.
I’m honestly not sure what you were planning on doing with the chill because the number of sacrifices made to have a decent chill uptime heavily outweighs the benefits, and you aren’t going to be doing anything with that chill. Even Chilling Victory pales beside decimate defenses when you take into account the huge damage boost from vulnerability on RS 1 with guaranteed crits.
I’m sorry if you feel like I just ripped apart your idea, but I don’t want Gee to get the wrong idea. There is almost no reward for sacrificing everything to run max chill, and the best Reaper specs so far are the ones that ignore chill.