Guild Wars 2

I began playing Necro recently and I run the meta Viper Horror build for my high fractal dailies. I have a question. I have Googled my question but did not find my answer.

I am trying to understand why Reaper is part of the meta build. Is it because of Decimate Defenses? Reaper grants the ability to wield a GS which is power based so why is Reaper part of the meta condi build?

Again, I just want to understand why I am choosing this trait line over others. I would like to go a little support with Blood Magic. I run pugs exclusively. If I ran with a static group that would be different but with pugs, well, you get a little bit of everything.

Thanks for your replies.

It’s not the ability to wield GS that makes Reaper good, it’s Reaper shroud & Deathly Chill. Deathly Chill converts all your chills into bleed stacks. Reaper shroud can pump out large amount of bleed + poison when you use the Executioner’s Scythe > Soul Spiral combo.

That and also reaper shroud gives you better mobility in death’s charge, and much higher stab uptime compared to baseline necros.

Thanks for the explanation.

It looks like the ability to chill your foe + Deathly Chill is one aspect that makes this trait line better. As far as I can tell, we have two abilities that chill, #4 dagger with a 18 second CD and Reaper Shroud #5 with a 30 second CD. I would expect the CDs to be shorter to justify in choosing Reaper.

You also mentioned Reaper Shroud #5 then #4 is good to use. I do agree, #2 is nice when you need to get out of those oh shoot moments.

Is using Reaper over any other trait line a significant advantage or is it a minor/small boost in our performance (damage or mobility)?

And this is from a PVE perspective.

Thanks again!

It’s in the synergy with blind, fear, chill, and bleed. Taking Reaper trait line, whenever you fear, you also chill. So keep that in mind, whenever you pop shroud 3 aoe fear, that’s an aoe chill.

I’m assuming you are talking about the Reaper Viper Horror build on metabattle? If so, Chilling Darkness will apply chill whenever you blind your targets. So every time you death’s charge (since death’s charge blinds), it’ll chill your target, and apply bleed. For blind you’ve got shroud 2 & dagger 4,

As for your question about min/max efficiency between taking Reaper trait line over others, that you’ll want to consult our PvE overlords. I know how traits work, but I only do PvP & WvW.

Going core with Curses/Death/Blood over the old Curses/Death/Reaper is somewhere around a 15% dps loss, closer to 20-25% if your group has high alacrity uptime. That’s under ideal circumstances of course, it’s less if you consider that you aren’t going to be pulling of chilling bolts every time you use shroud 4 because there might be another field under it that you combo instead, and it’s a dps loss if it’s ever anything but an ice field. Having Blood specced does of course also grant vampiric aura which is a sick 3-5% dps boost for your subgroup. So you can go core if you want. Unless you’re going for speedclears it doesn’t really matter much. It’s nice to have Transfusion if you don’t trust your teammates though.

Decimate defense IMO the most important trait to have there.

Thank you all for replying, very helpful!

Core necro is as viable as Reaper in this build. I’m running Curse/Blood/Death and it works perfect.

gavyne.6847:

It’s in the synergy with blind, fear, chill, and bleed. Taking Reaper trait line, whenever you fear, you also chill. So keep that in mind, whenever you pop shroud 3 aoe fear, that’s an aoe chill.

I’m assuming you are talking about the Reaper Viper Horror build on metabattle? If so, Chilling Darkness will apply chill whenever you blind your targets. So every time you death’s charge (since death’s charge blinds), it’ll chill your target, and apply bleed. For blind you’ve got shroud 2 & dagger 4,

As for your question about min/max efficiency between taking Reaper trait line over others, that you’ll want to consult our PvE overlords. I know how traits work, but I only do PvP & WvW.

You don’t generally use Death’s Charge, unless for mobility. It sucks dong for proccing any effects, since they occur on 9th hit.

As for OP: Reaper is minimal increase in damage and offers greater minimal increase than other traitlines in group environment, that’s basically the whole reason. More crit and couple bleeds.
If your group keeps dying faster than Harambe, take Blood with Transfusion over it.

You’re definitely right that one of the biggest reasons is Decimate Defenses, which in every raid and most fractal groups comes to an extra/free +50% crit chance. While it is a condition build, you still deal a good amount direct damage in Viper’s gear and this really adds to that.

As others said, you’re taking Reaper mainly for Soul Spiral, Executioners Scythe, and your chills adding a stack of bleed (which in Viper Horror means that your blinds also apply an extra stack of bleed via Chilling Darkness.) The reason this is important and worth dedicating an entire trait line to is sort of two fold. Soul Spiral (12 stacks of poison + whatever condition applying field you can get yourself into) is a ridiculous upgrade over the access to condition damage that you would get from Vanilla Shroud (the torment beam, which is barely worth mentioning). Now, you could easily say, well just don’t go into shroud form… But there are times where you have to in fractals to avoid damage/pulse stability and it’s nice to be able to put out some good damage while doing so. The second reason is that Soul Spiral covers a good chunk of the time where you’d just be sitting there auto-attacking with the scepter. As previous posters mentioned, combing Executioners Scythe into your Soul Spiral is good because it adds a ton of extra bleed via chilling bolts, and if you can do this great—but Scythe is much better used for wrecking break bars (which is notably much harder to do as a necro without it)

Also, if you want to take Blood, you should (Curses/Blood/Reaper)… In my experience, the only time Death Magic has really outshined the utility of Blood in fractals is in late tier 3 and early tier 4 when you get the Afflicted singularity (especially if you pug a lot.) A lot of times my group won’t have the proper cleansing and it’s nice to be able to run a passive Plague Signet to alleviate their condition pressure without worrying about overloading yourself. Also, it allows for you to spend your time running around res’ing your group if you have to, while your pets keep up some decentish dps.

Rym.1469:

You don’t generally use Death’s Charge, unless for mobility. It sucks dong for proccing any effects, since they occur on 9th hit.

Actually the small hits on the Shroud 2 skill do procc Barbed Precision. So if you’re standing in melee range its definitely worth using just before Shroud 5 for the 5-8 bleeds from Barbed Precision since you can also buffer Shroud 5 during Shroud 2 to make it cast slightly faster.