Guild Wars 2

As someone who has played necromancer for a long time in 5-10 man WvW combat, I disagree on the WvW aspect of your post, Zefrost. Not to mention that 10v10 is in no way large scale. It’s mid scale at best.
Now, the 2 major problems with base necromancer in these fights are lack of sustain due to subpar recovery and lack of stability, personal or otherwise.
This forces a group to babysit all but the best of necromancers and takes away resources they could otherwise use for pushes. They still work amazingly well if utilized properly but their resource drain is massive.
Reaper fixes this by massively improving recovery, improving self peel capability and giving access to tons of personal stability, making the class far less greedy than before.
It’s also a completely different beast from standard necromancer. Don’t try to play or even build it as one. Mostly because Reapers actually have fairly amazing survivability.
Blocks and invulns are not the only measure of that.
Now for some other statements.

Mediguards of all kinds are bad in this kind of combat. In fact, it hasn’t been a good choice for anything for over 6 months now as mesmers, thieves and elementalists massively outshine it in everything it’s trying to do.
I’m actually appalled that you’d compare any class to medi guard in usefulness. It utterly fails at everything you want from either a guardian or an initiator as it has no support to speak of while also having bad burst and disengage.
I can get more team support on my Reaper by slotting blood magic.

15% of it is added to the class baseline so you don’t have to spec into it to get the benefits.
Works like that for all the class specific stats if I recall it correctly.

This does not seem like a one time opportunity.
I’d say we play the Reaper on the coming beta weekend to get hands on experience with the entire class and then organize some constructive feedback.

Just tested it in the HoM on the invincible target golem. Guildmate on his ele helped me. If it is indeed bugged, it’s a bit more difficult than that because it worked perfectly fine for us. Using Berserker amulet with pack runes, which gives base 52.8% crit%. Lightning Storm+dagger water auto to keep up vuln while I autoattacked the golem with my dagger. Crits on every strike until vuln dropped off.

I was just looking at this with a couple guildmates. Specifically, Shrug it off is still only cleansing one condition and also does not work with trooper runes.

Toughness would be better as you are more likely to eat power damage on frontlines. So yeah, I’d say they should keep it.

I too am surprised that it went unchanged for this long. Expected something like this every BWE so far.
Old BB had several problems. You weren’t able to allow Reapers to take proper advantage of it by themselves as it, together with allied boon output, would result in Reapers with far too much sustain. And yes, it worked. I tried it. An allied guardian was enough to make you immortal even in outnumbered fights while using a build that was far from optimised. This took agency away from the Reaper, which is bad while also making them far too powerful in certain situations.
And no, you can’t nerf everyone else to compensate. Because at that point you have to look at how to nerf them for necromancers only or how the nerfs affect builds and matchups for at least 3 classes. Not to mention the effect it has on potential future elite specs.
It’s only logical to remove the source of both problems and allow Reapers to control their own trait. And that’s really the only thing that’s missing here. Some more scaling boon generation is needed so that Reapers can trigger their own trait reliably without being forced into other traitlines or Chilling Victory.
Now ANet has the chance to properly balance it. Given that Chilling Nova and Soul Eater are currently somewhat lackluster, those are good places to start. Maybe even give some to Shivers of Dread to have some baseline effectiveness. Personally, I’d like to see some fury and retaliation somewhere in the Reaper set.