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If you’re doing the fight as intended, you need to get the blue ghosts that pop up around the edges of the room to help you. Someone above mentioned you can interact with them, but they also seem to have their own break bars.. I didn’t try this yet so maybe someone can confirm. This is the normal way to do this fight.
If you are going for the Fearless achievement, you want to hit the spirit of doubt as little as possible when the bar isn’t broken, or wait a few seconds for the damage reduction buff to fall off of it. However, you don’t seem to be able to avoid the hands, and your cooldowns quickly become extremely long, so you need to finish the fight reasonably fast.
Make sure you’d stacking whatever buffs are available to your profession early on in the fight, breaking the bar without hitting it too much, and then doing as much as you can while it’s broken. If your damage seems very low, try breaking the bar partway, so there’s only a little blue left showing, then waiting for the buff to fall off, then finishing the break bar.
Any time a boss has a buff, take a few seconds to mouse over the buff and read what it does. That makes it a lot more clear how you’re supposed to do the fight. Also, if health is an issue, try a mango pie or similar to help out. I tried a minion build as well (necro), but they also seem to have long cooldown on their attacks from your debuff, and the spirits tends to target them first, so I had better luck using a standard condi build.
It’s also worth noting that, in general, condition damage becomes better when things live longer. I found the scepter to be a bit slower while levelling, but it’s also much safer since you can hang back and have an easier time telling when the enemy is about to do something you need to dodge. Even when you’re using shroud, if a big ability is coming, you’ll want to dodge it (something like a giant or an ettin doing a big knockdown for example).
As far as skills go, it’s probably worth your time to get the signet that increases movement speed early on, or take the trait that increases move speed while using a dagger if you like using one.
I’m planning on running Traveller’s in my main set for the movespeed. It’s hard to live without it. I’m almost going for a more beefy fighter while still maintaining 100% crit and as much ferocity as possible (cavalier armor, mix of cavalier, zerk, valk/zerk trinkets).
I’ll keep a Zerk set in my back pocket, eventually with Scholar once I can afford a mountain of silk. Strength is nice as well and more consistent than Scholar, but with power/ferocity Scholar is well suited for us.
Other options:
- Ogre and Ice are the not bank-breaking versions of the above.
- Earth could be nice if you’re running a well-heavy build with Blood Magic.
- Svanir could help with chill on a tankier build.
- Exuberance could be fun with Valks if it weren’t so expensive.
- Trooper has good group support in a shout-heavy build.
- Elementalist actually looks nice for hybrid, with duration to both chill and burning.
I’ve really enjoyed seeing how Reaper has changed over the course of the three weekends. I’m coming from the perspective of a primarily PvE player, so keep that in mind..
I’m excited to have a durable melee, as that’s one of the things that I enjoy on Necro vs. other professions, and Reaper is a huge boost to that. Also, getting several field/finisher combos within the class really improved the experience. Shamelessly stealing the nice formatting above:
Greatsword
• Autoattack is very slow, I often end up swapped through skills for combos and didn’t let it finish. This may simply be due to how long anything less than champions or some elites live, though.
• Gravedigger feels like it needs slightly bigger range. It’s awkward to have enemies who are visually being hit by the tip of my sword not taking damage. The Love the damage, though. Cast time feels fine to me.
• Death Spiral feels good.
• Nightfall isn’t as useful defensively as a one-second blind field like our well, but the ability to always have a field to combo off of is worth it.
• Grasping Darkness still fialed to hit a few times, though I think that may have been myself or the target moving out of range. The range does feel fairly short.
Shouts
• Your Soul is Mine: The LF is nice, but I usually ended up running a longer CD hel with utility like Consume Conditions or Well of Blood for Cleansing Bolts.
• You Are All Weaklings: Very nice might boost and weakness. The might is pretty short, but the cooldown is, too. I suspect this will be used more solo than in a group setting, though maybe have more frequent access to vuln will give it the nod over other choices.
• Suffer: I always like to have a condi cleans handy. I’m used to using the well, so it took some getting used to relying on a single button press instead of the pulsing cleanse, but this felt like it worked well.
• Nothing Can Save You: This feels more niche, especially if I’m running Axe/Focus as the second weapon set instead of staff. I didn’t use it much, but the numbers seem fine for when it is needed.
• Rise : I was surprised how strong this ended up being. The minions had the usual AoE problem but lasted long enough that it felt worth pressing every time. I actually messed around a bit soloing in Arah and they made a big difference.
• Chilled to the Bone: I think this may be my go-to when not running Spectral Mastery for Lich. Part of Reaper’s weakness is the amount of time you need to expose yourself to get off a Gravedigger in a crowd, and this helped with that nicely.
Reaper Shroud
• The Autoattack is fine and plays nice with several of our traits. I’d like to see a bit more life force on it, as a lot of the time even running VP it was hard to stay in shroud for long given incoming damage in melee. Some that is certainly me needing to dodge better, but on longer fights I can see myself getting forced out quickly, and in short fights you’re only in there long enough to combo off and get something into Gravedigger reset range anyway.
• Death’s Charge: Mobility, a different finisher, and a low CD.. not much to say here. Love the frost armor.
• Infusing Terror: I actually thought the stability kept going out of shroud already. Would be nice.
• Soul Spiral: My favorite button in Shroud. Good combo potential. Always happy to press this.
• Executioners Scythe: A field we don’t get anywhere else, and probably our best one to combo off of. I often used this more as an opener as an execute, the throw out some chilling bolts, but in a longer fight it’ll be back up when the boss is low and you can then start to whirl off it with Gravedigger, too. Also, like Chilled to the Bone, it’s great to have a stun to let you get off your harder hitters safely on non-bosses.
Traits
• Augury of Death: Not sure I even noticed the siphon, but if you’re using several shouts it’s a standard cooldown reduction option.
• Chilling Nova: I didn’t really notice this go off.. does it even have a visual? In any case, it’s some extra damage and chill.
• Relentless Pursuit: Seems fine when it’s needed. I suspect I’d like it more in PvP.
• Soul Eater: I didn’t play around with this too much. If the reduction is per target hit, seems fine. If it’s 3% per swing, that feels low. Agree that the siphon here feels out of place. Maybe if it was 5-10% of damage dealt by Gravedigger?
• Chilling Victory: This would be a great option for a more Shroud-focused build. Also didn’t try it very much.
• Decimate Defenses: One of my favorite talents. The option to swap in some alternate gearsets and still be able to reach high levels of crit has opened up all kinds of possible builds, and I love it. Necro had this to an extent with the 50% crit in Shroud, but this applying outside of Shroud makes all the difference. It does mean that if you run low precision gear you’re not always going to have the high crit rate on enemies that don’t live long (and there’s that heartbreak when you see a 4k Gravedigger instead of 10k+), but being able to not run super glass cannon all the time and still be able to hold your own when it matters is welcome. I’m curious to see how much uptime this will actually get, as I found that most of my pugs the last few days had some difficuly keeping vuln up, and while we’re very good at it, you can’t keep it on everything all the time.
• Blighter’s Boon: Good sustain option, should be great for groups, and somewhat addresses the lack of healing in Shroud as a potential raid concern, especially with Herald on your side. I wonder if it will be enough, and what non-Reaper Necros will do, though.
• Deathly Chill: I haven’t tried a Reaper condi build yet.
• Reapers Onslaught: Feels good. It’s great to be able to combo off several times in an encounter if you can stay in Shroud long enough to pick off some weaker guys.
Like several people above, I do feel that Shroud ended pretty quickly at times, but as noted above I didn’t stack as many supporting traits as I could, so if you take all the LF gen you can it may be fine.
Gear
I tried several variations on gear.. full zerk, valk armor and zerk trinkets, cavalier armor and zerk trinkets, and cavalier armor with a mishmash to get crit as close to 30% as possible (group with fury, but not necessarily spotter/a banner). For running around solo, cavalier with zerk trinkets seemed to work best (I’m a little slow on the dodges at times, especially if it’s hard to see enemy animations under legendary effects/other players’ spells flying around). I’m planning on sacrifcing the power to start with that, and will just swap trinkets out depending on if I’m solo or grouped.
Traitlines
I almost always paired Reaper with Spite. Given that Spite gives you vuln on chill and pulsing vuln in Shroud, as well as the 20% damage below 50% health which meshes well with Gravedigger, I never wanted to take it off my bar for a DPS focused build. I tried each of the other choices for the last slot.
Soul Reaping is a good default choice. I generally took Unyielding Blast as I was using Traveller Runes for movespeed already. I took Spectral Mastery if running Lich, or VP if not. Generally, I found less of a need for Lich as a damage cooldown – I may be more inclined to take it over CttB in high level fractals or the like where it’s not always a good idea to melee the boss. Losing the range on Shroud may make this more attractive. Finally, as I was already getting crit from Decimate Defenses, either of the other GMs were good options, but I mainly used Dhuumfire since I was using shroud to combo RS5 + RS4 more often than not, so the stun break may not be up when needed. It added a surprisingly good amount of damage with no Condi Damage on gear, and I can see it being a lynchpin for Condi Reaper.
Curses was underwhelming as a power build. It has some nice utility in Plague Sending and RS2 corrupting boons, and Weakening Shroud is good, but it seems more suited to a hybrid or condi build.
Blood Magic was great for sustain as always and is likely to be run in groups. The first row doesn’t have much choice unless you’re running dagger or bleeding sigils on your weapon sets. All of themasters and GMs are good options depending on what you’re running in the rest of your build.
Death Magic was actually my favorite pairing by the end of the weekend. It’s a bit more selfish than Blood Magic, but keeping in mind that we’re a bruiser that had slower skills, the extra defense was welcome. I mainly ran Shrouded Removal, Deadly Strength (helps with the power loss from running cavalier over valk or zerk armor), and Corrupter’s Fervor. Every chill adding 3 vuln from Spite kept that up easily. Unholy Sanctuary is also an option, and should be good with new content while you’re figuring out what to dodge, or if you’re going for more sustain.
I think that’s about all I have.. very excited for release!
(edited by Rhatha.2376)