Reaper BW1 feedback by [rT] Spoj

Reaper feedback by Retaliate[rT] Spoj


Greatsword
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Auto-attack
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Currently the auto-attack feels very slow and clunky. The chill on the final hit is far too short considering the total time for the auto chain to complete. I feel like the damage numbers should be buffed slightly and the chain should be changed to take about 3 seconds to repeat.

In PvP and WvW players can simply move to avoid the final hit which means chill is almost never applied. In PvE you have to dodge attacks occasionally which means you will interrupt the chain a lot. This means the damage and chill uptime is even worse. I feel like the chill duration needs to be long enough to last for the full chain. Even in actual combat perma chill is not going to be all that common. In PvE dodges and other attacks will prevent it and in PvP players will cleanse and avoid the chill. Just auto-attacking for perma chill is going to be a bad play choice. So there should be no harm in providing that much chill with the auto chain.

Gravedigger
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This skill has far too long a cast time and after cast for its damage. There is no justification to use this skill. Its also really easy to avoid because of how slow it is. And its hard to hit moving PvE mobs with. Also the 80% reduction gives a 1 second period where you are waiting to cast again. In this time you cant do much because the rest of the greatsword skills are too slow.

I feel it needs to go back to 100% or just scrap the entire cooldown reduction. The damage should be buffed to give about a 3.00 coefficient. And the aftercast/cast time should be reduced slightly.

Death Spiral
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This skill is mostly fine apart from the range. It doesn’t hit very reliably on large groups so I would buff the range slightly to about 300.

However I feel the greatsword is missing something. And this seems like the best place to put it. If this skill was a small 400 range dash in addition to its current effects I feel the weapon as a whole would feel a little better and a lot more fun in terms of catching foes.

Nightfall
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The root on cast is frustrating. Especially with how slow this weapon is. The radius is also too small. Its hard to properly hit foes with its current radius and rooted cast. The pulses are also too slow. I feel it should be 8 pulses with 1 second intervals. Otherwise it doesn’t work very well as a defensive blind skill.

Grasping Darkness
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This skill is unreliable to hit and work. It doesn’t always pull foes the full distance and it often misses. Also the animation seems to bug and almost rush itself so you don’t see it properly. I also feel this skill should be ground targeted like the new tempest focus skill Lightning Orb. It would improve its functionality dramatically if you could aim it. It would also prevent many of the bugs where it misses. I would also buff the duration of the poison to make it more useful as a debuff skill. 1 or 2 stacks with much longer duration would be much better.

Greatsword summary
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Currently the greatsword is a very bad weapon. It was advertised to be slow but hit harder to compensate. Currently it does not. Dagger is far superior in terms of damage and it hits a lot faster. The damage numbers need to be buffed considerably to compensate. And then buff it some more considering how much you self interrupt through dodges or mobs/players just avoid the attacks just by moving. Its far to slow and too weak. It doesn’t feel fun and it certainly doesn’t feel useful. Being useful can be a good alternative way to make a weapon feel fun.
The slowness makes it so clunky and boring to play. Giving a small dash on skill 3 would make it feel a bit more mobile and responsive. Making it a lot more fun and useful.

The chill is also terrible. We have basically no access with the auto-attacks current chil duration. Whereas it needs to be permanent. Considering auto-attack only is a bad play choice. It should definitely be possible to maintain chill by only auto-attacking.


Reaper Shroud
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Auto-attack
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Currently I think the base auto-attack isnt too bad. The damage numbers could maybe be slightly higher to justify the melee range and higher risk. Life force management seems to be hard to maintain in RS. So I would also buff the lifeforce return on the final hit. 2-3% is probably necessary. At 1% it doesn’t really do anything.

Death's Charge
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This skills effects are fine. I would probably make the projectile block last a bit longer after casting so it is a bit more useful in that department. But the main problem with this skill is the functionality in how you target it. It can troll you so easily by running through targets and off ledges. When used against a wall it also becomes annoying if you don’t aim straight at the wall because you will slide off to the side.

I feel like this skill should lock to a target if you have one. So it should work like warrior savage leap and guardian leap of faith. Basically without a target it works as it does now. But with a target it locks and finishes its cast at the targets location. But it should still do the full duration of spins, damage and projectile block even if used on a target at point blank.

Infusing Terror > Terrify
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I think Infusing terror is mostly fine as it is. I would maybe allow the stab to carry over out of shroud. And it could probably due with being a stunbreak. Or put the stunbreak on terrify.

Terrify however should be instant cast. As it stands the cast time makes it bad for interrupting or using defensively. In the verdant brink map story chapter defend event I had a huge problem of being interrupted constantly even on this relatively short cast time. And if not then the fear duration should be buffed and it should apply chill as base to completely cover the extended fear duration.

Soul Spiral
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Soul Spiral is too weak for damage. The tooltip displays 2 second duration despite it actually being 4 second. It should also just display it as cast time instead of duration for consistency with other channels. With a 4 second duration its damage is way too low (its half the dps of dagger). So if it stays as it is then the damage needs to be doubled. If not then the duration needs to be halved. Other than that its fine for what it does.

Executioner's Scythe
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This skill is mostly fine as it is. The chill duration could be buffed a bit. The only problem is it has a bug where it randomly misses. Although the main problem with this is that it is basically a much better balanced and superior version of the elite shout.

Reaper Shroud summary
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Overall Reaper Shroud is pretty decent. It needs a few functionality tweaks and some slight number changes on a few skills. But it feels fun and relatively effective. With damage and lifeforce buffs it will become a good tool and be a lot of fun to use.


Shouts
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Your soul is mine
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The problem with this shout is that its healing is far too weak. Against large groups its still not great for sustain. And its main use of granting life force isnt amazing either. The cast time should and cooldown is fine though.

You are all weaklings
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The might on this skill is far too short duration. It needs to be about 10 seconds and possibly the same for the weakness. The cast time also needs to be half a second maximum. The weakness and might might be useful in PvE if it was boosted in duration and with a bettet cast time. As it stands its no good.

Suffer
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Suffer is basically our chill shout. But it also steps on the toes of transfers. However if we want to transfer conditions we are better off using plague signet. Which does more, is instant cast and has the same cooldown. So I feel suffer needs to be buffed considerably through its chill potential. Basically make it 0.25 seconds cast, 20 second cooldown and buff the chill duration to 5-7 seconds. Then it can at least be useful for chill. Otherwise it has no use and is completely outclassed by plague signet and tempests flash freeze.

Nothing can save you
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I think this skill is fine as it is. Its more of a PvP skill but its cast time and vuln duration are decent numbers wise. I would probably make it 30 second cooldown though. And maybe boost the damage up to Suffer's level.

Rise
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This shout is totally useless for any build. First its only effective when you have 5 foes nearby. But Jagged horrors are no good against multiple foes because they are single target minions. Its only use is a death nova proc skill. But its highly situational and has a far too high cast time and cooldown for even this.

I would completely scrap this skill in all honesty. Give us a shout which blocks projectiles for a set duration instead. And grants a blast finisher per target hit. But keep it on a short cast time and cooldown.

Chilled to the bone
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This elite is totally outclassed by Executioner's Scyther. And is far weaker than Revenants Jade Winds. The cast time is far too long. The stun duration is too short. And the cooldown is far too long. To make this useful as a stun skill I would buff the damage, reduce the cooldown to 60 seconds. Reduce the cast time to 1 second. The stun duration also needs to be at least 3 seconds just like Jade Winds.

But I would personally prefer it to be a CC on par with deep freeze but AoE. So make it 5 second duration. Then it actually has a real use as a CC skill. And gives Reaper something really worthwhile in PvE. I think the chill duration could also be a slight bit higher considering its elite status and cast time (even if changed to 1 second cast with 60 second cooldown). The stability per target is fine if the cast is shorter. But there’s not a whole lot of use for stab which isnt instant cast in this game. Stability is more of a boon you want straight away.

Shouts summary
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The main problem is their poor effectiveness on a single foe and this a problem with all shouts. Theres not really an easy solution for this other than having inverse exponential scaling. I would make the base effect with no targets the same as with one target to solve the issue of shouts being totally useless when foes avoid you or while out of range/combat.

They also suffer from low damage, high cast times and high cooldowns which are a bit too much considering they are shouts. I get that they are damaging and offensive so they shouldn’t all be instant. But they need to be better than this. Tempest shouts are much better than Reaper shouts in this regard. They also don’t provide any useful utility for PvE. Replacing Rise with a projectile block shout and buffing chill and weakness duration could rectify this.


Traits
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Augury of Death
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This trait doesnt really have a lot of use in PvE because shouts are weak. In PvP it doesn’t make sense because you arent going to hit many enemies. Not sure what to do about this other than making shouts better.

Chilling Nova
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This is a really bad trait now that it has a ICD of 15 seconds. Our chill duration is practically non existent at the moment so we rarely proc this and the chill duration and damage it gives is inconsequential. I would say revert this back to 3 procs every 5 seconds but reduce the chill to 1 second. Or make it 3 procs per 15 seconds with 2 second chill.

Relentless Pursuit
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Not really a PvE trait but its perfectly fine. And good at what it does and will have niche uses in some PvE. No changes needed.

Soul Eater
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This trait has no use. The cooldown reduction is rather pointless considering how bad greatsword is at the moment. Gravedigger cannot be spammed above 50% health which means you wont get much cooldown reduction anyway. And below 50% you will only want to spam Gravedigger. So it doesnt make sense. Also greatsword is far too slow so the life steal is totally pointless. I would change this to work like Zealous Blade. Just give it flat heals of a much higher amount per hit to work better with the slow hit speed of greatsword.

Chilling Force
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The ICD per target totally destroys this traits use in a lot of PvE content. Boss fights are mostly one target. Which means the might gain is really poor for anything other than large groups of mobs. Also our chill uptime is really poor at the moment so we cant even properly sustain 5 stacks from this trait. Its bad. We need more chill and the ICD needs to be removed. Or change it to 5 procs per second.

Decimate Defenses
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This trait is perfectly fine as it is. Really good trait. No changes needed. Although it would be nice if the crit bonus displayed either as an icon on our bar or in the hero panel.

Blighter's Boon
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This trait is also fine as it is. If Chilling force gets improved and chill uptime gets restored it might become a bit strong in certain situations. So maybe a multi proc ICD would be needed. But care needs to taken to not completely destroy this traits solo sustain if you do this.

Deathly Chill
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This trait is far too weak currently. Chill is a duration condition so the damage needs to be much much better. The same can be said for terror since conditions have changed.

Another solution would be to add additional effects. So maybe it should make Reaper's deal 10% bonus damage and 10% bonus condition damage to chilled foes. In addition to chill doing condition damage. You could also make the damage chill does scale with power instead of condition damage. Or make it a direct damage tick which can critical hit. As it stands its weak and needs to be changed a lot to make it better.

Reaper's Onslaught
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This trait currently doesn’t work in the beta. So I cant really say anything conclusive. However in theory this could be a very good trait. Potentially boosting RS auto-attack to deal better damage than dagger. Which would certainly be interesting.

Overall Summary
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In general the Reaper suffers mainly from numbers issues. Its too slow and doesnt hit very hard which means its not very fun to play. The chill uptime of the spec is also very poor. The greatsword and shouts are the biggest culprits to its problems and main aspects holding the elite spec back. Currently I only want to take reaper for Reaper Shroud and ignore everything else.

Greatsword is far too slow and clunky which makes it quite unfun especially with its low damage. I felt as if I was constantly lagging while using greatword because of its slow nature (in particular the auto-attack and gravedigger) which was not fun at all. The chill on auto needs to last for the full chain so that perma chill is possible on an unmoving dummy which does nothing. That way in real fights there is a small chance of decent chill uptime while using auto-attack only (poor play decision).

Shouts are problematic because of their poor effectiveness without low targets and their generally high casts and cooldowns. They also lack a bit too much utility.

Reaper Shroud is mostly fine. A few quality of life and numbers tweaks will make this a very fun and effective part of the Reaper. Unfortunately the shouts and greatsword are holding the rest of the elite spec back.

The traits are rather weak now since they have had some nerfs since the initial preview. They need to be partially reverted and buffed accordingly.

The biggest problem with reaper right now (ignoring greatsword) is that chill has really poor uptime. For a spec which is supposed to be really good at chill this is kind of embarrassing. In PvE I found my chill was practically non existent because I had to dodge frequently. In the cases where I could actually get a full greatsword auto chain off + executioners scythe I still had very little chill. It lasted about 3 seconds max before it was gone. And I wouldn’t see it again until executioners scythe came back most of the time. This made Chilling force totally useless.

A regular Necro just spamming dark path has way better and more reliable chill uptime than reaper. The best way to get long lasting chill on a foe it to pick up an eles icebow and use frost fan at point blank range. Reaper should be the best at maintaining permanent chill. And with all the cleanses in PvP and WvW and our very slow easily dodged telegraphed attacks I think you need to go back and be a lot more generous with our chill application.