Media Tour Reaper Impressions

[Endariel]

For me, it looks like a class with significant button bloat straight out of the gate (32 buttons. 24 class skills, 6 role skills, sprint, LB), has at least one dead skill (Soul Sow/Harvest Moon. It was barely 2 years ago when the devs LITERALLY made the same mistake with Shoha for Samurai) and, well...it looks really cool? I've been wanting a proper battlemage after the disappointments that RDM and DRK were to me. However, I just can't get past the concerns of button bloat and creating another Chakra/Shoha mechanic that doesn't generate during standard content. Beyond that, I actually have to play it, otherwise I'm grasping at straws for how it will feel.

Also the pseudo-dot just feels weird. I get what it's trying to do, but I don't think the class benefits from having that mechanic. It already looks to be a moderately busy rotation. I'd have preferred they gave this mechanic to a class like DRK that is desperate for something to differentiate it from WAR at this point (instead of like, oblation) than throw it on RPR. It's also 2 buttons because the devs want a single target and aoe version, which I have long since stopped enjoying as it's a major source of button bloat to take low-use skills have a single target and AoE version. And I don't know why the devs keep doing this. SB was so good in this regard because you used abilities like Foul both for single target and AoE, keeping bars nice and compact almost across the board.

well granted half of his kit are upgrades and button replacement. But we'll see

[Taranok]

well granted half of his kit are upgrades and button replacement. But we'll see

It made it very hard to count exactly how many buttons they actually had, I'll admit. But they have 2 buttons just for moving, 2 buttons for applying the psuedo-DoT, 1 button that will be used once or twice every boss with few exceptions and then immediately ignored, and, well, that's about it. It's hard to tell exactly how bad it is, but when looking at the bars of people testing the job, it had a lot more bloat than, say, Summoner that was rivaling Machinist for fewest skills, and has my attention because of that and its constantly changing, if simple in-the-moment, rotation. A similar reason to why I like BLM's rotation, but with more variety and fewer timers threatening to destroy everything you've worked for.

What I am wondering right now is what stats should Reapers shoot for regarding gear and what materia melds should be prioritized?

This really depends. The class has no DoTs, and looks to have a significant amount of DPS directly tied into oGCDs. This is a recipe for skill speed being low priority. It also appears to not have any critical anxiety bar speed break points (E.G. an easy way to get a 6th hit in during a 10s window, which iirc no class has, or a 9th hit during a 20s No Mercy).

However, a lot of its oGCDs are also directly tied into just running your GCD rotation, not on waiting for a cooldown, so who actually knows? It depends on how much double weaving it needs to do at that point. I noticed the same thing when looking into Summoner, but Summoner has the advantage of having exactly 0 GCDs per minute at a 2.5s GCD for ruin 3 spam, and could gain an entire GCD if it moves its spell speed down to about 2.375 (realistically, 2.37) second GCD but would have somewhere around 10 or so skills every minute that wouldn't benefit from it (4 oGCDs from titan, 2? oGCDs during any demi, 3 from aetherflow, 1 for aetherpact, + an unknown amount of damage the demi itself will directly do). Is it worth those skills not benefiting to fit in a single ruin 3 every minute and give you enough wiggle room to cast a single raise without clipping something else? I don't know.

With how tight SMN's rotation is in theory, it might legitimately need it. RPR could have an identical situation. But I would love for more classes to be ambiguous with skill/spell speed, because it's very tiring how the majority of classes want to either dump it, or build to very specific break points and then not care.

[ItMe]

Reaper is looking very neat.
I wasn't expecting it to tickle me, but it's now looking like one of the top 4 classes I am looking forward to.
Basically everyone from the media tour I tuned into described its playstyle as "intuitive," and that's something I really value in a class.

[Cherie_Lavigne]

When doing casual content, I play the job that looks the coolest to me. Reaper feels super edgy, looks cool, and isn't a tank. I will be playing through EW with it and leveling SMN beside it as well.

[Jirah]

Progression kit might be a whore, but that’s what you get for starting so late.

[MagiusNecros]

My weak guess is either Skill speed>Crit>Direct Hit or Crit>Direct Hit>Skill Speed

I'll probably bite the bullet and see what can come out of Spell Speed and Determination with some hipster build that maximizes Arcane Crest dot ticks. The 2.47 WS recast and SpS 2.50 recast is just going to bother me.

Probably looking at 2 builds. The hipster build above and the typical build for CRIT and DH build.

I dunno why Harpe, Soulsow, Harvest Moon, Communio have to be spells with a different GCD recast. Samurai has WS with cast times and is all on the same recast.

An experiment to try at my own expense is full Spell Speed melds to see how much it can reduce in-combat Soulsow time for more harvest moons.

They really just need to combine Skillspeed and Spellspeed into the same thing and just call it Haste or Agility or some crap.

[Lyth]

I think that Skill Speed will be a really bad choice for Reaper due to your Shroud window, outside of just doing it for a laugh. Your base GCD while it's active is 1.5s, and your oGCDs have a 1s recast, which will cause all kinds of clipping problems. We're probably going to be actively avoiding it.

[Acece]

I think that Skill Speed will be a really bad choice for Reaper due to your Shroud window, outside of just doing it for a laugh. Your base GCD while it's active is 1.5s, and your oGCDs have a 1s recast, which will cause all kinds of clipping problems. We're probably going to be actively avoiding it.

I think the gcd can't go lower then a 1.5 sec gcd, so sks won't do anything for shroud phase. could be wrong, never seen anything under a 1.5 gcd.

[MagiusNecros]

Probably will run DET/DH for Reaper. The +10% damage is achievable and maybe gear/melds at 90 can push to 50% DH rate.

CRIT/DET is probably the go to for big crits.

The dream of course would be +10% Det damage stacked with Death's Design, 50% DH Rate and 20% Crit rate.

But eh we will see.