Reaper feedback

[Cabalabob]

So I’ve been playing the reworked reaper lately and I’ve got to say I’m not too happy with it. A lot of my complaints with the old version have not been addressed and they’ve doubled down on other bad design choices. So I want to take a look at current reaper and what I feel needs to change.

As usual I feel like I need to preface this with I only play frontlines, so maybe it works better in CC but for frontlines there are things I feel need to drastically change.

So I want to start with plentiful harvest. 8 stacks is far too many, either lower it to 4 but make it so they only build from soul slice, or increase the ways we can generate immortal sacrifice stacks like adding it to the final hit of our basic combo or gallows/gibbet. (side note, soul slice still has a tooltip error where it says it generates soul sacrifice not immortal sacrifice).

Next I want to talk about arcane crest. You basically always want to pair this ability with death warrant since they have the same cooldown and duration and their effects synergise for your burst. The problem here is arcane crest is a defensive utility, yet you need to use it at a time when you’re likely not being attacked and the shield will be gone by the time you are. I feel like the 10% damage increase should be removed from arcane crest and leave that ability as purely a defensive option and the damage increase simply be added to death warrant.

As for death warrant, I personally hate “wildfire” style mechanics because if the enemy isn’t dead in 2 seconds they aren’t gonna die, so either they’re dead before it goes off or they escape and heal so your compiled damage doesn’t help. There are 2 changes I’d like to see to death warrant. First, it should reset on kill/assist or just have a shorter cooldown. Second, we should be able to remote trigger it early. If I hit a 17.6k communio followed by a 22k plentiful harvest I’m ready for that thing to explode before the enemy has time to recover but it likely still has 2-3 seconds left on it. Maybe make it so harvest moon instantly triggers death warrant after it hits so you just use that as a combo finisher for it.

Hell’s ingress had a nice change with increasing your movement speed. But it doesn’t stack with sprint so it’s still hard to catch up with fleeing enemies on a job with very limited ranged potential. Regress also still has trouble with any kind of elevation making it a really useless addition, I still think just giving us 2 charges and removing regress entirely would be a more effective solution and would help with the chasing situation, giving us the option to either jump forward and then jump back, or jump forward twice.

Lastly I want to talk about the LB. While it has great damage potential it’s over too long of a timeframe giving it the same issue as death warrant that the enemy can just heal through it or escape before you can use half the combo. And you can’t even fit the entire combo into the duration of a death warrant, meaning you need to apply it towards the end of your combo which feels janky, especially with the 1.5 second recast on the reaping attacks. And the duration of enshroud is still far too short, giving you about 6 seconds of wiggle room if targets move out of range and forget about being stunned/silenced while using it. I’d say double the potency of void/cross reaping but increase the recast to 2.4 seconds and decrease enshroud stacks to 3 (one void/cross and a communio) then make it so void and cross reaping apply bind instead of lemure’s slice and make lemure’s slice extend the duration of hysteria instead. That way you’d get the damage off from the LB in a shorter time frame with less actions required, your bind can be reapplied after it is inevitably immediately cleansed and will hold your specific target still while you’re less likely to be stunned into oblivion thanks to the extended hysteria in AoE. And buff communio potency to 18-20k so it’s stronger than the new void/cross.