So.. let's discuss Reapers.

[Requimatic]

Without an auto-attack replacing skill like Cadence, how are Reapers going to work in comparison? (By this, I mean melee-oriented Reapers, with little to no summons.)

I mean, are their basic auto-attacks going to be strong enough to support themselves later on? It also seems like there's a lot of fighting between 4 damage types: Aether, Vitality, Cold, and Piercing.

It almost seems like such a build almost has to focus a lot on the summons.. then again, I'm a novice when it comes to making builds.

All the things I've come up with thusfar ends up running me out of points early on, even when only dumping reasonable amounts in to WPS skills (say, the 20% point).

I'm curious as to what any theorycrafters, or anyone past level 30 or higher has come up with in regards to a melee-oriented Reaper build.

Anyone have any examples, thoughts, or input?

I know a lot of Blademaster builds don't max out a lot of the Nightblade WPS skills, but I'm mainly curious with how far to take those.. because things like Pneumatic Burst are paramount (to me, anyway) and should be maxed, most likely.

Harbinger of Souls also seems like a good one to max out, but.. again, I am unsure.

[KG]

My 2c: Looks like one of those combos that will really come into its own due to skill modifiers and late-game damage conversion gear to narrow down the damage types a bit. So if you want to theorycraft, go poke around in those.

Two handed weapons at the very least show some promise with Bone Harvest plus other weapon damage nukes that favor big 2h stuff. I think there's a Bone Harvest-oriented scythe plus Soulrend is nice as always.

I haven't even glanced at 1h weapons beyond what has dropped for me so far.

[powbam]

DW BoneHarvest on LMB, WPS procs in-between the cooldowns.. very beasty. I'll upload what I got so far later after work if you like but I'm loving it.

[Requimatic]

Originally posted by KG:

My 2c: Looks like one of those combos that will really come into its own due to skill modifiers and late-game damage conversion gear to narrow down the damage types a bit. So if you want to theorycraft, go poke around in those.

Two handed weapons at the very least show some promise with Bone Harvest plus other weapon damage nukes that favor big 2h stuff. I think there's a Bone Harvest-oriented scythe plus Soulrend is nice as always.

I haven't even glanced at 1h weapons beyond what has dropped for me so far.

Yeah, there's a 100% to Cold conversion on Bone Harvest that I believe was added just for Soulrend, IIRC.

I mean I like the idea of a kind of drain-tank Assassin, but I'm not sure how it'll play out later on.

[Requimatic]

Originally posted by powbam:

DW BoneHarvest on LMB, WPS procs in-between the cooldowns.. very beasty. I'll upload what I got so far later after work if you like but I'm loving it.

That sounds interesting; my only real concern with a such a build is where to stop putting points in to what. Granted, you can always spec out of things later on (for instance, the skeletons early on are pretttttyy OP, but I imagine if you don't buff 'em up get slaughtered in an instant), but there just doesn't seem to be a whole lot of synergy between Necro and Nightblade.

That, or maybe I'm just missing it. ;)

[powbam]

Originally posted by Requimatic:

Originally posted by powbam:

DW BoneHarvest on LMB, WPS procs in-between the cooldowns.. very beasty. I'll upload what I got so far later after work if you like but I'm loving it.

That sounds interesting; my only real concern with a such a build is where to stop putting points in to what. Granted, you can always spec out of things later on (for instance, the skeletons early on are pretttttyy OP, but I imagine if you don't buff 'em up get slaughtered in an instant), but there just doesn't seem to be a whole lot of synergy between Necro and Nightblade.

That, or maybe I'm just missing it. ;)

There's synergy there but my build is kinda ad hoc atm... We'll see how it goes later.

[Unicarn]

My first expansion character is a two-handed melee Reaper. I haven't gone far, but my plan is to use Amarasta's Blade Burst and Bone Harvest as both my AoE and as a way to buff myself up so I can use Shadow Strike.

Primary damage will be cold, with some Vitality, Piercing, and a little bit of Poison.

No idea if it'll work, but it'll be fun.

[Requimatic]

Originally posted by Unicarn:

My first expansion character is a two-handed melee Reaper. I haven't gone far, but my plan is to use Amarasta's Blade Burst and Bone Harvest as both my AoE and as a way to buff myself up so I can use Shadow Strike.

Primary damage will be cold, with some Vitality, Piercing, and a little bit of Poison.

No idea if it'll work, but it'll be fun.

See, there's synergy there for 2H Reapers with the 100% to Cold conversion on Bone Harvest.

But for DW? There's.. not really anything. Granted, almost every build is going to have tiny bits of damage from other types here and there (for instance, my Pyro has a bit of Pierce and some Bleed? I think, but has a 1000% modifier for Fire and a similar level for Chaos), so I imagine if your gear pumps Pierce/Cold (the logical choice, it seems), or even Aether/Vitality, it could work in that regard.

I guess I'm just going to bite the bullet, throw something together in Grim Calc and see how it goes. At the very least, I've got some pretty good weapons set aside for this sort of build.

I had a lot more 2H stuff set aside also, but ended up vendoring it to make room before I even knew the expansion was coming so soon.. oh well!

[Azunai]

don't think the reaper is designed as a DW build. none of the skills you might use scale with 2 weapons, so might as well simply use a twohanded weapon. played my new reaper some more yesterday. he's level 35 or so right now and wrecks things ridiculously fast.

between blade burst, shadow strike and bone harvest, there isn't much room for auto attacks and half of them will be replaced by the 2 WPS (they max at 25% like the 2 WPS in the soldier tree). might even add ring of steel with cold transmuter to get a 4th active skill.

main damage type is cold, but he also does a decent chunk of acid (from ABB+lethal assault) and vitality from necro stuff.

went with spider/eel -> kraken first, then after filling viper i replaced the points in eel (no longer needed) and picked the new murmur constellation next (cold/acid themed, including RR). not sure where to head next. might work towards the new rattosh (sp?) constellation that boost vit (and aether i think)

EDIT: if you want to go the DW route, the reaper might still be a decent class all you really need to make a DW build viable is a decent source of flat damage.

both ABB and bone harvest add LOTS of flat damage via their buff modifiers and you can use get all the nightblade WPS to fill the gaps between the nuke skills. guess it would work just fine, with or without DW scaling modifiers.


EDIT2:
my build (around level 36 or so) looks something like this right now: http://www.grimtools.com/calc/Q2zgGAVA

EDIT3: might end up something like that eventually:
http://www.grimtools.com/calc/lNk9ndVJ

with enough +skill items, i'd probably drop points from RoS & ABB - i only want to get them to >100% weapon damage so they don't feel like a dps loss when using them. also, stuff like pburst, veil, nights chill etc. could easily save some points if i can get say +2 or +3 to all NB skills, so i could probably max bone harvest and put some more points into spectral binding or something.

[ha..HA!]

If you really want to dual wield, you could always usa a shard of beronath in one of your weapons and use its default attack replacer then use bone harvest after building up charges. Of course, that's just off the top of my head and I have no idea if that would be viable at end game so take my advice with a grain of salt.

[Kotli]

Originally posted by ha..HA!:

If you really want to dual wield, you could always usa a shard of beronath in one of your weapons and use its default attack replacer then use bone harvest after building up charges. Of course, that's just off the top of my head and I have no idea if that would be viable at end game so take my advice with a grain of salt.

Well since Cadance dont proc WPS on 3rd hit my Blademaster is using Shard of Beronath default attack replacer.

[Requimatic]

Originally posted by ha..HA!:

If you really want to dual wield, you could always usa a shard of beronath in one of your weapons and use its default attack replacer then use bone harvest after building up charges. Of course, that's just off the top of my head and I have no idea if that would be viable at end game so take my advice with a grain of salt.

Hm.. that's true. I wonder how much of an increase that would be over just default attacks.

Edit: just looked at the actual item, I didn't know what it did. I might have to do that, neat.

Still, though, it looks like Reaper is meant as more of a 2H class than anything.. kinda sucks, but 2H love was needed in the game from what I understand. Not really complaining. :)

[powbam]

Originally posted by Requimatic:

Still, though, it looks like Reaper is meant as more of a 2H class than anything.. kinda sucks, but 2H love was needed in the game from what I understand. Not really complaining. :)

I suppose.... it's still early days for this guy of course but he's a total freak in bed and the ladies are loving him so far and he prefers two of everything and it seems to be doing just fine by him. I suppose 2 Reaper's Touch might have a little to do with it.

http://www.grimtools.com/calc/RZRJRBZD

I did say that the "synergy" was an ad hoc affair :) Get out your duct tape and just make it work. I'm kinda splitting focus between Cold/Vit and the other incidental damage types endemic to such a build following in a lesser fashion.

[Requimatic]

Dual auras with Veil of Shadow and Spectral Binding could be pretty devastating later on..

"Haha, you suck just for being close to me!" kind of thing. I mean Nightblades kind of monopolized on Veil anyway.. so a point in to Binding and then maxing out its passive, plus maxed out Veil, makes for -44%? attack speed (unless they don't stack additively) for anything close to you.. that's pretty big for survivability.

I like Binding; the extra health is nice, but I don't know that maxing it out down the line would hurt other areas too much. Personally, I like to have at least 20% activation chance on WPS skills, but I've seen 68k+ DPS Cadence builds with only 1 point tossed in to them, or less.. and that was before the expansion. (One build I was looking at in particular skipped over everything except Execution in the Nightblade WPS line, after like.. 1? point in Dual Blades.)

That's where I end up with a lot of confusion; when's a good stopping point? Respeccing is easy enough, and at least with Reapers you don't have to make a choice between two Exclusives like you do Death Knight (Harbinger/Master, and Oleron's Rage).. so if you go the Vitality route, there's a lot of damage to be had there (Harbinger). The added life steal is icing on the cake there.

Anyway, are those crafted weapons or did you just get really lucky with drops? Hah. I think I can craft Omen for later on but they aren't really what I'd call ideal.. but they'd work well, I think.

[powbam]

Originally posted by Requimatic:

Dual auras with Veil of Shadow and Spectral Binding could be pretty devastating later on..

"Haha, you suck just for being close to me!" kind of thing. I mean Nightblades kind of monopolized on Veil anyway.. so a point in to Binding and then maxing out its passive, plus maxed out Veil, makes for -44%? attack speed (unless they don't stack additively) for anything close to you.. that's pretty big for survivability.

They do help alot and honestly I love the combo.

Originally posted by Requimatic:

Personally, I like to have at least 20% activation chance on WPS skills, but I've seen 68k+ DPS Cadence builds with only 1 point tossed in to them, or less.. and that was before the expansion. (One build I was looking at in particular skipped over everything except Execution in the Nightblade WPS line, after like.. 1? point in Dual Blades.)

That's where I end up with a lot of confusion; when's a good stopping point?

Hard to say and opinions do vary wildly on that issue. I've always liked dropping points in Dual Blades compared to most critics, then again I may very well change my mind later down the line in order to beef up more productive areas.

Originally posted by Requimatic:

Anyway, are those crafted weapons or did you just get really lucky with drops? Hah. I think I can craft Omen for later on but they aren't really what I'd call ideal.. but they'd work well, I think.

Actually Reaper's Touch is where the idea to go Bone Harvest came from. I admit I happened to have one sitting in the shared stash and then another dropped and I'm looking at the Dread bonuses going on there and I said fuggit, I'm going to try it, and boy has it been working out beautifully ever since. I rarely twink characters surprisingly but after so many game hours I do tend find myself allowing it more often these days on whims. It's going to be hard to give 'em up later on but we'll see what all I find down the road.

RIght now I'm waiting for 35 as I have a Deathchill relic all but ready and waiting to be crafted... that should fit in what I have going quite nicely.

I could upload my save file if you want to give it a whirl yourself without committing fully. Take a test drive so to speak.

Screw it... uploaded it anyway for whoever wants. Your call. Toggle skills located on 2nd skillbar.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/y00mxek8ercyzne/_Live%20The%20Life.zip?dl=0

[Requimatic]

For higher difficulty stuff, I can see the aura combo being pretty much mandatory, along with maxed or close-to-maxed Pneumatic Burst for self-heals (I mean.. who doesn't usually max that out anyway? It's an amazing cooldown.)

As for the WPS.. dropping some points out of Dual Blades isn't a bad idea; I may give that a whirl and see how it goes. I still need to get to the point where I can actually toss points around to see what I like, though.. the planned Reaper is only like level 12 right now because I've spent so much time fretting and thinking over potential builds for it.

Speaking of Relics, I noticed Gluttony earlier and think I'm going to have to craft one for my Reaper to start with. After just looking at Deathchill, though.. that's pretty much perfect for a Cold/Vit setup, and brings yet another aura in to play.. neat!