So I’ve been playing Reaper pretty intensively the past couple weeks, and I feel like I’m getting greater mastery of the job. Since I mentioned I was falling in love with Reaper a while ago, I guess now I’m in a relationship with it (polyamorously, Warrior is still my main!) and I’m past the honeymoon. A few thoughts about it:
- Reaper is very powerful, but it does nothing quickly. Everything is followups upon followups, sowing now to reap later.
- Related to this, Reaper is very much about resource management and planning ahead, particularly in dungeons where I often need to decide whether to spend my resources on the current fight or hold them to speed up the next. I dig this, I’m a planner by nature.
- And the flip side of this is that Reaper is flexible about when to spend your resources. The only hard and fast timing rules are to always plan ahead to be able to use Gluttony on cooldown, use Arcane Circle on cooldown, and keep Soul Slice/Scythe ticking — otherwise I can do things whenever they make sense in the fight.
- This means that when I know a fight, I can plan my busy, distracting (though less distracting than a week ago!) Enshroud window for a safe time, when I can afford to spend attention on my abilities.
- When I was first learning the job it felt like I had very poor ranged options because Harpe normally has a cast time, but that’s only half true. There’s of course Enhanced Harpe after a teleport, which removes the cast time, and Harvest Moon that’s meant for one use per downtime when I’m forced to disengage. But my biggest, most important attacks are also ranged so I can use them when I’m forced out of melee: Communio, so I can finish my Enshroud remotely when necessary, and Gluttony, so (with planning in order to have enough Soul at the right time) I can still use it on cooldown at range for those valuable two Soul Reavers.
I’m mostly happy with the job, but I do have a few complaints:
- My biggest pet peeve thus far is that Hell’s Ingress/Egress teleports you forward/back relative to the direction your character is facing. It’s another micro-planning moment for Reaper, where you have to either plan your facing direction in advance for a teleport a few seconds in the future, or actually run in the direction you want to go for a fraction of a second (so you’re actually facing the right direction) before jumping forward.
- The flavor and lore can be off-putting. Inviting a voidsent into a close working relationship sounds like a recipe for disaster, up until 6.2 gives you a different perspective on voidsent, and the ability names take some getting used to. I go for a cheerful “wholesome Reaper” aesthetic and a silly lighthearted headcanon about my avatar to offset it, but I feel the flavor does this mechanically excellent job a disservice.
- Minor in the grand scheme of things, but Communio has underwhelming sound and graphics for what it is. It’s the capstone of the Enshroud phase, a massive 1100p attack, and it’s less impressive than 500p Gluttony.
All told, I still like it a lot!
