Optimal necro open world gear and spec?

Yesterday unlocked my reaper spec. I have to say that out of the 4 professions I have at 80 so far, none have come even close to the might of a reaper. It is amazing indeed!Tried a berserker reaper build I saw on YouTube and it worked great. However, it raised some questions since I feel it could be even better.

1)Generally, which performs better in open world? Power or condi reaper? Reaper abilities seem to be half power and half condi based, so one has to be the focus.2) The split damage nature of the reaper skills suggest that they may benefit from celestial stats. Worth having celestial for this spec?3)I want to solo dungeons on the reaper due to its great survivability. This means I have to kill enemies with a lot of health.The GS 3 on the reaper applies vulnerability for 10 secs. The cooldown of the skill is 9 and a half secs. This means that even if you fight a high health mob where this matters, you can never stack the debuff. Is it worth switching a piece of berserker gear for viper to stack the vulnerability and eventually increase the killing speed? Or maybe just use different runes to prolong the duration instead? If so, which one should it be?

Viper condition reaper was a thing before pof expansion. I guess it still works

Full Berserker Reaper is an open world PvE demi-god.

I'm running:Blood Low Low HighSpite High Mid MidReaper Mid High Low

GS & Axe/Dagger

You want power for fast killing without ramp-up time. No, definitely not celestial for pve.Protection on wells + blind + life siphon basically makes you a near-unstoppable killing machine.For solo dungeons you can mostly just blind trash , break bosses and do just fine. I wouldnt recommend condi stats to extend vuln, you get plenty as a necro as is.

I run Berserker Armor/Weapons with Valkyrie Trinkets on my Reaper and she’s my absolute favourite for open world playing. I use Trooper Runes for a condi cleanse on Shout use and some extra padding with the other stats it gives.High-ish damage, 20k+ health. Been using it since I can remember.

Avoid condi reaper. It's just not practical anymore since they nerfed shroud and deathly chill. Your damage outside of shroud as condi reaper is pretty underwhelming, and you are subject to a ramp-up time that makes power builds far more suited to open world.

Shame, I used to enjoy soloing fractals with it.

To piggyback on this thread, what about weapons/gear stats? Less focus on cond dmg and more on?? Power? Toughness? Also, super new to this game. Level 44 on first toon.

@barobins.9458 said:To piggyback on this thread, what about weapons/gear stats? Less focus on cond dmg and more on?? Power? Toughness? Also, super new to this game. Level 44 on first toon.

If you're going for power & dmg, berserker's stats (power, precision, ferocity). Weapons that cater power will be axe and dagger(mainhand) from the nature of the weapon's attack.

My advice, don't limit yourself trying new stuff and play around the class for understanding. As long as the build is reasonable (eg. Avoid using scepter for power builds, due to the nature of the weapon's attack is focusing on inflicting condi etc).

@Eramonster.2718 , thanks! Yeah. I’ve been messing around with duel daggers, scepter/horn switching. Started out working with pets and moved on to signets and Wells. Just messing in everything to see what works in what situation.

So far, this game and the community has been awesome!

@barobins.9458 said:@"Eramonster.2718" , thanks! Yeah. I’ve been messing around with duel daggers, scepter/horn switching. Started out working with pets and moved on to signets and Wells. Just messing in everything to see what works in what situation.

So far, this game and the community has been awesome!

For what its worth, here is the signet/vampire/power build I am using in open world. Is it "optimal"? Well....no, not likely, but I enjoy the melee playstyle so that makes it optimal is a different sense. :)https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/home/leaving?target=http%3A%2F%2Fgw2skills.net%2Feditor%2F%3FvRQQRAnY4Yn0ICN2gl2Au0A0uhjchCGANQCI3htOfnDxSMFA-jRCBQBQR53DM%2FlC9NyQjQAeCAHc%2FBrq%2BDAOJATQJIpAyTZE-e

If you're running reaper, this is what I use for PvE. It lacks reliable stability or a stun break, but its so tanky that the only real threat is the same stun heavy monsters that would destroy most classes anyway. Its also unique in that it gets stronger the more mobs you fights at once, making it one of the most survivable builds in the game without having to give up your offensive capabilities. Its only real problems are toughness being a liability in Raids, and high level Fractals favoring Condi DPS.... but anything open world or Living story, you almost never die.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vRQQNAR3dnM0At1gdbCe1As3glpBbqldBOWxfwU4LUaAUACAA-jByEABKp8TNdDA8EA0QDDiq/YwFB4m9H6TJIA-e

The 3 key aspects to the build's success:

• How it uses Decimate defenses to offset Precision, allowing you dump those points into Vit for a bigger HP pool and Life Force capacity.
• Using minion focused utility skills to take advantage of a Toughness boosting trait, Minion Condition transfer, Minion life steal, and their aggregate DPS to compliment your more bursty damage attacks.
• 2 Life Siphon traits that allows you to heal while in Shroud (which is otherwise impossible)

The runes and sigils I listed in the build are not critical to anything the build does, and are chosen because they add some quality of life when solo playing and just ridiculously cheap to obtain. Speed sigil for swiftness uptime, and Rage runes for no effort 60% fury uptime (a boon you don't have good access to otherwise). You can swap them with anything else you find more interesting or optimal, but I've found these to be just overall convenient, regardless of which maps I'm in. And that includes HOT and POF, which are notorious for stacking enemy groups to make areas difficult to bypass.

Usage basics:

• Open with Death Spiral for stack vulnerability (which adds +24% crit chance off the bat due to Decimate defenses), and go into Reaper Shroud when you want to lay down burst damage, or are trying to power through a lot of incoming damage.
• GS5 and Reaper 5 are heavy CCs for Break bars. Reaper 3 for stability, or flip it to fire Terrify for more break bar CC.
• If your surrounded by mobs, use "Rise!" to generate Life Force, and spawn up to 5 more minions which redirect 30% of damage you take to them, add more toughness due to Flesh of the Master trait, more life stealing with their hits, and generates more life force when they expire. Note ambient mobs also count as hits, and will spawn minions, so you can take advantage of that in certain maps when soloing champs.
• Reaper shroud can be used both offensively and defensively, and your blood traits allow you heal back up in Shroud by attacking. This combination gives you stupid amounts of combat momentum during map metas, and can pretty much tank your way through any fight short of a Legendary's heavy hitter. Reaper's onslaught also increases your auto attack speed, which buys a little more time in shroud while cleaving your way through groups of enemies.
• Minions can be left on auto pilot, and the only minion skills you need to be aware of is Shadow Fiend's "Haunt" skill, which gives 10% life force, and Flesh Golem's Charge attack...... I don't think I need to explain how much of a break bar destroyer that skill is.
• The Axe/Focus is mainly there to give you a kiting/ranged option if needed, and can help generate life force while GS skills are on cool down. Boon strip on Axe 3/Focus 5 is occasionally useful for fights where enemies have Protection or self-stack a lot might (like Eye of Zhaitan). The high attack rate of the axe skills also trigger a lot of life steal, so its useful in recovering HP while kiting in boss fights that exhausted your shroud.
• For Maximum Tyrial Cosplay, Reaper hood with Sublime WvW chest armor (if you have the rank for it), Celestial Dye, and Radiant Gloves and Shoulders.

If you don't want the minions, theres an Alternative build replacing Death magic with Soul Reaping for less passive tankiness and more shroud uptime. You can swap Decimate defenses for Chilling Victory if you take Death Perception, or take Foot in the Grave to get a Stun break. Or use Unyielding blast to generate stacks of Vul in your auto attack. Honestly, for more offense oriented reapers, Soul Reaping has a ton of options that strongly compliment Reaper Shroud.

Both the main and variant builds are very straight forward, and just amazingly durable for anything Open world events or story chapters can throw at you. While it might be not be good for Group content like Raids and Fractals, you'd end up wanting Condi build for those anyway. I also forgot to note that despite listing Ascended gear.... you could very much run this build with all exotics and not notice much of a difference. If anything, I would suggest using Exotic armor (which is very cheap with Valk being a core stat), earrings and backpiece, to save money/tokens, and only get obtain Asc Amulet and rings since they're cheap enough. With the money/resources you didn't spend on making Asc armor, earrings and back piece.... invest those into a Scourge WvW build if you play there. Or invest in another class entirely.

I'm not actually maining Reaper (as I main Warrior), but my power Reaper would definitely be my close second. Run into the fray, use GS#4 and go crazy. If the enemy still stands after 4 - 3 - Triple AA - 2 - 2... , then it's either "Your are all weaklings", "Suffer!" and go to 3 or Reaper's Shroud and go havoc. All in all, I enjoy Reaper pretty much and right now feel the urge to play it more =)

However, Condi Scourge wants to be played one day as well... never done Condi builds until now. Hopefully with Viper's gear I still pack a punch while ramping up.

To the question: I run with full exotic berzerker's and am doing just fine. Everything is pushed towards good dmg and shroud uptime, so Spite, Soulreaping and Reaper (might be a bit outdated, gotta look into my build once more - at least that was what I was comfortable with last time). Sometimes, when I'm lazy, I switch to axe/warhorn for some Ghastly Claw action.

Edit: Not sure if that is "optimal", but it worked out for me.

For me, it's Power Reaper. Why? -- because there is nothing in OW that is particularly slow to kill. Everything dies quickly, so why wait for damage to ramp up as with condis? For builds, metabattle now has OW builds. Note that this even works for dungeons. Necro MM was used to solo dungeons even before the new elite specs came out.

@"starlinvf.1358" said:If you're running reaper, this is what I use for PvE. It lacks reliable stability or a stun break, but its so tanky that the only real threat is the same stun heavy monsters that would destroy most classes anyway. Its also unique in that it gets stronger the more mobs you fights at once, making it one of the most survivable builds in the game without having to give up your offensive capabilities. Its only real problems are toughness being a liability in Raids, and high level Fractals favoring Condi DPS.... but anything open world or Living story, you almost never die.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vRQQNAR3dnM0At1gdbCe1As3glpBbqldBOWxfwU4LUaAUACAA-jByEABKp8TNdDA8EA0QDDiq/YwFB4m9H6TJIA-e

The 3 key aspects to the build's success:

• How it uses Decimate defenses to offset Precision, allowing you dump those points into Vit for a bigger HP pool and Life Force capacity.
• Using minion focused utility skills to take advantage of a Toughness boosting trait, Minion Condition transfer, Minion life steal, and their aggregate DPS to compliment your more bursty damage attacks.
• 2 Life Siphon traits that allows you to heal while in Shroud (which is otherwise impossible)

The runes and sigils I listed in the build are not critical to anything the build does, and are chosen because they add some quality of life when solo playing and just ridiculously cheap to obtain. Speed sigil for swiftness uptime, and Rage runes for no effort 60% fury uptime (a boon you don't have good access to otherwise). You can swap them with anything else you find more interesting or optimal, but I've found these to be just overall convenient, regardless of which maps I'm in. And that includes HOT and POF, which are notorious for stacking enemy groups to make areas difficult to bypass.

This build has really helped a lot. In trying to really understand it and see how to best use it, I noticed something.Correct me if I'm wrong, isn't the Blood Bond in this build not trigger-able? The only thing I see to cause 4 stacks of bleeding is two times dodging on the same enemy within the limit of the 8 seconds Mark of Blood. Is that in fact what one should do? Trigger twice the mark so that he has 4 stacks of bleeding? Or can we augment this build with either another selection and/or something that can cause bleeding reliably?

@seePyou.3250 said:

@"starlinvf.1358" said:If you're running reaper, this is what I use for PvE. It lacks reliable stability or a stun break, but its so tanky that the only real threat is the same stun heavy monsters that would destroy most classes anyway. Its also unique in that it gets stronger the more mobs you fights at once, making it one of the most survivable builds in the game without having to give up your offensive capabilities. Its only real problems are toughness being a liability in Raids, and high level Fractals favoring Condi DPS.... but anything open world or Living story, you almost never die.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vRQQNAR3dnM0At1gdbCe1As3glpBbqldBOWxfwU4LUaAUACAA-jByEABKp8TNdDA8EA0QDDiq/YwFB4m9H6TJIA-e

The 3 key aspects to the build's success:

• How it uses Decimate defenses to offset Precision, allowing you dump those points into Vit for a bigger HP pool and Life Force capacity.
• Using minion focused utility skills to take advantage of a Toughness boosting trait, Minion Condition transfer, Minion life steal, and their aggregate DPS to compliment your more bursty damage attacks.
• 2 Life Siphon traits that allows you to heal while in Shroud (which is otherwise impossible)

The runes and sigils I listed in the build are not critical to anything the build does, and are chosen because they add some quality of life when solo playing and just ridiculously cheap to obtain. Speed sigil for swiftness uptime, and Rage runes for no effort 60% fury uptime (a boon you don't have good access to otherwise). You can swap them with anything else you find more interesting or optimal, but I've found these to be just overall convenient, regardless of which maps I'm in. And that includes HOT and POF, which are notorious for stacking enemy groups to make areas difficult to bypass.

That trait tier doesn't have any real synergy options for a power build, so Blood bond is a "least pointless" option, and kind of the only reason its taken. But you do get Jagged Horrors from Death Nova, and those minions do inflict bleeding.... so Lesser Vamp does trigger occasionally between them, Lesser mark of blood, and Necromatic Corruption transferring bleeding off of you. Fun Fact: Jagged Horrors don't have a hard cap timer like Shambling horrors do, so its possible to have more then 2 up if they have some source of healing from nearby allies. You could go Ritual of Life for the Res bonus, but that only really sees any use in world boss fights where people with glass builds and no dodge key get downed all the time. Quickening Thirst requires Daggers, so it doesn't matter unless you're using Daggers in your build.

Thank you for the quick and complete answer!!

@"starlinvf.1358" said:If you're running reaper, this is what I use for PvE. It lacks reliable stability or a stun break, but its so tanky that the only real threat is the same stun heavy monsters that would destroy most classes anyway. Its also unique in that it gets stronger the more mobs you fights at once, making it one of the most survivable builds in the game without having to give up your offensive capabilities. Its only real problems are toughness being a liability in Raids, and high level Fractals favoring Condi DPS.... but anything open world or Living story, you almost never die.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vRQQNAR3dnM0At1gdbCe1As3glpBbqldBOWxfwU4LUaAUACAA-jByEABKp8TNdDA8EA0QDDiq/YwFB4m9H6TJIA-e

I wanted to come and thank you for posting this. I switched my main reaper to this build, or as close as I could get quickly anyway. Even with her still having 6 Ascended Zerk armour, axe and focus on only Exotic - but zerk - and a few other bits of gear in zerk or random nonsense (she diverted from level something-low to 80 with my HoT instant-80 token so lots of Rabid that's mostly gone) instead of Valk, the results were ... impressive. I am seriously pleased, and I'm looking forward to cranking the armour and trinkets over to Valk in the near future.

Thanks again.

@Steve The Cynic.3217 said:

@"starlinvf.1358" said:If you're running reaper, this is what I use for PvE. It lacks reliable stability or a stun break, but its so tanky that the only real threat is the same stun heavy monsters that would destroy most classes anyway. Its also unique in that it gets stronger the more mobs you fights at once, making it one of the most survivable builds in the game without having to give up your offensive capabilities. Its only real problems are toughness being a liability in Raids, and high level Fractals favoring Condi DPS.... but anything open world or Living story, you almost never die.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vRQQNAR3dnM0At1gdbCe1As3glpBbqldBOWxfwU4LUaAUACAA-jByEABKp8TNdDA8EA0QDDiq/YwFB4m9H6TJIA-e

The main reason for Valks is that you don't need a lot of precision with Decimate Defenses or Death Perception giving you a significant Crit chance bonus, so that frees up points for other stats. What makes Vit good on Necro is increasing its already large HP pool, and furthering increasing the point total of shroud. Keep in mind that Shroud decays on a %, but it also soaks incoming damage instead of your HP, and has a 50% damage reduction on incoming physical damage while up.... so a large point total is still beneficial if you can afford it.

You still want to have around 1500 Precision (for a 30% base crit chance) for an average 80% crit chance in solo fights, and easily hits 100% in boss fights. You can also go with Power runes (Strength or Pack are good options) for more reliable base damage, but the crit damage is pretty similar.

@"Haleydawn.3764" said:I run Berserker Armor/Weapons with Valkyrie Trinkets on my Reaper and she’s my absolute favourite for open world playing. I use Trooper Runes for a condi cleanse on Shout use and some extra padding with the other stats it gives.High-ish damage, 20k+ health. Been using it since I can remember.

I'm just going to elaborate on my own comment from April.This is the build I have used since, well, ever, on my Reaper.It's a good build if you don't want minions. I personally hate AI, so I made this to not need them. You can still use some with this build but you may need to replace the runes if you use less shouts.I will say, it does look like poop on paper, but it's effective. I defeated Liadri with 8 orbs and Turai with this build (hence the food choices found in the linked build!), and my Reaper is my go-to for Open World, because it's so much fun, I survive well on it, and enemies MELT.