Reaper is the worst spvp class I've ever played. Went 0-16 today, felt great.

"An inexorable force on the battlefield, the reaper empowers itself enough to wield a cleaving greatsword to harvest its foes."Yet I'm the one being harvested.Everyone kites me despite taking every anti kiting talentEveryone Blocks/Evades/Teleports away from me.Everyone hunts me down when I go into reaper form.Everyone that has decent range utter owns me completely.Can't even go toe to toe with most other melee.Shouts don't work sometimes, including elites.

I mean seriously? I tried every build imaginable, even this weird max hp build that still does decent damage when the opponent is finally out of guards/evades/invulns/etc., but it's still not enough.

What is this class that has the coolest concept ever and it's utter trash in spvp? Why?I can't possibly be that bad. I've never been so frustrated in my life trying to make this work.

If the video is representative on how you play, you are to eager to kill your foes and forget the objective in sPvP. This lead you to chase meaninglessly some players while some other eat your health pool safely from the back. In the end when you're at low health, a single foe just need to stay composed to kill you. The sPvP mode is conquest, not FFA.

why did you feel the need to post this twice?

Reaper is not a duelist.Reaper is not a long sustained winner. It works best with a support babysitter in medium sized fights.Reaper is kitable, so only fighting on a small AND enemys node may force them to tank otherwise avoidable damage.Reaper is "counterable", meaning a single,block,evade,invul can counter your telegraphed combo.

You fought a duelist.You fought in a drawn out sustained fight.You fought off node.YOU lost.

Lore class description dont mean kitten, except necro is the only one where anet keeps their archaic mindset of slow n clunky

^this.

There are a lot of people who keep getting farmed and they have no idea why. Be humble question yourself and l2p

@"Farkon.2170" said:"An inexorable force on the battlefield, the reaper empowers itself enough to wield a cleaving greatsword to harvest its foes."Yet I'm the one being harvested.Everyone kites me despite taking every anti kiting talentEveryone Blocks/Evades/Teleports away from me.Everyone hunts me down when I go into reaper form.Everyone that has decent range utter owns me completely.Can't even go toe to toe with most other melee.Shouts don't work sometimes, including elites.

I mean seriously? I tried every build imaginable, even this weird max hp build that still does decent damage when the opponent is finally out of guards/evades/invulns/etc., but it's still not enough.

What is this class that has the coolest concept ever and it's utter trash in spvp? Why?I can't possibly be that bad. I've never been so frustrated in my life trying to make this work.

I'm sorry. This almost made me laugh after reading it. You're using the wrong class for SPvP. They're kiting you because players know they can't harm you while you're in reaper shroud. So all they have to do is wait till your life force go down to zero, then you become a helpless easy prey. Reaper is not designed for SPvP but is hands down the undisputable king of open world content, capable of soloing champions. What you're doing is no different than trying to solo tank champions as an elementalist. GW2 is a learning experience. Hopefully this helps you understand why you're dying. But if you absolutely must go necro in PvP, a scourge is better than a reaper. Reaper is mainly power based dps, therefore you'll have to chase them around and hit them in melee range whereas with a scourge, they do mainly condi damage. As a scourge, you just hit them with a few DoTs from a distance, their health will go down and you don't need to chase them around. Just make sure your gears have condi damage.

You need to practice knowing what situations you can and or should or should not go into.

Alot of people get dunked by reaper in a single soul spiral so you assume necro / reaper is an EZ class.When in fact its not so EZ in the sense that you need good placement have to know what moves you can make and what moves you cant. Making mistakes get you killed fairly quickly with little room for recovery.

The way reaper is currently if you get +1'ed its usually a loss.If you fight a duelist like others have mentioned and you dont make the right evasive plays at the start of the fight you die.

Overall losing 16 matches does not mean reaper is badit means one of 2 things

• 1 your team was bad 16 games in a row and dont understand how to coordinate anything
• 2 your team was not bad but the enemy team was just better than your team and got ahead and snowballed 16 games in a row.

I would encourage you to take a break from reaper and give it another try some time later.

Necro and it's elite specializations play more like a tower defense game - poor mobility but great AoE for point or ally defense.

Something is the worst, but it's not the class.

@"Flumek.9043" said:Reaper is not a duelist.

And that's the real problem here. Necro has no duelist spec.Its only good in a team, but even there it gets punished for playing in a team, as it cannot be healed in 2/3 specs while being in shroud.Which doesn't make sense at all.

Reaper is not a long sustained winner. It works best with a support babysitter in medium sized fights.Reaper is kitable, so only fighting on a small AND enemys node may force them to tank otherwise avoidable damage.Reaper is "counterable", meaning a single,block,evade,invul can counter your telegraphed combo.

Then why are some other classes almost not counterable? Only by very certain builds, while necro gets countered by a lot of things (outsustain, range, cc...)On any class you can literally press one button, to negate reapers damage, and after you managed to do that, you will just outsustain him, or kill with even more dmg.

And also why is everyone crying about scourges Condi application, that gives 2 stacks of damaging conditions and 2 stacks non-damaging, while mesmer is able to put even more conditions and even more damaging stacks on you than scourge can?

The only thing that reaper is real good at is whirling in a group of idiots, taking all of them down.

And stacking scourges in wvw kinda works good as well, but in pvp it's only a noob smasher and in pve it's still suboptimal

You fought a duelist.You fought in a drawn out sustained fight.You fought off node.YOU lost.

Lore class description dont mean kitten, except necro is the only one where anet keeps their archaic mindset of slow n clunky

I'm sorry, but you just didn't play well. You left you're group to fight a duelist, procced every counter that that spellbreaker put up, didn't wait for them to use Endure Pain first before launching your big attacks (Auto in Reaper's Shroud deals a LOT of damage if you have Death Perception and Onslaught, so it serves as a good bait for EP) and your utilities are not optimal. "Suffer" is pretty much a must in PvP for condi transfer and chill application, Well of Corruption is essential for boon corrupt on boon spamming foes as well as a bit of an area denial, and I would also highly recommend Well of Power as a stunbreak as foes won't really enter in it and it converts condis to boon (highly effective against burn guards since they mostly put out burning which is turned to aegis). I also recommend using CttB when entering a large group fight for the stability (2 per foe hit) so you won't be cc'ed to hell and back.

In PvP, going in and smashing all the buttons won't get you anywhere. You not only need to know the class you're playing but also the class you're playing against. For example, Warriors have a stun available when they block so you need to time you're dodge/stab, weavers will evade 8/10 hits so make sure to leave your most damaging skills for those 2 hits that land, with shatter mirages, you need to bait their burst before doing anything else etc.

If you want a "necro duelist" , play this:

Just swap the glassy amulet for WIZARD. 30% expertise isnt worth 5k health if you can get half that ammount just from traveler rune + it doesnt do that much damaging condies.

But now you have 0 cleave, so avoid teamfights and anything bigger than 2v2.

Bonus tipp:You can use unholy martyr to give yourself lifeforce out of combat.You need to destroy wurm at start to get 10%, HEAL FIRST for 5 vuln -> courpt boon for posion -> dagger immob for self bleed = 30% lifeforce out of gate + swap sigils like doom ready

All I see in the video is buttonmashing against the spec (spellbreaker) that punishes buttonmashing the most of all specs.

Your build seems even pretty okay to do the job. Bait his autostunbreak with warhorn 4... tank his burst with SA/shroud combo... kite him through nightfall... burst him in shroud. Your boon corrupt is a bit on the low end but it's still doable... yeah IF you would not trigger every single full counter and eat every burst skill. And if you wouldn't have used spectral walk at the beginning of the fight for no reason you could even kite his rampage a few seconds later with ease.

Lots of misplay in this video. Don't blame reaper for losing to a spellbreaker. Spellbreakers are not your counters! Before watching the video I expected you to be sniped by some ranged spec 24/7, but this is just ridiculous.

Side Note 1: Please look up in the skill wiki what "Magebane Tether" does! Your kiting attempts while under the effect of that trait were a pain to watch!

Side Note 2: I disagree with everyone in this thread! Reaper can be a duelling spec, especially in sPvP, where there are lots of LOS options and jumping puzzles to avoid damage. Reaper is only weak in open field duells which typically take place in WvW roaming.

That fight was survivable. When you hit that 6k mark chasing that Spellbreaker was a fool's errand. They have damage mitigation for days. You should have pulled back and regrouped with your team while getting some much needed health. You had two other teammates with you at the start of the chase (with two more further back from what I could see) and both of them pulled back. You should have fallen back with them and the three of you stay together to counter-attack the Spellbreaker when she returned. Also, that uncapped point should have been your goal. With the Spellbreaker retreating, you should have fallen back there to cap it before she returned. The goal in sPvP is to cap points, if someone runs off you don't need to give chase. I'll ignore someone if it means I can get to a node uninterrupted. Chasing can lead to drawn out fights that favor them and death gives them 5 points.

@Nimon.7840 said:

@"Flumek.9043" said:Reaper is not a duelist.

Reaper is not a long sustained winner. It works best with a support babysitter in medium sized fights.Reaper is kitable, so only fighting on a small AND enemys node may force them to tank otherwise avoidable damage.Reaper is "counterable", meaning a single,block,evade,invul can counter your telegraphed combo.

You fought a duelist.You fought in a drawn out sustained fight.You fought off node.YOU lost.

Lore class description dont mean kitten, except necro is the only one where anet keeps their archaic mindset of slow n clunky

If it helps, I take issue with Mesmer.

I mean no offense OP but your gameplay was horrible. You wasted resources for no reason in combat and didn't manage your swaps well.
Not contesting points at all is how you lose. Thief was considered the best solo-carry class in PvP for a while despite being the weakest combat class simultaneously - it won through point control and nothing else.

And yeah, you're not going to win extended duels anymore, sorry. They systematically removed its dueling capabilities through VP/SoS/Base RS Decay/CV's LF gain because "WE NEED MOAR PvE DEEPS" got the reaper massive damage buffs at the cost of all of its durability and utility via shroud/flickering. You enter a fight, deal some damage, and just try to stay alive now while utilizing support from your teammates. The spec is a noob trap and will remain as such until they nerf the damage and return everything they took from the spec otherwise.

That said, the main problem in this clip still wasn't the reaper. You need to get better at point rotation and resource management with shroud and dodges.

Even then, if you want something to go and 1v1 people on, play warrior, holosmith, or mesmer.

Wait, so you're all serious about me running when I had 6k? I was NOT going to get away, I had no tools left to run away with. Swiftness was gone(stolen/broken it looks like), reaper's form wasn't available, and that op as shit class had more mobility.

If I just straight up ran, this thread would be aimed towards how I didn't engage since I wouldn't be able to run.

Sure, chasing might have been a mistake, but the mindset was to isolate that enemy from my allies to go away from the point since i'm not a bunker build and can't hold a point well. Doesn't make sense to hold a point when I don't have the build for it.

@Farkon.2170 said:Wait, so you're all serious about me running when I had 6k? I was NOT going to get away, I had no tools left to run away with. Swiftness was gone(stolen/broken it looks like), reaper's form wasn't available, and that op as kitten class had more mobility.

If I just straight up ran, this thread would be aimed towards how I didn't engage since I wouldn't be able to run.

Sure, chasing might have been a mistake, but the mindset was to isolate that enemy from my allies to go away from the point since i'm not a bunker build and can't hold a point well. Doesn't make sense to hold a point when I don't have the build for it.

No no, the issue is more how often you chain mistakes. Had you stayed with your allies you would have benefit from their support and you would have helped them capping the point. They might even have rezzed you when your foes downed you.

This isn't a problem of profession being weak, this is a problem of ability to read the battlefield, focus on objective and trust your teammates. The mirage tried to help you but the further you got, the easier it was for the enemy thief to have it's way. For the sake of chasing this SB you put yourself in a dire situation and let the enemy team get an advantage. The SB wouldn't have been able to cope with you and the mirage while the mirage would have been able to get rid of the thief and the FB which ended you rallyed by the thief with your help.

@"Dadnir.5038" said:No no, the issue is more how often you chain mistakes. Had you stayed with your allies you would have benefit from their support and you would have helped them capping the point. They might even have rezzed you when your foes downed you.

So basically you're admitting that I was going to get downed anyways, awesome. I didn't have anything to offer my team anyways since I was low on hp and would be easy prey to the thief that you mentioned. Having my team to rush to my aid while they take damage on my behalf isn't ideal to me.

This isn't a problem of profession being weak, this is a problem of ability to read the battlefield, focus on objective and trust your teammates. The mirage tried to help you but the further you got, the easier it was for the enemy thief to have it's way. For the sake of chasing this SB you put yourself in a dire situation and let the enemy team get an advantage. The SB wouldn't have been able to cope with you and the mirage while the mirage would have been able to get rid of the thief and the FB which ended you rallyed by the thief with your help.

I was dodging away from the thief to not take a ton more damage from the spinning, yet here you're telling me I should of. There was only one mistake, if even that, is that I chased the SB and didn't head back. Even then, I would have to turn my back on them with my shroud wearing out and they have greater mobility then me to overtake me without my shroud up.

In any case, I'm not the best pvper, but I just went almost 16-0 with a baseline shatter mesmer. It was 14-2 but close enough. Done with pvp reaper until something changes that lets me be on par with everyone else's mobility.

https://i.gyazo.com/a031d8b396b254ba5e3df6870ed88933.png

I hope you are also aware that what profession you play is not necessarily linked to how much you win pvp rounds ye? It's a team effort and if your team sucks then you won't win. I'm ok at pvp, and sometimes I get a win streak and sometimes I get a losing streak. So saying that you had a loss streak because you were on Reaper is somewhat of a fallacious argument. When I was working on The Ascension, I pvped on classes I had no idea how to play and I still got my 10 wins for each one because I was on a good team...and I capped.

@Farkon.2170 said:

@Dadnir.5038 said:No no, the issue is more how often you chain mistakes. Had you stayed with your allies you would have benefit from their support and you would have helped them capping the point. They might even have rezzed you when your foes downed you.

Well yes, you'll have go down and what? You totally miss my point. My point is that if you had stayed with the mirage even if you would have been able to prevent the thief from rallying the firebrand. If you had been downed before killing the FB you'll even have had a possibility to rally on it's death. Your whole team wouldn't have had to rush to you because you'd already have the mirage by your side.

The point if you miss it is that you shouldn't go far away from your teammate when your health is low. The contrast between your gameplay and the FB that's been rallied by the thief highlight this fact even more. You can see the FB kitting the 3 of you while running in circle to gain time for it's teammate to come at his help and in the end it pay.

All professions aren't played the same way. A mesmer can afford to rely on it's mobility to go out of combat and rest. A necromancer on the other hand have a more straigthforward gameplay and can't afford such thing. The necromancer is designed in such a way that unless you go full defense you need a babysitter by your side.

@Farkon.2170 said:Wait, so you're all serious about me running when I had 6k? I was NOT going to get away, I had no tools left to run away with. Swiftness was gone(stolen/broken it looks like), reaper's form wasn't available, and that op as kitten class had more mobility.

If I just straight up ran, this thread would be aimed towards how I didn't engage since I wouldn't be able to run.

Sure, chasing might have been a mistake, but the mindset was to isolate that enemy from my allies to go away from the point since i'm not a bunker build and can't hold a point well. Doesn't make sense to hold a point when I don't have the build for it.

Ah, the denial ... the fact is that you didn't play well and it's not a deficiency of the class that gave your losing results. It has nothing to do with your experience as a PVPer ... it has everything to do with your experience playing THIS class with THIS build in PVP.

@Farkon.2170 said:Wait, so you're all serious about me running when I had 6k? I was NOT going to get away, I had no tools left to run away with. Swiftness was gone(stolen/broken it looks like), reaper's form wasn't available, and that op as kitten class had more mobility.

If I just straight up ran, this thread would be aimed towards how I didn't engage since I wouldn't be able to run.

Sure, chasing might have been a mistake, but the mindset was to isolate that enemy from my allies to go away from the point since i'm not a bunker build and can't hold a point well. Doesn't make sense to hold a point when I don't have the build for it.

Except you being off-point is going to get you and your team killed and losing points, and will keep you from advancing. Your gameplay itself wasn't even tight enough to win most of what you needed to to make off-point combat have significance. If you want to actually win a disadvantageous matchup on reaper, you need to outplay them at every moment, AND because of the changes to its sustain and shroud, depending on the matchup, they may also need to misplay. At the very top end, some matchups are just borderline unwinnable for the reaper now. It's not fun, and it's not fair, but it's the only way there's even some semblance of a means for the class to not be blatantly overpowered. Until they make some big reverts, it's the reality of the situation. It's really only faceroll and a powerhouse of a class if you have a favorable matchup where you don't need any amount of sustain at all, or in a situation where your opponent runs a high-risk build and doesn't play it exceptionally.

The builds capable of sustaining in a fight on their own always are bunkers. Defense is stronger than offense in GW2 in a 1v1, especially in sPvP. Mobility/landspeed enables consistent decaps and applies map pressure. Reaper generally performs poorly at both since nerfs to its shroud defenses (which necro relies on as a concept in order to sustain at all), so it's best as a teamfighter and dealing lots of damage. Which it does.

And it's because of reaper's lack of self-sufficiency that your idea of how you were going to win the game is wrong. You should be on-point because you have the resources for burst-damage negation (shroud; a lot of your life force is lost to time/ticks rather than sheer damage) and tons of AoE pressure and denial potential. Bumming boons, heals, sustain, and so on from other players will help you help them bunker and hold points by killing other players.

It's also not comparable experience with the mesmer. Those are unranked games where the players tend to be objectively worse, because like you, they're also experimenting, don't care to be trying hard to win, just want to fight, etc. While the mesmer is a decent +1 fighter, it comes more or less in the form of mirage and team-focused play with Portal. Alternatively, a supportive Chrono for bunkering is also viable, but again, is contrary to your mentality.

You can continue to deny it all you want, but the fact is, you weren't playing well across the board from a micro or a macro perspective. Yes, the reaper is not a good class for what you were trying to do, but you weren't doing what you were trying to do well to begin with, and what you were trying to do had little strategical macro-play purpose, and it's fairly disingenuous to claim a profession is weak based on its worst-case-scenario. If you want to find success long-term when the opponents get better and are more aware of the game mode's win conditions based on their comps, you're going to need to recognize it.

It's also a tem-based game mode. Sometimes you just get unlucky with teammates who can't perform. When I struggled in Gold/Silver for a while, there were literally times when I was 1v4'ing and sometimes even winning on points as a thief because my teammates would not capture or decap enough for us to not lose. It was common for me to need to 1v3 to maintain map control, because like what you showed in the video above, the rest of my team was not helping secure objectives necessary to win. Sometimes you get these kinds of teams even when you play well. But by trying to win a fight instead of trying to win the game, you're contributing to these kinds of problems more than anything else.

You're going to die in sPvP sometimes, and sometimes you need to make the decision to deliberately do so or risk doing so in order to make a better play when looking at the broad scope of winning the match. Dying for the point, for map control, baiting your enemies around if you are holding a triple-capture, and so on, can be more worthwhile than trying to win a random fight that may or may not snowball an opposing team's lead by allowing them a capture if your allies cannot easily hold their own weight. It's also entirely possible you're just mechanically more in-tune with mesmer. I am miles better at sustaining while on glass reaper and thief than I am with warrior and holosmith just based on some innate mindsets and mechanics preferences of how to play games. I don't let this alone convince me the latter two are weak; I know I'm just bad at them and not practiced or well-versed in their respective nuances.

@Farkon.2170 said:Wait, so you're all serious about me running when I had 6k? I was NOT going to get away, I had no tools left to run away with. Swiftness was gone(stolen/broken it looks like), reaper's form wasn't available, and that op as kitten class had more mobility.

If I just straight up ran, this thread would be aimed towards how I didn't engage since I wouldn't be able to run.

Sure, chasing might have been a mistake, but the mindset was to isolate that enemy from my allies to go away from the point since i'm not a bunker build and can't hold a point well. Doesn't make sense to hold a point when I don't have the build for it.

Yes, you should have run away. You had two people behind you to support a retreat and to help you stay alive. That Spellbreaker wouldn't have killed you if she had to attack you while taking damage from three separate sources at the same time. More to the point, if you had run when your teammates ran you would have been fine, all things being equal. Even if she did down you the fact that you had two teammates to support you would have made death less likely. It is really important to know when to engage and when to disengage. The goal isn't to kill people, it's to cap points. There was an uncapped point behind you and you left it to chase down a Spellbreaker you couldn't beat with that much health.

The only person who got isolated was you. The Spellbreaker was more than capable of handling isolation better as they have a lot of damage mitigation and can take a lot of hits in a 1v1. You needed the support of your team to win. Even if you are not playing a bunker build playing off point is how you lose games. Even if I know I'm going to die I will dodge, heal, damage mitigate and do everything I can to tie up the opposing team while remaining on point. So long as I'm on point they aren't being able to cap it. This may mean I die, they take it, we lose. It also may mean I die, but them spending so much time trying to kill me while on point means my teammates are caping something else and generating the points needed to win.

@Farkon.2170 said:

@"Dadnir.5038" said:No no, the issue is more how often you chain mistakes. Had you stayed with your allies you would have benefit from their support and you would have helped them capping the point. They might even have rezzed you when your foes downed you.

This isn't a problem of profession being weak, this is a problem of ability to read the battlefield, focus on objective and trust your teammates. The mirage tried to help you but the further you got, the easier it was for the enemy thief to have it's way. For the sake of chasing this SB you put yourself in a dire situation and let the enemy team get an advantage. The SB wouldn't have been able to cope with you and the mirage while the mirage would have been able to get rid of the thief and the FB which ended you rallyed by the thief with your help.

You might not have gone down had you stayed with your team. You also made more than one mistake. People have highlighted them. You can choose to ignore them but then what was the point of posting the thread in the first place?

Also, going 16-0 with Mesmer is not an indication of the strength of Reaper. Mesmer is, first and foremost, stronger all around. There is no denying that. However, Mesmer being stronger does not mean Reaper is as weak as you claim it is. It just means you do not know how to play Reaper.

Edit: As my own testimonial, I made use of the build in the video, dusted off my old Reaper and won my first match easily, going so far as to rack up 19 kills and only dying once. I'm honestly not invested in this enough to play another 15 matches but Necromancer isn't even my best PvP character.

Plenty of reapers made it to plat and above. If you lose 4-5 times in a row, it could be mmr hell. If you lose more than FIFTEEN times in a row, it's YOU. I made it to mid plat all the time with reaper. It's not the best but by no means a weak class. Stop listening to those whiny map chat plebs.

@"DavyMcB.1603" said:Plenty of reapers made it to plat and above. If you lose 4-5 times in a row, it could be mmr hell. If you lose more than FIFTEEN times in a row, it's YOU. I made it to mid plat all the time with reaper. It's not the best but by no means a weak class. Stop listening to those whiny map chat plebs.

So what if I win 30 times in a row with a different class?

https://i.gyazo.com/a031d8b396b254ba5e3df6870ed88933.png

https://i.gyazo.com/0e6e70abe495c38683c77df39506cff4.png

I'll try Reaper again with a different mindset, maybe I should change race since I've been using radiation field with great effect as a mesmer..