[1.0.2.1] Bone Strike Soulrend Reaper (Miniguide)

Update 1.0.3.0: Everything got buff. Overall better. Nothing change in setup.

Miniguide?
I waste so much time in this build to customize improving total dmg output and raise defensive. It ends up a bit below my standard at first. So I don’t want to write a full guide. But thanks for Ptirodaktill and Socrathustra who points out that Ravenous Earth isn’t effective as a debuff skill. I finally make the build up to my standard again.

Introduction
Bone Strike = Bone Harvest + Shadow Strike as main dmg. Playstyle is just nuke those skill to your opponents.
There are 2 variations of the build. Offensive cheaper gear and Defensive one.

Setup compare sheet(Fully buff)

Top dmg is really high, but that doesn’t mean it outperform other builds.

Grimtool Link & Gearing
Main soulrend provide us free all armor slot. I’ll show you my choice.

Overall performance is good : high dmg, fast clear speed. very good AoE but somewhat squishy. Careful when fighting explosive/reflective mobs

It can easily clear bosses and mobs fast. It can handle madqueen and nemesis but not 100% safety if they spawn with good MIs and weapons.

Able to farm gladiator crucible with party. I didn’t try solo yet but I doubt it is risky. Challenger may be better choice.

Mythical Silver Sentinel’s is a very good epic set. Even with 2 pieces it gives so many resistance. With 3 pieces you’ll get extra stackable cold RR. There’re also dmg conversion to cold as well.

  • Defensive Setup : http://www.grimtools.com/calc/Q2zbWrd2
    It is more stable and tankier than offensive. Safe enough to kill stuff. The performance is close to offensive setup, but dmg is a little bit lower. IMO this is better choice.

Able to farm gladiator crucible with party. I didn’t try solo yet but I think it has a decent success rate.

I just put all non-set defensive legendaries together. Nothing more.

Skills
I use

  • Shadow Strike and Bone Harvest as my main dmg.

  • Ill Omen for Physical dmg reduction

  • Spectral Binding for OA and HP

  • Master of Death because it is only exclusive aura I could get full benefit

  • Mark of Torment because it can save my ass very well when doing bossfight

  • ABB to trigger Lethal Assault and get more dmg.

  • Veil of Shadow to get stackable RR from Night’s Chill.

  • Pneumatic Burst to get some sort of instant health and resistance.

  • I don’t take Ring of Steel and Circle of Slaughter because I have enough surrounding CC from the boots and Bone Harvest’s terrifying.
  • Ravenous Earth is not effective debuff as it should. So I drop all entire lines.

Devotions [ul]
[li]Murmur, Mistress of Rumors : New constellation which can give us more -% cold resistance debuff(stackable RR)[/li]
[li]Viper : Amplier to our overall debuff on resistance reduction.[/li]
[li]Bard’s Harp : Get some energy restoration and flat OA, DA[/li]
[li]Rhowan’s Crown : flat RR [/li]
[li]Chariot of the Death : some instant HP and a decent amount of DA. It is also passively increase our OA too.[/li]
[/ul]

Videos
Defensive Setup vs Fabius 26 sec

I’m not recording Madqueen Rashalga fight because reaper don’t have any advantage on her. I don’t have very fast kill time on her(consider as <10 sec kill time). Need to kite her when she activate her vengeance aura.

PS. Thank you to Ptirodaktill and Socrathustra for helping me polish the build. :smiley:

Attachment: Reaper_Strike_Sheet.jpg
Attachment: reaper_strike_maxdmg.jpg

1 Like

Very cool, glad to see some reaper builds fleshing out now. Thank you for postimg this!

Sent from my SM-G930V using Tapatalk

But these rings are for dual-wielding. Why do you use them?

It is universal use. No part of the its description say it’s for dw. :confused:

I use them because they gives good skill points(Elemental Awakening and Phantasmal Armor), high OA, cold dmg and dmg conversion.(Shadow Strike and Bone Harvest have high pierce dmg)

You may use Band of Eternal Haunted and another ring instead. :wink:

videos uploaded

So you think Bone Harvest needs a buff?

Awesome idea about Divinesteal Hauberk! I realy like it!
Do you think with so much DPS from skills offencive devotions procs worth it? Id rather drop Leviaphan for Targo stuff. I wonder if HC-vialbe build should look like http://www.grimtools.com/calc/p25WRKBZ this?

Idk. I still don’t understand all factors affect my testing.

As far as I know is I have less 15% stackable RR and don’t have belgothian’s carnage relic. Less attack speed and cast speed. Not sure if there’s a bug or something. :rolleyes:

From my theorycraft of reaper in different variation. Both mastery sync still not good. Need more items to cooperate them together.
Example Deathguard is very odd one and don’t have good belt for supporting acid and all skills in any corresponding class yet.

Necromancer himself has less survivability in battles and don’t have universal good skills/buff/auras like inquisitor has. He has no dmg reduction, resistance buff, reliable health support, but have 2 debuff enemies’ dmg which is unstack and caster gears(very low armor)

That’s look good. I assume the rest augment might be poison&acid and overcapped things about 25% reserve for getting debuff. It is always good to sacrifice some dmg to get huge defense especially for HC.

Though, I never play HC and still died a lot in testing :stuck_out_tongue:

Anyway be careful of getting burst down. Necromancer don’t have good defense mechanic to hold your char longer except Mark of Torment. :slight_smile:
I also don’t see you get reduce dmg debuff too. It may be risky sometimes.

Necromancer does have damage reduction in Rotting Fumes from the Ravenous Earth line.

Yeah, I knew. One of the best debuff for necromancer.

I’m curious why Ill omen have physical dmg debuff (5 secs) while rotting fumes has all dmg debuff(1 secs) and flat RR from foul eruption(and again 50% chance at max lv for what) . That’s very odd things they separate 2 useful mechanic to 2 skills. They’re also can’t stack dmg reduction debuff with each other. :furious:

Dmg reduction dosent stack =( So Il omen is only good for devotions-proc.
BTW do you find Noxius fumes reliable? Do they work against solo boses with no corpses around? MB its better to drop them off for more OA/health from Spectral binding and switch leviaphan for Crown for flat RR ?

I wish ill omen could do something more than devotion procs :cry: If you don’t take decay(from Ravenous Earth) I think ill omen is good for dmg debuff since ultimate mobs and boss deal high physical dmg.

I’ve test drop foul eruption and get Manticore(I want poison&acid resistance and HP). The result isn’t different much.

But I only test with many corpses around boss situation even 1vs1 there’re corpses nearby. May be you’re right and that means Ravenous Earth isn’t totally good. Hmmm, what a hard skill choice of being necro :cry:

Ive tried Foul eruption on my Spellbinder, but decided to stick with Manticore. Foul eruption is better against trash, but i didnt need dmg boost against trash and manticore offer resists, health and OA and let me spend 12 precioc points elsewere, like grab more HP and OA from Spectral binding. :roll:
BTW consider Staff of Ratosh for life leech res reduction. That thing should double your sustain. You can replinish your entire healthpool with every SS/Bone harvest with just 20% ADCTH from gear.

This is kinda like my DW melee infiltrator, except I’m focused on the WPS line. I tweaked your build to be more like it in case you wanted to try something of the sort. You would probably want to use two well-rolled MIs that deal pure cold damage. There are several, in fact you may have some if you farmed those Alkamos items directly.

Some notable tweaks:

  1. Dropped ravenous earth. It was a large point investment in an off-spec damage type.
  2. Moved devotions around to pick up Rowan’s Crown (edit: Rowan’s covers the same RR type as Ravenous). Dropped the crab-shield thing, because the damage types it doesn’t protect against physical.
  3. Weapon Pool Skills. 1 point was already getting you to 20% chance on the NB skills. I maxed execution, obviously. Dreadchill Mark has a nice bonus to Necrotic Edge. Didn’t take Whirling Death.
  4. Didn’t take extra points in Shadow Strike mods past the first. The poison one is focused on single-target, but we’re not increasing poison damage. The second is a lower dot focused on AOE, but chances are you’re dealing enough AOE damage already.
  5. No earthly idea why you weren’t buffing Spectral Binding. Got you over 1.5k HP from that alone plus a bunch of OA.
  6. Gave you some crazy-good Loxmere daggers. Obviously those are a bit insane, but that’s all that came to mind right off the bat for that slot. You would probably want to aim for something less ludicrous unless you like grinding Loxmere.

Thoughts?

EDIT: Here is a more defensive version of your own build with no items switched. I think I’ve min/maxed the right places for defense. I think I’m missing some of the HP from the devotions in the prior setup, but I didn’t want to bother switching them around again. Take whichever.

1&2. I’ve tried both Manticore for flat RR before, but decide to stick with 2 debuff in a single skill like “Ravenous Earth” at last. I’m not caring about off-spec dmg but I care only how effective debuff is.(I think it has large area)

After few discussion with Ptirodaktill. He points out that Ravenous Earth isn’t totally cover things up every times. So I’m starting to think of dropping all it’s entire line then switch from Crab to Rhowan’s Crown and take ill omen instead.

  1. WPS almost useless for slow attack speed 2H weapon and we’re focusing in low cooldown skills. So I consider it’ll be the last choice I’ll take to 25% if I had points left.

  2. NJE is a must for cd reduction and crit dmg. Crit dmg is an effective mechanic to raise your dmg significantly aside from total dmg modified. No one care about poison dmg.(Everyone who builds around shadow strike know that)

  3. I weight others to be more important. I use to have 12/12 or 3/12. It didn’t affect much. I mean I’m caring about more defense mechanic other than only raising HP.
    With nearly no dmg diminishing other than dmg debuff. Still get hit by nemesis and boss hard. I took crab constellation because I need to fight them longer than I expected especially fabius and moosiluake.

  4. I knew Loxmere and his dagger. Is he spawn at SoT? The only place I know is Plain of Strife and sometimes he’s not spawn there. Anyway, the build is focusing in Soulrend. So it’s not gonna be change.

Note that I edit this build in grimtool more than 10 times and tested all. Around some gears, skills and devotions. Highest build edit for me. It took me quite sometimes to proceed. Nothing change much in majority of testing.

Build Update. Finally it meets my standard and back to normal sense.

Thank you to Ptirodaktill and Socrathustra for helping me polish the build by point me out to use flat RR debuff from Elemental Storm(Rhowan’s Crown) instead of Ravenous Earth. Finally, the build’s dmg output works as it should be.

;);):wink:

Looks really good, this is what I had in my mind for my own Reaper. Was just waiting for someone to come up with a more detailed build path and gear selection… :smiley:

Do you stand your grounds and auto, or do you kite out why you wait for your cooldowns? Aside from the decent Phys Resist, HP and Regen that you have, your DA and Armor don’t seem sturdy enough for Ultimate on melee builds.

Or does it just clear mobs fast enough to prevent it from getting overwhelmed?

I won’t kite with melee build. As you see in the fabius fight video. If every skills are on cooldown, I’d hold my RMB to make some auto attack waiting for them. [but still cannot facetank with new nemesis and new super boss]

I don’t need much regen because the build rely on Attack Damage Convert to Health(ADCtH). I can regain HP as long as I deal weapon dmg.

2.4-2.5 DA is pretty high atm. + Wayward souls proc --> Most boss and nemesis can’t crit you. (Including OA reduction on them)

As I explain in the build. There’re low cooldown CC procs like some freezing and terrifying to handle mobs even though I could kill them pretty fast.

Great. I’ll make a test version of it and give it a go, when I have the time. Hopefully my experience is as successful as yours.

Your second paragraph is more or less what I suggested. The elemental storm is great at covering a large area. Crab doesn’t do much, since all its targeted damage types are easy to stack resistance on.

  1. WPS almost useless for slow attack speed 2H weapon and we’re focusing in low cooldown skills. So I consider it’ll be the last choice I’ll take to 25% if I had points left.

That was why I switched you over to those daggers. Loxmere is in the bottom-right of Plains of Strife 40% of the time. He hits like a truck, though, so be careful. He also seems to have a high legendary drop rate. I killed him last night and he dropped two copies of his daggers and 2 legendaries in one run. He seems to have legendaries fairly often.

  1. NJE is a must for cd reduction and crit dmg. Crit dmg is an effective mechanic to raise your dmg significantly aside from total dmg modified. No one care about poison dmg.(Everyone who builds around shadow strike know that)

Loxmere daggers take .4 seconds off the CD and add 16% crit damage between them, and if you have the WPS, you have other damage you can dish out between SS uses. Not sure which would deal more, but you could look up the damage tracking program and try to parse which is better.

Of course there’s nothing keeping you from doing both Loxmere and NJE… in fact, the cooldown could get pretty damn low with both.

  1. I weight others to be more important. I use to have 12/12 or 3/12. It didn’t affect much. I mean I’m caring about more defense mechanic other than only raising HP.
    With nearly no dmg diminishing other than dmg debuff. Still get hit by nemesis and boss hard. I took crab constellation because I need to fight them longer than I expected especially fabius and moosiluake.

Note that I edit this build in grimtool more than 10 times and tested all. Around some gears, skills and devotions. Highest build edit for me. It took me quite sometimes to proceed. Nothing change much in majority of testing.

HP will definitely make a difference, especially if you opt for the dual wield WPS build, which I actually recommend. If you wanted to do a nuker build, I’d actually recommend Inquisitor over necro. Rune of Haggarad is crazy.