I’ve seen a few posts about Reap Spirit before, with varying complaints of its duality (the spirit is crap if you’re a caster, the spell is crap if you’re a summoner). Eitherway, the spell always feels like 50% is useless.
I’ve recently built it into one of my characters focusing fully on the damage component (aethermage with some fire damage on the side) and understand why the damage is so underwhelming. It’s single target, has a cooldown and the summon doesn’t do anything for the build.
I spent some time browsing the affixes and legendaries and the set using Reap Spirit and couldn’t find anything that really dealt with this duality. The Divinity set is the only one that uses it as far as I could see, and you need the full set for a ‘decent’ modifier.
For Forgotten Gods, I therefore suggest the following affixes / unique item stats or mastery change to Reap Spirit:
Reap Spirit now deals 90% less damage, but the Wraith it summons lives twice as long and deals twice as much damage.
Reap Spirit now deals 100% more damage, but no longer summons a Wraith.
Reap Spirit no longer has a cooldown. I’ve noticed some interesting interaction for the fact that it deals weapon damage, allowing it to also steal life and become a nice basic attack on bosses. I know some items give significant reduced cooldown already, but the biggest one (-2sec) just doesn’t cut it in my build.
Reap Spirit’s Sundered Wraith explodes upon death, dealing (player scaled) damage, but only lasts for half it’s original duration.
Numbers for opt. 1 and 2 are arbitrary, but close to what I’d image make this spell more useful.
I’ll keep adding ideas when I think of them or if people suggest cool ones in the replies.
A little clarification would be nice. The animation where you fire a spectral wave towards your enemy after which the Reap Spirit is spawned. Does that Spectral Wave deal damage that scales with player bonuses?
If so then I am up for option 2. That animation is the coolest in the game second only to Mark of Torment
The animation deals main hand damage, aether damage (scales with player damage) and vitality decay (scales with player damage).
The wraith itself deals cold and vitality damage (scales with pet dmg).
The Wraith is not bad for summoner’s build, and I think I understand the design thought that went into this skill initially.
It is likely that the dev’s wanted to make a summoning skill that was on par with Shaman’s Primal Spirit, a timed-life super strong pet. To make it ‘unique’ and not just another Primal Spirit copy, they added in the damage component, but to prevent it from being OP they made it single target and relatively weak.
This is all fine for the summoning skill, but the treasure they dug up - a skill with a hybrid or pure caster potential - was left untouched by them. As a result we have an odd summoning skill that requires you to hit a mob, while it deceptively seems attractive for Aether spellcasters.
Currently with my aethermage, +1400% aether damage, at level 6/16, it is dealing a measly 5k damage and a 400dmg dot (which im guessing is the vita decay). For comparison; my devastation meteors are hitting for 19k each (ok fine it’s at level 22 but you get the point, it’s AoE and throws a ton of meteors). That’s just not OK.
Slight changes are coming to this skill in 1.0.6.0 and Zantai has given permission for streaming once a new build is released for testing, no guarantee on when, but…soon.
