During the press tour for the new addon of Final Fantasy XIV, Endwalker, MeinMMO author Irina was able to test the new job Reaper. Here are her impressions of it.
This is the Reaper: The second new job that will be playable from the release of Endwalker on November 23 is the dark Reaper. It is a physical melee fighter who uses a scythe as a weapon and shares its armor with the Dragoon.
The Reaper is characterized by drawing its power from the Thirteenth Shard world, which has been overtaken by darkness. It can even summon a spectral non-sentient “pet” called an Avatar.
The spirit has its own skills that can deal damage in combat, and the Reaper can even merge with it to deal significant damage for a short time.
You can watch the gameplay of the Reaper in a trailer:
About the Author
MeinMMO author Irina Moritz has been playing Final Fantasy XIV since its inception, spending over 800 days of playtime there. She is an active raider who has mastered the high-end game content of the MMORPG for years. She also enjoys theorycrafting and likes to delve into the various systems of the game. Currently, she is expanding her airship and submarine empire in her one-man guild to take control of the markets in Eorzea.
Lots of Style and More Complex than Expected
This article and the described player experience are based on a version of FFXIV: Endwalker that is still in development. The final version may contain changes.
This is how the Reaper feels: Contrary to the claim by director Yoshida that the Reaper should be easy to understand for new players, I found the melee fighter quite complex. Definitely more complex than the Shadowbringers jobs Gunbreaker and Dancer.
This is mainly due to the many changes of skills that occur during the various phases of the rotation. The skill Blood Stalk has 4 different forms and changes to
- Unveiled Gallows,
- Unveiled Gibbet,
- Lemure’s Slice, depending on the active buffs.
As a job beginner, it is easy to lose track of which skill changes to what under which circumstances and when one can use them. Therefore, I think that especially MMORPG newcomers might have difficulties keeping up with the rotation as a Reaper.
So, if you want to dive into the Reaper immediately after the launch of Endwalker, take enough time to test the rotation on the training dummy and read the skill descriptions carefully.
Once you have the hang of it, a nice skill flow develops, where it is not bothersome that the Reaper only has a 3-step combo. It is balanced out by the Avatar and Soul Reaver skills and feels anything but monotonous.
But it is mainly the transition into the Shroud form that makes the Reaper truly shine. The GCD is reduced to 1.5 seconds, and it feels like you are dealing a significant amount of damage in a very short time.
And I must be honest: the job is really stylish. The animations are very cool, and I kept performing them while testing just to see all the details. They differ enough from the Dark Knight, which also has darkness as a job theme. The Reaper’s animations are faster and more agile compared to the bulky attacks of the DRK.
This is how the Reaper works
These are the skills: Like every other job in FFXIV, the Reaper also has its own resources. Primarily, it is Soul and Shroud, which are collected by executing certain skills.
As a melee fighter, the Reaper uses a three-step combo as the basis for his rotation, with each hit granting you 10x Soul resource. To balance the only short combo, the Reaper has plenty of skills with Global Cooldown (GCD) and without Global Cooldown (oGCD) that can only be used under certain conditions.
In the basic rotation, you execute the base combo until you have collected 50 Soul. After that, it goes as follows:
With 50 Soul, the Reaper can now weave the oGCDs Blood Stalk (single target) and Grim Swathe (AoE) to trigger the Soul Reaver effect.
Soul Reaver allows the use of GCD skills Gallows, Gibbet, and Guillotine, which are stronger than the basic combo. Each grants 10 Shroud points.
Once 50 Shroud points have been collected, the Shroud form can be activated. The Reaper merges with the Avatar and gains access to powerful skills with very short GCD. This is essentially the “burst phase” of the job, where it deals a lot of damage.
The strong skills in the Shroud form require their own new resources: Lemure Shroud and Void Shroud. The Reaper returns to normal form once the resources are used up, the timer runs out, or you have used the big finisher skill Communio.
The tricky part here is that a good portion of the Reaper’s skills transform into other skills when certain conditions are met (for example, Shroud form). So, get ready for your skills to change constantly during battle.
Additionally, the Reaper has several buffs. It can increase its damage against enemies by 10% or instantly grant itself 50 Soul. Both abilities will undoubtedly play important roles in the opener and burst phases.
Among group buffs, the Reaper has both a defensive and an offensive skill that grants the group a shield or increases damage by 3%.
But remember that the numbers and descriptions of the skills may change before the release of Endwalker.
What is your impression of the Reaper so far? Will you level the job right at the release of Endwalker or later? Let us know in the comments.
All about the new job Sage can be found here:
