SUP3RSH4DOW: Reaper just feels like “getting good” at it is overcoming weaknesses instead of playing to strengths. When presented with nonstandard encounter design on reaper, i’m mostly just trying to mitigate the bleeding. Even in its hyper-niche of being The Closer in ultimate final phases, it’s DT iteration really falls short of the highs we saw in endwalker. The classic SE solution would be just removing all of the possible weaknesses, but I think if they could find a way to implenent skillfull ways to play to the strengths, it could become more fun and rewarding to play.

Sidenote: How does the literal grim reaper job not have any form of execute damage increase? When the boss hp drops below 30% I want a job mechanic that makes me see red.

All4Tanuki: The timing on Perfectio Pwhatever is despicable and the lack of features <70 are the only issues I've had with it tbh. I'm interested to see if anything else in this vid rings with me

cruye9633: make arcane circle last exactly 1 second longer so I don't need a latency plug to get perfectio under my own goddamn buff

thesadyuumi: Reaper has been really fun this tier honestly the “weird” things that some people complain about have been the highlights of the job for me in enjoyment of the fights including m10s

Ketchupkamisama: I feel like the simplicity of the job actually translates into rigidness that really exposes some of the main issues. One of the biggest is that gibbet/gallows (obv including upgraded versions) HAVE to be used immediately or else they’re lost. This results in overcapping on charges potentially especially during downtime (forced or otherwise), because if you need to use any of your ranged resources or reapply death design, it’s gone. Additionally this means gluttony doesn’t get used during burst and continues to drift throughout a fight. Like everyone else is saying, having such a tight burst window for “optimal” double enshroud is… just frustrating. Knowing that if I don’t have perfect uptime I’m either 1. Unable to complete the first full enshroud window or 2. Won’t fit in perfectio at the end just feels so bad, especially when the party buff is so small (3% I believe?). I think if they made gibbet/gallows saveable, or at least doesn’t get lost on using certain skills (namely any ranged ability or shroud related skills) this would give reaper much needed flexibility, and a little extra gauge to help over the course of longer fights. Hell, maybe even have certain moves like the ranged attack or sacrificium slightly extend deaths design timer would help. You know what, just for the hell of it, have enhanced Harper give charges, and at idk 3 charges you get harvest moon again. I think the thing that just keeps hurting me as someone that loves playing RPR for the visuals, VPR just feels like RPR but better with less headache

brontome: That reaper patch happened to be the first patch i was around for. Reaper is one of those jobs that feels its held back by its simplicity, kinda like how summoner cant do that much damage because itll invalidate the merits of harder jobs. But the issue with this is its right next to viper which is even easier, and has more damage. Wish reaper could feel better about this but its just unfortunate placing

cruye9633: a 2nd charge of hell's ingress/egress would be

fun

don't have to let you stack up the harpe charges either, i'm just a fan of more movement

legenddragontv: As someone who mains reaper in the current raid-tier I definitely can agree with the points you make, it’s not the strongest, it’s kind of weird when it comes to deaths design with 2 targets. overall I really enjoy playing reaper and trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t is what makes the job fun for me.

the gage negativity is a problem I mostly see in M11S or normal mode fights that drag on (10 min), outside of down-time.

one solution I can see to "fixe" this could be that shadow of death gives 5 soule-gauage, either when you apply it or on some sort of a timer e.g. 30sec, sort of as a passive gain. I don’t think it will get completely rid of this problem, but at least on fights where you can have full up-time it will help a lot, whene the fight is longer.

GamerBlazened: Hi, one of the 7 and quarter people who play reaper here.

Reaper is really fun, it really does the "build up and release" well. I actually really enjoy doing bros and tyrant because they ask me to do stuff a little different.

Like whorl can be a gain on two if you cleave enough and tyrant's split arena feels so much better than when I tried it on dragoon.

If I had to say how to buff it, perhaps a second gluttony stack or have design auto apply the first time you hit something. Or if we go the lazy route, raise arcane circle from 3%

iPlayOnSpica: Communio being 25y is probably the most useless ranged benefit in the game. That is because your previous gcd will always be a 1.5s 3y melee weaponskill, and there is no situation where you'd benefit from the immediate next gcd being 25y unless it's a boss that very conveniently teleports in that moment.

SomeRandomPersonIGuess: in my opinion there is a pretty fun solution for adjusting the two drawbacks of Reaper (tho I'm also aware that they won't happen and it's just me coping as a Reaper main):

in regards to the Shroud gauge generation: I really don't understand how Death's design has no bonus for single target. It is a really good tool for group fights as the "when a enemy gets defeated gain 10 soul gauge" is really powerful but this obviously doesn't really factor in for 9/10 bosses in the game. So my solution would be to give Infernal Slice the trait "while enemy is afflicted with Death's Design this attack generates 5 more soul gauge". Only a small change but over a long fight it should give enough of a boost to be more consistently getting the odd minute enshroud.

And then we have Death's Design and the issue of needing to re-apply it on new targets... and I'm really wondering how to effectively solve it. My immediate idea is one that would be neat but is very unrealistic. And that is to give Gibbet and Gallows (as well as their enhanced versions) a trait that adds some stackable buff to Reapers and when it is at maybe 5 or so it turns Shadow of Death into a oGCD. Depending on when during cooldown you have to switch target you might still need to attack once without Death's Design applied but during the next cooldown you could weave it in. But I also realise the issue with something like that and that is the buff it would be in single target boss fights. Not having to waste a GCD for Shadow of Death every 30 seconds would give a pretty strong potency increase (especially in combination with my proposed idea for the gauge improvement). Solution for that would be to have that oGCD version only be able to be used on targets that don't have Death's Design applied yet, but that would result in a completely new skill hotkey rather than a temporarily change to Shadow of Death.

Another small thing I'd change for reaper is the option for Harpe to (re-)apply Death's Design on a target. Would really help when you have to leave melee range at a unfortunate spot in the rotation

rud45r2hell: Reaper should get more health sustain based attacks. It would feel great to gain more survivability as Reaper.

Dontreadthis0: As someone who has played reaper for cruiserweight and heavyweight the issue is not its gauge negativity or deaths design(on single target).

If i were to say what ive heard other hardcore reaper players (as well as what i think) what are the real issues its these:

1. Its neither selfish nor a buff job so it ends up doing both at a sub par level. Nor does it feed into buffs particularly well either for that matter

2. Gluttony is a bad cooldown thats only use is gauge generation.

3. Despite being extremely gauge focused, even in full uptime scenarios you are still a midling job

The main point is not that the weaknesses need to be fixed. If you do that you’ll just end up making it into viper most likely. The issue is there is no strength to make up for those weaknesses.

I do want to mention that because of how gauge dependent the job is it can actually become incredibly complex and can end up being quite a large dps gain, especially with knowing the specific killtimes. which i think is cool even if i dont interact with it much(dont really enjoy parse groups).

xavier5987: maybe im just too used to DRG's gameplay, but I legit forget that Death's Design is a thing you have to do and press

Mullen_Malla: Long story short: VPR came out so the FF14 dev team focused all the rotation optimization on VPR instead of the old stinky Endwalker job. Watch VPR getting 2 new Finishers in the next expansion so you don't ever get a double re-awakening; Its gonna be the same shit just a different toilet.

Teo_stra: I want to play Sower instead

pyrotius: Reaper is my go to level cap fate grinding job, right above Warrior. The gauge storing and the extra gauge on adds and the frequent shield make it excellent to bounce between fates where I don't have to sync down. Samurai/MCH are close thirds cause of the good burst potential but Reaper is just so cozy and more chill. I wouldn't bring it into a savage fight because I prefer other melee jobs but Reaper has a place in my heart next to War, Blu, Smn, and Mch as "funny unsynced solo and alt content" jobs.

My biggest gripe with reaper is that the not a dot "dot" doesn't mesh into the rotation its just a completely separate GCD I need to keep tabs on. It's so annoying. Vpr's not a dot "dot" back in 7.0 was at least weaved into the GCD combo so it meshed well as opposed to being a tacked on thing.

Strider_Shinryu: Note that I'm not a RPR player at all but in the time I have spent with it I actually like Death's Design. It provides a unique wrinkle to the job that makes it stand out and gives something extra to think about. If anything I'd like to see them add more to Death's Design so that there was more benefit to maintaining it on a target or it exploded after a certain amount of time or something.

GAF516: Step 1, What went wrong with job A video.

Step 2, Devs make job A more like job B and C.

Step 3, Why is there too much job homogenisation in FFXIV video...

Luna3rd990: 9:35 I feel so called out XD

I play Reaper because I like it. :>

Staineless84: My own shoutout, now I feel special!

Lol, in the end I didn't even swap, I went DRG for one lockout to see how I would do but I was already so practiced in optimizing RPR that it wasn't really an increase. Plus RPR has one advantage over DRG, which is that more of the responsibility is on yourself. It's not wholly on you like VPR or SAM, because you do have a buff but RPR is a high adps job.

And yeah, despite all the flaws, I love it. I enjoy putting my buff on the enemies, I enjoy the strange rotation and stockpiling that can be done. After this recent patch I'm very happy with the job which really goes to show that despite being gauge negative and having issues with mobility at range because harpe is a cast or struggling to be relevant in downtime heavy fights, it is very fun to play. The sound design on enshroud melee attacks alone has me hooked. RPR also has the benefit of the most flexibility in your positionals which makes true north oddly efficient. Because you can hold your soul gauge for another 5 gcd's before using it, you get to choose when to place the positional you have to do after blood stalk so as long as you don't lose out on a soul slice, it's very flexible with them. I will use true north for every single gluttony, which is the only inflexible part, and often get 3 positionals into a single true north because while it's up, why not throw another into it?

I will say that one thing you could have touched up on is how, because we can stockpile pretty much the most damage for a burst we also get extremely punished from a death, which is my least favourite part of the job when it's somebody elses fault I died. :P M11S is a good example, my OT shot me the other day on the charybdistopia. I lost 50 soul and 90 shroud, plus my harvest moon, right before the 2 minutes. I almost always have 100 shroud going into that 2 mins and this isn't the only fight in the tier where it's optimal to do that, it's done twice in M10S, and every time a death will punish RPR way more than any other job. When I did try out DRG, dying never felt like a big deal.

Taldemarr: I picked up reaper for the current savage, since I ended up on melee and I had already played one tier on dragoon and wanted to know how to play both maiming jobs. I had a pretty bad outlook before getting started, but I really started to enjoy reaper during prog.

Even though reaper has a tough time in M10S due to target changing and Death's Design, I found it super fascinating trying to optimize for the cleave moments. We ended up using a strat where we delay the 4 minute burst to better land during the cleave moments and I had a blast figuring out where to spend soul gauge on.

I find that M11S is a really enjoyable fight for melee dps once you get the weapon greeding down combined with the fixed stampede strat. Fast and engaging with little downtime. Due to the fight length I ended up using a pot at pull, at around the 5 min mark for double enshroud gluttony and for the final 2s in the end, which was neat. Overall I think it's a fun job but damn if you die with any shroud gauge it's joever

Edit: I will mention that AoE before communio feels really bad to me. I think 45-69 range is fine, 70-89 feels like there it's missing A LOT. I'd like to have enshroud at 70 and communio at 80 at the latest

EternalChronicler: Here's a thought on the subject of negative gauge: Death's Design now adds 1 to your Soul Gauge each time a member of your party deals damage to the afflicted enemy with a weaponskill or spell, in addition to the damage bonus. Some potencies may have to be reduced to compensate. Namely, Soul Slice and Guilllotine.

xsteelersx6: Why are RPR shroud weaves not extended range like GNB and VPR? Genuinely, why was that QOL not shared? Small thing, but bugs me a lot personally. Especially when it's much easier to rationalize extended reach thanks to your avatar forms limbs compared to the other two...

For generalized fixes here are some ideas;

-Two charges of Gluttony would help avoid issues like RPR losing uses because it's supposed to delay Gluttony use for burst starting at 2mins. Would also assist with gauge gain a small bit in full uptime.

-Give Shroud GCD's the ability to apply DD for 5s per hit, this helps both with applying DD while cleaving, and assists with gauge negativity since you don't need to Shadow of Death for 0 gauge as often.

-Alternatively, just give Shadow of Death / Whorl a 10 gauge gain not just when something dies but upon use as well. This does not overly buff gauge gain in the best of situations while taking away one of the biggest flaws.

hauntedmasc: It's so bizarre to hear my main job described in ways that I've never thought of. I simply don't agree on this perspective. I've maxed every melee, I finished MSQ as a VPR, and I've given fair time to all of them beyond just leveling. RPR has won for me every time. It simply feels great to play, and has a lot of that "job identity" folks seem so desperate for. As a maths guy, I love the analysis, but I don't think the analysis reflects how it feels to play the job.

noblephoenix8906: As someone who was rocking RPR back in late EW, I thought it was a very good job all things considered but once DT came out with VPR and RPR having a tougher time in general with now trying to shove Perfecto into their burst, it just, I dunno, didn't feel right anymore. While fixing gauge negativity is a good way to go about it now, I'd also feel like either reworking deaths design to be more of a buff or maybe a trait that applies the debuff in some form to nearby enemies or give it the Bloodfest treatment, where it allows you to overstock resources for 30 seconds. Also possibly insta-cast Communio would fix the squeezing in of Perfecto during burst but thats just me.

NeedleFlu2048: Small correction. you can get 3 soulsow/harvest moon on Xtremes (first sickest take off and then big explosion)

Mar 29 2026

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