TERA - Reaper PvE - Rotations
The following assumes you're familiar with skill and glyph details outlined in the relevant sections, if you want to see the rotation built from the ground up, then look here. If you're just interested in a template to follow, you'll find that at the top of this page.
You can have the best gear, perfect glyphs and crystals, and be using all the right consumables, but unless you actually know how and when to use your skills, you can't consider yourself a good Reaper. Rotations are vital to playing any class well, because pretty much no matter what gear you're using, a good rotation will out-dps a bad rotation by a long way.
When it comes to building a rotation for Reapers, it's really important to consider efficiency - being able to use powerful skills every cooldown, and properly making use of glyphs. If you just spam skills, you will inevitably run out of things to do that are remotely sensible options (being able to cast soul reversal doesn't count).
This section will do two things, firstly I'm just going to plain and straight give you my rotation, and honestly, it's quite simple, you can repeat the same thing more or less guaranteed every 25 or so seconds for the entire fight.
Secondly, I'll go into detail as to why skills are chained as they are, and what's important about how the rotation is structured. If you're interested in building your own rotations, or just the logic behind it all, you'll want to read that. It's far better for you to understand why you're doing what you're doing than just blindly copy something, and in no way am I trying to say my rotation is perfect. I actually know I could be doing more damage, I just find this easier to play with due to the consistency.
My Rotation
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
This is one continuous rotation, mostly directly chaining from one skill to the next. For this to work you'll need a nostrum and depending on your attack speed you may need a cdr roll on your gear somewhere too.
It'll take practice to really get your head around this, such as incorporating dodges, and knowing how to pick up if you get interrupted. Realistically, this isn't going to work exactly as listed all the time, but a class wouldn't be interesting if it was that easy now would it?
Building Combos
To build a rotation, the first thing to do is identify a set of strong skills and glyphs to shape it around. If you've read through the Skills and Glyphs sections, you'll already have an idea of what these are.
The three overall strongest dps skills we have are:
- Grim Strike
- Whipsaw
- Sundering Strike
As for glyphs, we're looking at a set that's something like this.
With this information, we can begin constructing some basic combos that will be the basis of any rotation eventually built. We want to utilise all of these glyphs effectively, and find sensible ways to chain our powerful skills together.
Whipsaw:
Of all our high dps skills, Whipsaw is the easiest one to implement. Pendulum Strike has a powerlink glyph for Whipsaw, and the range of Whipsaw is such that you'll normally be at a perfect distance after casting Pendulum Strike, meaning we have the following combo:
>
Grim Strike + Sundering Strike:
These two require a little more thought, as both require being chained from another skill to have decent casting speed, and grim strike has multiple powerlink glyphs to utilise. The fastest way to cast Sundering Strike is to chain it directly from Double Shear:
>
Doing this, however, fails to utilise the Grim Strike powerlink on Double Shear, which would require a totally different combo now to be useful. So we can make this combo much better by adding Grim Strike in the middle:
>
>
This is almost perfect, but one thing is still missing; Double Shear does 10% more base damage when chained from another skill, so we need something else to start with. If you look through our glyphs, Death Spiral is the perfect candidate, as it also provides a powerlink not only for Double Shear itself, but also Grim Strike, taking the total bonus damage to 40% when we cast it. So our final combo looks like this:
>
>
>
Cable Step:
We've now gone through all our high dps skills, and almost all our glyphs too. The Cable Step glyph has a very particular use, which is to speed up our slow animations, those being Shadow Burst and Shadow Lash. The potential combos are therefore very straightforward, as none of these skills have any other set-up required:
>
>
Shadow Reaping:
Now the only thing not addressed is the glyph on Shadow Reaping. I'll go into this later though, as you will effectively have a seperate rotation during Reaping, and it's more important to look into the rest first.
Step 1 - Powerlinks Galore
Now we have all our basic combos sorted out, it's time to start putting them all together into an actual rotation that takes cooldowns into account, and prioritises the best skill choice at each point. The start is easy though, you want to start with your highest reliably damaging combo, which is our Grim + Sundering powerlink combo, as it utilises two of our highest dps skills in quick succession.
>
>
>
We're not quite done though, as there's an important thing to note about Death Spiral, being its ability to be cast twice within a 6 second window. We don't want to pass up the powerlink glyphs it provides both Double Shear and Grim Strike, so its important to cast Death Spiral again after Sundering Strike, before we lose our chance to get the second cast off.
>
>
>
>
Step 2 - Movers and Shakers
We now have active powerlinks for Double Shear and Grim Strike, but both skills are on cooldown. At this point, we want to find something to fill the gap while we're waiting for Double Shear to be usable again. Our other high dps skill, Whipsaw, fills this role perfectly, dealing high damage in the process.
>
After casting Whipsaw, Double Shear will be off cooldown, and we're ready to utilise our powerlinks again. Most importantly, Whipsaw itself chains into Double Shear, so we get the 10% damage buff by casting it immediately afterwards, meaning we can efficiently utilise all available damage buffs for both Double Shear and Grim Strike twice from one single Death Spiral cooldown.
>
>
>
Step 3 - Marmite
There's one last combo to fit in, which is the Cable Step combo. Being a standalone piece, there's no set-up required for this, so we can just go straight into casting it. Cable Step provides you with two options, Shadow Burst and Shadow Lash, but at this point Shadow Burst is the winner by far, as it is faster damage, and we don't need to refill our MP just yet.
>
Of course sometimes Shadow Burst refuses to crit, and then you're sad you even bothered to use it in the first place. But anyways, by this point we now have all of our combos combined into a working rotation of sorts.
Step 4 - Filling Gaps
Given the recent changes to the Reaper class, you should be able to go straight back to Death Spiral now. However, if the rotation goes perfectly and you have high attack speed and low cdr, you may well find that some of your skills are not ready for you to immediately repeat step 1. If this is the case, you'll want to find ways to fill time until you can. Using the Grim Strike reset glyph is one way to do this, as if you get even one extra cast of it, you'll be fine for cooldowns. Another way is to simply fill with Smite, which does relatively decent damage, and can be used for movement too.
If you are finding yourself needing to fill gaps here, I advise either reducing the overall attack speed on your gear, or investing in cdr on your weapon.
Step 5 - Repetition
After casting Shadow Burst, we basically start the rotation over, going back to Death Spiral, as everything should be ready to use again. Sometimes a few timings will be different, but just aim to keep it as close as possible to the original. If you find you can't cast Sundering Strike in the first instance, then just cast it as soon as you can after a Grim Strike or Double Shear.
So the full section looks like this:
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
Step 6 - I can taste the mana!
Rather than ending our rotation with another Shadow Burst, given the lack of MP (and the fact that Shadow Burst is on cooldown anyway unless something strange happened) we want to chain Cable Step into Shadow Lash instead:
>
As a final note, if Sundering Strike is off cd while you're casting Shadow Lash, then in order to efficiently make use of its cooldown, you should aim to chain Shadow Lash into Double Shear and then into Sundering Strike, as this only sacrifices one powerlink, and makes much better use of Sundering Strike's cooldown.
>
>
>
Step 7 - There is no Step 7
That’s pretty much it all covered. Putting together steps 1 through 6 leaves you with one fluid, repeatable and consistent rotation that with practice should hold for as long as you need it to. Obviously bosses do attack and it will get interrupted a fair few times, but if you aim to just continue where you left off, they shouldn’t stop you being able to keep this going indefinitely.
To summarise, your rotation is made up of 4 combos, 2 of which are repeated, cast over a roughly 30 second window:
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
If you put all of that together in one block, it's exactly the rotation listed at the top of the page. So there you have it! A complete and functional Reaper rotation that efficiently makes use of our high damage skills and our strongest glyphs.
Extra 1 - Behold, my final form!
With the main rotation out the way, it's time to talk about Shadow Reaping. This skill is insanely powerful, with nostrums and cdr rolls it basically allows you to spam any skills you like for 15 seconds (20 seconds when glyphed). Needless to say, while Reaping is active, we're most interested in casting our high dps skills: Whipsaw, Grim Strike and Sundering Strike.
Option A: We can shove all of these into one combo, starting with Pendulum Strike for the Whipsaw powerlink:
>
>
>
You may wonder why we're sacrificing both Grim Strike powerlinks in this combo. The fact is that when cooldowns are not a concern, using Death Spiral or Double Shear wastes a lot of potential dps from both Whipsaw and Sundering Strike, which as mentioned above, can be spammed more or less as often as you want. Given the crazy cdr, you can repeat the above combo indefinitely while Reaping is active - assuming you have the MP for it.
>
>
>
>
Repeat indefinitely
In order to make use of Reaping really well, you're going to need some mana potions (or a very good healer). I'd advise always carrying around some Divine Infusions, or if that's too expensive, whatever you can afford, it's well worth it for the dps boost. Especially since, in a scenario where you pop a quickcarve brooch, have energy stars or titanic wrath active and have Reaping glyphed for duration, you can repeat the above combo 6+ times within one Reaping.
Option B: This is a better option if you're Slying, as you don't want the HP restoration from Whipsaw, however it's slightly dependent upon your current gear stats. You need high enough cdr and not too high attack speed.
We are going to ignore Whipsaw, and focus on Sundering Strike, using it as many times as possible. We're going to utilise Death Spiral for chaining purposes as well as animation cancelling to allow for better fluidity, and we'll repeat our standard combo-starter, like so:
>
>
>
As above, this just gets repeated indefinitely for as long as you can manage. It should be noted that if (due to your atk spd/cdr ratio) you can skip the Double Shear and still cast Sundering with no delay, that will be a better option. This combo uses Sundering much more than the other one listed, and thus has much higher overall damage output, but depending on how mobile the target is you may need to mix and match for the highest efficiency. Also this: Option C I swear not a joke honest.
Extra 2 - Bloodlust
There is a mechanic in Tera - which I have taken to calling Bloodlust - by which certain skills do less damage to mobs with close to max HP, and more damage to mobs as they lose HP. For Reapers, one of our skills is affected by a mechanic like this, and that is Sundering Strike.
The actual damage of Sundering Strike varies by about 78% from the beginning of a fight to the end, which is a huge swing. Every 5% HP the target loses, it gains a damage buff of around 4% from its original damage (6% as it drops below 50% for some reason). This means if you're hitting for ~34920 white damage on a mob at 100% HP, you will hit the same mob for ~62157 white damage at under 5% HP.
Now, for the most part, while interesting, this mechanic is something to ignore, because the damage will always average out in the end. However, there are a few things to take into consideration. Firstly, this means Sundering Strike is comparatively weaker at the beginning of fights, so skills such as Whipsaw should be prioritised if you ever have to choose. Likewise, at the end of fights, this is reversed, and Sundering Strike should be prioritised.
This also has quite a large effect on Shadow Reaping, as when considering how often we cast Sundering during one Reaping, you can see how even a 4% increase in the damage Sundering is doing would make quite a big difference overall. This makes Reaping stronger the later in the fight you are, something worth noting if you're really aiming for speed.