Reave

In a fit of rage-quit yesterday I let go off my desyncloner and went back to my claw ranger, for a change of pace. She had until now been double striking + melee splash.

So I gave Reave a good go. I like this skill a lot! It's fun to use and it's effective (I like that you didn't reduce the damage effectivness of this AoE attack). You have to be close to get it started, and after a few strikes you get the range and feel powerful. It's really cool, well designed skill so thank you.

My setup:


Will slot Blind and Added fire when further links are available.

sadly.. over reliance on attack speed via multistrike butchers your physical damage and the desync makes it so that whatever you do now you can do faster and most importantly - more reliable - with dual/double strike + melee splash.

reave is a paramount example of how bad desync is in this game and how mediocre melee is due to desync. that made me drop any hope that GGG cares about melee at all. theyve released this stopgap for us to shut up and let them polish CI low-life builds

use reave several times and then /oos - just look how mobs suddenly are ALMOST where you though they were

melee splash does not care for that - reave does. entire point of the skill is to have several mobs in the AOE cone. sadly.. mobs are in other places than what you see for the most of the time. good luck achieving the same clear speeds as with dual/double + melee splash or with ordinary cleave. ability to add one more support is moot when you dont hit shit :)


i wonder if there is even one melee alpha tester. it had to be hard to NOT notice that picking up loot cancels the charges

Reave is a fine skill, real fresh. What I like about it is I don't need to reduce my damage effectiveness by adding Melee Splash to it. So it's nice for groups and singletarget as well.

On the other hand I can't imagine being too useful without Multistrike. Multistrike not only adds a lot of attack speed and faster AoE growth but helps acquiring new targets after one's finished. Without Multistrike targeting is pretty glitchy and it seems to desync and miss a lot.

I've been trying reave on a (now) level 37 ranger who's been doing shield/claw. It's been pretty nice, since my AoE option no longer requires I maintain any sort of a good STR score to keep melee splash up to bearable levels, nor do I have to use two sockets to make the skill even happen. For another thing, reave tends to be really good at generating life with the life on hit implicit to claws (and any other such mods I may have collected.) So I can practically tank a crowd because I'm healing back enough health.

Personally I'm having no real trouble maintaining the 8 stacks as long as I'm actually attacking - I can reposition a bit, set up the wave / cone to hit the most targets possible between each strike, I just can't switch between fights or stall. Seriously I'm surprised people are seeing this skill as the face of desync- Any dash skill is miles worse.

Edit: Only complaint - Once I'm at 8 stacks, my ranger insists on running into melee range to punch solitary targets. Obviously holding shift lets me choose my range a lot easier, but I'm wondering if this couldn't get the Ethereal Knives treatment and have the movement adjust to match the range of Reave.

Reave looks amazing! It's one of the few melee skills with a large AoE to not have any damage penalties. The skill encourages a fast paced play style. The way I see it, you kill one pack and then move on to the next one. With that said, the only thing that bothers me is how fast its stacks dissipate. Perhaps chain killing mobs would be easier if you lost X stacks per second after not using Reave for 1 second. Stack duration aside, this is an amazing skill. Thank you GGG :).

using the same gear, reave + added fire + multi + melee dmg + faster attack + crit damage does a lot less damage than dual strike + splash + multi + melee dmg + faster attack + crit damage. i'm gonna post some screenshots later because i'm pretty sure you're not gonna believe me.

i'm talking about lvl 16 gems too. i just don't understand why reave's damage is so low.

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aj83 wrote:

To be honest, as a crit single dagger, life based shadow who currently uses double strike and splash along with whirling blades to get around and enduring cry and crit weakness, Reave is s disappointment.

It basically locks you into using multistrike, which I do not particularly like using for end game content, just to build the AoE buff up quickly only to have it disappear in 1 second or as soon as you use WB, end. cry or crit weakness :/ The fact that it only hits in a cone shape in front of you, also doesn't help much when you're surrounded.

My shadow is very simple, get around quickly, crit often and crit hard and get out while keeping endurance charges up. Using Reave makes him slow and nowhere near as effective.

OK, so after initially disliking the skill, I have come to learn and accept the play style you must adopt to play it effectively and can make an actual feedback post rather than just complain.

2 things:
*Longer buff drop off timer and have them cascade down, instead of going from 8 stacks to 0, go from 8 to 7 to 6 and so on. Otherwise, the skill is only effective after you've cast it a couple of times.

*I think using attack skills should reset the buff, but please allow curses, enduring cry and totems to be cast. Keeping the stacks up means I can really only enduring cry and crit weakness the first mob and plough down the rest while my charges disappear and no more cursing. Even if totems aren't allowed, shouting and cursing are needed IMO.

Otherwise, it's a decent skill, thanks GGG.

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inamory wrote:

using the same gear, reave + added fire + multi + melee dmg + faster attack + crit damage does a lot less damage than dual strike + splash + multi + melee dmg + faster attack + crit damage. i'm gonna post some screenshots later because i'm pretty sure you're not gonna believe me.

i'm talking about lvl 16 gems too. i just don't understand why reave's damage is so low.

fun stuff - paper dps is misleading in case of reave so reality is even worse

and it is all due to desync and how the skill works - you have to position yourself mid-fight. this time is the time your dps is 0 (ZERO). if you dont position, mobs that surrounded you will kill you. melee splash hits around you so you can stand still.

anyone thinking that this skill is very cool etc needs to simply do quick runs of sarns (i think this is the only 'fixed layout' map) several times and see that even with higher reave paper dps any skill with melee splash works better - just because of desync/wasted positioning time. add there no option for curses/mobility skills and you have a very lackluster skill that few will use just to be cool (or because previous skills are boring as hell)

If the cone was replaced with a 180 degree wave effect that ends with a dome, I would probably be satisfied with the skill. I am not asking for the reave AOE to be extended, just widened.