FFXIV Reaper Build Guide 7.55: BiS, Rotation, Stats

Here is the only sentence you actually need: melee Critical Hit is your best stat, your GCD should sit at 2.49 seconds, and your entire rotation exists to feed Enshroud windows into party buffs. Everything below is just you being told the same thing with more words, because apparently that is required for a proper guide.

Any solid ffxiv reaper build starts with substats, not glamour. Reaper barely cares about Skill Speed since its strongest tools live behind fixed cooldowns and Enshroud, which ignores the stat entirely. So skip it unless the game forces your hand.

Stat Priority

Correct reaper stat priority matters more than the color of your scythe, and no one will compliment your glamour if your parse looks like a corpse.

Materia Melds

Proper reaper materia melds are not glamorous work. Slot Critical Hit until your eyes bleed, then patch the rest.

Reaper runs on two gauges and neither one forgives you. The Soul Gauge fills from certain weaponskills and from Shadow of Death ticking on an afflicted enemy, and it spends on Blood Stalk, Grim Swathe, and Gluttony. The Shroud Gauge fills from Gibbet, Gallows, or Guillotine, and once you hit 50 you can spend it to enter Enshroud, the job's entire personality.

Do not let Immortal Sacrifice, Ideal Host, Perfectio Occulta, or Perfectio Parata fall off. The game gave you a gift and you are choosing to drop it on the floor. Do not do that.

Managing your reaper job gauge correctly is the difference between a competent Reaper and a melee train wreck standing in the wrong spot.

Key Trait

Melee Mastery III bumps Soul Slice's potency from 460 to 520 and pushes Perfectio to 1300 potency, making it the strongest single weaponskill in your kit once unlocked at level 100. Learning your reaper trait upgrades is not optional reading, it is the reason your Perfectio does anything worth bragging about.

Opener

1. Cast Soul Sow before pull and use Harpe at range as the countdown hits two seconds.
2. Use Shadow of Death, drink your potion late in the GCD, then Soul Slice.
3. Pop Arcane Circle with a slight delay so it does not clip your next GCD.
4. Fire Gluttony, then Executioner's Gibbet and Executioner's Gallows.
5. Use Plentiful Harvest and enter Enshroud.
6. Run Void Reaping, Sacrificium, Cross Reaping, Lemure's Slice, repeat, then Communio into Perfectio.

Botching the reaper opener costs you the entire two minute buff window, and nobody in your party will notice except the log, which remembers everything and forgives nothing.

Standard Rotation

A clean reaper rotation guide boils down to this: never let a gauge sit full while you stand there admiring your own outfit.

Relic Weapon

The Reaper's current relic is the Manderville Scythe, upgradeable into the Mandervillous Zaghnal, obtained through the Hildibrand questline and Manderium Meteorite turn ins at Radz At Han. It caps out statistically equal to endgame BiS weapons, so the only reason left to finish a reaper relic weapon is glamour and bragging rights, which is apparently reason enough for half the playerbase.

BiS Overview

Chasing exact reaper bis 7.55 pieces is a moving target since raid tiers rotate the gear, so treat any specific item list as expired the moment a new patch lands. Priority stays stat driven, not name driven.

Finally, remember that reaper enshroud is the whole point of the job. If you are not obsessively tracking Shroud and Ideal Host, you are just cosplaying a scythe user while doing DPS like a Level 50 side quest reward.

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