Reaper Form Lich without Death Seal?

Acolyte
1

My main query with this topic is how viable/easy is it to do a build with Reaper Form and to avoid Death Seal.

Im currently doing a Harvest/Reaper Form build and its incredibly fun. I havent hit empowered monoliths yet, but its doing perfectly fine in terms of clear speed and bossing. I have, however, avoided Death Seal.

I understand why it removes all ward, but I hate it as a concept. All of my skills scale with Intelligence, so I look for it everywhere. The bonus of that is all the Ward Retention granted by it. I just don’t really get removing all ward, making the retention granted by Int obsolete, and then also remove the only thing covering your health which you need for reaper form.

I understand the bonuses like the damage and necrotic waves are meant to be very good, and I also am not asking for Death Seal to change in any way. Im just wondering how much I am hurting my build by not taking it.

Currently my build has: Harvest, Bone Curse, Reaper Form, Transplant, AoD. Bone Curse is converted into an aura, and AoD is converted into Armor Shred, just for more context.

To reiterate, my build has no problems at the moment, even without Death Seal, I am purely wondering for the future whether I will face any issues or struggle more than builds that use it.

2

Objectively speaking you will miss out on a lot of power.

If it’s necessary or not is subjective depending on how far you want to push.
My Harvest Lich does not use any ward and I only use death seal for tough rares or bosses. But even without using death Seal the damage is great. I would say you can probably reach 300-500corruption without any issues without death Seal, but going further you will definitely lack damage.

But I do have one quesrion: do you really not want to use it because you feel like investment in ward/Int is “wasted” or do you not like the concept of Death Seal in general?
The “wasted” benefit from Int really doesn’t matter at all because the overall benefit is outshining that by a huge margin.

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3

Just want to point out that Lich will be buffed in 1.2, including a new skill. So things might change a lot then, including regarding death seal.

That being said, I feel that Death Seal, currently, fills the same spot as Volatile Reversal for sentinel (which is also being reworked, btw). Meaning that for Reaper Form, especially, it offers too many benefits not to use all the time.
So much like you use VR with all sentinels, because there is no alternative that will give you more benefits than it does, Death Seal is also an automatic take for all Reaper Forms because nothing else will give you as many benefits.

So yes, you’ll lose ward and switch the focus to health and leech instead, but you’ll gain a lot more with Seal than you give up on switching from ward.

4

its a mix of both tbh, I simply am not a fan of death seal as an ability, but I also dont enjoy the idea of working against my primary attribute and one of my skills. I am completely okay with 400-500ish corruption for this build.

5

hm interesting, obviously my build will change alongside new updates, so I may eventually use death seal.

Funnily enough, I have looked at making a VK on the build planner, and have avoided VR as well. However, I havent started that build or finalised the planner because I know the reworks are coming. So the same thing may happen down the road for this Lich too.

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6

I’ve cut it from my build and have enjoyed playing it more. The entire low life build seems to go against all the HP leach that you have going, and when you switch from pack to pack and you’re already at low life, reaper form drops much faster.

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7

yeah thats basically my thought process, plus you have full access to ward. I see it as a big loss in damage for a pretty big gain in survivability and duration to reaper form.

Though I do contradict myself a bit since im using Death’s Embrace, but ive found the damage i recieve from it is all leeched back in the same hit, albeit over 3 seconds.

8

Why though?

With lower Health, but higher eHP due to much higher DR leech is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay better, because the same HP/sec is worth more.

Death Seal is a little loss in eHP, but if build around it it is even less impactful, when combining it with Endurance and especially leech.

Nice, cool that you are using my Unique. But as I pointed out to Rasalom, lower Health but higher eHP does help here actually.

Death’s Embrace does consume current health, so if you are lower current health you will lose less health and regain it much faster.

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9

The new Lich skill has been pushed to later
Mike said it last stream

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10

yeah i agree with everything ur saying, I am just personally too attached to running ward to use Death Seal lol, thats where most of my grievance with it is. Though, I completely understand why it disables ward and I dont want/expect them to change it. Im just hoping they buff AoD since that is what ive been using in place of DS

11

Maybe they could add a node to Death Seal where your consumed ward is used as extra leech, or extra mitigation.

12

Oh no. I was aiming to try it out in 1.2 as a part of my first run with lich :expressionless: only 2 unplayed masteries left
I’ll keep an eye on nonmainstream choises mentioned here