GW2 reaper open world build: the celestial Reaper

One set of Celestial across all fifteen slots. Celestial gives a share of every attribute, which is what you want when your damage is split between bleeding from chill and direct hits from a melee set. Necromancer wears light armour. Exotic Celestial is fine — ascended is a few percent and the agony resistance you only need in fractals.

Most Reaper builds treat chill as crowd control. This one treats it as a damage type. Deathly Chill makes chill deal damage over time, applying bleeding on top of the slow — and once that is in place, every other chill source on the bar turns into a damage source.

Bitter Chill adds three stacks of vulnerability whenever you chill, so the target takes more of everything that follows. Chilling Darkness turns any blind into a chill, so even your defensive presses feed the engine. Chilling Nova makes critical hits on a chilled target explode and chill everything next to it. And Chilling Victory hands you might and one percent life force per strike on a chilled foe — which means the build generates its own resource without spending a trait line on resource generation.

Two of these do more work than their tooltips suggest. Chilled to the Bone is the largest chill button in the game: it freezes every enemy around you and grants boons for each one caught — on a build where chill is a damage type, that is an area attack, not crowd control. Spectral Grasp is the setup that makes it worth pressing, pulling a pack together first. The rest is defensive by design, and even the defence feeds the engine: Well of Darkness blinds, and blind triggers Chilling Darkness.

Three lines, and five of the nine picks exist to make chill hurt. The gold line runs through the selection in each.

The sustain question, answered honestly

This build skips Soul Reaping, the line that improves Shroud and life force generation. That sounds like a problem, and on paper it is: Shroud comes back slower than you expect, and the temptation is to press it the moment it lights up.

Do not. There is a line of fine print in Parasitic Contagion that decides how this build is played. It heals you for a percentage of your condition damage — and healing will not occur while life force replaces health. The lifesteal is switched off while you are in Shroud.

So this Reaper heals while it applies conditions, not while it hides. Shroud is a damage window, not a retreat. Use it as a second health bar and you turn off your healing at exactly the moment you decided you were in trouble. Bank life force with Chilling Victory and Spiteful Fortitude, spend it deliberately, come back out to heal.

What Lingering Curse actually gives you here

Lingering Curse does two things: it raises condition damage by a flat amount, and it extends conditions applied by scepter skills. This build carries Sword, Sword and Staff. There is no scepter. Half of that grandmaster is dead text on this bar — what you get is the flat condition damage, which is still strong on Celestial, but it is not the scepter trait people remember.

The opener is fear, not chill. Dread pays out when you apply fear, and fear is why the rotation starts on Staff 5. Reaper's Mark fears, Dread switches on, and only then does Chillblains start the chill engine.

Three phases and a rule. Open at range with the Staff marks, swap to the swords, and enter Shroud when you have banked life force and want the target dead — not when the button lights up. The lane underneath tracks what you are holding. Press play, or click any step.

Swap to Staff when you intend to enter Shroud soon after, so you are not stuck at range with the swords on cooldown. Against a pack the loop is more forgiving than it sounds, because Chilling Nova spreads chill on every critical hit and the marks are area damage by default. Against a single champion it is slower — that is the honest trade.

The sword skills have a second activation that sacrifices your own health. On a build whose healing switches off in Shroud, that is not a small footnote. Under pressure, let the first press stand and skip the follow-up.

What it is good at, and what it is not:

Take it to farm, not to clear fast. The damage arrives over time and the ramp is real: trash dies before the bleeding stacks matter, so on easy content you are paying for sustain you never needed. It punishes Shroud misuse harder than most Reaper builds, because your healing is off while you are in there and Shroud returns slowly without Soul Reaping. And it is a melee build without a greatsword's reach, so anything that forces you out of range interrupts the damage and the healing at once.

What you get in return is a build that sustains itself out of its own damage through two separate lifesteal sources, holds up on long fights and champions, and never asks you to change gear.

Paste this into an empty build template slot in-game. The traits and skills on this page were decoded from this exact code and checked against the official Guild Wars 2 API. The code carries skills, traits and weapons only — gear, stat prefixes, runes and sigils are not in it.