Stealthing Reaper: A workbook for observations and tactics

[Saekee]

As many of you have figured out by now, stealthing quests in the Reaper difficulty is vastly discouraged due to the reaper autodetect of stealthed figures.

This workbook is mine and others' exploration into how to overcome these obstacles. Severlin mentioned that there might be some changes to the setting, but until then...Please contribute. Rants are not welcome since they are not helping me. I do not like getting auto-detected.

Observations (will update):

1. When a reaper detects your footfalls, you get a red circle strobing below your toon. I do not know why you know that they are aware of you, but it is a perk. If you DO NOT MOVE, you will not get the circle/detection information. This is the same as with spiders and oozes.
2. There is a range in which reapers do not yet detect you. If you are not too close to them, but just far enough away, they will come looking for you alone without having aggro'd all the mobs onto you. If you are standing within other ones where the reaper did not spawn, then those will in turn be newly aggro'd, reversing all your sneak success. So this does not work in all quests
3. When reapers first spawn, if you are not moving and in stealth, they do not see you right away. In fact, I had a carnage reaper in The Tide Turns chase after a noisemaker instead of me while I was up on the pipes near the last set of rats--it spawned with the rats after I was already in place, immobile, stealthed.
4. If reapers do not have line of sight, and you are under detection, they will come to investigate without alerting mobs around them (still studying this, thanks Blerkington) and you can use bluff on them.
5. Sometimes while sneaking they spawn with 1 HP. I have not seen this with zerg groups. I have no idea why.
6. Sometimes they do not see you if you are below them but they do seem to see you if you are above them. See this post here.
7. If you are detected by one (you get the footfalls) and you ignore it, it is possible that you will get the detection symbol (red footfalls) for the entire dungeon run. So once detected, it is a good idea to kill that reaper. In a Snitch run I made recently, a reaper hidden in some tunnel detected me while I went up a waterflow. That made the red footfalls appear all the way to the end. It did NOT result in mobs detecting me later (I snuck past the sleeping dogs fine, for example). I just lost the alert system.
8. You can bluff pull a reaper but do not fail at the bluff roll...
9. I have seen reapers detecting me but unable to chase me down since they were stuck behind other mobs. I was not close enough for the reaper to have it tell them where I was.
10. You can have a reaper sometimes sense you past a closed door and then go through it (still closed) to pursue you. I had this happen in Relic of a Sovereign Past and The Final Vintage
11. There are quests with mobs that are not active until you run near them. Stealthed toons can prevent them from activating. However, reapers will spawn ACTIVE in such cases (I saw this in the newer quests anyway). So you will need to deal with them--pull them with stealth to a kill area, or something similar. This could be useful in high reaper for a good party.

General stealth strategy (updating): Stealth in reaper is inefficient and frustrating. Until one can charm them, it really only works well in a limited number of quests.

1. Stealth slowly and watch for red footfalls
2. Quests that are typically good for normal play are rarely good for reaper. Typical stealth quests like Undermine or Blockade Buster feature packs of mobs that one can sneak past; on reaper, that ends up being an aggro mess. Plus, they lack #3 below:
3. always have a kill area where you can pull a lone reaper to execute without aggroing other mobs. Sometimes creating a kill zone is a good idea (not just sneaking by mobs but clearing out an area slowly)
4. Have some means of taking them down fast and hard. For melee stealth toons, I recommend a combo of Improved Feint then a well-timed Shiv. This double-bluff extended turnaround allows a safe rapid takedown if the setting is not too high.
5. If you can charm them somehow, like a sneaky bard or something, this will get a whole lot easier...
6. epic: adrenaline melee knockdown works on reapers; they float still but are immobile. This alone makes it my ED of choice.

To Devs:
Please note that even using my best techniques it was taking me a long time to get through r1-2 reaper settings on my squishy gimp build. So no, this is not some shortcut to get easy Rxp. It is very difficult. I am also getting cremated by bosses who are proving to be the biggest obstacle.


Epic quests I have used the stealth technique (Difficulty; my level) on my squishy build (reincarnated at level 21; will try again):

1. Claw of Vulkoor (r6; 20) solo. With the right spawns, they can be isolated
2. Snitch (r1 or 2?; 20) solo. Red-nameds proved to hard for me in higher settings.
3. The Tide Turns (r1, 20) solo.
4. A Small Problem (r1, 20) solo. Did not want to do a tougher setting for a protect-NPC quest.
5. Impossible Demands (r3?, 20) solo. Well, hardly a stealth quest...
6. Claw of Vulkoor (r10, 21) solo. Lucky spawns.