A new Halloween-themed gear set is available in the Proving Grounds: Grim Reaper Gear. In this article, we will break down the new gearset and compare it to the gold-standard Arbiter attack gear.
Grim Reaper: The Warrior Set
A quick look over the new Grim Reaper gear’s stats makes it clear that the main focus of this set is an absolutely ridiculous amount of Warrior attack. A full legendary set clocks in at +480% Warrior Attack, making your warrior-type troops nearly five times as strong.
Compared to Arbiter and Aranea, the bonuses look like this:
- Grim Reaper +480% Warrior Attack
- Aranea +387% Cavalry Attack
- Arbiter (with Call) +262% Attack
This puts Grim Reaper ahead in the pure potential attack category, and is even equal to Arbiter in terms of attack if you are sending Warriors against Mages.
This pure attack power comes at the price of Armor, which means while your Warriors will be hitting exceptionally hard, they won’t get the survivability benefits that comes with Arbiter. This can of course be mitigated with hero skill points in either Noctis’s HP or Prompto’s HP or Armor skills, or with gems.
The Grim Reaper gear does come with banishment boosts, slightly extending the banishment boost duration and doubling the banishment attack boost, which is potentially huge depending on the level of your banishment portal.
This is very much an explosive attack gear set, all told. Assuming you can afford a piece or more (see below for more on that) this gear clearly outstrips most other gear in terms of attack power. It does not entirely blow Arbiter or Aranea out of the water, but it is definitely a potential upgrade.
Grim Reaper Proving Grounds Event
As with previous gear sets, Grim Reaper is at present time only available for a limited time in the Proving Grounds. This formula is the same as for previous events: spend elixir to fight a series of enemies and bosses, with the bosses dropping gear mats.
The packs required for this gearset appear to be in range or even higher than the last few PG gear events, which required 60-80 packs to complete all the way. So a complete set of this gear is likely to be prohibitively expensive for most players. Still, if you have 40k in Elixir hanging around from previous Thank You or Combo packs, it might be worth seeking out a piece of this armor even at a lower color level.
Conclusion
Due to the cost, this gear set is likely to be very rare, but any players who do manage to get ahold of a full or partial set are likely to be absolute terrors to anyone who didn’t pick up a few decent Undertaker pieces. If you have someone on your server swinging this gear around at even the same tier, it might be best to stock up on mages.
It’s very likely that one of the next few gear sets will be mage-focused, given that we now have  Warrior and Cavalry gear sets. It will be interesting to see if the Mage gear goes even higher on Attack power to compensate for the inherent speed issue with mages, or if they go in another direction.
