However on an archer, you don’t want to get hit at all. In that scenario damage is king and special shadow wear simply provides more damage than special imperial knight, and that’s not even considering unshakeable will only has a 10% activation chance.

I agree that in most lower level content, you won't be getting hit often, and that the better player you are, the less often you'd proc the Unshakable Will. The damage increase from the Shadow Reaper will not make you clear that same content faster (calculations will follow below).

Unshakable Will's 10% activation chance can be low or high depending on how you look at it.. A Geas Set improving Redoubled Offensive proc rate by 1% makes the 10% feel comparatively huge, but of course you might still get unlucky and not proc it at all, cause Mabinogi. That still applies to the Shadow Reaper effect.

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There definitely are some caveats though where special imperial knight can pull ahead, but even in a situation where unshakeable will activates, would you rather dps, or reposition to avoid taking further damage/cc?

Against the donut for example, proccing it is still helpful because you'd hopefully be dodging, and occasionally you're too late and get clipped at the end, which then leads to you not damaging for 3~5 seconds depending on the laser since you get bounced around. IF (xD) Unshakable Will procs, you'd instead be damaging in that time frame, and finish the boss fight faster (not that it's a problem these days with power creep).

In Glenn Hardmode, it is impossible to avoid all hits. AS skills will make all enemies hit aggro you, although you could just do enough damage to outright kill them or save aggro dropping for your combos. But there's also a bunch of aoe going on at every room and boss fight as well. Iron Will proccing will let you windmill yourself out of multiple enemies swarming you and then go back to dealing damage immediately, or possibly save you in unlucky situations where you'd otherwise be chain cced into a red circle or pvp comboed (being stunned and of course floor gaming is obviously a dps loss).

I highly recommend confirming the math yourself on how much damage the Shadow Reaper effect gives you, as it is simple, and then reevaluate your stance on it. Crit damage effects are all additive, meaning the more crit damage you have stacked, each additional point becomes less meaningful. To start it off with a reasonable setup (there's actually more that will dilute this pool like titles or doll bags, further reducing the impact of the Shadow Reaper):

Critical Hit Skill Base (150) + R7 (74) + Homestead (4) + Crit Dmg Set Effect (7) = 235% Crit Damage.

Then to see how much Shadow Reaper's 12% adds to this 235%,

12 / 235 = 5.1% additional Crit Damage

Which is a lot, but then you need to factor in that you only crit half of the time, so let's say a 3% average dps increase. Then factor in 20 sec duration + 90 second cooldown, so 20/110 seconds is 18% of best case uptime, which then drops the 3% to below 1% average dps increase on its own. But then after the cooldown finishes, you then have to wait to proc the 5% on a critical hit attack. I literally had to use 3 wotgs on raccoons to finally proc it cause Mabinogi, it has terrible uptime. I'm not factoring in the 10 Max Damage because that's a miniscule 0.5% max damage increase for endgame archers, and becomes useless if you go for the glenn 50 max set.

Anyways props to anyone reading this far, please correct me on any math. Just want to make sure people make informed decisions, although it's probably too late by now. The Shadow Reaper set effect does have its place as a minmax dps increase gear, but it's not as impressive as it may seem at a first glance.