Guild Wars 2

[These are my personal opinions, and experiences – Overall my weapons of choice for this beta were sword/axe and Hammer, with Shiro and Herald Legends. My opinions are tailored around the primary use of those selections. ]

So this weekend I decided to play primarily one dedicated specialisation class to get a better feel of the class and play style as opposed just playing them all for an hour or two, i chose to go with the Herald.

From the start let me just say, well done. The revenant is at a state that it can easily be implemented into the game as it is and immediately playable. It feels well balanced in the respect that you can play it like any of the primary classes with the same benefits and drawbacks that each class may have. It is the most complete specialisation and the most worked on, and you can tell with the attention to detail. The gameplay is smooth and the transitions between legends and weapons is excellent. I have only found some minor issues with the class.

With Regards to the Herald alot of people have cried OP, but frankly it’s not, it’s a term used too loosely by players who touch a class for 5m and see features they don’t normally have on their main and want, after testing revenant in a few dungeons, fractals, PvE in varying maps and extensively through Verdant Brink as iterated above i find it well balanced.

Herald skills are quite nice, and I like that with variations in energy costs it lets you have a few different support or offense options for your party or for solo roaming.

- Facet of Light gives you a nice passive regen, not as strong as elementalist water attunement heal, or warrior passive but makes up for it with Infuse Light. Infuse light gives you the benefit of Defiant stance which in tough melee situations can be used to escape out of bad situations and reset yourself so that you can fight again. It has the drawback of not being an immediate burst heal which can be costly in high condition situations but overrall if used in the right way can keep you fighting fit. (someone told me it should be the same duration as defiant stance, but it’s an ELITE specialisation, i think they can get away with 1 extra second of uptime)

- Facet of Darkness is an interesting offensive support buff, there is not many classes that can support a party with fury besides elementalist. As much as fury is useful, especially with the trait increasing crit chance to 40%, I found it more useful with it’s secondary effect causing aoe blind and force revealing. HoT has it’s fair share of new enemies that use a stealth mechanic to escape forced melee encounters. While fury is useful, with -2 energy degen cost I personally prefer to opt for might and regeneration as support for my party, especially as for the time being the meta is still zerk-centric and base crit chance tends to already be high.

- Facet of Elements is the revenants obligatory speed buff, most classes have a passive speed buff and this is it for revenant, it has the added bonus of pulsing swiftness for people around you too, will be quite good for guild rush escorts in the future. Now it’s secondary is one of the few Herald abilities that can hit for some condition damage, Elemental Blast adds a nice level of mitigation for melee combat (weakness and Chill), especially useful for sword/axe users such as myself.

- Facet of Strength is a great mid range party buffer, I found it’s about half as effective as PS/EA warrior or a might stack Ele, but for small encounters it can sit you passively at about 9-11 might, 11-15 in combat. (Factoring in Strength Runes, and Strength sigils). It’s more like engineer’s Juggernaut ability with party wide pulsing. It’s a good balance, and with -2 energy cost it keep it’s balance by making it a little more costly to maintain. It’s secondary effect Burst of Strength is a bit lackluster, damage +weakness, but there really is no incentive to use it, if it was damage x might stack level, + weakness duration x might stack level. It would probably be more of a functional burst skill, as it stands it’s better to maintain the might.

Facet of Chaos [Elite] – This needs to be reworked completely, it’s the only facet that feels unusable as a maintainable facet with it’s -5 cost, it should probably be reduced to -2 like might and fury to be on par, as it stands atm facet of chaos is basically double activated to use Chaotic Release. Envoy of Exuberance does a better job of providing protection and a heal. As for the Burst, Chaotic Release, very nice CC, not over the top damage wise, and is excellent for bunching up a group of enemies for a spike, interrupting skills on a large scale or just clearing them from allies to help rally.

Facet of Nature (Utility Facet) – TBH, this isn’t really needed. I didn’t find myself using this facet in any situation, 50% boon duration isn’t really needed when you’re primary facets pulse their boons to be maintained. It needs to be reworked as it currently has no place on the bar apart from decoration, or to burst One with Nature for some quick boons. It could probably be easily removed from the bar completely without any afterthought.

Traits wise – Herald trait line is quite reasonable, a good combination of traits for the offensive or defensive player.

One note regarding the Roiling Mists trait, perhaps a change in the tooltip, to show effective % chance increase to fury. Alot of people have been crying out that it is OP without considering the actual wording of the trait line.

: Critical-hit chance has increased effectiveness when you are under the effect of fury.
Effectiveness Increased: 100% :

I have actually read more than one map chat person saying that revenants get 100% crit. When in reality if you read the text it increases fury effectiveness by 100%, meaning 2x the crit chance. If your base crit chance is 20% the trait increases it by 20% (hence 100% effectiveness), resulting in a base crit chance of 40%. For those saying revenant gets 100%, with full zerk armor and this trait, base crit sat about 45.9% crit. Compared to elementalists, thieves or warriors this is actually quite low.

Weapons wise, there isn’t really much to say, Shield provides a bulwark for defence. And the rest have been covered in the last beta.

With regards to PvP, I will always support class mechanics being split between PvP and PvE like they did in GW1 because the things that players want in PvE are vastly different to that of those in a PvP perspective. Nerfing based on the pvp vocal minority is not intelligent design.

Overall well done anet on the Herald and firming up the revenant for release, an excellent class that I can see replacing my primary class for in the game.

Elite spec isn’t supposed to mean stronger.

Considering you focused on Revenant, and in particular, the Herald, this last beta weekend, you didn’t appear to have paid that much attention to it or how things work, really.

Sernius Alathar.6538:

- Facet of Strength is a great mid range party buffer, I found it’s about half as effective as PS/EA warrior or a might stack Ele, but for small encounters it can sit you passively at about 9-11 might, 11-15 in combat. (Factoring in Strength Runes, and Strength sigils). It’s more like engineer’s Juggernaut ability with party wide pulsing. It’s a good balance, and with -2 energy cost it keep it’s balance by making it a little more costly to maintain. It’s secondary effect Burst of Strength is a bit lackluster, damage +weakness, but there really is no incentive to use it, if it was damage x might stack level, + weakness duration x might stack level. It would probably be more of a functional burst skill, as it stands it’s better to maintain the might.

The active doesn’t cause weakness, it causes 10 stacks of vulnerability – to targets in an cleave AoE. This is powerful in and of by itself, and has high synergy with the passive too. The passive increases your damage by buffing you and your allies (at roughly 10 stacks of might, with the Trait), and the active increases your party’s damage by instead debuffing enemies (at 10 stacks of vulnerability). This seems like a good tradeoff when you need your energy regen back for something else, and correct tactical use of this ability could be highly effective.

Sernius Alathar.6538:

Facet of Nature (Utility Facet) – TBH, this isn’t really needed. I didn’t find myself using this facet in any situation, 50% boon duration isn’t really needed when you’re primary facets pulse their boons to be maintained. It needs to be reworked as it currently has no place on the bar apart from decoration, or to burst One with Nature for some quick boons. It could probably be easily removed from the bar completely without any afterthought.

It’s not supposed to be needed, it’s an option, and there’s definetly benefits to using it, even with boons you are pulsing, to say otherwise you are just demonstrating a lack of mechanical understanding of the game here.

The biggest example would once again be Might; If you are pulsing/generating enough Might to maintain up 10 stacks without 50% boon duration, then by increasing the length of each of those pulsed/generated Might stacks by 50%, you will be able to maintain up to 15 stacks of Might with the +50% boon duration, as each stack lasts longer meaning more will be existing at the same time without expiring. That seem’s pretty good to me; And personally by combining it with Sword 3 and a Sigil of Strength I was able to maintain 25 stacks of Might on myself (without Strength Runes). I didn’t test within a party (didn’t really have a chance with having two 15-hour shifts to work this weekend), but with the right set-up I could see it enabling the Revenant to maintain almost Phalanx Strength levels of Might on a party (I doubt quite as high but it should be somewhat close), if combined with that Revenant trait that grants Might to allies each time you apply a boon to them.

Plus, you are also forgetting that Facet of Nature applies it’s passive bonus to nearby allies aswell. That means if you don’t want to consume energy on on maintaining Might and Fury for the party yourself, using this you could let other classes in your party do it for the party instead. With Fire Fields and Blast Finishers, even without using Staff, a Guardian can maintain 15-16 stacks of Might on a party by himself – this will let him do upto 24 Might; Or a Phalanx Strength Warrior, won’t be locked into Greatsword to maintain 25 Might and will be free to swap out to Axe/Mace on CD to increase his personal DPS and just make things a bit more fun and interesting for him; Or classes that can’t maintain full Fury up-time on a party may have some application of it, able to generate enough of it round the clock for everyone (I’m thinking of Ranger or Guardian again here, but will help out Warriors too). You could do these things yourself as a Revenant Herald, but at high energy cost (2 upkeep for Fury, 2 upkeep for Might), using just this one passive skill frees you up alot.

Let’s not also forget the potential of increasing by 50% party-wide Quickness up-time for more DPS from Mesmer’s Time Warp or Guardian’s Feel My Wrath too (not 100% sure how Quickness stacks since it became an official Boon, as Time Warp pulses it may not work with it, but it will definitely work with Feel My Wrath).

Then of course there’s increased length to party members granting other useful boons that Herald doesn’t have access too, such as Vigor and Resistance. In short, there’s alot of application for Facet of Nature, and it’s just ignorant to see it as redundant.

Sernius Alathar.6538:

Facet of Chaos [Elite] – This needs to be reworked completely, it’s the only facet that feels unusable as a maintainable facet with it’s -5 cost, it should probably be reduced to -2 like might and fury to be on par, as it stands atm facet of chaos is basically double activated to use Chaotic Release. Envoy of Exuberance does a better job of providing protection and a heal. As for the Burst, Chaotic Release, very nice CC, not over the top damage wise, and is excellent for bunching up a group of enemies for a spike, interrupting skills on a large scale or just clearing them from allies to help rally.

Not going to argue it’s expensive, sure, but once again, you are greatly underestimating the power of Protection. Won’t go into too much detail this time, but will point out a few things: Protection reduces the damage affected allies take by 33%. The Facet of Nature applies it to the entire party. For comparison, the most it’s possible to stack Vulnerability up to, is 25, for a 25% damage recieved increases; This completely counters that and then some. The most damage reduction individual traits give for certain situations, tend to be only between 5% and 10%. Considering what else is on offer in this game when it comes to damage reduction, short of active defenses (Blind, Aegis), it doesn’t get any better than Protection.

The idea is that you don’t maintain it around the clock of course, but use it temporarily to protect your party easily from heavy spikes or rapid incoming damage.

Sure, Guardian can maintain perma-protection on a party too, but this requires him to maintain an auto-attack chain with Hammer, reducing his overall DPS potential from proper rotations, is more positional (because, Symbols), and the Guardian could be CC’d ending the bonus for the party until the Guardian is back up on his feet and can start his auto-chain again. Locking you out from other skills (due to no energy regen) by maintaing permanent Protection for the party with your Herald is similar to the price a Guardian has to pay for doing it; The advantage you have though here with Herald, is that CC’ing you will not stop the party benefiting from the perma-protection the way it would if you were a Guardian. The protection will still pulse to party members whether you are up and fighting, or stuck on your kitten on the floor.