Revenant Needs Changes
The Legends:
Dwarf: As I played the first time around I found the Dwarf to be a fun legend merely because of its creative way to gain stability, and the reliability of its play style. I found myself ignoring forced engage most of the time, as it wasn’t necessary in PvE and hard to land in WvW. I almost never used Vengeful Hammers as they only served to chew up energy and provide little damage. The elite skill, Rite of the Great Dwarf, was extremely nice. Making you and your nearby allies massive tanks, as it causes you to negate 50% of all damage for the next 5 seconds. That being said I have come to not like it very much, due to the lengthy channel time, in which you are a complete sitting duck. Such that by the time you gain the damage resistance you are almost required to use it to run away and heal. I was hoping in the new release that they would change it so that Vengeful Hammers had a lower energy cost, and Rite of the Great Dwarf to have no channel time. As it currently stands Rite of the Great Dwarf has a 2.75 second cool down, but requires 50 energy to use. This makes it extremely difficult to use though as most of your weapon abilities also require energy to use. So you must decide to either stand there for awhile and become tanky and then just stand there some more, or use your full kit.
Demon: I never got into the Demon legend very well due to its unreliability. The kit is based upon conditions applied to YOU. That meaning the more conditions you have applied to you, the more damage your abilities do, the more resistance you have, and the more you heal. The reason I didn’t like this kit is because most of the time you could only get 2 or 3 conditions on you before you would be at a point where you would be downed, and it is quite difficult to use the kit as it makes you wait to use your damage. Unyielding Anguish, which allows the Rev to jump to an area applying torment and displacing enemies, was the least reliable skill of them all. As it displaces enemies in a random direction, which can cause you to lose vision of them and interrupts the flow of battle. Your elite skill, Embrace the Darkness, gives +10% to all attributes and copies conditions to nearby enemies. I find this to be extremely useless, as it doesn’t catch the eye, so most of the time I just end up forgetting about it and perform just the same without it.
The Legends Continued:
Centaur: I was very excited to try out the new Centaur legend at the start of this beta event, as I had read about it online and was thinking that this would be a great way to become a sustained tank. Once I got in game with it, it delivered. For the most part. The kit is centered around summoning a tablet which heals in a small area every 3 seconds and doesn’t despawn unless you use the elite ability, leave the tether distance, or change legends. I love this part of the kit so much. It is very well put together. You start by summoning the tablet in an area, then you can recast heal to move it around. I find this to be a creative challenge to having a constant AOE heal for both you, and your team. Unfortunately the heal is quite minimal. It is about 350ish at level 80, so when you have 24,000 health it is basically the same a spitting in the ocean to change its volume. Now I understand why it is so low, and don’t feel it needs changing, as it requires you to utilize the rest of its kit as you play which I think is a good thing. Now onto the rest of the kit: Protective Solace, Purifying Essence, and Natural Harmony. Protective Solace is my favorite of all the Revenant’s defensive utility abilites. It puts a shield around the tablet which destroys all projectiles. This has so many uses. So far I have used it directly on top of me to isolate melee enemies from the help of their ranged allies, directly on top of ranged enemies so as to run across an open space unencumbered, and as a sort of charging shield to rush up to groups of ranged enemies and protect myself and allies from their attack as we charge. All around love this ability and feel it needs no change. On the other hand the rest of the tablet abilities are pretty weak. Purifying Essence will remove up to 3 conditions and heal for 400 health per condition removed. When ever I use this in combat I feel no difference in the fight. Natural Harmony on the other hand does make a bit of a difference. It channels the tablet and then heals around it for 1,800 health. The only problem is that it requires 25 energy, but I guess that is the price you pay for a 2 second cool down. Unfortunately by the time I need to heal in the fight I don’t have time to generate 25 energy and sacrifice using my weapon kit, so I hardly ever use use it. Now for its elite ability, Energy Expulsion, this ability causes your tablet to explode knocking back enemies and leaving behind 5 fragments that heal for 1,200 health each when they are picked up. As of now there is no use for this ability. The main reasons is that the channel is too long, and the knock back doesn’t work. For me elite abilities should be the peak of your kit. It should act differently than any other ability you have and should have a long cool down so as to entice you to not use it every fight. The fact that this even channels is bad. The tablet has an extremely small range, so the enemy can easily take one step back during the channel to avoid the knock back. So I feel that the channel should either be less then 0.5 seconds, or not exist at all. So as to make the knock back viable. Also I have never seen anything in the tablet range get knocked back when I use this. It may be because the knock back doesn’t work, or it is really small. Either way the ability is completely useless without the knock back. The heal doesn’t even work. Due to the lack of disable, it is never viable to grab the fragments, as they heal for less then the damage the enemies deal in the time it takes to walk around and grab them, you are better off just using Natural Harmony. Not to mention, using the elite ability destroys the tablet so if you want to use any of your other abilities you have to re-summon the tablet. I feel this kit has a lot of potential, as you can see by how much I typed about it, but playing it feels as if they developers were afraid that it would be far to strong. So they took it into the other direction. The sustain from it is great, but it doesn’t make that much of a difference. Also another suggestion I might make, is to add a small white ring around the base of the tablet to show its heal range and maybe some mechanism to show the tether distance. I would also like to see the tablet stay around for awhile after changing legends so as to better sustain other legends.
The Legends Continued Again:
Assassin: This kit is pretty great. It is all about dps and being faster than your opponent. Phase Traversal causes you to shadow step to your enemy and make your next few attacks unblockable. This is a pretty good ability, mainly as a gab closer. The next ability, Riposting Shadows, dashes you back away from your target and is useful for disengage, but I hardly ever use it as it has an energy cost, and by the time in the fight when I need it I cant use it and even when I do I am most likely crippled and they catch back up to me easily. But what makes this kit so good is the ability Impossible Odds. Which grants 1 second of super speed, so you can catch any enemy and 1 second of quickness so you can blow through your dps and the ability recasts. So it constantly uses energy to grant quickness and super speed so you can sustain it for a quick fight and burst people down. The problem is it uses alot of energy to do this so you really don’t have any disengage or follow up, which hardly ever matters. But the problem with this ability is it negates all of your other abilities. It can close and open gaps far more efficiently then Phase traversal and Riposting Shadows, as it has a lower energy cost. So most of the time I only ever use Impossible Odds. But the real problem with this kit is the heal. The heal causes you to summon 6 daggers which steal life from you enemies as you attack. This sucks though because they only heal for 900 each and they don’t go off very often. Maybe it is a bug, but whenever i use them I never feel like I’m sustaining any life so I can only be in this legend for a short while.
Now I know that I have been typing a lot and thank you for reading this far, but I want to quickly go over weapons and customization.
Weapons: The problem here is that he has no real sustained range. Hammer is his only ranged kit, but it fails to keep distance between the character and the enemy, while still doing damage. I have mostly mained dps characters up until now, and even with full berserk armor and runes he still doesn’t come anywhere near their damage. I’m not saying that he should, as he is meant to be a tank, but at range he has no utility and therefor just feels like dead weight. I feel to fix this they should add more utility to his base weapon kit. At the moment he is left with a small chill and a pull off of sword and axe respectively when he should be providing more support rather than damage as he is meant to be more of a tank then a dps main.
Customization: Now the whole idea behind the Revenant is to change between legends to gain access to new abilities and play styles. But right now the kits in the legends have zero customization, therefore the player is left to play one of four ways. The legends. Now while the player does have access to two legends at any one time, this still leaves no room for combos as nothing is left behind by the other legend. So you start from scratch each change. Not to mention you armor and weapon build will really only line up for one of the four legends, so the other on at your disposal will be more of an after thought and not really have an effect on your play. The problem with this is that the game is biased on become your own character with your own play style and doing what you want, not what is told to you. This forces the player into a playing style which ruins the game play. I’m not sure entirely how to change this, it may have to come down to more weapon customization, as the elementalist has this multi kit as well which locks you into an area for weapons, but leave you freedom on your utility slots. Perhaps the Revenant could be the opposite of this.
All and all I do love the Revenant, I feel that he has great potential and that as of now is still in need of dire changes. I understand that he has a difficult play style and I may be unable to utilize him to the best of his capabilities, but I feel that a good character still has great play to them even for low skill players. As of now I feel like he is trying to be too much and that he needs to be focused in on one thing, as I don’t feel like a tank, mage, paladin, or any real role as of yet. His customization is lacking and I feel forced into a play style. I hope that this post may help to bring about changes to him and make the Revenant stronger over all. If you don’t agree with me or feel I missed something please feel free to leave a comment. Thank you for reading.