So people don’t agitate themselves with wild accusations of bias, I will note that I’ve played a few hundred games on Revenant since its release. It’s not my main, but I played it a fair bit over a couple seasons.
Here’s what I expect happened to a lot of players: When Rev was released, it was overtuned — certainly not as OP as I’ve seen happen with new release classes in other games, but it was definitely stronger than most professions. It could do a little of everything and it could do it all very well. Don’t forget that the S1 condi build had arguably the highest sustain of any non-bunker and it did so with a completely offensive amulet. They had to remove Durability runes from PvP mostly because of Rev.
Rev was very strong, and that made it kind of easy to play. You didn’t necessarily do well if you didn’t know what you were doing, but you could make a lot of mistakes and still recover. Put a rev in the right hands and the damage pressure was hard to top.
Rev started receiving much-needed nerfs, and suddenly some people who thought they were very good at the profession found themselves unable to perform. The core mechanics could no longer carry you; you had to make the right choices. They didn’t see it that way; they saw it as the profession being nerfed into the ground — i.e., the standard finger-pointing of the medium.
I’d say that right now rev’s major liability is compositional dependence, but that isn’t unique to rev. There are certain matchups that are just bad news, and the more you solo queue, the more likely you are to be stuck in a bad 1v1 to try to save the game.
I’ll say here as everywhere: Rev was obviously designed around having one weapon set. The addition of the swap was based on uninformed feedback. You could undo a lot of the nerfs and create some real choice and balance if rev only had one weapon set.
