Just wanna throw this out there one extra time and cross my fingers message comes across to Anet from the community.
Passive abilities are winning fights and needs some heavy nerfs, or perhaps rather some heavy changes into active things!
Examples:
+ Mesmers Aoe fields that fights on their own and skills that you just spam spam spam i count as passives.
+ Diamond skin is kinda just lazy design.
+ Passive shroud gains, passive dmg from pets and traps.
+ Most importantly though, in this meta which is all about tanks. One class is tanking using viper amulett… Like do anyone really need explanation for why this is extremely poor?
+ Same sorta goes for Engineer tanks using burst amulett, not as critical right now but not far behind.
How to look at Revs before balancing:
Revenant is the best offensive character in the game because it is the worst target in the game. Remove the blocks and passive stability gains and give tools to be used creatively. A glass cannon build must live on the edge of his seat all of the time. A glass cannon build is exciting because it high risk and high reward.
Revenant now is high reward, and absolutely 0 risk.
Guild wars 2 should and could be a game all about the ACTIVE skill of players, now its consistently more and more and more about passives and rotations. Imagine for a second that battles were so active that you could by skill rather than balance kill 3 opponents on your own and turn the game by your own prowess? (kinda like counter strike, which we all know how unsuccessful that game has been cough)
This is the true aim for making soloQ and leagues successful.
Iv’e rambled a bit much perhaps but the intent is all good
Just wanna do my part and sharing what balance insight i can muster. Please all add to it and help Anet make the right choices!