Guild Wars 2

To begin, I would like to summarize how Energy currently works. Energy is a resource used by Revenants. Currently, all Revenant Skills besides Auto-attacks require energy to be activated. Weapon skills all cost between 5 and 15 energy to activate, while Healing, Utility, and Elite skills require between 25 and 50 energy to activate or require a maintenance fee of 5 energy per second. Energy regens at a rate of 5 per second. Energy has a max of 100 and resets to 50 whenever the Revenant swap legends. Roy Cronacher described Energy as having a push and pull feel on a GW blog post.

This system directly leads to many problems of the problems identified with Revenant over this Test weekend such as lack of customizability, lack of flexibility and extreme predictability. These problems are identified and discussed in these threads on the forums and Reddit: Discussion How could we fix the Revenants Missing Revenant Significant Flexibility Sacrifice and My big Revenant Rework. In addition, I would like to point out how exactly the energy mechanic leads to the flexibility and predictability Problems.

Flexibility: As it stands, each legend is highly specific to a certain role. Ventauri is very good at healing and general support, Mallyx is great at Condition Manipulation, and Jalis is proficient at surviving and Tanking. All signs point to Shiro being similar in concept as a heavy damage dealer. However, Energy heavily constrains the output of each Legend. You can only use 1 Healing, utility, or elite skill upon swapping to a Legend (remember 20-50 energy cost per skill) and then you have to wait several seconds before you can activate a second. In addition, every time you use a weapon skill this increases the time between other skill activations. This is a Hard constraint and does not allow the flexibility of activating multiple utility skills if required or multiple Weapon Skills to set up a burst unless you spend a large amount of time doing nothing or just auto-attacking after a Legend Swap.
The other thing to note is that Legend Swapping every time off cool down is not a healthy practice. As already stated, each legend is highly specialized. So, you may be forced to legend swap in order to regain energy but into a horrible situation for a highly specialized legends. However, the only way for Revenants to actively regain energy is to Legend Swap, so they are often forced to do so every 10 seconds.

Predictibality: In sPvP and WvW, Revenants will be the most predictable class. Due to the hard cap energy imposes on them, their enemies will be able to predict what the Revenant does after each Legend Swap (ALS for the following scenarios). If the Revenant activates a non-weapon skill ALS, this opens a sizable window for the enemy to Burst the revenant as the revenant’s active defense will be down until his energy recovers. If the Revenant spams autos ALS, the enemy knows he is saving for a Burst of high cost skills and will be able to interrupt the Revenant’s burst, Dodge it, counter it etc. etc. If the Revenant spams Weapon skills, the Enemy can outlast it using their own active defense while waiting for the moment when the revenant’s Energy is on empty.
In addition, this predictibility leads to a very face-roll style of play for the Revenant. Upon Legend Swap, the Revenant has only a few choices (3-5 depending on if you use 5 or 10 energy cost abilities) into how to use his abilities unless he waits a long time as opposed to all other profession who have up to 10 skills that can be chained in a row. Even face-roll warriors, have more choice in how they use their abilities. Energy was intended to create a balancing act for the revenant between bursting their skills and saving their skills, but in the end, it only accomplishes limiting the available choices to the Revenant.

Ultimately, the problem with Energy is the fact that there is no active way other than legend swapping for the Player to regain energy! There is no balancing act. And as already stated, Legend swapping for the sake of regaining Energy is not always a good thing, and quite often a bad thing.

Some people have suggested removing the energy cost from Weapon Skills, but that does not lead to Dynamic Gameplay. Instead I would suggest these two changes to energy:
1) If energy is below 50, it increases at a rate of 5 per second. If energy is above 50, it decreases at a rate of 5 per second. If energy is at 50, it neither increases or decreases passively.
2) All Weapon Skills besides auto-attacks Increase Energy (instead of decreasing it). However, they cannot be activated if Energy would be increased to a value greater than 100. For example, if a Revenant tried to use Staff 5 at 90 energy, the skill would not activate since it would increases energy by 15 to 105 energy.
3) All other Energy mechanics remain the same.

These Suggestions truly create the Push and Pull play style Roy described the Revenant as having. The Revanant will push his energy up using his weapon skills and then he will pull it down using Legend Skills. Clearly, this suggestion would lead to a rebalancing of many of the cooldowns of the Legend skills to prevent them from being overpowered, but it should be worth as these suggestions create a highly dynamic play style as the revenant will juggle his energy to Increase it to cast Legend Skills and Decrease it to cast Weapon Skills around the fulcrum of 50 energy. This greatly increases the flexibility of the revenant as it has a choice in when to swap legends to when it best fits the situation, not exclusively to regain energy. Also, Revenant’s will be a lot more unpredictible as to what they will do once they Legend Swap. Will they use Weapons kills, Legend skills, or wait for a good moment to burst something ALS? In addition, a lore link can be created explaining Revenants as “Gathering Mist” with their weapons to feed the Strength of their channeled Legends. What are y’alls thoughts?

I agree, there needs to be some way to generate more energy, either from skills or traits.
In the original Revenant Livestream, they kept talking about ‘push and pull’, but there is only one of those. Once you deplete your energy, you have to wait for it to regen or swap legends.
I think energy replenishes far too quickly for it to be a concern, and removing energy from weapon skills is not a fix. We’d just have surplus, spammabale energy.
Borrowing ideas from the thief’s initiative or the Necro’s life force, I think we could make the Revenant’s energy management fun.

Thats a good point. I am gonna add that quote from Roy into my suggestion.

This is an interesting idea. I definitely agree that resetting energy to 50 upon legend swap penalizes the Revenant if they don’t dump their energy and swapping legends every 10 seconds. This surely can’t be intended.

I also agree that Rev could really use a way to increase energy regen (currently, they can only slow down energy regen, not increase it).

The only issue that I have with weapon skills generating energy is that this will encourage many of them, which have very short cooldowns, to be spammed. Sure, the cooldown could be increased, but I like the short cooldowns. If I want to use Hammer #2, for example, the cooldown is only 2 seconds. But I don’t use it on every cooldown because it costs energy and it’s only a dps increase in specific situations. I think this is really great, and I’d hate to see weapon skills on Rev become more cooldown-limited than they already are.

I would like to see energy no longer reset when swapping legends, but to make up for this, the energy cost of many skills could be reduced. I would also really, really like to see an additional F skill that might be a long channel that regenerates energy (e.g. 4 second channel, regenerates 5 energy per second, for a total of 10/sec when combined with the base energy regen rate). You’re vulnerable to interrupt when using it, and you’re not doing dps, but you would have some control over energy regen. You’d probably have to be able to move while casting, or it would be really bad. This way you could channel energy to build up your reserves and prepare for a burst. Or use it strategically when you’re out of range of your target or waiting on a cooldown.

There needs to be a way to generate energy, and I’m assuming we’ll get a trait like this with one of the remaining 2 trait lines we yet to see.

However I’m not sure i like the idea you have of Weapon skills generating Energy and not being usable if said skill would cause energy to be over 100.

I feel the only thing that needs to be done is Energy on each individual skill needs to be looked at and adjusted accordingly, and the energy requirements for heals needs to be removed.

No class has a resource attached to their heal, neither should the revenant.

As it is now, the revenant needs to watch out for both Energy AND potential interrupts when casting a heal, every other class in-game only has to worry about interrupts.

I really, really like your idea. An additional benefit to moving energy regen to weapons instead of legend swap, is that then you can change it so that energy reserve is retained between swaps. That way, if I’m spamming with energy charging skills, I could either follow up by immediately hitting with the utilities in my current legend or swap and hit with the other legend, or a combination of the two. It opens up the possibility of cross-legend chains.

In this vein, however, I feel like weapons would need to behave differently in different legends. Otherwise it again becomes predictable if I unload energy with my elites, because I’ll always have to follow up with the same “gathering” skills.

This would take an overhaul-level re-balance, but it would add SO MUCH nuance to the profession, and make the legends interplay with each other in new and interesting ways.

I’m pretty sure I saw a Roy quote in the past few days saying they’d already internally fixed the energy regen problem.

/rummages in Dev Tracker

Aha. https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/revenant/How-to-Improve-Revenants-ideas/first#post5272356

I don’t know if that answers the concerns in this thread but it does seem on point.

Donari.5237:

I’m pretty sure I saw a Roy quote in the past few days saying they’d already internally fixed the energy regen problem.

/rummages in Dev Tracker

Aha. https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/revenant/How-to-Improve-Revenants-ideas/first#post5272356

I don’t know if that answers the concerns in this thread but it does seem on point.

it’s only on point for the upkeep skills. There is still some sort of energy trait needed to make those utility + weapon skills somewhat smarter to use.