Guild Wars 2

12625 letters article. Jeebus! Post 2/4

The Energy System
The revenant’s energy system can reflect upon the thief’s initiative system, in the sense they are both systems that put a limitation on how many skills can be used. There are two main differences however, and both of these differences work against the revenant and favor thief.

-Thief has access to skills that regenerate raw ammounts of initiative. Revenant can only gain a set ammount of of energy by switching legends (which actually resets energy).

-Only weaponskills, excluding autoattack(Button 1) are limited by initiative for thief. Revenant has every skill but autoattack(Button 1) limited by energy. On top of that, weapon skills and heals are also limited by CoolDowns.

This produces the end effect of the Revenant accessing less skills than the rest of classes, being the class that can use the least ammount of skills, which is counterproductive to the decision of taking out weapon change off revenant because it would have access to too many skills.

On top of this, thief has access to Stealth and Shadowsteps, which allows thieves to regenerate initiative safely. Revenant can only wait it out, accepting everything coming their way. This makes the system not work as intended (it is overlimitting).

Here are some suggestions to rebalancing the energy system(pick none, pick one, pick several, or pick all, as required):
-Remove cooldowns from weapon
-Reduce energy costs on all weapon skills
-Remove energy costs from non-defensive weapon skills (Staff’s “Warding Rift” and “Renewing Mists” are samples of defensive weapon skills).
-Add energy gain on successfull autoattack hits. (This feels to be the most natural solution).
-Add weapon swap.

Legends
We’ve been able to test Mallyx, Jalis, and Ventari’s legends. Ventari’s has come to be the best out of all three by exclling on its field of defense and warding. However, Jalis and Mallyx are not as functional or compatible, since they’re incarnation-type legends that only require attunement to use their skills and Ventari is a summon-type(lets call it summon for the time being )legend, producing a massive change in playstyle. Different weapons are workable in different legends, but current weapon skills (and because of this extends to future weapons) do not adapt to the different legends on the fly. For example, we have the hammer, which has been associated with Jalis. The problem is that the hammer is a ranged weapon and Jalis encourages melee confrontation, while Ventari synergizes possitively thanks to the projectile negation.

On the other side of the coin, we have the Staff. The staff complies well with Jalis since it is a melee weapon with a handy block skill, and a push knockback. However, taunting an enemy with the ultimate goal of blocking them with your staff or knocking them defeats the purpose.

To reflect into the meaning of these words, we got the elementalist and engineer classes, both of which are classes that are locked out of weapon switch as well.

Ventari the best? Come on. Active use of tablet makes you unable to do anything else.

2/4
The elementalist defines its playstyle under two axis: Weapon and attunement. Fire is more damage oriented, Water is more healing oriented, Air is more CC oriented, and Earth is more Defense Oriented. Paralelly, Staff is a ranged’ish weapon (Meteor rain on fire, Static field on Air, are samples of ranged applications of the above concepts), Dagger/Dagger is a melee combo (Dagger skills 3 and 4 on fire, Electric Aura on Air 3, Earth 4 and Water 4 are samples of melee applicatiosn of the above concepts). Scepter/Focus offers a playstyle that stays at mid range while keeping the safety of ranged attacks.

The engineer defines its playstyle bassed on how many kits does it use, and which. Weapon selection is as important as selecting your kits (even more if you dont use any kits!). Toolbelt skills also balance every skill by offering proportionally balanced alternatives, which might be prerred to the actual utility skills, procuring variety this way. This means that more utilities to choose from benefit the engineer as a wider variety is born.

The Revenant fails to reflect on any of these two samples. Utility skills (mainly due to the flaws of the energy system) don’t set the playstyle and weapon skills are still more important. It also fails to reflect on the elementalist as weapons do not flow correctly with legend switching.

Because of this, my suggestions to fix this problem are the following(as before, pick none, one, three, or all, as preferred or needed):
-Add more utility skills to each legend, so each legend has skills that more or less resemble eachother but actually work so legends have better synergy among themselves. This reflects on the elementalist.
-Add one extra elite skill for each legend, so each legend has access to an incarnation-type elite skill and one summon-type elite skill.
-Allow the usage of skills that produce energy degeneration out of combat. This cuts or nullifies the combat options for revenant when opening.
Ie.: A revenant fights a thief that turns invisible. Because the revenant is still out of combat, it is unable to cast “Vengeful Hammers” to protect itself from a sneak attack.
-Add a small bonus on Weaponskill#1 depending on invoked legend.
Mallyx
-Change self- conditions to negative (0~50) energy thresholds.
-Change skill bonuses to positive (51~100) energy thresholds.
Mallyx is a powerfull demon that is not happy with his powers being borrowed by “any” human and because it requires great power to surpress. I think this should be reflected by punishing the player if using skills under a certain energy threshold since they would hypotetically be too weak to surpress mallyx’ influence. Successfully hoarding energy should reward the player by unleashing its full power and punish it for miss-spending energy. Current system unnecesarily punishes player since every scenario engouh conditions were had, the player is effectively already dead. (Yay burn stacks!). Resistance per skill use is not enough.
Jalis
-Rite of the Great Dwarf changed to instant cast. Cost increased to 50. Reduces energy to 0 and does not regenerate naturally for the duration of the ritual. (Meaning other sources of energy refreshing would still be useable). Keep party buff and add “Your next attack causes Taunt (2s) on the target”.(As if thief venoms, once per application)
-Vengeful Hammers: 2 Energy regeneration per hit.
The costs on Jallis’ skills are generally too high for what the skills actually achieve. Additionally, his elite skill has high costs and cast time for just some damage reduction (in other words, cast time and energy costs are too high for that damage reduction).

3/4

Ventari
-Ventari is OP well designed on every aspect.
-Some skills that are not instant cast but act over time would be nice to amplify the variety of playstyles under ventari’s tablet.

The most important suggestion is the ability of revenants to choose different skills for each legend. This would set them different from both elementalist and engineer while also reflecting on ranger’s pet system (only the part where you choose your two pets!), by adding another layer of choice.

Right now players choose the following when deciding their skills:
-Desired Weapon
-Desired Legends.

Elementalists choose weapon, main attunement (the one they will be using the most), and utilities(three layers). Engineers choose weapon, and utilities. Due to the nature of kits, each kit counts as a layer of choice(one layer for each kit). Rangers choose two weapons, utilities, and pets(four layers). This means that the revenant has little opportunity to change skill choices, and the actual skills selected are very limited since they’re tied to a legend. I can’t emphatyse enough the need for more skills for each legend.

We can understand as a “layer of choice” when a player asks themselves what should they run. Ie: I like flamethrower. Should I run turrets, or elixirs? If the only utlity skills avaliable are the flamethrower and turrets, the need to choose between turrets or elixirs vanishes, thus eliminating a layer. More layers add more variety, albeit more intrincancy and difficulty. (II. Do not fear difficulty. Hard ground makes stronger roots.) A greater variety of utility skills on each legend would also help closing the gap between playstyles between legends, which is currently too wide for weapon choices.

Weapons
This will be a short section. Staff, Hammer, Axe and Mace were the tools we could test. However, all weapons shared one problem: They’re underpowered. As already stated numerous times, the current energy system puts a lock that is too strong on them, while also having weak attacks even when using a full damage spec. This makes it very hard to survive as a revenant even with two heals veing accessible throgh legend sweap. Also, axe skill #4 does not always do its full damage.

Weapons need a general buff. The suggestions on this matter are the sames as the suggestions to fix the energy system, plus one:
-Remove cooldowns from weapon
-Reduce energy costs on all weapon skills
-Remove energy costs from non-defensive weapon skills (Staff’s “Warding Rift” and “Renewing Mists” are samples of defensive weapon skills).
-Add energy gain on successfull autoattack hits. (This feels to be the most natural solution).
-Add weapon swap.
NEW-Increase damage of Weaponskill#1.

This means that correctly adressing the energy system will fix any imbalance regarding to weapons.

Traits
There is a small conceptual flaw with the traits the revenant has access to, and this is something it reflects on every other class. In order to make the transition from the older trait system to the new one, several traits were mixed together, while others were ridden off or completely changed into new traits. This is not the impression on revenant. Every trait feels like the equivalent of one old trait, instead of the equivalent of one new mixed or reworked trait. This is specially obvious with the lack of cooldown reduction traits, or what would make more sense traits that reduce energy consumption. There’s also a severe lack of damage multipliers, which everyone suspects have been moved to the future DPS-oriented trait line (Shiro’s). I would suggest heavily against this if this is the decission made, since we would be tied to always running one specific legend (Ventari) and one specific trait line (to-be DPS), which would effectively shut revenant into the role of a healer.

The beta has finished in the process of writing this post, so I can’t recall or check names, but I suggest to fuse some of the traits currently existing and creating new ones. Ie.: fuse the traits that make legend swapping instant and stun breaking granting fury. There isnt much more I can come up with this, since every multiplier I found was more or less oriented to outgoing healing power, traits that seemed good enough.

4/4

TL;DR The Suggestion Film!
Energy system hard and unrewarding.
Ventari the only well desgined legend.
Weapons dont do enough damage.
Traits are bland and plain.

-Remove cooldowns from weapon
-Reduce energy costs on all weapon skills
-Remove energy costs from non-defensive weapon skills (Staff’s “Warding Rift” and “Renewing Mists” are samples of defensive weapon skills).
-Add energy gain on successfull autoattack hits. (This feels to be the most natural solution).
-Add weapon swap.
-Add more utility skills to each legend, so each legend has skills that more or less resemble eachother but actually work so legends have better synergy among themselves.
-Add one extra elite skill for each legend, so each legend has access to an incarnation-type elite skill and one summon-type elite skill.
-Allow the usage of skills that produce energy degeneration out of combat.
-Add a small bonus on Weaponskill#1 depending on invoked legend.
-Change self- conditions to negative (0~50) energy thresholds.(Mallyx)
-Change skill bonuses to positive (51~100) energy thresholds. (Mallyx)
-Rite of the Great Dwarf changed to instant cast. Cost increased to 50. Reduces energy to 0 and does not regenerate naturally for the duration of the ritual. Keep party buff and add “Your next attack causes Taunt (2s) on the target”. (Jalis)
-Vengeful Hammers: 2 Energy regeneration per hit. (Jalis)
-Special emphasys on more utility skills per legend.
-Increase damage of Weaponskill#1.
-Blend some of the current traits together and make new ones.

Sorry It took me more work than expected to sepparate the text in different pieces.

Ventari the best? Come on. Active use of tablet makes you unable to do anything else.

This flaw comes from the energy system, not from smart usage of ventari’s tablet.

Rainiris.1975

Kidel.2057

Ventari the best? Come on. Active use of tablet makes you unable to do anything else.

This flaw comes from the energy system, not from smart usage of ventari’s tablet.

I’m pretty sure this is from the cast time when you use the ‘move tablet here,’ not the energy cost.