Guild Wars 2

People complain that customizability for the revenant is significantly lower than for other classes and I think they have a point. This also results in a very static and not flexible class when it comes to combat. This might cause mayor issues especially for pvp.

In this thread I want to break down the issues and maybe give some possible solutions.

Legend System

I don’t think they will change the utility part. That is kind of the core design. They will rather keep releasing more legends which makes sense imo. You now compare the 5 slots you can freely chose of other classes with 2 slots that each come with a complete new set of 5 skills though. With 3 legends this feels incredible limiting. With 5 (what is planned) this should actually be a lot better already given that they balance them properly. And just like new skills are added to existing classes there will come even more legends, each with a new set of 5 different skills to play around with. So I don’t think it is all that bad, the fact that we have only 3 right now is the main problem. Also keep in mind that quite a few classes always take the same heal, elite or always run specific utility skills anyway.

Weapon Set

Now this is a different story. First of all weapon skills ARE what you do in combat. In a way they dictiate playstyle much more so the argument that instead of weapon swap, revenant swaps utility skills to achieve situational flexibility is completely invalid. At this point with no weapon swap there is NO class with such a static playstyle. The closest you could compare it with are propably warrior pvp builds with two sets of completely melee weapon (some people even try melee only ranger). These specs are VERY hard to make worth just because they have very obvious mayor weaknesses by getting kitet. Engi has kits, ele has attunements. I think the revenant needs something similiar.

Possible Solutions

Out of my head a few ideas that might work:

1. Just enable weapon swap. This might solve more problems than it is “bad design”. It kind of would make revenant an upgraded version of for example warrior with the utility swapping. I can understand that they originally want to disable weapon swapping.
2. Design weapons in a way that they are all very flexible to use. For example engi weapons are all ranged but also good on close range (even if engi still has the kits) so they can function in many situations. I don’t think that is an easy task though with just 5 skillslots and revenant was designed with many melee weapons.
3. Make legends also swap single weapon skills (similiar to what thief has when combining 1h weapons), for example skill 4 and 5 (or even 1 and 2 which would make it very significant since it affects the autoattack and propably most often used second skill) of each weapon set could be different dependent on the legend. With Jarlis hammer could become melee range and deal more damage, with malyx it adds confusion, etc.

I think that your ideas are pretty good. I would add additional possible solutions which came to my mind.

4. Each Legend affect all weapons providing additonal effects to the weapon skills.

So for example using staff and mallyx at the same time – some staff skills could impose additionally conditions on enemies, transfer conditions or do more dmg when condition is imposed on the enemy. This is just an example, but that’s the idea which would provide more diversity and loosen weapon restriction, so you can utilize both legends with all weapons effectively with synergy to equiped legend.

5. We are no longer forced to have legend equiped all the time. Change Legend to be triggered by F1 and F2 and second click would put us in “non-legendary” form.

In non-legendary form we could have some number of utility skills non legend related, but related to the profession itelf like “disappearing in the mists”, short invisibility and during invis you restore your energy, etc. Just an example to show what do I mean by “non-legendary” utilities, thematically related to the mist but not to specific legend. Plus we could equip racial utility skills as well in this case.

Legendary stances then should have utility skill like now, but also fixed weapon. So when you use Jallys, you wield Legendary Dwarf Hammer. When you use ventari you wield Legendary Centaur Staff, etc. So Basically, when you are in legenary stance you have locked utilities and locked “kit” or “conjured weapons” tied to Revenant at the same time when legendary stance is turned on.

TL;DR So to sum it up, you have some basic “mist-related” utilities, variety of utilities to customize your build with normal weapon as they are implemented, but you can tirgger legend which will set your utilities and weapon skills to be legend-specific.

i think that different utilities should be allowed on the different legends, my reasoning behind this is that despite having access to the different legends, elementalists still have more skills available to use, so, i propose that each legend have a wider range of utilities so you can properly customise your loadout (each bar behaving somewhat like the underwater vs on land skill bars) this would also allow revenants to use racial utilities and elites, as they would be available to use on all legends (kind of like ‘core skills’) i would also prefer there to be new legends and new weapons to use though i guess these are coming in the future seeing how this is still in beta (i assume revenants will also get underwater combat, if not, doing HoTW will be very difficult on certain paths)

in clarification, the extra utilities will still reflect the legend in use (ventari for heals, jalis for toughness and mallyx for conditions respectively) but it will give revenants much needed customisation to their builds

AikunFelcis.7258:

TL;DR So to sum it up, you have some basic “mist-related” utilities, variety of utilities to customize your build with normal weapon as they are implemented, but you can tirgger legend which will set your utilities and weapon skills to be legend-specific.

Yeah I can definitely see some of that happening especially since there will also be an elite spec for revenant, right?

I still find the lack of customization of utility bar less problematic than having only 1 weapon all the time. Even if you just slightly modify that weapon dependent on your active weapon (like add conditions with every attack while on mallyx, heal on ventari) this won’t fix this problem, it would jut create some synergy similiar to ele attunement traits without changing the skills themselves (like ele does when attuning).

This is why I came up with the “thief idea” of completely swapping out certain weapon skills. This is a lot additional work so it would be important to decide if all 5 skills should swap or just 1 or 2 and if so which ones. To REALLY change the way a weapon feels and to change playsytle it certainly would have to be the autoattack because having a different skill #5 which is only 20 sec cd anyway won’t help much. Then again revenant weapon skill cooldowns are that low.

Getefix.9150:

i think that different utilities should be allowed on the different legends, my reasoning behind this is that despite having access to the different legends, elementalists still have more skills available to use, so, i propose that each legend have a wider range of utilities so you can properly customise your loadout (each bar behaving somewhat like the underwater vs on land skill bars) this would also allow revenants to use racial utilities and elites, as they would be available to use on all legends (kind of like ‘core skills’) i would also prefer there to be new legends and new weapons to use though i guess these are coming in the future seeing how this is still in beta (i assume revenants will also get underwater combat, if not, doing HoTW will be very difficult on certain paths)

in clarification, the extra utilities will still reflect the legend in use (ventari for heals, jalis for toughness and mallyx for conditions respectively) but it will give revenants much needed customisation to their builds

The thing is that this might generate future problems and does not fix the issues with the static weapon set which is way more important to how a class feels compared to the utility set. I think the purpose of revenant is to create a system where they can add more and more legends in the future. With your suggestion each of those would ALSO require addtional skills to pick from. Think about it. If we just would have 5 or 6 legends already instead of the 3 we have. Wouldn’t picking 2 of those be already kind of enough freedom? The amount of combination you can create out of 3 sucks but with 5 or 6 is already really decent.

The problems of the class are located more on the left side of the skill bar than on the right side in my opinion.

Dojo.1867:

Yeah I can definitely see some of that happening especially since there will also be an elite spec for revenant, right?

I still find the lack of customization of utility bar less problematic than having only 1 weapon all the time. Even if you just slightly modify that weapon dependent on your active weapon (like add conditions with every attack while on mallyx, heal on ventari) this won’t fix this problem, it would jut create some synergy similiar to ele attunement traits without changing the skills themselves (like ele does when attuning).

This is why I came up with the “thief idea” of completely swapping out certain weapon skills. This is a lot additional work so it would be important to decide if all 5 skills should swap or just 1 or 2 and if so which ones. To REALLY change the way a weapon feels and to change playsytle it certainly would have to be the autoattack because having a different skill #5 which is only 20 sec cd anyway won’t help much. Then again revenant weapon skill cooldowns are that low.

I think that “option 5” I mention above would fix the utility skills issue, so we would be able to use different utilities in “non-legendary” form, while equiping legend would be like equiping kit, where utilities and “special legend” weapon is tied to specific legend. So each legend would have 5 weapon and 5 utility skills when equiped related to this legend.

So if we have 2 legend slots, we would have 20 legend fixed skills + 5 weapon skills (non-legendary stance) + 5 utility skills (non-legendary stance). So let’s say they would add 2 heals, 8 utilities and 2 elite skills not related to legend + you could select racial skill, etc when you are in non-legendary form. So you could run with 30 different skills in theory. Additionaly “Invocation” specialization trait line could be reworked to buff different utilities from “non-legendary” form.

Dojo.1867:

The thing is that this might generate future problems and does not fix the issues with the static weapon set which is way more important to how a class feels compared to the utility set. I think the purpose of revenant is to create a system where they can add more and more legends in the future. With your suggestion each of those would ALSO require addtional skills to pick from. Think about it. If we just would have 5 or 6 legends already instead of the 3 we have. Wouldn’t picking 2 of those be already kind of enough freedom? The amount of combination you can create out of 3 sucks but with 5 or 6 is already really decent.

The problems of the class are located more on the left side of the skill bar than on the right side in my opinion.

i dont mean a whole bunch of extra utilities, maybe just a handful (say 1 extra heal and 3 more utilities but no more elites) per legend or simply just the racial skills, i feel as though the revenant would feel left out if he was blocked form using racial skills simply based on the fact that they are a revenant, if anything, human and norn skills (in rp/lore) would be stronger due to their connection with the mists, asura could be stronger due to their understanding of the arcane powers of the mists, sylvari may have a stronger connection to the dream and charr treat their warbands like family no matter what profession they are, and being a revenant doesnt stop you from calling down air strikes, roaring, pulling out pistols etc so the fact that they cant use racial skills make no sense whatsoever

Getefix.9150:

i think that different utilities should be allowed on the different legends, my reasoning behind this is that despite having access to the different legends, elementalists still have more skills available to use, so, i propose that each legend have a wider range of utilities so you can properly customise your loadout (each bar behaving somewhat like the underwater vs on land skill bars) this would also allow revenants to use racial utilities and elites, as they would be available to use on all legends (kind of like ‘core skills’) i would also prefer there to be new legends and new weapons to use though i guess these are coming in the future seeing how this is still in beta (i assume revenants will also get underwater combat, if not, doing HoTW will be very difficult on certain paths)

in clarification, the extra utilities will still reflect the legend in use (ventari for heals, jalis for toughness and mallyx for conditions respectively) but it will give revenants much needed customisation to their builds

I’m pretty sure this is already in the works. If for no other reason than the fact that the utility skills still have the option of being swapped around. We only have 3 right now to use (this is the beta and an unfinished product), but I think we will have more to choose from for each legend.

What if they just designed “legend neutral” utility sills or heals that can be swapped in for every legend.

Like a neutral heal. You cannot equip the malyx heal as jarlis or the other way around but both can always equip the neutral one. That would be rather resource efficient and you could actually even pick that legend neutral traitline and let it interact with those skills.

Maybe just call the mist skills? If you chose the same mist skill for both legends they should propably share the cooldown.

i like the idea of having neutral-mist skills. the implementation i see in my mind is having ‘neutral’ low energy low-ish cooldown skills within the legends’ archtypes but each stance reserves either the elite or heal (ventari) upkeep skill that toggles to the current legend skills in addition to whatever active effects you get for the original upkeep skill (such as right of the great dwarf’s protection or the slew of mallyx’s effects. I’d like the rev ‘invocations’ to feel like the keystone derv transforms from gw:nightfall rather than the emergency/hyperdrive button we see elite skills as now. i am of the opinion that a change like this might have this sort of effect

Just to add water to the mill :

The devs can release as much legends as they want, it won’t solve the inherent problem legends brings to the revenant : not getting the right tools for the right job.

When you are trying to build for a dungeon (speed clear or just pug) with any vanilla class, you are always switching weapons and skills to only have stuff that is useful for the coming encounter.
Just the useful skills and nothing else.

With revenant, too bad, no matter what you choose, you’ll always end up with something on your bar that is not usable!

Suggested solutions :

• Either add a new type of skills that are not legends related and that can be equipped on any legend. This will aloow us to replace a useless stance with something that has some use.
• Or upgrade the legend specific skills so that they are more powerful than the counterparts other classes have. Since the legend skills come in bundle and you won’t use some of them, we need something to compensate.

I guess that mixing current legend utilities and other legend/legend neutral utilities would be hard because of some limitations. As we see legends work as kits for utility skills right now, they are in fixed slots. Easiest solution would be equiping first legend by F1, unequiping legend by second time pushing F1. Second legend for F2. When no legend is equiped then we are in neutral form and we can use neutral “mist” utility skills. Variety of utilities could be provided there, while leaving legend skills fixed as they are. See my posts above.

I think the legend problem is a customization problem in the first place.

Everything on the left side of the skillbar is a playability problem though and even more urgent. Since you mentioned dungeons I find it less problemativ having to stick to 2 sets of heal/utilities/elites (even if a few of those skills are not that efficient) than being stuck with 1 weapon set. The “neutral” skill type every legend can swap in would solve many problems but what about the weapon skills?

You should be allowed to equip one weapon set per legend. Swapping the legend swaps the weapon. If you don’t want to swap weapons, equip the same weapon on both legends.

Personally, I think this is probably the simplest and best way to do it. I was surprised this wasn’t the case already.

personally I would love it if instead of weapon swap, they could get armor swaps. it would add a new and unique gameplay element to the rev, with great customizability (being able to swap between like berserker and cleric armor on a 10 sec cd) and it wouldn’t require too much work on the development end to boot.

A few ideas from this post have been brilliant. I do hope ANet has a chance to review them. My favorites ideas from this post that wouldn’t require an excessive amount of coding and would add the much needed customization are the following;

- Revenant weapons are battle neutral and gain abilities based off of what Legend is currently active. Staff could inflict conditions while in Mallyx, then grants protection in dwarf and might/fury while in Shiro as a few examples.

- A Neutral set of Utility skills to swap into in addition to Racial Utilities. I will try and explain this the best I can. While in Mallyx Legend you change #6 to a Neutral/Racial Utility and it is only changed in Mallyx Legend. Similar to above ground/water utility bars, each Legend utility bar could be partially customizable.

- A passive ability while in each Legend. If while in Mallyx you have a chance to give your opponent a random condition on critical, or a chance to drop heal orbs when struck while in Ventari it would make swapping Legends more advantageous and fun.
Right now Legend swapping feels like it is just to change Utilities and that is not very compelling especially in the current state they are in.

I feel just these changes would help the class feel unique and be a little more fun to play without a huge amount of re-working.

One idea some guy in chat and I had was to allow for you to choose from a pool of legend utility skills that all tie to the legend’s role. For instance, Ventari could have a set of skills for healing, a set of skills for damage mitigation, a set of skills for boons and buffing, and a set of skills for condi removal. Your utilities would still be tied to your legend’s role, but you would be able to choose how you provide that role.