Guild Wars 2

OK, I’ll just start by saying, this feedback thread is not going to include any specifics for the following:

Balance [The reason for this is because, well… it can change before release. Numbers are not final, condition types/how many per skill are not final, etc]
Core Revenant Issues [Of which there are many that I won’t go into here]

This feedback thread is going to primarily focus on the design of the Renegade elite spec and how it overall feels to play in my opinion. I’m by no means a pro, so please excuse me for blunders of core understanding.

I’m going to try structure the thread as best as possible for easy reading. Broken down into:
Shortbow
Elite Mechanic [F abilities and Kalla’s Fervor]
Legend [Utilities]
For each I’m going to:
- Break them down by skill and what I like and dislike about them
- Suggestions on what could be changed to improve that skill (if applicable)

So with that out of the way, let me get started!

—-Overall Renegade Thoughts—-
I’m just going to get straight to the point. It feels boring! Definitely in its current state.

I’m not 100% sure on the intention the devs had/have for the spec, but putting down what are essentially wells, that are boring to look at, make terrible noises and have bland effects isn’t what I feel makes the Revenant fun to play.

Switching between weapons and legends to quickly use the required abilities for the given situation make it great to play. It feels like a magical hybrid of Thief and Guardian… Renegade moves so far from that and almost forces you to sit in the legend to get any kind of benefit from it at all!

—-Shortbow—-

Overall, I actually think the shortbow is the best part of the new elite spec. Each skill has flavor and purpose and look great! I’m not a big fan of the sound effects it makes though! It seems like every skill is a blip noise. You cast Bloodbane Path or Spiritcrush and it just goes blip, blip, blip. Which doesn’t make them feel very impactful…. Not like Mace 2 and 3 anyway, which feel and sound great! I feel all shortbow skills need a better sound effect, however minor people feel that is! Give it a similar sound to what Citadel Bombardment uses, that’d make them feel awesome!

Shattershot
Looks good, functions well, not really much else wrong with it other than balance.

Bloodbane Path
A bit hard to read what’s happening with this skill as it kicks off so quickly, so maybe some slight animation adjustments to make it better to see, but overall a cool skill and works well.

Sevenshot
Now this skill is clunky to use (and not because half the arrows currently bug out). The idea of the skill is sound, but I feel it could be implemented far better. instead of having the reverse shotgun targeting that makes you feel that you have to back peddle in order to maximize it’s potential, why not allow the user the ability to choose the location the arrows congregate? This would still leave some difficulty for skill use, while providing some awesome skill shot moments! Think of Li Ming’s targeting of magic missiles from Heroes of the Storm if people have played. I know, shock horror using another game as a basis for improvement here ArenaNet =O. just my 2cents!

Spiritcrush
Good skill, works well. Maybe add a bit of fire inside the ring, to better represent why people are actually getting burnt. having fire around you and nothing on the inside doesn’t make a lot of sense as to why you’re getting burnt standing in blank.

Scorchrazor
Really like this skill! Feel it should be a knockback just because of the animation, but overall the function is really good non the less!

—-Elite Mechanic—-
Now, I’m not so sure how much of a fan I am for just adding some more F skills and calling it an elite spec that plays differently, because it really doesn’t make it feel as though it does. But I can sympathize it might be hard to mix up the Revenant play style given it’s design, so I’ll forgive that one for now.

F2 – Heroic Command
I feel this skill and all F skills need some serious balance tuning, but I did say I wouldn’t talk about balance, so I digress. Overall the skill works OK? Sorta… in it’s current form, bit boring, bit eh. I’ll talk more about how it could be really great when I cover my thoughts about Kalla’s Fervor design further down.

F3 – Citadel Bombardment
Love it, awesome looking and sounding skill. Probably the best part of the whole elite, which is a bit sad. I would however up the amount of missiles/arrows, un-traited that the skill fires, and reduce the damage a little bit to make it feel even more impactful and flavorful.

F4 – Order from Above
Errgghhh… Alacrity although good for the game, just doesn’t feel like it should be here! It just seems like a poor attempt to make another class option to provide it. Leave Alacrity to the Chronomancers, so that they stay unique!! I’m not sure what to change this to, but something else. Maybe take inspiration from what I have to say per Kalla’s Fervor.

Kalla’s Fervor
Now!!! This is where I feel you could make Renegade feel truly unique. As I was saying above about leaving Alacrity to the Chrono. Why not make Kalla’s Fervor sharable to allies and unique to the Renegade?? The class has a lot of built in components that help keep the up time of this buff, so numbers here or there may need to change. But Kalla is all about her “war band” right? What better way to spread that feeling, by having her act as a leader to a party and spread the buff? Thematically it’d be great and it’d also make the Revenant a solid RAID/Fractal/Dungeon group choice, same as how Chrono is now!! There would be some fiddling about traits and balance, but faaarrr out I think it’d transform the class!

—-Kalla Legend [Utilities]—-
Now… this is where I come to what I truly feel makes my claim of the class being boring! The animations for the utilities are boring, the sound effects are boring, the utility is boring, not to mention the balance is terrible, compounding the issue even further!

Now I don’t know if the intention was to make the class feel like a Ritualist… because is just… doesn’t! The Ritualist summoned spirits and could move them with him/her using skills. They looked and sounded cool as well.

I don’t know if this was an attempt to give the Revenant wells, without actually giving them wells! I just can’t grasp what the intention was!!!

I honestly feel this was ArenaNet trying to give the Revenant a strong group support option, but just failed terribly at making it feel good to play… Leaving people who do group content as AI bots that just auto attack and want to stab their eyes out.

I’m not even 100% sure how they could fix this without having to do some serious re-design of the whole elite spec.

I’m not going to go skill by skill on this one, as they all fall into the same category for me!

But I’ll try my best on some suggestions that could improve this part of the elite!

Suggestion 1
Instead of having each skill cast a Char that just dances in the middle of a ring for X flat energy cost, providing some sort of group buff, why not have it summon said “Leader” and a bunch of other char warriors/healers/etc that go out and do the effects to allies actively while slowly draining energy the longer they’re up.. giving the utilities the feeling that you’re actually summoning some kind of… I don’t know… war band maybe? this way the flavor of the skills at least improve. Sure, maybe this would make it feel like a Christmas tree with Revenant’s running around with 20-30 ghostly chars running next to them, but it’s better than a dancing char in the middle of some light mist.

Suggestion 2
All these suggestions are going to be some kind of re-work to the animations/feeling of the utilities, because that is what is so terrible about them. So similar to the above, instead of having a char summon and stand there dancing. Why not summon char(s) per skill, that immediately cast a single powerful skill at said location and then disappear. for attack skills, you have some run in from the mists with swords/axes/weapon of choice and attack as they run past the enemy, disappearing at the end of the animation… kind of like a bull rush charge type thing in a line. You could have a line of them appear near you and let off a volley of arrows at a location (wow, bow type synergy here???), summon some that stand next to mini catapults launching balls of fire…. I don’t know, there are so many different things in war that could be leveraged off to give these skills flavor while providing similar utility.

Suggestion 3
Remove summons all together! Use other things that are used in times of war, like battle cries, that give similar buffs to enemies in X radius around the Renegade. Maybe take some inspiration from GW1’s paragon class and have them do Leadership/Command skills and provide chants/echos out to allies. This would also fit perfectly into the Elona theme (Not that Kalla had anything to do with Elona… but whatever). The theme still remains with being some kind of leader and your war band can be your allies.

Yeah… This is a tough one… but it DEFINITELY needs some serious work. There is a very good reason why everyone is voting and complaining about the Renegade being the worst Elite Spec of this expansion.

So yeah! That is my 2 Cents guys! Tell me what you think and add to the feedback.

If ArenaNet aren’t looking through this feedback like they actively were last time round and nothing changes because “That’s how they wanted to do it” and the customer base’s opinion fall by the way side, then you’ll quickly see this profession/elite forgotten. A lot of people will be annoyed and probably cause some of those people to quit. But anyway!

I really loved your initiative here!

I like most of your suggestions and I honestly love some of them. I think all the flavour ones are spot-on and it’d be great if the devs got to implement them.

I also thought about your Shortbow #3 suggestion. It’d be really cool to be able to change the trail angle of the arrows from this ability. It’d basically mean that we can use it to its full potential with targets that are closer than 900 range and increase the skill it takes for somebody to use it properly. What I’d like to see is that the meeting point for the projectiles is marked by the mouse pointer, while the projectiles would still run for 900 range. It’d increase the possibilites and chaos that this skill brings to the table!

Regarding Kalla’s Fervor, I understand why they’d be afraid of letting us share it with allies. It could be countered, however, by removing our stacks when we shared the Fervor, so we need to build it and then share it and so on. I’m not too sure if F2 could be used for that end when traited, but then I love being able to have 10 stacks on, so… maybe remove the F3-enhancing trait and make it sort of baseline? Then we could free up a GM that makes F2 increase in energy but allows us to share Kalla’s Fervor instead of might? That’d be nice since we’d have 3 competing (and amazing) GM traits that allow us to support our allies depending on the situation or strategy, through Fervor, Alacrity or Might generation.

I know you didn’t want to get into balance but… I got an idea for some (or maybe all) of the utilities. The elite skill is bonkers amazing and we could learn from its design. And that’s thanks to the fire field it brings with it. I think it’d be really amazing if we could provide fields through our utilities (maybe not 10-second fields, mind you). The healing would clearly benefit a bunch from having a water field (2-3 blasts with mace? I’d fell in love). The other clear candidate would be the Icerazor dude: as the name implies, make it an Ice field and let it synergize with Corruption better. I think the rest of the utilities are good enough, mechanically. But then it’d give it more consistency if they gave a poison or ethereal field (for the bleeding charr) and dark (for the dazing charr). It’d be as simple as a 2-sec field, but it could clearly improve the utility and support possibilities of Kalla’s legend. Regarding flavour… I’d go all the way and call them Echos since lorewise it’d make sense for the warband to be a temporal echo from Kalla’s revolution and it makes them feel more detached from Ritualist’s spirits and their own thing. I think of them as Kalla’s memories of her lost warbands materializing from the mists. Also, there’s the paragon connection right there.

So cool that you started this thread! I have big hopes for the Renegade and this changes could really make it feel more unique.

Thanks!

The SB3 work like the li ming arcane missile…… https://youtu.be/-tDgACIFuNI?t=42

Uete.3805:

I really loved your initiative here!

I like most of your suggestions and I honestly love some of them. I think all the flavour ones are spot-on and it’d be great if the devs got to implement them.

I also thought about your Shortbow #3 suggestion. It’d be really cool to be able to change the trail angle of the arrows from this ability. It’d basically mean that we can use it to its full potential with targets that are closer than 900 range and increase the skill it takes for somebody to use it properly. What I’d like to see is that the meeting point for the projectiles is marked by the mouse pointer, while the projectiles would still run for 900 range. It’d increase the possibilites and chaos that this skill brings to the table!

Regarding Kalla’s Fervor, I understand why they’d be afraid of letting us share it with allies. It could be countered, however, by removing our stacks when we shared the Fervor, so we need to build it and then share it and so on. I’m not too sure if F2 could be used for that end when traited, but then I love being able to have 10 stacks on, so… maybe remove the F3-enhancing trait and make it sort of baseline? Then we could free up a GM that makes F2 increase in energy but allows us to share Kalla’s Fervor instead of might? That’d be nice since we’d have 3 competing (and amazing) GM traits that allow us to support our allies depending on the situation or strategy, through Fervor, Alacrity or Might generation.

I know you didn’t want to get into balance but… I got an idea for some (or maybe all) of the utilities. The elite skill is bonkers amazing and we could learn from its design. And that’s thanks to the fire field it brings with it. I think it’d be really amazing if we could provide fields through our utilities (maybe not 10-second fields, mind you). The healing would clearly benefit a bunch from having a water field (2-3 blasts with mace? I’d fell in love). The other clear candidate would be the Icerazor dude: as the name implies, make it an Ice field and let it synergize with Corruption better. I think the rest of the utilities are good enough, mechanically. But then it’d give it more consistency if they gave a poison or ethereal field (for the bleeding charr) and dark (for the dazing charr). It’d be as simple as a 2-sec field, but it could clearly improve the utility and support possibilities of Kalla’s legend. Regarding flavour… I’d go all the way and call them Echos since lorewise it’d make sense for the warband to be a temporal echo from Kalla’s revolution and it makes them feel more detached from Ritualist’s spirits and their own thing. I think of them as Kalla’s memories of her lost warbands materializing from the mists. Also, there’s the paragon connection right there.

So cool that you started this thread! I have big hopes for the Renegade and this changes could really make it feel more unique.

Thanks!

Thank you =)! I really appreciate the feedback and it sounds as though you’re on the same page as me!

I love the idea of the Grandmaster trait change you suggested! Providing real substantial choice in what play style you want to take!

The great thing about using the F2-F4 skills as well with it… is the flavor and style of the Renegade elite can move around with you regardless of whether you’re using the Kalla legend or not. Maybe shift the focus of Kalla’s Fervor more primarily to the F skills and how you share that buff, allowing you to be a condi rev, a power rev, a support rev, etc. while still spreading that leadership love!

Definitely agree with aligning the utilities more closely with Paragon, so they feel more relevant to the expansions location in the world, while still making thematic sense with Kalla being a war band leader. It would also leave an open path for a proper Ritualist style legend if we were to visit Cantha in the future.

I really like the Revenant and I wanted this elite spec to make me love it! But it’s struggling to do that for me in it’s current form. Hence all the flavor suggestions above.

I definitely agree balance has a big part of making a class feel enjoyable as well, and that utilities like the current elite provide a powerful buff…. I’m just not a big fan of how they have been executed… they feel very static and lack luster to use, which moves away from what the rest of the class is like to play. I get they want elite specs to change the play style… but I don’t think you need to re-define the class to do that… because that will ultimately end up muddying the water and all classes will start to feel the same.

I really hope Anet devs are looking through these forums and taking things on board and changing stuff accordingly. I’m just not sure this time round though. Last elite specs, all the forums had devs actively responding to peoples posts and you could really see the feedback being taken on board, especially with the Revenant!

It’s like a work place… good managers listen to their staff and take their feedback onboard and change things accordingly to have things work better…. I think it’s even more important for a game.. we are those workers, we are providing feedback to help better their game. At the end of the day, the game wouldn’t exist without us… so the worst thing they can possibly do is ignore us (not saying they are, but it feels a bit that way).

Thanks once again for the addition!

Noctis.3426:

The SB3 work like the li ming arcane missile…… https://youtu.be/-tDgACIFuNI?t=42

=O!!! So the functionality is there!!! All they need to do is fix the telegraph and we’re golden! having it in the game without the telegraph just feels a bit clunky! I think it’d make for some awesome plays!!!