Feedback on Stances and Specialisations
There’s the matter of the trait paths/specialisations as well. They have some rather OP options within themselves, it feels like, but they don’t synergise as well together as they could. Like, okay, you get to choose three. Well, you can expect any two of them to actually work together in a nice, tight, fluid manner. In contrast, I feel like right now Engineer and Necromancer have the best examples to look to for how different Specialisations can be made to work together very well. For example, my main character, an Engineer, is running Firearms/Alchemy/Inventions, full sinister Build and Pistol/Shield. He does a lot of condition application on crit, and in Firearms he can choose—right at the adept level—between three traits that benefit the build. Pistol condis lasting longer so he can stack more, vuln/swift on crit, or increased crit chance against enemies within range. Now with Revenant I feel like it just sort of ends there. I would take Chemical Rounds to increase condi duration because i already have high crit rate and defy the meta by using my pistol/shield skills a lot. Other players would probably be using Grenades or Bombs with this build, and if bombs, then High Caliber to get that extra 10% crit rate would be a no brainer. But what Engineer does that Revenant isn’t doing well at all right now is making you think again because Heavy Armour Exploit—the one that gives the enemy Vuln and the player swiftness on crit—has to be considered in the context of one of my other Specialisations/Trait Paths: Alchemy. In my Alchemy traits I have Invigorating Speed, which is providing me Vigor every time I gain Swiftness. Which I get on every critical hit. Then moving on, my Grandmaster Trait in Alchemy is Iron Blooded. SO. Suddenly my motivation is changed. I want to take Heavy Armour Exploit in Firearms, which was the weakest option before, because not only is it applying an extra condition that makes Modified Ammunition (Firearms Grandmaster Trait) twice as effective (Vulnerability allowing Modified Ammunition to give me +2% dmg to the target, who receives +1% dmg from the condition in the first place), but it’s also giving me swiftness and, thanks to Invigorating Speed, vigor, which means that thanks to Iron Blooded, I’m taking -4% dmg from all physical damage sources around me.
That’s just one small example. To restate: I’ve noticed that Necromancer and (after specialisations replaced trait paths) Engineer do this better than pretty much any class right now. Revenant barely seems to even consider the idea at all. As a player, I revel in working out builds in this manner, like a puzzle with very easily observed results that can make or break an effort to achieve something. and Revenant let me down in that regard. You’ll see me bring this up again when I get to the Legendary Dwarf Stance.
Speaking of stances…
Legendary Centaur Stance
I feel like ArenaNet is really pushing Ventari’s Tablet. They chose to highlight it as an example of their new class, to show it off, and there are…a bunch of traits available in the Beta having to do with it. But…most of the Revenant testers I’ve come across just…really hate the Tablet. I’m not that much of a fan of it myself. And I’ll tell you why. It’s unresponsive, and you’re penalised for trying to use it in a fluid manner. ArenaNet was very excited about the Tablet healing allies it crosses over as it travels, but even with Cleric’s gear and traited for maximum outgoing healing increase, the heal isn’t all that fantastic—at least, not enough to justify how difficult it is to use. The Tablet travels in a straight line, and you can’t change its path mid-travel. You can’t send it to a targeted ally. And people…move. All the time, constantly. The people you’re trying to heal usually aren’t there by the time the tablet gets there. And if you try to anticipate where they will be going your timing has to be absolutely perfect to make it work. Also, because it takes class energy to move the tablet, you are now restricted in what you can do next. Such as…the class’s only condi removal other than a one condition removal dodge roll. The one condition removal which sucks a tonne of class energy to use. So if you just moved the tablet…you probably have enough to use your condi removal 9 skill. Now you can use auto attack and nothing else. You know what Ventari’s Tablet is great for? Well, because you’re penalised for moving the tablet…stacking. Stand in this spot and dump heals. Dump ALL THE HEALS. By which I mean set the burst heal skill to auto-attack and only use your auto-attack. What I’d really like is to see Ventari’s tablet traitable to follow me around without sucking my class energy dry. I’d also like to see the burst healing skills be instant. Usually by the time I’ve used them and they’ve actually executed I’m very nearly dead if I’m not already. “Well, you need to think ahead. That’s part of the challenge and skill of the class.” Okay, yeah, granted, that’s a skill you need to cultivate. But the sheer amount of foresight you need to cultivate to play Centaur Stance correctly right now is basically precognition. You can’t know when a stealthed Thief is going to appear and knock down 75% of your health and then finish you off. You can’t know that you or an ally just happened to miss the evasion from one of Giganticus Lupicus’s devastating attacks. And when things like that happen, you better hope you haven’t used up so much of your class energy that you can’t use that burst heal. And you better hope you or they can actually survive long enough for the move to actually trigger. Not even mentioning the ambiguous range of the move.
Protective Solace also feels massively disappointing, since, although a powerful ability, it has limited functionality. Seeing as it devours your class energy at such an alarming rate, it should really have some sort of other effect when Diminish Solace is used to collapse the field. I find myself thinking of the Guardian’s Shield of Absorption. when you detonate it, you get burst healing. Why is this a good idea for the Solace skill? Well, it’s such a powerful niche ability that there’s the strong urge to simply have it up as often as possible, perpetually. Which is sort of unskillful and a cop-out, not to mention unfair, to a degree (though as I will allude to below, I did do exactly that at least once). While simultaneously being an energy hog, that drains an inexperienced player of their ability to do…just about anything before they really realise what they’re doing or how to play the class. By making Diminish Solace have an effect—burst healing does seem to be the smartest thing to do, and I don’t mean that dumb “drops healing orbs” thing—you encourage the player to do something other than keep the shield up as often as possible, since a burst heal may be more desirable or necessary at the time, and new players will have something encouraging them to not totally deplete their energy resource.
By the by, I think this is a bug, but it’s sort of rubbish that when you die while the tablet is summoned, the tablet seems to disappear with you, but your skillbar doesn’t get the memo. So when you go to bring your tablet to you, you find it isn’t actually in existence anymore…which means that you can’t detonate it with the Elite Skill…which means you have to switch Stances and then wait for your F1 to cooldown before you can switch back to Centaur Stance and spawn a new tablet.
(edited by Casys.8290)
Legendary Demon Stance
This is the stance I like and want to use the most. I also feel it’s the most problematic stance of the three available at the moment. What I’m really hung up on right now—and I was pretty sure ahead of time I would be—is that to use the Demon Legend you have to essentially be a Corruption Necro, which I always avoided like, well, the plague. Corruption Necro being a build in which you take primarily, if not all, Corruption Skills, which apply powerful boons to the character but also inflict conditions on them. “Well maybe you just suck at managing conditions. Get on level, scrub.” Okay, granted, I may not be that great at it. I’m not because I never wanted to learn how because it just seemed like an unnecessary risk when I could play a more powerful and versatile necro without all that work of killing myself. I think Anet believes that granting resistance and giving you benefits for thresholds of condis on you being more than the enemy would make it work. They’re wrong, and I’ll tell you why. The key difference between Corruption Necromancer and Mallyx-Channelling Revenant is that the Necro has the ability to transfer conditions. Not copy conditions. Transfer them. They actually have a bunch of different ways of doing this. I’m not logged in looking at my primary Necromancer right now, but I know that he’s currently running by default three different ways to transfer conditions from himself to enemies. It constitutes all of his condition removal; transfer does. And I’m pretty sure he could trait for more. Not 100% sure. Revenant has…multiple ways of copying conditions, but because Anet wants you to pass these thresholds that make the Demon Stance skills more powerful, no means of removing them. The only way they can remove them is by dodging as many times as you can (if you’re traited to remove conditions on dodge; hope you don’t need to dodge attacks) switching to Centaur Stance (remove one condition if you’re traited for it), summon Ventari’s Tablet (because it doesn’t spawn when you enter the stance; I suppose you could have a rune that removes a condition on a heal skill), then use the 9 key Centaur Stance Skill to remove some conditions and heal for each condi you remove. So…assuming you haven’t died from sheer condi damage you’re trying to remove, attacks from the enemy/enemies you’re fighting, or simply been interrupted ten times to Sunday in the process, you may have just successfully removed…some of your conditions if you’re fighting an enemy/enemies who are also applying conditions. Oh, and of course there’s the possibility that you died during this time because you didn’t have the class energy to actually do any given one of these steps.
Something that came to my attention while writing this review is that the Jalis Heal skill removes up to three conditions and grants retaliation for each condition removed. This is much better than trying the above procedure, and, since there is no CondiDmg/Precision/Heal gear set in the game (For what reason I seriously cannot possibly fathom—as much as I love Sinister, ArenaNet needs to stop developing redundant Berserker/Assassin and Rampager/Sinister sets and provide more variety. I could go on a much further tangent from here about a discussion I had with some friends about how that’s holding back a proliferation of Healing Builds. But I won’t.) Demon/Centaur dual stance doesn’t really synergise all that well in the first place. I’ve definitely adapted to Mallyx/Jalis instead, since I can also inflict slow and taunt and weakness while gaining stability instead of…basically wasting everything trying to force the tablet to do anything. The issue here is that Dwarf Stance, while lending its condi removal and utilities to the Demon Stance, has its 9 skill hammers and elite skill 100% useless to the combination. I guess this is acceptable since you’re probably wanting to conserve class energy while you’re in that stance until you switch back to Demon Stance…but it means you can’t readily keep the pressure on the enemy while you’re in that stance. It’s a solution…but a flimsy one. And to trait to make it less flimsy, you have to make some very painful sacrifices. This goes back to the poor synergy between trait paths I spoke about nearer the outset., which I will address more after talking about the Legendary Dwarf Stance exclusively. See below for more discussion on Jalis.
(edited by Casys.8290)
Now, I know some of you are thinking: “Well you missed the heal skill that Demon Stance has, Empowering Misery. It heals you more for each condition you have. Like Necro’s Consume Conditions.” Nah. I remembered it. Except unlike Consume Conditions, Empowering Misery doesn’t remove conditions. It does give you another condition which restricts your endurance regen…meaning that one of your only condition removals that you spent a trait getting is now handicapped. Also it has a 30s cooldown, so…keep building those conditions you didn’t clear, thus more rapidly diminishing your health you just spent time and class energy replenishing some of.
Ultimately I love this stance because I love conditions, and the Mallyx theme is super cool and appropriate. I scoffed when I first saw the Elite Skill in Demon Stance was a Transformation type skill, but I got over that fast because it is such an awesome Elite Skill. It’s useful, easy to use—easily the most fluid non-weapon skill the class has at the moment—and very cool (“Now you will know true unlimited power!”). And what drives me nuts about it is that it’s pretty easy to fix.
Empowering Misery should work like Consume Conditions in that it actually removes conditions.
Embrace the Darkness should transfer conditions each pulse rather than copy them.
…and that’s it. That’s all this stance really needs to be properly functional. One of the options they provided in the Beta test package of runes and sigils and such were Superior Runes of Lyssa. I used those for a significant chunk of my testing time because, ha, wow, one of the things that makes Embrace the Darkness so awesome is that it lends itself very strongly to the Runesets that provide a 6th Tier Bonus that triggers on Elite skill use, and Runes of Lyssa convert up to 5 conditions on the player into boons one elite skill use. I’ve no doubt ArenaNet anticipated this, which is why they provided that Rune as a beta test option. It comes with precision too, so you can apply more condis on critical hits. But here’s the catch…the effectiveness of Embrace the Darkness as an elite skill is more or less halved by the fact that you now probably only have one or two conditions—if you have any left—to copy to the enemy. It actually makes that particular Elite skill significantly weaker. So what I’m actually doing is restricting myself to one specific Runeset which will allow me to survive using my class. This is why I stated #2 just above. Embrace the Darkness transferring conditions rather than copying them maintains what makes it so kitten currently, while also allowing a Rev using Demon Stance to actually maintain themselves in a fight.
Now, I would like to take a minute to talk about how the weapon skills interact with the utility skills in this stance. Well, one in particular. Let’s assume, that, like an intelligent person you choose weapons for your character that synergise/compliment the build you’re going for. If you’re doing a condition build, you’re going to choose weapons that inflict conditions. This is natural. For a Revenant this is even more important because all the skills, weapon and non-weapon, use the class energy pool. Which means that if you choose a weapon that doesn’t have many condition application skills, then you have to spam the energy-eating utility skills to apply any conditions. Which…doesn’t work. SO. Revenant. We have Mace/Axe. Which is really cool and I like it. Wide variety of condition application with a nice little CC in there—just how I like my pistol/shield Engineer. But looky here, it’s definitely intended to be melee. Well, that’s cool, we’ll finally have a use for the Superior Rune of Rata Sum (which I’ve been looking for for what seems like forever). But then there’s…Unyielding Anguish, the Key 9 skill. It displaces your foe and inflicts self-cripple. Let’s think about that. You’ve just displaced all the foes you’re trying to attack, instantly whisking them away from you. And you’re melee. Which means you need to stop what you’re doing and chase after them. …While you’re crippled. “Well your Axe 4 skill is a gap closer and your Mace 2 has good reach on it.” You are absolutely correct! Except you just used class energy to displace the enemies. And if they moved in towards you again they just changed location again before you could do that. You may not have the class energy to use those skills. Mace 2 takes forever to channel. “But Zeth, it applies torment, and then forces the enemy to relocate, which means they move around, making torment more powerful!” Yeah it does…unless they’re one of PvE’s many enemies with range. Or any given PvP/WvW player who simply knows to clear the torment, switch to range, or simply not move. If anything, I helped the enemy escape from me by moving them away from my other melee attacks. That is to say…all of my attacks.
I guess what I’m saying here is that Unyielding Anguish is totally counterintuitive to the point of being a liability to the playstyle of the condition Revenant. I assume this will be rectified when the class is finished and there’s an extra utility skill I can choose from to put in that slot. I’ll simply never use Unyielding Anguish. Well. Almost never. One very good use I found for it was for keeping enemies off of points in PvP matches. Unfortunately, because of the condition management problems discussed above, Demon Stance is mostly a death sentence in PvP right now.
I get the feeling that most people will assert that the problems I’m complaining about here stem from a misuse or abuse of the skills in question. Which is a fair assertion, but in the interest of fairness, what is the point of building a class entirely around swapping utility skill sets if you don’t anticipate heavy use of those skills?
Legendary Dwarf Stance
To be honest the stance itself seems fine. I have no problems with its abilities. Because its utility skills are actually all about utility, it doesn’t encourage spamming them, which means I can manage my class energy much better. One thing that needs refining though is how this path works with traits. One thing I saw that I really liked was Empowering Vengeance—it’s a Retribution Specialisation Grandmaster trait that gives Might each time you’re struck while under the effects of Retaliation. There’s also Improved Aggression: Taunted enemies do less damage. There should be more things like that, similar to the Engineer’s Invigorating Speed mentioned earlier—“When you gain swiftness, you also gain vigor!”. What would work really well would be something like “When you gain stability you also gain X.” Or “When you Taunt an enemy, you gain Y”. I mean heck, we already have Empowering Vengence—can’t be that hard to expand the paradigm. Really, anything that would enable the Dwarf Stance to passively enhance other Stances for a renewed attack while you’re unable to lay on the pressure you’re focusing on in your other stance. Or perhaps simply make it an all out self-utility Stance. “Heal when you use a skill that uses energy” is a skill I’ve definitely taken to help in this regard. What that needs, though, is to take a lesson from Thief, and scale the amount of healing to the amount of energy used.
Dwarf Stance may also benefit from something that could be borrowed from the Elementalist to benefit all the Stances: “Gain stats when channelling a Legend”. Centaur Stance could give healing, Demon, condition duration or damage, Dwarf could be toughness, etc.
Now, I promised I’d return to this topic of trait synergy, Dwarf Stance and such back when I was talking about survivability with the Demon Stance. So here we go.
Why Specialisation Synergy Currently Sucks
Let’s say, for example, that I wanted to take Empowering Vengeance. If you’ve actually been paying attention to this review, then you realise this is the sort of synergy I really love, and as far as practicality goes, it means that what conditions are still on my foe while I’m dealing with survival are doing more damage, what fewer blows I land on them while I’m dealing with survival do more damage. It makes things work better, see? There’s also Enduring Recovery, which grants endurance when you’re hit, and Retaliatory Evasion, which grants retaliation after dodge rolling. “All right, see, now there’s some synergy!” No. You’re wrong. Stop interrupting me. That’s exactly the problem I was talking about at the outset. Those traits may all work together very well in the context I’ve given…but to take them in the first place, I’m forced to drop some of the other traits in the other specialisations that would work with them. The obvious specialisation to drop to take Retribution would be Salvation, because it deals so much more heavily with healing, party support and Ventari’s Tablet, which, well, screw that with the Condition Build being used as the example here. But if I give that up…suddenly I lose the ability to inflict Blind entirely. Well okay, big deal, you have to make concessions. I guess another concession I’m simply loathe to give in to but must would be dazing foes when I use an Elite Skill. But I also lose—and this one’s a big deal—the ability to lose a condition on dodge. No more losing conditions on dodge. That is the sort of poor synergy I’m talking about. Imagine, if you will, that I’m inflicting conditions on myself using Mallyx while fighting a condition-application heavy opponent. Dude, it doesn’t matter if I get prolonged Resistance boons from every 6-0 skill I use, I can’t keep the boon up forever, and when it’s down, I drown under the staggering weight of all the conditions. Switching to Centaur stance has been established as a bad idea, and switching to Dwarf stance could potentially clear one condition, and its heal can remove up to three more. …while more conditions are being heaped upon me mercilessly. But now, oh ho ho, this is the sort of thing I as a player would live for, now imagine I could remove a condition on dodge and receive endurance on hit (with a cooldown, we don’t want things to be OP). Suddenly, I have a way to cope. I can dodge around and lose conditions, and when I can’t, I can stack up some resistance until I can again. Will I take no condition damage? Unlikely, but we aren’t going for invincible, since that would simply be unfair. We’re going for survivable. And that would work. A good, clever player who is adept at managing their endurance, class energy, boon duration and heal skills would be able to put up one hell of an impressive fight for who knows how long with that setup.
But no. Revenant sucks at inter-specialisation synergy. So this can’t happen. This was just one example. I could give up Invocation or Corruption instead, losing my only stun break and a bunch of fury that helps me continue to apply conditions as well as the ability use those handy Jalis skills to help me survive more often by giving up Invocation. Or lose almost all my ability to grant myself resistance by giving up Corruption, which is simply a no-go.
Weapon Skills!
I don’t actually think I’m going to go into weapon skills in this review. Hammer and Mace/Axe were both basically fine and I didn’t have any real problem with them aside from spit and polish being needed. Didn’t really use Staff, though it seemed sort of superficially lame; lacked the martial artistry I expected melee staff to have. I expected them to be flipping over and spinning past enemies like the Thief does with Dagger/Dagger—which I suppose is why I had actually been hoping for a melee-staff Warrior specialisation that doesn’t seem to be coming. What staff has going for it more than anything else is the impending hilarity of seeing every staff-rev in the game 5-skill itself off every cliff in the game. I look forward to seeing that. Especially in Skyhammer PvP matches.
I did want to end on an amusing and entertaining anecdote about something that I really enjoyed with the Revenant class though. On a whim I decided to try a bunker Rev in PvP. So before the Foefire match we’d rolled began I threw together a Cleric’s Build with Hammer for a weapon and Retribution/Invocation/Salvation Specialisations with Jalis/Ventari stances. Proceeded to hold Graveyard solo after the team initially took it, sometimes 4v1, and made all but four of the kills in the match. Died only once when I was forced into a protracted 1v1 against their necro featuring me on the offensive, which is owing to Rev being rubbish with condi removal. But yeah, finishing’s a breeze with Inspiring Reinforcement, and between the Tablet healing me and destroying projectiles, I can stand on a point and destroy ranged attacks with Protective Solace, while beating melee fighters senseless as I outheal their attacks. So you know, if you want to never die but stand in just one spot…Legendary Centaur Stance Revenant does indeed have your back.