Guild Wars 2

Like the title says—my main criticism of the Revenant, is that it is fundamentally designed on every level, to limit the ways a player can customize their character:

Utilities completely depend on legends, of which there will only be 5, and even choosing the fifth one forces you into an elite spec. From the five, you can choose two. I wrote about this in another thread, but this gives you a total of 5C2 = 10 possible combinations for utility skills. Other professions have at least 4 healing skills, 20 utilities to choose 3 from, and 3 possible elite skills—so 4 * 20C3 * 3 = 54,720 different combinations for the 6-0 half of the bar.

Most of the 55k choices in the base classes lead to interesting modifications in play styles and customization to make your profession fit what you want to do with it. Every utility/healing skill has a situation where it shines, a proper way to use it, and a set of traits to support it. Legends take that systemic depth and toss it out the windows without offering a suitable replacement

Revenants can’t switch weapons. Of all the design choices, this one makes the least sense to me. Clearly, each weapon is built to favor a certain legend—which is constraining in it’s own right but we’ll ignore that in favor of more quantifiable issues—yet you only get one weapon with two legends. For comaprison, here are other profession loadout options:

• Warrior: 4 (TH) + 3(MH) * 5 (OH) = 19 sets, from which you can pick 2 so 19*18 loadouts = 342
• Elementalist: (1 + 2*2)[possible equipped sets] * (5C0 + 5C1+5C2+5C3) [possible utility conjures] * 2[possible elite conjure] = 252 without even counting attunements
• Guardian: 3+3*3 = 12, 12*11 = 132
• Ranger: 3+2*4 = 11, 11*10 = 110
• Mesmer: 2+2*4 = 10, 10*9 = 90
• Necro: 1+3 * 3 = 10, 10 * 9 = 90
• Engie: 3 * (4C0 + 4C1 + 4C2 + 4C3) [utility kits] * 2 [elite kit] = 90
• Thief: 1 + 3 * 2 = 7, 7*6 = 42
• Revenant: 2 + 2 * 2 = 6

Note that I’m not even counting the extra option elite specializations will add to everyone, and giving ANet the benefit of the doubt and assuming Shiro will add another main-hand/off-hand option to the revenant. Even with these biases in favor of the revenant, ever single other class has an order of magnitude more tool sets they can bring to a fight. Heck, even if revenant could switch weapons they would still have the fewest loadout options, at 30.

The entire skill bar bar requires energy. As a revenant, you can either spam AA or you can forget about using your utilities. No other class has to give up half their skill bar to use the other half, so I can’t quantify this problem as well as the others, but it’s bad.

This one, at least, could potentially be helped by a re-balance of how fast energy is accumulated and how much skills cost in energy. However, I think I’ve already demonstrated how little freedom revenant offers players—the current consequence of the energy mechanic is to offer even less freedom in play-styles.

In short, the Revenant is broken, and it’s not an issue of balance or “it’s only partially finished.” Revenant is broken because unless there are some massive changes coming to the class that haven’t been announced, when ANet is finished with it, every single revenant will play the same. When revenant was still an idea on a whiteboard, ANet made a terrible mistake in designing it so that once you choose two legends and a weapon, your entire build is pigeonholed. Even if all the bugs were fixed, all the promised features were added, and all the weapons properly balanced for activation time and damage coefficients, this class would still be fundamentally broken.

I really like the concept and the style of the revenant. I want it to work and be fun. However, the class has deep issues that are not “Beta test” issues, which make it less fun and which frankly defies the core principles GW2 was built on when it first came out, eschewing the Holy Trinity because of the way Trinity games constrain players into specific builds.

I don’t like being so negative, but revenant really needs a lot of help. I’m hoping better defining the problem will be constructive.

The lack of build diversity is biggest concern. Having your utilities selected for you in four or or five packages plus only one weapon is not good.

Which is a shame. I actually like the class a great deal. But the class needs More CHOICES.

+1

This is definitely the issue I saw. It extends past Legends and weapons in the Specializations, too, due to the fact that each spec is tied so inextricably to a legend. So you HAVE to choose your spec based on your legend, and no matter which legends you choose, they will always render one of your spec lines completely useless.

So yeah. Gutted build diversity, and near-useless spec lines makes for a very monolithic profession.

I agree with this, but at the same time I see what ANet is trying to do.

Saying it is fundamentally broken isn’t wrong, matter of fact when they developed GW2 they dropped Energy because it was a crazy balancing act they couldn’t keep up with. (Anyone from GW1 knows this)

I kinda predicted the Rev would be a pain to balance due to that alone. And this is purely talking about CDs and Energy, much less the weapon and legend locking utility problem. I think the latter two need to be addressed most, with energy being balanced last.

I can see two relatively easy choices for expanding Revenant options:

1. Weapon swapping. In the least, it would allow us to pair the weapon with the Legend, but it also gives us the option to swap between melee and ranged. Engi has a similar problem, but at least they can pick kits (bombs, toolkit, flamethrower) to get around the occasional no-ranged restriction.
2. Add more skills to each Legend, and allow us to choose. It’d be a ton of work, but having each Legend with two healing skills, two elites, and 5-6 utilities. I’ll admit, I got hopeful when I clicked the arrow on my tab and saw space for skills, only to realize that all I could do is swap their positions. Adding skills gives us some much-needed freedom.

Thinking about it a little, I don’t mind our heal, utility, and elite being locked to legends and swapping them like weapons.

IMO though, if we are not able to adjust utilities to customize builds to match to weapons, maybe instead they can introduce the ability to select different skills on each weapon to account for it. That way each weapon can be customized to suit the legends utilities. It’s not entirely a radical concept, given most utilities and traits in current classes are selected to match the locked weapons skills. Just turn that concept on its head. I’d even be willing to be locked into one weapon set during combat if this was the case. Because I can see how swapping legends which swap utilities and being able to swap to another weapon set all in combat is not quite fair.

I don’t know how achievable such a system would be however in GW2s with the way weapons are set up.

Rune Darkmoor.3269:

Thinking about it a little, I don’t mind our heal, utility, and elite being locked to legends and swapping them like weapons.

IMO though, if we are not able to adjust utilities to customize builds to match to weapons, maybe instead they can introduce the ability to select different skills on each weapon to account for it. That way each weapon can be customized to suit the legends utilities. It’s not entirely a radical concept, given most utilities and traits in current classes are selected to match the locked weapons skills. Just turn that concept on its head. I’d even be willing to be locked into one weapon set during combat if this was the case. Because I can see how swapping legends which swap utilities and being able to swap to another weapon set all in combat is not quite fair.

I don’t know how achievable such a system would be however in GW2s with the way weapons are set up.

I’ve thought that, but then what’s the real functional difference between Revenant and Elementalist, except revenant only gets 2 swaps? Is switching 6-0 with a customizable 1-5 distinct enough from switching 1-5 with customizable 6-0 to justify charging cash-money for a new class?

The more I think about it, the more I think each elite skill should be a transformation into the legend in question (and that’s considering I don’t like transformations in general), complete with it’s own weapon & skills. On the surface, that doesn’t seem like it would really increase build options, but it ensures that you can mix any weapon with any two legends and make it work if you want (since no matter what you choose, you will always have an appropriate set of weapon skills at your disposal).

Yeah, however they design them, they need to make sure that the total number of options available to a Revenant are equivalent to the options available to other classes.

Misguided.5139:

The more I think about it, the more I think each elite skill should be a transformation into the legend in question (and that’s considering I don’t like transformations in general), complete with it’s own weapon & skills. On the surface, that doesn’t seem like it would really increase build options, but it ensures that you can mix any weapon with any two legends and make it work if you want (since no matter what you choose, you will always have an appropriate set of weapon skills at your disposal).

A transformation would be pretty sweet. With a very important caveat.
Transformations are terrible overall, because they’re stiff. They don’t work within the fluid combat system that GW2 has. They’re also fairly short, so knowing what they do requires some off-site research.