Guild Wars 2

What do you think about Revenant Hammer 2 (Coalescence of Ruin), competitively?

Here is a full description of Revenant Hammer 2 (CoR):
Damage First Impact: 246 (1.00)?
Damage Second Impact: 369 (1.50)?
Damage Final Impact: 492 (2.0)?
Number of Impacts: 3
Number of Targets: 5
Range: 1,200
Cast time: 0.75 seconds
Cooldown: 2 seconds
Energy: 5

And for comparison, here a description of Guardian Hammer 2 (Mighty Blow or MB):
Damage: 647 (1.75)?
Number of Targets: 5
Radius: 180
Combo Combo Finisher: Blast
Range: 300
Cast time: 0.75 seconds
Cooldown: 5 seconds

For those who are unaware, the numbers in parenthesis are damage coefficients that are multiplied by power.

Those two skills share similar damage output, but differ in a few areas: Range, Cooldown, Impacts, and Energy. The range of CoR is 4 times farther than MB. The cooldown of CoR is 2s compared to MB’s cooldown of 5s. CoR has 3 impacts, while MB has only 1. CoR requires Energy, while MB does not. The required 5 energy for Coalescence of Ruin could be argued as a hindrance to the skill, however it’s currently too small of a value to effectively encourage energy management. These differences makes Coalescence of Ruin over twice as spammable, and with 4 times the range, miles more versatile than Mighty Blow.

During a long fight, Coalescence will simply out-damage Mighty Blow, especially when considering certain Revenant traits such as Malicious Reprisal (When one of your attacks is blocked, your next 2 attacks will be unblockable), Cruel Repercussion (When one of your attacks is negated, your next attack will deal 50% bonus damage), and Roiling Mists (Critical-hit chance has increased effectiveness when you are under the effect of fury aka +40% crit chance from fury as opposed to +20%).

Another interesting thing to consider is that Guardians have a lower base health pool than Revenants, which allows Revenants to gear with stats more towards damage output, while Guardians have to generally gear with stats more towards survivability.

This is just one comparison of potentially many out there. I chose CoR vs. MB, because they’re both #2 skills on a 2-handed weapon.

So, what do you think? What are your opinions on CoR, from a competitive standpoint?

Compare with Staff 2 fireattunement of elementalist…

2handed rangeweapon vs 2handed rangeweapon. Could bei interesting

Comparing Revenant hammer 2 with guardian hammer 2 simply because they both happen to be hammer skills is nonsensical. That makes as much sense as comparing Fire Ele staff 5 to Druid staff 5

I don’t think you can honestly ignore the energy cost of any ability, even one that is 5. The reason is because we don’t operate in a vacuum and actually use a variety of abilities. The best example of this is, of course, upkeep abilities. If you are at -4 upkeep and at 1 energy a second then the effective cool down on CORuin is 5 seconds because if you don’t you will eventually run out of energy at that rate. It also adds up in other upkeep scenarios as well. For example if you’re using Impossible Odds and are at -5 then doing a CORuin just took off a second of Impossible Odds time.

Furthermore I think it’s faulty to compare any other existing class or mechanics to other classes. Class balance is a tapestry of numerous factors all coming together from passive defenses (health pool) to weapon skills to utilities and traits. Cherry picking out a single aspect, of any character, and directly comparing to a cherry picked aspect of another character is faulty and misleading. You could no more reasonably compare Mighty Blow to Lava Font or Heart Seeker than to CORuin.

Furthermore you ignore huge and obvious differences in abilities. While you do acknowledge the 1200 range you ignore the animation time that gives ample time to move out of it at it’s most heaviest damage. This is in addition to the numerous and well documented bugs currently with the skill such as it’s animation not lining up with damage as well as unreliability on uneven terrain. This also fails to point out that a blast finisher on kitten cool down makes for one of the most reliable blast finishers in the game to date.

… Whoa… You put a fair bit of work into this post, and I thank you for that, however…

It seems that your willingly not mentioning a lot of other factors here, all of which do play into the skills.

• 1: Guardian’s Health Value is a direct result of the Guardian’s Virtue of Resolve, which is on almost always. It also has no bearing what-so ever on the weapons in question.

• 2: The Rev Hammer is the Rev’s only range weapon choice.
  The Hammer is the only range weapon on the Revenant. Guardian Hammer is not a ranged weapon, it’s a Melee Crowd-Control weapon.

This effects a few things on your post, first the Range issue. There is supposed to be a difference in range. That is one of the defining factors of a ranged weapon.

Next, Your post is like comparing dagger on Elementalist to the Necromancer. The two weapons, while called the same thing, function drastically differently.

• 3: Multi-Hit Vs Single Hit.
  Aside from the fact Anet claims this is new tech which was not available to them when making the other base classes, If you can only hit someone once, what does it matter that their are two other hits? Also, each of these hits are considerably weaker then Might Blow.

• 4: Energy is Irrelevant in this discussion.
  Energy, while it matters to the overall gameplay of the Revenant, is in no way comparable to to anything on the Guardian. Therefore, total moot to bring up, much like the Guardian’s lower health pool.

• 5: CoR Vs Might Blow should be about the skills and their tool tips, and not the Trait-lines and talents of the two classes. If your going to mention Traits and other passive effects, and a perfectly modeled situation for CoR to shine in, you might as well also compared the damage of a Full Nomad Guardian’s Might Blow to a Full Zerk Rev’s CoR for all the accuracy your giving your argument.

While your post is very nicely set up, your focusing a a very small part of the overall picture and only mentioning evidence that supports your claim… instead of letting the evidence talk for it’s self and drawing it’s own conclusion.

Remind me to call you if I need a Lawyer.

I think the point they were making was this…

If you compare the effectiveness of the skill to other skills of other classes, the amount of times you can use it vs how effective the damage is, there does seem to be some imbalance there. Yes, the skill has some other odd behavior with terrain, but with a 2s cool down it can hit people for 7-9k twice in the time it takes for a guardian to hit people once for 5-6k with hammer 2.

The point they were making is that it is a tad bit out of line with other abilities given to other classes.

Example of how to bring it in line again…

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vlAQNAS8MA-TVRQwAbU+BY/he6Gwq+jKlgAA-w

leave the first hit: 1311
Second (Edit): 1623
Final (Edit): 1945

Then increase the cool down to 4 seconds

The skill will still have big payoff since it is harder to land than some other skills but it wont allow you to hit nearly 10k on glassy targets on a 2 second recharge either.

Now they did buff the damage on it already once because of complaints that it didnt hit hard enough. I’m going to reference Goldilocks theory here and apply it to gw2, we have our 2 extremes that have been tested. Now we know which one is just right.

You can’t just compare 2 arbitrary skills from 2 different professions, on weapons designed for different purposes no less.

Guardian hammer 1 gives perma protection! Why can’t rev hammer give perma protection as well?

maybe you cant compare the 2 skills but… hammer 2 is currently way too strong and either needs a damage nerf or a cooldown increase.

Doesn’t need a damage nerf. Maybe increase the cd very slightly. This is our only ranged option afterall.

Altair.8402:

You can’t just compare 2 arbitrary skills from 2 different professions, on weapons designed for different purposes no less.

Guardian hammer 1 gives perma protection! Why can’t rev hammer give perma protection as well?

Exactly. You have to look at the entire range of abilities on the weapon and the role they perform for the given profession. Revenant Hammer 2 has 1200 range, why doesn’t Guardian hammer 2?

it is also slow line aoe , a melee enemy walking around u wont get hit by CoR , while it will get hit by MB.
u say its too strong to hit 10k on squishys ..u need to be squishy urself to do so and a squishy thief/mesmer can bust higher + out of stealth.
or take killshot for example a ranged skill with rather low cd , u can make it 100% crit and a few more improvements, it will hit more then 10k on squishy targets + u cant just walk out of the dmg – u have to dogge ( reflect wont work if war uses signet of might).