Guild Wars 2

I played last beta weekend and have been trying it out both in PvE and PvP this weekend.

Overall the class is complex to use with multiple resource and cooldown management, and many skills that seem designed to be used with other skills.

In PvE you can get some decent rhythm going but damage is still disappointing without building for it, and you seem very vulnerable to bursty enemies (like the enemies in the story preview) unless you bunker build very heavily, in which case you struggle to output any damage.
For a class with two heals it feels less impressive than most classes single heal, especially the Assasin’s healing, this seems simply terrible.
The Assasin healing requires you to precast before you engage, or waste time casting a non-instant heal in combat. This means that you either waste potential healing, or that you can easily get in an emergency situation before your healing starts to take effect.
Demon form healing synergises very well with the other abilities on the toolbar, however, and while slightly more complex to use effectively, I think it works well.
Weapon set swapping suffers from being an afterthought, in that each weapon set possible feels very clunky when you try to build together-especially since the largest damage source is burns and torment, which are only available on a single weapon set.

Coming to PvP, Revenant has been hugely underwhelming.
Single target abilities are few and far between with low damage (even when I was using strength runes with might stacking), and the AoE abilities have massive tells.
You also suffer hugely from any form of control, be it blinds or KD’s or stuns, even after building specifically keeping these in mind. These are also very easy to cast on you while you’re winding up for the attacks worth landing, which means at best you bet stunned and interrupted, or even worse you get blinded and waste the entire ability.
[Edit]You also have very few reliable stunbreaks, making you even more vulnerable to these abilities.
Weapon sets also have little synergy, with weak singletarget skills and slow AoE’s, resulting in little consistency of role.
Finally, your movement abilities have far too short a range compared to other classes, and cannot be free targetted to give mobility. This is especially glaring combined with your lack of swiftness options, and your lack of movement traits.

Now that is what I call real Feedback, I agree with you in every single point

This pretty much mirrors my experience; the revenant needs a lot of work.

The best damage I could put out was with the sword auto-attack and vengeful hammers, and that was pretty pitiful compared to most classes, in addition to be being boring. My rotation has pretty much been Vengeful Hammers → Auto until out of energy → Swap to Shiro → Impossible Odds → Auto until out of energy → Swap to Jalis etc.

In pvp I was using impossible odds to “quick-cast” hammer skills because that’s the only way I can get them to hit something, and even then it’s incredibly easy to dodge. I tried berserker builds (damage too low) soldier/knight/cele tanky builds (no protection really hurts this) condi builds (this one is actually really tricky and I’m still learning new stuff with Mallyx stance, but I still feel I can’t apply enough conditions without copying the ones someone else has placed on me) and full on healing/support builds (which worked OK, but I feel like I would have been a greater asset to my team if I had access to some good cc and mitigation in addition to raw output.)

The weapons need to be redesigned for better synergy with each other and we need to fill empty niches. We need a tanky melee weapon set and a condi ranged weapon set, and they need to be adaptable to other roles (much like how the guardian’s mace provides good healing and protection or excellent dps depending on how you build yourself). We need higher base damage and better scaling ratios. We need a ranged weapon that doesn’t take a fortnight to pull off a simple cc (seriously, if you start casting as soon as an enemy starts his attack with the intent to interrupt it, your cc won’t kick in until after it’s needed). We need evade/invulnerability on the sword #3. We need the hammer #3 to not launch your character into the AoE that you went ranged to avoid (the mist thing looks great, just make it purely aesthetic or give us invuln).

Also, why do regular attacks cost energy? I’d say Mallyx is the best example of what the stances should be since it requires you to use all of your skills, but, because of that, I’m almost always energy starved. It should be cooldowns on the left of my bars and energy on the right with the utilities designed to be used more often.

This post turned out more rambly than it should have been but I really want the revenant to be awesome. Arenanet’s class design for Guild Wars 2 has been awesome (purple butterflies!) but they seem to have a hard time getting those great ideas into balanced gameplay (see everything wrong with the necromancer). I’m hoping with all of the attention the revenant is getting we’ll see some significant changes. Otherwise I suppose I’ll be playing my new chronomancer.

2 nice feedbacks here. I don’t feel that revenant is underwhelming now, but I agree with many of the things you said.
Only the lack of switfness is not an issue atm since we have superspeed.

Yes, I agree especially with the energy cost on weapon skills, since they already have cooldowns comparable with other classes and it really restricts your utility usage.

I guess overall the problem is that it requires extreme specs to be even viable at single purposes and doing so removes anything else-survivability requires almost no weapon usage so you have utilities, and takes away all your damage output, and going offensive renders you the most vulnerable class in the game.

When they anounced that revenent will have accsess to two heals I kinda though “Oh wow that’s a nice thing to stregh on revenent” but when I look at the heals you can use both and endup with almost the same result as other classes get in one heal.

Energy on weapon skills it’s not the most terrible thing I think you have to manage your energy and that’s somehow intressting but since the utilitys are SOO super expensive you will just endup using nearly none of them or spamming AA use some of them. I also find it strange that you can’t use them all even if you collected 100% energy.

Valfaros.6908:

When they anounced that revenent will have accsess to two heals I kinda though “Oh wow that’s a nice thing to stregh on revenent” but when I look at the heals you can use both and endup with almost the same result as other classes get in one heal.

With jalis+shiro you can heal for 1200 total, remove 3 conditions and gain attack bonus and retaliation. That’a about 80% of your health.
With jalis+mallyx you can heal 7000, +800 extra heal for each condition, gain retaliation and remove 3 conditions. With 3 condis that’s around 9400.
No class can do that with 1 heal. Most heals are around 4000, so pretty much on pair with all Revenant heals.
And you can also gain Fury and Resistance with traits.
All numbers on Berserker gear, no celestial stuff, not even gems.

Shiro’s and Ventari’s are a bit underwhelming, that’s true. Shiro’s is over 6 seconds with 1s cd between hits, and Ventari has slow heals supposed to be for group, not yourself.

Valfaros.6908:

Energy on weapon skills it’s not the most terrible thing I think you have to manage your energy and that’s somehow intressting but since the utilitys are SOO super expensive you will just endup using nearly none of them or spamming AA use some of them. I also find it strange that you can’t use them all even if you collected 100% energy.

That’s true.

Take shiro and ventari and you endup with a 3k burstheal so …. yes take the best heals and you get something pretty good but not that much higher then guardian heal signet so that’s that.

If you read my previous post more carefully you’ll notice I already said that Shiro has no burst heal and Ventari has selfless heal. Ventari’s low self-heal is on purpose.
That’s the only combination with low heals however. Again, Jalis+Mallyx is 7000+ and Shiro+Jalis is 1200+ (with over 6k burst heal) over 6 seconds.
Double heal is good if you pick the right skills. Of course Shiro+Ventari is a bad combination (they make no sense together).

Most heals are not 4k though. In fact I don’t know any that are 4k unless you misuse them badly, like do engi turret without overcharge and then destroy it without a field. So you’re making a false comparison by putting that number up. If we take my PvP engi build, I have no healing strength whatsoever and pull 5.5k plus buffs, which you can trait for condi removal and extra buffs. On a 20 second cooldown.
Also I hope none of your Shiro attacks missed or were blocked, and you’ve spent twice the time (in fact more since they’re longer casting times) casting heals as I have. You’ve also used up profession energy which means one less utility or weapon usage.

So congrats on pulling 7.5k on a roughly 30 second cooldown, that has conditional dependency and requires specific setups. It’s bad healing.

The feedback in this thread is great. I agree with SolarDragon that having two healing abilities feels like a disadvantage rather than an advantage because the Shiro heal in particular is so weak.

Ventari heal bothers me even more than Shiro tbh.
Yes it’s AoE healing, but that’s all you do; you’re basically giving up all your utility and what you end up with is marginally better than an engi turret and worse than ele water staff.
Protective solace is nice though, albeit quite situational, and an energy glutton like all the channels.

Xernth.8561:

The feedback in this thread is great. I agree with SolarDragon that having two healing abilities feels like a disadvantage rather than an advantage because the Shiro heal in particular is so weak.

This problem doesn’t come from double heal (Jalis heal is great, imagine 2 of them), but from Shiro’s heal, and this has been addressed in multiple reviews and feedback.

Kidel.2057:

Xernth.8561:

The feedback in this thread is great. I agree with SolarDragon that having two healing abilities feels like a disadvantage rather than an advantage because the Shiro heal in particular is so weak.

This problem doesn’t come from double heal (Jalis heal is great, imagine 2 of them), but from Shiro’s heal, and this has been addressed in multiple reviews and feedback.

Since we don’t know which of the feedback threads the Dev is going to pay most attention to, it makes sense to “cross pollinate” the most important feedback into multiple threads. Of course this could get out of hand, but it is consistent messaging, the same reason most brands have a slogan or tagline.