Guild Wars 2

My complete summary of the Revanant for the 7/10/15 to 7/13/15 beta weekend. I’ve made several small posts before now but I wanted to summarize my review in one place.

Summary
Overall, the Revenant has good animations and skills and attacks are mostly fluid (though some have overly-long cast times). Many of the new mechanics are very enjoyable, and players are rewarded for using energy efficiently and punished for wasting it. Versatility is fairly low, perhaps due to the lack of weapon swap combined with the limited role of each weapon set. Currently the Rev is also lacking several things important in WvW/PvP, such as mobility, soft-CCs to keep targets in range or out of range, blocks/invulnerability, and stun breakers. Additionally, many cast times on skills are quite long (3/4sec to 1 sec, even for skills with relatively minor effects). I will discuss my thoughts on specific weapons, traits, and utilities below:

Weapons
Staff
The staff seems to be a primarily support-oriented weapon with some personal defense as well. The animations are very nice, but the damage output is poor. While staff is likely not intended for burst damage, I think it should be capable of sustained damage, since Rev’s have no weapon swap. The energy cost for abilities can be a bit high, e.g. the two-part #2 combo takes 15 total energy, or skill #5 takes 20 energy! The cast time on skill #2, as many others have said, is too long to be worth using (for both the first skill and the triggered skill). Damage is also kind of low – this is okay, as again staff shouldn’t be a burst weapon. I really like skill #3. It seems to be a shield block type skill with a 2 second duration on 10 second cooldown. This adds really useful defensive utility. I also like skill #4 – although others have complained, I think a self-root and 1 sec. cast time is a reasonable cost for a medium heal and double condition removal on a weapon skill. Skill #5 is great, no complaints here.

Hammer
I think the hammer is almost in a good place. Power scaling is good. The auto attack does good damage, and skill #2 hits even harder when used at max. range. Skill #3 has a long cast time and doesn’t really add much value. Since Rev is limited to one weapon set, and hammer is ranged-only, I think #3 could be changed to not teleport the Rev back to the starting location. This would turn it into a sort of blink (but which takes some time to move the Rev rather than moving instantly) on a shortish cooldown. This seems reasonable since hammer works best at long range yet has no gap creators. Skills #4 and #5 seem to work well, I have no complaints about these. The cast time on skill #5 is reasonable IMO, as it is a ranged AoE knockdown with good damage.

Mace/Axe
I didn’t use this weapon set as much, but currently damage seems a little low. Power scaling is poor, relegating it primarily to use as a condition weapn and not a hybrid weapon. I like skill #2 – the long cast time is balanced by the short cooldown to allow the Rev to attain a really high uptime on fire fields. Axe skills seem to work well.

Legends
Mallyx
I really enjoyed using the Mallyx legend to tank conditions when combined with the Demonic Defiance trait (adds resistance when using a Mallyx utility). I could use Pain Absorption to stack up resistance and I found this method appropriately effective – not too cheap to make conditions trivial, and not too expensive to make the method ineffective. It was fun playing with the balance of keeping up resistance or crashing if you run out of energy to maintain it. Unyielding Anguish is very useful, but seems too likely to disrupt allies by teleporting enemy targets all over the place. As others have pointed out, it even displaces downed targets and targets with stability, which is likely not intended.

Jalis
Jalis seems decent so far. Forced Engagement saw little use for me not because of the energy cost, but because of the long cast time. A 1 second cast made it impossible to use reactively to interrupt an opponent, for example, and the short duration made it lackluster when used proactively. Inspiring Reinforcement was very useful, perhaps due to the reasonable energy cost and cast time. It was very multi-functional (as all Revenant skills should be, since they have so few options) for negating hard CC, reducing enemy damage through weakness, securing stomps, or allowing long cast skills (like hammer #5) to be used without interruption. I rarely used vengeful hammers – the energy cost was too high. The damage bonus is decent if they can be maintained, but it pretty much stops me from using most other skills in order to conserve energy. I didn’t find a use yet for the Jalis elite skill. With such a short duration and only limited protection (from direct damage but not conditions or CCs), the cast time might be overly-long.

Ventari
I only used Ventari a little bit and found it to be very single-minded in it’s role (whether intended or not). The summoned tablet could often get stuck out of range if I changed my elevation by jumping over an obstacle or dropping off a ledge, requiring me to switch legends or detonate it with the elite skill and then resummon it to continue using it. I really liked Natural Harmony because it is instant cast. The energy cost and time delay for the healing felt like a reasonable price for this instant heal ability. The elite skill had a very long cast time, so that the knockback couldn’t be reliably used on targets. It also prevents it from being used as an emergency heal. I think the cast time should be significantly reduced.

Conclusions
I don’t have many specific comments about traits, nor have I done sufficient testing to identify bugs. The swirling mist trait in Incovation was very hard to see, so I often did not know how many mist orbs I had (if any). The implementation of the mist orbs for healing is unintuitive. In conclusion, I think the Revenant’s biggest concerns are (1) it is very limited right now by being unable to swap weapons and being locked into set utilities for each legend, and (2) long cast times on many abilities makes them difficult make good use of (though some skills with long cast times seemed appropriate to me), and (3) the balance of energy use.

Many others have said Rev should get weapon swap. While I don’t think this is a bad idea, I would rather see all weapon sets become more potent and versatile such that weapon swap is not needed. This may be done by allowing all weapon sets to output sustained damage, by reducing weapon skill cooldowns, and by carefully balancing each skill to be multi-functional across different builds. Since Rev utility skills are fixed, I think the same careful balancing should be done for each utility skill. Each skill needs to have a purpose in all game modes and in all builds that can make use of that legend, since we can’t swap out useless utilities. The same is true for weapons – all weapon skills should be useful in all game modes and in all builds that can make use of that weapon.

Energy balance is an interesting topic that I could speak on for some time but will try to be brief. In some cases, energy balance felt very good – e.g. the energy cost on many weapon skills, and some utility skills (e.g. pain absorption, natural harmony, and inspiring reinforcement). However, I do have one concern about energy. When we swap legends, we are reset to 50 energy – this can encourage us to spend all of our energy, legend swap, spend it all again, and keep swapping every 10 seconds. I think this is okay, but we should also have the option to be effective when spending longer than 10 seconds in a single legend. To facilitate this, I don’t think energy should be reset when swapping legends. This way, pooling energy is possible, and this pooled energy can be used for burst or to make good use of upkeep skills. Energy recovery on weapon swap could be reintroduced through a trait, e.g. in the Invocation line. To deal with the reduced energy availability, it may be necessary to reduce energy cost of some skills.

What I liked about the Revenant was the difference in playstyle compared to other professions, primarily resource management. Most professions are limited by cooldowns, and this encourages cycling through cooldowns and using many skills on cooldown. With Revenant, this behavior is punished by running the user out of energy. I found this change to be refreshing and promoted more strategic use of the right skill at the right time. The low cooldown on weapon skills was very refreshing as well, and also seemed to promote the same idea. Many weapon skills felt available whenever you wanted them, but you had to pay to use them, so it wasn’t always best to just use them on cooldown. Many of the weapon skills were also smartly designed such that even if a skill had a low cooldown, it wasn’t necessarily a dps gain to use it all the time, (e.g hammer #2) or it had a longer cast time that required the player to be more selective about using it (e.g. mace #2). I think a few minor boosts to each weapon set for versatility will really help the Rev to take advantage of these smart designs.