Guild Wars 2

Let’s take a step back. It’s not that the Rev has only access to pre-built 4 utilities. It’s actually 8 pre-built utility slots. That flexibility typically means that the Rev (even though it has predetermined utility slots) allows for a lot of meta change even if certain utilities go underused (see current state Ventari).

We have 2 paths to address concerns of developers not being on top of meta as well as the players,
(1) All utilities become usable in all legends (albleit huge balance issues and much adjustment)
(2) Developers continue to monitor meta and adjust utilities accordingly. Players keep stating the obvious on the boards/in game and adjustments are made for the game’s evolution.

I opt for #2.

On to the Racial utilities, it doesn’t make sense (even lore wise) that Revenants don’t get those abilities. The Racial utilities are already balanced as weaker versions against standard counterparts and can only be used in PvE/WvW. If Energy costs were added as well, I can’t even imagine taking any of those Racial utilities unless the underlying core Rev utilities are horrible which is how you gauge base level use.

What the Racials do help with is for new players/new Heralds to fill in the gaps. There is nothing wrong with that.

Neutral Abilities

To clear something up, there is no stated design around Revenants being “more part of the mist than their race”, etc. Roy specifically stated that the reason Racials weren’t allowed is because they didn’t mesh with the energy mechanic. I see that as a design and continuity flaw since it puts limitations on Revenants that other professions won’t have. It also means that, so long as this design remains, similar neutral skills will be blocked from the Revenant. Neutral(racial,faction,story, etc.) skills usable in PvE but not PvP have been part of Guildwars since the original game, but the Revenant isn’t allowed to use them because they want every skill except auto-attack to be limited by Energy. This also means they don’t get the *Mist*wolf Elite people paid for – try to explain that one with Lore and design concepts why don’t you.

Mechanic Changes vs. Design Flaws

There is difference between saying the mechanic needs to change and that the mechanic has design flaws or is poorly implemented.

For example, I’m not personally a fan of the current Energy system that requires constant swapping to get the most benefit. It’s grown on me a bit, but overall I’d rather they had honored the original Energy system this represents and made it more like a mana pool. I’d also rather their weapons weren’t linked to the pool and they used the normal CD system. Saying the profession sucked unless they changed those things would be an example of not liking the mechanic and wanting it changed. But that’s not the case here.

Rather – the issue being brought up here isn’t with the actual mechanic. The issue is with options, nuance, and customization designed along with that mechanic. These are things that are intrinsic to the health and wellbeing of the overall game and not the specific mechanic. The relatively limited skills based on a Legend and Energy mechanics can stay as they are. All people is the ability to actually use the build system that’s intrinsic to the game. If they’d at least add a 4th utility per Legend that would go a long way towards making a healthier profession who can be better iterated on.

If they’d go a step further and add a neutral set of Utilities (i.e. Glyphs so that they stick with the Legend theme and linked to the Invocation specialization) that would help with the design issues inherent in having very limited options per bar. For example, when you’re level 80 and unlock Glint and suddenly only have a Heal skill available like you’re back at level 1 that is bad design. The mechanic is fine, the design is flawed. By designing the mechanic such that you had these neutral Glyphs the Revenant would be able to slot those in place of their unattained elite skills and still be able to run a full build rather than ignoring the stance until it’s mostly filled. It might even be okay to run the bar with only 2-3 skills on it unlocked if not for the fact that the empty spots distractingly flash at you every few seconds – another example of poor design.

Revenant “Utility”
First off. What does your mechanic give you? An extra bar 6-0 bar. That’s exactly what the Engineer’s toolbelt gives him just in a different way. They could put your second Legends skills on the F1-F5 bar and it would be pretty much same. On top of that, the Engineer is designed such that any or all of their main utility skills can replace their weapon bar. Meanwhile, the Revenant mechanic – with its set in stone utilities – serves to limit your options and then further restrict all but your auto-attack with a limited resource. Don’t get me wrong, the resource is good in that it helps make up for not having a lot of utility options since so long as you’re spending your Energy on another utility it’s good (it’s the same concept Thieve’s Initiative runs off of) – but restricting your weapon skills just adds insult to injury – but we’re not discussing that.

The 6-0 skill load out for the Revenant is a grand total of SIX combinations (someone earlier said 8, but that’s not how numbers work guys). If you’re a Herald you have a whopping TEN options. This is also assuming all options are viable – which they certainly are not.

Meanwhile, a normal profession as approximately 40,480 different combinations of Heal, Utilities, and Elites (note: these are just combinations, not permutations. So the same utilities in a different order is not being counted again). That’s approximately 8,096 combinations of JUST the utilities. Even if you assume that only 1/4th of a profession’s utilities are ‘viable’ (which, though often true in the meta is still flawed in that it ignores the ability for the meta to shift to other utility skills – which the Rev can’t do) then that leaves the average profession with 20 combinations of Utilities – twice what the Revenant gets. However, the Revenant gets twice as many 6-0 skills right? That’s their mechanic after all. Okay, so let’s take their 10 combinations versus everyone else’s 20 and call it even.

Except, now that we’ve used rather biased and poor logic just to put the Revenant on par – I have to point out to you that we’ve taken the Revenant profession mechanic into account when we do this but not the mechanics of all the other professions. So all those extra passive and skills other professions get probably don’t really add much to their design, right?

So, to recap, so long as we ignore the profession mechanics of everyone else, assume all Revenant Legends will be meta viable and be able to keep up with an evolving meta, AND hope no one questions our logic too closely… we have a well-designed profession.

Or we can just admit that the profession has design flaws that will affect its long-term health and ask ANet to address it.

I’d like to see each legend gain a 4th utility skill (ie: choose 3 out of 4) so there is at least 1 choice in utilities for each of the 2 selected legends.

It really seems to hit a minority of people here. Most of people don’t complain about it or are quite happy with it. I admit i don’t understand. I having absolutly no problem with the lack of personnalisation, it was stated since the reveal of revenant’s concept. I just don’t know why people can’t be ok with that… Revenant was designed like elementalist, it’s kinda normal that he have not personnalisation on utility.
If it gain choice of utilities i want weapon swap on elementalist. After all, why not? I want to choose the abilities myself.

gannondorf.7628:

It really seems to hit a minority of people here. Most of people don’t complain about it or are quite happy with it. I admit i don’t understand. I having absolutly no problem with the lack of personnalisation, it was stated since the reveal of revenant’s concept. I just don’t know why people can’t be ok with that… Revenant was designed like elementalist, it’s kinda normal that he have not personnalisation on utility.
If it gain choice of utilities i want weapon swap on elementalist. After all, why not? I want to choose the abilities myself.

This is one giant logical fallacy – or several different a I suppose.

1) A ‘minority’ (which is arbitrary) voicing an opinion or making an observation does not invalidate that opinion. By your logic we’d all still be going around thinking the world was flat and the sun rotated around the earth.

2) ANet has never stated that the design of the Revenant was intended to have locked in skill bars. You can argue that it is obviously the design because that’s what we got, by you can’t say that ANet has told us all along what to expect since that have refused to comment on any post regarding the matter of whether or not Revenants would eventually receive more than the set 5 skills per Legend.

3) Elementalists and Weapon Swap is a straw man argument. Elementalists are similar in that their mechanic swaps part of their bar – but the comparison ends there. They trade one decisions point (their second weapon set) for twice the resulting options (20 weapon skills instead of 10). They lose some versatility in exchange for more options. Meanwhile Revenants trade 3 decision points (choosing 2 Legends instead of 5 skills) in exchange for twice the options. Revenants trade three times what Eles do in exchange for the same output – and then have all of their skills restricted by a resource in addition. These things do not equate.

Furthermore, to put this in a bit more perspective of how flawed this argument is, since the Ele mechanic is weapon skill based it means they trade 8 combinations of 10 skills for 5 combinations of 20 skills. That’s NOT a bad trade. Meanwhile Revenants trade over 40,000 combinations of 5 skills for 6 combinations of 10 skills AND get their entire skillset restricted by the Energy mechanic.

Ele’s end up with the most weapon skills in the game. Revenants end up with the fewest utility skills in the game. How are these comparable?

Maybe they can make it so that you can change the utility and elite skills of the legendary stances, but there will be a maximum limit of three racial utility and one racial elite skills in all of the legendary stances.

For example, you can change dwarf stance to have two racial utilities, and the other stance will have one racial utility. If you add another racial utility, you will be prevented from doing so because of the limit of racial utilities. If you would change one of the stances and the stance you are going to change to has racial utilities, it will deselect them by default or return to the default utility configuration.

Dastion is more or less making the point I was trying to make, though unpacking it a lot more. I forgot about the Mistwolf elite, that would be weird for the Revenant to not have if anyone.

They may be using a lot of words and big numbers, but what they’re getting at is that the Revenant may be in serious trouble in the longterm PvP meta due to their pre-baked utility choices. Even assuming that the profession is 100% viable in the current meta (which would be a stretch based on initial impressions) the very nature of meta is that they change. Emergent gameplay comes and goes based on the current balance, counter play, counter-counter play, counter-counter-counter play, etc. are we on the same page here? It’s like how in nature the species who can most easily adapt to environment or diet changes is more likely to survive those changes.

If the Revenant is only ever stuck with ten pre-baked utility slots, their ability to respond to changes in the meta is inferior to any other profession. They might have a rough answer to any of those changes (such as the current necessity for Glint) but by design they’ll never be as efficient as their peers who can build around them.

I think what Dastion wants is to prevent the Revenant, in the longterm, from gaining a reputation as a non-viable “cute gimmick” profession that ArenaNet introduced enthusiastically and then put it on the ADD design shelf to gather dust next to WvW, Fractals, living world, etc. — and nipping that in the bud early before the reputation is even there might not be a bad idea.

That said, as I said, it still seems early to me. I’m waiting to hear what the pro PvP guilds are saying and whether the pro PvE guilds like having them on raids etc. ; but please understand that anyone criticizing Revenant as it currently is doesn’t necessarily dislike it or even fail to understand its flavor.
If anything, I’m only speaking for myself, but I love the concept of the profession. I even think the limitations that come with being restricted by legends instead of swapping utilities in and out from a huge pool is inherently interesting and it could be a defining asymmetry. The problem right now is that literally every legend pretty much does only one or two things and there’s no interesting choices to make except which two legends you use. If every legend had its own mini-pool of utilities to choose from, or if they had some wild-card neutral abilities to slot in, I’d probably dislike it a lot less. As it stands, it doesn’t feel good to literally make no skill choices and that lack of flexibility could kill the profession in the meta before it’s even had a chance to try.

Great post ^

I think the solution to the relative lack of choice/adaptability is for each legend to have more utility skills per legend.

Extremely well said Midnight Tea. I have no issue with the concept, just the implementation. Limited choice is different than no choice. A single extra utility per Legend and a handful of neutral Utilities would make the profession shine while changing nothing about the actual ‘mechanic’.

No any given meta there may only be a select few options that are considered viable, but those options evolve and shift. The set of 3 utilities that are the “only good choice” shifts from patch to patch. Having those extra options allows the meta to shift – which means the Revenant has no wriggle room.

It also means they’re setting themselves up so that any time they want to add new skills to the profession they have to add a whole new pre-baked Legend. It just doesn’t mesh with the more modular nature of the game in the long run.

I just wish ANet would comment on this. I can deal with players who are unwilling to see the big picture, and I could deal with a Dev who disagrees. But Devs that won’t even comment on issues like this? That’s disheartening.

“Issue” is rather subjective here. It seems that Roy doesn’t have problem with that and majority of player don’t have too. Im not saying you opinion is non senseless but i just don’t think it’s going to happen coz most people don’t have problem with this and, if devs want this before, why they have not added it? Coz they want to create an elementalist style of play where every legend has his bruch of utilities. It seems that most people are okay with that or even love it coz it give legends an identity.
Again, if you really can’t bear this fact, why play revenant? It’s like if i’m going to ele forum and asking for weapon swap coz the skills from dagger are stuck and i want others coz i dislike them. Or I want to have the option to choose skills on kits, coz i don’t like them. Are this going to happen? No. Coz set of utilities have been create for work together and give an identity to the set itself. You don’t have much option now yes it’s true. But it’s only because Jalis, Ventari and Mallyx need ajustments. We basically have 5 legends to fuse. Yes it make less choice than others profession. But it was stated since the start that revenant is going to have this “problem”.

More choices would be welcome. I have a problem with characterizing the design as “flawed” but agree that adding a little choice would be an improvement. Perhaps that’s just a matter of semantics, I don’t know. There’s always room for improvement. It certainly isn’t “broken” as some have suggested.

@Dastion I wouldn’t worry too much about the Devs not seeing the scope of the design issue with the Revenant. Why? For one major reason — Glint is seen as more or less mandatory . Meaning that in the long run, you’ll almost never see a revenant who isn’t thusly also a herald. The huge skew of heralds has to show up on their radar somehow, even if just looking at metrics. If Glint is still considered “mandatory” a year or more from now to even meet a baseline in the meta, future elite specs are not going to see much adoption.

As you said, though, even one other utility option for each legend would go a long way to addressing this. I suspect we’ll be seeing that in the next few months, the Revenant still feels beta-y for lack of a better word and a lot of the real work had just begun. I also think they’re doing the right thing in going slowly with it — you can always add stuff to a class in a game, but taking stuff away can result in a huge player backlash and negative publicity.

I just want to to anyone that if you’re happy with what you have or you play a rev alt casually anyway, that’s cool! I’m not saying you’re wrong to enjoy yourself. I just want the Revenant to be awesome and embody the vision I think ANet ultimately have for it

Yeah, as I have said on a number of occasions, Revenant didn’t feel complete in BWE1, because there was no Herald. That is absolutely a problem, arguably the biggest problem the profession faces in the long run. If adding utilities can help address that, then it is absolutely something that should be strongly considered.

Does it make sense lore-wise? Yep
Do you get six utilities, two heals, and two elites? Yep

Perhaps what you mean to complain about are:

Do major traits have decent cooldowns? Nope
Are Jalis and Ventari allergic to water? Yup
How are you all enjoying that sweet ranged condition weapon? …

Xecil.2798:

Does it make sense lore-wise? Yep
Do you get six utilities, two heals, and two elites? Yep

Perhaps what you mean to complain about are:

Do major traits have decent cooldowns? Nope
Are Jalis and Ventari allergic to water? Yup
How are you all enjoying that sweet ranged condition weapon? …

How is there a lore reason for not having a small set of utilities to choose from per Legend? Asking a question to prove a point and saying “Yup” after it doesn’t prove that point.

Everything else is just symptoms of the same issue. They didn’t make more skills than they absolutely had to due to design time constraints. That’s the same reason they:

-Abandoned the initial 1 weapon set design in favor of a “quick fix” of adding weapon swap. It’s easier to add weapon swap than redesign Legends to include some sort of kit or form to allow you some flexibility to your weapon skills like Attunements/Conjures/Kits do for Ele/Engi.

-Despite adding weapon swap, left you with a single 1h weapon. If they’ve got to let something slide then underwater combat is it.

-Can’t use certain Legends under water? See above.

These are all issues and all could use a Dev response letting people know it’s a priority for them. Instead? Roy half heartedly responded to only the good posts, won some acclaim by adding in a dodge roll graphic that was suggested, and otherwise ignored posts such as this. And now that more and more posts are like this – ANet’s baby of a profession has been abandoned at the wayside because it’s making too much noise while the adults try to celebrate their expansion launch.

Xecil.2798:

Does it make sense lore-wise? Yep
Do you get six utilities, two heals, and two elites? Yep

Perhaps what you mean to complain about are:

Do major traits have decent cooldowns? Nope
Are Jalis and Ventari allergic to water? Yup
How are you all enjoying that sweet ranged condition weapon? …

No it doesn’t make sense lore-wise.

Before Rytlock disappeared into the Mists, he was a Charr of the Warrior Combat Profession and used Charr and Warrior skills as well as the common Combat Profession skill, Mistfire Wolf.
When he was in the mists he discovered a new Combat Profession, the Revenant.
Now, after returning from the mists, he is STILL a Charr but now a Revenant Combat Professional and SHOULD be using Charr and Revenant skills as well as the common Combat Profession skill, Mistfire Wolf.

During his time in the mists, he did not cease to be a Charr nor did he lose skills common to all Combat Professionals, he just changed his Combat Profession from Warrior to Revenant. Also, from a lore point of view, from all the professions, Revenants (who channel the power of the Mists) would be most likely to have access to a skill that summons a Mistfire Wolf from within the Mists.

Finally, both you and other people keep comparing how many skills the Revenant has access to during combat (Do you get six utilities, two heals, and two elites? Yep) in relation to other professions but that has nothing to do with the points I was making: lack of skill CHOICE. That is, the amount of choice a Revenant has when choosing it’s build. The range or variety of skills they have access to when creating a build that will allow them to fulfil their desired role during combat.

1. Yes, I realize this is a year-old thread. I was specifically referred here by GW2 Support.

2. As I reported to support: when I recently played through sylvari personal story on a new rev for nostalgia’s sake, after recovering Caladbolg, a rev has NO other skills available for use against BBEG Mazdak. This means no heal skill, no condi clear, no utilities at all.

3. You might say it’s no big deal because story is easy. However, it is certainly proof that rev is still lacking basic amenities other characters have. No rev wants to get into a fight underwater, either; they have only 1 weapon and 2 legends available. Why hasn’t Anet fixed these gaps?

4. Support gave me a pat answer that implied they had no understanding of this issue. So, here I am, asking again for Anet to pay attention to rev class.

Malchior.5732:

Lets be real here, your utility choices for most classes are already an illusion of choice.
So many garbage utilities on most classes that never get used and many more that are useless without the appropriate traits. So what’s the point?

Exactly this.

It’s telling that even without the ability to choose utility skills, Revenants still prkittengends / traits / gears-stats according to a build meta type you pick from a rather short list.

In other words, why isn’t our character customization a simple dropdown, “Condi DPS”, “Healer”, etc? I mean that’s about all the effective choice there is to the system.