Guild Wars 2

I think the thing that most makes Renegade seem, well bad… Is how the entire feel of Renegade’s design and what it brings to the table seems to take a different approach to revenant balance and cater to a different group of people’s needs than has been the case before.

What I mean is Revenant, and all of its the skill balancing/nerfing, has been aimed at high end play. The dev’s have even said time and time again things like, “While it may not seem so at a casual level, Revenant’s are still overpowered in the right hands, and have always been a high risk/high reward class in terms of skill.” Almost making the players feel bad for not succeeding in spite of the nerfs. And, that’s fine… Balance should come from a top down level.

And if Revenant has been and is tailored around high end play and all of it’s core balance has been reflecting that, it seems insane that the new elite spec plays entirely to a different crowd.

Nobody at high end PvE or PvP was screaming for Revenant to get a ranged condi weapon. It’s literally, the last thing they needed considering every other useful thing a revenant does (aside from tableting) they do from melee range. There’s ONE raid encounter where you even need ranged damage (Deimos), and you don’t even technically need it there, that’s just for the safety strategy… There’s nothing stopping a competent rev from going hamm in mallyx/jalis with his mace like normal, since they can easily not stand in a giant orange circle. This is also the case in sPvP, high end rev’s don’t want to stand on a ledge shooting their bow into the group, and if they felt they needed to kite, Mallyx/mace/axe already gave them plenty of ranged condi pokes to do that with. (And probably even better ones.)

The whole thing feels like they took player’s feedback over the past year, and just decided to make Revenant cater to a more casual base? I’m half surprised they didn’t just make Kalla an underwater spec while they were at it…

At any rate, I feel like that’s why Renegade felt so out of place—it’s designed from an entirely different viewpoint than the core it was to accompany.

Revenant USED TO BE overpowered in the right hands, when sword3 did 7 hits at 20% more damage, Shield5 used to heal 4000 HP, Vengeful Hammers was 300 range and so on. That’s why we overlooked the crap like “condi weakness”. But since the “right hands” seemed to become more and more frequent, they nerfed it for 2 years, mainly because of pvp. Now if you’re good you’re decent, but not OP.

Still it won’t have place in the condi meta that is going to be in PoF. Scourge and Spellbreaker will just remove Resistance and give us 5-6 conditions we can’t hope to cleanse. Maybe Renegade will find a place in buffing the condi dps of the others in PvE and in trying to survive thanks to external condi cleanse. In pvp and wvw it won’t be viable. Maybe not even the Herald will be.

Rev was never overpowered in PVE that’s for sure. They were wanted in the beginning for Natural Resonance, but after that got nerfed and they didn’t get buffed in any other way to compensate revs just disappeared from raids. Now you don’t really see them outside Deimos. Power rev is crap and while condi rev is definitely better now, there are still much better condi classes to bring over a rev. Renegade is supposed to fix this, but who knows. I am annoyed that they never reverted any of those nerfs they gave us because of pvp. With skill splitting there is no reason to not reverse those nerfs, especially with power rev being in such a bad place now.

I don’t have a problem with the idea of SB. When I first heard it was going to be that I was fine with it. Maybe because I play condi ranger and our SB works well. So I assumed renegade SB would be decent. But for god knows what reason they forgot about raiding and made attacks like SB3 work only at max range. They forgot that rev in essence is still a melee class. Their other condi set is a melee set and for raiding you need to be in melee with the rest of your group. Why they are ignoring this is anyone’s guess.

I was talking about PvP. Apparently many people complained about Revenant being “impossible to counter” a lot of time ago, when Sword-3 was still good.
They were too loud and Rev got nerfed.

Very good point xarallei about the inconsistencies in range of renegade skills. This is another thing that irks me to no end with just about anything. We all know the gw2 “Holy Trinity”, that is PS warr, Chronobunker and Magi Druid.

Now rather then attempting to give more options they keep it alive and kicking by making just about every other alternative subpar. Like new might generation professions (renegade, scourge) having abysmal 240 range for sharing compared to 600 on PS warr.

Especially on renegade that’s supposed to be ranged spec with shortbow. If he follows that design and actually snipes at range as he’s meant to, then no one is getting his might stacks with pathetic 240 range…