Guild Wars 2

Warning, Wall of Text

NOTES: 1) this is 100% PVE based comments. 2) The following comments are made with the full understanding that the class is missing legends and, as such, is incomplete. 3) I also go into this with the understanding that I have not had the experience necessary to have a solid grasp of everything I have at my disposal such as memorizing all the effects of the different utilities etc. I am trying to do this more of an overall feel as opposed to skill specifics. 4) I am saying the following from the perspective of a main engineer.

So played revenant some this past weekend, threw my unneeded weapons from 1 box in the forge and got my first ever precursor….argh…

The concept of the revenant is great. It appears as though the intention of this class was to be a skill swapping high button/min class like elementalist or engineer and as such I will be comparing it to them. However, as implemented it falls short of its potential in my opinion.

1) It is legend bound. The concept of legends is great: channeling a particular legend of the past and fusing its essence/personality with your own. However, you have only a single weapon to work with. This, in itself, is not necessarily a bad thing. However, each weapon synergizes very well with a particular trait line which synergizes very well with a particular legend. And that is good too. Synergies are a positive thing, except that what you end up with is a primary legend and a secondary legend. People will end up spending the great majority of their time in a single legend and a single weapon. if you are in content where you need good synergy, you take hammer/jalis or malyx/mace/axe. Or, if you are just running around, you just take ventari for the heal spams.

2) it is range bound. Every current class can create a build with both range and melee options at their disposal. All classes with weapon swap are obvious. Elementalist, even if it takes daggers, can also take frost bow and/or fiery greatsword to give them some range options. Engineer only has range weapons, but also has bomb kit and toolkit as options, besides grenades (low travel time and thus better accuracy in melee) and even rifle having good melee range ability. If a revenant takes mace/axe or staff, they are bound to melee. Axe does provide a couple range skills at 900 and staff has 2 at 600 but these all have cooldowns of 10-20 seconds. I expect shiro to be melee as well, and, of course, we dont know about glint.

I see this as an issue after having played in the verdant brink in the previous stress test. The events we encountered there had lots of mechanics that made it a bit more punishing to work in melee range, from stampeding mounted mobs to vines that throw you out of melee to the vinewrath that is surrounded by fire. Because of this, it was often be the case in open world that I wanted to have range at my disposal. but because I have no weapon swap, I surrendered to camping hammer. It was a similar situation in silverwastes this past weekend. There is some interrupting/teleporting (mace that can be done to compensate for this in melee, but with the simple number of enemies that can pop up at fort defense events it was often that I just needed to get out of range for a minute, I really felt tied down when using a melee weapon.

3) Legend swapping: It should be more or less instantaneous. If I need to swap legends to get to a skill, its probably because I need it right now. The animations on the skill bar are great, but I dont want them to impede skill usage. QoL suggestion: also allow legend swapping with the ` key like weapon swap.

4) Energy: energy was described as a push-pull mechanic. As it currently stands it is a pull-wait mechanic. It is basically a pseudo shared cooldown on skills. In order for it to be a real push-pull mechanic, there should be options to either temporarily increase the regen rate, or energy gaining skills so that, even though you do passively gain energy, there are things that you can do to draw from your legend and increase your energy reserves.

5) Hammer thoughts: I understand that hammer is not the DPS weapon, but when bound to a given weapon, the damage of individual weapons should be more on par with each other because of the inability to compensate with a weapon on swap. Also, the animation of the hammer which stops half way through a swing with a big hammer kind of makes my back hurt :P. what might help the hammer would be to reduce the damage by 75% but then cause it to be a chain skill that swings though from right to left and then left to right (chain of 2 attacks) in the same time as the current auto attack (1 sec). or leave the damage the same and allow the 2 attack chain in 1.5 second. I spent an unfortunately, smaller amount of time running jalis in this test because I used it more in the previous one. Because of this I wont attempt to remember thoughts back then.

Also, Hammer 3 “phase Smash” slowly rotates camera to be parallel with the trajectory of the skill. I can understand why this happens, but it just feels odd particularly after you have aligned your camera in a particular orientation to better guage enemy placement.

6) Mallyx: Mallyx is supposed to be the great manipulator of conditions. However, I didnt feel like I was really applying all that many conditions. I didnt feel I had access to the diversity or even stack counts that other classes have. The elite in mallyx pulses all conditions on you out to foes. The problem, as it stand though, is that it is very hard to have enough conditions on yourself to make it useable. I wanted to use this skill, but it was just never worth it. Unyielding anguish is the only other utility that applies a damaging condition to yourself, the others apply weakness vuln and blind, which are a nice bonus though. But, by the time you get some conditions on yourself from your utilities, the first ones you have applied would be just about expired by the time you get around to casting embrace the darkness and you would be almost out of energy to use in the upkeep for EtD.

In a different scenario, if you are in a situation where lots of conditions are being applied to you, then the skill could be good, except that (and this was stated by some people in my guild as well) if you are waiting for the opportune moment to use EtD, you have previously been using up all your energy giving yourself resistance trying to stay alive.

If you are in a party with lots of condi’s being applied, then it does make pain absorption and EtD much more useful, but if there are lots of condis being applied party wide and pain absorption just transfers 1, there is either going to be aoe condi removal being thrown around anyway negating your buildup for EtD or you will use all your energy pulling conditions and knock yourself out of EtD.

Another interesting thing that could be done to increase survivability while stacking up conditions on yourself would be to also decrease the cooldown of empowering misery per condition.

In relation to point 4, something that could be done is to have a skill, effects on multiple skills, or a trait that, as an example, adds an effect to axe attacks that draws energy from mallyx. This would give you either an extra positive energy change over time or a bulk of energy at once. In retaliation, mallyx would apply some condition to you. for instance, a trait that says “Using an axe while summoning mallyx draws energy from mallyx and torments you. Energy upkeep +3/sec for 5 seconds, torment 2 stacks 4 seconds” or something like that. That specific example may not be the best implementation, but that is kind of the idea.

While playing in mallyx, I felt that, being a condition master, I would be able to manipulate the conditions of what I was attacking. I kind of wanted an epidemic style skill. Whether that is copy of epidemic or something more Mallyx-y like copy (some, a limited number of stacks of all, something like that) conditions on your foe to yourself for 6 seconds gaining resistance for 4 seconds. this would then combo very well with EtD. Might also be a place to insert a little energy gain.

7) Ventari/staff. Staff skills are fun. I like the style. Some things I noticed though. The heal orbs on the auto attack were a little hard to pick up. Sometimes I felt like I ran right over top of them, but they didnt heal. They also seemed to not last as long as they should. I dont know what the actual time out on them is, but since the auto attack chain it at least 2 seconds (not counting any aftercast), it would be resonable for them to last 8-10 seconds (engineer med packs on bunker down last 10 and drop basically every 2 seconds on a mid-high crit, grenade build).

On the other hand, Since the big mechanic for ventari is the tablet, When using the tablet I want to have a more commanding view of the battle field. Where does my tablet need to go? who needs help? things like that. but I am stuck in melee when using the staff which has the best synergy with ventari and the corresponding trait line.

The tablet was definitely a nice change of pace from basically everything in the current game, but it had a couple odd features/absences. The cast time on tablet movement was long enough that sometimes I would end up canceling the move cast by going on to other skills. Because the tablet takes time to actually move across the ground, I think the cast time should either be reduced. The first thing I missed was a bulk heal. Every class has a healing skill (on #6) that will heal them (and sometimes aoe) for around 5k hp. I understand ventari to be a support/healing class and suspect that, because the tablet was given all support skills, a large heal was left out. But I do think it can be done without being out of balance. My suggestion will follow the next paragraph.

The elite in ventari amounts to not much more than a desummon and just doesnt feel elite. Yes, it has a knock back and leaves some med packs. The knock back is nice. The sum of the med packs add up to be the amount of healing of a strong #6 heal skill, but they only last 5 seconds and you have to run around and pick them up. This isnt something that can be used as a reliable heal, besides the fact that it desummons your tablet and comes at a cost of 50 energy, meaning that it also requires 50 energy to be used so if you are running low on energy, you have nothing that can even be potentially used as a bulk heal even if it has been a while since you used it.

I will start this by saying that I find having the desummon on the tablet being the elite to be a little weird in the first place. “Being” ventari, you shouldnt want to destroy your tablet. If necessary, then you have to do what you have to do, but it should, at the same time be worth it to destroy it, but also be unfortunate that it was done. As a suggestion for the ventari elite, remove or drastically lower the initial energy cost. when used, it can either be placed on it own cooldown (30-35sec?) or cause an effect that slows your energy replenishment for a given amount of time (-3 for 10 seconds). When the elite is used, it should provide more benefit especially if the energy cost is left unchanged. For instance, when you hit the elite, power drains from the tablet, healing for, say 4000, applying some regen and maybe protection to those in range, and leaving a large water field below it. about a second later, it falls to the ground, shatters (blast finisher) and breaks into the 5 little med pack pieces.

Also, when channeling ventari, I feel like I should at least be able to run like a centaur (maybe not outrun). Seems like 25% movement should be added to a ventari minor or add a 5-10 second swiftness to natural harmony on the tablet.

8) suggestions to increase skill count to bring it more in line with what appears to be its intended skill level. It is not my intention in that sentence to say that the class is “easy” to play or that I feel like I have “mastered” it already. It would be absurd to say that about an unfinished class for which I was only able to spend a weekend on. What I do feel like, however, is that having obvious and segmented synergies between the weapon/legend/trait lines coupled with the utility skill “bundles” you are given with each legend drastically reduces the options which drastically reduces the complexity of the class and makes builds much more discrete rather than tuned to your taste. So, the following are some suggestions and I understand we have an elite spec coming that we do not yet know the details of. They are not meant to say “Do all these” they are just some things I have considered.

-Add utilities to each legend. 5 utilities instead of 3 to select from would be a great help. Players very often swap utilities before a fight, but revenant will just get to take 2 fixed baskets of utilities. To get the effects they want, they may or may not be able to take the legend that synergizes with the style they want (tank, dps, heal, condi) and it means they must give up all 3 utilities to take an effect they can only get in another legend. As of right now, for example, If I want to play a tankier build, I would run jalis and hammer. but jalis has only 1 condi cleanse and it is on the heal. whether taking the trait to remove condi cleanse on legend swap or taking ventari, I have to go out of jalis for 10 seconds just to have access to a second condi cleanse.

-Weapon swap. This is the one I have seen pop up most. Just giving the options to weapon swap and legend swap.

-Tie weapons to legends. The weapons already have high synergy with a given legend and the tech is at least built to lock/unlock weapons based on a trait. we see this with the elite specs. If you may only use certain weapons when channelling certain legends and swap weapons when you legend swap, it would be less of a balancing issue then simple weapon swapping.

-Combining the previous 2. having your weapons swap when you legend swap but alow a choice for which weapons they will be.

-Primary and secondary weapon effects. This is what I originally envisioned when we heard about the revenant. In this scenario, each weapon has a basic attack with basically the same animations. However, depending on what legend you are in, it adds an effect to the skill. being in venrati would cause hammer 1 to drop a healing orb near you or being in mallyx would cause hammer 2 (coalescence of ruin) to cause burning on each impact. Obviously effects would need to be added across the board and rebalanced in this case.

-Finally, my personal favorite, but would require significant work from many departments. Allowing transforms. In this case, the legends would be bound to F1 and F2 rather than F1 as a simple swap. after you channel a legend, F1/2 flips and turns into a transform button. The transform would probably have the requirement of 100 energy (in other words, you are fully in communication with that legend), but not consume it. hitting the F skill again transforms you into a mist-y representation of that legend. and changes your weapon bar but leaves your utilities intact. The transform would have an upkeep of 7-8 energy/sec, weapon skills wouldnt cost energy but would have a typical cooldown, utilities would cost the same energy. Thus if you use a utility, you significantly reduce the duration you can spend in the transform. Because it has a 100 energy prerequisite and because swapping legends sets you at 50 energy, you would not be able to transform hop.

will probably remember something later on