Hey, everyone! I’m back to bring you all a list of changes based on feedback from our first Beta Weekend Event. Overall the revenant profession preformed much better and closer to where I want them to be, but there are still many things to tweak. If you happened to catch the live stream today, then you’ll have heard about a few of these changes, but this post will detail all the ones made so far.
These changes have been made internally and you’ll get to see them in the next iteration of revenant that you get to play. This post is a chance to see what’s coming for the revenant and a chance for you to give feedback about these changes as well as let us know about other others issue you have noticed while playing the profession.
In addition to these changes, harpoon and the revenant’s elite specialization, Herald, will be available to test in our next beta weekend event. Herald will include shield, legendary dragon stance (Glint), and the Herald traits. The blog post can be found on our website, if you missed it, or you can check out our YouTube channel
for the uploaded video of the stream to see everything in game.
General
There was some awkward behavior with the difference between invoking legends in combat and out of combat. This resulted in some weird behavior such as creating a scenario where you’d want to toggle Impossible Odds, wait till you get low energy, invoke your other legend, then switch back to Impossible Odds. We wanted to make invoking legends more consistent with other classes, such as the Elementalist attunements always having the same recharge.
- Invoking a legend will now have a 10 second recharge while out of combat.
Staff
Overall we felt like the number two skills Punishing Sweep and Debilitating Slam were a bit lackluster and didn’t fit the set very well. This is something we felt since the initial revenant test weekend. This skill was changed to add more control over a fight. As you will notice, we made Surge of the Mists an evade and this will be a common theme you see with skills that have your character moving through the mists. This is something that a lot of you gave a lot of feedback on so we’re going to try it out.
- Punishing Sweep: This skill will now apply 3 seconds of weakness to foes.
- Debilitating Slam: This skill will no longer apply weakness, instead it will daze foes it hits for 0.5 seconds. Decreased number of targets from 5 to 3 and increased the cost from 10 energy to 15.
- Renewing Wave: This skill is now a blast finisher.
- Surge of the Mists: This skill will now evade while your character is preforming this attack.
Sword
You gave us a lot of good feedback about the experience with sword, but there were some concerns that the damage, while good, felt a bit under-tuned. We boosted some of the damage values across the skills. The recharge felt a bit long on the off-hand skills so we reduced them a bit. As with Surge of the Mists, we made Unrelenting Assault evade for its duration. It was too punishing to be locked into a skill where you had no control over your character.
- Preparation Thrust: Increased the damage by 6%.
- Brutal Blade: Increased the damage by 5%.
- Rift Slash: Increased the initial strike damage by 11%.
- Precision Strike: Increased the chill from 1 second to 2 seconds and increased the damage by 34%.
- Unrelenting Assault: Increased the damage by 30%. This skill will now evade while your character is preforming this attack.
- Duelist’s Preparation: Fixed an issue causing this skill to not block for the intended duration. Decreased the recharge from 15 seconds to 12 seconds.
- Grasping Shadow: Decreased the recharge from 20 seconds to 15 seconds and increased the damage by 75%.
Hammer
There was a tweak to a cast time here to help with the flow of the weapon. The after-cast on Field of the Mists was actually much higher than one second so this should make it feel much better.
- Field of the Mists. Reduced the cast time from 1 second to 0.75 second.
- Phase Smash: This skill will now evade while your character is preforming this attack.
Legendary Assassin Stance
This stance had a lot of positive response, but based on feedback I felt as if we could really improve the feel and flow of this stance. A big one was allowing Phase Traversal to work like other teleports so it still would go up to the 1200 distance if used on a target further away then that.
- Enchanted Daggers: Reduced the time interval between the time an enchanted dagger is trigger and the next one from 1 second to 0.5 second.
- Riposting Shadows: Reduced the cost from 35 energy to 30 energy.
- Phase Traversal: This skill can now be used on a target out of range to close the distance similar to how Infiltrator’s Signet on thief works.
Legendary Centaur Stance
The outgoing healing traits were not working with many of the skills in this stance which led to it being much less impactful than intended since you can get an incredible amount of outgoing healing in the Salvation trait line.
- Fixed an issue where the skills for this stance were not working with the outgoing healing bonuses.
Legendary Dwarf Stance
Similar to staff having one outlier skill, so did this stance. Vengeful Hammers was in an odd place. It was mostly a skill used for added damage instead of fitting the theme of being more centered around being a tanky brawler. The skill has been redesigned with a new focus around survivability and being in the thick of a fight which should better fit this stance. Inspiring Reinforcement got reduced a bit because the potential uptime of stability was just too high when comparing to other stability skills; it could be kept up permanently. Besides that, I tweaked some of the other skills to make them feel better.
- Inspiring Reinforcement: Decreased the stability per pulse from 6 seconds to 1 second. Increased the recharge from 5 seconds to 10 seconds and its energy cost from 25 to 30.
- Vengeful Hammers: This skill has had a bit of a re-design. Decreased the damage done by 70%. The hammers will now heal you for a small amount when they hit a foe. While Vengeful Hammers is active you will take 20% decreased physical and condition damage. It also is now instant cast and lowered the from 180 to 120.
- Soothing Stone: Increased the base heal by 20%.
- Rite of the Great Dwarf: Reduced the cast time from 2.75 seconds to 1.25 seconds
Corruption
This trait was just too weak for what it was doing as a grandmaster trait. It should be more on par with other grandmaster traits now.
- Maniacal Persistence: Increased the critical-hit chance per pulse from 2% to 10%.
Devastation
There was a bug fix here and the redesign of a trait. Increased attack speed bonuses felt lackluster when you have access to Impossible Odds, which grants quickness. The increased attack speed values did not stack so I felt as if it was a good place to add in a damage multiplier that would also help out sword’s damage.
- Nefarious Momentum: Fixed a bug so you no longer can cancel-cast legendary assassin stance skills and still gain the might.
- Rapid Laceration: This trait has been changed to Vicious Lacerations. This trait will now increase damage by 2% per stack while attacking with a sword equipped. This stacks up to a maximum of five times.
Invocation
In this specialization line Invigorating Flow wasn’t working properly. Now that it does, the self-healing is quite visible. Similar to Maniacal Persistence, the Rolling Mists trait was just too weak as a conditional 10% critical chance increase so I increased it a bit.
- Invigorating Flow: Fixed an issue with this trait so it will properly trigger from energy spending skills.
- Rolling Mists: Increased the effectiveness increase from 50% to 100% to provide an extra 20% critical-hit chance while under the effects of fury.
I work on systems, combat, skills, and balance.
(edited by Roy Cronacher.1576)