Guild Wars 2

Ok, so I think most of us can conclusively agree, that the Rev, in Beta version, is not acceptable. Ok, so it’s not even remotely close. However, saying so, takes no steps towards fixing this class. So let’s point out the collective faults of the class in one place, combine with, reasonable, suggestions to fix things.

Note: Your study does not have to be “comprehensive” just point out what you have worked with.

1. Weapons

a.) Hammer

In the case of the hammer, and in the case of the Rev in general, the concept is to be a slow, ranged heavy hitter. Unfortunately, in the desire to err on the side of caution, the Hammer just feels slow. Period. The hammer also doesn’t pierce through enemies, so you’re more than likely hitting 1 guy and maybe the guy next to him.

Solution 1: Dmg/speed Fix: I would recommend at least a 10% boost in attack speed, and a 15% boost in base dmg. (recommended)

Solution 2: Speed/dmg Fix: 20% faster attack speed, 5-7% dmg boost.

Solution 3: Condi/Pierce Boost Fix: 50% Chance on hit to apply torment, hammer throws pierce targets or do splash dmg upon first hit. Hitting a target with torment on it, cripples the target for 1.5 seconds. (recommended)

c. Staff

I really “want” to like the staff, and it’s obvious it was made for a healer doing melee range self defense, probably in proximity to a tablet. My issue is the globes, you can barely see on the ground. Also the dmg is relatively low for a melee range weapon.

Solution 1: Globe Scale Fix: make the healing globes about 20-50% larger so they can be seen. (recommended)

Solution 2: Globe Creep Fix: Allow the globes to naturally gravitate towards you after 1 second at average walking speed. So if you’re crippled and running away they follow and heal you till they run out.

Solution 3: Boon Standard Fix: The globes need to generate swiftness or protection as a standard effect. (recommended)

Solution 4: Dmg Fix: This thing is melee range on a class that isn’t really meant to be, it needs 20-25% more base dmg.

2. Armor

When I play a heavy armor class. I expect it to be heavy armor. Not tissue paper wrapped in a thin film of metal. Anything, and I mean ANYTHING that got close and wasn’t an NPC was near instant death. I’ve tried going for power, I simply died faster because of the slow execution times of my skills.

I tried a Healing>Toughness build with 4 variable armor stats. It was barely any Tankier and I lost basically ALL my power. Took me ~30 seconds to kill a boar NPC in Drytop.

Something is wrong either with how the armor stats are being read, or with the base stats for the class.

Solution 1: Raise the base stats of the class to put them more in line with the fact that my medium armor Engie has more sustain than a heavy armor Rev. (Recommended.)

3. Misc.

-Skills do not link well with each other. Recommend to revisit the overall synergy of multiple Legends.

-There is no “reliable” swiftness skill. Right now you either run staff and trait for the orbs to grant swiftness, or you have to combo. Please add 1-2 skills that grant swiftness in a slightly less cumbersome way.

That’s all for now.

I can say, although revenants can be annoying to fight, they aren’t a challenge., they need more damage. That being said; their main damage legend has yet to be revealed.

My feedback/suggestions:

Hammer: Too slow and clunky feeling. Needs to be a bit faster to make up for it

Weapon Swap: The Revenant definitely needs this. I want to be able to switch between hammer, and mace/axe – being as we can ONLY swap between 2 legends (compared with engineers which can have 5 F-skills and multiple toolkits, and eles which have access to 4 elemental attunements). We don’t even have any utility skills to choose from for goodness sake, the least the Revenant should have is weapon swap!

Axe Skill #5; Temporal Rift: This skill has so much potential. I’ve ALWAYS wanted a quicksand-like-skill that the grawl from Overgrowth’s Statuary in Edge of the Mists has, and to me, this skill is the closest we’ll get to it. I feel it’s a bit lacklustre right now though, and could be AMAZING with a trait which makes it 1) unblockable, and 2) ground targeted. I want to be able to pull enemies off of towers, and position myself in ways to gain the upper hand. Right now, I feel this skill is limited when it comes to me wanting to pull enemies off high ledges – and can’t. With this change, it would be perfect.

Mace #1 skill’s range: it’s too low. Increase it to 300, 420 or 600, and now you’re talking!

Ventari legend: Too much focus on healing, not enough power

Lack of stun breaks

Staff animations look great, but its base damage is horrible.

Those are the things that stand out for me, that need improvements.

got one suggestion for the way tablet works : problem folks were debating at LA was that it’s way too tedious to move it while running ( it basically requires you to remap the skill to another key and even then it’s tedious ) so I’d suggest to be able to pick up the tablet ( similar to the way turrets on engineer work ) so you can drop it when required . This would ,of course , only be possible after you had summoned the thing .

I was testing moving it as I was running and caught myself constantly attempting to pick it up
And this was running around in Lion’s Arch …

It’s just not very intuitive , the way it’s designed now .

I’m also not sure about the energy -cost of numerous skills . I think it’s warrranted to look at possibility of faster regen or lessen energy cost .

you can even make the tablet visible when picked up ( you’d see a revenant running around with a stone tablet on his/her back ..that would be funny )

Weapons:
Hammer: Its skill set says “ranged weapon” with emphasis on utility/control, but has nothing to keep enemies at/near its preferred range.

Mace/Axe: I actually liked this one the most. While some of the animations feel too long (burn field), I think its in a decent place as a condi set.

Staff: Its fun to play, but it is currently lacking in the damage department. The healing/utility it provides is largely offset by how much damage you take because of how long it takes to kill anything with it.

Legends and their associated trait lines:
Of the three available at the moment, I felt Mallyx was the best. It plays similarly to a corruption necro and its traits enable it as such.

Jalis legend felt….meh. I know it is supposed to be the ‘tanky’ support spec, but it is just…meh. While it wants to keep enemies at mid-range, it simply lacks the close range threat to discourage them from walking up and punching you in the spleen. Its damage reduction traits are also largely based around keeping enemies at the 600+ range or getting yourself CC’d. The former will be difficult to reliably achieve, while the latter isn’t necessarily a good thing.

Ventari legend: Honestly don’t know why this is basically a full heal spec. I don’t really see it even performing on par with a support Guardian or support Elementalist, as it is right now. To me, the trait line felt too invested in the Ventari utilities at the expense of being more broadly appealing to other specs that might just want some extra healing power/utility.

Aesthetics: really like them, from the mildly glowy (but not overboard) armor, to the skill animations.

Combat feels: For a heavy class, they feel ‘glassy’, even when geared towards tankier stats. Their damage also feels rather low. Some of this might be because since the trait update, I feel pretty much all the original classes are over-tuned when it comes to damage. Also, the current lack of (what I’ll assume to be) the direct damage legend and its associated weapon(s)/traits might be part of the feeling of a ‘lack of payout’ for going glassy.

I found the Revenant legends to be lacking a lot of their character or it to be completely wrong. We were told the spirits would talk to us. Ventari making grunts and battlecries is not really talking to us, he didn’t say anything like what he has written on his tablet, heck, his grunts were incredibly aggravating. Mallyx just made grumpy sounds and Jalis didn’t even say a word to me. Worst part is, my character didn’t seem to acknowledge the spirits he was summoning either. I was looking forward to seeing how a Sylvari treats Mallyx compared with a Charr. But as it stands, the Revenant’s “homages” to GW1 feel incredibly empty.

Need larger Resistance duration while using Demon Stance, its fine be a condition magnet to spread around but not when you don’t have enough to ensure you don’t get melted by those same conditions.

Also Demon Heal (if I did the numbers right) gets affected negatively by poison. Fix this please.

Shadow Phage.9084:

Mace/Axe: I actually liked this one the most. While some of the animations feel too long (burn field), I think its in a decent place as a condi set.

I agree. I keep trying to switch, but come back to this combo almost every time. The biggest issue I have is inconsistency on the #2 skill (Searing Fissure). I have seen it DoT on things outside the actual on-screen graphic, but then not hit things that the graphic shows going right under.

I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be limited to the displayed targeting graphic’s area or not, but it makes it hard to judge where to place yourself to attack.

Mallyx in PvE: A fun concept with pulling conditions onto yourself to strengthen your utilities, but falls apart in large-scale groups or simply playing with casual friends — there’s too much area condition cleanse to keep conditions on yourself for any duration. Amusingly, this means the more Mallyx-focused revenants there are in one area, the less effective they all become.

Way to improve: Only solution I can come up with is via traits. Have conditions the revenant gains add a short-duration stacking ‘buff’ (really just a little token-counter) that increases with each unique condition, so Mallyx revenants have at least a small window to trigger skills 6-9’s bonus effects. This still does nothing for the elite skill, but I have no solution for that.

Mace/Axe streamlining: This set is so directionally-focused! All skills trigger in a linear fashion and that makes it important to keep your target in front of you. In melee, when a target circles around it’s much easier and faster for them to exit your effective attacking angles than it is for you to keep up. Additionally, torment doesn’t have its full potential in PvE where monsters will stick right up on you and cease moving as long as mace auto stays melee (whereas skills 2-5 are all somewhat ranged).

Way to improve: Make the mace auto slightly more ranged, so that it matches skills 2-5 at the least. Cleave would be nice to keep, though — perhaps through bouncing? . This will allow the revenant to keep a little more distance and force targets to make more of an effort to escape the revenant’s attacking angles, as well as trigger torment’s full potential as a movement-punishing condition.
On the side, Axe 4 feels like it should be a combo finisher, either projectile or leap. Up to you!

Unyielding Anguish: A decent skill at heart, but the displacement is a headache and works through many things that it shouldn’t. It also doesn’t seem to interrupt anything except the flow of a fight (into mass chaos) and therefore does nothing that it feels like it should.

Ways to improve: I like the area denial effect, I really do. The torment is a fitting condition to put on it, as well. However, its lack of control on where you displace enemies to makes it hard to consider using. Perhaps change the AoE into a wall instead of a well? I am unsure if this was intended to be an interruption skill or a forced-repositioning skill, and this may not be the best way to address it.

(Cutting here, general/Ventari discussion next)

(Sorry I have so much to say!)

Encouraging mismatched Legends and weapons: Currently it feels very punishing and ineffective to use a weapon that doesn’t match a legend. I believe using matching weapons and legends should feel the most effective, but please make mismatched use friendlier!

Ways to improve: I think the best way to address this would be through major traits — aesthetically, it’s the character’s choice on how far they want to mingle with the legends, and how much they want the legends to mingle together. Two examples I could think of (but, of course, not the best) would be altering existing traits to become less weapon-specific.
-The Mallyx line has a minor trait to cause torment on critical hit, which mace/axe already has a decent amount of (though it could use more). If this chance to proc increases from 33% to, say, 66% or 100%, I could really consider using the Mallyx traitline with staff and feel like I’m still staying true to the legend.
-The second example is in Ventari’s traitline — you can trait to have an additional healing shard appear with the exploded tablet. I’d like to see this healing shard, or a weaker version, appear with any completed weapon auto-chain. This would improve the staff’s purpose, and could be very strong with hammer’s singular projectile autoattack. Keep in mind hammer is a ranged weapon, so the revenant wouldn’t be able to benefit so much from it as their melee friend, who could truly appreciate it.

Ventari’s Tablet Overall: Many, many players have brought up how clunky this mechanic is. It’s a lot of management and, in my opinion, surprisingly energy-costly. I appreciate the importance of active play, but I feel that the tablet ought to do some things on its own.

Ways to improve: There’s two things I’d like to see in particular, and the first one is allowing the tablet to pulse a small area-healing effect on its own, akin to Soothing Mist and Battle Presence. There is an area-regeneration trait for it, but I don’t think that’s the same. This relieves some of the stress a Ventari revenant feels on needing to zip it around to and fro. The second thing I’d like to see is allowing the tablet to persist while channeling another legend. I know it was intended that the tablet cease when outside of Ventari, but with the way it exists right now, I’m severely disinclined to ever swap back to Ventari because it means I have to channel the tablet back into existence. Keeping the tablet persistent would allow me to react much faster to situations where I have to, say, explode it for healing, or summon the projectile bubble.