Guild Wars 2

My main character is Guardian in PvE tank/support spec. The following notes is comparision between Revenant and Guardian in that role. BTW we have dedicated elementalist healer in our group.

[Unrelenting Assault] – if the target is moving or rotating, this skill causes one strike less sometimes. Uneven ground or nearby walls can cause the attack to cast without damaging the target.

[Envoy of Exuberance] – Protection duration is too low to be of use in any non-trivial PvE encounter.

[Soothing Stone] — Why Retaliation? Again, the duration is too low to be useful Suggestion: change to long cast time Protection.

[Vengeful Hammers] — The energy cost is too high for boss fights. It is hard for the revenant tank to maintain energy reserve for party-saving abilities.
[Forced Engagement] — Is it bugged? Almost all mobs (including bosses, veterans) either ignores it or acts with delay.

[Inspiring Reinforcement] — Costly and useless. One stack with large activation delay. Hard to use it to counter incoming attacks. Suggestion: less cast time and two stacks of Stability. Maybe add stunbreak.

[Rite of the Great Dwarf] — Cast time is too high to counter boss abilities in time.

[Unwavering Avoidance] – Bugged? Stability is delayed.

Sono nice points here. Coming from a Guardian too and I’m completely ignoring Jalis now after trying to use him for days. We’ve been asking for some love for him since BW1 and he indeed received it, but not nearly enough.

I’m now using Glint+Shiro/Ventari/Mallyx for tanking, since it’s just better. Glint’s heal is 100 times stronger then Jalis heal, and if you want you can have perma regen and protection. I agree that the buff of RotD os stronger, but the duration is too short and the energy cost is too high (50 for basically nothing most of the time).

Shield however is more then enough to tank with any gear/build. Condi are a bit of an issue since you only have legendswap for them, but a dedicated Ele healer can cleanse them while sleeping.

I think that the heal and the elite are at a decent place, while the entire utility set is underwhelming.

Inspiring Reinforcement – If you don’t need stability, all you’re left with is a weak lightning field and weakness. Weakness is only applied at casting, so you must hit with the skill in the first place. There’s no cripple or anything of the sorts. You’re basically spending a lot of energy for an underwhelming weakness effect in those situations. And then, when you DO need stability, the skill is simply too slow to protect you against quick stuns, while leaving the field will automatically put you vulnerable to CC again because of how little stab lasts.

I do not mind the amount of counterplay it offers, but it needs a significant buff on what it offers. Cripple procs, perhaps?

Forced Engagement – This skill does nothing in PvE most of the time, except at breaking defiance bars. 2 seconds of taunt/ slow pretty much means you’re aggroing and weaknening a single attack. A single non-boss attack. If your target is melee, chances are, they won’t even have a chance to get close to you, so any retaliation you might have on you is pointless. This skill is entirely balanced around CC in PvP and around defiance bars against bosses, and is thus treated merely as another interrupt skill.

For taunt+slow to florish in normal PvE, it needs to last more, a lot more. 6 seconds, 8 seconds or 10 seconds. If not, then there’s almost no distinction between this skill and a generic daze, outside of a few subtle details.

Vengeful Hammers – If you have to spend your entire energy and sacrifice most of your skills in your skill bar for a 20% damage reduction, chances are, you already lost. This skill may be good when stacked with protection, but non-herald revenants have limited access to boons so Jalis is left as an awful tank without party support.

The reason why shiro’s and mallyx’s upkeeps work is because they allow for deadly combos. The reason for why glint’s upkeep skills work is because they have low upkeep costs. The reason why ventari’s upkeep work is both because the stance does not needs it to do its main job and because when you do need it, it offers 100% immunity to what you want to protect against (projectiles).

Jalis hammers stand in this weird spot where they consume all your energy like most deadly/ anti-death upkeeps, while merely offering subtler bonuses like glint’s usually much cheaper upkeeps.

Basically:

• Utility #1: Does close to nothing most of the time (except in heavy CC scenarios).
• Utility #2: Does close to nothing most of the time (except at breaking boss bars).
• Utility #3: Sacrifice your entire build to delay your death for a few seconds.