Guild Wars 2

Hey everyone,

Some of the regulars here might remember me from thethe post I made after the first revenant testing weekend and the post I made after the first beta weekend..
I will be writing in depth feedback on the revenant again so prepare yourself for a wall of text.
If you just want to watch the video: here it is: https://youtu.be/JyWdf4VsUoc

I spent about 50 hours on the revenant during the last beta weekend, and asked everyone in my guild and lots of people I met about their opinions, so this is where this feedback is coming from. Most of the feedback will be from a World versus World and Spvp perspective.

I’ll start by systematically going through each legend, traits included, followed by the assorted weapon(s).

Mallyx still feels like it’s in quite a good spot, although it might offer a bit too much resistance for a class that’s supposed te be weak against conditions. There are some classes that just don’t have access to boonstrip so it’s almost impossible for them to beat a revenant that is running mallyx , but other than that I still like the high risk/reward playstyle.

The corruption line seems to be in a good place except for the poison trait which I just can’t see getting any use in any scenario.
It’s one of the most thematically fitting legends which does what it’s supposed to do and it’s one of the only specs in the game that can reliable strip boons. Unyielding Anguish is problematic though, there is no way to get onto a point as it fully covers a point in conquest. Something should be done about this, some of the best suggestions i’ve come across is making the first hit displace and letting the field then pulse torment, or something else. Making the field smaller would also help for conquest, but the skill itself would still be slightly problematic. Making it so stability works might also help. There currently is no way to counterplay the skill except for blocks, but these are limited for most classes.

Mace and axe feel quite good, but while all weapons got access to new evades during their mist skills, mace and axe feel a bit left out as they get no evades or anything, but this might not be a bad thing as they’re certainly not weak in their current state.

Let’s look at jalis now: Jalis got some major improvements this beta weekend with the changed upkeep skill which feels better (the heals are quite low in PvP however) but the damage reduction is very nice. The improvement to the elite casting time was also great as you could now actually use it during fights. The taunt might be a bit expensive, but i’d rather have it this way, spamming taunt and slow would not be fun to play against. The jalis legend feels like a solid choice now, but it gets outshined by other legends that are more vital in many builds. If you however can make good use of the party wide damage reduction, I can see this getting picked up by more people.

The trait line is extremely strong, giving access to lots of damage reduction, healing, stability, extra endurance and even protection. This trait line makes you feel quite tanky even if you’re running berserker builds.

On to hammer: The hammer got a huge buff in the last patch by making phase smash an evade and giving you a way to handle focus. The damage is top notch and might be a bit too high, as doing 25k hits if you can find the sweet spot with a 2s cooldown might be too strong. I am aware of the fact that it is easy to evade, but you don’t even have enough endurance to evade every 2 seconds. I showcase some of the damage at the start of the video.

Let’s discuss ventari now. Ventari got fixed so the healing modifier traits actually work now. I have tried to run a cleric’s revenant with all the modifiers and monk runes in some stronghold games just focusing on keeping those doorbreakers alive, the healing was quite good although most seemed to come from regeneration ticks, but you were quite vulnerable while you were in ventari, as you didn’t have any stunbreaks or a reliable way to avoid taking damage, you also don’t really get a second heal like the other legends would offer, but your second heal just becomes summoning a tablet which made ventari feel not useful enough if people found out you were actually quite vulnerable while healing others.

The trait line that accompanies Ventari is in a healthy place, offering lots of modifiers you really need, but this line is only worth taking if you’re running a healing oriented build, it doesn’t feel like this trait line can be used without picking up the actual legend or weapons like the other trait lines can. which is rather sad, but at least it’s not bad at doing what it’s supposed to do.

The staff is a viable weapon and it feels like it’s a great swap, because of the great damage on the fifth skill, and the reliable block, the autoattacks felt a bit weak compared to hammer and sword, but the rest of the skillset makes up for that. A solid option. TBC —>

Continued:

Time for shiro! Shiro is the most vital legend if you’re running around in world versus world because of the mobility that is indispensable for running around in world versus world, and the stunbreak that saved my life more often than I would like to admit. The Elite is also borderline overpowered. Although it has a high energy cost, a 3 second aoe stun is super strong.
Every single skill is excellent in this legend, but while the energy reduction on riposting shadows is not a balance offender, the change to phase traversal is. This now offers a 1200 range shadowstep without a cooldown as long as there is something you can target. I think the energy cost and the range of the skill were balanced based on the way it worked before it was changed to work like infiltrator signet, so, while it is fun to be literally uncatchable and being able to go from the mid point to the home point in pvp in a second, this is not balanced. And I feel like either the energy cost should be increased, and/or the range should be reduced. The healing skill is still in a controversial spot, but I think this skill too is borderline overpowered, the initial heal is low, but the total heal is quite good, but more importantly, this heal does about 5300 additional damage, giving you access to crazy burst when you use that skill.

I still like the trait line, it’s well balanced and I like the lifesteal and vulnerability idea, only critique I have is the lack of a good option in the master category, as they all feel inferior too the adept traits.
Revenant sword changes were good, precision strike feels like it’s worth casting now, and the autoattack buff was welcome. There are 2 issues however, firstly the fact that if someone uses deflects and/or reflects they render you unable to use your autoattack chain, as you can’t get past the projectile part of the autoattack chain, this is quite a big problem as you can’t cleave at all when a revive bubble is procced by a guardian, and you almost can’t hit people if they decide to fight on a guardian wall of reflection for example. I would therefore suggest to make this part of the chain unblockable so you can actually cycle through it in these situations.
It’s time for the big one now: unrelenting assault. A lot has been said about this already, but I would like to start of clarifying for those who are about to say it. DOUBLE DODGING IS NOT A SOLUTION. you shouldn’t use all your endurance on a skill with a 10 second cooldown, as this enables the revenant to just kill you afterwards with his autoattacks or swap to hammer while you can’t evade anything. Popping 60 second and 80 second cooldowns like signet of stone and endure pain also won’t do as unrelenting assault will be up again in 10 seconds. This skill is strong at the moment, but that’s not even the main issue, the lack of counterplay is, the evade is longer than anything currently in the game, while it also does damage and stacks might. (except for the hammer’s phase smash at max range). Solutions might be quite tricky, but I like the suggestion of putting most of the damage in the final hit of the skill.
Off hand sword is one of the best off hand option, coming out on top of shield in bigger groups.
Time for invocation. This trait line is focused on fury, which is not a bad theme, but it doesn’t benefit conditions nearly as much as it benefits direct damage which is a shame, a trait that would add condition duration during fury or anything that benefits conditions too would be nice, similar to the 150 condition damage trait during fury warriors get access too. The trait line offers a bit of everything, like on condition cleanse on a 10 second cooldown gated on your legend swap, and okay traits, it doesn’t really stand out as much as it did when you needed it to make your legend swap instant. This feels good if you’re running power builds, but it feels underwhelming on condition builds.
To be continued —>

Continued:
Now, onto the shiny new herald. The facet idea turned way stronger than i thought it was gonna be. The facet of nature (f2) offered great uptime on some of the most important boons (protection, regeneration, fury) while offering 50%! boon duration aoe while upkeeping it for only 2 energy degeneration cost. The boon duration felt like it can use a higher cost, as 50% is a lot. It was a nice added profession mechanic.
The legend itself was very, very strong. It felt like one of the strongest legends even if you were alone, although all the boons get shared out to 5 people in range. The heal offered useful regeneration and a heal similar to defiant stance, turning all incoming damage (including condition damage) into healing. The skill was better than it was on paper, and was better than defiant stance for several reasons. The main one is the fact that it doesn’t have a cast time, this is what made defiant stance useless and makes this viable. The other one is a less positive one though, the complete lack of a tell when infuse light was on you. You can obviously see an orange glowing aura when a warrior uses endure pain, which tells everyone hitting him is useless during that time. But infuse light lacks this tell, all it has is some small blue-ish ray flowing into you at the start, but other than that, there was no way to tell if a revenant had that heal up except for the tool tip stating he had. so if people didn’t have the revenant selected, they had no way of telling they were actually healing him. This could use some proper aura or a tell that is more obvious.
The elite also has a quite peculiar issue, I’ve gotten comments from some people telling me: “the Herald is the true chronomancer, as it bends people’s frames”. Every single time the glint elite was cast, the ground particle effect caused everyone to lose more than 10 fps. I guess the animation could be toned down a bit for people with animations on low?
Shield was good, quite good, bug the skills were very expensive, and a chill or cripple seemed to decrease it by as much as a stun or daze, this should be adressed, as there is way more chill and cripple than stuns and dazes, and I think stuns and dazes should affect it more than chill and cripple. Shield 4 was OK.
The trait line had some good minor traits, and good adept traits, although hardening persistance seemed to be giving more stacks than you should be getting. The major traits were all pretty average. But the worst one has got to be the protection on healing skill which just pretty much made your glint heal worse. I would therefore suggest changing it to granting a boon based on the legend you are in when using a healing skill, giving might/fury in shiro and protection/retalliation in jalis, this would make the trait good without changing the general concept. The shared empowerment seemed to be rather weak, but it was you only option if you were not playing in big groups so you were obliged to take it. The boon duration increase from soothing bastion did not seem to work when I tried it.
All in all the most striking thing about the Glint legend was how it was hard to get rid of your energy. The upkeep costs were quite low, and the activations were free. This just doesn’t feel like it is as it is supposed to be. Other legends have an initial starting cost to start an upkeep which would not be out of place, giving the activations a cost would also not be surprising and even justified. Making it so the passive part has to be active for at least a second before being able to use the second part and not allowing doubletap might also help balancing it out.
In general, herald makes the vanilla revenant feel weak, the herald trait line and facet of nature feels like the arcane specialization line for the elementalist, as invocation doesn’t really fill that niche. It feels like revenant with boons where you would otherwise have none, it feels like nothing but an upgrade, even if you just get the specialization for the new facet of nature. The additional boon duration also helps greatly with the resistance uptime. Even for soloing, the boons from facet of nature seem to be your best option even as it shares those boons out to 5 people.

Some bugs I encountered were:-
-Mace 2 and hammer 2 not working on slopes.
-Gaze of darkness not revealing properly.
- The boon duration increase from soothing bastion did not seem to work when I tried it.

This class went from pretty underpowered to over the top quite fast, being overpowered is not fun, there is no glory in winning. As you can win some fights by only using unrelenting assault and literally no other skill. This is why I won’t be asking for buffs from a pvp perspective.
Feel free to tell me what you think of the Revenant and my feedback, thanks!

Thanks for the great work Roy! \o/

I’ve only played about 15-20 hours on my Revenant, so am not sure I could really comment in depth on your feedback. However, I find your points well explained and relevant, making sense. Nice job.

I’ve enjoyed the video very much too, made me want to play right again… Too bad I’ll have to wait for the next beta WE!

I feel it is a good exhaustive and honest feed-back.
I have been watching some top spvper and reached similar conclusions.
Thank you for this great job.

I agree with the poison trait as the only thing we can apply poison with is mace auto. Mallyx is the only answer we mainly have to condis so I think its balanced. Outside of Mallyx our condi clear is below average which is fine. I believe guard/ele/war/ranger are the ones that have no boon removal so that is fine as well.

For Jalis the only issue I have is with the taunt being 50 energy. 40 seems reasonable to me and can’t really be spammed and still leaves you with something to defend your self if needed.

I agree with the hammer 2 stuff for wvw ONLY. In pvp its fine as is.

Staff 4 animation should be changed to warrior banner 3 because being stuck in place for what you get seems bad.
Jade winds is pretty balanced. Has a long enough cast time with a very obvious animation. The cost is high as well and you are often forced to switch legends if you miss it.

Unrelenting assault is only good in 1v1. Outside of that it’s used defensively for the evade, might, and the dps spread. If you move dmg to the last hit like Hundred Blades than most people wont bother doing anything until the last hit. You will only end up making the skill some what worth in 1v1 except the person just has to dodge the last hit. In group play the main target will be the only one needing to dodge the last hit. While everyone else can just walk around getting tickled.

You can’t make it into a hundred blades type of deal because HB can cleave 5 people for a lot of damage. Where as UA bounces around target to target. It will become only used for the evade/might stack if what you purpose goes through. A lot of people don’t know how easily they can use UA to their advantage to make life hell for the Revenant. So I feel that UA is in a good spot now and any dmg modifying changes will make it sub-par. You can heavily negate UA’s dmg if you have a second target-able pet/summon/person near you.

It has many counters and I don’t think it should be balanced around 1v1s because nothing in this game is balanced around 1v1s.

What about idea for Ventari tablet not moving but instant teleport giving small aoe heal + regen? After swap to Ventari it would activ instant then it will follow your toon. If u use skill will go place you choose(aoe heal/regen). If it would be 600 range far it would teleport back to you.

Someone mentioned the idea of making it able to stick to a target, so you can let someone be the moving center of your heals, or just enabling to put it on yourself so people know they should be close to you for the heals. Teleport might also help, but it would make it hard for others to track your target if they really need those heals.

Nice feedback eems pretty honest i’m agree with a lot of things. And i have pretty same feelings in unranked pvp this WE. I’m also agree with mosharn. The only thing for me that’s pretty iritating is the cost of jailis taunt, too much. Maybe 40 seems cool yeah. But i let roy decide of this, after all revenant must be balanced.

I agree with pretty much everything except:
1. I think Jade Winds is completely fine. It has a very large animation and it costs a ton of energy(almost always forcing a Legend Swap).
2. I think the Jalis Taunt is rather weak. For 50 Energy I could use…Jade Winds >.>
Basically what would happen is that I never use it, because 50 Energy means I have almost nothing left for weapon skills and I wont even have a chance to use the Jalis Elite or anything really. I think we should try it out at 40 energy at least and go from there.

Nice review and another great video, thanks for sharing.

I also played Rev all beta weekend (mostly hotjoin) and I hate to agree with you about Phase Traversal. It’s a lot of fun, but there is nothing else in the game that even comes close to the mobility you get with this skill. If you equip Shiro, it is impossible for another player to escape from you…

I do agree with Malchior about Jalis taunt – this is really expensive, and when it gets blinded or blocked, it really ruins your day. I think a simple reduction in energy would go a long way with this. Perhaps 35 or 40 energy to cast.

I also agree about Unrelenting Assault needing some tweaking, but this is a well-known topic and I’ve already present my thoughts on that elsewhere.

Anyways, thanks for sharing another Rev video.

I would love to have Jalis be tauntier. The energy cost of that skill was the main reason I didn’t spend much time with it.

Yeah Rev is in a very good spot now, surely in the high end of the power spectrum.
He doesn’t need hugh nerfs, just some adjustments to a couple of skill that drives people mad: the UA brothers (Unrelenting Assault and Uyielding Anguish).

UA1) After reading many ideas i agree to move good chunk of the damage towards the end of the skill, now is X dmg * 7 hits, coming back to the starting target, make it :
- X/2 first 3 hits
- X the 4th
- X*1,5 last 3
The sum of the coeffs will be equals to 1,5+1+4,5 = still 7 hits damage.
This won’t hurt DPS potential in pve on single targets like bosses but if you dodge last 3 hits you dodge more than 60% of the damage. I’d be fine with that.
SIDE NOTE: since this skill builds might, dodging only last 3 hits is already a good tactic, do it folks!

UA2) the only issue is that ignores stability. This is not right, it has to eat 1 or 2 stacks of stab each pulse, so this won’t ruin the skill while giving a counter, and a obvious one!

About hammer 2 making 25k dmg per hit. This is with zerk gear, might stacks and 25 vuln on enemies and sweet sot and other things.

25/2 = 12,5. That is still less DPS wise than what other classe do so I dont see a problem tbh. And it’s ONLY with all these things and at long range with sweetspotting.

Got nothing on my engineer

I also EXTREMELY DISLIKE putting most of UA dmg at the end. This will becomes useless then ebcause everyone and their mom will dodge the final hit and it will be useless vs more enemies (since it will basically be a single target skill with useless random teleporting and delayed dmg to last enemy(first))

I would rather have it (i wouldn’t change it at all tbh but IF then) do 4 hits instead of 7, for the same dmg total and giving 2 might stacks then instead of 1. Easier to dodge, shorter evade. Less 1 hit dmg (that would be WAY too easy to dodge/block/invul).

Also disagree about Jade Winds. It costs the equivalent of 10 seconds of energy regen when not spending energy on anything else at all, even heal. Disagreed witj Jade Daggers as well. It’s meant to be an offensive heal.

Tbh I am more interested in seeing how meta shapes up for all classes after elite specs and changes rather than nerf Revenants prematurely and then stay nerfed for years

Think of how people complained about 100Blades for months after release. And to counter it all you needed was dodge or CC enemy :P

I really wasn’t going to roll a Rev but that video is freaking amazing and has convinced me otherwise. The class itself seems amazing. Why has every Rev I’ve fought in the beta weekends been trash? I kind of wish I’d come across more opponents as skilled as the OP.

Zera.8907:

I really wasn’t going to roll a Rev but that video is freaking amazing and has convinced me otherwise. The class itself seems amazing. Why has every Rev I’ve fought in the beta weekends been trash? I kind of wish I’d come across more opponents as skilled as the OP.

Because it’s a new class and a lot of people have no clue how to play it. I for one never lost to a single other Rev during the BWE (playing as a Rev). It’s pretty interesting to see how monumental the skill gap can be on the class (Energy Management OP I guess).

Oh and great post Wand I subbed to you awhile back as you seem to be the most skilled Rev (thats actually posting gameplay) at the moment so well done on picking up the class so fast. The only things I personally think need to be changed are Unyielding Anguish (cause it is completely OP) and Jalis Taunt. The taunt makes no sense at 50 Energy when you can use Jade Winds and effect more targets for the same cost. Aside from some trait refining I think everything else should stay as is. Most things in this class are balanced around Energy and I think they are balanced well. If for instance you decide to spam Phase Traversal to catch up to or stick to a target by the time you reach them you will be completely out of energy. This will force a Legend Swap locking you out of that Legend for 10 sec. This is balanced to me. I just used all of my Energy for what could potentially be a very risky play.

That was a fun video to watch. While I appreciate the thought and perspective that went into the feedback I tend to dismiss 90% of feedback that comes from a purely WvW outlook.

If we’re going to make extensive comments about the combat abilities (outside of PVE) at least do it with a baseline level playing field in sPvP. WvW makes great videos and is tons of fun but should not be the basis for critique.

Made a little sequel to this previous video. For those thirsty for more!

https://youtu.be/7Rolcc50-Yk

I just wanted to point out I believe the hearold trait protection on heal skill use seemed like it fit into the cleric hearold/ventri build quite well. Every time you re position your tablet it added protection. You could move your tablet every like 2 seconds.