Guild Wars 2

Although I am a long-term player with an embarrassing number of in-game hours behind me, I come from a position where I suppose I would now be considered a casual pve player (no dungeons/fractals). And an easily confused one. This means that my experience of the new class is likely not to be as universal, but may still be relevant to the devs since they I think (hope) they will want feedback from all types of players.

As my first time trying the Heart of Thorns Beta, I wanted to try making a healing sort of Revenant. I used to play healers in other games, and I miss that sort of sturdy support role. I used full cleric gear, and superior rune of the monk on it. My weapons were also cleric.

General Impressions
I found the Revenant to be fairly confusing at first. There is much about the class that is different to the other classes in the game, and indeed, in other games. Part of the confusion is that we didn’t get to attempt to level the character, and were just dumped with everything at level 80 and that is a lot to take in. Also, for many classes, how they function is fairly evident, but not so for the Revenant.

It took me quite a while to work out that the arrows on either side of the energy bar was only just how much energy he was losing or gaining at the time. I thought for a while it was something like a shield that was part of the class mechanics that gave him more defense when his energy was high. Yes.. I know many of you will be facepalming, but I did warn you I get confused easily :P

I have found it an interesting concept as a class, but some of the skills and animations seem to need a bit of work or tweaking. The animations in some cases seem very much reused or look too artificially stuck on which breaks immersion. Attacks, even magical attacks, shouldn’t break immersion in a game, and some of these do because of how they look.

What also needs work is the skill que system for the revenant. There have been many times where trying to do one skill after another, especially if they are both a ground target, not to work.

Weapons
Staff
I started out with the staff, because I thought ‘Hey, staff is most likely to be healing, right?’. Well yes it is, but I found it difficult to utilize the Ventari Legend with it properly, mainly because in melee you don’t have as much of an overview of battle as a ranged character, so moving the tablet to the best spots for support was problematic. I would generally just have the tablet sitting at my own location as a personal support, which isn’t really how it’s meant to be used.

The staff’s auto attack creates small healing orbs around you that can be picked up by you or your allies. I like the idea but I found that the orbs were really difficult to see on some terrain. I think the graphic for them needs to be changed a bit to be more visible (without being too much). Skill 1 is also the only combo finisher on the staff, and is on the last hit, which means it only procs one vulnerability on the foe every 2 seconds, with your field on dwarf lasting 5 seconds and demon on 4, which is really only 2 stacks of vulnerability. Not that great.

Overall, the staff seems to be a bit of a mixed bag of skills. You have basic melee attacks that include up to 3 targets, your skill 2 has the potential of helping weaken your foe for 3 seconds, skill 3 is anti-projectile that will blind foes near you if it is struck by any projectiles, skill 4 is an aoe heal and condition removal, and skill 5 is a charge and knockback skill. It seems to me to do a little bit of everything, but focus on nothing. I am not at all used to playing a melee character, so I can’t really say how the staff would be best utilized as a pve character.

I like the animation for skills 1,3 and 5. 4 is a bit mediocre and seems like it was taken from another class’ staff, but skill 2 looks just like the guardian hammer skill 4 ‘Banish’ but with a mist arc. A staff should both look and feel different, completely different, to a hammer, and using a hammer animation for this just sits wrong with me.

(continued in the next post)

Hammer
I tested out the Hammer after the staff because it was the only option for being ranged as a Revenant, a style I am far more used to playing. The hammer has an exceedingly pleasing range of 1200.

The skill type is split into three types as far as I can see. Skills 1 and 2 are for damaging foes in a long fairly thin line going from your character, while skills 3 and 5 are ground targeted aoe skills. Skill 4 is a block projectile skill.

The two ground targetted aoe skills of 3 and 5 are combo finishers that can be used to buff allies in a field with speed (You have a field in the Dwarf and Demon legends), and your auto attack skill 1 can be used in a field to put vulnerability on foes.

Overall the hammer is a very aoe sort of weapon. There is really nothing there that will be about taking down a single foe. I think that although skills 1 and 2 are fairly similar, there is a use for them both because of the field buff of 1 and the extra damage of 2, and skill 4 is really useful when facing other ranged targets. However I really amn’t convinced over how similar 3 and 5 are.

Hammer skill 3 has you leaping forwards in mist form and slamming an area, affecting up to 5 targets with damage and a 2 second chill. It costs 5 energy and takes 1.25 seconds to cast (although during that time you are in mist form). Skill 5 is the summoning of a giant hammer to slam into an area, also affecting 5 targets, who are damaged (slightly more than skill 3) and knocked down for 2 seconds. The skill takes 1.75 seconds to cast and costs 15 energy. Both skills merely buff speed to people if its on a field, so no difference there. Both skills are basically sort of damage and crowd control. Yes, one is chill and one is knockdown, which is different, with knockdown being more useful, but its still the same sort of thing.

Another problem with skills 3 and 5 is the cast time and the ability to cast things afterwards. Ideally I was wanting to perhaps cast skill 5 at a group of foes, which would damage and knock them down, then cast 3 on the same group straight after. But there is an issue with overlap here. Until the hammer actually finishes falling and a slight delay afterwards, trying to cast skill 3 doesn’t work. It is really difficult to judge when you are actually able to cast (and have it succeed) if you have just done 5. Its clunky and frustrating and makes using the two skills together pretty impossible. Likewise, trying to do it skill 3 then skill 5 suffers from the same problem. Neither skill seems to que properly, which limits its use.

I really like the idea of turning your character into mist to do a ranged attack like you see in skill 3. But to make that really useful I think the attack would actually have to be longer. I can see this skill being potentially very useful if you, as a ranged character, were being attacked by melee. You could use the skill 3 to divert the attacking mob to an ally who can then take the agro, or into a damaging aoe or trap that would hamper it’s return long enough for you to kill it. But it just doesn’t last long enough. Its 1.25 seconds long, and the enemy has only just started to turn away to go and attack you over there when you are back to yourself again and it just turns around (usually still in melee) and whacks you.

If I were to change it, I would make the cost higher and have the skill last longer, so that maybe the character leaps into the area and starts whacking things in the zone in melee with the hammer before returning to your previous position. Alternatively it could leap forward and do the damage aoe, but if the player clicks the button again it would do skill 5 as its second attack (at the same or higher energy cost since its mist form) thereby knocking the enemies down so they can recover a little and have more of a chance to stay out of melee range. If this were the case then the hammer would have a space for a different ability since skill 5 was linked to skill 3.

In terms of the animations of the hammer I don’t have too much complaint. I think its strange that skill 2 opens up red cracks in the ground when its meant to be the mists. Although the other animations also have touches of red, I think the red in skill 2 is excessive and just looks out of place like someone dumped down a sticker onto the game screen rather than something that is actually part of the world. If anything I would rather the skill be a bit less in-your-face with its animation. It sort of distracts the eye out of immersion a bit.

(continued in the next post)

Mace and Axe
The mace and axe are both melee weapons and seem very geared towards gathering enemies together and doing condition damage.

Overall I think the skills offered in the mace and axe are varied and interesting. I can see them being used a lot by players both in pvp and in pve since they are so versatile. There is nothing that jumps out at me as being too wrong with it, but I am not used to playing a melee class and could therefore be missing something really obvious in that regard.

In terms of the animations, they aren’t too bad. Although the skill 2 is really red, very much like the hammer skill I thought was too much, I don’t think it matters quite as much here, since it is smaller and burning is in fact part of it’s skill. I think skill 5, the temporal rift needs work though. I like the idea of it, but the actual animation of the rift does not have the level of detail or depth that it should. It looks very stuck on and doesn’t really reflect what the skill is trying to do. It just looks horrible. A large black line that turns into black and red marbled effect before disappearing. Eugh.

General weapon impressions
I have found over time that having no weapon swapping for this class is really inconvenient because only your utility skills change with your Legend, not your weapon skills. If I am playing as a ranged character (Hammer) that suddenly has a group of melee around me, I cannot really do anything about it except dodge and kite. Likewise if I am in melee and there is a reason I should really get out of that position for a while (cause aoe hurts), there is then very little I can do except just stand back and use the legend skills that I should be using in tandem with the weapon. There isn’t the versatility like you have in elementalist where your spells actually change, and engineer has a variety of different methods of kits that totally change their weapon kitten nal. Because the legends don’t change the weapon skills, I think that weapon swapping is needful. Without it, the class will underperform.

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Ventari Legend
Project Tranquility:
This summons the Tablet, and once it summons it, it will then move it. It has a passive heal every 3 seconds, and will heal allies it passes through. All other skills are based on relative distance to this tablet. It costs 10 energy to summon, and 10 energy to move. I have some issues with it.

1. There is at least one trait you can take that grants a buff when you use a Healing skill (Invocation: fierce infusion), but summoning the tablet does not count as a healing skill, only moving it does. This makes no sense to me. The heals you get, or indeed the trait buff of fury, are small and don’t last long at all. Why it doesn’t count as a healing skill is baffling.
2. In a situation where you are moving a lot, it can be really annoying having to either constantly move your tablet with skills and wait for it to turn up, or just leave it and summon another one only to have to immediately move it because it dumps at the place you started the cast from. I feel there should be some way of picking it up, making it follow you if directed to, or destroying the one you have in order for a faster placement when you get to a better location.
3. I am not really sold on the requirement of the skill to move the tablet in order to get the better heal on players. If the players are clumped together, as they often are stacking at boss events etc, then they are already in the best place, but sometimes you just need more heals. A good healer would be balancing using the burst heal, with the passive from the tablet along with the movement of the tablet, and I was just finding that annoying to do. In an event like Claw of Jormag where players are taking a lot of damage you want to be able to focus heal a bit more, while actually doing some attacking yourself (otherwise you will get no event credit). Trying to do that while also shifting the tablet back and forth over the same clump of people is just really annoying to me. I ended up scrapping doing the movement and just letting it do its passive thing most of the time along with the ‘Natural Harmony skill’. I don’t feel the movement heal does enough of an impact to really justify the annoyance of constantly spamming moving the tablet.
4. Lastly I think that in general moving the tablet when playing in melee is a lot more difficult to really utilize to its fullest, so there maybe needs to be other ways of gaining benefits from the tablet without moving it.

Natural Harmony
This skill does a delayed heal to up to 5 targets after a 2 second delay. It costs 35 energy.

Overall I am fairly happy with this skill. It’s simple (which I like). Although the cost is heavy on the energy side of things, it is an more substantial heal, which is good. Using it tactically to heal different groups up quickly is a great asset.

My only criticism of this skill is it’s cooldown. As the main healing skill of Ventari, you will likely be using this a lot and spamming it two or three times when you do, until your energy runs out. I mean, its great you can do that, but it means you are using the skills more than you might in the other classes. Really nit-picky, I know, but I would rather that this skill healed more but had a longer cooldown.

Purifying Essence
This skill removes up to 3 conditions from up to 5 targets, and heals the target for every condition that is removed. It costs 35 energy.

Like Natural Harmony, I liked this skill. It is simple and easy to understand its place in the game. Unlike it, I don’t think the cooldown needs to be changed, because its unlikely you will be needing to spam this skill.

Protective Solace
This skill creates a barrier that destroys enemy projectiles for 20 seconds, or until you deactivate it. It has no activation cost, but will degenerate your energy by -8 (per second?).

I found this skill really useful, and I like the fact I was having to balance the energy usage of the skill while fighting enemies, and using my weapon skills to fill in the time when I couldn’t have it up.

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Energy Expulsion
This is the Elite skill of the Ventari legend. It knocks back up to 5 enemies, destroys the tablet and leaves behind energy fragments to heal allies. It costs 50 energy and takes 2 seconds to cast.

I am really not convinced about this elite skill. It is far more like a normal skill than an elite to me. I feel like it offers little more to the skills than the others of that legend, less if you take into consideration the cast time and cost.

It costs half of your energy bar to activate (then you need to use 10 more energy to re-summon a tablet, and then another 10 if you need to move it somewhere), and instead of an aoe heal on people that needed it in the area, the people have to actually go and pick up the heals themselves. Nice idea in concept, but the heals these fragments give is so negligible as to be pointless. It barely gives any more healing than the moving of the tablet through people would, less than the staff skill 4, and the fact that people need to take critical seconds to go and pick up the heal make this even worse. The healing fragments really don’t hang around either, since they only last 5 seconds, so it isn’t like they can be left for a while by players until they are needed.

The other problem I see with it is that it is a 2 second channel cast, which can be interrupted. If you are playing ranged character, you would want to use this skill to blast away foes from you and escape, but the fact that the melee characters can interrupt you means that using the skill is really difficult to do in that situation. It is another example of how the ventari legend is more about other protecting other people than helping you survive to actually do that task.

I have been trying to think of things that might make it better. Any one of the things listed above could be altered to make it more useful, but even if one was changed, it would still only put it to around the usefulness of the the other normal skills. I think it would need to be two of the issues I mentioned in order to make it into something that felt elite. My choice would be to make it a very quick cast time, like the other ventari skills, and either increase the healing or duration of the fragments.

General Ventari impressions
Overall I quite like the skills that are offered, but I really feel there needs to be more that players can choose from.

For instance, right now the Ventari legend is all about healing and supporting, but I was struggling to keep myself alive at times because there was no large personal heal that could could save me from imminent death. I was having to cast ventari stuff then change legends, pop the Dwarf heal, (thus losing all the ventari tablet heals in the area) then swap back, and recast the tablet. Messy and unnecessary.

I would have another Heal skill that could still be to summon Ventari’s tablet, but instead of that second click moving the tablet, I would have it yank the tablet back to you (if it was away) and absorbed, giving you a personal heal that is significant. If Ventari is about healing, let people channeling him heal themselves better.

The second variation I would like to add to the healing skills is one that would summon ventari’s tablet, and have the second click for this (since it is likely to be used in melee context) might be to give some damage mitigation, block or something for a certain amount of time.

After some consideration, I feel it might be better to have the movement of ventari’s tablet actually be a skill, rather than only linked to the heal skill. Moving ventari’s tablet could be a skill, as it is now with the extra healing, and a second new skill could be to have the tablet come to you and follow you, possibly with a related buff or something. I think there might still be a place for the current Healing Skill as it is, but I think that having the other options added as well would give a better variety of gameplay than there currently is with Ventari.

In general, once I got used to playing Ventari, it was good fun, but as other players have mentioned, I am concerned about how much credit people are going to get in pve events using Ventari, because at least half their skills now are healing, which gives no credit. My other concerns are mainly about how the tablet has taken away proper heals from the Revenant using that legend, which is really strange considering the legend it is based on. Adding the skills mentioned would sort that though, as would making the heal skill more useful for melee players.

So there you have it. Congratulations if you reached the end of this lengthy essay. I wanted to do a proper beta test of the character. I didn’t touch on the traits or on the other legends because there are others that are far better equipped and knowledgeable to feedback on those.

I would like to add in some feedback about the weapons in general, and a little feedback on the Legendary Demon Stance:

Hammer (and general… I’m not great at organizing thoughts)

The Rev has the problem that the ranged weapon’s damage is mostly at range. Focusing on positioning so that enemies are in a line instead of a pile, and the damage scales up on the #2 being farther away, if they are close, it’s not much on the damage. This is where I have a problem with not being able to swap weapons. Not that it locks me in a role, but that it locks me in a position on the battle field. If I’m using melee and things are smashing me from range, I’m in a bad spot. If I’m ranged and things come into melee, I’m in a bad spot. At least the other classes can be effective with a weapon swap, or at least do the same DPS regardless of position (even though it’s very dangerous for Ele up close, they can still manage).

I also find the hammer skills to be a little too slow. Especially the number three skill. I used it in SW and things were all over me. I couldn’t move during the animation and they could still hit me. Died pretty fast, since I rooted myself in place for that skill. I will also agree that the after cast times are hard to judge and a little clunky.

Demon Stance:

I also am having problems with the energy management in terms of the utility skills with the Demon Stance. There’s a skill that does a nice AoE torment… but it cost 1/3 of my energy just to apply a little torment. I could also toss on just a little confusion for high amounts of energy. All of these skills benefit if you have conditions on you, but if you aren’t getting hit with conditions, your attacks are not very effective, and I can’t spam my own Demon Stance skills enough to give myself enough conditions. So… I can only put out good condition damage if I am being targeted with them? It seems more like an anti-condi ability rather than it’s own condi.

On a necro or a mesmer I can just give people conditions…. lots of them. Even on a ranger or theif condi build, you can just give conditions for days. For the Rev, sure you can get a few stacks of burning, a stack or two of poison… but that’s it. You can give a stack or two of something. I don’t like needing to have a ton of conditions on me first before I can do better than a stack or two… PvP and WvW, there are condis hitting you everywhere. But PvE… very few places that have real codi spikes that would be worth turning back to your enemy.

Again, I fully admit I might still just be doing something wrong since it’s new, but that’s my observation so far.