Guild Wars 2

I tried to search for ‘demon’, ‘push back’, ‘push’, and look for a feedback area but did not see it… please move if I posted in wrong spot, thanks

Anyhow. I tried a mace & axe combo with Demon build this weekend and, unlike others, did not see much issue with the overall DPS. What I did see, that concerns me as well as many other melee players, is the annoyingness of the pushback part of the torment & teleport utility skill. As this is a melee build that is heavy on DoT and, specifically, Torment, that skill is fairly essential to building up stacks.

However, the skill has two flaws…
1) Pushing enemies back outside the range of the mace/axe and forcing us to run back to our enemies (or use the teleport skill (4) from axe) to get back to attacking. This also compounds in that it makes other melee characters in the game have to constantly move about to keep attacking. In talking with a coworker who plays a melee warrior, he agreed it was annoying (and map-chat said something like “we are being Revnant trolled!”). He also pointed out that hardly anyone uses the ranger longbow skill with pushback when working with melee teammates. When using a build that requires lots of stacks of Torment as its primary DoT damage, not using this skill would be a serious detriment to damage output.
2) Skill applies cripple, making it even harder to run back to your enemies and keep swinging! If it was a ranged build, this would seem to make more sense but, as melee, it seems to be far too detrimental. I am not sure what a better self-applied condition would be to continue the theme, but maybe something like a bleed/burning for a teleport “cost” (think friction/burn of energies to move in and out of the mists).

As I have seen in a few other posts, though, the other two utility skills are indeed fairly unhelpful in the build.
— I like the condition transfer one because it lets you move the condition your skills apply to yourself (use ultimate and move the torment to the enemy, for example) but only moving one as a time with that large of an energy cost needs a bit of work (I am not sure what). At first I read that it transfered the one condition to five targets (not sure how, but I did) and thought it was really cool. Maybe that would redeem the skill if we could mass apply the condition. Then we stick to the semi-aoe nature of the build.
— The one that applied confusion? I doubt I ever even used it at all because I saw no good situations for it. When the detriment is blindness (I believe that was the one) it defeats the next damaging spell used (including, if I understand correctly, the condition transfer) unless you wait it out. For a condition build, there is a high change you would want something akin to Givers to extend condition duration (or the runes that do the same), which would only make you wait longer and lose out on even more DPS.

If I could look at my character, I would tell you the armor I used since I did not see the damage as being that bad and was, actually, stealing aggro from others just fine. However, it basically consisted of Berserker chest, Dire/Carrion/Rabid for everything else. Had I known the last “chest” had runes, I would have tried it with the Torment runeset but, sadly, stuck with Dolyak that was default.

Overall, I had fun with it and hope they can make improvements to bring it up to par with other DoT-specced professions. My shortbow ranger still kills things way faster, after all.

I feel Demon Stance Utility skills are too supporty. Too much support in Revenant. 3 out of 4 legends are support as far as utility skills go.

About the self-blind: If you apply resistance to yourself you can hit your enemy even though you’re blinded. I just didn’t test wether you loose blindnes when attacking while resistance is up and wether you can transfer blindnes to your enemy that way.

Still when Mallyx was introduces I thought the whole point of a Rev-condi-build was to flood yourself with conditions and distribute those to your foes. In that aspect the Mallyx I played during beta was pretty underwhelming.

You don’t lose the blind you just ignore it. I was using the trait that gave resistance on every utility so I did not have the problems because of it. The only problem I did have was taking 2 days of cripple of of a wounded pact soldier with no idea to how to cleanse it…

Word Devourer.1762:

The only problem I did have was taking 2 days of cripple of of a wounded pact soldier with no way to idea how to cleanse it…

Main reason why I’m not going to bother with Mallyx outside pvp. I’ll be using Jalis healing skill for conditions, plus Pulsating Pestilence trait (Invocation, Corruption, Devastation, with Shiro+Jalis).

I just hope that Jalis elite can become useful, otherwise Mallyx is better just for that 10% on every stat with the upkeep skill.