Guild Wars 2

So I know condition Revenant is not the most optimal. I want to improve it by point out problematic areas that revenant has with dealing condition damage and provide some suggestions.

PS. Sorry in advance, this is a long read as I go over most things related to conditions and rev.

For starters lets look at weapons:

The first thing you’ll notice is that there is a lack of range condi weapon. All we have mace and axe, which are both primarily melee weapons with some elements of aoe. There is no way to really deal damage at range, you always have to be up in things faces and that’s not always possible.

Second both mace and axe have an elevation issue. Searing fissure and Temporal Rift fail to work if there is even a slight in/de-cline between the rev and the target. This makes our damage really unreliable because both skills are bread and butter dps skills and them not applying conditions is a huge loss.

Mace and axe also require you to be in the face of your opponent, and have them to always be moving to do good torment damage. This makes it very hard to stick to opponents and continue to do damage.

We only have two reliable conditions that you apply with this set: burning, and torment. Most classes condition clear remove two conditions basically removing our damage. Combine that with our very low damage during ramp up time and it makes hard to damage certain opponents.

Poison has issues because we only have two methods to apply it, one of which is on torment application with an icd and the other is poison from the end of the aa combo that you will very rarely finish.

The weapon set is very fun and active to use but lacks application, and you will spend a long time building up burning and torment before you reach your true dps.

Now onto legends:

Another issue is the lack of support for conditions via legends. Many of the defensive and support lines are very appealing to a condi buld solely because they help the condition rev get past its 20 second wind up time that they have to spend in the face of what ever they are attacking. I think its great that we have many defensive options but we lack offensive ones for condi. I know what your thinking, “you do you have mallyx!”

Mallyx is good in the sense that it is useful to both the power and condition builds, however it lacks support help ramp up a condition build. I feel that if embrace the darkness did not exist, no one would take the line for condition based builds but solely for boonstrip and resistance. Going over the skills briefly here are my feelings towards them:

• Empowering Misery: Works, however, it does nothing about poison, and there are times where you could heal having 5 conditions up and one of them is poison and in turn you come out with the same or less than the vanilla base heal. This is a problem.
• Pain Absorption: Is arguably the reason why people use this stance. It provides good group support and immunity to condition damage.
• Banish Enchantment: Is useable but disjointed. No where else in the class do we have support or use for the measly mount of confusion applied. It would be much more useful if it applied one of our supported conditions, such as burning, poison or torment.
• Unyielding Anguish: Great for mobility and blinds, the torment element is poor for cost of the skill and the fact that your opponent must stay in it to apply stacks and then move around to get damage which is contradictory. It’s frankly too costly to be used for anything other than mobility.
• Embrace the darkness: Steroid boost ok! torment aura is decent but the skill feels too passive, I would say this and empowering misery are the only reason to pick up this stance.

Mallyx lacks any kind of in your face support other than vs condition damage. It fails to add any kind of burning, or poison application. The stance really only grants selfish buffs. The stance needs either better sustain or application to help out the melee weapon set.

None of the other stances except glint offer any kind of condition support, and glint is only directly though one skill Elemental Blast and passive support via furry and might boons.

Glint and Mallyx are basically the only two viable options for a condi build and frankly they really fall short together, as they only provide damage increases via passive buffs and really lack sustain and application.

Now onto traits:

Current Revenant only has one line that has support for condition damage and that is Corruption. Which has very poor support for condition damage. Only a few trait choices that help the build.

The minors in contrast to many of the choices in the corruption tree look very promising. You have torment duration, torment on crit and boonstrip.

The first tiers traits has some really lack luster traits

• Demonic defiance which allows you to gain resistance on skill use in mallyx arguably the best choice here.
• Venom Enhancement applies poison on torment with a long icd & posion duration seems good, but frankly the class has very little access to poison which makes basically no difference. It’s about the same as giving warrior a torment duration increase.
• Replenishing Despair has very little use, as the damage taken from keeping up condition is way higher than the heal will ever be.

This section does not apply any sustain outside of fighting condi, or applicaiton of applicaiton of condi.

Then in major your choices are:

• Bolstered Anguish: which kinda of works giving you damage for conditions on you.
• Frigid Precision: Useless chill on crit
• Spontaneous Destruction: boon removal.

None of the three of these have any kind of sustain, application or duration effects. They are all useless to a condition based build. Bolstered anguish is the clear winner because it will increase your power based damage.

Lastly in the grandmaster section we have:

• Diabolic Inferno: Applies burning on elite skill use. Clearly the only choice here as its the only reliable and useful trait.
• Maniacal Persistence: Ramping crit chance. Would be useful if our on crit application didnt have an ICD and we only have one trait that does that
• Pulsating Pestilence: Would be useful it was controllable, but its not.

Diabolic inferno feels like a minor trait and is really the only viable option. The rest basically useless.

The entire corruption trait line adds 1 trait choice that has value to a condition build this is a problem. We need better traits that either help us sustain via doing conditions, or help us apply conditions which free us to pick up a sustaining trait line.

Finally lets talk about torment:

Torment is a problem because it does 2/3rds of the damage is done on movement and only 1/3 if the target is standing still. It’s very similar to the problems confusion has. In order to get good damage your opponent has to be moving thus your going to have a hard time continually applying it or they need to be still or allow you to stack absurd amounts of it. Neither is frankly possible. It needs to be normalized to a 50/50 or have a mechanic added to it.

Two examples of mechanics that could be added to torment for rev would be a trait to reverse the the way it standardly works for times when its appropriate, or an active way to consume your opponents torment dealing damage as if they had be moving.

Onto Burning With both the problems of torment and poison brought forward now we can talk about burning. The main source of our reliable damage. The issue with burning is low application. We can’t really stack it, we can’t really apply much of it we only have access to it via 3 different ways:

• Searing fissure(buggy)
• Diabolic inferno
• Elemental Blast

We need better access to skills that apply burning.

In summation condi rev is a mess, it is a fun mess, but it is frankly not reliable. Many traits are useless to a condi build, there is very little support from stances for condition based builds, our conditions ever have low number of skills to apply them or very low and erratic damage. Condi rev needs some love.

Good write up but i gotta say in this current Meta where you see quite a lot of Necros and Condi Mesmers, i’m doing much better in soloQ as a Condi Rev than i do as a Power Rev.

Spartacus.3192:

Good write up but i gotta say in this current Meta where you see quite a lot of Necros and Condi Mesmers, i’m doing much better in soloQ as a Condi Rev than i do as a Power Rev.

Fair enough, it’s good to hear that your doing well as condition rev. My personal feelings is your doing good solely because of the traits and skills that allow you to sustain vs conditions, which are available to a power build.

I would argue the best condition management line is corruption since it gives resistance . Anyone taking that line is a condi rev not a power rev. I don’t consider invocation’s one condition cleanse per swap to be of any real use .

Hopefully these things get fixed some day. I loved the BW2 revenant, I understand displacement had to go but I didn’t like the rework besides that. I felt that dealing with other classes removing conditions from you was part of the intricate gameplay or at least positioning for Mallyx.

so far i had good result with condi rev….i had reach the higher rank last season. The only class/build i had is with warrior. Warrior currently counter all condi build. Condi rev ability to AOE remove boons and apply confusion is very valuable in team play

Condi revenant is indeed not optimal, yet it works not so bad overall, especially in WvW when you meet enemies with high mobility and lots of boon to strip.

Still I agree with most of what you said.

ThomasC.1056:

Condi revenant is indeed not optimal, yet it works not so bad overall, especially in WvW when you meet enemies with high mobility and lots of boon to strip.

Still I agree with most of what you said.

like all argue condi rev does not do the most condi damage but the amount of benefit it bring to team play is sufficient. But however its tough to play compare to power rev because you need to switch stance a lot.

Benefits:
1. Banish Enchantment- Deal damage, apply confusion, and remove boons from your
foe
2. Pain Absorption – Grant resistance to yourself and nearby allies. Absorb conditions
from those allies. Its very good for team play and keeping your team alive
3. condi rev eat power rev for breakfast

Cons:
1. no range condi wep. Not a lot of ppl like the melee playstyle of condi rev and its much harder to play compare to other condi class like ranger, nerco or warrior

2. need to switch between Herald and demon a lot

3. its hard to fight with build that have a lot of cc

4. need to manage your energy bar…

5. people are 2 use of power rev to a point when its been nerf ppl do not know how to pay other spec. I have not lose to a power rev 1 on 1 ever since power rev is nerf

Amongst other benefits, I’d add that Embrace the Darkness can be tremendously effective against melee thieves (supposing you survive the first spike).
Another weird benefit : players are so accustomed to power rev that they expect any rev to play power. They usually feel how wrong they are when they try to disengage and run away, and die miserably farther because of the 21 stacks of torment they got from you ;-)

I agree on cons :

• No range weapon
• No truly satisfying switch (both weapon and legend) that allows you not to play mixed damage.
• Really really vulnerable to CC.

I think the biggest problem is that it’s insanely difficult to apply/keep pressure on a good player with the mace. Mace 2 and 3 are super terrible outside of initially joining in as a +1 or cleaving downed people, and the Mace’s AA is not going to do anything against a moving target, which is unfortunate because that’s who torment is supposed to work against.

The sword offers chill and ua, which are both skills that can be used to help you stay on a target—even if they blink/teleport/leap away. This is part of what makes the sword so strong, and it really becomes noticeable when you switch to condi and are left with the mace. It makes sense to try to fill that void with the axe, but rift is easily avoided and axe 4 is just the worst. Honestly, if axe 4 didn’t have a five minute teleportation animation and place you at such a weird max-range position behind the target while simultaneously auto-wonking your camera and triggering every DH trap along the way, it might really fix a lot of the mace’s woes.