Guild Wars 2

Just some theorycraft to help people when revenant comes out

Traits
Devastation is a must have for damage multipliers.
Minor traits

• Mutilate Defenses (25% vuln when hit opponent)
• Targeted Destruction (7% damage multiplier against foes with vuln)
• Focused Siphoning (siphon health from vuln foes) – should be very useful to you alive if it really has no ICD. Especially when you’ll be inflicting yourself with condi on Mallyx elite.

Major traits

• Assassin’s Presence (150 ferocity to party) – can be changed to Rapid Lacerations (maximum 10% increase in attack speed), but I think party ferocity increase wins out overall.
• Ferocious Strikes (150 ferocity when dual wield) – pretty much no competition when you have a PS warrior, ele or guardian to stack might around you.
• Swift Termination (20% damage multiplier against foes below 50%) – no competition here as well tbh, you won’t be doing much CC except against boss defiance.

Invocation is a must have for multipliers and fury, minors traits worth much more than major except Roiling Mists.
Minors traits

• Invoker’s Rage (5s fury when swap legends, roughly 7s with runes of rage) – if you have no guardian to grant you fury, you’ll have to swap legends continously to maximise its effect.
• Ferocious Aggression (7% damage multipliers when in fury)
• Empty Vessel (Stun break when swap legend)

Majors traits

• Cruel Repercussion (50% extra damage if attack is negated) – alright skill I think, you can swap it with Fierce Infusion if you’re too lazy to press F1/F2 every 5s.
• Incensed Response (10s fury when break out of stun by changing legends) – I thought about changing this with Equilibrium, but I notice you’ll swap legend so much that when you finish using other energy skills you probably don’t have enough energy to surpass the threshold and damage foes.
• Roiling Mists (fury has 50% increase effectiveness on critical chance) – a must have, this means fury will grant 30% crit chance so no other explanation needed lol.

Corruption is rather optional, I choose this over retribution simply because of the last damage multiplier out of other specialization lines. You can swap to retribution if you find yourself dying too much.
Minors traits

• Rampant Vex (33% to inflict 4s torment chance when crit) – You’ll be doing A LOT of crit with 80% crit chance and dual sword’s quick attack autos. Though you won’t have any condi damage to make it worthwhile, at least its better than nothing right
• Opportune Extraction (50% remove one boon every 10s)
• Yearning Empowerment (33% increase in torment duration)

Majors traits

• Replenishing Despair (incoming condi heals you) – just to keep you alive you condi manage to overwhelm your siphons.
• Bolstered Anguish (3% damage multiplier for each condi on you) – only reason I take this line to be honest. And 3% for each condi really makes it worthwhile.
• Pulsating Pestilence – (when struck copy all condi from you to nearby foes) – small extra, though nothing major.

Equipment
Weapons will obviously be sword/sword, second weapon optional as you’ll never really swap to it lol. Legends are Shiro for quickness and Mallyx for attributes. Both of which have nice upkeep skills to boost your DPS.

Borrowing gear stats calculation from warrior, go straight to equipment section please!

• Sigil of frailty is exchangeable if party stack vuln easily.
• Battle if your party have no PS warrior/guardian/ele.

In total, with 25 might (easily achieve by PS warrior) and fury (guard or yourself) you’ll have

• 3500 power with 7% damage multiplier from vuln foes, 7% from fury, 10% from scholars runes, 5% on sigil of force, 3% on every condi on you, 20% against foes below 50% hp.
• 80% crit chance provided that you keep up the fury from swapping legends.
• 245% crit damage with dual wield and party ferocity.
• 750 condi damage for torment on crit. Kinda meh but welcome nonetheless.
• 60 hp siphon per hit on foes with vuln to keep you healthy from condi in Mallyx elite and maintain multipliers from scholars.

Didn’t Invocation get stunbreaker and Fury on legend swap, plus 7% more damage under Fury?
Invocation is probably something to use on 90% of the Revenants.

sorry I type invocation as invigoration xD

oh nvm I just notice someone clarify rolling mist :P, it only give 30% crit chance in total

NICENIKESHOE.7128:

oh nvm I just notice someone clarify rolling mist :P, it only give 30% crit chance in total

Yep, but Roy said it’s going to be buffed since it’s almost useless. See Dev Tracker.

Also Fierce Infusion is great with Shiro’s healing skill, that already buffs damage (I’ll spam that).

I agree with the rest of your build It’s almost the same I made for myself. I also made another one with Retribution in case I need some sort of survivability. Revenant seems a lot squishy to me. Corruption seems better for condi management however, even if I am probably going to use shiro+jalis

I did start a similar thread here and chose the same traits as you did.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/revenant/PvE-sword-Shiro-DPS/first

I don’t think sword off-hand has any interest damage-wise (the block can be useful). Axe seems like a better choice.

Neither offhand will add DPS to the sword. The Autoattack has very high ratios for the cast time and doesn’t really require you to press any buttons other than 1 currently.

Knox.8962:

Neither offhand will add DPS to the sword. The Autoattack has very high ratios for the cast time and doesn’t really require you to press any buttons other than 1 currently.

As I said in another thread, sword 3 is a good gap closer that gives, in the shortest time, 9 might, 8-9 vulnerability, torment and 10% skill speed. OH sword is better then axe just because it has support for sword 3, giving the opportunity for a better peak on a single target.
Precision strike is there only to slow down enemies

It would be nice if they buffed OH sword a bit more so you’d have reason to use it for damage.

Plus I’d still like to know if you can move while using the block.

If my coefficients are correct, sword mh is 2.15 for at least 1.75s while axe 4 is 1.65 for 0.5s. Axe 5 has also a higher global DPS because even in zerker, the torment hits quite high, but it takes more time to tick so won’t be worth it in short fights. For a single enemy, sword 3 is the highest DPS skill of sword.

xarallei.4279:

It would be nice if they buffed OH sword a bit more so you’d have reason to use it for damage.

Plus I’d still like to know if you can move while using the block.

You do. Sword 3 is awful in a group, you need sword 4 and 5 to isolate. Plus the 2s block (no hit limit) is huge if you l2p

@xarallei sword off-hand is more a defensive + CC weapon which can be very nice in PvP/WvW but not so useful in PvE I think (the block is always useful even in PvE of course)

Silverkey.2078:

If my coefficients are correct, sword mh is 2.15 for at least 1.75s while axe 4 is 1.65 for 0.5s. Axe 5 has also a higher global DPS because even in zerker, the torment hits quite high, but it takes more time to tick so won’t be worth it in short fights. For a single enemy, sword 3 is the highest DPS skill of sword.

Your numbers are not correct. You don’t seem to have counted the return hit from Sword AA#2 and the delayed damage from AA#3 (0.5 and 0.3 respectively)

Including those you get the following numbers for sword damage skills:
Sword AA is 0.75, 0.5×2, 0.9 + 0.3 = 2.95 over 2.1s = 1.4 coeff/s
Sword 3 is 0.55×7 = 3.85 over 3s = 1.283 coeff/s

Axe 4 is 1.65 over 1s-ish second. I haven’t put a timer on Axe 4 yet, but 1s is pretty close. This makes it worth using, from a raw damage number standpoint, but the 10 energy you give up for that isn’t worth as much as an additional 2 seconds of Quickness that would be more valuable to your overall damage output.

Sword AA and 3 have pretty much the same damage output. Sword 3 is better for gap closing, might and on a single target. Sword 1 is better with only 1 target in the area and if you are already close.
6>9>3>1>1>1 is the best rotation imo.

second set probably be mace mainhand to have the constant fire field etc if for some reason there no ele. Allows might stacking before the fight pretty easily.

With Shiro and weapon swap, I’ll be using the Rev now in Dungeons in the next Beta… but I’m not going to worry about a build until Beta hits, at which point I’ll figure out a good build.

Corran.4957:

second set probably be mace mainhand to have the constant fire field etc if for some reason there no ele. Allows might stacking before the fight pretty easily.

Mace for dungeons, Hammer for some world bosses. Yeah, many reasonable options for weapons.

How do you guys see Superior Sigil of Fire on OH Sword? (instead of frailty)

@Knox
Thanks for the correction. I should really look at cast time of skills and not trust tooltips…

Tooltips are the actual cast time basically, but the animation has an aftercast effect that isn’t included in the tooltip. I spent most of the beta weekend recording and timing the available skills and calculating damage numbers so I could speak intelligently on the subject for discussions like this.

Thank you Knox

I don’t see Corruption being big in dungeons unless you’re going for pure single target damage.
With its high speed attacks, sword can probably keep a higher uptime on the Hammer Summons and adding all those hammer attacks from the upkeep can probably add a hefty amount of AoE Vuln and lifesteal.

I can see Sw+A/M+Sw (or Hammer, or just OH Sword) with Shiro/Jalis using Devastation-Retribution-Invocation being more useful for the majority of dungeons and Fractals. (IMO, Rite of the Great Dwarf will end up outshining projectile destruction in Fractals when combined with Jade Wind like on Grawl Shaman) Jalis offers AoE Stability on a low CD (great for Aetherblade Fractal), an actual condition cleanse (which Revenant lacks outside of Jalis and Ventari, but the latter’s condition cleanse takes 2 casts)., and the AoE hammers. Hell, I can see a few uses for the Taunt ability in certain Fractals.

This is not so much going for the optimal damage build (as I do agree that what you’ve posted at this time looks to be the optimal burst damage build). I always think when theorycrafting, especially in GW2, it’s good to have a few builds that aren’t optimal but perform well in dungeons since we can’t rely on PuGs to always run the optimal build, nor can we always count on the optimal speedrun build to reliable in non-speedrun settings. (We don’t want to end up like Engies who only had one optimal build…that was tedious to learn and pull off…and in some places actually impossible to use.) Pure damage builds are great on paper and when you can line up the perfect setting to theoretically use them…but practically, the majority of the community will not be in situations to use them like this.

I agree with you Fade, however I think I’ll end up using Devastation-Corruption-Invocation and Shiro+Jalis.
Corruption has a very useful condi cleanse trait. While I like Jalis skills, Retribution traits are kind of meh. What are you planning to use?

However I’ll give a try to Sword+Mallyx for that elite skill.

We dont know yet about elite line that can bring us something nice (I hope) but at the moment agree with people about Devastation+Invocation (if they dont change anything ofc or nerf something).

On a single target boss, yeah, Corruption will be better than Retribution (in terms of damage), but once you get into multiple targets I think Retribution will pull ahead when you combine Reflexive Summon with Vengeful Hammers (essentially have 3 hammers that can do vuln and lifesteal).

As for my traits, I’d look at either Close Quarters or Improved Aggression. CQ lowers damage coming in from mobs outside of 360 range and IA improves taunt and makes taunted mobs do less damage (and taunt lasts longer on NPCs). IMO, there are a few very good places to use taunt (Mai Trin, end boss of Dredge Fractal, and Legendary Grawl shaman) but CQ would be better unless IA lowers taunted mob’s damage lower than that.

The Master tier is a bit lacking. I’d either go for Retal on dodge or Prot on being disabled. With the stability on dodge, it’d be a really good combo (plus the endurance on hit would work well with this). Lastly, Reflexive Summon unless it’s a situation where you don’t want AoE flying everywhere, but those are the situations where Mallyx and Corruption would be better than Jalis.

We saw yesterday that the hammer can trigger lifesteal as Roy did have that trait up. If you watch the video, you notice a little light flying around his character. I think that’s the Reflexive Summon trait, but since it’s a projectile and he’s wielding bolt…it turned it into a lightning bolt.

Overall, I do agree with the choices for Devastation and Invocation, but I’d probably end up running with Sword+axe/Hammer with the legends and specializations I mentioned (unless Glint is more boon focused). In my mind, it’s going to be difficult to compete with Jallis because he does have a general utility set. Yeah, people want him to tank, but to me he seems liek the active forms of survivability we get in GW2. Plus the Lightning Field from the road is going to add more vuln with hammer and sword AA 2 (iirc)

Don’t forget if you run axe OH you don’t get the bonus fero from the duel weild trait.

Khenzo.2465:

Don’t forget if you run axe OH you don’t get the bonus fero from the duel weild trait.

Yep.
Plus Axe skills are pretty useless. You want to open with sword 3, then just use 1 over and over (best dps skill and no energy cost).
Temporal rift is a waste of energy, while Grasping Shadow may be useful to grab an enemy and do Unrelenting Assault full damage on it.
Talking about pve.
Enemies that are immune to Grasping Shadow are also immune to Temporal rift.

And the block is always useful.

Kidel.2057:

Khenzo.2465:

Don’t forget if you run axe OH you don’t get the bonus fero from the duel weild trait.

Plus axe OH skills are pretty useless. You want to open with sword 3, then just use 1 over and over (best dps skill and no energy cost).
Temporal rift is a waste of energy, while Grasping Shadow may be useful to grab an enemy and do Unrelenting Assault full damage on it.
Talking about pve.

Yeah, at the moment there is no real use for the axe. Sure there might be a few areas where the small pull might be useful, but every party runs with a guard anyway or a mesmer which does it better. It’s just lost fero for no gain lol

150 ferocity is a flat 10% more damage if you have 100% crit rate. Even if axe was useful, and it isn’t, I would still take double swords for that boost.

Kidel.2057:

150 ferocity is a flat 10% more damage if you have 100% crit rate. Even if axe was useful, and it isn’t, I would still take double swords for that boost.

150 Ferocity isn’t 10% more damage at any value of crit unless you somehow managed to get negative 750 ferocity.

Adding 10% more crit dmage even at 0 ferocity would take you from 150% up to 160%, which is a (160/150 -1) 6.67% increase. So at best you’d be adding 6.67%, and at worst, quite a bit less than that.

I’m pretty sure Axe does count for dual wield, since the trait seems pretty similar to the warrior grand master trait dual wielding. I suspect axe may be worth opening with for bosses that start active, outside of that it’s probably not worth it unless the fight will be short enough to kill the boss within a guard/mesmer’s granted quickness, although in that case simply using Embrace the Darkness is probably the best option.

I suspect the ideal setup in dungeons will be Mace/Axe for blasting might and gap closing and then switch to S/S once a fight starts and camp the sword auto for the rest of the fight, rotating Shiro/Mallyx upkeep skills.

The dual wield trait works for any combination of dual wielding weapons. Sword mh, sword oh, mace and axe and all the possible combinations. And shield, when they add that with the glint specialization.

Ferocious Strikes: Gain increased Ferocity when dual wielding weapons.

Yeah, Sword+Axe, Mace+Axe, Sword+Sword, and Mace+Sword all qualify to get it. Only one trait in that line requires the use of a weapon…and that’s the skill speed one…and you can get that boost as long as you are wielding one sword equipped.

Ideal setup would be to not use the Mace 2 at all because an Ele fire field will be vastly superior to anything we can give. However, if we need to we could keep a fire field down when there’s not an ele around, but that wouldn’t be the ideal setup.

Again, Mallyx is good for Single Target burst, but remember the number 1 rule about DPS. Dead DPS is no DPS. When you’re safe and secure to do that burst (like in CoF1 for me), yes the optimal build is good to run. If you’re not safe and secure, I’d still say that Jalis is going to be practically better than Mallyx. Condi Cleanse, Stability, AoE vuln (chance) and Lifesteal plus damage from all the hammers (can have up to three with traits), and the lower group damage is great. Plus the other bonuses of Retribution in my eyes makes it outweigh Mallyx and Corruption for the majority of the playerbase.

ShadowLordX.5148:

I suspect the ideal setup in dungeons will be Mace/Axe for blasting might and gap closing and then switch to S/S once a fight starts and camp the sword auto for the rest of the fight, rotating Shiro/Mallyx upkeep skills.

With the current mechanics, this is the ideal rotation.