Guild Wars 2

Early TL;DR
It’s an upgrade to Base Power Revenant, potentially on par with Herald, if not better.

I have been playing Base Power Revenant for practically the entirety of the class’s existence. It has never been too amazing but it was a lot more interesting to me than running Herald and being a boonbot. Being able to safely stomp downed enemies with the stability road and having better defenses against conditions was great! When the buffs to Jalis came in recently, I was really excited to see that my build became a lot stronger and I could even carry in Ranked pvp now from time to time!

So naturally when I got to try this new elite spec, rather than go condition crazy like a lot of you other guys, I decided to see if I could make it work with my build and well….

I dropped the Devastation line and started running Retribution/Invocation/Renegade and it is essentially an upgrade to my base Power Revenant build.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vlAQNAscinXNuNSqJ7JR/kVlsgyrS4QZWJYrcsElZlgN++XN4YB-TpxHQBA4IActyAaY/BGeIAU2JAIgPAAA

For Renegade I am using: Wrought Iron Will, Sudden Reversal, and Righteous Rebel

Essentially by running that exact setup with Renegade as the third line, I am able to gain bonus retaliation on evade, extra fury generation, a knockdown whenever I stun break, consistent vigor generation, and a lovely 10% crit damage bonus which puts my Marauder build at 197% crit damage. Plus with all the retaliation being applied, you will be returning a ton of damage back to your enemy plus be granting yourself extra might and receiving a 10% damage bonus from the Jalis trait. You also get a nice 33% perma reduced incoming condition damage, which when combined with Jalis’s hammers, reduces all condition damage you’re taking by 53%. That is insane.

If conditions werent a big deal to you, you could also potentially run Lasting Legacy to boost your crit damage another 10% as well and gain the ability to instantly apply 10 stacks of might when you hit F2 so long as you have max Fervor.

Essentially, whatever Devastation offered my old build is greatly overshadowed by the stuff Renegade offers my build. I really think you guys should give it a shot before you label Renegade as a complete failure because at least the traitline offers some nice things for Power builds.

Plus with the extra 20% crit damage from Lasting Legacy combined with Devastation and Invocation, we could potentially see some Power Renegade raid viability >.> But I can’t say for sure since I can’t test that theory out at the moment.

Anyway, give it a shot. Hope you guys like it. Cheers!

Edit: With proper management and using Lasting Legacy, you can maintain a solid 20 to 25 Stacks of might using this build for the majority of a fight so long as you pop Heroic Command and Unrelenting Assault regularly.
So yeah. :P
Hope this lets you guys enjoy the elite spec more. I’m sure having a blast with it.

While I haven’t tested this myself, if Renegade is more useful on a power build, when it was specifically built to be a condi/support spec, then that just proves that the spec is an absolute failure from the devs intended. I can see the reason for trying to pull some light from all the doom and gloom Renegade was, but this isn’t helping. If anything it’s making it worse.

CutesySylveon.8290:

While I haven’t tested this myself, if Renegade is more useful on a power build, when it was specifically built to be a condi/support spec, then that just proves that the spec is an absolute failure from the devs intended. I can see the reason for trying to pull some light from all the doom and gloom Renegade was, but this isn’t helping. If anything it’s making it worse.

Oh I agree that it needs work on the condi side and looking at Kalla’s legend herself, I’m not impressed at all at what she offers save for maybe her heal and elite. The shortbow also looks a little clunky and unreliable.

But as for power, I’d say the Elite spec was a resounding success hahaha.

I have to disagree on so many levels that the heal is anything but in top 3 for the worst heals in the game. Poor initial healing and requiring you to hold in a small point to get the rest of it is a horrible idea when Rev already has too many heals that have special requirements to do any good, like Glint and taking damage and Shiro in doing damage without missing. I don’t understand why they refuse to let Rev have normal heals that can simply be used reliably. Add in that if it’s interrupted, Kalla’s heal flat out fails and goes on full cd while being the only stun break of the legend and it’s got my vote for worst heal in the game.

I was playing lots of power Renegade yesterday! It’s super fun and very effective. I was running devastation instead of invocation, to maximize my lifesteal damage and sustain with menders amulet. Simply my favorite pvp build that I’ve tried so far on beta week-end. I can’t get enough of that aoe interupt spam.

This beats the condi of this build imo. Condi relies too much on comboing the utility skills, which, while it’s a fun mechanic, the costs are simply too high to play this way. I’m not going to get too far into that here, but yes power renegade is the new revenant meta imo for pvp.

Are you using Kalla legend or Jalis+Shiro?

Because the latter would confirm the fact that Renegade has great traits, decent F skills and very bad healing/utility skills. Also nobody seems to like the bow.

So yeah, basically 33% of this elite spec is viable.

CutesySylveon.8290:

While I haven’t tested this myself, if Renegade is more useful on a power build, when it was specifically built to be a condi/support spec, then that just proves that the spec is an absolute failure from the devs intended. I can see the reason for trying to pull some light from all the doom and gloom Renegade was, but this isn’t helping. If anything it’s making it worse.

What.. in the world.. are.. you.. even.. on about? Just because it’s got a good duality with being functional in both a Power and Condition build, it doesn’t mean it’s necessarily more useful in one over the other. That means it’s well designed. Condition Renegade is quite strong from a PvE perspective, and not absolutely terrible for PvP either. The combination of dropping Razorclaw at your feet while tossing Icerazor (who will pummel the enemy 20x with Vulnerability and Cripple and gain the effect of adding Bleeds due to him being an extension of the Renegade) over by your target followed by a quick Seven Shot (every arrow that connects adds a stack of Bleeds, for up to 7 stacks together with 7 stacks of Torment) followed by Bloodbane Path/Scorchrazor to a Spiritcrush or switching to Mallyx and Mace/Axe is quite devastating. It’s not a weak Elite Specialization for Conditions. Toss in Orders from Above to restore your cooldowns a bit faster for additional skill usage. Obviously, against a player, you may want to connect Scorchrazor before you do Seven Shot, etc.; there’s a good chunk of alternative ways you can throw these things out. Razorclaw at your (and/or your team members) feet is going to be huge though. Also, for PvE purposes, do not forget the skill split between PvP and PvE. There will likely be more damage in PvE.

What Renegade needs is huge bug fixes though. The “No valid path to target.” is inexcusable and completely broken when it means you can’t use your Utility skills whatsoever on top of (certain) WvW walls and bridges, on top of certain terrain and so on forth. It’s horrible, and I can’t even fathom how they have let that one slide. Seven Shot needs serious fixing too. Several of the arrows never basically spawn, because it for some reason on perfectly flat terrain still seems to think it’s blocked (https://youtu.be/0C4kOM3W2Xg). It’s also extremely cumbersome to use in narrow areas, so that skill as-is can use some dev work to make it functional in more scenarios than just big open areas. I also find that I never ever have energy enough for Citadel Bombardment, which on top of that isn’t surefire to connect, it’s RNG, so that could use some energy cost reduction or at least become more reliable in its damage. It’s currently not feeling worth it to use it, as it costs way too much for little payoff when you can use way more skills and pump out way more damage in a shorter time than the skill takes to play out its animation.

Oh, and the heal is of course junk. Most of us seem to agree on that. Maybe it scales well with Healing Power, but that feels like a weird design choice if so. It’s fairly terrible with Condi/Power builds. Not a fan of the Stun break being on it either. Not entirely sure where else they could move it though; Darkrazor?

Kidel.2057:

Are you using Kalla legend or Jalis+Shiro?

Because the latter would confirm the fact that Renegade has great traits, decent F skills and very bad healing/utility skills. Also nobody seems to like the bow.

So yeah, basically 33% of this elite spec is viable.

Jalis+Shiro.

I actually think 34% of the elite spec is viable as far as I’m concerned. Extra 1% for the F2 skill xD

But that’s okay with me considering I wasn’t a fan of the shortbow from the beginning and I have grown accustomed to using Jalis and Shiro together.

For everyone else’s sake though, I do hope they make the condi portions viable.

CutesySylveon.8290:

I don’t understand why they refuse to let Rev have normal heals that can simply be used reliably. Add in that if it’s interrupted, Kalla’s heal flat out fails and goes on full cd while being the only stun break of the legend and it’s got my vote for worst heal in the game.

I dont understand why rev cant have reliable heals either. Kalla heal goes on full cd bc its a stunbreak, otherwise you would be able to stunbreak over n over like it happened with Rite during first HoT beta. Great idea from devs on that one to link stunbreak to a heal skill. But well.. im not surprised anyway, they proved over and over that they dont know what they doing.

They sold it as “offensive support” so it was, as OP said, a success in terms of power offense. I’ve also had similar success (with a slightly different power build).

As far as condi and kalla’s utilities go, the shortbow needs to be worked to be less buggy and needs a bit of a rework as it does trash damage and feels clunky. The utilities get interrupted or killed constantly and are awful due to that, but would have some potential if they were immune to CC or had a few stability stacks.

Her heal needs at least 1000-2000 extra initial heal, reduced energy cost, shorter cast time, and the break stun moved somewhere else tho.

I was running Kalla/Shiro for Menders build. It was very enjoyable to play. But condition builds feel lackluster a bit with Renegade.

Loboling.5293:

I was running Kalla/Shiro for Menders build. It was very enjoyable to play. But condition builds feel lackluster a bit with Renegade.

Why menders with Shiro/Kalla? That Healing Power seems so wasted there… Or does it actually have real scaling with Kalla’s elite (unlike the horrible healing power scaling on every other life draining skill in the game?)

narcx.3570:

Loboling.5293:

I was running Kalla/Shiro for Menders build. It was very enjoyable to play. But condition builds feel lackluster a bit with Renegade.

Why menders with Shiro/Kalla? That Healing Power seems so wasted there… Or does it actually have real scaling with Kalla’s elite (unlike the horrible healing power scaling on every other life draining skill in the game?)

Since Menders is power/heal you maximize both damage and healing through the lifesteal effects. And yes, the elite has great scalling with healing power. When the elite is up, I steal 600hp per strike. So sword 2 heals for 1800hp, sword 3 heals for 3000hp; and this stacks with devestation lifesteal trait. Combine this with my shiro heal dealing more damage with the recent update, and the nice healing scalling. Shiro heal gives me 8khp, and I get I think about 10k from kalla heal, 5k of which is aoe and heals allies too.

Menders means that I can heal my allies when I need to, and that I can out-sustain the conditions being thrown on me, with the final grandmaster trait, hoelbrak runes, and the kalla heal, I’m very tanky. Best of all, all this damage immunity (spirit beasts and warriors) gets bypassed by lifesteal, so you can keep pressure up during that. A lot more than people realize.

The damage is lower than something like maurauders, but by focusing on sustain, you don’t have the same need to retreat from battle. You can stay in there a lot longer. Which lets you benefit more from kalla’s summons. And share them more with allies. Holosmiths heal up super fast if they have our elite up. I was able to save quite a few who were going ham without watching their hp. For now, there is no icd for the elite. That allows for all this to work.

Loboling.5293:

narcx.3570:

Loboling.5293:

I was running Kalla/Shiro for Menders build. It was very enjoyable to play. But condition builds feel lackluster a bit with Renegade.

Why menders with Shiro/Kalla? That Healing Power seems so wasted there… Or does it actually have real scaling with Kalla’s elite (unlike the horrible healing power scaling on every other life draining skill in the game?)

Since Menders is power/heal you maximize both damage and healing through the lifesteal effects. And yes, the elite has great scalling with healing power. When the elite is up, I steal 600hp per strike. So sword 2 heals for 1800hp, sword 3 heals for 3000hp; and this stacks with devestation lifesteal trait. Combine this with my shiro heal dealing more damage with the recent update, and the nice healing scalling. Shiro heal gives me 8khp, and I get I think about 10k from kalla heal, 5k of which is aoe and heals allies too.

Menders means that I can heal my allies when I need to, and that I can out-sustain the conditions being thrown on me, with the final grandmaster trait, hoelbrak runes, and the kalla heal, I’m very tanky. Best of all, all this damage immunity (spirit beasts and warriors) gets bypassed by lifesteal, so you can keep pressure up during that. A lot more than people realize.

The damage is lower than something like maurauders, but by focusing on sustain, you don’t have the same need to retreat from battle. You can stay in there a lot longer. Which lets you benefit more from kalla’s summons. And share them more with allies. Holosmiths heal up super fast if they have our elite up. I was able to save quite a few who were going ham without watching their hp. For now, there is no icd for the elite. That allows for all this to work.

Ah, that sounds like it’s gonna get fixed/nerfed. All other life steal skills scale off .02% of healing power. Good to know.

Loboling.5293:

narcx.3570:

Loboling.5293:

I was running Kalla/Shiro for Menders build. It was very enjoyable to play. But condition builds feel lackluster a bit with Renegade.

Why menders with Shiro/Kalla? That Healing Power seems so wasted there… Or does it actually have real scaling with Kalla’s elite (unlike the horrible healing power scaling on every other life draining skill in the game?)

Since Menders is power/heal you maximize both damage and healing through the lifesteal effects. And yes, the elite has great scalling with healing power. When the elite is up, I steal 600hp per strike. So sword 2 heals for 1800hp, sword 3 heals for 3000hp; and this stacks with devestation lifesteal trait. Combine this with my shiro heal dealing more damage with the recent update, and the nice healing scalling. Shiro heal gives me 8khp, and I get I think about 10k from kalla heal, 5k of which is aoe and heals allies too.

Menders means that I can heal my allies when I need to, and that I can out-sustain the conditions being thrown on me, with the final grandmaster trait, hoelbrak runes, and the kalla heal, I’m very tanky. Best of all, all this damage immunity (spirit beasts and warriors) gets bypassed by lifesteal, so you can keep pressure up during that. A lot more than people realize.

The damage is lower than something like maurauders, but by focusing on sustain, you don’t have the same need to retreat from battle. You can stay in there a lot longer. Which lets you benefit more from kalla’s summons. And share them more with allies. Holosmiths heal up super fast if they have our elite up. I was able to save quite a few who were going ham without watching their hp. For now, there is no icd for the elite. That allows for all this to work.

This is all fun and games until you get conditions on you. The most effective part about this build is seeing how high condi damage can get in the kill breakdown screen after you’re dead.

With 20% reduction to condition duration, and up to 66% reduction to condition damage. You can still sustain pretty well through condies. You still have an evade and block on each weapon set.

Either way, the build is not some OP build. It’s pretty weak in some ways because it needs some important buffs to energy cost. Everything is too expensive on renegade. But so far, power Renegade shows some promise, and even menders allows you to tank really well. Just give it a try.

Absconditus.6804:

CutesySylveon.8290:

While I haven’t tested this myself, if Renegade is more useful on a power build, when it was specifically built to be a condi/support spec, then that just proves that the spec is an absolute failure from the devs intended. I can see the reason for trying to pull some light from all the doom and gloom Renegade was, but this isn’t helping. If anything it’s making it worse.

What.. in the world.. are.. you.. even.. on about? Just because it’s got a good duality with being functional in both a Power and Condition build, it doesn’t mean it’s necessarily more useful in one over the other. That means it’s well designed. Condition Renegade is quite strong from a PvE perspective, and not absolutely terrible for PvP either. The combination of dropping Razorclaw at your feet while tossing Icerazor (who will pummel the enemy 20x with Vulnerability and Cripple and gain the effect of adding Bleeds due to him being an extension of the Renegade) over by your target followed by a quick Seven Shot (every arrow that connects adds a stack of Bleeds, for up to 7 stacks together with 7 stacks of Torment) followed by Bloodbane Path/Scorchrazor to a Spiritcrush or switching to Mallyx and Mace/Axe is quite devastating. It’s not a weak Elite Specialization for Conditions. Toss in Orders from Above to restore your cooldowns a bit faster for additional skill usage. Obviously, against a player, you may want to connect Scorchrazor before you do Seven Shot, etc.; there’s a good chunk of alternative ways you can throw these things out. Razorclaw at your (and/or your team members) feet is going to be huge though. Also, for PvE purposes, do not forget the skill split between PvP and PvE. There will likely be more damage in PvE.

What Renegade needs is huge bug fixes though. The “No valid path to target.” is inexcusable and completely broken when it means you can’t use your Utility skills whatsoever on top of WvW walls and bridges, on top of certain terrain and so on forth. It’s horrible, and I can’t even fathom how they have let that one slide. Seven Shot needs serious fixing too. Several of the arrows never basically spawn, because it for some reason on perfectly flat terrain still seems to think it’s blocked. It’s also extremely cumbersome to use in narrow areas, so that skill as-is can use some dev work to make it functional in more scenarios than just big open areas. I also find that I never ever have energy enough for Citadel Bombardment, which on top of that isn’t surefire to connect, it’s RNG, so that could use some energy cost reduction or at least become more reliable in its damage. It’s currently not feeling worth it to use it, as it costs way too much for little payoff when you can use way more skills and pump out way more damage in a shorter time than the skill takes to play out its animation.

Oh, and the heal is of course junk. Most of us seem to agree on that. Maybe it scales well with Healing Power, but that feels like a weird design choice if so. It’s fairly terrible with Condi/Power builds. Not a fan of the Stun break being on it either. Not entirely sure where else they could move it though; Darkrazor?

If you really think this spec is well designed, then I have to ask what you’re on, because I want some of it. Every situation you described was a theorycrafters dream that will absolutely never come to pass in any real scenario, not only because no one is dumb enough to stand in these AoE’s and take all the stuff you described, but also because you can’t start the fight with 65 energy to drop two utilities then use 3 of your energy costing weapon skills without someone knocking you silly or interrupting it at any point, and this was all before you claim to swap legends. Then tossing in some F abilities and I’m wondering where in the world are you getting your energy management ideas from because you flat out can’t do all of that. The only good skill for PvP in the Kalla legend is the daze because it’s cheap CC.

In PvE it’s not much better since you should never be using the Sb because the bleed is worthlessly short and clunky, Sevenshot fails half the time as we’ve already mentioned, and Spiritcrusher can’t even fire behind you and is crutched with a much longer effective time with the arrow falling animation, making it take much longer than the 3/4 sec the tooltip says, and for what? A few one second burns? Razorclaw should be good for PvE, no issues there, but Icerazor doing cripple and vuln is worthless in PvE since both are laughably short and cripple has no purpose in PvE. Why is this not chill so it has synergy with Corruption? The elite can be a decent damage and sustain buff, but now we run into our energy cost problems again if we want to use the other utilities or F skills. Assuming we’ll be running Mallyx with Renegade and Kalla, we won’t have the energy to make use of anything in Mallyx if we use him get the energy for our F2-4.

Energy costs and duration numbers can be tweaked, but if Kalla ends up being a better Power spec for rev than condi, then it’s NOT because it was just designed that well, it’s another Reaper scenario where they started with an idea and worked towards it and failed, and instead of fixing the issues, they just let it ride until the next expac when they try again.

I think Renegade is better than many players are giving it credit for, even if it’s buggy right now. It’s not perfect, it’s energy hungry, but still; it’s easy to test out some combos in the Mists. And sure, these are under perfect conditions against easy AI, but it shows you can in rapid succession perform more or less by the book what I wrote out, without it being just a “theorycrafters dream”. Look at the ticks, look at the cluster of conditions that would need to be cleansed and consider how easy they are to re-apply (you could obviously Legend swap and weapon swap to re-apply conditions with Mallyx), and look at the speed of which they are applied. Can they be avoided, obviously, otherwise it’d be completely broken. But can you condi-burst someone with Renegade? Likely. The more of your allies are nearby the stronger you are. Renegade is in my eyes obviously meant to be a spec that thrives with team mates. It’s not a duelist. Let your team mates knock someone down and then seal their fate with a burst of conditions.

Here’s an example; https://youtu.be/8847KBvhwrA

To repeat myself yet again, I was mainly talking about the specialization in regards to PvE (and yet again; skills can be balanced differently in PvP and PvE — as in, the Bleeds may last twice as long in PvE for all we know), though it can function for PvP too (WvW perhaps more so than Structured). Oh, and if you want, you can set your targeting to Instant and re-position the sweet spot for Seven Shot to actually hit targets up close (with the bonus being that some arrows tends to double dip the target).

PS: I realize I should perhaps have used a different AI than the Ranger in the example, but you can go do the same exact combo yourself on any of the AI in the Mists, the results won’t be vastly different. The repeated Cripple makes it somewhat easy to keep your personal distance and for Icerazor to finish attacking. When enemies close on you, swap to the melee weapon set. In PvE, the Cripple is not of importance, it’s the amount of Bleeds Icerazor can apply being as he is an extension of us, the player. I can also understand why they went with Cripple over Chill, as to not need to mess with Abyssal Chill, giving it an ICD that would make it harder to burst out Torment with other skills on other weapon sets and a certain legend.

Absconditus.6804:

I think Renegade is better than many players are giving it credit for, even if it’s buggy right now. It’s not perfect, it’s energy hungry, but still; it’s easy to test out some combos in the Mists. And sure, these are under perfect conditions against easy AI, but it shows you can in rapid succession perform more or less by the book what I wrote out, without it being just a “theorycrafters dream”. Look at the ticks, look at the cluster of conditions that would need to be cleansed and consider how easy they are to re-apply (you could obviously Legend swap and weapon swap to re-apply conditions with Mallyx), and look at the speed of which they are applied. Can they be avoided, obviously, otherwise it’d be completely broken. But can you condi-burst someone with Renegade? Likely. The more of your allies are nearby the stronger you are. Renegade is in my eyes obviously meant to be a spec that thrives with team mates. It’s not a duelist. Let your team mates knock someone down and then seal their fate with a burst of conditions.

Here’s an example; https://youtu.be/8847KBvhwrA

To repeat myself yet again, I was mainly talking about the specialization in regards to PvE (and yet again; skills can be balanced differently in PvP and PvE — as in, the Bleeds may last twice as long in PvE for all we know), though it can function for PvP too (WvW perhaps more so than Structured). Oh, and if you want, you can set your targeting to Instant and re-position the sweet spot for Seven Shot to actually hit targets up close (with the bonus being that some arrows tends to double dip the target).

PS: I realize I should perhaps have used a different AI than the Ranger in the example, but you can go do the same exact combo yourself on any of the AI in the Mists, the results won’t be vastly different. The repeated Cripple makes it somewhat easy to keep your personal distance and for Icerazor to finish attacking. When enemies close on you, swap to the melee weapon set. In PvE, the Cripple is not of importance, it’s the amount of Bleeds Icerazor can apply being as he is an extension of us, the player. I can also understand why they went with Cripple over Chill, as to not need to mess with Abyssal Chill, giving it an ICD that would make it harder to burst out Torment with other skills on other weapon sets and a certain legend.

None of the condi burst capabilites you describe with Renegade are any different than what you can do with Mallyx when traited properly. One use of Unyielding Anguish can get you almost 20 stacks of torment, more if you use sigils and runes. While applying chill, which is much more valuable then cripple and vuln, even when all three of these conditions are short, chill is objectively better to have. On top of this, the torment from that single skill lasts over twice as long, sometimes three times as long, as the bleeds you get from Renegade. If they gave Abyssal Chill a CD, then it would be for the purpose of forcing us to use the new legend by nerfing the rest. If it becomes an issue of them both doing chill and being the same skill effectively, then why did they mirror it with cripple and vuln on Kalla as opposed to torment and chill with Mallyx? It’s lazy, that’s why.

You can apply all these condi’s with Mallyx and reapply them no differently with either legend respectively, which begs the question of why you would take both when one does the job better and it more reliably with less risk of you being caught with your pants down because Kalla has no means if mitigating conditions on you or healing reliably.

If Sevenshot was changed to function the way it does with the targeting bug it has now, then it would be much better, but I personally don’t like the instant casting of my AoE’s in case my mouse isn’t where it needs to be.

All of the summon situations assume that they aren’t being simply moved out of, CC’d, or flat out die from cleave, which is going to be a major issue in a real teamfight where you say Kalla should thrive.

The spec is worthless trash and anybody saying otherwise is a PvE-er (where it’s still bottom tier trash) or some guy who tried it in unranked against bots

Faee.1439:

The spec is worthless trash and anybody saying otherwise is a PvE-er (where it’s still bottom tier trash) or some guy who tried it in unranked against bots

Word.