I’m really confused by the OP’s comment.
GW2 is the most melee-centric MMO I’ve ever played. Even theoretically ranged light armour users are strongly encouraged by the game’s mechanics to fight at melee range.
Eg. AOE buffs and heals have a very limited range. So in group content the norm is for everyone to bunch up around a boss, and dodge away from or interrupt or block etc. the big AOE attacks.
Even solo PvE favours melee. Zipping madly around a foe so they’re rarely facing the right way to hit you is one of the best forms of defence. You can’t do that at range.
Thanks to ANet for giving us the opportunity to take the elites into PvE this morning. But unfortunately I came away liking the renegade even less.
Darkrazor and Icerazor are both garbage. There I was annoyed that they had cooldowns, but then I discovered they’re not worth using at all. Total waste of energy. Literally. If I used them I found them not doing much good and it left me without enough energy to use weapon abilities.
Apart from the sex factor, I wouldn’t mind more ‘skimpy’ clothing options for my Sylvari cos they look really cool naked. Especially at night.
It’s one of the reasons I love the cook outfit. Hide the helmet and gloves and you get an outfit that isn’t exactly skimpy but there’s a lot of more skin / wood showing.
I’m not exactly “keeping the faith” or even hoping.
There may be a slim chance they’ll turn renegade into something I’d want to play so I’ll keep an eye on it until PoF launches.
But I would bet against it. Unfortunately.
It really is such a shame to see that whoever thought up the skin ideas (90% of the Gemstore skins in particular) couldn’t show some restraint, especially since how amazing GW1’s aesthetic was.
I think that’s for the Asian market, which GW2 has done rather well with. To a western eye their aesthetic can appear lacking in restraint.
Personally I’d rather gouge my eyes than wear most of GW2’s armours or outfits. Especially in the light category. But there are a few I do like and I just don’t care about what other people wear.
And as a general rule, the harder it is to acquire a weapon or armour skin, the worse it looks. Most legendary weapons look insane for my tastes. From a player perspective I think that’s awesome. If all the hardest to get stuff looks hideous, it’s super easy for me to be happy with the much better looking, basic skins and not bother with the grind.
If it’s event stuff you’re having trouble with, it can help to wait until events for that map are part of the dailies.
It’s not, but that’s still 1 month away and what if they make it so you can only unlock it using new content? HoT mastery points won’t work for PoF for example.
I don’t think that’s likely, both because that would be a serious change to the hero point system and because one of the biggest criticisms of HoT at launch was that they’d hyped the hell out of the new elites but you had to play through most of the expansion to earn enough HP to fully unlock them.
Not being able to play the whole expansion as the new spec was so disappointing that ANet later significantly lowered the cost of training the elites.
Having learned that lesson, they’re likely to allow players to spend existing HP to quickly / instantly fully train the new elites.
That will not help. The skills will be competing on energy with utilities, weapon and heroic.
Nonsense.
You’re thinking like every other profession where you just activate every ability as it comes off cooldown to maximise DPS.
Obviously with energy in the mix, you need to be smart and spend that energy wisely.
I just don’t see adding more AI skills into the game as a good idea (see Gyros), and I hope Anet sees this too.
Pet skills aren’t unpopular. Necro minions, ranger pets and mesmer illusions can be very powerful and appreciated in PvE.
Gyros were an unfathomable mistake though. Anet took their only immensely unpopular iteration of pets – guardian spirit weapons – and gave to them to engineers as an elite. It should have surprised no-one that they were just as unpopular.
You can’t keep them up enough to be truly useful and it’s just irritating having to resummon them all the time.
Additionally, bows were used for hunting. If women were allowed to hunt, perhaps they were allowed small bows (shortbows) to use on small game—bows that wouldn’t be considered a “War bow.”
Kalla has the bow because revenant lacked a ranged condition damage weapon and bow is that for ranger and thief. Many medium armour users will already have an ascended condition bow or two and accordingly be more inclined to give renegade a go.
Forge Puts the other kits on cool down so i see Hoilomancer dancing between the Holoforge and useing there Sword to maintin a ballance of heat and cooldown
You beat me to it.
Additionally, both sword and exceed skills benefit from heat.
I like it too. Much better than what we have.
Unfortunately I think we’re unlikely to get it now because it would involve too much additional graphics development to implement before launch.
Just get rid of all the cooldowns and tone down the disrupt spirit.
Remove the cooldowns instead.
In this case I looked at the online Oxford Dictionary (I assume it’s what you did because I found the bit you quoted there, and more) and the Merriam-Webster Dictionary.
Huh? You assumed? How?
I clearly stated that I used the Oxford dictionary definition and linked directly to it.
The term fervour is often associated with religion, as you can see in the Oxford dictionary definition’s example usage : “he talked with all the fervour of a new convert”.
As for the rest of what you said, my point stands completely unchallenged.
Fervor is a term commonly associated with religion. Kalla wasn’t just not religious, she had led a rebellion against religious oppression.
Ergo ascribing the attribute of fervor to her is completely insane.
Second, this “Orders from Above” thing… Kalla was the leader of the rebellion and so if she gave orders to those following her, those followers would see these as “Orders from Above.”
Try reading the ability description.
“Orders from above arrive, renewing your abilities and those of your nearby allies.”
Kalla clearly isn’t issuing those orders and if she were, calling them ‘orders from above’ would be very imperious and also out of character.
yeah, as I said in my review in the Demo Feedback thread, Kalla’s terminology is completely off with “Fervor” and “from Above”.
I struggle to understand how they could get even this so horribly wrong.
It’s like they want us to dislike this legend.
No weapon swap is one of the best things about engineer.
If you don’t want to be madly jumping about between different weapons to take advantage of their long cooldown abilities, you don’t have to. Awesome.
If you do, you can equip a kit. Or two, three, four or five even.
They’ve got all bases covered in this respect. It’s one of the features of engineer which I envy.
I believe they stated that elite specs were NOT meant to be stronger, but instead meant to offer a different playstyle.
Can’t treat anything that any developer says as gospel though.
Like they originally said there’d be no holy trinity or healers. Fine. But then that didn’t work and instead of just saying it didn’t work, they said they never said that in the first place.
Uhuh. Sure.
In one of the elite spec vids for PoF I think one of them says something like their goal with elites has always been for them not to be absolutely necessary. But that’s exactly what they did with HoT. Chronomancers had alacrity and Druids were designed as THE spike damage healers.
In other words if you reduce damage on Holosmith, what are you left with?
Hollowsmith.
The problem is not really Renegade, aside from the terrible energy costs, but core Revenant. It now needs a buff and condi cleanse.
No. Renegade is definitely a problem and for many of us for completely different reasons to those.
I think the energy costs are fine. It’s the cooldowns I want to see go.
FYI here’s you yourself saying Renegade is a problem.
This subforum has many experienced Revenants and none of them is happy with Renegade. It’s simply bad design, functionality, usage and looks.
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You might think that with a insufficient understanding of English.
Fervor isn’t intrinsically associated with religion.
You speak of an insufficient understanding of English. How ironic!
Perhaps you need to consult a dictionary on the meaning of a few words, like “often” and “intrinsically”.
The term fervour is often associated with religion, as you can see in the Oxford dictionary definition’s example usage : “he talked with all the fervour of a new convert”.
Oh….
And because Charr are militaristic, Orders from Above doesn’t have to symbolize religious thought any more than their standard atheism pandering would warrant. It’s much more likely the orders came from higher ups in the command list.
First off, I didn’t say that there was anything religious about Orders from Above. You’ve again completely misunderstood.
The operative term which I used repeatedly is led.
Kalla led a rebellion against religious oppression.
…
And another called “Orders from Above”. Since she led the rebellion and died immediately afterwards, who is she / we taking orders from? And why do they provide alacrity?
Kalla was in charge. There was no-one above her to take orders from.
2 years of developement fixed in less than 1 month? Meh.
Didn’t they mention that Renegade was one of the elites which was sent back to the drawing board? Possibly more than once.
It’s obviously a mess but if they had the will to fix it, it could be done. If we / they can arrive at a solution which mainly requires code changes rather than graphical ones then it’s not that big a job.
I would make two changes to Herald.
1) Separate the active abilities and passive boons and take the cooldowns off the actives. Give us the option to play as a dragon magic wielder minus those kitten ed cooldowns and more people would play it.
Lose natural resonance and make that F skill instead toggle between utilities being boons and those active abilities.
Rename the boons accordingly so they make sense.
2) Make boon’ing more interesting. The simplest alternative I can think of is to have boons interact.
Eg. you could maintain swiftness for 1 energy or fury for 2 energy. But with both active you also get 1s (per 3s pulse) of quickness. Baseline. So you could bring that up to 2s with enough boon duration bonus.
Other combinations might give things like aegis, retaliation, stability, vigor.
That way instead of passively maintaining boons and auto-attacking, Heralds might alter their active facets to provide the most useful boons to their allies as needed.
If you play all of the other classes you get a really good feel for this game. It’s all about fast paced combat, possibly having up to 20 skills on cooldown simultaneously in some cases.
I respect that you and some others enjoy that style of play.
Not everyone does though.
That’s why revenant is a bit different.
However its kind of hamstrung in it’s purpose, as originally we were supposed to take condi from allies, or receive them and use it nefariously,
That was an interesting idea. It’s a shame they couldn’t pull it off.
If I recall correctly ANet did try this but it failed because in WvW Mallyx revenants were being cleansed against their will and losing the extra power they got from being conditioned?
Could be an interesting idea to revisit. Maybe a trait to repel cleanse attempts?
Your Logic is flawed in the sense that Revs still don’t work like other classes where we actually have a viable second weapon swap to switch to.
My logic is fine. Your claim is nonsense.
I play just fine and rarely use the sword.
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I like the idea of being able to channel energy through spirits to do something extra.
That would not only make gameplay more interesting but also enhance the renegade’s poor identity.
Kalla was a leader. We don’t see that in Renegade’s current form apart from her summoning minions. If she’s inspiring them on to greater efforts through these extra abilities, we see a bit more leadership.
It also potentially solves the problem of cooldowns. Eg. Darkrazor’s Daring with its 6s of aoe interruption is obviously a bit OP. But if that gets moved into an extra skill then maybe the actual summoning abilities wouldn’t need cooldowns and also wouldn’t need to expire so quickly or possibly at all.
So we would have more flexibility and freedom in how we use the spirits. Hooray!
That would potentially create a new problem though in how do we move / create new spirits? Because the button to do that now activates their special ability.
I’ll propose a solution. Rather than making them ‘chain’ abilities, make this an F skill called something like “Kalla’s Inspiration” or just “Inspire”.
If you have Kalla active and the spirit has been summoned, that F skill plus the spirit’s button will perform the special action. If no spirit is summoned that F skill would be greyed out.
If you have your other legend active, that F skill targets might target the nearest spirit to the revenant.
They’re not likely to do another summoning heavy legend so shapeshifting seems like the obvious alternative for a Norn and their spirits.
I like it.
Though I would expect heavy opposition from Norn players of every other profession. No-one likes it when some other group gets to do something cool better than they can.
I disagree 1000% for two reasons.
1) It should be the cooldowns which are removed.
2) If they remove the energy cost instead then we’re left like every profession and to maximise DPS will be expected to manically change weapons every 10 seconds, as well as legends for the 50 free energy.
Madness multiplied!!!!!
What kittenes me off is legends that would be perfectly workable underwater, if they have a SINGLE skill that isn’t usable, they disable the whole legend. There’s no reason why all of jalis skills shouldn’t work as is underwater except for the road, which you could honestly just make a new skill underwater. But no, all their love goes to eles of course
There is a reason. Balance.
Herald is balanced around players using Elemental Blast every 15s. But they try to avoid using burning underwater and locking this single ability would significantly reduce Herald’s damage output.
Jalis’ Inspiring Reinforcement isn’t just a stability buff. It’s also a weakness debuff, lightning field and does damage. If you’re playing at range (i.e. the hammer in ground combat) IR makes a big contribution to total DPS.
Most of us would probably happily accept even a slightly kitten Jalis underwater but there’s alway PvP to consider. They would cop complaints about this.
That said, they could certainly alter such abilities to make them functional underwater.
I thought the shortbow was good. Especially in combination with Mallyx it seemed to work well. And with something like Seraph gear it might work well with Ventari.
Sevenshot could be tricky to use to maximum effect with many regular sized moving targets but it’s only one ability.
I like the idea of summoning warband members. Implementation missed the mark but I like the idea.
I generally agree with everything you said, except this.
Part of what made Glint acceptable with it’s CDs was the fact that using their actives was essentially free and cost the Revenant next to no energy.
Herald is balanced around using those ‘free’ attacks every time they come off cooldown. So it devolves revenant to being like every other profession – just activating every attack as it comes off cooldown to maximise DPS.
My guess is that this is why they deny us Herald underwater. It’s balanced around using elemental blast every 15s and that has burning, which apart from a few notable exceptions, they tend not to use in underwater combat.
Energy cost on everything as well as huge cooldowns feels weird, would it not make more sense to not have energy cost on weapon skills then the huge energy cost of the utilities would be fine since you are spending your resource how you want?
Personally, yes, I’d strongly prefer this. And there’s probably many players who don’t play GW2 because they don’t like CD driven combat design who also would.
But the best time to do that would have been with HoT’s launch and the newly introduced revenants. Because at this point ArenaNet would struggle to get the message out to such players that GW2 suddenly has something for them.
I suspect instead that they’re heading in the opposite direction. They’ll give up on trying to cater to such players and just make every profession cooldown driven, eg. Renegade.
Even thieves get a weapon ability with a charge (which is essentially a softer cooldown) on it with PoF. Might just be the first of many.
warrior banners do work underwater, they ground based.
Yes. I know.
Many ground based skills work underwater. They just pop around the user in a sphere or around the target.
Yep. That’s why I suggested it. Our own Mallyx’s Unyielding Anguish gets this treatment.
I don’t think they put any more thought into it other than picking a female npc to shoehorn in.
That’s what makes this even harder for me to understand.
I can appreciate them wanting to bring a bit more gender balance to our legend offerings. But having decided to do that, I would have thought that they’d spare no effort in making sure the legend was well received.
Merely making it work underwater would have been widely appreciated. But they didn’t do that. And we’ve got this odd language.
It’s really bizarre.
Hi there all,How do you play this?
It differs by legend but my take on it is different to yours. I see options. Rev isn’t like other professions where you’re just meant to use every ability as it comes off cooldown to maximise DPS. You can’t because there’s not enough energy to do that.
Take Mallyx as the most extreme example since none of his utilities have CDs except for his heal.
You could gear and trait especially for torment and spend most of your energy on unyielding torment and embrace the darkness.
It’s possible – though I haven’t tried it myself – to gear and trait specifically for confusion and go nuts with banish enchantment.
Or you could gear for condition damage and use a bit of everything, including burning from mace. Or burning or bleeding with shortbow.
Shiro and Jalis have 5 and 10 second CDs respectively on some of their abilities but you could use either with a power build and rely primarily on legend utilities for damage (eg. impossible odds, vengeful hammers).
That approach works less well with the elites though, since their utilities have and are balanced around CDs.
Possibly you’re meant to be madly flipping back and forth between legends every 10 seconds to take advantage of the 50 free energy provided by each swap.
Though personally I’d rather chew my foot off than take up that manic style of play.
I’ll change weapons / legends / whatever because it makes sense to use one of their abilities at that particular moment in time. Not for any other reason.
Something occurred to me while replying to another topic about the poor identity of the new renegade spec. Even putting aside the various mechanical problems, there’s also a problem even at the level of how her abilities have been named.
Kalla led a rebellion against religious oppression.
The term fervour is often associated with religion, as you can see in the Oxford dictionary definition’s example usage : “he talked with all the fervour of a new convert”.
Yet we have a buff called “Kalla’s Fervor”.
And another called “Orders from Above”. Since she led the rebellion and died immediately afterwards, who is she / we taking orders from? And why do they provide alacrity?
It’s especially bizarre if you read the official wiki entry for the Charr Rebellion. Kalla was famed for her speed, aka alacrity.
“Scores of charr came to watch the battle in the ruined arena in Rin. The two warriors were well matched. As a male of the race, Ironstrike was the larger and stronger of the two, but Scorchrazor was by far the faster and more skilled.”
Obviously the mechanical problems are more serious, but words matter too and their choices are completely at odds with the legend they’re trying to sell us.
And the fact that Photon Forge give kits 6 sec cd is not a problem because by the time you used you forge skill to pass 50% heat and weapon skill 6 seconds are alredy gone and you can use your kit.
The freedom is still gone though.
Being able to freely switch between weapons and kits is one of the best things about engineers. Giving that up is a loss.
Basically you lose the pet and gain engineer like F skills. That’s soulbeast.
I don’t think they intended to dazzle with this one. It’s more an answer to a long-standing problem of pets sometimes being worse than useless (eg. in some dungeon content) and needing to be put away, and then rangers being kitten because of that.
No. Keep the energy cost as is but get rid of the cooldowns.
Let us decide if / when to use them. Not some cooldown.
All these new skills feel like they are a mishmash mess from all other classes, yet in a weaken form that seem to just be thrown together with little thought or effort. No real identity for the Revenant.
IMO the biggest problem in this respect are the F skills.
There’s an attack, with a cooldown. So it’s just like an extra weapon ability.
There’s an alacrity buff and a might buff. With cooldowns. Just because people like alacrity and might in group content. And they’re very oddly named. Orders from above? Kalla led the rebellion. She was inspirational so why don’t her buffs reflect that?
Nothing about these enhance the base profession – which eschews cooldowns – and they definitely seem lazy and random.
The other problem is Kalla’s Fervor. That’s a transparent boost over the base profession. Even if you don’t want to use the shortbow or any of the Renegade abilities, having the extra ferocity and condition damage is an obvious benefit. So obvious it looks like a desperate design decision.
IMO the renegade F skills a) shouldn’t have cooldowns and b) should be unique, team oriented buffs. Like Kalla’s current elite. Turn that and Razorclaw into F skills, and make another which is defensively oriented. Each would be too costly to maintain constantly even in group content so revenants would need to use them strategically. And also manage their energy use with other abilities.
Then make all the utilities more solo-oriented. Personally I’d stick with spirit summons but get rid of cooldowns and balance accordingly.
Sure. Why not?
Ok Renegade isn’t like Herald with no ground targetted abilities. Herald could theoretically work underwater exactly is.
But Renegade would need only a few minor tweaks. Make disruption charr summon at targetted enemy’s location. Make the others spawn near you. Make the F bombardment enemy targetted.
Done.
Ok, arguably burning as a condition underwater is a little weird, but guardians do it so why not us? Or just change the condition’s name to ‘scalding’ and problem solved.
I’ve never understood the one weapon desire on Rev.
It’s this simple.
Most other prof weapon abilities are balanced around the idea that players can swap between weapons / attunements / kits – with varying cooldowns – to access different longer cooldown big attacks.
Not everyone loves doing that. Personally I don’t. I want to swap weapons or do anything combat-wise because it makes sense to, not because design elements like cooldowns make that decision for me.
I would have preferred revenant with a single weapon but taking energy costs into account and the generally small cooldowns on rev weapons I don’t think it’s a problem. Unlike the 50 free energy revs get on legend swapping.
I like the OP’s fixes. All of them.
Nothing extra to add.
what good is a short recharge if they hit nothing?
Oh come on. Nothing? Really? Not ever?
Saying things like that, do you want to be taken seriously? Really? Ever?
I like the pet(s) on my ranger so doubt I’d use beastmode much.
The upside I see is in group content with weapons like longbow, with its 2 very situational and rarely used abilities (in PvE). That leaves auto-attack and only 2 abilities to activate (plus maybe pet’s, depending on how long its cooldown is). Assuming my pet isn’t needed to tank then beastmode would give me a few extra abilities to play with.
Photon forge certainly seemed powerful.
But I’m more a fan of ranged than melee combat so both the sword and forge aren’t so appealing to me.
And the thing I like most about engis is being able to freely change between kits. Holosmith nerfs that.
Possibly they could be better. Truly. I don’t debate that.
But mantras were the high point of firebrand when I took a lot at them.
Short 15s recharge means they’re reliably available. The exact opposite of tomes.
Is it just me or it seems that ANet does not like Revenant?
I think they don’t know what to do with it.
At launch it appeared they were trying to broaden the game’s appeal with a different style of combat. But they didn’t take it far enough. So they’ve got an unhappy compromise which doesn’t really please anyone.
Given both elite specs are crammed full of cooldowns my guess is that they’ll eventually change base revenant to be the same. That’s why I’m hesitant to buy PoF or get too invested in the game.
Even thieves got their first cooldown on a weapon ability with this expansion. That was a surprise.