This pretty much mirrors my experience; the revenant needs a lot of work.
The best damage I could put out was with the sword auto-attack and vengeful hammers, and that was pretty pitiful compared to most classes, in addition to be being boring. My rotation has pretty much been Vengeful Hammers → Auto until out of energy → Swap to Shiro → Impossible Odds → Auto until out of energy → Swap to Jalis etc.
In pvp I was using impossible odds to “quick-cast” hammer skills because that’s the only way I can get them to hit something, and even then it’s incredibly easy to dodge. I tried berserker builds (damage too low) soldier/knight/cele tanky builds (no protection really hurts this) condi builds (this one is actually really tricky and I’m still learning new stuff with Mallyx stance, but I still feel I can’t apply enough conditions without copying the ones someone else has placed on me) and full on healing/support builds (which worked OK, but I feel like I would have been a greater asset to my team if I had access to some good cc and mitigation in addition to raw output.)
The weapons need to be redesigned for better synergy with each other and we need to fill empty niches. We need a tanky melee weapon set and a condi ranged weapon set, and they need to be adaptable to other roles (much like how the guardian’s mace provides good healing and protection or excellent dps depending on how you build yourself). We need higher base damage and better scaling ratios. We need a ranged weapon that doesn’t take a fortnight to pull off a simple cc (seriously, if you start casting as soon as an enemy starts his attack with the intent to interrupt it, your cc won’t kick in until after it’s needed). We need evade/invulnerability on the sword #3. We need the hammer #3 to not launch your character into the AoE that you went ranged to avoid (the mist thing looks great, just make it purely aesthetic or give us invuln).
Also, why do regular attacks cost energy? I’d say Mallyx is the best example of what the stances should be since it requires you to use all of your skills, but, because of that, I’m almost always energy starved. It should be cooldowns on the left of my bars and energy on the right with the utilities designed to be used more often.
This post turned out more rambly than it should have been but I really want the revenant to be awesome. Arenanet’s class design for Guild Wars 2 has been awesome (purple butterflies!) but they seem to have a hard time getting those great ideas into balanced gameplay (see everything wrong with the necromancer). I’m hoping with all of the attention the revenant is getting we’ll see some significant changes. Otherwise I suppose I’ll be playing my new chronomancer.
