Guild Wars 2

Had a lot of fun with Sword/focus condi combo in the betas. They flow so well together, specially fire and earth. in fire/eart you can use your sword 2 for a fire field and focus 4 for a blast finisher, then swap immediately to earth/fire and do focus 4 for a fire field and sword 2 for a blast finisher. Mix in a couple of pure fire and earth sword 3s for extra damage and you basically have a very rythmic rotation going. Having earth focus skills in there is also great for survivability. you can also combine earth skills with the sword water 2 for additional healing. The only problem with this combo is usually condi cleanse, though you can supplement that with traits or utilities.

She looks a lot darker from that angle, but most of the outfit is bone-white actually.

Caeledh.5437:

There is a reason. Balance.

Balance.

Underwater.

Lmao

There isn’t even underwater in pvp anymore

Tried using quick draw with dagger 3 and it seemed to have no effect other than wasting the quick draw buff. Ambidextry does reduce mainhand dagger count recharges, so quick draw should as well.

FranzM.1298:

Kidel.2057:

FranzM.1298:

The renegade AI skills do not work when standing in puddles. I was in Spirit Watch and when i ground targeted the puddles it said i could not use it underwater.

What’s the excuse for Jalis and Glint?

I was being serious. It happens on those too? That’s just sad. I’m starting to think they should dedicate one developer per profession so each one gets the attention they need.

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

Akeno.4962:

Vennyhedgie.5369:

The biggest issue is your heal does not benefit from outgoing healing effectiveness buffs for some reason, and until that gets fixed, you’re better off sticking with ventari

Sure, thats something they should be changing asap. It’s a group heal, so the group should enjoy your outgoing healing modifiers. And you’re always taking Ventari, obviously. Kalla is just a secondary legend.

Miellyn.6847:

You still can’t provide perma alacrity as the heal with it costs too much and the cooldown of Orders from above limits you even with reduced energy costs. Glint will be most likely still better as you can give perma protection. The protection from heal skills procs everytime you move the tablet.

Of course, right now with these immense energy costs it’s quite difficult to provide permalacrity. But the possibility is still there with some adjustments. Why introduce alacrity to Ventari AND Kalla if that’s not the reason? (For aesthetics reasons they could change the effect of alacrity with revenant to some class characteristic color, like light grey, or to legends characteristic colors, light green and dark orange.)

All for one has no ICD, so you just need to invoke 2 spirits (or Soulcleave twice) to have protection while waiting for Ventari, even with no boon duration. Chronos could take that protection and provide it to the group with their quickness rotations. Otherwise, yes, some protection is lost.

You essentially have perma alacrity, I’ve managed to get it to only have like a 1 or 2 second gap every 30 seconds while energy refilled a bit. Granted you can only auto attack to do this, but let’s be honest that’s most of what you do on rev anyway

I actually really like most of the stances, specially since you can share them, thought I’d make their durations a bit longer. Moa is pretty nice, the boon duration increase works really well coupled with dolyak. You’re granting all your allies a hefty amount of boons with those two. The heal stance is also really sweet, although I wish it would heal a bit more even if it didn’t remove condis,but I guess that’s what the other heals are for. The dagger auto attack is WAAAAY too slow, this seems to be a trend with most of the new weapons. Their cast times and aftercasts make them feel clunky.
Dagger 2 also seems to struggle activating depending on what you’re doing before you use it for some reason. What the skills do is fine in and of itself, but the animations make them feel horrible.
The traits are also fairly good, but there’s an odd lack of condi support in them, considering dagger is a condi weapon (like the power scaling on this is attrocious). Soulbeast has some very interesting interactions with skills affecting you instead of your pet now which has buffed power damage significantly, this isn’t the case for condi builds though. The only trait with such interactions is Refined Toxins, which is great with dagger 2, but it competes with Ambidextry and I’d really like to be able to use both at the same time. The same line shouldn’t have competing traits that basically do the same. One gives more condi damage and reduces cooldowns on condi weapons, the other is more condi application which is basically more condi damage. Move refined toxins to the adept tier please! It works really well with soulbeast

I main rev too, but underwater rev just makes me feel like the class is always incomplete and abandoned. All those blank skills just feel like a lazy lack of polish

The biggest issue is your heal does not benefit from outgoing healing effectiveness buffs for some reason, and until that gets fixed, you’re better off sticking with ventari

No, that’s a terrible idea. And whoever came up with fatigue that’s even worse.

They are just fine as they are, they just need reduced costs. Order’s from above gives us an option for support builds, Citadel bombardment will be good damage in pve, but the cost is just god kitten insane. Might per stack is fine, even at 20 energy, but I wouldn’t mind it go down to 15.

But that would require resources spent on revenant and we don’t want any of that.

They should start by giving us core legends underwater AND another underwater weapon

Not exactly a renegade specific suggestion but alacrity should increase the recharge rate of profession mechanics such as initiative and energy. It’s just counter productive.

Also, the cast times on the summons need to be shorter, I often find myself interrupting a summon by trying to use another because I use it mid cast

ScottBroChill.3254:

Just give us a third elite spec that allows us to pick our own heal, utilities, and elite and nothing more. It’s like they wanted to make a second elementalis, but instead of everything flowing they wanted everything clunky and restricted by 3 different things; legend recharge, energy cost, skill recharge. Some of the skills are fun, and some of the spirits are cool, but it just doesn’t work for kitten.

That’s 4 things, you forgot line of sight casting. 5 if you count water

Honestly I’m just frustrated at my inhability to play this spec because we’re barred from PvE content. As someone who only PvEs this is a huge middle finger, specially for such a static spec like renegade. Whoever thought not letting us try PvE content definitely needs to rethink their decisions. Like, we had the HoT specs in pve, why not now?

I feel like the sword autos might be a tad slow. If you look carefully all sword autos’ first attack have 1/2 cast time, giving the impression it’ll be faster than what it actually is, since all other second and third attacks have 3/4

Yeah it’s been two years and at this point I’m gonna have to call anet on this bs. Underwater revenant is a definite shower of lack of quality and polish. Imagine a new player starting with rev. If I was starting the game and suddenly I couldn’t fight underwater I’d be extremely confused.

This is supposed to be a complete product anet, and right now it’s in the same state it was 3 years ago when it was in beta when you were literaly “still tweaking skills to work underwater”.

Get with it, this is unacceptable.

narcx.3570:

Vennyhedgie.5369:

narcx.3570:

lmaogg.7325:

Vennyhedgie.5369:

Renegade is a PvE spec, get it in your heads.

The real problem is they didn’t allow us to test these specs in PvE. That was the real dumb decision they made

It’s just bad. There is no such thing as a “pve only” spec.

Also, it seems like it’ll suck for PvE too.
Not enough support to justify bringing such lackluster damage.

The damage IS very good, but just not usuable outside of PvE. And same way as scrapper and spellbreaker are pvp especs, renegade is a pve one

It’s not even close to what the other elite specs can do to a golem right now.

You are definitely playing it wrong then, the damage from spirits is insane. Specially the lifesteal.

I agree, although it might make it too strong. But I keep thinking and using it as if it was an evade because of the animation

Yeah everything just feels awkward and not flowing well, the cast time, the aftercasts, the cancelling, the LoS errors… sometimes when using skills like SB 2 it straight up doesn’t fire. Something feels really off and I don’t know what it is

narcx.3570:

lmaogg.7325:

Vennyhedgie.5369:

Renegade is a PvE spec, get it in your heads.

The real problem is they didn’t allow us to test these specs in PvE. That was the real dumb decision they made

It’s just bad. There is no such thing as a “pve only” spec.

Also, it seems like it’ll suck for PvE too.
Not enough support to justify bringing such lackluster damage.

The damage IS very good, but just not usuable outside of PvE. And same way as scrapper and spellbreaker are pvp especs, renegade is a pve one

I will have to agree that most skills feel clunky to use. Path to target checks for some reason, can’t cast SB 4 at your feet, nor backwards (it should basically work like DH longbow, the whole bow kit is almost identical in functionality, allow us to line cast SB 5) the cast times on the summons are too long as well. They already take about a second after being summoned to use their effects.

And f3’s cost is way too massive, yes. It’s basically elite levels of energy consumption.

Renegade is a PvE spec, get it in your heads.

The real problem is they didn’t allow us to test these specs in PvE. That was the real dumb decision they made

Got two conversations with Kalla on Male Charr:

Kalla: You strike me as someone who never gives up. I like that.
Rev: You never know when history will be watching.

Kalla: I understand you brought soldiers from all nations together to fight the dragons.
Rev: It’s true. Defeating a dragon took the strength of all five races.

Did some preliminary tests. The elite skill is insane. No CD on the lifesteal. Says it only applies to players, but because the damage your other summons do count as yours, it’s making your summoned spirits lifesteal as well (700 per hit, no cd, they also lifesteal from devastation traits). They can also inherit the bleeding on hit effect

The daze skill is a PULSING daze, 6 dazes total. Looks like a great break bar skill. Doesn’t really do much other than that(and proccing other summon buffs).

Absconditus.6804:

I’m a bit worried when I see that the Elite actually puts you at ONE health. That practically means you can never use it in PvP, and it’s going to be incredibly dangerous to use in PvE. Not a fan. That just seems like a recipe for the downed state every time you use it. In PvP it’s like a “I surrender” button I guess. People can laugh at Revenant even more as they just give up. The enemy can see when it is summoned. The enemy can learn how long it takes before the 1 health state triggers. Not to forget that conditions exist. That sure feels like an Elite.. what are they thinking? I’m almost worried it does that to your allies too. Renegade will quickly be the most hated class in the game if that’s the case. Unless this is some sort of thing that can affect enemies as well (which would be equally as broken) by standing in the AoE circle and only trigger from that, then.. regardless, that Elite just seems stupid.

That was just Karl using Dev cheats to drop his health so you could see how much it heals, that’s not going to happen ingame.

It worth mentioning that the elite is also an upkeep fire field, which doesn’t show up in the tooltip.

Mikau.6920:

RabbitUp.8294:

InViictuZz.1705:

RabbitUp.8294:

Brutaly.6257:

RabbitUp.8294:

The condition duration of axe is such a joke though, 2s seconds of bleeding on auto, when warrior sword does 8s and has a trait that increases it by 20%.

The difference is that warrior has bleeds as main condi and for FB it is a cover condi. FB does not need more bleeds.

Comparing apples and pears.

It’s not a cover condi, it’s part of its dps. Plus, warrior has plenty of burn with Berzerker.

Guardian, on the other hand had its VoJ cut in half.

what do you mean with VoJ cut in half??? The passive burning from Tome of Justice is 541 for 1 1/2 while voJ does the same dmg but with 4s. Isn´t ToJ better because it provides more dmg in a shorter period of time ??

ToJ: 360,67 dmg per second
VoJ: 135,24 dmg per second

another advantage is that you don´t have as much time to cleanse it.

All burning does the same base dps per stack, you see a bigger number on the tooltip because of traits and condi damage gear.

It’s also not 1.5, it’s 1s, half of what it is now. 1.5 must be the pvp version.

WHAT? And I thougth it could be bad on a 1.5 sec. Then would be no reason to use with Permeating Wrath. 50% nerf is just too much. From what we saw, I don’t believe that Firebrand will be self suficient as condi build without passive VoJ, even more considering the insane cast time on axe #2.

At least, only 2 more days to test it out. Every new thing I dicover I lose interest on Firebrand (And I really like Burning Guard)

In the stream, permeating wrath was applying 5+ second burns, so it might have been an olver version of the trait. Let’s hope they don’t destroy condi guard with firebrand

Brutaly.6257:

RabbitUp.8294:

Brutaly.6257:

RabbitUp.8294:

The condition duration of axe is such a joke though, 2s seconds of bleeding on auto, when warrior sword does 8s and has a trait that increases it by 20%.

The difference is that warrior has bleeds as main condi and for FB it is a cover condi. FB does not need more bleeds.

Comparing apples and pears.

It’s not a cover condi, it’s part of its dps. Plus, warrior has plenty of burn with Berzerker.

Guardian, on the other hand had its VoJ cut in half.

The swords main condition for a war is bleeds. Guardian has a second (primary) tied to the axe, Why should we compare the war sword and the guardian axe?

Building a condi FB will never ever focus on having huge stacks of bleeding and balthazar runes will still be the way to go in any game mode. In pve it bleeds will be minor and in pvp and wvw it is a cover condi, nothing more.

Its apples and pears.

I think they want us to take unrelenting criticism when building for condi damage. They moved the “main” bleed damage to a trait so it can have a proc chance.

skeeman.3140:

I didn’t see it mentioned here, but the tooltip for Symbol of Vengeance says it only affects three targets versus the usual five for a symbol. I’m hoping that’s just a tooltip error.

http://i.imgur.com/aUBuGeL.png

If this is true, along with the reduced VoJ passive and short durations on the bleeds I believe they’re intentionally holding firebrand back so it doesn’t become a burning monstrosity. Equiping Firebrand will be like nerfing yourself against single targets in exchange of massive cleave damage, which is not a good prospect for raids.

Dadnir.5038:

The renegade scream “charr” with every single skills it have.

My sylvari revenant can’t wait for it’s equally lame futur legend with all it’s skills spawning plant turret

Have you heard of your lord and saviour Ventari? :p

No not really, crafting isn’t really a big part of the game other than to get ascended gear (and even that you can get through other means)

Not sure what you mean by Trade skills.

For early PvE and leveling I recomend you train the Jalis legend. It will give you access to vengful hammers which is a very good damage reduction, healing and additional damage all in one skill. Its heal skill also cleanses conditions in case you need it, though in open pve it’s not often.

Training shiro will give you access to quickness, a good stun break and a very strong elite skill that stuns 5 enemies near you every 5 seconds if you need it.

Personally when leveling I prefer to use condition damage builds since they generally require less stats to do decent damage at low levels

Milan.9035:

Yea they are really just spirits. Sucks a lot. I wish they would change them but they will not. The engi is a perfect example. They revealed gyros and we all said please god no more ai. And we still got em.

Honestly renegade doesn’t strike me as a pvp spec, same way as spellbreaker is more of a pvp spec. In pve they’re fine since they changed how aoe damage hurts AIs, they’re basically unkillable there.

Every time they change this skill it works worse than before. Can we have the original version of this skill that jumped at the target, but not THROUGH them?

Thiazi.1250:

Vennyhedgie.5369:

But yeah I admit I was expecting more condi interaction. Too many traits are variations to get kalla’s fervor, and a couple are in quite the wrong places.
We’re forced to take a minor trait that gives us a knockdown on stun break but the only stun break renegade has is on its heal, which is already super weird in and of itself. That needs to be looked at.

The weirdness was due to the wiki literally having the traits in the wrong places. Looks like somebody fixed them though, so I’m saved from trying to create an account and edit stuff.

Oh is the current order the correct one? I can’t really tell which one’s minor and major from the screenshots I saw so I have to go with what the wiki says

Fractured.3928:

Vennyhedgie.5369:

It’s not that it will make it good. Condi rev is already good, the problem is that it doesn’t have any ranged condi damage, which is what shortbow provides

I’m assuming the skills do then? Cuase don’t really see any in the traits heh.

Well you can get up to 20% condi damage with the traits, more so for bleeds (though this doesn’t really affect current condi rev much).

But yeah I admit I was expecting more condi interaction. Too many traits are variations to get kalla’s fervor, and a couple are in quite the wrong places.
We’re forced to take a minor trait that gives us a knockdown on stun break but the only stun break renegade has is on its heal, which is already super weird in and of itself. That needs to be looked at.

It’s not that it will make it good. Condi rev is already good, the problem is that it doesn’t have any ranged condi damage, which is what shortbow provides

ThomasC.1056:

Just for the sake of lisibility, the wiki also has them clean

Thank you very much for this!

Buran.3796:

ANet will give stealth + backstab to the Orr Abominations before letting a Rev to gain access to stability.

Except they have a legend and a traitline almost dedicated to defense and stability

The shortbow itself has his own set of problems (no defensive skill in a 5 skill weapon, no cc, no mobility),

Skill 5 is a line that knocks down foes for 2 seconds on a 20 sec CD

Have you even read the skills?

The rest at least isn’t to far off.

Staff still deals decent damage considering its kit, don’t dismiss it so quickly

If you want to go support for PvE and dungeons, definitely take Herald and use Glint.
If you like the sword you probably wanna take the Devastation traitline.
And to tie them together, Invocation works really well, and gives you a lot of crit chance.

For a secondary weapon you can either use a staff for defiance bars (breakbars) or a hammer if you need a ranged weapon.

Now that the traits have been revealed I can safely say Renegade brings a few things to the table:
Might spam. Like, a lot. You’re not gonna need might from many other sources really.
Alacrity, a fair share. Even more so if traited. 6seconds on a 20 second CD (shorter because of alacrity itself).
A super strong 700dmg lifesteal aura, with no apparent internal CD as of now, which is also an upkeep fire field (doesn’t show up in the tooltip for some reason but was shown in aurora’s videos).
Protection near their summons.
-33%Condi damage reduction on their heal summon. (could be helpful for some fights, + some future encounters). An extra personal -33% whenever they have their own buff maxed (which with how easy it is to get it’ll be all the time).
Absurd burning dmg on big hitboxes.
IF the daze summon PULSES daze (which isn’t very clear from either the tooltip nor the videos), insane breakbar damage potential.
And personal permacrit traits (doesn’t really benefit the team directly but it’s nice for deeps).

I would also suggest switching Sudden Reversal (currently minor) with vindication(currenty major). Sudden reversal doesn’t do much for us in pve, while Vindication can be used to our advantadge in any of the 3 gamemodes.

I’m mostly okay with what I think the grandmasters are, however there’s too much “gain kalla’s fervor” spam in these traits. It’s not that hard to get the buff to begin with. I think they should change at least 2 of these to do something else.

Also, let us share kalla’s fervor pls

You might want to give the new stat set Griever a try. It’s basically berserker’s with some condition damage.

There’s a beta ongoing for the new story where I believe you can make any class with their HoT elite specialization. You might want to try the revenant out there

I can confirm from the videos that it doesn’t have an internal cooldown, I already studied that in detail.

However it can only empower players, so any AI is not affected

lagrimabendita.8763:

but are they a good alternative option?

I would like to come back in the new expansion and I am between Revenant as healer, or The new guardian class as healer (if it finally is a real option) or the new Necro class, it looks amazin, shilds for everyone!

Well we don’t have enough info on the new elite spec to know if it’ll be able to be a healer, although the heal skill is aoe and it also has a lifesteal elite, so you never know

technically you can do both at the same time WHILE also bringing alacrity. I have a build for that. But it would require so much technical skill it’s kinda mindwrecking for raids.

You’d have to keep up with the boss mechanics while keeping your allies alive while also making sure you manage your energy to provide alacrity

Datenshi.2765:

Vennyhedgie.5369:

Datenshi.2765:

A nice collection of non-changes ANet. Please do something productive with your time. Don’t bother buffing meaningless traits that are still less effective then what’s already being used.

There have been quite a few buffs and fixes what are you talking about

How about you read what i wrote before quoting me? “Don’t bother buffing meaningless traits that are still less effective then what’s already being used”..Please explain to me how you interpreted that as me saying there hasn’t been ANY buffs or fixes?

Their changes changed nothing. What’s “meta” is still “meta” because their buffs are inadequate and weak.

The points of buffs is to take something that isn’t used and put it in line to what is currently in use, contrary to popular belief.

Buffing something that’s already used just becomes powercreep

I really need to get a link to my build and so I can start sharing it around here.

Anyway rev is great in open world PvE since it’s very versatile and (contrary to what some ignorants say) very mobile.

Usually I run a condi build with Jalis and Mallyx. If you are still leveling and you have to chose what to trait, I would recomend going corruption first as it will give you the bigest damage boost, and conditions scale better while leveling up than power builds.