Guild Wars 2

This new zone is definitely not fun right now >_>

Rev really needs weapon swap. There is no good reason not to have it. The utilities legends bring (so far) are just not good enough to justify being stuck in the same 5 attacks.

When playing Mallyx, you use 1-2 utilities against condi. If you are fighting something that doesn’t condi then you don’t use them much (except to give yourself more condis for bigger heals.)

You use Jalis for group stability and sometimes taunt. If the boss is really CC heavy (Centaur would boss, Teq phase 1, KQ) you’re going to be spamming road and nothing else the whole fight.

Ventari you are determined to be in heal mode for the whole encounter so you’ll be spamming your heal skills anyways.

What I’m saying is Rev legends are situational and rarely do you swap between them midfight if you know what your doing. It doesn’t lead to the same diversity Ele/Engi has. I’m always stuck on the same weapon/s for the whole encounter and it sucks. It’s boring. I’m trying to get ooc if I want to switch. It’s just bad.

I think that instead having weapon swap, each weapon should have extra effects on some of its skills that change depending on legend.

For example, the 3rd hit of the staff autoattack chain would create healing orbs under ventari, but those orbs would deal a random condition to enemies under mallyx, explode, dealing damage under Shiro, and give allies a short protection (only once reach) under Jallis.

Tbh, I don’t think that you want to swap your legend every time you swap your weapon.

Lets say you run a condi build with hammer + mace/axe
You applied a couple of condis with mace and malyx #8 on a target, and in order to prevent them from condi-clearing, you swap to hammer, use skill #5 and then finish them off with malyx #9.
Yes, the ventari tablet can be annoying with this, but the fix would be to spawn ventaris tablet automatically at your position, if you swap into that legend. Then you still can move it around with #6.

Anyways, without weapon-swap OR a rework to its class-mechanic, this class will not work out. It’s really as simple as that.

Wow, you people who are claiming the revenant is fine fine as is… have you even played one? Currently, they are by far the weakest DPS class in GW2 and no amount of utility is going to fix that. A level 80 sporting all exotic gear with the best runes/sigils SHOULD NOT struggle to beat a basic mob one-on-one. If you want that kind of challenge, play your level 80 character with level 5 gear, but don’t say a broken beta class is fine, dandy, and fun.

Zev.3407:

Rev staff isnt lower DPS because its tied to the “support” legend . . its lower dps cus it can heal while u fight

it’s called balanced

Even if they buff the dps for rev, staff would still be lower for the fact it can heal you while you fight

let the gear balance the weapon

if i go berserker then make it buff the damage to be competitive damage, but not as much damage as Shiro and the “true dps weapon” that rev will be getting, and then make it do crap healing

if i go clerics or nomad’s, then make it buff the healing to where the healing makes a difference and then i do alright dps, but definitely not as low as what is currently in beta

Damage numbers will likely be looked at a few times more before they release the expansion, I wouldn’t worry about it that much.

The 2 things that bother me is

1: That the rev has little flexibility when it comes to switching from melee combat to ranged.

2: The rev is extremely reliant on the weapon they choose & unlike an elementalist legend swap doesnt seem to give as much flexibility as atunement swap.

thejoedude.3465:

I beg to differ when you said guardian can always do good damage with gs, run nomad gear and see

run nomad on revenant and then you’ll realize you wish you could still do the same amount of damage as your nomad guardian

Yes, it is normal to have 1-2 weapons that have low damage. However revenant doesn’t have many weapons left and so far all four of them have godly awful base damage on every skill.

Even damage modifiers will not fix that without breaking out-of-profession skills like picking up an Ice Bow.

I also agree revenant deserves weapon swap – you only get access to an extra 5 skills with the second legend, most of which are restricted to niche roles and aren’t “weapon skill” types. Compare that to how many extra skills elementalist (3x 5) or engineer (potentially 4x 5 + 5 on toolbelt) gain, it’s nowhere near that.

drkmgic.9583:

I was wishing the whole time that. Switching your legendary meant switching your weapon too. It’s really hard to not have the option of switching to range or melee.

This is very true. Especially on a heavy melee oriented dominant class. Guardian and Warrior can swap to range from melee. A Rev can only choose 1, which is very very bad, considering there are encounters that need lots of swapping, fractals come to my mind straight away. Indeed on pvp too, a melee heavy class need option to switch melee to range in combat.
Bad design tbh.

I was wishing the whole time that. Switching your legendary meant switching your weapon too. It’s really hard to not have the option of switching to range or melee.

So I’m throwing this up in its own thread for the ten minutes before ArenaNet merges it into some other oversized thread nobody actually reads…but hey! They said this was a beta weekend and they wanted feedback, so here it is, from me and my guild both.

So me and most of my guild spent a good portion of last night on beta Revenants, trying them out, seeing how they worked, seeing what we all thought. As they feel (rightly, as it turns out) that this place is a horrible degenerate snake pit full of angry shouty people, the task has fallen to the one guy in the guild salty enough not to immediately pickle upon stepping foot in here.

ANYWAYS.

We did some general PvE, some Silverwastes-ing, and managed to scrape up an all-Rev dungeon run, putting the new class through its paces on the PvE side, and the general consensus was disappointment. The Revenant dealt pants for damage even in the verymost glassy of cannon-gear – I personally tried Mace/Axe in Rampager, in lieu of Sinister, and Hammer in Berserker, and both felt anemic and lacking. Now, this is somewhat mitigated by the fact that you guys haven’t given us Shiro yet so we don’t have our rawrdeeps weapons/Legend yet…but the fact that Mallyx felt somewhat lacking is something of a sore point. As well, both Jalis and Ventari are still going to have to put people down at some point. Think I’m going to leave feedback here piece by piece. Mostly my own, but also pertinent points I heard from my guildmates while Rev-ing with them. As follows:

Hammer – I spent most of my time on the Rev with the hammer, with a good trial of mace/axe and a handful of very frustrating minutes on staff. The hammer is interesting, but the general Rev nodeeps issue is felt most keenly here. I spent ninety percent of my time on the hammer Swing-Swing-Coalescing, trying to find the exceptionally fine sweet spot where I could tag my enemies with the backmost pair of blasts from Coalescence…and wondering what my other three skills did. Phase Smash is awesome to watch but very difficult to hit with – a 1200-unit leap has just a wee little bit of a windup time, meaning either you lead your targets to nigh-psychic levels or you use it on stationary threats, and Drop the Hammer…!

Wow. Next best thing to a 2-second build-up, and what I get is a moderate-damage AoE hit with a brief knockdown. I’m sorry ArenaNet, but when I spend half an eternity summoning a spectral hammer bigger than my car to smash the ground, I’m expecting freaking mushroom clouds, not…poot. The weight and visceral feedback of the skill feels right – the big bass boom of the impact, the visual of that monstrous Mistbreaker, that stuff was baller as hell. The actual effects…less so. Hammer as a whole just felt rather vanilla, with not a ton of incentive to mix up its skills or do anything other than Swing-Swing-Coalesce, especially when the ’Hammer’s’ close-range option is switching on Vengeful Hammers. VH is fun, and the hammer-on-hit trait helps too, but it does mean I basically get to discard everything but my autoattack when an enemy presses me on the hammer.

On the positive end: the guaranteed projectile finisher on the AA led to some interesting strategies. Frequently I’d find myself dropping roads on my enemies as much to AA through them for extra Vuln stacks, and I swiftly learned that the Mistwall skill was a surprisingly useful emergency band-aid due to being able to combo Lifesteal projectiles through it. The hammer seems like it’s going to be potentially quite fun to work with combo setters with. The weapon also picked up nicely when fighting multiple enemies – if I could get the positioning right, Coalescence’s wide linear AoE and the AA’s surprisingly chunky projectile managed to deal quite a dang bit of AoE damage, almost making up for the Rev’s somewhat laughable single-target damage. I felt like this was a potentially pretty useful fire support weapon – but ‘fire support’ isn’t something that works well in GW2, and all the delicious combo fields the Rev’s AA likes to work with are at the other end where the forward guys are, making it hard to both maximize Coalesce and also see what my team was up to. That, and…let’s face it. I was Bearbowing without the bear. Much shame.

Mace/Axe – Mace/Axe feels like it’s potentially one of the most brutal weapon sets in the game, and it’s also an amazing spectacle. Blasty explosions, glowing burning rifts in the ground, glowing burning rifts in midair, leaps, shadowsteps…there’s a lot going on with this set. It felt like Mace/Axe had all the fun interactions and useful tools that Hammer was lacking, and the set also worked surprisingly well with Jalis’ legend skills. I expect this to be the breakout hit when the Rev finally ships, unless Shiro’s swords are as insanely potent as Shiro himself was. But for some reason, and this is quite possibly on me rather than the Rev, I could not click with the set. Part of that is doubtlessly me never seeing it before in my life, but I did end up back on Hammer for our dungeon run. I will say, however, that the widened linear paths on M/A were quite nice. Piercing arrow/rifle traits/skills are generally no good because the projectile is so narrow you need the stars to align (tee hee hee…) to tag more than one threat…but the M/A set, and the Hammer as well to some extent, rewarded positioning and proper enemy herding without needing such an intense degree of such that it felt unobtainable and not worth the time.

I didn’t put enough time into Staff to leave proper feedback for it. It was a pretty much instantaneous turn-off, that’s about all I can really say. So incredibly depressed that you guys dropped rifle Thieves for this thing… Anyways. Moving on to legends.

Jalis – After a time experimenting in general PvE, Jalis was the only legend I used whatsoever in our dungeon run night’s finale. Jalis seems to be set up pretty well – it has an absolute gobsmackton of stability, with enough energy to drop roads pretty much on cooldown so long as you leave the rest of your util bar alone. As well, the animations for Jalis’ skills are amazeballs – I never got tired of pointing at enemies and saying “ROAD!”. The chain was interesting and a great visual tell, though I must mention that the actual Taunt portion of the skill seems to be nonfunctional. I never saw an enemy’s behavior change when I taunted them, and I had the Jalis trait giving me a 4s taunt so plenty of time to observe. Not once did an enemy stop attacking my allies and charge at me in a lather. Disappoint. Anyways. The road was excellent, and I swiftly learned that Vengeful Hammers was my weapon swap for when things decided to try and come eat my face, but the chain felt like it was overcosted to me. It costs as much to fire the chain as it does to perform the Rite of the great Dwarf – one of those is a mass AoE damage reduction, and one of them is a single-target 2s slow and nonfunctional taunt. I get that the chain can be traited and RotGD can’t, but still. I would advise maybe seeing how the chain feels at 35e? Something?

Ventari – For a legend so focused on peace, kindness, community and generosity, Ventari is selfish as kittenes. You cannot use Ventari as an off-legend – either Ventari is your primary legend and the thing you’re centering your build on, or he’s useless. You cannot switch to Ventari for a quick-fire situational skill – you have to switch, set up the Tablet which takes a year and a half, then position the tablet which takes another year and a half, and then you can use your stuff. It’s an interesting idea, and it does present very unique gameplay that will doubtlessly light some people’s fires, but I’m a Thief player with a side of Warrior. I have maybe one character of my ten regular cast who doesn’t have some sort of passive speed, and I pretty much never stop moving – even on Hammer I tended to jitter from side to side just because standing still equates to death in all too many cases. I played Ventari for perhaps a minute and a half before saying, out loud, “yeah, screw the everlovin’ blue-eyed hell out of this”, and switched back to Mallyx. And…proceeded to more or less camp Jalis for the rest of the night.

His traitline also blows. Hard. If you’re not using Ventari-the-legend? There are no grandmaster traits in Salvation worth bothering with. Selfless Amplification is bogus, Natural Abundance is nonfunctional without the Tablet, which leaves the astoundingly lackluster Momentary Pacification. AoE cleanse on dodge is about the only reason to acknowledge this traitline exists if you’re not hip-deep in Ventari and his teachings.

This was actually a pretty major concern shared across most of my guildmates I managed to talk to – the entirety of the Revenant’s trait selections felt scattered, weird, and lackluster. There were no Phalanx Strengths, no Prismatic Understandings, no Invigorating Precisions – nothing that made someone sit up and go “wow, that’s awesome! That gives me an idea…” There were some neat things here and there, but Dall spent twenty minutes looking at Rev traits prior to our dungeon run trying to figure out something vaguely resembling a build before eventually just giving up in disgust and assigning things at semi-random. For a class that has no weapon swap to play with, and also zero flexibility in its selections of utility skills, this seems an almost unforgivable lapse. Traits are the one and only place on the Rev where we get some actual character customization, some small chance to put our own stamp on the class, and at current? Rev traits are almost universally either boring, bad, or both.

So…we skipped Mallyx, but that’s okay. I didn’t really get much out of Mallyx. He didn’t seem actively detrimental like Ventari did, but whenever I swapped over to him I found I couldn’t remember what his skills did. I mostly just fired a util skill at semi-random when I wanted some Resistance. I’d have to work with it more, but as compared to Jalis, which I took an immediate and powerful liking to, and Ventari, which I took an immediate and even more powerful disliking to, Mallyx was just…there. Yeah.

Overall, in a nutshell:
-Rev damage is pitiful and literally everyone in my guild (who I could wrangle into Mumble or a party and thus actually communicate with >_>) noticed it straightaway.
-Mace/Axe is good. Flashy, fun, engaging, and potentially extremely dangerous if tweaked up.
-Hammer is okay. Potentially good, but currently somewhat boring to play for long periods of time.
-Staff got intensely mixed reviews. Some folks liked it, some hated it, a couple thought it was okay.
-Jalis-the-legend is great. Inspiring Reinforcement is possibly my favorite utility skill amongst the entire game.
-Mallyx-the-legend is forgettable and makes little impact. This is decidedly weird for a nigh-unkillable demonic demigod.
-Ventari-the-legend is bad and also intensely selfish, does not work even remotely well with any other legend.
-Rev traits are boring, bland, and unimpactful, and it super dragged down opinions of the class across everyone I spoke to. Psyckos, in fact, said the following: “Well, now that I’ve experienced the Rev, I’m going to put it back down for the rest of the weekend.” He honestly regretted spending as much time as he did on the Rev, not earning pay on his live account. Playing the same stuff he’s played for three years now and earning a few hours’ extra munny for it was a better use of his time than this first crack at a brand-new profession. That does not speak well for the profession’s ability to grab a player’s attention and make them want to run it.
-The Rev’s Mistward armor is unbelievably awesome. Everybody loves it. Everybody wants it. If it’s a gemstore item you may end up with a revolt on your hands. Please make equivalent medium and light armors at some point because the aesthetic and design of the Mistward armor, and the accompanying Mistbreaker hammer, are super pants-tighteningly fantabulous.
-Nash found The Hunter on her beta Rev. I believe MLRX found a precursor, too. They are sad. ArenaNet, you guys should be bros and let people who found precursors on their beta Revs send in screenshots or something to get those precursors live. These folks left off earning their usual rewards and playing their live accounts to help you guys get beta feedback on the Rev, it’s kinna dooky that they can’t keep something as awesome and as vanishingly rare as a precursor drop.

So that’s my beta feedback report for the Revenant Trial Bonanza weekend. Hope it helps at least a little bit, and thanks for the crack at the character.

Xiahou Mao.9701:

Bear in mind, a lot of your guild is going to be testing their Revenants too, in all likelihood, so even if you have access to guildchat it might wind up being emptier this weekend anyway.

Wait what?
You make it sound like it there’s no point to have guild chat because everyone is going to be on their revenants and not have access.
Which is true, that’s what we have right now.
But the OP was saying guild chat should be open for him/her to use, and if it were open for him/her to use it would be open for the rest of his/her guild as well and thus guild chat would not in fact be empty.

He’s right, sharing what we see could make for a lot of good word of mouth for the class (with the opposite also true to be fair)

I’m sorry Anet, but I don’t think I’ll be testing your Revenant this weekend.

The fun part about GW2 is being able to communicate with friends, and the lack of a guild panel means I cannot join guild chat. If I want to share my wonder at the awesome Revenant I’d have to jump back to my regular characters first. I don’t want that.

i could spam this thread with examples of fun builds i played before that had their use and are now unduplicatable. the optimal build is not always the fun one as i have said before. meta is the gaming lobotomy. you drool on yourself and play the meta and it’s all “optimal mathmatic effeciency”. or you break from what everyone else is doing and play something that you find enjoyable. that is no longer possible. I am CERTAIN that that aweful metabattle build numbing site will soon have all 495(a number i have heard repeatedly on forums but not one i have checked) builds listed. gg. only not really when before we had thousands of builds possible. this is an obvious attempt by the dev team to limit the number of builds that need to be balanced.

The responses are unhelpful mostly because they are wrong
1) banners got nerfed, there is no area increaser
2) If you still go banners you are forced into rifle, if you use shouts you are forced to use bows.

I used the zephyr skin on my bow, I like bows. Now I have to buy and use a rifle
I hate guns in MMO I don’t like using them

This is NOT increase in choice, this is not more versatility in builds. This is a decrease in options.

Why is this hard to understand and just put down as QQ, yeah kitten it I will QQ about it because I build the character the way I like it. Why is that a cause for debate even?

I’ve not heard a response that couldn’t be summarised as “I’m all right Jack, therefore you’re just whining”

the reason for those whom don’t understand " play your way" its the choices we make while building our toons. We are not moaning we are letting Anet know we are unsatisfied with their choices at the moment. We do this so maybe they understand why a lot of us are leaving the game and actually giving them the option to fix it. players whom have played for a long time really don’t want to give up on them, they just want them to realize that some changes are not wanted nor needed and costing them time , effort and money to fix and that causes loss of many players.

Not saying I agree with the OP however it seems to me responses are unnecessarily unhelpful / unfriendly.
The way I read it, the OP would like more choice, as in far more choice. Any infringement of that warrants expressing some frustration. Also a good time to advocate for more of what you want…
As I say I don’t have a position on the OP. I would however say that we are the customers & should be asking for what we want. The OP was classier about that than the responses.

Ok so in a recent update traits and skills got a major overhaul. While I like they style I am dismayed at the reduced choice.

Firstly I now only have 3 traits to choose from per slot where previously I could use lesser traits in the higher slots.

Secondly now I have to unlock all the traits skills before I can use any of them. Where as before I could use them as I unlocked them.

Thirdly now I can only unlock traits in a specific order where previously I was able to unlock the ones I needed before unlocking the others.

Fourthly now I am restricted to using only 3 trait lines where previously I could have traits active in a 5 lines if I chose to.

While I understand the need to make things easier to balance for PvP there are some of us who only PvE. These changes restrict the way we play compared to pre patch. I now have to change the way I play on several characters that I have played the same way since their creation.

Please, can’t you just do seperate balancing for PvE and PvP so the balancing need of one does not negatively impact on the other?

I don’t feel it’s disastrous, but it most definitely lacks the scope for creativity and subtlety that the previous system had. By a HUGE margin.

Under the old system, I make it that there were no less than 30258000 different variations on allocating points on a 6/6/2 spread alone for players to choose from. (Yes, that really does say “Over 30 million”. And, yes, that’s combinations, not permutations, for anyone who thinks that I may have forgotten such things.) And that’s only one of many ways I could have chosen to spread my points out.

One pattern among many; 30 million variations. I’m not going to put the effort to work out the actual answer, because whilst the maths is trivial it’s also tedious, and I’d rather be playing; I only worked out the first number because I’m a maths nerd at heart. But the message is clear, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the final total were well over half a billion.

And, sure, most of those specs were probably obvious rubbish. And lots of good ones were near-identical. But what it meant was that there was a HUGE specification space out there for inventive, creative players to explore for something that suited their play style. That has now gone.

What are we left with? 270 distinct builds (27 different permutations of major trait per Core Specialization; 10 possible combinations of 3 Core Specializations. That’s yer lot).

270 versus maybe half a billion. In any profession, excluding incomplete builds, there are now exactly 270 different ways to fully spec your traits. That’s it. Probability that your “clever” new build is actually simply a carbon copy of lots of others running around out there – 100%. Room for creativity? Pretty much none. We’re going to be running cookie-cutter builds now, whether we want to or not. And, while I don’t dislike the new system per se – that’s a real shame.

(I’m sure that ANet are relying on HoT putting a little bit of variety back in. Undoubtedly it could, to some degree – but not to anything remotely resembling the scope we had before.)

Edit: OK, I revisited this and plugged the numbers into a spreadsheet, and that first number is wrong – I factored in the wrong number of Master traits, for a start. At a recalculate, I make 6/6/2 to have 22 million distinct variations. And a full, 14 trait point spec seems to work out at 138.6 million distinct variations across all such patterns in total (138640290 is the exact number I get) – not quite the half-billion I guessed. But the scale of change remains of the same order of magnitude.

The old LA (before Scarlet) felt like home.
The new one has an impressive imperial style - jut the atmosphere is gone...

Maybe someone can come and destroy it again and bring back our pirate city. haha…

The more I think on it, the more I realize that the new LA is my least favorite city. It just has no character and feels too themepark. Doesn’t feel lived in.

I know it’s all rebuild and we’re supposed to love it but…..alas, I really miss the old LA. I loved the whole ship theme it had going on, it was really unique. Now it feels like it has lost its character. It’s not awful, but it’s definitely not my favorite city by a long shot anymore.

edit: I have to agree with the person above me, it doesn’t feel like a city anymore. It feels like a themepark.

I am seeing a lot of praise for the new Lion’s Arch, so I realize I may be representing a minority opinion when I say that I am strongly disappointed in what appears to me to be a very questionable (or outright misguided) design philosophy in making this new city.

A lot of what makes Guild Wars 2 so easy to get into is the world feels lived-in. Now, this is a Theme Park MMO, so of course it is not lived in, nor can it be really. But it’s important to provide that illusion so the player can, even for a moment, suspend their disbelief and imagine that Tyria is a world where lives happen, where people settle down and have jobs and shop for food. It makes the world feel like its worth fighting for, defending, exploring, and falling in love with.

The old Lion’s Arch had this. It looked old, creaky, patched together and well-settled. It felt a little dirty, a little sleazy. It put on airs as old cities with rich histories tend to do, even as they slowly decay with time. You could almost smell the rotting wood, the salt water, the miasma of human occupation. It felt like a real place, a city that grew slowly over time as necessity dictated. It wasn’t the easiest on the eyes but that was part of the charm.

The new LA is a big step away from all of that and all to its detriment. I cannot decide if it looks more like a college campus or a theme park for kiddies, and neither are positive comparisons. I’ve settled mostly on theme park. It’s clean, it’s colorful, its huge with lots of wide-open, poorly-used space. There is almost no ecumenical sense of use of real estate. It doesn’t feel like a place where people have to actually live. It looks, and feels, very fake.

The buildings shaped like sea creatures is a baffling design choice that absolutely stumps me. What are we, grade schoolers? The bank is a cutesy-wootsy octopus? The Traders is a seashell, the crafting station a starfish? The harbor is a lobster? What? Are you kidding me?

This isn’t a place where serious people go to do serious work, this is a place where 6 year olds get cotton candy from a carny dressed like a pirate. This is a place where you go to get a selfie with Captain Hook. This is a place where tinny sea shanties are played over speakers hidden in fake plastic trees. There’s almost no space for people to live in, there’s no flow to how the city is designed. I say city, but of course, it’s a video game hub zone. I can no longer suspend my disbelief, I’m no longer in this world but instead I am sitting at my computer staring at a pastel-colored hub zone designed, apparently, by Disney World architects.

LA as it currently stands is what happens when the people in charge of designing the world and environments of the game lose focus on what made their locations so iconic in the first place. The new lion’s arch is a travesty. I’ve been there once, had a look around, and I feel absolutely no desire at all to ever go back. I thought Disney World was fake, kitschy and annoying when I was eight. I have even less patience for that candy-coated disingenuous tourist-trap theme-parky manufactured-fun nonsense now than I did then.

The new Lion’s Arch is instantly forgettable. I could say I miss the old one, but what I really miss, in my heart of hearts, was the dedication the art team had for crafting living, breathing worlds. That is what I miss the most, because none of it is to be found here.

Hello there,
I noticed that we don’t have the Specific Dungeon Npcs anymore and instead we have just one that sells everything. It is just one Npc for 8 different currencies, while there are 5 or more different Npcs for the Black Lion Weapons, that all use the same currency.

There is so much space in Lion’s Arch, why the Dungeon Npcs don’t get to have their own place?! They should have their own building with their desks and they can even have fashion model dolls demonstrating the different armor skins you can get from them.
They can be turned into a cool little thing and placed more conveniently.