As much as I would LOVE a true shapeshifter, it’ll probably never happen because it goes against the lore of GW2.
In Lore only Norn are supposed to shapeshift, but that might get retconned due to heart events etc
Players of any race shapeshift in the game. Several quests do it. There are also potions.
Right now, I don’t see the new legend being anywhere close to meta.
Meta this meta that…
I remember back before raids when every profession was at least capable if not equal, and people could just play the prof if they enjoyed it.
Even if they could die, while the other utility skills have a CD, the elite doesn’t, it’s just an upkeep, so you might just be able to resummon it instantly, kinda like when the jalis hammers get despawned due to bad terrain
10 energy to summon, 9 energy upkeep.
IMO all of the utilities should have a maintain cost like the elite, rather than CDs.
Not a fan of the F skills having CDs either.
As it is, this spekittenerally stomps all over the main reason I prefer this prof. So I would never play it. Except to use the bow.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could use the elite spec weapon without having that spec active?
It just seems like Revenant fills a role that is already filled.
I’m disappointed with rev for my own reasons but this seems completely kitten about to me.
Professions shouldn’t be about unique roles. That’s bad design.
Professions have unique themes and mechanics.
Mechanically revenant is supposed to be about reliance on energy instead of cooldowns but sadly they failed to follow through with that in both elite specs.
For my tastes, the original four legends are pretty decent. They require a very different approach to most of GW2’s other profs, but are functional, versatile and offer good variety (except UW of course!).
What has me a little bit excited is the change to attunement cooldowns.
Your current attunement doesn’t go on CD when you change attunement. Instead all attunements go on a 3 second CD when you change.
Elementalist was always my favourite profession thematically but I find weapon / attunement CD annoying. I love how engineers can either have no swapping or swap freely with kits, but much less into them thematically.
So this has me seriously considering returning.
Impressively PoF has managed to deliver a revenant spec I like even less than Herald.
Thematically it’s great. The bow stuff looks ok. What’s the problem then?
One.
That’s how many abilities Renegade get which use energy and doesn’t have a cooldown.
So disappointing. This was supposed to be – and sold to us as – the profession you’ll love if you prefer energy to cooldowns. Ironically the good news for me in PoF is in the elementalist elite spec with its drastically reduced attunement cooldowns.
Please, ANet, if you’re serious about this profession, stop doing this.
Will i actually enjoy the endgame as a rev?
You’d know best. The prof isn’t fundamentally different at end-game. If you enjoyed it up to this point then you’ll probably continue enjoying it.
Glint and it’s super handy perma speed boost is nigh obligatory. But unless you play both of your equipped legends (I don’t cos I despise GW2’s mad weapon / legend swapping) that won’t impact on how you play. Play one legend. Switch to Glint between fights for speed.
I’ve been a thief main for sometime and wanted to switch it up, but seems people have nothing but bad things to say about the class.
If you enjoy thief then you’ve a good chance of enjoying revenant.
Revenant cops so much flak because ANet half- kitten d it. Like they did thieves.
Some people like the freedom and flexibility of mana / energy / initiative style combat. Some people prefer the rigidity of cooldown driven rotations. With both thieves (because utilities have CDs) and revenants (because weapon abilities and many utilities have CDs, and also legend and weapon swap) they split the difference and arrived at an unhappy compromise which pleases neither crowd.
So all the people who were sold on the idea of revenant being a new freeform addition were very disappointed. And GW2’s existing playerbase who are accustomed to it’s cooldown driven rotations and not needing to worry about energy, were all like, “WTF do I need to worry about this energy nonsense?”
I think the auto attack is fine.
Same.
In what way is it not viable?
For starters, new revenant characters can’t regenerate energy underwater.
At all.
Regenerating energy requires a legend to be equipped. The legend new players start with is Jalis and Jalis can’t be equipped underwater.
You can’t start spending hero points to acquire a new legend until level 11. There’s a more than good chance of you’re hitting UW content before then.
Plus if you don’t research and discover that most legends don’t work UW there’s a good chance that a new revenant player wouldn’t spend their early points getting Shiro or Mallyx. In fact what you’d expect a lot of players to do is spend those points unlocking Jalis’s abilities.
…if I recall correctly, to my knowledge, have access to their kits/elements/shatters etc.
It varies widely between professions.
Revenant is probably the worst with 60% of our utilities unavailable. For a very long time guardians had no elites they could use UW except for racials. I just read that necros still lose their elite pet every time they go UW.
Everyone gets screwed a little bit.
Engineers seem to get screwed the least though and many of their abilities are cleverly and simply transformed to function perfectly UW. Several kits even work almost identically UW as they do on the ground.
Why the same isn’t done for other professions is a mystery.
Ventari isn’t available because the tablet really can’t work underwater.
That’s silly.
It would only require one small change to one of Ventari’s abilities – Ventari’s Will.
Instead of moving the tablet to the selected location, which isn’t possible underwater, have it flip between moving to your selected enemy target or yourself.
It would be that easy.
It’s the internal cooldown on the passive proc of the spirit. For example the sun spirit can apply 2 stacks of burning every 8 seconds that you have the buff on you.
I read it differently.
The sun spirit grants its effect which lasts 6 seconds.
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Sun_Spirit_
While under that effect every attack you make has a 75% chance to inflict 2 stacks of burning for 3 seconds.
The effect recharge of 8 seconds prevents you from constantly refreshing it, so you have 6 seconds of it active then 2+ seconds without.
It is not fun to be gated from skills…
Preach!
I couldn’t agree more. It’s why while thematically I like lots of professions I can’t stand playing most of them.
But if soulbeast is shapeshifting (please!) I could probably tolerate GW2’s infernal CDs on their ‘weapon’ abilities, provided there’s not some ridiculous jumping back and forth between regular weapons and shapeshifting to build up such resources.
I don’t find this a hard choice at all. Because it’s no choice at all.
Sword and dagger are just too weird and annoying. I’m guessing they’re meant for pvp with all their mad dancing and leaping around.
That only leaves greatsword. Which thankfully doesn’t suck.
I want to love spirits so much. They are easily the most druid-like abilities we have.
Glyphs? Bugger them!
I really don’t mind spirit being immobile but the 20 second cooldown makes them useless most of the time. I’d just love to be able to summon them more often. I couldn’t care less about the completely useless (to a ranged character) active abilities.
So I want to play my druid using these all the time cos they look so cool. But instead I equip our array of entirely defensive signets and use a DPS heavy pet. And combat is 1, 2, F2….. wait a while, another 2 / F2, etc. etc. etkittenil I get so bored that I go play another prof.
Well you don’t need to finish that episode to progress further….
Oh, right. I forgot these are discrete episodes and you can switch between them. There is that at least.
Onto the next ep with that character. Or perhaps not? If there’s more content like this that would be a waste of time.
I only got past Adrienne because my necromancer is a minion master and I could pay her back for her minion spam with my own minion spam. That and having minions makes my necro tougher to kill so… Not as much latency plus lots of luck did the rest.
If I can ever be bothered to try it again this is probably my only option. With Adrienne’s big attack being unavoidable I need her tanked. Maybe bow ranger. Don’t know if bow’s stealth would be effective at shaking off the adds, with the companions doing so little damage, but it might.
…Guards still have Weapons…
Don’t envy those. Their cooldowns make them pretty useless. They’re as cool looking but rarely seen, if not more so, than spirits.
I’m on the fence when it comes to spirits unbound.
They were definitely more useful that way. With mobile content or just open world PvE you could get better uptime from them. But there was still some downtime and thematically I kind of like them immobile.
If you died repeatedly before the end you need to learn the game better.
kitten.
I’ve had no problem playing any other part of the game. Without any help at all.
This particular piece of content is both poorly conceived and broken.
Adrienne – like nearly every raid boss ever – is a certifiable idiot. Even after she sees that you can break her shield, she just twirls around the room so you can do it again. And again.
Had she even a modicum of intelligence she would put her shield up and stand in a corner.
But worse than just boring and stupid, this content is ridiculously overpowered.
Don’t run out into the middle of groups., pick them off from the edges. Use the landscape. Pull a few at a time.
Saying this you reveal that you’ve never played this content.
It’s a small enclosed room (i.e. there is no landscape) and there’s an endless swarm of mobs who go for you. Plus Adrienne whose mega attack hits you before you have any chance to dodge. And that’s the truth. Australians have a 250+ ms latency handicap and while I can cope with that in every other part of the game, her attacks seem to have a shorter delay.
Then once you’re dead, that’s it. The companions rez you but the moment you’re back up, all of those mobs plus Adrienne are on you again. I die instantly – and not just go down but fully die – without having any opportunity to move, dodge or activate any abilities.
Over and over and over and over.
In all my several decades of playing MMOs I’ve never seen a piece of content this bad. ANet should be severely embarassed to have released it.
I’m not wasting any more of my time on it and if that means I can’t progress any further in GW2, so be it.
I’ve always regarded this trait as largely pointless. As I do most secondary effects on long cooldowns. Unless your pet’s F2 attack has a cooldown of 20 seconds or longer AND you primarily or always want that heal going off, this trait is useless.
Remove the internal cooldown and scale the heal to the pet’s F2 cooldown.
The present version heals for 2580 + 0.8 x healing power on a 20 sec CD.
Change that to (129 +0.04 x healing power) x [pet F2 cooldown].
That wouldn’t make it overpowered but at least it might be moderately useful.
We have read it. Here are the relevant quotes:
" That is why Guild Wars 2 does not have a dedicated healing class."
Wow. Selectively taking a single sentence and misinterpreting it out of context. We’ve never seen that before…
Here’s a few more choice quotes.
" Don’t belittle the SUPPORT role by calling it heal. Healing is the least dynamic kind of support there is."
“Sure, there are some healing spells in Guild Wars 2, but they make up a small portion of the support lines that are spread throughout the professions.”
etc. etc.
Food for thought…
Jon P quote from this site published on 6/10/2011
http://tap-repeatedly.com/2011/06/exclusive-interview-arenanets-jon-peters-and-jonathan-sharp/
“Jon P: When we actually made the decision to not have healers, it wasn’t my job to talk to others about it directly, so I’m unsure how heavily other people were consulted. I know some were skeptical and were worried. A lot of people like to play healers and liked to play monks in Guild Wars 1. That being said, it’s not a secret around the office that I do not like to play healers, so I wasn’t too sad to see them go!”
http://dulfy.net/2015/09/25/gw2-druid-ranger-elite-specialization-livestream-reveal/
“Druid
Bringing heavy healing to GW2, unlike anything you have seen before. Strong support, very powerful in upcoming raids and WvW. Can sustain a zerg train of 20-30 players in WvW.
Upcoming content will have stuff that you can’t just dodge to survive.
Berserk meta is going away.
Uses staff, support through positioning."
Indeed. These things are widely and correctly understood. Anyone trying to claim otherwise is just bizarre.
I’ve also encountered this one.
New revenant characters have no energy regeneration in underwater combat.
Seriously.
You only get energy regeneration if you equip a legend. The legend you begin with can’t be equipped underwater.
Fix = new revenant characters should start with either of the two underwater capable legends and have that legend equipped by default for underwater combat.
However, the active skills have the same cool down than the spirit so I struggle to understand what you would gain by removing the cool down.
Being in the Nature Magic spec I’d think that most players equipping this trait are much more interested in their buffs. Accordingly what they’d probably appreciate is being able to instantly resummon them – with the balance being they lose their on death or activate ability.
My point was that having invested heavily in a buff heavy specialization, players equipping this trait are probably much more interested in the buff effect of spirits than their activated ability. But being on a 20 sec cooldown means they’re not available enough to be useful most of the time.
Open world content is typically over a lot quicker than that. Open world end game content is likely to see spirits die a lot…. and spend much of their time unavailable on cooldown. Lots of both open world and instanced content also has a lot of moving around. With spirits no longer able to follow you and being on a 20 second cooldown…. well you get it.
So the trait would trade that activated ability for losing the 20 second cooldown.
Still not sure why we can’t have 2 traits and expand on Spirits.
I wholeheartedly agree. Across the board I think rangers and all classes could benefit from more trait variety. But I wouldn’t hold my breath for that. The limited trait options mean that developers can determine a fixed number of optimal builds for each profession and try to balance them against each other. The more traits there are, the harder that gets.
But yes I’d like this. GW seemed to offer a lot more variety in this department.
This trait seems contradictory to me.
Spirits – like many abilities – seem to serve a dual purpose. They provide aoe buffs and can be killed to do an instant attack. But generally you’re only interested in one or the other.
Being in the Nature Magic spec I’d think that most players equipping this trait are much more interested in their buffs. Accordingly what they’d probably appreciate is being able to instantly resummon them – with the balance being they lose their on death or activate ability.
As it is I don’t use them and almost never see anyone else using them in solo content. A 20 sec cooldown means you can’t use them every fight and they’re just not worth the effort.
I think it’s a huge shame. They look awesome and apart from the druid elite spec are the only aspect of nature magic that rangers have. Take the cooldown away and I’d use them all the time.
I got up to this one this morning and now understand why GW2’s popularity circled the drain.
Wow. Just wow.
For starters – only a very teensy, tiny minority of players (eg. raiders) enjoy this style of content. Supposedly kick kitten evil champions who are strong but cannot deviate from a stupid pattern. And you locked solo story content behind this. Not clever, ANet. Not clever.
Secondly, it doesn’t need tuning so much as a swift kick to the nads. Even just the first white mantle ambush is nuts. Then Adrienne is absurd. Your companions do very little to help and there’s so many adds.
Die, wait a minute or so while a companion rezzes me, instantly – yes instantly – die again. Repeat. Repeat. Exit mission to repair armour (which is plenty good btw). And again.
Part of my problem is likely location. Australian latency means I have a good 200-250 ms handicap when it comes to getting out of attack telegraphs. Adrienne in particular is impossible to avoid. I see her attack, attempt to dodge but am hit by the attack anyway.
I’m disinclined to attempt it again. Even if I get persevere and get past it, games are meant to be enjoyable. This is not enjoyable and I have to imagine that there’s more content like this beyond it.
This game’s initial and substantial success was built on being the very opposite of this.
I only have dragon equipped for swiftness. Rarely use it in combat except in open world events where others can benefit from the buffs. Never use Nature etc. I play rev for its lack of or at least relatively short CDs.
Hammer dwarf is good for zerker gear.
Mace demon is nice. Twilight armor dungeon condition gear is relatively quick to get and decent.
This one sort of makes sense to me. Legend swap is akin to weapon / attunement.
What alacrity should do is boost energy regen for revs and iniative regen for thieves.
But I reckon the game would be better off doing away with weapon / attunement / legend CDs entirely. It’s just annoying.
@ the no-healer deniers…
ANet said no healers. Explicitly. Also no tanks. This is fact.
They set out to ‘redefine’ the holy trinity into their trinity of damage / support / control. But they didn’t arrive there. They landed in Melee-Beserkerville.
Druid is a support class, not a healer.
What a bizarre claim. Druid is absolutely a healer. Nearly every single druid ability is a heal.
Their new weapon heals. It has a single CC ability on a long cooldown. And a single support ability on a long cooldown…. which also heals.
Their special form heals, heals, heals and more heals. With a single CC ability.
They have glyphs. More heals, 1 CC and a buff.
They have peerless burst healing – courtesy of celestial avatar – and are the only profession with serious underwater healing. Again courtesy of avatar. Their healing power is so awesome that they’re nerfed in pvp with a longer CD on the avatar.
Yes the game design allows you to equip the druid spec, not use the druid weapon or utilities and thereby not play as a healer. But the spec is 95% healing so druids is a healing (not support) class.
Only thief elite I ever use is the summon, for rare and special occasions.
The appeal of thieves is weapon abilities not having cooldowns. The fact that utilities and elites do makes signets super appealing. It’s just a shame thieves don’t have an elite signet.
In all honesty anet should not even use the term “balance” because they dont actually focus on it, balance is about being able to counter other classes and having strengths and weaknesses unique to each class. What anet does is simply try to pick winners and losers every few months for the sake of keeping the meta fresh or something, unfortunately they fail badly because they simply never fix what they break.
Yes. Though it’s fairly standard practice among MMO developers.
Here are the advantages from their perspective:
1) It forces players to find new gear. That’s more time they need to play to get themselves back to optimal.
2) It encourages many players to change classes. That could mean more time levelling, acquiring skill points and progressing through story content. Again that’s more time they need to play.
3) It’s cheap and nasty ‘change’. Substantially changing professions by eg. adding new weapons or utilities would be costly. But they tweak a few abilities and traits here and there and suddenly you have to play your profession differently. As you put it, that’s keeping it fresh.
I just can’t understand how Elementalist is the top DPS class…
Attune to fire.
Equip a staff.
I’m not even joking. Mainly courtesy of lava font, fire staff dishes out such awesome area damage that it beats the pants of any single target damage alternatives.
Lava font’s damage is likely so high because in PvP players will typically be smart enough to move off it quickly. But in PvE mobs are incredibly stupid.
Now for speculation, I’m confident we’ll be seeing a “charging over time” mechanic given the solar nature, that would potentially overcharge our abilities but I’d like to propose that it could be used more like necro’s death shroud where it grants new weapon skills (=kits) upon activation.
Personally I think that would be a terrible shame.
One of the most appealing things about the profession is that it doesn’t have any cooldowns or other limitations on weapon / kit swapping.
You can use one weapon set if you prefer. Or equip as many kits as you like and either hop around madly using all their long cooldown stuff or just have them there as an option. For the sake of flexibility.
IMO this freedom is the single best thing about the profession. Adding an elite spec which craps on the best thing about the profession would be horrible.
Not that ANet haven’t done exactly that before though.
However I can’t seem to get past level 10 with him…
Have you tried logging in?
1.- Which is the best kit to level him up? I find I take a long time to kill anythig with any weapon…
They’re all viable but the bomb kit has a bit more bite because of its very short range and small delay on damage (which you can trait to be shorter eventually).
Do you know about lightfoot passage? Multiple pets there.
…I still wish for shape shifter
Seconded.
Druid should have more than just one aspect and thus variety in glyphs.
Now that’s an interesting idea.
They never said there’d be no healers. They said there’d be no need to wait for healers – there wouldn’t be one or two professions you have to wait for to get a healer, you can take a party with any set of professions and somebody will be able to go healer if they have the gear.
You don’t seriously believe that do you?
Leading up to GW2’s launch ArenaNet extensively, repeatedly and at length detailed how GW2 would have no holy trinity. Especially not healers. Of any kind. Everyone would have self-heals with big’ish cooldowns. Damage avoidance (i.e. getting out of red circles) and prevention would be key.
ArenaNet themselves seem to have taken this page down but it survives in the archive.
The various problems with condition damage in combination with the deliberate weakness of healing and other forms of support resulted in the least diverse PvE imaginable. Nearly everyone running with the same stats (berserker) and melee.
It was a mistake. Which is ok. To err is human. Why anyone feels a need to attempt to rewrite this history escapes me. GW2 was big news at launch and its lack of holy trinity is one of the things it was best known for.
Rapid Flow: This now gives swiftness when it triggers. This is a pretty significant change that I’m surprised that no one has mentioned on the forums.
Probably because no-one cares. They stuck this in the least attractive specialization.
One of the main selling points of the revenant profession is it being energy rather than cooldown driven. You know, you playing your character rather than your character playing you – courtesy of predefined optimal rotations.
Invocation favours swapping legends…. which is on a cooldown.
Even if you don’t mind manically swapping legends every 10 seconds, different legends tend to favour different stats so legend swapping might give you 50 free energy but you’re then stuck with a legend less suited to your stats.
Invocation has a few potentially useful GM traits – like boosting outgoing healing or crit chance with fury – but otherwise is very easy to pass on. Even with this change.
Rev now has access to a permanent runspeed boost outside of Glint! Yes, this trait triggers while out of combat.
Rev has always had this.
Inspiring reinforcement creates a lightning field. Blast finisher (which rev has on several weapons) on a lightning field gives 10s of aoe swiftness.
More tedious than glint but still perma-able.
Agree with OP. It’s very sad to see they never bothered to finish uw combat for revenant. It shouldn’t be that hard to tweak most skills to function uw.
But I think it’s a vicious cycle scenario. For this and other reasons, revenants aren’t terribly popular so they see less value in finishing them.
You men the role that they sword up and down would never be in the game and is useful only in raids?
They sure did. Then they claimed they never did. And now healing is there.
Personally I think their original vision was a mistake and that’s one of the reasons the game’s popularity has waned. Everything being a melee DPS zerg fest is really boring.
Plenty of people, eg. me, actually like playing roles other than DPS. GW2 1.0 offered a nice story and world to play through but not much reason to stick around once you’d finished that.
If you view it as an elite spec though its by far the worst designed one.
I don’t love the druid. The staff doesn’t impress and the whole astral force / celestial avatar thing doesn’t thrill me either. It’s just the same rotation of abilities for burst healing and AF build up. In other MMOs healing is much more strategic.
But IMO herald was by far the worst designed elite. The main selling point of the new revenant class was their abilities being fuelled by energy instead of limited by cooldowns.
They hyped everyone up about that and their elite spec – showing us the cool dragon stuff – then it emerged that the (non-buff) herald abilities would be limited by cooldowns instead of fuelled by energy.
Seriously.
She didnt literally use a shield, but she did “Shield” the other races during the last Dragon Uprising so I guess that’s a way to look at it.
Yeah, plus her wing is conveniently shield shaped.
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Glint%27s_Bastion
I personally would rather not see Eir as a legend.
With the newly introduced revenant class, their not having any female or norn legends and her heroic death, she does stand out as a good choice.
The problem is new revenants. For them she isn’t dead yet. They probably could weave some kind of explanation like the mists being timeless, but it is an unnecessary complication given how many dead potential legends there are.
The leaker said they are like engi kits. And judging by the picture, we get an initiative bar, so there’s some gating. Which makes sense, they can’t just give guardian 5 weapons with no drawback.
Tomes like engi kits? Yes please.
And you mean an initiative bar like thieves have, and guardians originally had? Energy instead of CDs? Wow!
I can’t find this leaker’s comments though, so don’t want to get too excited.
I have never been a fan continiously kitt swapping on engi. So in that sense i dont think i would like it on guardian also.
I also loathe the manic swapping but it isn’t necessary on an engineer. Just an option. Same as for most other professions.
Ignore the forum cries of “you must be swapping attunement / legend / kit / pet constantly or you’re a lazy kitten who’s not pulling their weight”. Every profession except revs have traits which promote not swapping.
I’d hope for the same with these tomes.
I remember seeing these pre launch and imagining how cool they’d be. But limited time summons with long CDs are just annoying.
The best you can presently do is try to rotate between sword and hammer, except that hammer’s knockback is generally a royal pain in the lion.
What they should do is allow spirit weapons to be slotted as an elite and in that slot be perma. Do that and players would use them.
There’s too many problems with base revenant for me to care much about the new legend.
Shapeshifting would interest me. Only that.
Perma too. I don’t want to be manically jumping back and forth between weapon skills and a shapeshift. Nor manically jumping into and out of multiple forms.
I’d just like to be able to be a bear. Or a bird. Or a wolf.
And bite stuff.
Hadn’t heard about them getting alacrity until seeing this thread.
I don’t love the look of it.
Executing the same ability over and over and over and over and over to keep a buff up? Yeah, that’s not going to make me want to throw myself out a window.
no biggy, ESO’s Morrowind is just around the corner and the Warden sounds like the class I was hoping the Rev would be.
Yeah, generally speaking ESOs gameplay is much more to my liking. A resource pool (or two) and I can execute abilities as it makes sense to, rather than cooldown driven combat which devolves into predetermined rotations.
I had very high hopes for the Revenant to give me that in GW2. But with cooldowns on weapon skills and quite a lot of their utility skills too, that was a big disappointment. The one thing that was lacking in ESO was nature themed magic and Warden looks set to fix that.
unfortunately it is locked out and they are unable to be used with revenant since it’s utility bar is locked to stances. It’s sorta dumb.
I wouldn’t say it’s dumb.
Yes they are the only profession not to have access to them, but racial skills are locked out of PvP for everyone (for balance reasons) and it’s not like many people use them in PvE either.
What I would hope is that eventually Revenants have a legend for each of the major races. Presently the entire Vetinari legend is essentially Sylvari racial skills.