Guild Wars 2

Really need to decide if they want it to be a burst weapon or a condition weapon and then update abilities accordingly.

I See No Tomorrow.7302:

I mean yeah but as I noted warhorn will give an additional 8 skills because of elementalist element attunement swapping (which effectively makes warhorn give more skills to ele than greatsword to necro, shield to mesmer, and longbow to guardian)

The number of skills is irrelevant. I don’t care if the new Tempest thing was a single attunement ever and you only ever got 3 skills out of it or whatever.

The issue is that we already have amazing Offhand weapon choices that are great and each offer their own competitive advantages. What we DO lack is competitive alternatives for the main hand weapons which is why most people these days are all Dagger/X now after they killed Scepter burst builds with FA/BtTH both being Grandmaster.

In the current scenario there’s only two possible outcomes:

1. The Warhorn is brokenly OP to the point it outshines our already amazing options and it becomes mandatory as the offhand option thus rendering the other good options pointless.

2. The Warhorn is some kinda off-the-wall idea that ultimately is less useful than the already amazing options.

Understand that ultimately none of this is really a problem. Again we already have amazing options in everything but our main hand weapons. It’s like complaining we’re too rich and have to manage all this money…poor us. It’s simply disappointing because there’s very real gaps and very real areas for improvement that could be made and instead they choose to give us more of something we already have.

I think my signature video is more relevant to how most of us feel about the Warhorn.

I See No Tomorrow.7302:

Why would warhorn be bad? I suppose everyone has an opinion but rejecting Tempest outright because of the weapon choice is a bit premature imo

I mean, Chronomancer also got an offhand and the shield skills seem pretty good. Who knows how good the EIGHT warhorn skills will be in addition to the inevitable utility skills?

Besides, Anet are adding more elite specs in the future so Ele will probably get a sword at some point.

Weapon matters a lot more when you can’t swap to another set like the rest of the classes.

ionix.9054:

Any weapon could be amazing. How can you people say sword would be better then warhorn? ANET can literally make up anything they want for the weapon.

I was holding out before I bought Zap. Now I know I am going to buy Spark. Aesthetics is all we have to work with at this point.

Because we already have two amazing offhands that fill any role we need or want. Pretty much the first class to get something we don’t need while our lack of MH options goes unaddressed. This gives us more OH options than we have MH options. Like…what?

They had one job when it came to the Elementalist and pretty much bungled it.

MattyP.6954:

How about you guys actually, you know, play the content before you declare it DoA? Seriously, Ele will probably get sword in a future specialization—so just wait to see what Warhorn actually does before getting all kitteny about it.

Because we already know what we have?

Dagger is an excellent offensive weapon. AOE Burn, huge fire burst, mobility, knock up, forst aura, aoe heal/cleanse, knockdown, big dmg/bleed…it’s pretty great and offers a ton of self combo potential.

Focus is a crazy awesome defensive weapon. Burn field, fire aura, targeted chill, dmg/daze, projectile destruction, knockdown, condi cleanse and projectile reflect, straight up immunity all ranged.

When you get down to the brass tacks of it there’s no need for another option there. When you start considering the other possibilities the existing OH weapons already cover all those bases or do so in a better way.

The bigger issue Elementalists face is lack of MH weapon options to go with those already amazing offhands. Scepter has always been in a weird space being half a condition weapon and half a burst power damage weapon the second half of which was largely broken after the Fresh Air/Bolt to the Heart changes. This leaves Dagger as the go to MH item as the only other choice after 1H. There was lots of room to fill many gaps with a MH weapon that we currently lack (dedicated Condi weapon, dedicated burst weapon, mobility weapon, etc).

You’re right. We’ll see more on Thursday…but looking at what we already have…kinda hard to imagine anything that’s better than what we already got.

Kolisch.4691:

It just looks ugly. If it’s a sword off hand even with the same skills, the complaints will drop by half. I mean, who wants to be seen running around blowing a snail shell.

Unleash the power of the Swiffer Duster!

http://assets.inhabitat.com/files/swiffer2.jpg

Drayos.8759:

well staying in longer… as far as i could see… we got pulse damage and things if we delayed how quickly we run through each specc, im assuming this is to try push this whole Jack of trades Hit everything playstyle we currently have and to be more capable of excelling in one area… i mean afterall i’d like to see more Damaging builds go up, D/D is great for sustain and things but we have nothing inthe Meta for just Pure explosive damage, so hopefully this will draw away from Support and bring more Power/AoE and Powerhouse Nuking.

The general problem with this line of thinking is that, ultimately, it’s the class design that doesn’t allow us to camp a single attunement. If I need a CC/Protection/Condi Cleanse/etc I have to swap out of Fire. Just how it is. I don’t swap because I want to, but simply because that’s what the class demands and how it works. So the idea of a mechanic, “Singularity”, rewards camping an attunement is novel but fundamentally impractical to the base design of the Elementalist class as a whole. Sure it’ll pulse Might or pulse Burn or whatever, but in the end in order to counter game mechanics as a class I’m still forced to swap because weapon skills are balanced around swapping attunements rather than each attunement being self sufficient enough to sit and camp it.

RIP.

/Dagger (lots of combos) and /Focus (lots of survivability) already pretty kitten amazing as far as off hands go. The core specializations are also in a pretty amazing spot as well with everything (except maybe Earth) all being super useful and great to the point there’s times where it’s hard to choose between them. I try to think about what they could possibly add that the Elementalist doesn’t have and the only answer is more base HP/Armor cause it has almost everything else that isn’t class specific.

I’m putting my money on this being one of the first specializations where the base class is widely more preferable than the specialization. Traits and Utilities will say it all.

Okay lets be a little realistic here.

Engineers get access up to ability weapon bars (Weapon, Tool Bar, Med Kit, 3 Kits, and Elite Kit). Even if you consider you’re removing utilities to get those additional bars, the fact remains there’s a ridiculous amount of access to abilities going on.

Elementalists get access to four weapon bars via attunements. In addition they also get up to 4 Conjured Weapons that are limited weapon swaps as well, but regardless always have the four different attunement bars.

Revenants got one weapon bar and was the only class in the game that couldn’t change it’s main weapon skills in combat. It can change it’s utilities, and is the only class that can do that, but it’s also the only class that is tied to a set of utilities and really unable to change them out to mix-match different utilities (at this time) meaning that’s kinda it’s own cost as well. Imagine if you had to choose Conjures and get 4 Conjures or Arcane and get all Arcane. This left the Revenant feeling pretty weak and in certain setups without any ranged options what so ever. The weapon fixes all of that and gives them access to a “normal” amount of weapon bars that other classes have.

Well to be honest if we’re doing comparisons you can easily stack infinite swiftness with Inspiring Reinforcement (Air field) then smashing 2 blast finishers on it with Hammer with Drop the Hammer and Phase Smash. If you sit there and do this over and over, you can technically build infinite swiftness.

The problem is neither of these is very functional or mobile. You have to complete stop due to long animation timers (even Phase Smashing in place takes super long for some reason).

There’s also no passive +25% runspeed at all, either, which is pretty miserable. Maybe Glint will have it (like Chronomancer has it for Mesmer) but that feels bit off too since Shiro is supposed to be about mobility.

I want to say first I love all the changes, they are pretty great.

As a WvW player however I’m still largely concerned about the over all lack of Stun Breaks however. The biggest problem I found using Ventari was not the amount of support it provided but the fact that it had no answer when the enemy front line crashed through ours into the back line. Without a stun break you are pretty much dead meat no matter what your setup is. Even the stacking duration Stability on the Jalis Utility (the infamous “road”) is very limited duration and amount.

Really see a Shiro/Malyx, Jalis and Invocation style setup kinda being mandatory for WvW to really make it work which is unfortunate because as mentioned Ventari is probably the closest to full support this game has come to yet.

Blade.3456:

THAT SAID! (… after further thought)
Given the map now heavily favors defending, you may find your servers “off-peak” have a better chance holding keeps, etc. Just ensure you leave your keeps armed to the teeth.
SO I could be wrong with my opening comment, this new map design might in fact help address your problem We will have to wait and see!

Or it means that during off hours for your server when the Oceanics then Euros roll in to NA prime time the NA defenders can easily hold off forces because the “off hours” people took everything for you.

Double edged sword.

It’s all about a mix. Like I went:

Berserker Armor + Hoelbrak Runes
Berserker Hammer + Bloodlust/Fire
Soldier Necklace, Cavalier Earrings, and Assassins Rings.

In total that gave me 2100 Power, 2550 Armor, 40% crit, 204% crit dmg and 17.5k HP which is more than enough to survive anything while still having respectable damage. With Ascended gear that’ll be a bit better (especially Armor) and be slightly more defensive/offensive.

With -60% condi duration Malyx was actually pretty good regardless of not being Condition focused from a defensive perspective (resistance is very strong when not being stripped).

I’d almost argue baseline because it’s pretty much needed to make Malyx builds function.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/revenant/WvW-Revenant-Feedback/first#post5275033

This was my feedback from time spent playing in the zerg/group in T1.

At this point my Hammer 2 is critting anywhere from 3k (close) to 5k (end) which it hits a lot incoming groups. Seems to okay. The Malyx/Jalis combo works well once you figure it out.

Hunh…never noticed that even on my own Engie cause despite being virtually all Zerker he’s still over 17k HP. I stand corrected.

Guess I shouldn’t be so surprised though given all the kitten backwards design decisions between classes.

All testing I’ve done is it’s a straight up -50% direct damage taken. Haven’t tested it with conditions.

The activation time and energy cost combined however simply make it unwieldy in normal play. Either needs energy cost reduced or become instant cast.

messiah.1908:

1. with 2 utilities legend you have 5 weapon slot so 10 utilities in total . no other profession got 10 utilities . so you end up the same but i say bring up one more legend to choose from
2. if you want condition with mace /axe you take healing legend and condition legend so you build yourself around condition. same with hammer you take jalis
3. you right the legend are weak atm and not benefit the play and game style of the revenant

1. The 10 utility slots, which are static and you’re unable to choose what goes into them at this time, isn’t enough to justify the loss of a weapon slot. Even an Engineer with 2 kits, the 5 tool slots, and their main weapon has at least four the same as the Elementalist. With only 2 Legends that’s only 3 total bars you’re swapping around with.

2. You have 3 specializations. By your logic we take Jalis as hammer, but then I have 2 more choices. Assuming Invocation is the second one, all the rest are built around their specific weapon you can’t swap to giving you an option of traits that are so specialized as to be worthless to you.

As I see it they got two routes. Either they add an additional weapon or they unfocus the specialization traits to be more generic rather than so specific. I mean they can choose to do neither, but then this class will always end up just being an inferior version of other classes. An Elementalist can easily do the same support as Ventari and Jalis while still providing large AOE DPS and CC Support at the same time and their Cantrips provide more survivability than Revenant could imagine getting on their best day.

xarallei.4279:

That is incorrect. Rangers are a medium health class, not a high hp class. I think that’s why people are surprised revenants are not high health. There are so many medium hp classes now.

Actually it’s all balanced at 3/3/3.

Ele/Thief/Guardian – Low HP
Mesmer/Ranger/Revenant – Medium HP
Engie/Warrior/Necro – High HP

Armor: Berserker w/ Travelers Runes (tried Hoelbrack/Strength, kept falling behind)
Weapon: Hammer – Berserker – Bloodlust/Fire
Back: Celestial (forced), Rings: Assassin, Earrings: Cavalier, Neck: Soldier
2122 Power, 2556 Armor, 17872 HP, 40.19% crit, 204.2% crit dmg
Retribution (2, 6, 9) Corruption (2, 6, 8.) Invocation (3, 5, 7)

Biggest Struggle
Biggest struggle I ran into Revenant was lack of defenses. Even in Jalis the lack of high stacked stability and mobility skills really put a lot of pressure on the Revenant in general. Inspiring Reinforcement is alright but requires basically 5 seconds of standing in it to be beneficial which is impractical in WvW before a push (you often times have 2.5 seconds for an Empower before a charge). This forces you to play it more like a Necro backline than a frontline fighter because you simply don’t have the stability or mobility options of normal frontline (Warrior / Guardians). There’s almost no stunbreakers on any of the abilities outside of Rite of the Great Dwarf and Legends (if traited).

Hammer
Hammer 3 charging through all the damage between you and the target area made it largely unusable in WvW. The bomb is real and this just made it a death sentence to charge through and get hit by Wells. Should be changed to be immune. Hammer 4 needs a quicker cast time to be useful as it either telegraphs in advance “don’t attack me using projectiles” or it’s too slow to negate anything that matters. The rest I found good use with and got a lot of decent hits in.

Ventari
Honestly hated it. I loved the idea and the micro was fun for a bit, but the lack of self defenses from utility leaves you a sitting duck while this thing is out. Honestly every major Death was me trying to use Ventari (absorb protectiles, support heals, run heal through frontline, etc) and just getting over-ran because no stun breaks and no stability. It’s a novel idea, but that’s about it, simply isn’t functional in high level WvW when being pressured. Might be good in Pirate Ship meta WvW though.

Jalis
This was my go-to legend beacuse of of the stability on Road and lightning field for AOE swiftness. Not sure why taunt has a 50 energy cost. It has so many counters just don’t get it, only used it like 3 times to pull 1-2 guys on the edge of a wall off as the slow meant no one was really coming at you on a long distance with a 2s duration. Vengeful Hammers also didn’t get much use because with lack of stability and mobility going melee meant a death sentence. Most energy was spent on Road and Rite of the Great Dwarf. Rite as a stun break was ok, and the -50% damage taken is great too, but the cast time is way too long to be useful in real combat. I’m usually having to Road first which out of combat means not enough energy for Jalis too it’s all very clunky and doesn’t work.

Malyx
Honestly came to love this by the end of the night. Resistance is amazing for survival in a large zerg group and using Pain Absorbtion was incredibly useful in a group for building Resistance as well as helping my team out with condi clear. Banish Enchantment is incredibly powerful in a group but the lack of 1200 range made it not as useful as it could be in WvW. Unyielding Anguish is broken as all hell and that Disruption Field needs to be prevented by Stability at minimum. It was very easy to stall enemy pushes by Anguishing into our own line and watching the enemy jitter all over the place. Without Stability the Embrace the Darkness was useless.

Actually if you bothered to read most of the posts asking for weapon swap you will see, in fact, Utility Swap is not the same thing as Weapon Swap. Some points brought up so far are:

1. It’s the only class in the game right now that can’t change it’s 1-5 skills. Classes always have 2-6 options to change these abilities.

2. Weapons are very Legend/Specialization specific. Taking a Hammer doesn’t help out Salvation line which has Staff altering abilities in it. The additional conditions in Corruption doesn’t benefit you unless you’re doing a Condi Mace/Axe build.

3. There’s no permanence to Legend benefits. For example if you swap out of Jalis, you cease to benefit from Jalis as there’s very few if any lasting buffs from any of the lines. All of Ventari’s stuff immediately disappears without the Tablet. Most resistance in Malyx lasts but a few seconds.

In essence, it doesn’t gain enough benefit from Utility Swap to justify losing a second weapon set. Now they could adjust the Utilities and make them more powerful or more Energy efficient or something of that nature but as it stands it’s just not there.

Basically the Revenant suffers the same thing that Elementalists suffer through with thematic design. What is “thematic design”? Thematic design is when things are designed in line with a theme rather than functionality. For example most classes have a very clear Condition line, a very clear Power line, etc. Elementalists on the other hand have all things burning related in Fire, all things bleeding related in Earth, all things Speed related in Air, etc and all the designs match a “theme.”

Ultimately this always leads to a weaker character over all because it’s not balanced on a functional level (IE: A line benefits any heals with any heal) but instead only a theme level that only benefits what you have equipped (IE: Ventari trait line only benefits if you have Ventari).

Was kinda hoping to escape this bad design philosophy from the Elementalist but apparently Roy is using the same design for the Revenant as well

I play Elementalist a lot and Engineer a lot. Both classes have access to many, many different lines and weapon. For example my Engineer has Mainhand, Flamethrower and Mortar almost always equipped for 3 weapon sets. I also get access to a whole other bar of Tools effectively giving me 4 bars (with a max potential for 7 effective bars). Elementalist of course always has access to 4 bars of skills as well.

It’s important to remember, however, that NONE of these abilities are resource based and instead all cool down based. The two classes’ ability to rapid swap between ability bars and launch cool downs is unmatched.

The Revenant by comparison simply isn’t even close. For one they only have access to one main bar of abilities at all times and all utilities are hugely gated by Energy. One can’t simply swap from Jalis to Malyx and fire off both Elites. Even rocking off simple Utilities gets very expensive very quickly let alone trying to swap between two Legends.

There’s very little, if any, lasting benefits once you swap from a Legend. For example on an Elementalist I can do Staff Earth 3 for Magnetic Aura then swap to Fire and still retain that shield. As an Engineer if I lay down a set of Mortar fields then swap out I can take advantage of those. By comparison Revenant has none of these advantages because all Legend advantages are pretty much either short enough to be lost by the time you switch or simply flat out stop working when you switch such as anything Ventari related (and most things Malyx/Jalis as well).

Ultimately at this time the lack of a second weapon just isn’t justified by current design standards set by other classes. You simply don’t get enough benefit for the trade off.

Isn’t it the same guy who does Elementalists is doing Revenants?

He’s a thematic designer. Everything must match a theme rather than be functional.

That’s why.

Well if you’re killing a ton and surviving that’s the most important thing

I think you’ll find however as you get into Ascended gear it’s usually better to swap the two and use Soldier Accessories and Berserker Armor instead. You’ll find a better mix of stats that way instead of doing Soldier Armor with Berserker Jewelry. Play around with it a bit as it’s generally easier to swap in Jewelry than it is to replace Ascended armor.

Well that’s what builds largely are now, taste. You could debate forever whether or not Burning Precision and Blinding Ashes (damage and blind) is better than Burning Fire and Pyromancer’s Puissance (Condi Cleanse and Might) but at the end of the day the only thing that really matters now is gear and coming up with a decent mix of gear that provides you with solid defense and offense.

I saw what they had proposed before.

I am 1000% happier with what we got currently than what they had previously planned.

Could they do more? Sure. Could and does every other class in the game argue the same? Definitely.

Without doing any kind of modification on gear (yet) I was rolling around with this build (link) last night and wrecking faces.

With Guard Stacks + 25 stacks of Bloodlust (never died over 4+ hours) I was just blapping people with 7k Ice Spikes and 6k Meteors. Best of all I still maintained 2500+ armor and nearly 17k HP while doing it (will be over 17k when Robust kicks in a few days with 5/5 Guard Stacks). It was like having all the burst of old glass cannon Ele with strong defensive stats.

Granted last night seemed like an adjustment period and a lot of people weren’t geared properly as well as we seemed to largely be against JQ and TC’s scrub teams but it seemed ridiculously powerful. That mostly, I think, just meant I wasn’t riding my Cantrips as hard.

Thinking I may eventually adjust to something like Saphir (Assassins) armor with a Gobrech (Valkyrie) chest which would keep my crit about the same (39%) while trading a bit of Power for that additional Vitality. I’ve heard conflicting reports about them removing Guard Stacks in WvW (some say entirely, some say they’ll be made passive, etc) so I’ll likely decide then.

There’s so much speculation all around.

Till we get the details it’s like we’re a buncha dogs chasing our own tails. Just wait and see what we get. If you don’t like it, there’s tons of other fun classes and specializations being done and hell even the base Elementalist class is pretty great now

Laraley.7695:

Kodiak.3281:

Pretty stoked and completely surprised how much they listened to.

Really? I think the only thing they listened to was not to keep EA as a gm trait, rest seems a bit random.

Uh what?

They revamped the Fire Line which prior to the changes was fairly hum drum. The 150 power in Fire Attunement vs a Chance to gain Fire Aura when you attune to Fire? Buring Fire moved to Adept? Ferocious Winds in Air now Ferocity based on Precision instead of Healing Power? Bolt to the Heart no longer 20% under 33% and a proper 20% under 50%? What’s crazy is the list goes on!

There’s a lot there man they changed from the initial round of !@#$ery they originally had.

Pretty stoked and completely surprised how much they listened to.

Sadrien.3470:

Just because you buff ele’s base hp or toughness doesn’t mean people will stop playing cele dd. It will just buff cele dd more then any glass build because the perma protection work better with higher hp and the higher healing of cele dd works better with high toughness. All your suggestions do not buff staff they make dd ele broken op.

Glass builds can’t exist without more innate stats or tools to avoid damage entirely. That’s just how it is. Builds like Celestial can be adjusted by going after their Boon generation like they already are with the EA/EA both GM nerf coming up.

Mightybird.6034:

why are we even discussing exo vs ascended? I am only interested in stat types…I shouldnt have mentioned ascended at all aparently lol

Ascended vs non Ascended matters a lot because there’s a few options out there not available or hard to replicate such as Soldier’s Trinkets and such (because there’s no exotic gems/crests with Soldier stats). When you’re trying to min-max stats around in various combinations this can be critical.

Sounds like ultimately though you just need to aim for WvW stats and what will work for you there and just deal with those stats in every other game mode. There’s really nothing you can’t do in this game in WvW gear except maybe super high end 40-50 Fractals.

PlatinumMember.5274:

Kodiak.3281:

The reason why burst Elementalist doesn’t work in SPvP is a lack of escapes/mobility to correspond with it’s low HP/Armor.

Guardians doesn’t have either (escapes/mobility) and they are doing fine. Elementalist have very few damage mitigation skills. We have to rely on cantrips for defense and they all come with high CD.

They also have other ways to compensate built in on top of also having Heavy Armor from the get go. Also their offensive lines are tied in with their defensive stats, such as Valor adding large amount of Toughness while also massively boosting Hammer skills (Glacial Heart) as well as Meditations (Monk’s Focus). Comparatively it’d be like getting Fresh Air and Soothing Disruption in the Earth Line.

This is why Guardian makes a poor comparison compared to a Thief or Mesmer.

Vinteros Asteano.1209:

People have always said that ascended armor wasn’t worth it, but I noticed a significant damage increase when I equipped my ascended armor set.

It’s a 3% increase in stats for armor and a 5% increase in stats for weapons I believe and if you scale down to lower level content the stats gained are basically gone. This of course isn’t counting the Infusion slots.

The thing I noticed the most for Ascended armor is the actual amount of Armor you get from it cause it’s a pretty decent bump towards Armor rating. This let me tweak my stats slightly different and take a piece of Soldier (more power) or two over Knight or Cavalier instead while tweaking stats for WvW.

That said it’s 300-500g depending on prices and armor suit you make (light is more expensive since most of the cost revolves around Damask) and that’s a lot for some people.

This is what I run for WvW.
(or I did before I ran guild builds for WvW)

The HP is a bit low but with Guard Stacks (currently) it’s okay cause I gain around 2500 extra HP towards the 18k range as WvW moves on throughout the week and you gain the HP boost from score. The food is extremely easy to get (Lotus are everywhere in Orr and the only other part is Pepper which is cheap/easy) and the Stones are pretty standard. Lightning Rod catches so many people with damage but unfortunately that damage doesn’t contribute towards bags

Depending how the night is going I’ll swap in more Berserker accessories as needed.

When I do PvE I typically run something like this

This is the fairly standard combo for dungeons. I personally enjoy the additional armor and if HOT wasn’t coming up soon I’d be investing in Resilient Infusions for an even 2400 armor. If your group is sucking or tougher fights like Mai Trin (dem pistol shots) I usually swap 4 points out of Air and throw them back into Water for more survivability. I probably shouldn’t take Blasting Staff but honestly I don’t really care and prefer the larger size haha but putting it in Vital Striking will raise your HP a bit as well.

I used to carry around 5 different armor sets but over time I got lazy and only wanted one as well. This suit serves me for everything in game giving me the best of all worlds. Celestial isn’t a terrible idea, but it wastes too many stat points on Condition and Healing and is going to be receiving a nerf with HOT making hybrid gear builds ostensibly better. Now I wear this suit and only have a set of Berserker accessories in the bag alongside full Ascended weapon set.

The reason why burst Elementalist doesn’t work in SPvP is a lack of escapes/mobility to correspond with it’s low HP/Armor.

When you look at the play styles of traditional high burst classes, namely the Thief and Mesmer, both have numerous escape tools to get out of hard situations. This show these classes deal with being focused, they can use stealth and mobility or clone generation. Their survivability isn’t tied directly to having to tank damage but rather avoid damage entirely.

Elementalist on the other hand lacks these escape tools and instead is expected/designed to take these hits and either mitigate them with Boons and recover from them with healing. However, because healing was repeatedly nerfed at release, in order to properly keep up with the amount of damage out there you’re instead forced to spec heavily into Water/Arcane to get enough boon generation and healing to get enough sustain for it to matter.

Realistically we should probably have our HP pool swapped with Mesmer but that would mean having consistent game design and I’m pretty sure the developers are against that because “ooo wow looky here the light armor pool is different than the medium woooo diversificationalism shiny special cases!!!11”

I do agree that judgements like good or bad, viable and not viable, time considerations such as fast or slow are all subjective. If how good or bad something is in direct comparison to everything else in the game you can clearly see from a pure stats perspective even his original idea wasn’t even in the realm of bad. It’s not like he was suggesting full Celestial or full Dire or something. All he really needed to do was adjust some poor trait choices around and he’d be fixed up.

Instead poor Avador went the other route and went too far into Offense. While the Ascended Berserker gear is understandable (gives you something to grow into) Celestial Jewelry offers a lot of stats that are uneeded and unwated such as Condition Damage and Healing Power. Really he should be focusing the jewelry on making up the defensive stats he lost from his Armor such as with a mix of Soldier, Cavalier, Valkyrie Jewelry while maintaining high power contributions. Also by taking that many points out of Water and that many points out of Vitality from gear he’s gutted his base HP almost to the base where now the few hundred points in Armor and Health he had aren’t enough to make a meaningful contribution towards his survivability and he’s going to run into survivability issues again (which at that point why not simply go full DPS?).

Really he should be aiming for around 2400 armor and 15-16k HP to feel fairly comfortable and the rest of the stats will fill in where they may. Going this route is also great for upcoming changes like HOT stat line changes because he can get all the defensive stats from his gear while still keeping an offensive trait setup in the future.

Can’t speak for others but I already note a large difference in AI mechanics so far. For example Snipers who leave huge AOE lines in the middle of the field and will do things like jumping back out of attacks and melee players. Is it the peak of artificial intelligence? No. Is it greater than just running in and auto attacking? Yes.

See how things progress but if you’re expecting ultra challenging AI you’re probably shooting a bit too high with the expectations.

Neko.9021:

And I think that the proper response, when someone comes asking for build advice, is to be honest and offer good build advice.

When people come here asking if something is “viable” they aren’t asking if they can complete content with it. What they’re asking is they know the build isn’t the meta, but is it good enough that they will be able to pull their own weight with it in dungeons.

The inherent difference in answering this is the spectrum in which people look at the game. There’s a wide variety of armor sets in this game. Nomad, Dire, Shaman, Apothecary, Cleric, Carrion, Celestial, Soldiers, Valkyrie, Assassin and Berserker. Some people only look at one end of that spectrum and anything not there is immediately labeled bad/terrible/useless.

Personally I like to look at the stats and do a comparison from there. Long as they hit around 2000+ power, 40%+ crit, 180%+ crit damage the truth is they’re not going to be an anchor on their group. It’s not like they’re bringing absolutely nothing and just putzing along for the ride. The group isn’t suddenly going to take three times as long. Labeling something like that bad is misleading because they will contribute to the group and won’t have any issues which by most people’s standards is a success. The only honest thing to say is that builds that don’t focus on maximum DPS are poor at speed clearing content.

I think pretending that builds are worse than they really are (such as comparing a build to being naked with a weapon equipped) is completely dishonest and misleading.

Also, Avador, there’s plenty of existing guides on what people think are good. It’s basically maximum Berserker gear full DPS builds. You can either go read those as your leisure or you can wait till they keep giving you build tweaks and advice and you’ll arrive at the same destination.

I ignore time as a factor simply because there are too many variables that go into time to make it a reliable to measure in anything other than a group designed to speed clear dungeons (even if that’s not their intent).

You have 4 other team mates. These other team mates can have any number of specs, defensive or offensive. In addition these players can be at varying levels of game play and some may know the encounters or have done the dungeon a few times but aren’t invested enough to remember what to do. They may also have varying styles of game play where some melee stack and others stay at maximum range. All these random factors that go into doing normal dungeons all contribute to the time it takes to complete the dungeon and are all factors entirely outside of your control.

In this case the OP doesn’t want to go Berserker. So the idea of suggesting maximum DPS builds or comparing his builds to those builds isn’t a viable route because those all are based on Berserker. Therefore looking at his build in comparison of all the gear choices (Berserker on one end and Nomads on the other) his build is fairly offensive when looking at it in that context. Like on a scale of 0 – 10 of offensive power with 0 being Nomads and 10 being Berserker, his build rates somewhere around a 6 or 7. That isn’t that bad and with some tweaks to his traits could be a solid 7 which you’re not exactly an anchor on your group at a 7.

The biggest issue when you get down to Comparisons is the fact that Revenant at this time is lacking full gear selections and full trait lines. For example there’s no Power line at this time nor the direct damage focused Legend.

That said I found it very comfortable to play and found a lot of cross over from Elementalist game play. For example using the Road Utility and then Hammer 5 → Hammer 3 to blast two stacks of AOE Swiftness for getting around. The hammer also does very well during events for tagging with large, spammable AOEs with the Shockwave and the naturally piercing attacks. Depending on what else they have for Utilities (there’s 2 more legends and then an elite legend left) they could be a familiar alternative for a Staff Elementalist but an unlikely replacement.

Mace/Axe was very condi oriented and had a great feel for smaller encounters. Axe abilities were pretty amazing, but Mace was fairly slow and felt it.

I think the underlying question is what you consider “viable” means. For some individuals/groups, completing content as fast as possible which means anything less than full Berserker isn’t viable to them. For other individuals/groups, completing content is it’s own measure and long as everything gets done that’s considered viable to them.

Can this build do content? Of course. It’s not bad at all and you should be able to do dungeon content and fractals without much problems. There are a few tweaks it could use for things like Internal Fire/Conjurer over Ember’s Might and taking a few points out of Water because your Vitality is through the roof. There’s sufficient Power/Crit/Crit Damage (especially first build) to keep up sufficiently and not feel like you’re being carried.

However you wouldn’t be setting any speed run records. Higher end Fractal Content likely aren’t going to go very well either as most of the current strategies revolve around maximum DPS groups and tactics to overcome the content.

Necro has a lot of inherent lazy ways to survive from it’s massive base HP pool to doubling that with Death Shroud.

Elementalist you basically got around two options:

1. Not be lazy and constantly be switching around utilities, weapons, attunements, etc and play “serious mode” most of the time because if you don’t you’ll die. A lot of it is going to be adjusting to the events and bringing the utility you need for that event (such as multi-waves having enough to constantly rotate cool downs to survive multiple waves).

2. Throw on some defensive gear and get some Toughness/Vitality and just lazy mode through the content sitting in Staff Fire and just face roll your way through the entire game.

Personally I choose the second option and just throw on my WvW gear.

Really wish they’d make it so there was a PvE only option for players. Being the PvE option would give you 10% gold, magic find, karma gain and XP gain but you’re effectively on a server that isn’t connected to WvW. Switching onto this server would be free of charge.

This would free up room on servers without forcing anyone off anything. Possibly give them EOTM as a rotating server or whatever is lowest pop when they join or something.

I always make Zojja (Berserker) weapons because they’re very easy to universally work into just about any character.

There’s actually a few factors that go into the encounter you’re facing. For example if you’re with a Mesmer or Thief I find it’s very common for them to stealth and their mobs can suddenly come to you. This will put you over the target cap and sometimes you can just get mauled. It happens.

When starting out like you are, I always recommend gearing a bit more defensively. Soldiers (Power/Vit/Tough) is generally my recommendation and it can be gained doing Ascalon Catacombs which is an extremely easy farm dungeon that can be done alongside CoF. Alternatively if you have a lot of WvW badges you can buy a suit that way, but don’t put anything expensive in it as you can’t salvage WvW gear. Getting a Soldier suit of gear isn’t a terrible investment as it’s useful in places like WvW as well as potentially HOT with new PvE changes coming up (hard to say at this stage).

There’s also a variety of utility skills we can put on to help with small burst scenarios. For example Armor of Earth will give you a strong 6s of Protection/Stability. This will let you face tank some damage for those seconds while you burn the mobs down. Particularly strong burn Utilities like Conjure Frostbow → Ice Storm (4) will let you obliterate 3+ mobs on you for those 6 seconds duration. There’s also the extremely strong Water/Earth Elementals which should survive long enough (if cast right before you enter) and their use skills are more defensive (a melee knockback+heal and AOE Protection).

In addition to Utilities, you should get comfortable with your weapons. Using Staff Air to Static Field and Gust (which Pierces) can be handy. In addition there’s Staff Earth for Unsteady Ground and Shockwave both which can keep things away from you. When you use Staff Water to refresh with Geyser and Healing Rain don’t forget to use Frozen Ground to give you a patch of Chill to allow yourself to kite them around. Offhand Dagger has CC’s like Updraft and Earthquake and soft protection with Frost Armor applying Chill and reducing damage incoming.

Over time as you get more comfortable using your utilities and your weapon skills you can slide back into that Berserker gear because you won’t be dying as much. You also should be looking for only be joining Berserker groups with Berserker gear. Many normal groups run much slower and playing with Berserker gear in that scenario can be frustrating. I’ve seen some groups take so long that we had 3 respawn waves of mobs with that Pillar encounter for example because the DPS was slow on the gate killer. However in a maximum Berserker team this won’t be the case and they should be able to kill it fast and let you simply move on with no trouble.

I’m a huge fan of stringing people out. It’s a big ol world. It’s very easy to disconnect from people using a Cantrip like Mistform to get out of danger and Ride the Lightning to really string the enemy out or get them to stop focusing on you. This lets you re-engage on your terms.

Gokil did a great job covering the rest.

Yea also what you do in WvW is fairly important as well. Solo roam is different from small group havoc and yet still different from guild/blob/zerg. Also what is killing you also helps a lot at suggesting game play tips.