Guild Wars 2

ESO RvR is pure trash. The only thing super nice about ESO’s RvR on the PC is that so few people are playing it that it’s very easy to get a group into. There might be a small queue at times, but over all there’s low barriers for entry.

GW2 on the other hand isn’t bad, it ticks most of the elements offering good play for smaller groups and larger groups and after a number of changes is finally pretty rewarding. The big issue is there’s a lot of barriers to entry and for groups who formed after GW2 launched 5 years ago trying to get a group of 20 or even 5 people onto the same server usually means you gotta aim for a pretty medium/low WvW server.

Absconditus.6804:

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

Is it actually on the skill or were they doing that just to demonstrate the amount of lifesteal the elite adds?

ScottBroChill.3254:

Dude, they are never making ritualists in this game so this is the closest thing I can get. I’m very upset. Can ya just let me have this one and not get it reworked?

I dunno, the new Scourge seems to be pretty much identical in the way it summons spirits and pulses effects/attacks around them.

Would be nice if you could setup your own Squad Tag to only show to Guild Members.

Well, you got the name right.

First: Definately change it back to Friday regardless of time.

Second: Why so late? Just set it back to the old time, and if you have to update, do an update. You guys seem to hardly update on Fridays and ruining a guaranteed Friday night reset time because you might update has never made sense. Just do your dang update, and we’ll adjust from there. Will it be annoying? Sure. Even with that annoyance will it still be better than Saturday or late Friday? Absolutely.

DeceiverX.8361:

I completely agree. Fact of the matter is it’d come down to nerfing the coefficient by like 50%, though, which obviously people would get very upset about.

People would be upset because that’s not balancing, it’s simply an axe job.

In actual balance everything is worth a value. So lets say, theoretically, a weapon is supposed to have X amount of value. Things like DPS/CC/Heals/etc all have their own values as well that make up that total weapon value. If you reduce the damage on an ability by 50% that value number dramatically shifts downward and thus, balance wise, you have to give that number elsewhere on the weapon.

This is a great change.

One friendly player should not be able to negate the damage of another friendly player through bad (or good) timing.

For the players who are concerned about WvW, all I have to say is there are better ways to accomplish what you’re looking for rather than a bad solution that inadvertently does the job.

On the CC front, our primary source of stability was nerfed pretty hard. The method in which we got stability already meant we had to give up our endurance and trade it for stability as a cost. In addition, many of our lines lack sources of stability or stunbreaks. While the pinnacle of our stunbreaks, Riposting Shadows, is fantastic any other line basically suffers immensely. Inspiring Reinforcements was gutted, doesn’t break stun, and Rite of the Great Dwarf has an immense energy cost to be practical. I’m sure on a smaller scale fight of SPvP this seemed like permanent CC protection but on any larger scales, especially WvW, it is basically non-existent.

On the Condition front, Mallyx was the primary way to deal with Conditions but was nerfed directly to Demonic Defiance previously as well as with said resistance being our primary method to deal with Conditions we’re now even more vulnerable with the increase to stripping/converting Boons.

We also had rather high recovery options such as Infuse Light and Crystal Hibernation to previously deal with some of these downsides but Infuse Light saw a duration decrease and Facet of Light caught a cast time meanwhile Crystal Hibernation retained all it’s various downsides (predictably channeled immobilize) while losing a good chunk of it’s recovery.

Sword was changed simply because the other options weren’t as good as auto attacking and rather than address that they chose to just directly nerf auto attacks which allowed us to predictably apply DPS and instead transferred it into an attack we have very little control over it’s targeting. I already had an attack that was useless with multiple targets around, now I have two while they reduced the one that I could control. Thanks, Anet.

Hammer’s CORuin change was a colossal kick in the jimmies. Not because it shouldn’t be able to hit a target multiple times, but because two Revenants have the potential to negate each others damage. I can’t stress how absurd it is. I don’t want to flippantly throw around words like “lazy solution” but quite frankly allowing one person to negate another person’s damage is the kind of thing people should get written up for allowing it to ever get into production. It is literal incompetence.

They went after our damage, they went after our extremely limited ability to deal with CC, they went after our limited ability to deal with conditions, and they went after our recovery. That isn’t balance. Balance is: Your method of dealing with conditions is too good, we’re changing that, and adding in a different way for you to deal with them. Balance is: Your auto attack damage is too good, you already have uncontrollable DPS, we’re changing this other ability so you have more predictable DPS here to compensate.

The balance team of this game has always been the number one factor holding the game back. It’s why SPvP was largely a niche of the game prior to HOT. It’s why PvE was basically stack and burn until HOT. It’s why WvW has always been the butt end joke for game balance. What changed with HOT? We had new developers come in, design new specializations, and they opened up new ways to play the game. Expansion over, welcome back old balance team, time to run the game right back into the ground again.

To be fair they probably have had Karl in charge of balance for a long time now (which is why the game was such a joke for e-sports, stuck in a terrible meta for pve, and lolbalance for wvw) pre-HOT.

Then with HOT, for new classes and new specializations, they brought in others to help out design things and that’s how we got Roy and the other great devs (Chrono/Reaper guy).

However now that HOT has launched we’re probably back to good ol’ “nerf all the things” Karl while Roy and the others are on the next expansion (they mentioned working on another expansion already) team designing the new specializations and such or another project behind the scenes.

They probably had no other way to make the multi-hit abilities not double hit from the same cast so they did this “fix” as a quick and dirty fix.

We should create a pool on how long it takes for them to address it.

My feedback is on the Revenant and the Quarterly balance updates.

I really dislike the Revenant changes. Not because of what, specifically, was nerfed in some cases but rather because it was all nerfs. It’s all take, and no give.

A lot of what we got access to with Roy early on there were many good explanations for changes. A great example was a Crystal Hibernation discussion we had. Some of us wanted to be able to move with Crystal Hibernation because if you look at every other previous stationary block skill in the past it’s all gotten changed to be mobile because of the nature of a highly mobile game being immobile is counter intuitive (see: Engineer Shield block). However Roy came in and explained that the immobile nature was a trade off of having such a high heal effect on a weapon skill and if it was to be made mobile we’d lose a huge chunk of the healing off of it. Yet here we are in a balance update with the healing going massively down and nothing to compensate for it.

Changing Coalescence of Ruin so only one person can hit a target at the same time across multiple Revenants is beyond bogus. I don’t care if it can’t hit multiple times on a single cast, I care that my damage is being arbitrarily negated because someone else did an ability the same time as I did randomly. No one wants to feel useless and this has the potential for me to lose out on things like NPC tags or coordinated burst fire in group play because, whoops, too many Revenants.

More over let me say that with all nerfs and no buffs or changes to existing mechanics (Jalis, Ventari) you have basically said, “Welp. That’s what you get for the next 90-120 days. Have fun.” and frankly I don’t even want to play the game now until the next balance update. I know nothing is going to change, I know I have nothing to look forward to. I can’t even say, “Yea that sucks they nerfed sword, but hey lets look at this other thing they changed/buffed.” cause it doesn’t exist. In that meantime instead of putting my gaming budget into GW2 I’ll put it into other games elsewhere.

gannondorf.7628:

Yep you have see it coming but it was pretty obvious. I just can suggest people to leave the class, now useless, for now or playing other games. I have starting to level up a new main: engineer but i’m just don’t sure i’m going to still on this game for now.

Yea I’m torn between doing other games for now and possibly going with my Condi Reaper or possibly making a Condi Warrior.

Presumably Revenant was just rolled in with the other classes and is balanced based on their standards rather than what works for the Revenant.

Roy had a lot of explanations of why things were the way they were. Like when we asked for moving Crystal Hibernation we were told the healing would be dramatically reduced if we could move with it. Just like we couldn’t have Condition removal, despite being proven time and time again as essential for classes to be successful, because of other defensive options we got. The same with other moves like lack of CC defense because that’s our weakness and to provide strong defensive options such as the Unwavering Avoidance. There were good, logical reasons for the decisions that were made.

However the balance team that took over doesn’t actually “balance” anything but rather just takes, takes, takes and gives nothing back. Then months down the line when their metrics shows, shockingly, a class is weak or under-represented then they’ll look at later adding buffs down the line to boost that up. Ran into this for years with the Elementalist since launch on it’s highs, it’s lows, then back on high again.

Your only options really are deal with it (contributes to the problem cause they think you’re Ok with it), switch classes to some new FOTM, or quit till they change things then come back (or don’t). I’m usually a fan of option 3.

See you guys don’t get Karl’s method of balancing things is all.

By nerfing Shiro (before), Sword and Glint (now) it’s supposed to make all those other really bad options seem not so bad. It’s like taking an average person and sticking them next to a REALLY ugly person you really notice the difference. But now you make the average person look uglier and maybe you’ll consider the really ugly option now.

Of course none of that actually works, but hey, E-Sports.

Burtnik.5218:

Also now that our dps is trashed, sustain nerfed i have to ask – where is my condi removal?

Hahahaha oh boy are you under the impression that “balance” means take one thing and give another?

Are you guys new here or what?

They don’t think they’re going to nerf one thing, but to compensate they’re going to fix another. They almost never fix things. It literally took an expansion effort for them to fix things for other classes that they had complained about since day one. Strap in, cause chances are nothing will be fixed for a very long time.

Anet balances entirely off metrics. The more people do XYZ, the more they’re going to look at nerfing it. The less people use ABC, the more they’re going to look at nerfing XYZ to make ABC look more competitive as an option. In any and all scenarios they have repeatedly said they look at balancing from the perspective “Is this underpowered?” but instead “Is that so overpowered it makes this look underpowered?”

But consider this, for everyone of us who comes here and says Jalis or Ventari is bad, there’s at least 2-3 people in game who are going, “Woooeee this Ventari Tablet is neat!” and using it regardless of how much we can mathematically rant and rave how bad it is on the forums. We can say no one would ever use it, but they have numbers showing them that players are clearly, in fact, using it.

That’s why I highly recommend to anyone who plays GW2 to buckle into a few classes so when ANet’s slow moving balance team ruins your class for a while you got another one to fall back on and keep going.

As I said in the other thread, ANet isn’t that kind of developer.

Some Developers will see things are weaker, then buff those up to give competitive alternatives.

ANet Developers will see things are weaker, and then nerf anything stronger so the weaker options seem more competitive.

I saw this being an Elementalist Main for a super long time with the game over the last few years. Water/Arcane were taken by nearly every Elementalist due to class design and instead of making the other options more competitive or redesigning the class so you don’t feel forced into those options all they do is nerf, renerf, and nerf those lines some more. It never works and all it does is people are forced to double down even harder into those gutted lines cause the other options just aren’t good.

It’s the same thing with Revenant (or any class for that matter). Rather than address the real problems, they’ll pick apart the good bits till they’re a shadow of what they once were but still everyone is gonna go Glint and Hammer/Sword because the other options just don’t work in the game they designed.

Anytime Karl is in charge you gotta clench them butt cheeks and hope you can still walk after they’re done. It’ll make you really appreciate the days of Roy being around super, super fast.

Also people talking about Bugs are pretty naive to the way Anet does things around here. They almost never focus on fixing bugs when they do balance stuff. It isn’t like “Oh, well, we’re going to nerf XYZ but we fixed ABC.” Most of the time they just nerf “XYZ” and figure they’ll get around to ABC whenever they can if ever. Other classes are still waiting years out for some of their bugs/issues to be addressed.

I honestly expected they’d be gutting our class going right after Herald and Shiro and making them largely worthless to be “competitive” with other worthless options like Jalis and Ventari. So anything not that is a welcome surprise, and anything on par with that was expected.

Looks pretty solid. The only comments I have are:

1. You really want Cruel Repercussion and Malicious Reprisal. All the complaining you hear about Revenants in WvW is because of Cruel Repercussion. See there’s a tons of Guardians out there as they are staple to any WvW comp which in turn means lots of Aegis. Especially with new Dragon Hunters everyone is using their “F3” ability which gives Aegis plus blocks all incoming damage. So what is going to happen is you are going to do COR, it’s going to get blocked cause of Aegis. The next COR then will have Cruel Repercussion and you will have Malicious Reprisal which means they can’t block your COR again.

2. You really won’t be using Sword/Axe that much except maybe after runners, using Impossible Odds to catch up with super Speed and then Axe to close on them from range. However most cases you will be using Hammer in this setup. Most setups I know of use Staff as their backup cause even if you don’t use it as front line, it has plenty of defensive tools on it which are useful if just for you surviving/getting out.

3. Your biggest issues are going to be stun breaks and defense. You basically have almost no CC break or Condi management in your build cause you’re running double offensive Legends in Shiro/Glint and swapped out Retribution for Devastation. This means without dedicated Guardians giving you Stability you won’t make it as the group moves because you’ll get caught in CC like Guardian Line of Warding, Elementalist Static Fields and Earth Lines or even Necros Spectral Wall.

This creates a bit of a headache scenario because Shiro has a reliable stun break (Riposting Shadows) but not the fury you need from Facet of Darkness. If you go after Fierce Infusion instead of Cruel Repercussion to fill the Fury gap you lose out on that big damage boost. You can get away without needing Fury, but then that’s an entirely other gear set!

The good news is these are all things that are trait/build related and can be changed if you find yourself hating life later without having to swap around your gear as much. So you can give it a try, and if you hate life, swap it back. On nights I have reliable Guardians to give me Stability I also swap out Retribution for Devastation as well.

I took a break after release but when I came back my two sets I had setup are still fantastic in terms of performance.

This is my PvE Build

Pretty standard build. I also swap to Axe but prefer Shield when soloing HOT content. Same when running fractals to swap to staff for breakbar removal if needed. I prefer the few extra HP I mix in and with Fury up it’s sitting fine with crit. Plenty of Might duration to keep stacks when soloing.

This is my WvW build however.

So with this I basically have 2500 power (still), over 3100 armor, 18k HP, -40% condi duration, and still 204% crit damage with 18% crit (really 58% cause we always have fury on us). This setup gives you a full range of options and many defensive moves to get out of anything short of an instant-down scenario. Honestly it’s the best of all worlds once you get used to timing your dodges proactively to generate stability.

Staff provides strong mobility, defenses and pretty decent Cleave while you can use Dragon Facets for damage (Strength and Elements). You also still have Hammer which is devastating in WvW regardless of where you are in a fight (front, mid or backline). With this build I can easily hang with the front line and am just as comfortable in the back with little worries for self survivability.

Dwarf stance is basically your “Oh !@#$” button as you pop to dwarf (stun break), then pop Rite (stun break 2) and you should be able to keep going with a strong condi cleanse heal as well. Don’t forget that Vengeful Hammers is a -20% damage reduction as well which stacks on top of -10% from Close Quarters and -10% from Determined Resolution on top of 3100 armor just makes you tanky as all get out on demand.

The only thing of some annoyance is stability, but with Enhanced Bulwark and Unwavering Avoidance you should be able to hold your own. The the biggest issue seems to be Dragon Hunter Bow #5 but with good positioning I was usually able to dodge/stab roll out of them.

Might not work for everyone, but I enjoy it immensely

These changes make me want to login and WvW again.

Basically, they nerfed the wrong thing.

Instead of nerfing the maximum number of targets they needed to look at it’s interaction with Cruel Repercussion. CR makes COR 50% harder hitting which with it already being hard hitting just bumps it up to stupid levels. CR is fairly reliable in WvW simply because of the number of Guardians passively applying Aegis (outside their control) so there’s really no counter play there.

Unfortunately when ANet finally gets around to figuring this part out they’re going to not only nerf Cruel Repercussion but never undo any other nerfs they did along the way trying to fix the issue.

So what happens is Guardians run their auras that grant Aegis. First Coalescence of Ruin you cast hits those guys plus everyone else and you get Cruel Repercussion. Then, keeping target clear so you don’t waste Cruel Repercussion on an auto attack, you wait for CORuin to come back up and then cast it again for +50% damage and that’s when, if at 1200m range, you do this kind of damage in full glass damage spec. In addition to this, as you don’t need to dual wield, you can easily also use Malicious Reprisal which will make all your attacks unblockable meaning those kittens are going to hit regardless so long as they are in the area.

This issue is largely specific to WvW because of the amount of Guardians in groups who passively apply Aegis to everyone around them in addition to actively providing it for Indomitable Courage.

It’s worth noting that in order to see these kinds of numbers you pretty much have to run full glassy PvE gear and spec. This leaves you highly vulnerable to CC and otherwise if not protected in a guardian group for stability. The base CORuin is largely fine, however Cruel Repercussion largely needs to be looked as that is causing numbers that are pretty wild with the consistent blocks you see with Guardians in play.

The vast majority of people run Shiro because it’s the only line with a reliable stun break. Every other line, even the supposed tanky line, just isn’t good for stun break or stability which forces us into Shiro.

If other lines offered more reliable stun breaks, such as Inspiring Reinforcements acting like a stunbreak/stability you might see more people using Jalis over Shiro. However until they give Revenant more access to stun breaks in other lines, it really forces us into Shiro for that aspect alone.

It’s pretty common once beta/testing is over they pretty much don’t interact on the forums anymore. We might get the ocassional token message here or there but the kind of dev access we had in the past is likely over. I’m pretty sure most of the feedback is still read/digested/reviewed but I imagine there’s a lot of things going on.

Takoyakii.2146:

I think it’s the same thing as wyvern fight. That too many players make fight longer because of cc scaling and some people not contribute cc when needed.

But it’s harder because his attack is faster and he move while break bar is up.

Spot on! It’s less a “PUGs will learn” thing and more of a mechanics thing.

I mean I can tell people 100 times in chat to the point I’m squelched to bring crowd control to break the break bar but it doesn’t mean jack if they miss it or otherwise. The mechanic doesn’t care, it’s just going to keep scaling up regardless.

Really depends on what the encounter requires to be tanked what kinda setup you want. Do you need a mixture of damage and damage mitigation? Is damage mitigation pointless and you’d just use/spam Shiro mobility?

While I get the necessity of making difficult encounters in the game this one ranks right up there with one of the more frustrating encounters due to the mechanics.

1. The breakbar seems to scale forever so if everyone doesn’t bring CC you’re boned. Now some might go, “Yea this is great!” the problem is that there’s a lot of people who don’t pay attention, don’t really care, and are just there because they see a lot of people there. No amount of spamming chat gets these people to put proper CC on their bar to do this fight.

2. The breakbar trigger time is wonky and causes a lot of CC to be wasted. He gets his break bar, people blow their CCs (ground target and all), and then he gets up and walks a random distance in the other direction faster than most players can run making most AOE CCs completely miss entirely.

While I generally like, and understand, the mechanics of the fight I feel like it’s over tuned currently for a realistic PUG experience that it is. Considering it is also one of the precursor collection steps for some of the new Precursors it is even more frustrating because it draws even more people which just exasperates the problem further.

My suggestion would be either to change the mechanics so he doesn’t go on a walkabout during his CC phase, make his CC phase longer, or simply make it not scale/take as much to break.

So I was going for Vinetooth Prime earlier in Auric Basin. After it finished (fail) I relogged onto my Necromancer to zone in and see if I could get a different IP/map where it wasn’t done yet. I got the same IP and logged into my Herald again and noticed I still had participation credit!

So I relogged again, tried again, even logged out and same results after closing the client and logging into the same IP/Map I still had my participation. However if you do get into a different IP/map your participation is not saved so if you crash from a full map it is gone. I have not tested trying to get back into a map you already had credit on but I did test leaving the map (such as to the guild hall) and I did keep credit if I stayed on the same IP/Map.

Video for proof: https://youtu.be/4d5kSeo4TYk
(black part is me closing client)

Per Reddit confirmed to be Fire Elemental from Open World:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/3t6yl6/nevermore_collection_thaumanova_collection/

Was running around Tyria and noticed Facet of Elements and other Facets kept immediately turning off again…

…just had them turn off in a Fractal even. Think when you hit full energy (100) it turns off any auras?

UPDATE: Has to deal with having Glint selected underwater according to other thread.

What game mode?

Scholar runes about 3g per meaning 18g for full set. Rage runes are about 60s per and that means 3g for a full set.

If you’re worried about money I’d get Rage. Sigils are all fairly expensive regardless of choices so Rage and some decent Sigils wouldn’t be a bad call.

Versepelles.1972:

Thanks to all those who have contributed constructive feedback! I’m glad this thread has sparked such interest, even with much of it being the unfortunately typical criticism without solutions. I’ll update the original post to reflect some of the community viewpoints.

If there ain’t a problem there’s no need to fix it.

If you start seeing 2-3 Shiro/Glint players mandatory per team like there was D/D Elementalist then there’s a problem to be fixed. However as people have already started figuring out the counters (heavy condi pressure, heavy CC pressure) Revenant isn’t in a bad spot for TEAM play.

The biggest complaints you see are from duelers who complain Revenant wins 1v1 which there is no 1v1 game mode.

These balance decisions are terrible for a number of reasons:

1. They are pretty ignorant of past changes of Revenants. For example a lot of our damage abilities were increased due to their low performance in most scenarios. For example Unrelenting Assault has incredibly low burst damage against multiple targets and single target it’s outperformed by our auto attack. That doesn’t mean some perfect Unrelenting Assault against a single target isn’t going to ruin their day it just means in the average scenarios they were put in it wasn’t that bad (especially since a single dodge can negate it’s damage as much as you suggest over it’s hugely long animation).

2. You take a lot way and don’t give anything in return. That is not the definition of balance. Really your changes come off as, “I want to see more Condition Revenants so please buff Mallyx/Corruption/Mace/Axe and nerf anything Shiro/Glint related plz.” If you’re going to take away from Shiro and Glint, you have to balance back to those abilities in other areas they are weak in such as condition management (or the complete lack of) or vulnerability to CC.

Black Box.9312:

Yeah, I agree. I do think that CoR damage is kind of crazy, but there’s no way that it would hit for 12k against a target with 3k armor unless there was a very unique set of circumstances.

The only way this happens is if it’s boosted through the moon such as with Cruel Repercussions and even then I’d be very skeptical of a 12k hit on 3k armor. Boasting inaccurate numbers just isn’t going to do anyone any favors.

CRepercussions goes off a lot because of Guardian’s Aegis. It’s almost impossible not to see at least one block with CORuin which if you run untargeted (so an auto attack doesn’t get it) means you can fire off the second one a few seconds later for MUCH higher damage.

As for “git gud” to be honest there’s no get good part of the skill in WvW. There’s enough ground targeted things you are going to get hit by this. It’s just how it is. Same goes for most ground targeted stuff in large scale (read 20 v 20 or more) you’re just not going to avoid it because often times it’s on you before you can see it through all the visual noise (Friendly and enemy looks identical).

The more logical counter is simply kill the Revenants. If you are rocking maximum DPS gear you don’t have any armor let alone a large health pool. We are very vulnerable to CC without a Guardian group similar to Necros.

Lack of stun breaks is one of the downsides to a Revenant. Most cases we’ll get access to 2-3 depending on spec with very few if any sources of stability depending on spec.

While our access to stun break is not as bad as our weakness to heavy Condi pressure, it is pretty noticeable against incredibly CC heavy classes like Druid, Scrapper or Reaper (nasty mix of soft and hard CC).

This is kinda the trade off for being such an amazing power damage counter with our abilities.

Devastation you should be taking Assassin’s Presence.

Invocation you should be taking Roiling Mists.

That is a lot of Ruby Orbs. Replace with other stuff as you get money to buy them. Sigil of Force for Sword. Runes for DPS later on. Rage runes are pretty Cheap and provide a nice DPS add over Ruby. Strength runes are the expensive but generally ideal option for all around game play (group, solo, etc).

WvW depends on what you’re going to be doing in WvW.

That’s primarily why I don’t use it over putting my energy into Rite of the Great Dwarf instead. Trying to run Hammers consistently, as you say, doesn’t work because of hills, walls, stairs…hell running through doors you break down cancels it lol.

Yea that’s why you don’t focus on Ferocity as part of Condi builds since you just wanted the Crit for a chance to proc a Condi.

Not sure how many alts you have but as you run them through the HOT story you get a box of Viper, Minstrel or Trailblazer gear on each character. I’ve used this to regear my Engineer out in Extoic Viper gear.

Pompeia.5483:

I do not get, however, why power scaling on mace is the least bit relevant when the goal is to apply condi’s. If you mean why go Sinister instead of, say, Dire… was mostly due to the ease of getting Sinister gear vs Dire and Rabid seemed silly when precision, to my knowledge, does not affect conditions (and the last, Carrion, also has power so why not just get Sinister at that point and L2P). That and Sinister is nice for Hammer for those few times you have no choice but to be ranged or use sword, which is what I run as my weapon-swap main-hand when I want that extra evade. As for Viper… I had my Revenant set made in-full weeks before BWE3 and have not seen much point in making a new set just for that.

It’s all about dealing as much damage as you can and doing power damage is every bit as efficient as dealing condi damage when most condi based attacks also deal damage at the same time. It’s classes like, say Engineer, who can properly take advantage of both Power and Condi at the same time that work out the best in these regards. Especially with new Viper style gear where Power and Condi are equal.

Rabid, Rampager, Sinister and Viper matter because of traits like “Rampant Vex” where your crits have a chance to cause Torment. Many classes have something like this such as critical hits cause bleeding (the most common) or burning. More crits = more condition since almost none of these have an Internal Cool Down meaning their potential to generate conditions is pretty high. In fact this is what caused the Bleeding dilema prior to HOT, because so many classes like Engineer, Warrior and Mesmer have these passive bleeds that took up the 25 slots from Condi based players from crits alone.

There’s no reason to “make” new sets anymore. The thing after they made the Ascended stat swap is to simply get the materials to swap stats (10 Spirit Shards, 1 Exotic Insignia, 5 Globs, and the Armor piece) which is infinitely cheaper and very viable to do.

Pompeia.5483:

Okay, so I admit I insta-leveled my Rev to 80 and know little of the crit-scaling problems in low-level area’s because I always condi since I <3 DoTs.

I would guess some of these other folks know better in regards to leveling area’s and for power… but what I mentioned for what the trait lines and weapons do is still valid.

Regardless, always good to experiment on your own once you know the basic idea of each trait line on any class!

I’m very hestitant about a Condi build. I’d love to do it, no REALLY love to do a Condi build, but the two big things holding me back are:

1. Terrible power scaling making most of the current Condi gear (Viper, Sinister) irrelevant on mace attacks.
2. Torment is one of the worst spammable conditions in the game because it only really shines during movement.

If the power scaling got changed a smidge to be on par with other professions and we got a trait that let us reverse the Torment effect (more damage on tick, less bonus dmg when moving) I’d be all over that in a heart beat.

If you’re soloing things, most things will be facing you so Assassin’s Annihilation isn’t as useful as you’d think (at least with me playing around with it since mobs instantly turn to face you as you move). In addition while 10% from Vicious Lacerations is definitely nice it’s nothing compared to the scaling 10% crit until you crit lower level.

Now as you get on in levels, 100% agree that by about 70 or so Corruption loses it’s flavor due to access to gear and precision scaling is much better.

I REALLY don’t get why people keep suggesting to get Devastation first. It’s two principle DPS boosts are Ferocity boosts that only work if you have a respectable amount of Crit. Devastation has zero fury generation thus most of the DPS boost is non-existent until you get said crit rating much later with Invocation and later gear/Herald. Even the final triat, +20% dmg under 50%, is just a 10% damage boost.

Even Invocation offers minimal Fury up time, only when you heal or stun break. So while that’s a nice boost, you’re either forced to lead with your heal to generate Fury or you have to save your heal for when you need it and then you don’t really generate Fury.

Now when you’re 80…none of that is a problem. You have gear to offset these factors and make up for it with full Berserker or even Valkyrie when you can get Permanent Fury with Herald. However when leveling you just can’t make the most of these lines.

Pompeia.5483:

Currently Corruption line is kinda useless unless you go Tormenting/condi so save that for last unless you like DoTs and can kite mobs well.

This is incorrect. Early on Corruption is the best line to first specialize into at level 21 because of Maniacal Persistence.

See lower level Precision is downscaled horribly. For example if you go to a level 15 zone at level 80 with 40-50% chance to crit you’ll scale down to only 15% chance to crit from Precision. You just don’t get much crit % from precision. This is what makes buffs like Fury so strong and allows us to literally walk around 1-2 shotting lower level things because our power, crit damage with actual crit rating is too much for lower level areas.

This is where Maniacal Persistence rolls into picture. Getting a stacking 10% crit every second you don’t crit with such a low crit rating is a colossal boost in DPS. Furthermore by the time you do max the line out you’ll mostly be swimming in “Honed” gear (Power/Ferocity) because that’s what the game likes to give you in the 40-60 range pre-Berserker (and Strong Gear from 20-40).

One could make the argument that going Corruption solely for MP is a waste, however you gotta consider that lines like Devastation really only work with a large amount of crit (since it’s all +Ferocity which requires crit) as well as Invocation early on can’t keep up enough Fury up time to really take advantage of Roiling Mists until Herald (which is long past 80) making it the single best DPS line we got until later on.

I cover all this in a post here:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/revenant/Looking-for-a-leveling-build/first#post5723388

Really don’t get the Hammer hate either. Hammer is amazing all things considered. The auto attacks at 80 with proper gear crit upwards for 4-5k and CORuin’s 3rd hit (means keep them at range if possible) can hit upwards of 10-11k every 2 seconds. That’s also all AOE as basic shot pierces and CORuin is 3 blasts hitting 5 targets for a max of 15 targets (5 per blast).

In addition to this Field of the Mists is one of the most consistent projectile shut downs in the game (50%) while also offering a DPS boost because our auto attacks are projectiles that always lifesteal. That means in addition to the auto attack, you also do a life steal attack which with Enchanted Daggers can add up quite a bit on just Auto Attacks.

Phase Smash is also great as a bit of a mob juke out in addition to large damage. You actually, physically travel with this skill even though it snaps you back. This means mobs will often times go chasing you where you were rather than where you are. Also mobs will charge up melee attacks cause you were physically in range. For example Brutes will start their charged up knock down attack when using it and waste it on something not even there.

While I was certainly a higher level coming down, I always found Hammer to be the best when doing lower level content simply because I could CORuin, Phase Smash, CORuin and literally piles of things would be dead.

It is wrong. It’s been reported since BWE1. I got Roy to acknowledge it after BWE3 however so he was at least aware of it. There are a number of other hammer issues as well that were also pointed out.

If they’re not going to make it so Glint, Jalis, and Ventari work under water then I agree there needs to be separate stances for underwater.

JALIS
Inspiring Reinforcements: Create a flow of water in the direction you’re facing with same effect as Inspiring Reinforcements.

GLINT
Elemental Blast: Create AOE blast cone on selected target identical to one above. Can change burning to Blind because of the Steam (or don’t, whatever).

VENTARI
Tablet: Summons Tablet into World that is stationary.
Tablet Alternative: Makes Tablet travel to Revenant pulling it to them healing all on the path it travels.

There ya go. All other conflicts solved of making them all work underwater.

So you’re aware they said that armor would be 1/6th a legendary in cost per piece so the whole suit would be the same cost as one legendary. So I imagine a back piece, while still expensive, won’t be the same level as say a weapon.