Guild Wars 2

Staff wasn’t meant to be DPS/burst weapon in the first place – it’s designed to be support/defensive weaponset. As long as it sticks to this theme, I don’t mind.

For a skill that doesn’t require much setup, good combo and has no windup, it really did too much damage. Keep Evade and CC as these are part of the weaponset’s theme, nerf the damage is correct direction.

It changes absolutely nothing, so w/e. A bit less damage on Staff #5 won’t stop Power Rev from being #2 after Condi Mes and it’s okay that they’ve changed Rite – but Frost Auras and similar effects should get the same treatment.

I guess you will have to wait till PvP comes back, Jebro.

I can send you Hearthstone or HotS clips, tho.

There might be small balance tweak on Tuesday. If so, I believe both Power Rev and Condi Mes will get some nerf.

In general, the profession is good or broken good in all the game modes, but has pretty much one build with slight variations for everything and barely any alternative playstyles or other viable builds.

credits to Magno

Understandable. I’m not sure how successfull his Overwatch streams will be, but he’s fun to watch most of the times. GW2 PvP and game in general has no growth on Twitch and I can’t see it changing anytime soon, probably till another expansion.

Could This return?

jbrother.1340:

Xynful.8140:

The $$$ is all that matters at this point. PvP isn’t great, we all know that, but the $$$, man, the $$$.

Name a company that is in business for profit in which “$$$” is not the most important factor even above the human cost? Oh and prove it.

He meant that majority of players in Pro Leagues are still playing and competing because there’s money on line and openly talk about that. Highly doubt you would see 60% of them in-game in current state with no significant monetary reward as motivation.

You’re not forced into something you don’t like, though. If you don’t like complexity or more micromanagement, you can always run Tempest for example.

Maybe I worded my “4 reasons” not clear enough – what I meant was to list main reasons why people who would like to play the Legend don’t do it. There’s no point in including “I don’t like the gameplay” among those reasons, imo.

Not everything has to appeal to everyone. If it was to be like that, there would be nothing unique.

Lonewolf Kai.3682:

Rym.1469:

In general, I could give four bullet points explaining four main reasons why you don’t see any Ventari Revenants:

• 1. Druid exists. And it’s not burst healer – it’s burst and sustain healer. It not only brings heals, but also unique damage buffs, most importantly Grace of the Land. If Celestial Avatar went to 15-20s CD, problem would be fixed, but that would require lowering powercreep.

• 2. Ventari has no real defensive ability to prevent focus or lower damage it takes for some period of time. Now you can at least knockback foes with #0, but it doesn’t help much.
  To improve Ventari here, Protective Solace should do something more than just block projectiles – it should be something Ventari Revenant could use to lower the pressure.

• 3. Ventari has no stunbreak. Stunbreak on Purifying Essence or Elite would fix the problem.

• 4. Salvation specialization is outdated, but most importantly, doesn’t synergize enough with concepts behind Ventari. Legend has been tuned to have it’s healing output based on very high +% outgoing healing bonuses, but Salvation doesn’t give enough +% baseline. Almost all bonuses like these require specific gear, traits that restrict more valuable utility choices in same tiers (condition cleanse for example).

• How to combat this?: Salvation Grandmaster minor increasing outgoing healing % by 15% (same as Tempest and less than Druid which weren’t balanced as much around this and have stronger base heals) should probably be bumped to 30-50%, so any Ventari Revenant picking up Salvation can play Legend as it was meant to be played.

These would be my top 4 reasons.

While those are your top 4, I’d add in that one of the biggest probable reasons is the tablet micromanagement needed to play Ventari. I hear this, and I include myself in it, as one of the most common reasons.

While it can be another reason, I think rather than concept of Tablet micromanagement being bad, the issue lies within small things, like a tad too small radius (240 instead of 300), #6 having shorter range than Tablet’s leash range, it being too slow sometimes. Honestly, recent patch showed that small changes to Ventari can improve it’s gameplay – you can easily see the difference if you played it before.

Next small changes like making Tablet healing more obvious to allies (green “+” above fragments for example) could surely make it even more intuitive for both Revenant and allies.

I see and understand that not everyone might be sold on Tablet micromanaging, collecting shards/fragments to heal, but after playing it for a bit you can get use to it and I like the concept. It’s a unique playstyle, something that requires more thought and feels more fun than nearly every other support in this game which is basically mindless shout spam. It certainly has it’s flavour and I’d prefer for Ventari to stay.

To me, Ventari Revenant as a concept is basically the healthy design GW2 should have more of.

No, because buffs they attempted to make were terribly misplaced and haven’t touched core issues of OH Sword.

Personally, I’d hit condition cleanse and disable elites during CS.

I like Duelling version of the build a lot, Inspiration option feels cheesy.

If anyone is interested, there’s short VoD from my today’s Ventari Revenant stream in Unranked PvP:

https://www.twitch.tv/rym69/v/62150062

It is obviously Unranked so quality of matches is questionable and as I said above, it is obvious that Ventari is not worth playing over other Revenant builds or other supports, but if someone, like OP, is wondering how’s Ventari doing, there you go.

Build

In general, I could give four bullet points explaining four main reasons why you don’t see any Ventari Revenants:

• 1. Druid exists. And it’s not burst healer – it’s burst and sustain healer. It not only brings heals, but also unique damage buffs, most importantly Grace of the Land. If Celestial Avatar went to 15-20s CD, problem would be fixed, but that would require lowering powercreep.

• 2. Ventari has no real defensive ability to prevent focus or lower damage it takes for some period of time. Now you can at least knockback foes with #0, but it doesn’t help much.
  To improve Ventari here, Protective Solace should do something more than just block projectiles – it should be something Ventari Revenant could use to lower the pressure.

• 3. Ventari has no stunbreak. Stunbreak on Purifying Essence or Elite would fix the problem.

• 4. Salvation specialization is outdated, but most importantly, doesn’t synergize enough with concepts behind Ventari. Legend has been tuned to have it’s healing output based on very high +% outgoing healing bonuses, but Salvation doesn’t give enough +% baseline. Almost all bonuses like these require specific gear, traits that restrict more valuable utility choices in same tiers (condition cleanse for example).

• How to combat this?: Salvation Grandmaster minor increasing outgoing healing % by 15% (same as Tempest and less than Druid which weren’t balanced as much around this and have stronger base heals) should probably be bumped to 30-50%, so any Ventari Revenant picking up Salvation can play Legend as it was meant to be played.

These would be my top 4 reasons.

We need patch that would give us balance and profession update, not balance hotfix.

Some changes were good, many were mind-boggling,

General impression of the patch is the same as for the one before – couple hotfixes to patch some things in the meta, but yet still no balance “Update” that would open up alternative playstyles, allow build diversification, update useless traits/skills or reduce powercreep across the board.

Hammerguard.9834:

Blizzard doesn’t need 90% of their community to come to the forums to tell them how stupid a decision they never made was.

Ashran.

FeelsBadMan

No, it’s not. It’s hillarious decapper though and could maybe hold points.

EDIT: So far, I’ve had best success with this build: .

Make no mistake, this is not nearly as powerful as Power Revenant or Condi Rev, but does the best of all post-patch Ventari builds I’ve tested today and is at least something refreshing. It’s certainly not ESL competitive, but gameplay is fun and there are many little cool things you can do with it. Heals are decent and damage isn’t terrible due to semi-offensive amulet. Addition of mandatory PvP Legend – Shiro – gives it some decent mobility and stun break.

I guess Devastation could be better than Salvation for personal sustain and damage, since Salvation is pile of kitten in general, but I kinda like the regeneration/blind and I enjoy picking up healing roots if the RNGesus is merciful and they spawn within reach.

Once you start messing with improving amount of profession-specific resources, traits that give more of it generally become “baseline” for any serious spec. That would happen if there were traits giving you more energy generation. It’s a big no no and I’m glad they’re not messing with it.

One note from myself: Long time ago, during Beta Weekend Events I was suggesting small rework of Invigorating Flow.

Instead of random small self-heal every 5 seconds, it would spawn one of small healing Orbs that Staff Autoattack creates for every 10 energy spent. It would not only make the trait a bit more interesting, but also give Tranquil Benediction better synergy – each traited orb would give little bit of Regeneration and Swiftness, making Glint less required.

Alternatively, this trait could change places with Shrouding Mists. Then Invigorating Flow could additionaly pull existing Orbs to the most injured allies/ally within 600 radius upon invoking Legend that would be a real improvement to Support builds.

If Shrouding Mists and Equilibrium were in the Invocation Master Tier (Tier 2) already, we could also move Charged Mists there and make the whole tier about managing the below/above 50 energy treshold where each of 3 choices could cater to different playstyle.

• Equilibrium – Burst option: either damage on swap or small self-heal.

• Shrouding Mists – Support/defensive option: Increased healing or reduced damage.

• Charged Mists – Mightstacking option, oriented most likely for sustained damage or condition builds.

This way Invocation could have one more new Grandmaster trait. With Rolling Mists, Invigorating Flow the third option could provide more self-sustain, utility or maybe interaction with boons.

The change was obviously aimed at PvP, not PvE. It’s just talk to avoid the disussion.

There is one explanation for Deathly Chill change – they wanted it to go away for now. That’s it. They haven’t added any synergy with new version of trait, in fact, only reduced the potential synergy by nerfing whirl finisher on Soul Spiral.

It’s just a shame that no other GM Reaper trait could actually replace it.

They wanted to plainly kill Deathly Chill for the season. Thing is…there isn’t really a good GM option in Reaper specialization now, since they didn’t really give any alternatives.

Honestly, there are many changes that I’m scratching my head at. Has to be the weirdest balance patch I’ve seen.

Mallyx Revenant will probably do much better than Warrior and have better Resistance uptime, but I could see Warrior being the next good thing for duelling Mesmers.

If they didn’t have condi cleanse.

This is the weirdest balance patch yet.

Did Spinal Shivers buff affect the Chill of Death, too?

I got to ~25k DPS on test golem without full ascended setup.

I can certainly say that I’m not really satisfied with changes, as I feel like, again, barely anything got fixed and there’s no real initiative for alternative playstyles.

Ventari feels better, but still no way as powerful as Tempest or Druid, working 3x as hard to achieve same or worse effects. With shorter delays, instant tablet movements and especially instant elite that is rather dank knockback it could see some play and I will be testing some builds tomorrow on stream, but I think both Power and Condi Rev are much better.

Actually, they haven’t nerfed much.

But haven’t fixed much either. Ventari feels much better, but Salvation traitline is still a kittenshow.

Check here: https://www.reddit.com/r/gw2esports

Olrun did an amazing job some time ago and compiled lists of top tips for some professions and in specific matchups.

Surely an entertaining match. Thanks to oRNG for giving us a good show. Best wishes to all of them.

As a bonus, swap damage with hydromancy+leeching. Combined with Equilibrium, there’s your instant AoE burst.

Shatterstone will get a 10% buff.

Hey,

Guild Wars 2 is harder to balance with health sacrafices than GW1 was, yet many would like to see that risk/reward on Necromancer.

What if theoretical future sacrafice e-specialization was sacraficing Endurance instead of Health? Such thing would eliminate the need for tremendous self-healing, make Endurance bar something you use not only for dodges and be very distinct.

Just couple of my loose thoughts.

Indeed, it looks amazing!

I’m not too jealous, though. Maybe Revenant will get some cooler sword AA animation in the future – this one took 3 years and is real improvement to Ranger gameplay.

Varezenem.2813:

Rym.1469:

Yes, but apart from being fun, it brings nothing over Druid or Tempest, realistically speaking.

It does bring a bit more than a tempest but lacks healing and is harder to use.

Indeed that could be little exaggeration, but still, as it is right now, I wouldn’t bring it over other healers, maybe just for fun.

Minstrel’s gear having Power instead of Toughness could help Ventari/Glint Revenant a lot, such a shame that they went with this ultra-defensive stat combination. Or, honestly, any stat with high Healing Power, Power and some boon duration.

Yes, but apart from being fun, it brings nothing over Druid or Tempest, realistically speaking.

Before you start changing Druid/Ranger you have to realise that the reason why people don’t play DPS builds is that most of Druid’s damage comes from pets and that Ranger’s non-Staff weapons basically suck dong against semi-decent players.

It triggers every elite effect when it procs.

There are options for cleanses scattered around – I would rather focus on updating those – cleanse on roll in Salvation, Purifying Essence on Ventari, Resistance and many other anti-condi things.

If you ask about more removal on popular PvP builds then I have to disagree. Last thing I want is profession going away from it’s concept ideas.

This is most likely caused by going underwater or picking up environmental objects with facets on. Common bug and there are even more bound to underwater when it comes to Revenant. Reported multiple times during Betas, like many other Rev bugs.

It should fix itself after a minute or so or you can swap legends couple times to fix. Not much else you can do.

I can’t predict what will be buffed or reworked – possibly some help to Power Necro, but no idea what will they choose.

As for nerfs – I could see nerf to Stability uptime on Reaper’s Shroud with Foot in the Grave being buffed to provide more of it.

I would gladly see Deathly Chill’s concept being reworked with simple idea I’ve been hammering on for years – instead of doing DoT damage by itself, it should punish frequent small condition clears when maybe not affecting full condi clears with one skill.

I think Plague Signet could use small nerf (CD to 35s?), but only if Condition Mesmer gets nerfed (at least CS+Moa), too.

Chaith.8256:

If the nerf everything patch ever happens, it’s definitely in order for a phase traversal nerf. I’d probably predict a nerf to 16 seconds in cooldown, (and Riposting Shadows refilling 25 endurance). It’s good to promote other skills/legends for decent intra-profession balance.

Very much doubt such long CD will ever be added – I could see increase in Energy requirement to 30-35 or shorter range, but adding 5s+ cooldowns really negates whole idea of energy management which is supposed to be profession’s mechanic.
Also, in order to promote other legends they also have to first fix said Legends. Currently, any PvP Revenant build without Shiro is mediocre at best.

As for OP – this is common among all shadowsteps. If it’s to be nerfed, I would rather see global nerf to shadowstep mechanic as a whole and save LoS ignore behaviour for very few specific abilities with cooldowns.

dominik.9721:

I’d say the build diversity is even pretty good in comparison to other classes.Considering you can play power revenant with invocation, power revenant with retribution or even condition revenant with mallyx, you have 3 viable options which is more than most other classes have.

Most stuff that I would consider broken is shared among Condition Revenant and Power Revenant. Be it Riposting Shadows, Precision Strike, Versed in Stone proc, mobility.

Nerfing one affects the other – the difference between Condition Rev and Power Rev is, more or less, one traitline, one legend and a Mace/Axe instead of Staff. It would be very easy to make both unviable or broken in one change.

I’m requesting nerfs and I’ve been requesting them for a long time. All I’m asking for is something more than “X has 2s more cooldown and does less damage” from entire balance update.

Themistokles.1238:

And all are asking for hard Nerfs. But if someone says, “What will the Revenant get for the Nerf?” Everyone is raging on him.
(…)
All what some of you guys and ladys want to do is to delete Rev from PvP. But if you want to be part of the PvP, why Rev shouldn’t be able to stay there too.

I can agree.

You have to understand that (more reasonable) Revenant players are not trying to deny strength of Power Revenant or speak against nerfing it – in fact, quite the opposite, we want the changes probably more than Thief or Warrior players. But we also want something in exchange, some alternative, healthier playstyle.

Looking back to the last “balance patch” for Revenant which consisted of absolutely no updates that could incentivize other playstyles, builds or traits but focused almost entirely on tweaking one build, you can understand people are afraid of that single build becoming unviable. Revenant doesn’t have unique utilities that would justify bringing him despite underperforming like Portal+Moa on Mesmer and decapping of Thief.

While I appreciate that you guys like the (extremaly outdated) thread and digged it out somehow, I won’t be making any updates or further suggestions if I don’t see any Dev interest in updating other aspects of Revenant than just changing and tweaking Shiro/Glint in balance updates or expressed in other way.

If I do in the future, it will be probably on reddit where it can attract dev attention.

Bjarkov.9751:

Well tbh, my only problem with rev is how it makes my warrior completely useless in pvp. Sure damage is about the ‘same’, even though the cooldowns on some rev skills are far to short, looking at the amount of damage they give out… Revs just have more utility, more dps and more sustain than a warrior (counting on berserker stance and endure pain isn’t really a good option)… Sure dps on burn warrior is good, and its even better on gunflame warr, but still, it just seems VERY lackluster compared to the utility and dps that the rev offers.

Here is what i think would be the best scenario, when viewed from a pvp standpoint. Nerf all classes except warrior, thief and maybe guard. Give eles the option to go dps, without being squishy as kitten. I think queue times would be too high i you went with the “only one class of the same type, per team, per game” idea, but something needs to be done, and atm there are only 7 classes in pvp (thief and ele is split in 2 halves and warrior doesnt count as a class :P)

Dont get me wrong, i arent hating on rev for being ‘op’, and i myself played op classes to get to legendary, primarily ele support, necro and engi. But i still dont like the fact that the current balance and the current classes, make other classes completely useless. NO class is tankier than engi, NO class give the amount of physical damage that the rev does, NO class can compete with necro when you look at the amount of condies it gives and NO class even come close to compete with the ele when looking at support/healing.

Revenant isn’t something that holds Warrior behind or useless. It’s Warrior design after Specialization Patch.

Let’s say Revenant is unplayable – you still have the other 7 elite specializations, some stepping on old Warrior niches far more than Revenant (tanky Scrapper and CC for example). And being completly honest, Condi Warrior’s best 1v1 is Power Revenant atm.

Warrior has very basic design Berserker really hasn’t improved at all and doesn’t have whole lot of utility – it’s also about landing burst or chain bursting and such things are just unviable against sustain powercreep many builds have nowadays.

There are multiple things that should be changed in Revenant. There is need for nerfs, but there is also huge need for various buffs, updates and redesigns.

Riposting Shadows endurance restoration and Precision Strike 1v1 surely are a problem in PvP, but…if they just keep on nerfing Revenant without actually making effort and updating things long overdue (entire Salvation traitline, Ventari, Jalis, promised Mallyx rework, Sword OH, half of the traits in Corruption that don’t make sense and multiple other pre-specialization patch traits scattered around all specializations except Herald) the Revenant can quickly become a barren wasteland.

There are also other bad outcomes – nerfing Sword damage won’t help PvE. Revenant is already at the edge of being worth bringing to raid, many groups just don’t take 1 anymore and, let’s be honest, it’s pretty kittening dull playstyle already being reduced to Chronomancer’s kitten.

Tl;dr – Revenant needs updates because when third part of it is OP in PvP, the rest is somewhere in beta state, left in dust. And if you keep on nerfing and not giving any alternatives in exchange, as Balance Team seems to be doing, this will end badly for both PvP and PvE.

A lot of Revenant should be fixed this Balance Patch, not only Jalis and Ventari.

Should.

Interesting.

As for Condition Revenant, I will add that Herald basically enables it – gives reliable Stability that can cover absolute lack of stunbreak in Mallyx and improves boon duration which is extremaly needed, since you need to have enough Resistance to survive against conditions outside big teamfights where Pain Absorption would be enough.

I’m also quite curious why ArenaNet has stopped promoting their tournaments with carrots on the stick like precursor giveaways on streams. Yes, that’s quite cheap and brings PvE players, but you have to drag them there somehow to show that Season 2 is much better than infamous Season 1. Some may get interested. Even other big e-sports games have tons of such carrot giveaways.

Okay, I will answer this quickly for Revenants overall:

• If you are running Glint you can Blind stomp with Gaze of Darkness as you described. Alternatively, Staff #3 can be used to Blind before you start stomping, but that’s rather unreliable

• If you are running Retribution you can use upkeep Facet of Nature + dodge roll for Stability and immediately start stomping. FoN will make the 2.x second Stability stack into little over 3s required for stomping, that’s enough for 1v1 stomp most of the time.

• If you are running Enhanced Bulwark trait with Retribution, just dodge roll to get 2 Stability stacks and stomp.

• If you run Mallyx Revenant or have other source, Resistance will allow you to resist Necromancer’s downstate Fear without need for Stability.

• In teamfight, you should Sword AA with quickness on downed body unless there’s nobody else to stomp.

• You can avoid downstate CC from professions using projectiles in downstate if you happen to be using Hammer or Ventari (for some reason). Just Hammer #4 or put Tablet with Protective Solace (bubble) on top of stomped enemy. This will work against Revenant, Warrior, Engineer.

• If using Jalis, put road (Inspiring Reinforcement) on top of stomped body to get pulsing Stability.

• In addition, Staff #2 is very effective way of interrupting rezzes/stomps.

• General rule – unless you’re running Enhanced Bulwark, you’re not the best at stomping as Revenant. That’s said, both Power and Condi rev are extremaly strong at cleaving downed body due to abyssmal damage and CC and can easily capitalize on enemies that overcommit to rezzing. Stomp if you have to, but you’re not the best at it.

Hope it helps.