Guild Wars 2

What you mention has always been there and yet mesmers were never op. Now they are, but the guilty is not distortion but the fact that you can be lockdown + shatter + stealthy.

Except that the vast majority of the population plays mostly PvE and not PvP
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1WyVFfM50DRzRIQxFRJ9_4F4FU6TN7UOZmm2bElchEkA/viewanalytics#start=publishanalytics

Plus, it’s precisely because people get bored playing PvE that they need to improve it.

Finally, the fact that a PvP-balanced game (because whether you believe it or not, the developers balance the game for PvP and not PvE) is not balanced for PvE is mostly a proof that the PvE is bad.

Also I want to say that I think the core specialization was great in many ways and is a much healthier base to improve on. It is still fairly new and they haven’t done any balancing yet. Or to be precise, they rushed into a few which were a bad idea and I am happy that they take their time instead of doing stupid nerfs (like nerfing to the ground some mesmer traits nobody complained over but keeping the “op” ones).

I’m not sure about the “no utilities when using your weapon”. The death shroud (or other transforms like Lich form, Rampage etc…) is meant to be a powerful transformation that you can’t have all the time and with extra survivability, so the lack of utility is not as much of a problem. Here you’re saying you should have utilities ONLY when using the transforms, which sounds dangerous.
The way I meant it was rather you are invoking on a legend but you only “become the legend” when you decide so. So you always have utilities available.
Essentially, in my system, “F1” would be “become the legend” and “F2” would be the legend swap.

For PU, I haven’t used it myself since patch, so I don’t know how powerful this is really. While stealth is broken on its own, is stealth duration really game changing? Does it take much more than the 3s of torch stealth to prepare a burst?

@DresdenAllblack
Really no, please! I don’t know why everyone thinks that is a good idea. The weapons don’t work that tightly with the legend that you want to switch them together. I gave somewhere else the example that staff actually pairs very well with Jalis and hammer very well with Ventari. There is no reason to switch both at the same time except removing some of the flexibility the weapon switch brings back.

+ D/D elementalist has so much mobility that you can come back to melee much easier than the revenant staff.

Pick Vabbi if you want a hopeless case and the opportunity to constitute 50% of all the population during european low times :p

I’m fairly ignorant in terms of zerg fights, but if the meta is now more ranged than ever, isn’t reflection a bigger thing than before? Sure, many AOEs are not reflectable (wells, marks, meteor shower…) but many ranged AA are.
I am just a mesmer who has mostly roamed but is interested in zerg fights if only my server had a larger population…

Actually the skill was very similar in animation to hammer 3 which was not even invulnerable.

Well that does depend on how you activate it. It can be as a kit, meaning it takes a utility slot. Or it can be triggered as a weapon-swap (if you swap weapons, you switch to currently activated legend-skills, swap again, back to your weapon). It can be similar to death shroud, activated using the F1-F5 slots (F1= become the legend, F2=swap legend)…

But even 20 skills is still an improvement compared to the current 15, especially because it adds the most needed 1-5 flexibility.

It’s even more fun if you think that may explain why they don’t want to give us good condi weapons :p

I agree. They can fix the damage easily (it’s just a number). They can add a gap opener for hammer and a better gap closer to staff. But the lack of flexibility and customization is a tough one and needs more than a few tweaks.

@Bhawb.
I believe the developers think that adding conditions to ourselves is a strength. So they consider the extra condition “an additional effect”. They want to see us putting conditions on ourself and then sending them or “boonifying” them BUT they wanted the revenant to have resistance and not us…

Well you have 1 weapon set (5 skills), 2 “kits” (10 skills) and 2 utility sets (10 skills).
I am not sure how energy should be handled. My feeling is that it should not affect skills 1-5 in the first place. But it would be possible to use the energy to fuel the “kits”, yes.

Well they like symmetry. They wanted 3 class of each armor. They wanted one class for each armor without weapon swap (ele, engineer, revenant), now they can very well have one class per armor type with decent access to stealth (mesmer, thief, revenant).

No it does not have any link to the weapon. Else it is too much different skills. It only depends on the legend.

I would like to add one possibility that has not been listed.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/revenant/Suggestion-Legend-specific-1-5-skills/first#post5279427

I like this thread, it is the most complete on the lack of flexibility of the class.

Hi
The forum is unfortunately getting full of posts often very similar, and the best way I found to solve that was adding one more :p
Many people felt that the class lacks versatility because of only one weapon set and the possibility to switch utilities does not make up for it simply because 1) utilities are not as central to the play style as the weapon set 2) since we are constrained in the choice of utilities (we take all the legend or nothing), it feels like we have as much or even less “desirable” utilities as the other classes, and not more. Moreover, the weapon skills are often very specific (1 range, 1 support, 1 condition melee) to compare with for example the elementalist attunements which allow support, defense and damage in the same weapon.

Many suggestions have been made in the forum, in particular a simple weapon swap. However, I would argue (as some others did) that it would not fit the theme as much. Some suggested that the weapons behave differently according to the legend currently invoked. This would imply way too much work as one would need 5 skills per legend per weapon. Some suggested to simply add an effect to the skills depending on the legend, like a condition if using Mallyx etc…. But that would still not fix the range problem and only partly fixes anything else actually.

So my suggestion (actually not only mine) is to have for each legend a set of 1-5 skills where you “become the legend”. One could thus swap between the usual weapon and the legend-specific skills. In total, one would have access to an equivalent of 3 “weapon sets” and 2 “utility sets” so 25 skills, just like the elementalist. But in terms of development time, this would be much less than elementalist because adding a weapon set and a legend would mean developing 15 new skills as opposed to the 25 (5×4+5) for an elementalist. Also, the effect when you become the legend could use the ones currently used for the elite of Mallyx and Jalis. I really love in particular the Mallyx effect and I would love fighting more like this.

Since there is currently 5 legends, the developers would have to create 25 new skills, which is a lot of work, but flexibility is really badly needed on the revenant and I feel that is the best way to do it.

I have already suggested this but I think the best way would be that each legend brings with it a set of 1-5 skills not linked to the weapon. So in total, we would have 5 weapon skills, 5 legend1 skills, 5 legend2 skills and 5 utilities for each legend so 25 skills. That would become a highly versatile class, on par with elementalist for number of skills available during a fight, but with still less total skills available (and thus less skills to develop). For example, adding a weapon + 5 utilities (for each new elite specialization) mean 25 more skills for elementalist while it would be “only” 15 more skills for a revenant.

Well for example it is very similar to warrior sword.
AA: mace: 2×4s torment + 3s poison. Total damage coef: 1.35. app. cast time 1 1/4
AA: sword: 2×8s bleeding + cripple. Total damage coef: 1.8. app. cast time 1 1/4

sword’s damage is significantly higher. Torment is 75% bleeding or 150% if moving. Poison is about the same as bleeding. Assuming the enemy is moving, mace has an equivalent 15s bleeding while sword 16. Poison is probably more annoying than cripple BUT cripple allows enemy to stay at melee range.
Mace 3 and sword 2 are similar in many ways (cool down, cast time) but mace is slightly stronger and a blast finisher while sword leaps further and does not cost energy. The leap distance again punishes the mace by making it less sticky.
Finally mace 2 has a LONG cast time preventing it from having any use. Sword 3 has a very high coefficient especially against enemy with less than 50% health.

So overall, I would say the mace is not too bad in its conditions, except that it lacks tools to stay at melee range and it has clearly lower base damage. Boost its damage, make the leap 600, add some kind of soft CC and make skill 2 faster and you have a decent weapon.

It’s the best necromancer condition weapon, which is why condi necro are terrible. Look at good condi classes.

And in the trailer, when channeling Glint I believe Rytlock had no weapons…

It seems to be working now (at least it worked for me). But since this problem does not seem new, I think it should be fixed to prevent players from having a disastrous first experience with the game.
PS: also EU player.

A crippled foe still ticks torment as far as I know. So that could be a way to maintain melee AND tick higher torment. And yes, go to the necro forum and see how little people like the scepter. It is far from being an ideal source of conditions nor damage. So saying the revenant’s mace falls short of it says a lot :p

The shapeshifting idea is about what we are discussing in “Secondary Weapon and 4th Utility”

I’d rather it does not teleport back to its previous location but a bit further back as a way to maintain range (like mesmer phase retreat or one elementalist fire skill I forgot the name)

If I understand well, you want a legend-specific version of weapon skills for each weapon. While that would be great, that is really unlikely because that would mean too much work. The number of different skills would be number of weapons times number of legend which is huge. Some people mention the legend adding a simple effect to each weapon. This requires less work since now the legend effect is the same for all skills (like adding torment if using Mallyx) but that would not fix at all the lack of flexibility of current weapons.

I really don’t think they would do it as it would be a lot of reword, but one could imagine something like necromancer’s death shroud. You have your weapons skills or a transform depending on your current legend which would be maintained thanks to energy. Currently, I probably played wrong, but I didn’t feel that much of difference in gameplay when switching legend. Skills 1-5 is what makes most of your gameplay. We need to have an additional legend-themed 1-5 skills in one way or another.

Well except that Shiro won’t fix the revenant alone. There would still need to be a lot to revamp, so they should not try to appear “proud”.

Still stuck… We tried to make people log out to restart the instance, but people just don’t care…

Yes, I can confirm I was also locked today and tried but ended up on the same megaserver. It is server night time, I believe there is only one instance due to the limited number of players.

It seems this bug is not new. Imagine the impression on someone starting his first gw2 character…

My main, Ljusa Dunkel
still working on the weapons.

The mesmerizing Ljusa Dunkel, my main
Conjurer Pants
Whisper’s Secret Robes
Feathered Mantle

Well F1 is stun break only if traited. Meaning that everyone has to spec in this line. One more sign of how customizable a revenant is:
choose 2 legends out of 5
take a weapon (often corresponding to a legend).

that’s all. thanks for coming

MSFone.3026:

Nobody is running a phantasm build camping three phants and going AA on scepter… or if they are they shouldn’t be.

Well nobody is doing that because of the phantasm overwrite. As a matter of fact, without this, a hybrid phantasm build would be better than the usual assassin phantasm build in both sustained DPS and ramp time (PvE). In the past, if I understood well, all new illusions would overwrite the previous ones, but they fixed so that clones get overwritten in priority. They could most likely easily change so that there is no clone overwrite of phantasm at all.

I like 2 and 3, it’s mostly the AA which destroy all the feeling. It is slow, weak and the generated clone are awful. The AA should apply more conditions so that the scepter clones become more useful + there need to be a way not to generate clone from the AA. Currently, the AA is too slow for the extra clone to really be useful in shatter builds and at the same time punishes phantasm build, so removing it altogether would probably be a good thing. But if one decides to keep this, there should not be any new clone if we already have 3 illusions. Since clone death builds do not exist anymore, I don’t see who would oppose that.

I had an idea which was essentially similar. For each legend, the elite would give you access to a secondary set of skills where you really “become the legend”. It would take the appearance effect we already have for rite of the great dwarf or Embrace the Darkness but give you a new set of 1-5 skills, a bit like the death shroud of necro. Each transformation would increase some of your stats and be fairly powerful (to be worth of the elite slot). Their would have their own range (1200 for mallyx, melee for Jalis…) and feel like you are really fighting like the legend would have.
Alternatively, if we don’t want to have it as an elite since it would necessarily mean short duration, we could have it as a “weapon swap” but without actually equipping a new weapon.

Yes but I don’t think you should force the weapon swap on the legend swap. Both should be independent. I think the inherent problem is the design. To my knowledge, no class has such strong tie between utilities and weapons. On the other hand, I still don’t think they go perfectly hand in hand.
For example: using the staff with ventari and the hammer with Jalis make sense. But I think using staff with Jalis and the hammer with Ventari makes as much (if not more sense). You’re already healing yourself with Ventari, so go hammer and DPS a bit, keeping range, reflecting projectiles with Ventari. Then the enemy goes closer, switch staff and use Jalis. Jalis allows you to tank better and stay in melee range with staff and keeping high heal uptime with staff utilities.

And here I switched both together, but my point was just that weapons can combine very well with “non-native” legend so switching both at the same time may not be a good idea.

It seems this bug has already been noticed by others but apparently not fixed since it just happened to me today. I do not know what triggered it so I will tell all the story. I was on the skyhammer, fighting when I fell out of the cliff and died. Then, when I respawned, my camera was like trapped on the ground, like if my character was in the ground and not above. I could not move, I could just change direction of the camera. Finally, I fell down and arrived in the water below the map. Then, there was no way to come back in the fight above ground.

This is the first time it happens to me, but it is very frustrating.

Other past mentions of the bug I found:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8fOHAoz_j4
http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/28ll4u/a_cool_skyhammer_bug_raising_awareness_of_why/

First, I assume you mean PvE.
Then, I disagree with Jerus. Rampager is the best for mesmer right now (when it comes to condition DPS) because even with scepter, our best condition damage comes from the bleeds of the pistol (or focus) which requires high crits. The scepter-focus/pistol DPS is somewhat fine. To be precise, it would be on par with assassin build if the enemies were attacking more for the confusion to proc (both builds are about identical at around 1 attack/s on the enemy which is more than most PvE enemies). But even in this case, most condition damage by far comes from bleeds.

I thought one could only make a human currently? How do we make a charr (or anything else)?

At range or not for hammer?
(I did not include 25% from vulnerability nor food, may explain most of the differences).

I seriously doubt they will add underwater-specific legend. Don’t get me wrong, that would be nice, but I don’t think so.

I realize it may be difficult to implement but for “Embrace the Darkness” what about “when the skill is active, the effect from your condition is also applied to the enemy”. So you keep your conditions and still suffer from it if you don’t have resistance, but all the damage/effect of the conditions is on the enemy as well.

This can be done effectively by copying 1s of all your current conditions to the enemy every second (that may already be what you suggested).

I don’t think this would be so interesting. The example you give is nice, but in general, I don’t see how to keep the personality of the chosen utility and the personality of the legend together. On the other hand, I really would love 4-5 utilities per legend that you can pick from. We have absolutely not enough customization of the skills set right now.

Agreed that the main problem is the PvE not the class. Necro is unique in its great abilities to manipulate boons and conditions, can maintain high vulnerability uptime… but this is useless in current PvE. However, necro is still weak when it comes to conditions. Engineer greatly outperform necro for example. We should have a better (faster) application of conditions. Currently we need someone else to provide conditions for our condition manipulation to be strong.

I would be essentially fine with that. It would make the class more unique. Currently, I felt that the legend swap did not change the “flavor” enough. Changing the AA would definitely make the legend a more central element.

With those numbers, they would be a clear worst DPS of all professions. But we know the DPS weapon, DPS legend and DPS trait line will be coming. A damage-oriented melee weapon set, some damage modifiers and a boost from Anet and everything will look very different. That’s why I think it is too early to try going for accurate calculations. Everyone is complaining about damage currently, so they will most likely boost DPS (except if we all missed something in the class design). I was mostly disappointed over mace-axe which should be the best condition DPS weapons of the revenant but feel very weak.

An effect based on legend like attunement would be a lot of work. Ele has very few weapons and only 4 attunements. Revenant has already more weapons than ele and the number of legends is meant to increase. It is doable if the effect is generic (like increase damage or add torment or whatever) but not if it is skill-specific.
No, I think weapon swap is really needed. Ele and engi have high versatility, I felt more the opposite for revenant. We have few skills, very limited choice (1 weapon set, 2 legends…). Also, I think there should be more utility skill for each legend so that we can pick. Not very many, maybe just 1 or 2 more, but GIVE US SOME CHOICE!!!!!!!

I did check the coefficients that were on wiki for hammer, mace and axe and added those for staff. I did a very rough cast time estimate (averaged over 10 to 20 casts) and it was not that different from the sum of official cast times. I assume 25 might stacks, fury, banners. I do not pretend my numbers are very accurate, for example I did not include the vengeful hammers which add a small DPS, nor using any utility for that matter (in principle, mallyx can do some damage although I don’t actually think it is a DPS increase especially since all weapons perform better in berserker). I did not include the crit chance which increases over time because it is non trivial to compute (and we already have high crit)

Well if you are in a group who does not provide might, it may benefit the group DPS more than it reduces yours. But in general, PvE or PvP, I agree with Lyrael that the cast time of the fire field is too long. In PvP, I only saw it interesting as a pre-engage skill.