Guild Wars 2

I certainly agree that 10 matches for placement is not nearly enough. What if everyone started at the same rank? Everyone starts at a rating of zero in bronze, for example. Yes, it means that pros will play against new players for the first few games, but it won’t be long before they move up.

Boss Nomad.6487:

Most people seem to have forgotten that there is 5 totally random players on the enemy team and only 4 totally randoms on your team (or 3 if you duoQ). So it is actually more likely that the troll-, unmotivated-, pve-, bad-, “horribad”-, “terribad”- and “kittentibad”-players are on the enemy team.
(Terms in quote marks are terms that ppl who have to blame their team for everything commonly use. If you are one of them, STOP.). It is just EXTREMELY rare that ALL the players who are not playing well are on YOUR team. Yet players make it sound like all of them are in their team. Remember that there are also players better than you in pretty much every game.

It is YOU that make the difference between climbing or dropping. Play better than others? You will climb. Play worse? You will drop. As simple as that.

And NO, the placements are not the reason you are stuck in bronze/silver. If you are better than the other players at that rating, you will climb no matter what teams you get. If you cannot climb, you have to accept the fact that you belong to that rating. This might be very hard to accept but it is a fact. Just remember, you are not there forever. You can always improve. But only if you seriously look into improving.

Simple tips to improve generally:

- Do not blame your team mates for anything.
Blaming your team drops the win rate because they are very likely to respond that they did nothing wrong or with something you did wrong and completely lose focus of the game. In worst cases they can even go afk. You gain absolutely nothing positive by doing this.

- Record your games, look what you did well and what you should have done differently.
You left skyhammer, should you have gone far instead of close?
Should you have went to mid instead of close?
Should you have disengaged from a fight and at which point?
Could you have ressed a team-mate by using a specific skill?
Etc.
There are so many things that you can look for. The answer is not “i already know how to rotate, i am the best, all the others in my team are noobs”, you can always improve. You don’t always even feel like you have improved.

- Keep in mind that it is you that make the difference, not your team. This does not mean that you should be able to carry 4 bad team-mates, you just have to accept that the game did not go that well and move on. In the long run it does not matter.

- Lost a game? Move on. No one can maintain a 100% win ratio.

- Be friendly in chat. Not like “kittenING STOP GOING MID”, more like “Lets go far we cannot win mid”

- Friendly reminders about buffs.

- Use pings wisely. You can ping things like points about to be decapped by enemy, buffs before they spawn. Someone could have an intense fight and forget to look at the map. Do not spam pings and do not draw 20000 lines between mid and close only causing confusion.

- Use skills wisely, don’t just spam all skills and then wonder why you died.

These are some good points, and I agree that, while placements may be inaccurate, it is very possible to recover from a bad placement with dedication and skill.

I would add one more tip that I think is very important in being able to raise your ranking:

Play like you can win, regardless of the skill level of your teammates. You will not win every game and you can not carry every game, but as Nomad says, if you are better than the average player in the game, your win chance should be greater than 50%. If you get discouraged and give up and blame everything on your teammates, it is unlikely that you will be able to play at your best. This can result in a negative spiral in which you lose then get discouraged and that causes you to lose some more. If you can control your mental state, you should be able to perform at your best regardless of the state of the game. And that will lead to more wins.

Diru.4531:

Give an MMR point for playing a match. This will get rid of the players who placed well but aren’t actively participating in the season. The number one spot in NA right now has played 11 matches total. This is easy to implement. Just add the total amount of played ranked matches to a players current MMR rating and start giving an extra point per match.

Reward individual player performance. In Platinum and Gold tiers have a point penalty for underperforming. In Silver and Bronze tiers have no penalties, but point bonuses for performing well.

Penalty examples:

• Most deaths
• No top stats in a match

Reward examples:

• Least deaths
• Multiple top stats in a match

Team based MMR only makes sense when the teams are evenly matched. The chances of this happening decreases significantly in lower divisions, yet the punishment for losing a match remains the same. There needs to be at least some incentive to keep playing your best when your teammates aren’t doing well.

I think these ideas are reasonable, though they would probably generate some salt…I definitely agree that the top players should not have 11 games total played when there are others who have 80% win rate and on the order of 100 games.

My solution would be to have everyone start in Bronze (e.g. at a rating of zero) and work their way up. There would be several effects of this, some positive and some negative, but ultimately I think it would be a beneficial change. Here’s why:

-I don’t think 10 games for placement is enough to accurately measure someone’s true rating. As a result, many players are ranked too high or too low initially, and have to play a lot more games to reach their true rating. If those players simply choose to play very few games, they can retain an inaccurate rating for a long time, presumably for the whole season.

-All inexperienced or unskilled players would get stuck in bronze, rather than a small percentage getting lucky in the first ten games and getting into gold (for example) where they can cause problems for more skilled players.

-I understand this means that the first games for everyone would have players from a wide skill level distribution and that newbies could end up playing against ESL pros. However, over a short period of time, the pros would advance in rank and the less skilled players would not, so this would only be a transient problem.

I think the matchmaking itself is decent but my primary concern is with the inaccuracy of the placement matches.

The season 5 matchmaking system is not perfect, however. While I think the matchmaking for games is accurate and encourages competition, I am not impressed with the system of determining initial rankings from the first 10 games.
As of 12/25/16, there are two people in the top 5 on the NA leaderboard with only 10 total games played (10 wins, 0 losses). While it’s good to allow people with fewer games to outrank people with more games, it nonetheless seems excessive for players with 100% W/L at 10 games to outrank players with 80%+ W/L at 100 games (for example). I do not think 10 games is sufficient to determine someone’s initial rating.

Additionally, W/L ratio seems almost unrelated to ranking (I understand it shouldn’t have a 100% correlation, but it should have some correlation). I would like to see all players start at bronze and climb up to their actual rating, rather than the wide diversity we see in season 5 where some players started in bronze and others in platinum, and their rating was very volatile for a while. The problem presented by this current method is that rating gain/loss from each game is reduced as the number of games played increases. An inaccurate placement after the first 10 games requires more games played to bring someone to their accurate rating than a player who was placed appropriately during the first 10 games. For example, if I have the skill level of a gold player but I get unlucky during my first 10 games and get placed in bronze, I will need to play lots of games to eventually reach my true rating. I will eventually get there because if I am better than the average player at my current rating, my W/L ratio will be greater than 50% – but it might take hundreds of games. On the other hand, if my true rating is bronze and I got luckily carried during the first 10 games, then my rating would drop over time to get back down to my true rating. But if I chose not to play very many games I could stay at a rank higher than my true skill level. As a result, I would like to see players all start at bronze rating. Skilled players will move up to their true rating, and unskilled players will stay in bronze.

A minimum number of games could then be required for each division – just to ensure the rating is accurate. I don’t think 10 is enough. For example, players could 25 games played to be allowed into silver, 50 for gold, 75 for platinum, and 100 for legendary. Of course, you can play 100 games and still be bronze if you play poorly. But this higher division-based minimum games played requirement will prevent things like W/L 10-0 players achieving the top ranking with only 10 games played.

My review of sPVP season 5 so far:

Some background on my playing experience: I have played GW2 since launch. I mostly play WvW, and spend less time in PvE and PvP. I started at bronze rank around 850, with a low W/L (3 wins,7 losses) and have since climbed to mid silver (around 1150) with around 60% win rate overall in 80 total games. I have played solely using power Revenant.

Overall, I think there are several significant improvements in the ranking system for season 5 compared to earlier seasons. The separation of rewards (pips) from ranking is great and works as intended. Most games I’ve played consist of players that seem to genuinely care about winning, regardless of the skill level of each player. I think the increased dedication in general may be responsible for some of the complaints about players being stuck in a rating they don’t think they deserve. Even bad or inexperienced players will try to win, and so there is good competition even at low ratings. I played my first 20 games or so without being really serious about winning. Then I became more dedicated to winning and my win rate since has been around 75-80%. My personal score at the end of the vast majority of my games shows me contributing atleast my fair share with 20% or more of my team’s damage, kills, revives, and offense or defense, and less than 20% of my team’s deaths. I do not believe it when players claim that they are unable to advance their due to flaws in the matchmaking system – if your rank is low, I would encourage you to practice more or play more seriously, and again I say this as someone who has a low rank myself. I have been able to attain a decent win rate and slowly raise my ranking by playing seriously. Some things that I have been doing as part of ‘being serious’ include:

-Don’t play when tired, unfocused, or distracted. Don’t multi-task while playing
-Warm up if necessary with unranked or hot join games before playing ranked games. Making mistakes (e.g. playing below your potential) during ranked games should not happen often.
-Don’t experiment with builds while playing ranked games
-Discipline yourself to pay attention to the map state during the game – don’t worry about kills, kill/death ratio, or other measures of personal performance.
-Make sure that each choice you make – whether to engage in combat or disengage, which point to fight at, etc., is deliberate and made solely with the objective of helping your team win the game (rather than, for example, fighting an enemy you wish to fight or boosting your kill count). Don’t be in a rush – a smart choice made slowly is more valuable in many circumstances than a poor choice made quickly.
-Talk with your teammates. If something needs to be done (e.g. decapping far, or capping home while everyone is zerging mid), don’t be afraid to do it yourself if you are in a good position to do it or if your teammates will not do it.
-Check out who you’re fighting against (which professions) at the start of each match. Change your build and/or your profession appropriately, if you are sufficiently experienced to play other builds or professions skillfully. Similarly, see who is on your team and change your build or class appropriately if your team is lacking a roamer, bunker, support, etc.

I followed most of these points in every game since I started playing ‘seriously’, but I did not follow all of them. I suspect if I followed all of them my win rate would be a little higher. I generally didn’t make changes to my build or my profession based on team compositions (primarily because I would not be able to play as skillfully). However, I recognize that the willingness to do things like this will contribute positively to a high win ratio.

Crowley.8761:

PadreNike.1803:

My observations:
- There are considerably less (rarity actually) Revenants than any other season
- Condi rev is still a rare sight, I may have seen 1 during my climb
- Viper is hard to play correctly and requires lots of practice with the build, beginners better use Carrion/Wanderer
- Condi rev still has a surprise factor advantage due to it’s rarity
- The recent buff to pain absorption (stun break) is a game changer
- Play it right against the up and coming burn guard and you can insta pop them (that means let them burn burst you and transfer it back to them with pulsating pestilence while giving yourself resist)
- Try to be in team fights as much as you can, although you can beat anyone 1v1 with this build, this isn’t your role
- There is however a big downside to condi rev and that is that a good thief will just shut you down completely, a good thief can stick to you 24/7 and +1 anything you do, hence try to be in team fights, think of yourself like necro, the anti-bunker condi cleave machine
- Power rev is still viable and deadly in the right hands, it just requires a much higher skill cap, Toker has 4 accounts in the top 25 NA playing power rev, the only problem is what happens if you’re not Toker

What I find about thieves is that if you stand in the fire patch from #2 you kinda neutralize them. Bad ones will go inside it, decent ones will back off, good ones will find a way to hit you though but you still aren’t powerless against them. It’s just positioning.

In teamfights you can get shafted fast I find, I usually play it as a buffer/support for teamfights and then use the swiftness and 1v1 strength to keep close and far.

I agree that the number of revs is definitely a lot lower now, while the DH and warrior numbers are through the roof. It’s your run of the mill FotM people, since power rev isn’t braindead spam anymore that was to be expected though.

What wep sets are you using btw? I go mace obviously, but instead of shield or sword I use axe for offhand for the interrupt you get from the #5 pull, plus the blink which makes up for not having Shiro imo.

2nd set I rarely go into since we only have one condi wep and I need to keep up the pressure. It’s good for a last resort/hail mary survival to have sword/shield but you do leave ample time for enemy recovery doing that since you won’t be outputting much dmg.

I haven’t tried condi Rev too much (I mostly play power), but I always question using the Sword MH in the second weapon set, especially when using pure condi amulets (e.g. Deadshot, Carrion, or Wanderer’s). Would it be better in these situations to use Mace/Axe and Mace/Shield, for example? That way you can still do damage while you weapon swap, though you do lose out on the evade in Sword 3. With Viper, Sword may be a bit better due to the Power / Precision.

Got it, thanks for clearing that up.

If this is true, then wouldn’t decay actually make it easier to gain rank? If you’re ranked 2000, for example, and get seven days worth of decay, your first game will then be against rank 1300 players (on average). You’ll play an easier game and get +100 rank at the end of it. Repeat 6 more times and just make sure you don’t have any decay accumulated at the end of the season…

I’ve been using a slight modification on the standard Glint/Shiro power build but swapped out Staff for Hammer. Hammer is working great for ranged pressure in team fights. It’s nice to have an option to fight from range without having to run into melee against Necros and trapper DHs. It’s also good against Ele, and decent against Mesmer, but it suffers against Thief. I also have a bit of trouble with it against Druid since they can generally out-sustain it.

Buran.3796:

fluidmonolith.3584:

They’re usually glassy and will die to it fast. DH longbow can’t compete with Rev hammer.

This is funny. Would you care to explain? I mean:

• Every lb skill except # 5 has a faster cast than hammer, which makes them easier to interrupt.

• Longbow AA in a power DH does the same damage over time than hammer AA in power Herald (with DH NOT using Unscathed Contender); takes them 15-16 seconds to kill the heavy golem in the myst hall with marauder stats. But this favors LB due a higher fire ratio increases the number of procs.

• Is almost impossible to land hammer #3 and #5 in not afk players; both are amongst the slowest and more predictable animations in the entire game.

• Coalescence of ruin fails at the slighest slant of terrain. So the best skill of the package is hammer #4, which is a great block . But now take a lok at the longbow:

• Deflecting Shot is a spammable (cd 10s) unblockable skill that pierces, blinds on hit and once traited knockbacks 300 units (every target reached, up to 5) and grants at least 6 seconds of stability to the DH. This and True Shot (cd 4s) both are also 100% combo finishers that clean conditions every time thy cross LB #4.

If the Rev had the DH’s longbow, maybe I would be playing Rev. Saying that Rev’s hammer is better lacks sense to me.

I’m not saying that Rev hammer is better in all scenarios, however from my experience, Rev hammer is great at ranged dueling against most builds as long as your opponent is willing to stay at range (and it is terrible if your opponent decides to melee you). I am also speaking specifically about PvP. So the slow cast on hammer #3 or #5 are fine if you’re attacking a DH bunkering a point, since the DH must then choose to get hit or get off the point and let you decap for a second or two. Most PvP maps are also pretty flat at the capture points, so terrain shouldn’t influence hammer #2 as much there.

Crowley.8761:

Since DH spams are in almost every game, condi rev really shines. I love it when 2 of them drop their traps and I just run right in with my heal 1v1 they are cake really, they can’t go head to head and their bow dmg is crap when they don’t have traps to back them up.

Since the staff nerfs I’ve swapped staff for hammer in the standard power build, and it also wrecks most trapper DHs. Just stay out of trap range and kill them with hammer. They’re usually glassy and will die to it fast. DH longbow can’t compete with Rev hammer.

I did not know this… thanks for the info. That sounds like a bug.

If you are holding down a movement key (e.g. wasd) when you start channeling Crystal Hibernation, you need to release all of them. Then when you push a movement key again, the channel will be broken.

ArthurDent.9538:

OriOri.8724:

Rarnark.5623:

Since season 2 things have been going pretty good. Gentle nerfs to overtuned classes and buffs to guardian/warrior/thief to bring them into viability. However, the last 2 patches you have completely kitten the bed. Nerfing the living hell out of druid condi clear/sustain and now completely axing revenant damage WITHOUT EVEN SEEING what the metagame is since the last lan.

Not to mention you announced season 5 yet THERE IS STILL NO TEAMS because you guys REFUSE to mention anything about the competitive scene/lans/cash prizing for god knows what reason. And even if there was a confirmed event people have no idea what comps to practice because you randomly just delete classes/builds from the meta game. Why hasn’t mesmer been touched as much as druid/rev>!?!?!? Honestly wtf.

It’s moves like this that make people lose faith in this game. shoutouts to everyone who put time and effort into this game to be let down. Shout outs to all the people rolling the dice trying to figure out what class to practice.

You’re better than this.

This is your problem. You expect ANet to “balance” based off of a player imposed meta. That is a bad way to go about balancing a game. ANet nerfed SotM because it was a skill that did everything, and Rev staff was intended as a defensive weapon. If you don’t believe me, look at https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/pvp/Upcoming-Changes-to-Skills/page/3#post6424659 ANet tell you themselves. It was a skill that desperately needed a nerf of some kind, and nerfing its damage allowed it to still fit the design concept of the weapon for Rev.

Balance patches should be focused on what is over/underperforming. And SotM was overperforming for Rev. Did rev need some nerfs to other skills/traits? Probably, and its sad that that wasn’t addressed. But nerfing SotM was a GOOD balancing decision by ANet. It was just too good of a skill. In fact, now that ANet is finally starting to balance around what is over/underperforming instead of around the meta (even though its just barely a start in this direction) we might start to see better balancing come through in the next few iterations

Then allow staff to actually work as a defensive weapon. The 2 and 4 skills are both bad and would still be bad even if they didn’t cost any energy. The auto attack is also bad with completely negligible healing. And now the block is on a similar cool down to other channeled blocks despite having a significant energy cost and being 1 of only 2 skills the weapon is used for. Balance weapon kits as a whole there, is nothing wrong with 1 or 2 strong skills on a weapon set if the other 3 skills are fairly weak. There is a problem when you have 3 weak skills and 2 ok ones.

Unfortunately, I think you are correct here. I have no problem with the 50% damage nerf on SotM – it fits the intended functionality of the weapon. However, other skills do not:

Staff #2 should give CC, but Debilitating Slam is locked behind Punishing Sweep, which is slow to cast and hard to land.
Staff #3 (in PvP) now has a 15 second cooldown, compared to 12 seconds on the Sword OH block. Nonetheless, Staff should be more defensive than Sword?
Staff #4 is slow to cast and thus requires very good situational awareness to use – otherwise you may take a lot of damage while casting it.
Staff auto-attack provides negligible healing in PvP / WvW where moving around specifically to pick up the orbs can cause more damage than they heal.

SotM was overpowered, sure, but Staff as a whole package is fairly weak, and it is now weaker.

Abelisk.4527:

Precision Strike still does its thing… I don’t see what the fret’s about. SotM has evade, along with Staff 3 (also an evade), and then you also have Glint healing and… yeah.

SotM isn’t ever my main method of damage… Sword 3 usually is. Staff is a resistance-type weapon in general too. I was baffled at why the damage for SotM was so high.

I noticed that everyone ignored all the positive buffs and focused on this nerf (divisive). I’m feeling they want Mallyx back in the scene, which is gonna be interesting to see how it all plays out.

I agree in general. There are some harsh nerfs here but most of them aren’t so bad. SotM should not be about damage in my opinion. I don’t really care for the nerf on Precision Strike, since it’s not often that you can hit one player with all of the projectiles. However, I don’t think the change to Precision Strike will break Rev.

My biggest concern is that Staff was only powerful because of SoTM, and is not a viable weapon on its own. I have tried for many hours to use Staff as a primary weapon but haven’t been successful. It’s kited very easily, some skills have long cast times, it uses as lot of energy, and the cooldowns are long. The increased cooldown of Warding Rift is completely unnecessary and pushes Staff even farther from being a viable main weapon. Any cooldown that is shorter than 20 seconds will generally be irrelevant when staff is used only as a secondary weapon, due to the cooldown on weapon swap. So the increased cooldown on Warding Rift does nothing to displace Staff as a secondary weapon to Sword/X, while it significantly reduces the defensive capabilities of Staff if it were to be used as a primary weapon.

To that end, I would like to see the cooldown on Warding Rift reverted. I think the cooldown on SotM could also even be reduced a bit (e.g to 15 seconds), given the heavy damage nerf. Again, this wouldn’t benefit Sword/X users with Staff as a backup weapon, but it might make it more appealing for players to use Staff for more than 10 seconds at a time.

The nerf to Surge of the Mists damage seems huge, but it’s in line with what I expect is the intended functionality of staff (CC, not burst damage). However, I would’ve expected a nerf like this to come with a reduction in energy cost or cooldown.

I don’t think Precision Strike needed the nerf. Yes, it could hit a single target hard, but only under circumstances in which there were no other players, pets, or inanimate objects in range.

The increased cooldown of Warding Rift is also unnecessary, in my opinion.

The reduced energy cost of Debilitating Slam is very welcome, though with the long cast time on Punishing Sweep, I still doubt it will get much use.

And finally, the added stunbreak on Pain Absorption is pretty huge and shouldn’t be underestimated!

If I recall, Crusader amulet used to be in the game but was removed.

lordbachus.6091:

RedDeadFred.1256:

I don’t know if the class needs a redesign, it just needs more skills. If each legend had double the skills, it’d feel a lot less limiting.

Maybe lower cds and raise energy costs. I’d love it if there were no cds and instead it was entirely energy management. They’d obviously have to tweak some numbers, but I think the class would be more interesting. Maybe I’m wrong though.

There is an easy way to add more skills…. make it so that for each stance there is an option to choose stancform i.e. Taking dragon or centaur form and having 5 formspecific weaponskills… just making the forms f1 and f2 and double clicking on them activating this…. in this way it would allow more skills…

I am not sure I understand what you are proposing. Could you please elaborate?

Another option for more skills could be to make ‘mists-themed’ utility skills which can be used in any stance. Weapon skills already include many ‘mists’ influences and text tooltips, such as sword #3, mace #2, staff #3, hammer #3, etc.

Mists-themed utility skills could include things such as stunbreaks, condi removal, or mobility, which are lacking in some legends. I expect these skills would probably need a higher cooldown than is typically seen in other Rev utility skills (e.g, greater than 5-10 seconds), or higher energy costs. Probably higher cooldowns since you could slot the same ‘mists’ skill on both of your legends, then use that skill multiple times in quick succession by legend swapping to reset energy to 50.

I have primarily used Revenant since HoT but am concerned about build variety. Everyone is expecting power Shiro / Glint, and it has a some severe vulnerabilities for counterplay. I played Engi almost exclusively until HoT so should be able to get back into it quickly. I’ve also played Thief a in previous seasons and am reasonably experienced with Warrior. I would probably not play Ele, Mesmer, Ranger, or Necro, as I haven’t played them enough to be competitive by the start of season 5.

Feel free to chime in on how you think any profession or build will perform this season.

First, I think Revenant design is fairly good in general. However, it is certainly not perfect and some improvements could be made. I would further push Revenant towards energy management rather than cooldown management. I would try to improve build versatility by revising poor traits and increasing utility skill options. I won’t give specific examples of changes here since it would be too lengthy, but my general idea is:

More utilities for each legend – I would give each base legend (e.g. not Glint or other elite spec legends) 5 utility skills, of which players could choose to equip 3. Among these, each legend would have access to atleast one stunbreak.

Rebalance weapons to reward smart energy management – I would remove weapon swap and add dual auto-attack functions to each main-hand and two-hand weapon (like on Revenant underwater Spear). I would significantly reduce weapon skill cooldowns across the board, and increase energy costs of a few key weapon skills which would otherwise be spammable without consequence. Weapon skills would then be regulated heavily by energy rather than cooldown timers, which rewards skillful energy management.

Balance the rewards for pooling energy in one legend vs. swapping legends frequently to maximize energy regeneration – Currently, it is often beneficial to swap legends every 10 seconds to generate up to 50 energy. I would give options for players to also make builds which favored pooling energy. This could be done, for example, by providing traits which trigger at high energy, or by changing utility or weapons skills to have increased effect at > 50 energy. Ideally, players could make some builds that favor rapid legend swapping for energy gain while other builds would favor pooling energy with less frequent legend swapping.

InsaneQR.7412:

Einlanzer.1627:

otto.5684:

Rev is not missing weapon, but weapons. Compare total weapon skills with any other class and you will realize that Rev is some where between 10-15 skills behind and not F1-5 skills aside from Glint.

Rev is an incomplete class.

Yeah, my opinion is that it needs two more at base, not including additional elite specs – a hybrid or condi ranged weapon and a hybrid melee weapon. Shortbow and GS make the most sense probably.

New Elite spec will come in next expansion. Problem with the current one is the limitation it gives. Glint is basically mandatory and the facet of nature is not complementary to other legends. Every legends misses something and needs more skills.

Give Rec Greatsword as new ranged condi weapon with torment applications and CC.

Change the F2 Skill depending on legend:
Shiro: Increases dmg done in Area (passive), give AoE swiftness (active)
Jalis: Decrease dmg taken in Area (passive), give AoE Stability (active)
Ventari: Increase healing received in Area (passive), AoE burst heal with waterfield (active)
Mallyx: Reduced incoming Condi Duration (passive), AoE condi and boon cleanse on the respective targets (active)

Give every legend a new skill:
Shiro: Burst life-leech skill for more sustain and oh kitten button.
Jalis: Block skill, something like AoE taunt with a block duration for better tanking
Mallyx: Condi cleanse
Ventari: Stunbreak (and summon on legendswap and no destruction on elite)

Overhaul a lot of traits.

I certainly agree that Rev needs more utility skill options in each legend to improve build diversity. I had previously made some specific suggestions, some of which are similar to the ones you propose (life leech on shiro, block on Jalis, and stun break on Ventari):

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/revenant/More-utilities-per-legend-suggestions/first#post6325936

Story (No spoilers)
There was a good amount of story advancement and several intriguing possibilities for future development. Gameplay in quests was fairly bland and generally served only to advance the story. The last story quest in particular had a confusing boss battle with vague mechanics.

Bitterfrost Frontier
I have mixed feelings on this new map. There are some very interesting mechanics. The series of braziers to protect is meaningful because it supplies players with torches can be used to open chests scattered across the map. There seems to be a good balance between the availability and usage of torch ‘charges’ and the spacing of braziers which serve as a torch supply depot. Frostbite (an unbreakable stun mechanic applied by some enemies and ice storms across the map) is also interesting because it destroys wielded torches. But torch-wielders can also spend a charge for temporary immunity to frostbite. There’s a lot of cool features with this whole setup that really encourages players to protect the braziers.

The map layout, while sporting impressive visuals, seems very patchwork. Terrain ranges from an ancient forest to a Svanir outpost to a hot spring. Regions are crammed next to each other with very little transition between them, which is jarring and makes the map feel very unrealistic. Although the map is moderately large, each individual biome is fairly small and cramped. I would rather see fewer large biomes in a given map with logical transitions between them.

Bitterfrost Frontier is loaded with loot, though I don’t know if this is good or bad. I appreciate that there are a variety of rewards, from expensive / grindy status items, ascended gear, cooking recipes, and minis. Inventory bloat is pretty severe here. There’s lots of reagents needed to craft daily potions which give you temporary access to part of the map.

By “default energy generation gets cut in half”, would be it be easier to represent this as an upkeep? E.g. conjured weapon has an upkeep of -2 or -3 and, like all upkeeps, shuts off if you run out of energy. Maybe -3 would work well for balance, depending on the energy cost of the conjured weapon skills.

Then you could also get rid of the duration cap and reduce the cooldown too. E.g. 10 energy and 3/4 or 1 second cast to summon the conjured weapon, and conjured weapon has an upkeep of -3. Then the cooldown can be reduced to 5 or 10 seconds, since Revenant seems to not have long cooldowns in general.

I agree that it’s good to have the conjure weapon skills be somewhat similar to existing weapon skills to take advantage of traits. But I also think the conjured weapon skills should be stronger (to justify the upkeep cost and cast time to get the conjured weapon). It might be harder to balance them to be stronger than default weapons but not overpowered.

I didn’t play much of Guild Wars 1, does anyone know of any character that might fit the theme for this specialization?

I like the general idea of a weapon master elite spec. Revenant is currently severely lacking weapon options (e.g. only one ranged weapon and only one condition weapon). Your idea would address a lot of these issues.

Not sure about the specific details of each weapon set. E.g. some of them seem to perform very similarly to an existing weapon (e.g. Mace vs. Axe/Axe). Also not sure that Jalis’ weapon autoattack should be ranged, as he is heavily themed as a melee fighter.

What determines which weapon you get? E.g. if I have Shiro and Jalis equipped, do I get the weapon for Shiro when I’m in Shiro stance and the weapon for Jalis when I’m in Jalis stance? Does it cost energy to conjure the weapon? What is the cooldown?

I think the added weapons add a lot of versatility here, so the new legend’s utility skills could be a little simpler. E.g. physical skills like Thief or Warrior have, but more mist-themed.

Norjena.5172:

I agree with the first 2 posts, and disagree with all who think that staff doesn´t need equal dmg to sword.

Without same dmg it will never be an viable (non niche) weapon.

Under what conditions should staff damage equal sword damage?

Without any traits and using a berserker build, sword auto-attack currently does around 8% more damage than staff auto-attack.

However, sword also gets more damage from Devastation traits. It gets a 10% buff (Vicious Lacerations), it applies vuln by default (around 9 stacks maintainable without extra condition duration) which adds more damage, and it attacks faster than staff so it will trigger more life siphoning (Focused Siphoning). So with traits, sword auto-attack damage is atleast 27% higher than staff.

I’m not even going to attempt to estimate the situational dps differences between weapon skill cooldowns (sword 2 & 3, staff 2 & 5).

So do we buff staff by 8% so they’re equal without traits? Do we buff it by 27% so that a fully traited sword-user is equal to an untraited staff user? Do we buff the staff trait in Salvation to increase damage, even though Salvation is thematically opposed to dps?

InsaneQR.7412:

Jack Skywalker.5674:

Well for it to work we would need fewer weapons than we already have and lose weapon swaping. I have toyed with this ideea and played a few games with Mace/Axe + Sw/Sw – obviously the OP beat me to it with this suggestion by posting it first,but here are my 2 cents on the toppic.

From an animation stand point for this ideea to work we would have to lose both hand swords as well as mace mh and axe oh in favor of dagger/dagger due to the fact that the animations of both swords, mace and axe can be recycled easiest within daggers (exception being precision strike from sword mh).

Unfortunetly dagger/dagger would be a poor fit for staff animations and arguably hammer animations, but with dagger/dagger holding the abilities of both hands swords, mh mace and oh axe, the rest of the skills can be condensed within Staff because this weapon is able to mimic animations of all hammer skills….except for Hammer AA which would have to be changed to a fast striking chain (hopefully they recycle the first 2 bits of the animations from melee version because those bits are the most awesome).

You misunderstood a little bit what i meant. I thought of these weapons as we have them now with additional 5 skills you could swap like utility skills as you wanted with weaponswap still working.
In my idea you can run sw/sw on both sets but with different skills in each slot and even mixed up if you wanted to. Or one time Hammer Ranged and one time melee. Or sw/sw on one set with condi dmg and staff ranged ob the other set with condi.
Just how you like it. With several trait fixes this could provide a looooot of build variaty.

Every weaponskill has basically another option you could choose if you will say so and not mixing axe and sword skill or something like that.

It sounds like you are saying that each weapon skill would have an alternative skill you could slot instead? For example, hammer auto-attack would have an alternative auto-attack that might be melee range. Sword #2 might have an alternative that you could slot instead, which does condi damage? So, every weapon skill slot would have two options and you get to pick to slot one of the two.

Since Rev is very limited in weapon options compared to other professions, I think this sounds reasonable. It would be a lot of work for ANet and likely wouldn’t happen except in an expansion. And they might remove weapon swap from Rev if they do it.

They could also look at giving Rev weapons two auto-attacks like Rev spear has underwater. E.g. hammer could have one melee auto attack and one range auto-attack. The only downside is that each auto-attack has its own separate skill slot, so we’d have to lose one skill or condense two skills into one to fit in an additional autoattack on each main-hand or two-hand weapon.

But then would Rev only need one weapon set ever? And how would animations work? If I have equipped a sword and slotted a hammer attack in AA, what would that look like?

It’s a cool idea, but I’m not sure how to make it work…

I’ve been interested in staff since before Rev was released and I’ve spent lots of time trying to make it work (primarily WvW / PvP). Unfortunately, it’s not a competitive weapon right now, though it’s fine to switch into for 10 seconds and use a few skills before switching back to sword.

Since both staff and sword are direct damage weapons, they inherently compete with each other. The problem is that sword is generally better than staff in most areas:

single-target damage: sword wins, and it should (as a dueling-oriented weapon)

-sustain: staff should win…but it really doesn’t. Staff is easily kited and sword #3 provides great sustain

-healing: again, staff should win…but autoattack orbs are hard to pick up when you need to be mobile. And staff #4 heals less than shield #4. Shield, which will be paired with sword, is far better for healing than staff.

range / anti-kiting: sword wins here, but it probably should.

CC: this is where staff could win, but it needs a few tweaks.

I don’t think staff needs more damage, but it has some poor-performing skills that prevent it from being great for CC or sustain.

auto-attack – the heal could be removed and replaced with a defensive condition, like weakness or blind

skill #2 – the first attack is too slow. It might be OP to make the first skill apply daze directly, but I would recommend decreasing the cast time on the first strike to 0.25 or 0.5 seconds.

skill #3 – is fine, IMO

skill #4 – is too slow. When you need to clean condis, you need to do it now. It should be 0.5 second cast.

skill #5 – is good, but the cooldown is long. I would like to see it revised to be more of a CC / evade than a damage skill. The cooldown could be reduced to 15 seconds and the damage reduced by 20%.

Two extra utilities for each legend (no extra elites or heals) would give Rev the same number of utilities as other professions. I made some proposals regarding this earlier:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/revenant/More-utilities-per-legend-suggestions/first#post6325936

List is not in order of importance

-[PvP] more Stronghold PvP map(s)

-[WvW] updated WvW gameplay to integrate modern features used in PvE. For example, gliding should be possible in WvW since it’s such a well-liked mechanic. It could be unlocked in WvW similarly to other WvW skills (e.g. arrow cart mastery) so that it is unrelated to expansion-locked content. WvW maps could also use a graphical refresh to be visually comparable to modern content. Obviously, maps would need to be revised to accommodate gliding.

- [WvW] Significantly more masteries / skills to spend WvW leveling points on, as many people have unlocked everything. Alternatively, adjustment of points needed per level of each skill to have a more exponential scaling so that they take more points to unlock. E.g. currently Guard Killer costs 1, 3, 6, 10, and 15 points for levels 1-5 respectively. It could be changed to e.g. 1, 3, 10, 30, 100.

- [PvE] challenging solo PvE content (e.g. instanced areas or solo Fractals). For example, Fractals can be designed to scale in difficulty depending on the number of players from 1-5. Mechanics requiring multiple players would be modified or removed for 1 or 2 player versions. Of course, rewards would still be greater with more players to encourage group play.

-[All] of course, a new elite spec for each profession

-[All] significant balance updates to refresh unused (poor-performing) traits and skills in each profession. E.g. Guardian spirit weapons.

draxynnic.3719:

It’s a stretch goal, but if the above is done and Jalis is still underperforming, I’d like to see Forced Engagement get a flipover skill that allows it to be used as an actual pull.

That sounds amazing. I would like this. Maybe 25 energy for the first sequence (taunt) and 15 energy for the second (pull)

Eval.2371:

fluidmonolith.3584:

Jack Skywalker.5674:

Malyx without the Demonic Defiance trait from Coruption is very bad.

Unfortunately this has been my experience as well. And if you need Demonic Defiance then you need Corruption. And Corruption is not very good with power builds either.

Why couldn’t it be?

Corruption gives some extra resistance, some good boon rip and the ability to copy back conditions with pulsating pestilence. All of these things help a power build.

I do think that jallis is way superior in dealing with conditions though, the heal cleanses and there are two other skills that reduce the damage of conditions.

That was just my impression from trying it out in WvW and PvP. You lose a lot of damage in a Sword/X power build if you trade Invocation or Devastation for Corruption. In my opinion, the boon rip (2 boons every 25 seconds) and the condition copy (which only matters for CC conditions rather than damaging conditions if you’re using a power build) don’t really make up for the damage loss. It might work in a sort of bunker-ish build that doesn’t care about damage as much, I haven’t tried that. But again, this is just my outlook. I’d like to use Mallyx in a power build, I just haven’t yet found a way to make it work for me.

Jack Skywalker.5674:

Malyx without the Demonic Defiance trait from Coruption is very bad.

Unfortunately this has been my experience as well. And if you need Demonic Defiance then you need Corruption. And Corruption is not very good with power builds either.

BlaqueFyre.5678:

Buran.3796:

Eval.2371:

Buran.3796:

Meanwhile take a look at the Ranger…
The ArenaNet balancing team needs some internal coherence…

I get that your frustrated and need something to attack, but to be frank, shortbow is still useless outside of pve. Anything you can do with short bow, is much easier with longbow

I mean that the change gives them swiftness regadless the skill (which needs a target) hits or not, whereas Unwavering Avoidance (which doesn’t need a target) now demands to actively evade an attack in order to gracefully grant stability. In the same patch.

Previously we can call stability before performing a valuable task (reviving, finishing, starting a slow and powerful attack which we want to protect against interrupts as happens with Chaotic Release or Jade Winds, etc.). Now we have to relegate our inititative, we need to let the enemy to attack first, to command the pulse of the fight if we want to get stability. It’s not viable, doesn’t let me play aggrressively, leading the way in wich we start a fight, and is utterly useless if you face classes with broad access to stealth.

Even worse: before we have the choice to get stability and tank attacks and exchange hits against, lets say, a Berserker with mace + shield + Head Butt if we want, and it was arguably a better option than rely on breakstuns, because we have no access to 3 breakstuns in short term. Now you can’t and if you miss one single evade you will eat a chainstun while having at most a couple of breakstuns. Is even more funny because as a Herald our viable ranged weapons are 0.

Look at traits that are actually similar instead of looking at a weapon skill that’s no where near the same. The exact same trait almost is the best example Perfectly Weighted does the exact same thing needs and Evade to grant stability, Escapist absolution must successfully evade an attack to remove a condition, Evasive Mirror needs to Evade, ineptitude needs to evade and so on all traits that give something on Evade, and there are quiet a few more, not on dodge, all they did was make Unwavering Avoidance consistent with similar traits.

This consistency is reasonable, however there is a big inconsistency in stun break availability to Revenant compared to other professions which placed perhaps undesirably high value on Unwavering Avoidance. Just a quick glance at the GW2 wiki tells me that the following number of stunbreaks are available to different professions through utility skills (including elite specializations):

Guardian – 7
Revenant – 3
Warrior – 8
Engineer – 7
Ranger – 5
Thief – 6
Elementalist – 6
Mesmer – 7
Necromancer – 6

There are also traits which cause more actions to break stuns, and some of these are on short cooldowns similar to Invocation’s Empty Vessel – e.g. Druidic Clarity on Druid and Savage Instinct on Berserker.

Revenant needs more access to stun breaks. Unwavering Avoidance was used so heavily only because Rev has few options to break stuns. I am not opposed this change to Unwavering Avoidance for consistency, but it needs to be coupled with increased access to stability or stun breaks somewhere else – ideally on Mallyx and Ventari, and at reduced energy cost on Jalis.

I am generally not one to complain, but these changes look exceptionally unpleasant and unnecessary.

The reduced reliability of stability application from Unwavering Avoidance further pushes Revenant to either require Invocation or Shiro/Glint, or else be prepared to get CC’d a lot and be unable to break CC. I expect this will hurt the chances of Rev using other legends in WvW / PvP, such as Jalis, Mallyx, and Ventari.
The stability on dodge is a really big deal in PvP / WvW because 3 of Rev’s legends cannot reliably break stuns (Jalis technically can break stuns but it is exceptionally expensive to do so, and IMO is not reliable). Unwavering Avoidance allowed those builds to see use since it reduced the chance that player using them would be CC’d in the first place. A WvW / PvP player is now left with only two build options that can get out of CC reliably: Shiro / Glint, or mandatory Invocation traitline. This change is harmful to build diversity.

The change to Inspiring Reinforcement seems underwhelming and not enough to make Jalis viable (let alone to make Inspiring Reinforcement viable…), but I suppose we will see.

With the nerf to Naturalistic Resonance (which is fair IMO) and the simultaneous nerf to Unwavering Avoidance (which is not necessary, IMO), which indirectly nerfs Enhanced Bulwark, it may be that Herald is no longer as necessary. Maybe this means core Rev will become more viable. Of course, core Rev did not receive any significant buffs or bug fixes, so this isn’t really a good thing.

I’m glad Dwarven Battle Training gets fixed, but Rev is still left with poor build diversity due to underwhelming trait options in some cases. For example, the increased cooldown of Versed in Stone may encourage players to take other traits…but the other Retribution GM traits are still ineffective. Similarly, use of the Invocation traitline may increase with the nerfs to Retribution traits. But Invocation GM traits are similarly ineffective unless you’re heavily invested in power, precision, and fury, and take Roiling Mists.

Redfeather.6401:

Dirame.8521:

It’s probably going to be Turai Ossa.

If we’re going to Elona, it’s got to be Turai.

It probably will be, and it makes me sad. Turai is such a generic hero. Even his skills in GW1 were dull.

I didn’t play GW1 but it looks like Turai Ossa uses a sword and shield, which Rev already has. In this case, what new weapon would Rev get?

Resource management. Many MMOs are heavy on resource management, but most of GW2 is very light on it. For most professions, your only resources are your hitpoints and your cooldowns. Because Rev utility and weapon skills have an energy cost, every button you press requires a little more consideration, and this is very rewarding.

Xillllix.3485:

Seriously I missed this poll, and the opportunity to try them, and I see that I’m not the only one that doesn’t care about this.

WvW needs an adrenaline shoot straight to the heart. We were promised a WvW complete overhaul and all we got were a few improvements and fixes. I’m sure those who still play the game appreciate these fixes, but it’s just not enough in regards to expectations.

The potential for amazing gameplay with WvW is huge, we’ve even seen it in the past when fights were fun. Now only numbers count: winning a SMC large fight is just the matter of who has the most players to repeatedly press 1 (lag making all slow skills useless). The balance and skill meta isn’t as fun as it used to be. Some class (elementalist for example) are now boring to play and unrewarding.

Someone proposed Gliding! As realistic or unrealistic as it may be, at least it’s interesting. Spending 15 minutes repairing a wall pressing 1 isn’t.

Even using a ram is a tedious task. Why can’t we lock 1 on auto-attack so that we can at the very least chat while doing that? It’s a question I was asking myself 3 years ago when I got the game.

In the CDI thread we discussed making SMC an interesting fight, with points to capture, moving the lord on the second or third floor to spread out the fight, new mechanics, etc. Did Anet forget? Why go for things as irrelevant as repair hammers when the community told you what they wanted 2 years ago and you even agreed it was a good idea?

The Alpine borderland maps is a 3-way capture the flag map, but the map has no more flag (Orb). How do you expect to ever make that map as interesting as it was on launch if the primary objective has been removed and replaced with nothing? Shouldn’t you bring the Orb back now that the scoring system is apparently fixed to give servers a chance to catch up?

Servers should adapt to the online population dynamically, like other MMO do.

It should be possible for a small group of skilled and organized players to beat a bigger group of unorganized players, like it used to be.

The game needs New Skills, fields and mechanics; and they need to be interesting. ESO just launched a patch with new elite skills for all the weapons, as an example.

You need to find a way to bring the GvG guilds back to the game. All the GvG players are hibernating. Make a WvW map for fights and create a GvG tournament.

Merge the servers once and for all and do a new WvW tournament.

Update the WvW maps with a bigger variety of optional objectives for smaller groups.

Realign the textures properly in the keeps and in SMC.

Make it possible to catapult Asuras over walls.

Make good gameplay the primary focus.

I like the idea of adding gliding to WvW. It is generally regarded as a fun mechanic. Of course, terrain would need to be modified in some maps so players can’t glide into enemy keeps / towers and bypass walls or gates.

I think an initial concern was that gliding should be HoT content only, and WvW shouldn’t separate players based on whether or not they own HoT. I think it’s okay to add gliding to WvW as a base feature though. It can be unlocked like other WvW upgrades (e.g. repair master).

DeceiverX.8361:

Sartharina.3542:

Regen stacking would be great, and allow it to help counter condis on a lighter note. As it is, regen is so terrible that the developers have been forced to add regeneration-that-isn’t to the game instead.

Not sure if that’s a fair thing to say. There are benefits and drawbacks to simply tying the effects to boons. Quite honestly, I think the powerful boons like Protection, Resistance, and Quickness should get removed as boons and just become static buffs as to prevent them from being stackable and affected by duration bonuses. But this also has a gain which prevents them from being capable of being stripped, corrupted, or stolen.

I would actually like to go in the opposite direction – fewer static unique buffs and more buffs that apply basic boons. GW2 was supposed be be about minimal UI. Lots of unique buffs sometimes force me to mouse over a target that has them so I can see what a given static buff does. If all or most of the buffs were the few boons that we have, it would be a lot easier to see at a glance what effects are active on another player.

I think a better solution to boon stacking is to just reduce the number of skills and the duration of skills which apply boons to multiple targets.

I agree that careful rework would be needed. Like Thaddeus mentions about Stability, similar revisions could be done for skills which apply Regen. For example, base durations may need to be changed, and healing per stack + healing power scaling may need to be changed as well.

Would Regeneration (boon) be better if it stacked intensity instead of duration? This would have several benefits as I see it, and no detriments:

Intensity stacking plays better in teams. Regen is not considered very useful right now in groups, perhaps because it stacks duration. When one player applies regen to a group, other players who also apply it increase the duration resulting in regen lasting for up to several minutes but still healing only at a low rate per second. Furthermore, players with low healing power who apply regen can hinder players with high healing power who apply regen afterwards, – the latter application has to wait until the weaker regen wears off before their more powerful regen will have it’s effect.

More customization of skills that provide healing over time. Right now, Regen plays a fairly small role since it will only provide around 125-250 or so hps, depending on the healing power of the person who applied it. Some skills could be modified to provide a quick burst of healing (e.g. 5 stacks for 5 seconds) while others could provide more sustained healing (e.g. one stack for 20 seconds).

Is there any negative side to revising Regeneration to stack intensity instead of duration? The healing power scaling per stack may need to be revised as well, of course.

So. I think Crystal Hibernation needs to break stuns. Here’s why:

Soothing Bastion is unreliable. Ever notice that sometimes Soothing Bastion fails to proc and you die anyways? That’s because Crystal Hibernation doesn’t break stuns. This means if you are dropped to below 25% health while under effect of a CC, Soothing Bastion will not trigger! Pretty much all defensive proccing traits trigger stun breaking or instant-cast abilities to avoid this problem!

Crystal Hibernation has been nerfed to the point that many players are unhappy with it. The heal has been significantly reduced (unless you invest in healing power), the energy cost is high, and there’s lots of unblockable attacks it doesn’t protect you from anyways. I think buffing it by adding a stun break would not be excessive.

Revenant lacks stun breaks. Everyone knows this. Is it odd to put a stun break on a weapon skill? Sure, but who cares?

TL:DR – Crystal Hibernation should break stuns. This would not be OP, everyone is happy.

Burtnik.5218:

fluidmonolith.3584:

Do you support removal of energy cost from weapon skills? And if so, are you willing to accept an increase in utility skill energy costs to compensate?

As if utilities didnt cost tons of energy already. Also news from last min.. we dont really have more skills than other classes. For example Chrono got 20 skills as well. The difference between other classes and rev is that other classes got second set of utility skills in F keys while we swap kits. Thats all.

Rev came out with energy on wep skills for one simple reason – they came off with lower cd’s compared to other classes. However since all these nerfs that happened revenant doesnt really have shorter cd’s than other classes but they still cost energy for no reason. For me its unacceptable situation. Either lower cd’s to what they originally were or get rid of energy cost already.

Despite the increase in weapon cooldowns over time, Rev still remains competitive. I suspect the removal of energy costs from weapon skills would make Rev OP unless other changes were made. Further, I think the increase in weapon skill cooldown over time is largely independent of energy costs but rather is due to the fact that Rev can swap weapons, which permits chaining of powerful skills on one weapon into those of another. I previously proposed a removal of weapon swap combined with the addition of dual auto-attacks (like spear) to maintain versatility – a change such as this would permit significant reductions in weapon skill cooldown.

Euthymias.7984:

fluidmonolith.3584:

I see this question a lot. I have a big concern that is generally not addressed though.

If energy costs were removed from weapons, our energy would only be spent on utility skills. I expect that for the base Revenant legends, utility skill costs would need to increase to balance the removal of weapon skill energy cost. Also, Glint would become incredibly boring to play, and possibly broken.

So my question for other players: Do you support removal of energy cost from weapon skills? And if so, are you willing to accept an increase in utility skill energy costs to compensate?

>Phase Travel already costs 35 Energy
>IO is an -10 upkeep
>Jade Winds is 50 energy
>Riposting Shadows is 30 energy

Shiro wont need an energy increase tbh. If anything, its current costs would be fine without the burden of Weapon Skill energy.

>Pain Absorbsion is 35 energy
>Banish Enchantment is 20 energy
>Unyielding Anguish is 30 energy

Mallyx’s costs seem fine as is. At MOST I could see BE increase to 25.

Jalis and Ventari would benefit from this as well, and their costs seem reasonable without weapon energy tacked onto them.
Glint would be mostly unaffected anyway, since its nature as an Upkeep means that once the active’s used up, it’ll start building up energy again while its in CD if the others dont leave you in the negative anyway.

I know some utility skill costs have increased over time (Phase Traversal…). But despite these continual nerfs, Rev still remains competitive. I hate the Phase Traversal changes as much as anyone else, but I still use Shiro and Phase Traveral a lot. IMO, Mallyx is also still very competitive. So I still claim that removal of weapon energy costs would necessitate an increase in energy costs for utility skills (or some other type of balance). There are some exceptions, primarily in weak Jalis or Ventari skills. For example, I never touch Inspiring Reinforcement anymore since HoT beta nerfs. But Shiro and Mallyx, in my opinion, are competitive right now, so removal of weapon skill energy may cause their utilities to become more expensive.

And a final point that I am still concerned about – if weapon skill energy costs were removed, Glint would become broken and horribly boring. Players could maintain perma might and fury and essentially ignore touching their utility skills while spamming weapon skills off cooldown. Even if facet upkeeps were increased to balance, the gameplay for Glint without weapon skill costs would still be incredibly boring, IMO.

I understand everyone’s concern about high weapon skill cooldowns combined with energy cost – but Rev seems pretty balanced right now and I just don’t see how weapon energy costs can be removed without some sort of re-balancing somewhere else.

I see this question a lot. I have a big concern that is generally not addressed though.

If energy costs were removed from weapons, our energy would only be spent on utility skills. I expect that for the base Revenant legends, utility skill costs would need to increase to balance the removal of weapon skill energy cost. Also, Glint would become incredibly boring to play, and possibly broken.

So my question for other players: Do you support removal of energy cost from weapon skills? And if so, are you willing to accept an increase in utility skill energy costs to compensate?

Sir Black.7423:

The current amount of CC might be ok if builds actually had to sacrifice something to get it. If it was a matter of CC vs damage vs suvivability trade-offs then things might get interesting. But instead right now it feels like many classes easily bring a lot of CC, good suvivability, and decent damage all at the same time.

This. There is not too much CC, but there is too much CC that doesn’t cost anything (damage, sustain, mobility, etc).

Khisanth.2948:

fluidmonolith.3584:

I previously proposed a similar idea to remove weapon swap cd. The weapon swap cd seems arbitrary and GW2 has way too many cooldown-regulated combat functions already.

However, in removing the cooldown, I think we should model FPS games. Weapon swap should have a small cast time. In a FPS game, it’s not called a ‘cast-time’ but rather it’s the animation of pulling out a second weapon, during which you cannot fire.

I propose a 1/2 second cast time on weapon swap and no cooldown. Warrior’s fast hands could reduce the cast time to 1/4 second and Rune of the Warrior could still reduce cast time by 20%.

Because it would have a short cast time, we would no longer be able to swap weapons while stunned. I think this is okay. You could alternatively add the very short cd like engineer has while kit swapping, but I think the short cast time is a better solution. The cast time retains a cost (primarily that, for the next 0.5 seconds, you cannot perform any other action) which an instant weapon swap with brief cool down does not. Weapon swap should still have a cost, I think it would just be better if the cost were a cast time rather than an arbitrary cooldown.

Dazing yourself every time you try to weapon swap sounds like one of the worse ideas ever posted.

I don’t think it is accurate to say “using a skill or ability with a cast time” is equivalent to “dazing yourself”.

That said, it is perfectly valid if you prefer the current weapon swap system (10 second cooldown and instant cast) over my proposal (cast time and no cooldown).

I wanted the cast time version without the cooldown because I like some of the action combat aspects of GW2. I think if players asks himself “do I have half a second to switch weapons?” makes it feel more action-oriented than “is weapon swap off cooldown”? But that is just my view (and OP’s too, apparently).

archmagus.7249:

Engi kind of has a no-cd weapon swap via kits. Stowing a kit (default `) places the kit you were using on a really short (1s I believe) cd, but another kit can be equipped right away. (Eg. If I’m in elixir gun, I can stow it via `, then immediately equip bomb kit)

fluidmonolith.3584:

I previously proposed a similar idea to remove weapon swap cd. The weapon swap cd seems arbitrary and GW2 has way too many cooldown-regulated combat functions already.

However, in removing the cooldown, I think we should model FPS games. Weapon swap should have a small cast time. In a FPS game, it’s not called a ‘cast-time’ but rather it’s the animation of pulling out a second weapon, during which you cannot fire.

I propose a 1/2 second cast time on weapon swap and no cooldown. Warrior’s fast hands could reduce the cast time to 1/4 second and Rune of the Warrior could still reduce cast time by 20%.

Because it would have a short cast time, we would no longer be able to swap weapons while stunned. I think this is okay. You could alternatively add the very short cd like engineer has while kit swapping, but I think the short cast time is a better solution. The cast time retains a cost (primarily that, for the next 0.5 seconds, you cannot perform any other action) which an instant weapon swap with brief cool down does not. Weapon swap should still have a cost, I think it would just be better if the cost were a cast time rather than an arbitrary cooldown.

Rip Engi DPS.

Also, Implementing a cast time for weapons swaps would render skills which use the weapon swap mechanic to break stun (empty vessel on rev, foot in the grave on Nero come to mind) useless. Also, it would make it impossible for necros to leave shroud while stunned.

I’m not sure what would be done about Engi kits. I think they could get a cast time to equip, but I do agree that it might be horrible to play, so maybe the kits should not get a cast time. Ele attunement swapping is similarly difficult to decide on.

I do not propose adding a cast time to secondary profession mechanics such as the Rev legend swap or Necro death shroud that you mention. These should remain instant cast, IMO.

I previously proposed a similar idea to remove weapon swap cd. The weapon swap cd seems arbitrary and GW2 has way too many cooldown-regulated combat functions already.

However, in removing the cooldown, I think we should model FPS games. Weapon swap should have a small cast time. In a FPS game, it’s not called a ‘cast-time’ but rather it’s the animation of pulling out a second weapon, during which you cannot fire.

I propose a 1/2 second cast time on weapon swap and no cooldown. Warrior’s fast hands could reduce the cast time to 1/4 second and Rune of the Warrior could still reduce cast time by 20%.

Because it would have a short cast time, we would no longer be able to swap weapons while stunned. I think this is okay. You could alternatively add the very short cd like engineer has while kit swapping, but I think the short cast time is a better solution. The cast time retains a cost (primarily that, for the next 0.5 seconds, you cannot perform any other action) which an instant weapon swap with brief cool down does not. Weapon swap should still have a cost, I think it would just be better if the cost were a cast time rather than an arbitrary cooldown.

BrokenGlass.9356:

Obtena.7952:

Akeno.4962:

To me, build diversity means META build diversity. Because in meta, only Glint is acceptable (I’m talking about pve). Core legends aren’t good enough to be meta. They need to be buffed. If all core legends were good enough, you’d see tank, condi or healer heralds.

My demand is not that they change how skills are related to legends and you can choose only two, but that they work some trait lines (salvation i’m looking at you) and weapon skills, buff core legends or even revamp a legend’s design (like they changed Mallyx after beta, but now performs poorly) to create a variety in meta builds for any game mode.

I don’t see how that would work, irregardless of class because in that sense, Meta is just the optimal build for the situation. I mean, Meta build diversity … what does that even look like? Is there any class in this game where Meta build diversity exists?

As far as i know, each class has an optimal setup and rotation for whatever content you want to do. It’s not like I can choose one of a few builds, get whatever kind of gameplay I want AND be the optimal performance … that’s a fallacy in this game, just by the way it’s designed.

I think what is meant here, is that there ought to be a build that can be used in any given situation without herald, and not be trash.

Going pvp? Herald, and Shiro or Mallyx depending on wetter of not your using conditions.

Going wvw? Herald and Shiro or Mallyx. Potentially Jalis, if you front line, and want to spam it’s elite skill.

Going Fractals? Herald, Shiro.

Going Raid? Herald, Jalis. And even here, Jalis is only taken because the hammers add a small (very very small) dps boost, and the Chrono is giving you quickenss, so no Shiro needed.

So what we want out of Rev are just a few bullet points.

-Pve, (open world, fractal, and raid) viable conditions specs that can make use of mallyx.

-Pvp, viable bruiser and bunker builds that use Jalis.

-WvW Rev isn’t really in a bad state, but the changes needed in the other two game modes, would seriously benifit build diversity here in unpredictable ways.

-Core Rev builds at all. I understand that the class was released at the same time as herald. And that’s a shame.

What needs to be done?

Glint stance needs a minor nerf. (What exactly I don’t know, but it would be useful if only to encourage the community to make core Rev builds for a few months.)

Jalis needs and overhaul. I proposed how to do this in the ‘Jalis in SPvP’ thread.

Ventari, cool as it is, is completely one dimensional. A simple solution here: make the utilities do some other effect when the tablet is not spawned. Give a non-dedicated healer a reason to take this legend. Falure to do so, means only raid healer revs (which we don’t even want in their current state.) Or WvW backliners (which are uncommon) will ever use it. Give spvpers, and non-raiding pvers, a reason to use it.

Create cross legend synergy in traits inside core rev.

It’s a laundry list to be sure. But all of it is needed. This is not a list of buffs. It’s a list of development changes needed to get the class out of beta.

The only nerfs I think Glint needs are to reduce blanket boon uptime (while at the same time, other boonshare-heavy mechanics in other professions should also be looked at; and weak legends in Rev need improvement):
(1) increase the upkeep cost of facets: increase strength to -3, darkness to -3, and light to -2. This way a single Rev will only maintain perma might OR perma fury … not both.
(2) decrease base duration of boons from facet of nature by maybe 25 – 33%

I also definitely agree that Jalis needs an overhaul. Hammers are decent but bugged, RotGD is good but very situational due to the high energy cost, Forced Engagement is a bit underwhelming, and Inspiring Reinforcement is bad in several ways.

I also agree with your thoughts on Ventari completely. It needs to have some use outside of healing. I think another function could be CC. Salvation traitline needs the same treatment.

Pumpkin.5169:

Please no ritualist, summons and AI. It’s terrible for WvW.

I am also a bit hesitant about summons like this, but the idea seems well thought-out. I like the upkeep cost on maintaining totems and the alternate effects of utilities depending on whether you have Bound Spirits out or no Spirits.

I don’t think energy regain on scepter auto is a good idea. Also, the utilities have no defensive or stunbreak skills, so this legend seems very fragile.

Finally, it might be good to have a way to get rid of Bound Spirits without swapping legends or running out of energy.