First of all I want to thank Arenanet for letting me participate in the beta stress test! I enjoyed it a lot.
I did crash several times, mostly when fighting the wyvern. I didn’t see a connection between the crashes, but sent a crash report each time so hopefully those will be of some use.
I was really looking forward to experience the gameplay of the Revenant. I enjoyed both weapon sets, though the mace/axe combination I did enjoy a little better. It felt more fast paced / engaging to me. When I was reading about the Revenant legends only affecting the 6-0 skills instead of the weapon skills I was afraid that would feel very unnatural (being used to the Elementalist). But it flowed well with the class. That there were no other utility options to select did feel weird. I hope that it’ll get more utility options in the future, otherwise it would feel that the Revenant gameplay is a bit limited I’m afraid.
As for the legends themselves, I liked the idea/theme of the Demon stance more but in the end I felt the Dwarf stance was stronger with the utilities and elite skill.
The Revenant’s armor was looking amazing, but I am already looking forward to that since I saw the teaser image with Rytlock wearing it. (And with charrs being my favourite race I am even more excited for a heavy armor set that looks good on charr.)
I also liked the skins for the hammer (Mistbreaker), mace (Mistrender) and axe (Mistcleaver). I like the idea of hybrid builds and I would be happy to see if the celestial armor would be viable in the new HoT maps in the future. The traits also looked interesting and makes me curious to the future ones.
Masteries… The UI looked really bulky to me and initially I was looking around my herospanel to see a masteries tab there, before I found it by clicking the xp bar. I don’t know if it was explained in the mastery hint message, because I clicked that away too fast by accident. -__-
I spend a point at the gliders and equipped that. I could not make the mushroom line work.
The experience bar at the bottom stayed at 0 with the gliding line equipped. I didn’t get any progress there after doing many events.
The flamethrower challenge had a few issues. When I started the challenge and the cutscene of the nearby event came up, the UI of the flamethrower challenge at the right side of the screen disappeared, thus leaving me without knowing how much vines I burned down and how much time I had left. I also had issues with the flamethrower going in the direction I tried to aim it. When facing and walking forward, it suddenly blasted to one of the sides. So the aiming was difficult at times.
Gliding was not for me I guess. When I was knocked off the wyvern platform I glided through/over the chopper updrafts, but somehow I couldn’t fly up again. I don’t know if this is because I am bad at it or if it isn’t working correctly, but I only managed to get up 1 time. The other times I flew through the updrafts nothing happened.
I did experience skill lag during the beta quite often, especially at the wyvern fight and with deploying my glider around it – pressing a button without something happening, or with the skill happening in a delayed a few seconds. This was especially annoying with the gliding, since I hit the space bar a second time trying to deploy it and then suddenly it deploys and gets put away right after.
Overall I really enjoyed the Revenant and the new things and I am looking forward to the expansion even more! Not sure if Revenant will be my new main after the expansion, but I’ll certainly create a few of them. And it was just a lot of fun running around on a map with almost all of the other people playing Revenant too.