Renegade will continue to be useless in pvp unless the cast time on legend skills is reduced

So I've been playing renegade in pvp, trying to make it work, and god it feels awful. My first thought was the whole summons dying immediately thing would be my biggest issue, but that's actually the second biggest issue. Really it's just impossible to get them out in the first place. Cast time on every single skills is as long as most proffesions hard hitting heavy cc elite skills. 3/4 seconds on utilities and a whole entire second for the elite. I just die constantly mid cast just trying to get any of these charr out, the fact that they are cc'd and die immediately is just icing on the cake. Renegade has 0 effective defenses that allow you to take several seconds to just wave your hand around summoning char without getting cc'd or burst to a pile of ash.

They're doing a pvp/wvw split patch and I'm super bummed they once again did nothing to address the actual issues renegade has. They just keep increasing damage or reducing energy costs, which are honestly needed because the skills are mediocre as hell even if they get out and don't immediately die, but the real issues which make renegade sub garbage tier are just ignored. Cast times on all skills should be reduced to 1/2 a second, including the elite.

I wouldn't quite call it useless, I have had some decent success in platinum pvp with a few renegade builds.However it is HEAVILY impaired by its cast times with the amount of cc spam in team fights. Which does make it rather lackluster in full 5v5s, especially if you get focused.Those two combined make it a very hard battle to get any leeching combos off with your elite, to be able to sustain with Kalla in team fights.

What I would actually say the WORST issue with Renegade summons is related to cc as well...Whenever a summon is cc'd, even by a 1/4 sec daze. They sit around for what seems to be 2-3+ seconds before starting to do their actions again.So two of the summons are 10 second duration, two are 6, and the elite varies.That is completely unacceptable for some of these skills to not work for almost half of their duration because of a small cc.

There is so much pvp/ small wvw potential for Renegade and its Summons. It just needs a bit of love on the summons, their cast times, and the shortbow.

Renegade also suffers from most Revenant stun breaks in general being too punishing imo, besides the powerful Riposting Shadows and the one in Herald.I have 2 hybrid Renegade builds in pvp, with mallyx and kalla legends.The stun breaks from both of these legends lock you into an animation after stun breaking.

Having your stun break lock you into an animation only for that to be interrupted instantly again....makes it feel extremely punishing to fight decent warriors, thieves, mesmers, and holos.

I understand that Pain Absorption needs to have a cast time for such a powerful skill,but it feels very clunky to have the casts times on the skills paired to revenants stun breaks be any longer than a 1/4 sec.

+1 and +1

the problem is cast time and cc and easy killed . also if you check you will see there is a cast time , animation time, and only than the attack goes. so its not 0.75 sec rather about 1.25 sec.easy fix warband are not cc'able, or proc with aegis for 5 sec. and also 0.5 sec cast time is a must.

when i fight with renegade like necro i do fine but than when i am focus i need my team to support me as my utilities cant. but if i fight like necro why not to take a necro...

face it - renegade is pve trait line atm...

Agreed. But, I have found some success with power renegade in pvp. Using kalla/jalis, sometimes shiro instead of jalis, and hammer/staff and basically being a backline support with a hard hitting aa. So basically I just make it my job to never be targeted. It sounds selfish, but trust me it'll benefit the team. The hammer gives you enough range where people will forget about you or just not bother with engaging you so that helps with not being targeted. use icerazors do add some extra damage and annoy people, build up some energy and give alacrity to allies, and use darkrazors when reviving or stomping or preventing the enemy from doing the same. darkrazors is awesome because a lot of times people don't even understand why they are being interrupted so much and will stand in the AoE for a couple of seconds. Use your heal when teamates need healing, and don't discount the elite on the backline. It can do some good healing over time and will add some burst to your attacks. You have to be weary when summoning though, don't through them directly in the middle of a fight or they will get cc'd. Throw them slightly to the side of the middle or on the outside for some area denial. Also, make sure to have the trait that lets them grant protection. It's not the strongest class in pvp and isn't designed to well for it, but you can do some pretty nasty dps support with it. The problem is the pvp game mode doesn't really make support builds that viable since it promotes the team splitting apart to take two points.

i think renegade would be fine if we had a good side legend to run either power or condi with. maybe if jallis gets buffed or maybe we could run shiro and mallyx. also kalla will never work in competitive scenes like pvp or wvw and i don't believe they should ever balance it for those game modes. the shortbow could work competitively if we could survive will using it.

@ScottBroChill.3254 said:Agreed. But, I have found some success with power renegade in pvp. Using kalla/jalis, sometimes shiro instead of jalis, and hammer/staff and basically being a backline support with a hard hitting aa. So basically I just make it my job to never be targeted. It sounds selfish, but trust me it'll benefit the team. The hammer gives you enough range where people will forget about you or just not bother with engaging you so that helps with not being targeted. use icerazors do add some extra damage and annoy people, build up some energy and give alacrity to allies, and use darkrazors when reviving or stomping or preventing the enemy from doing the same. darkrazors is awesome because a lot of times people don't even understand why they are being interrupted so much and will stand in the AoE for a couple of seconds. Use your heal when teamates need healing, and don't discount the elite on the backline. It can do some good healing over time and will add some burst to your attacks. You have to be weary when summoning though, don't through them directly in the middle of a fight or they will get cc'd. Throw them slightly to the side of the middle or on the outside for some area denial. Also, make sure to have the trait that lets them grant protection. It's not the strongest class in pvp and isn't designed to well for it, but you can do some pretty nasty dps support with it. The problem is the pvp game mode doesn't really make support builds that viable since it promotes the team splitting apart to take two points.

i play some nice build with it and it did surprise some players. the elite +icerazor+rune of madking got me full hp from 2500 hp. its gimmik buildthief and mesmer will look for you and kill you unless your team will babysit you like necro. also because its not common build ppl dodge of the healing area or the aoe buff....jallis is design for semi melee and kalla also 600 range cast.... in bronze it working for me (use 2 gold 3 but stop playing atm)

@"Pyroen.2086" said:i think renegade would be fine if we had a good side legend to run either power or condi with. maybe if jallis gets buffed or maybe we could run shiro and mallyx. also kalla will never work in competitive scenes like pvp or wvw and i don't believe they should ever balance it for those game modes. the shortbow could work competitively if we could survive will using it.

if kalla was like ritualist spirits (harder to kill) it could work nice with jallis stability skills

this is what i test atm. http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vlAQNAscmnXMXNSumrJRZz/kst5gSY38QJ4berkFNl6PIPymkdMWj3odACgIA-jpgSABHXGAg9HAAnice leeching abilities (1.2k with soulcleave each sec....) fast might stacks . but still mesmer and thief eat me alive

@messiah.1908 said:

@"Pyroen.2086" said:i think renegade would be fine if we had a good side legend to run either power or condi with. maybe if jallis gets buffed or maybe we could run shiro and mallyx. also kalla will never work in competitive scenes like pvp or wvw and i don't believe they should ever balance it for those game modes. the shortbow could work competitively if we could survive will using it.

Stuff will happen if you get summons out and they aren't immediately cc'd. If you throw out elite charr and icerazor, you'll life steal like crazy and kills someone pretty quick; the problem is it takes over 2 seconds to put both these put and for them to start doing their thing, which doesn't seem like mich but with things like mesmer instant cast ranged stun it's an eternity. Getting interupted .9 secs into the 1 second elite cast time is just the most frustrating thing, now you have to restart the whole cast time all over and spend another full second just eating damage while dealing none and not defending yourself at all.

In wvw I saw a scourge that I know was wearing all trailblazers hit one of mine with one auto attack from a scepter and it interupted and killed the charr ghost. Is just really bad design that only works in pve. Yet all the chances to change it since PoF launched and still nothing. Just seems like they are aiming for revenant to become a pve class only.

I don’t think ANET will ever put the work in needed to make Renegade viable in competitve play. They should just improve the renegade experience in PvE and focus efforts on improving core revenant. For renegade to be decent in PvP/WvW, they would have to tear it down and rebuild and let’s face it...it’s probably not going to ever happen. They won’t want to admit they made a terrible spec and even if they did, they won’t commit the resources necessary to fixing the least played class.

@Exalted Quality.8534 said:They won’t want to admit they made a terrible spec and even if they did, they won’t commit the resources necessary to fixing the least played class.

Engineer is even less played than revenant (despite of holo existence), but still, Anet gave some attention to it.

@SirTomato.3627 said:

@Exalted Quality.8534 said:They won’t want to admit they made a terrible spec and even if they did, they won’t commit the resources necessary to fixing the least played class.

In pvp or wvw because thats for sure not true in pvp.

@Milan.9035 said:In pvp or wvw because thats for sure not true in pvp.

Fractals and open world mostly. In sPvP i see enough both.

Open world is the most populated part of the game. So you can make some statistics based on it.

I don't play WvW, don't know about it.

I main engi and rev. Engis get way more love than revs (albeit not very much). Holos are a popular spec in high level PvE, sPvP, and WvW from what I’ve seen. Core Revs and Heralds are non existent in high end PvE and extremely rare in WvW/sPvP. Renegades are somewhat common in high end PvE, but I’ve seen next-to-none in sPvP/WvW.

I wish they would own up to the fact that the Renegade spec was poorly thought out and needs a complete overhaul, but it’s probably not going to happen. I enjoy playing renegade in PvE, but it has many problems. The direction they are going with small number changes will never bring more Renegades to competitive play because the the design sucks. There’s way too much counterplay...the cast time and energy costs are ridiculous, the immobile spirits can be cc’ed or killed almost immediately by a little AoE. And, it that wasn’t enough to deal with on its own, all someone has to do is NOT STAND IN THE 360 RADIUS to be affected by the underwhelming effects of the spirits. I mean, how is Razorclaw’s Rage even a skill?

What’s most frustrating about renegade is that ANET failed to provide anything fundamentally different than herald...they are both support specs that are exponentially better in groups.

Summons should have 2 modes The first mode is what we have currently where the summons just stand still. The second mode is where the summons goes after the target but the area of effect is reduced.meh just given out awful suggestions lol.

@Exalted Quality.8534 said:Core Revs and Heralds are non existent in high end PvE and extremely rare in WvW/sPvP.

What? Heralds are like the main damage dealer in WvW right now.

Anyway I have been playing a lot of Renegade the last 2-3 weeks in WvW. It honestly has potential. The traitline is, for the most part, fine, as well as the profession skills. It's the Kalla legend which is the biggest problem. I didn't even consider using it for the first few weeks because of its well-documented problems. When I did finally try out Kalla, it was even worse than I thought it would be lol. Shortbow also has a few really awkward skills to use. The 3 skill might be the hardest skill to aim in the game. It does do pretty good damage IF you can hit someone where the lines converge, but that almost never happens. Hitting a moving target with that thing is really difficult, and a lot of the time in WvW it's just going to get reflected anyway. Shortbow 5 skill is really underrated though IMO.

@SWI.4127 said:

@Exalted Quality.8534 said:Core Revs and Heralds are non existent in high end PvE and extremely rare in WvW/sPvP.

Shortbow is all kinds of weird honestly. The whole theme around is that you shoot arrows into portals which fire out back to your target, which is fine. Shortbow #2 allows you to fire behind yourself which is nice for kiting but if you use shortbow #4 and walk infront of it before it lands it just cancels the whole attack? The weapon has a lot of weird quirks to it that don't make a lot of sense. I can deal with the weapon being slow but when you have these weird rules to it about how different skills even function that's when it gets annoying.

@"Klypto.1703" said:In wvw I saw a scourge that I know was wearing all trailblazers hit one of mine with one auto attack from a scepter and it interupted and killed the charr ghost. Is just really bad design that only works in pve. Yet all the chances to change it since PoF launched and still nothing. Just seems like they are aiming for revenant to become a pve class only.

Bad design doesn't work in any game mode, period. They're pretty effectively useless outside of DPS golems which I'm 800% sure is what they tested most new specializations on when wrapping up their damage numbers instead of looking at usability.

Others bring up the poor design of shortbow. It's not even good in PVE, nor is it fun to use. The 3 skillshot is one of the most frustrating to line up because it requires pinpoint placement of your location in order to get damage that's only comparable to similar skills offered by other classes, on top of being slower to cast. Worst part is, the difference between hitting all 7 arrows or being just out of range is literally that perfect dot of lining it up; it's not risk and reward when the base skill offers so little damage and is so spread out to begin with. In my opinion Shortbow 3, for the purposes of both PVE and PVP should 1: start at a much thinner spread and 2: be X shaped. The skill should focus on where your mouse is pointed at, which will ultimately reward proper skillshot placing, Simultaneously, the thinner initial spread would result in less punishing uses allowing for more dynamic range usage of the skill.

If ranger shortbow were to be given a comparison, this would be ANet's attempt at trying to make the Renegade Shortbow play "differently" without considering the repercussions of regular gameplay. At the very least, the Ranger Shortbow has no cast times which make it marginally effective when skirmishing and kiting, in both PvP and PVE. It never hurts to have something that can fire incredibly fast (relatively speaking) instantaneous condition damage in quick succession. However, the Renegade Shortbow, while having some more power damage, utterly lacks in mobility and responsiveness while being harder to use in every aspect.

Even then, the damage doesn't even make up for it except on an immobile target because the rest of Renegade's Legend skills, while interesting and fantastic on anything that doesn't move, are easily susceptible to controls and any damage whatsoever. Not to mention that those legends take times to cast to effectively do anything for very small ranges and radii on top of a class with low mobility to begin with. They designed a close range caster-ish skirmisher with no mobility and survivability to boot.

So while it might do well in certain bursts of power (as others have stated) in both PVE and PvP, the specialization's legend and the star weapon (shortbow) are practically irrelevant to any meta and worst of all, aren't even entertaining to use because of how frustrating and unrewarding they are.