Herald Trait Update Suggestion

Many of the Herald specialization's traits are unfortunately not very useful or fun, leaving you to choose Radiant Revival, Shared Empowerment, and Elder's Force almost every single time. Also, despite being a boon heavy specialization and legendary stance, might stacking potential pretty much caps at 13-14 stacks. In addition to this, Herald's power damage is very low even though it cannot fill a supporting role as well as its competition for the elite spec slot, Renegade. I'm going to list a few proposed changes that I think would increase build diversity as well as the elite spec's potential for power damage and support. The numbers themselves may not be perfect and are also only done with PVE in mind. Let me know if you agree with the changes or if there's anything else you'd like to see on Herald! Also this was done for fun as I am a big Revenant fan, so if some of these changes incite a bit of rage in you, I sincerely apologize.

Alright so we're gonna start with a trait that is not actually in the Herald specialization, but is incredibly important to its power DPS. Forceful Persistence needs a bit of a buff to make the facet stacking damage meaningful. However, I understand that since it is an Adept trait, that this buff may be a little too powerful. If need be, it could swap places with Rapid Flow to become a Master trait.

InvocationMajor Adepts:

1. Forceful Persistence: Increase Herald facet damage increase to 4% per facet.

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Now we're going to get into the Herald traits! I'll leave some commentary on why I made certain changes down at the bottom so you can understand my rationale a bit.HeraldMajor Adepts:

1. Swift Gale: Old effect removed. Now increases ferocity by +120 while under the effects of superspeed.

Major Masters:

1. Bolster Fortifications: Increase protection duration to 2 and 1/2 seconds.
2. Shared Empowerment: Old effect removed. Now grants 1 stack of might for 5 seconds for each upkeep skill you have active (e.g. one upkeep skill means 1 stack, two upkeep skills means 2 stacks, etc.)
3. Harmonize Continuity: Keeps old effect. Now also gains Swift Gale's old effect (gain 3 seconds of superspeed on stun break)

Major Grandmasters:

1. Elder's Force: Increase damage per boon to 3%
2. Soothing Bastion: Old effect removed. Now reduces recharge of shield skills by 20%, shield skills now cleanse 1 condition from allies, gain +180 concentration.
3. Enhanced Bulwark: Keeps old effect. Also gain barrier (~1000) when stability is applied to you.

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Rationale: Harmonize Continuity and Swift GaleHarmonize Continuity and Swift Gale always felt a bit weird. Revenant does have a bit of a stun break theme running through it (Empty Vessel in Invocation and Sudden Reversal in Renegade come to mind) but having two traits that are very circumstantial related to stun break in Herald did not help with it's build diversity issues, especially considering Swift Gale had to compete with Hardening Persistence and Radiant Revival while Harmonize Continuity had to compete with Shared Empowerment. These two traits simply were not great choices in most cases. To amend this, I made Swift Gale interact with superspeed that is already available to Revenants through Impossible Odds, Chaotic Release, and the proposed new Harmonize Continuity. With these changes, hopefully Swift Gale and Harmonize Continuity are more competitive in their respective lines.

Rationale: Shared EmpowermentShared Empowerment is not very interactive in its current state and does not have much potential for might stacking. However, I did not want to simply buff the might duration and add passive 25 might to Herald, so I chose to make it interact with Herald's core mechanic, its Facets all being upkeep skills. Also, it interacting with upkeeps should allow Heralds to maintain a little bit of might even when they swap away from Glint.

Rationale: Soothing BastionIn theory, Soothing Bastion is a good choice for support builds. However, in reality the strange mechanic of increasing boon duration of boons currently on allies by 2 seconds feels a bit weird. The forced Crystal Hibernation is also a problem for the trait, meaning that if you do take the trait for the support aspect, you have the chance to be rendered unable to help your allies for several seconds, leaving them vulnerable. Unlike other revenant weapons, both shield skills have regular-ish cooldowns, so being able to reduce those would be helpful. Replacing the old boon duration increase mechanic is an increase in concentration which should be more useful and less clunky. If the increased concentration is something that is undesired (given with Facet of Nature and Envoy of Sustenance, Herald already has about ~50% boon duration) perhaps replacing the concentration with the application of a boon, like vigor, on shield skill use could be interesting.

Rationale: Enhanced BulwarkHerald's defensive capabilities, despite having access to the shield, are a little low. Further, Glint lacks access to stability and relies on Legendary Dwarf Stance to apply it, making this trait only useful half of the time. To amend this, I added barrier on stability application to increase defensive capability for the spec overall. If this ends up being a bit too powerful because of Inspiring Reinforcement's pulsing stability (or outside sources of stability), the trait cooldown could be increased a bit to compensate.

That's all from me! Let me know what you think and if there's anything you think should be changed in both Herald and core Revenant to improve the profession, let me know!

not to bad of changes. this might make the rev more wanted in pve content.

This doesnt adress the problem of other classes covering the same boons. Glint just doesnt stand out for what it does, there has to be something to make people want a herald. And Facet of Chaos has become obsolete when the Chronomancers got longer Alacrity. FoC more than anything else on Rev needs a redesign.

@LucianDK.8615 said:This doesnt adress the problem of other classes covering the same boons. Glint just doesnt stand out for what it does, there has to be something to make people want a herald. And Facet of Chaos has become obsolete when the Chronomancers got longer Alacrity. FoC more than anything else on Rev needs a redesign.

That would require some serious overhaul of the facets, completely changing what boons they give. Yes, other classes have access to things like might or fury and can provide them to allies, but I figured Herald should at least be on par with other classes/builds when it comes to these boons since its facets are entirely based on them.

Boon application was only a part of my suggested changes as well, I did seek to improve damage potential to make the class more worthy of filling a power DPS role.

I actually would prefer the core Revenant to be buffed to be useful with or without Herald.

Yes, core seriously needs love. Id be thrilled to run Shiro/jalis without feeling like fail.

I really like that Swift Gale idea... Makes new terrible impossible odds less terrible.

On the whole I like all these trait ideas... And most importantly, I think they're pretty realistic changes and not too op--with the exception of Elder's focus, that should be a PvE-only buff I think. That extra 5% damage for basically doing nothing but double tapping f2 before a gank would probably be too strong in PvP, where rev's +1 damage potential is already pretty cray.

@lombomon.7268 said:

@LucianDK.8615 said:This doesnt adress the problem of other classes covering the same boons. Glint just doesnt stand out for what it does, there has to be something to make people want a herald. And Facet of Chaos has become obsolete when the Chronomancers got longer Alacrity. FoC more than anything else on Rev needs a redesign.

Its basically impossible to do that as long Chrono can reflect more boons then Herald, and generates ones Herald can't. To even edge its way into this situation, Herald would need to a source of quickness..... but quickness is too powerful to allow as 100% uptime via pulsed facets. Facet of Nature also made a lot of sense without boon reflects, but is utterly worthless in light of it.

So we have the question of should Herald be changed to incorporate boon reflection into its design, even if it can't generate quickness or alacrity? I've occasionally pondered the idea taking Mallyx's original design of condition gathering and applying it to boons on Herald. But its hard to figure out how to make this work well..... I've considered having Nature active increasing incoming boon duration, and activating it causing it copy them out. Another idea is redesigning the utility facets to pulse boons basic boons, but then consume and translate them to rare boons as an active skill. Anything to move anyway from this idea that camping the facet upkeep mode as being ideal.