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Help me understand Revenant. Need advice.


FyzE.3472

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Hello everyone!So for the longest time now I was considering leveling a Revenant. And, to be completely honest, the major reason of my doubts was hes success in PvP. I like PvP a lot, but I do play other stuff as well.My question is to you Revenant mains and just fans of the profession: What is it that you love in Revenant? And I'm asking about the theme, game-play, how it feels in general and all that stuff is interesting to me. Ideally please, sort of, compare it to the other professions that you have played (just to make the picture more clear for me, please).

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I wanna love the Rev for the mechanics, but the mechanics are what intentionally kill its combat flow. Its the nature of the energy cost, and the need to chain skills to be effective in PvP and even some parts of PvE. Each Rev Build has to be played a specific way, and requires a combat situation that meshes with it, in order for their builds to really shine. And thats a problem, when other things (especially players) can change the scenario on you in an instant. This leads to Revs feeling very clunky in practice, and have to learn how and when to approach an engagement, because you have a lot of problems reacting to sudden changes.

This problem is least pronounced in Raids, since the group comp is what ultimately matters, giving you a lot of wiggle room to be overly specialized. But in PvP, there is only 1 or 2 viable builds, depending on tier, and relies heavily on Shiro, since that stance has all the strong mobility skills.

In comparison to other classes, Rev feels incredibly stifling if your play style works on being highly reactive. The next closest class to being able to explain where it feels odd would be Ranger..... but Ranger has far more options to reach a better pay off, despite the amount of in-fighting its traits and skill choices impose on the player. Play-wise, Rev has the worst rebound potential (and that includes the Especs), its skills narrow in purpose, utility cost in PvP causes a lot of Energy contention, as a class you have poor condition management, your average damage output is very high, but the energy management has a good chance of killing your momentum if you're not carefully handling it. To play smart, you have to be one step ahead of your enemy, and make sure they're open when you try to lay down the hurt. When they hit, they hit like a truck.... but nearly everything they do has a counter play to it, and in higher tiers, your tricks get less reliable. There is a rework in development to address some of the Rev's weaker areas; but it seems this is just a stop gap fix, and the hope is they'll come back to the more fundamental problems in the future. Of the changes being pushed, most people aren't sure how much of an improvement these will have, despite it showing at least some promise.

Personally I only use Rev in WvW and K-training in Open world. The updated sword/sword finally offers a solid enough damage option to replace staff for OW, but its really hard to find anything in the Rev kit that has the Break bar destroying potential of Staff 5. Thematically, Revs are actually pretty open from a philosophical stand point. Most people associate it with Death Knight in tone, or Ritualist in theme; but I've found the Mist Walker (Time cop-ish) approach to be neutral enough to support any style of armor/outfit you want to run. You have the ability to manipulate the fabric of reality, to travel through it or draw support from it, to keep the those idiot mortals from tearing space/time a new one. Just for funsies, I gave him Ironclad outfit with Shining blade back piece/glider, painted him blue, and made him a Planet-based Ultra Smurf. Still looking for a proper sword for him though.

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I've only been playing a Revenant for a few weeks now, and I don't sPvP, nor have I taken him into WvW yet, but I find the prof a blast to play. I agree with much of what @starlinvf.1358 listed, course my perspective is from OW / Metas / Fractal / Dungeon content.

I'm also someone who doesn't like how I have to choose between upkeep skills and my combat skills, but I also acknowledge that's a L2P issue, where the skilled Revs know exactly how much energy they have at all times and when they can or can't use an ability.

What I personally love though is the durability and self-sustain I see, running Shiro / Jalis. I can facetank the Vet Vinetooth in AB and finish him off while I'm still at 80%, and that's without using a healing skill. For AoE / tagging, dwarf hammers are so sick and fun, though I'm sure that would be full on useless in sPvP.

Next Tuesday they are announcing some changes to Herald, so maybe hold on and see what ANET has in store for the prof.

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The best part of it for me is that the class feels incredibly flexible while in combat, despite the fixed utility skills. The energy system and low cooldowns overall presents an engaging gameplay that isn't really found in the other classes. It is a relatively high skill cap class (moreso depending on gamemode), so don't expect to succeed with it right away, but if you master it it's incredibly rewarding. Build design is also pretty flexible across all 3 gamemodes. I have 12+ builds I use depending on mood, gamemode, and situation

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It may be different now, but Rev was a complete pig to level as Herald or Renegade are/were more or less mandatory. I suppose that goes for other classes too though, in that no class is particularly complete with only half its talents.

I picked Rev as I enjoy being able to put out boons to my team mates as well as dealing damage, which wasn't a thing back when I mained my Warrior before HoT.

In terms of gameplay style, I find the "easy to learn, hard to master" rhythm of switching weapon sets and legends to be particularly entertaining. One lives or dies as a Rev by deciding when to flip one or both bars - switching early grants you access to That Skill You Need, but it can also cancel auras/effects/etc and fail to trigger on swap effects that were on cool down. You also lose energy you had yet to spend if you are flipping legends.

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so rev... i main rev since the profession was released with hot, but only recently got around to play him as support. what can I say about rev? The design is obviously very different to the vanilla professions. While those (this is especially visible in trait lines) were layed out more casually and allow for synergys between weapons, utilities and traits, the rev profession really has far less options. for every "role" in the game you have one legend + traitline (condi mallyx, power shiro, tank jalis, support ventari) + invocation for well... legend stuff. if you try to make a power build on core rev, you have devastation line obviously, invocation because why not and then? .. the synergy between the legends is not great because every one of them tries to fit another role. for these "i dont really know what to fit to my core legend for this build" situations you have the elite specs, they are designed to fill the gap. thats why you can take renegade for condi, support and power builds - while renegade itself does not really excel at any of these roles.What i described is viewed by many many people as a downside. While I agree that you have less options than on other classes, I dont think this is necessarily a downside. Everything is very focused on what its doing, imo you can see the experience the devs made over the years distilled into a small amount of options, that actually.... work.The second obvious difference is the energy system. while EVERY other profession in this game has just one kind of cost for their abilities (one mechanic ie cooldowns [or in case of thief weapons initiative with no cd]) rev always has 2 costs - cooldowns AND energy. This is one of the reasons rev feels different and why alot of people qq about the class. It is hard to balance this around all the other classes, and many people forget this while talking about rev balance. imo the devs are slowly getting into it after few years. the energy system forces you to really focus on your decisions, since "false" decisions will hurt you/your energy more than other classes.Looking at these 2 design decisions some may feel like rev is subpar to other classes, but I personally dont think so. It is a very interesting profession that takes time to learn. Time that not many are willing to spend. Perhaps you do?

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  • 3 weeks later...

My favorite part of revlyfe (speaking to sPvP/Roaming) is that if you get killed it's 100% your own fault. There's no situation where if you played differently you couldn't have won, or at least survived/stalled until help arrived. It really makes you strive to analyze your game and play smarter, readjust your combos, rethink your energy management, and learn when other classes are at their most vulnerable. Playing Rev in these game modes will 100% make you a better overall GW2 player and carries into other classes and PvE.

Speaking to PvE (raiding), the short bow+m/a rotation just feels really good to play and has very little auto attack segments (which are something that I really don't like in a dps class... Smart skill spam > aa spam 100% of the time, imo.) Plus you do ridiculous damage vs Huge hitbox with Vindication, and amped up Citadel Bombardment is top meme's to cast with a legendary weapon.

Gameplay-wise, I would most compare playing Revenant to a slower version of Weaver... Everything you do comes in segments/phases, be in a max DPS raid rotation or your PvP combat flow. So rather than learning one big dps rotation, you learn 4 sequential mini-rotations, and then if mechanics happen to shift your cool downs, it's all about re-prioritizing which rotation you want to be coming back into. And same with PvP, every time you swap legends, you need to know what you want to accomplish during that 10 second/100 energy interval and what you can do if something goes awry.

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