Ludovide.1967

I think heal vindicator is incredibly fun in wvw, it can put out a ton of healing and condition cleanses, and has a really reactive playstyle. Also, ventari is very powerful right now, especially with the projectile block bubble. But, unless you take dwarf stance, it lacks stability or any really good boons. It has good protection, vigor, and regeneration uptime, but unfortunately without better access to boons like aegis and stability it feels a little lacking in wvw compared to other specs who have a ton of access to those boons. And without alacrity or quickness, it won't be viable in endgame pve as a support either. So the spec is in a really weird place at the moment, but I still find it a lot of fun to play.

Personally I think heal vindicator is a ton of fun in wvw, especially with the ventari changes. But it sucks that without quickness/alacrity it won't be viable in pve. Also, I second people saying that the elites suck. I actually think that the urn of Saint Victor is pretty cool, but that it should give out better boons. Also, it sucks if you get cced because the damage over time can kill you without you having any option to turn it off. Honestly, if the flip over skill for the urn was a stun break/gave stability it would fix the issue and I don't think it would be overpowered. The spear is a cool idea, but isn't there yet. Also, it makes archemorus the only legend without an energy drain skill, which I think needs to be addressed. Because if you are trying to play dps it means you can't use any of the abilities that interact with upkeep while using alliance stance.

Personally, I like ventari being pure support. It is the class fantasy for me, to be able to commit to basically only support and healing, and is what I love about Ventari stance. I also think it fits the idea of a person who gave up their violent/warrior ways for peace. I think making the entire stance about his tablet is a bit weird, and I would love for the abilities to do something different when the tablet is not deployed. I also think could have been cool to combine him with Ronan for a dual stance like InsaneQR suggested. I'll admit that not having good cc or any stun break hurts, and combine that with the high skill required, and I think the stance is generally not amazing when compared to other support classes, but it is also super unique and I wouldn't want to lose what makes it special.

For the most part I like the changes but I still feel like it should heal on move. I am very conflicted because I like having no energy to move it, it makes it much easier to reposition, but at the same time, it just feels clunkier now. If I send my tablet over to a low health ally, it does nothing unless I activate another skill, and considering how small the tablets radius is, my ally might have already moved away at that point. I feel like making one of the abilities a slow pulsing heal over time, or just adding some inherent pulsing healing to the tablet by default, would make up for no heal on move. The biggest advantage of movement not costing energy is the ability to keep the projectile bubble up longer and move it around. But that makes me worry that they will nerf this ability. Protective solace is one of the reasons I love Rev/ventari so much and I would hate to see it be overly nerfed. I think the empower mechanic is weird, because it is incentivising you to blow up and replace your tablet, when I would rather save the explode ability for when I need cc, not when I want to empower my skills. Maybe make it so when you move the tablet it empowers the next skill, but with a long internal cooldown? I'm not sure what the best solution would be.

Thank you! I actually had no idea the armor skin had such an impact on how dyes showed up.

I wanted to dye my engineer's armor to match the gold and green of the mech, but I haven't been able to find a dye that matches the colors exactly. Does anyone have any suggestions? Thanks

What rune/sigils are you using? I've been trying a similar build, and found it a lot of fun, but I wasnt sure on what gear was best for it.

I have to admit, I'm a little disappointed. I will still play virtuoso and have a ton of fun, and I'm glad to see they kept the condi line and buffed it a little bit, but I was expecting more changes. Also, I checked in game, but main hand and off hand sword skills don't count as blade skills. I just don't understand the reasoning behind that at all, considering they are literally blades and the greatsword counts as a blade (except for the greatsword auto attack, which is a shame). It's also strange to me that they kept the damage buff when within 600 range, despite it being a ranged spec. Personally I really enjoyed virtuoso in the betas, and I will continue to do so, but its a shame that, in my opinion, it is so close to being great.

So I avoided playing wvw as virtuoso because everyone said how awful it was, but I tried it out and it's surprisingly not bad. The utility skills, especially rain of swords, are just really good at harassing the enemy at range, same with the dagger's unstable bladestorm ability. If you combine that with the ability to generate blades from bleeding, you can generate all the blades you need just by casting rain of swords or unstable bladestorm into a big zerg of enemies. And that's just really fun to do. It's not amazing, due to the high amount of projectile hate, but I think it's better than people make it out to be. I also think the ability to gain unblockable shatters on blocking is better for PvP than it is for WvW, but it is still a very good trait. But I found the condi traitline to just be more fun to play with, personally.

I have to say, I think this is enough to make me want to switch out my scrapper support for a mech support. I really enjoy it. In the first beta I hated not having toolbelt skills, but honestly, the mech more than makes up for it. I don't really want toolbelt skills to be honest, especially if they come at the cost of nerfing the mech. The reduced cooldown on the mech was very needed in my opinion. However, some of the signets are now super overtuned. For example, the Shift Signet is a 20-25 second cooldown 1200 range teleport that breaks stuns and cleanses conditions and passively increases your movement speed. Compare that the the mesmer's blink, one of their most iconic abilities, which is a 1200 range teleport that breaks stuns with a 30 second cooldown. Shift signet is simply too powerful. I thought the reason you take the signet is to make sure you and your mech are in the same location, like to do some repositioning on the mech. If it needs to also break stun, fine, but why does it need to be 1200 range? That is just ridiculous. It should at most be 900 range if not 600, in my opinion. But on a more positive not, I do really enjoy the spec and am really looking forward to playing it in end of dragons

I really like the idea of dagger 3 being a flip over skill, it would bring some much needed mobility to the spec and I can imagine in pvp, sending it off away from enemies as a way to disengage (even if it is a bit slow). I dont like the idea of making the shatters ground targeted personally, atleast not f1 and f2

This is such a good idea, and would go a long way to differentiating bladesongs from the core shatters. Personally I think one of the bladesongs should grant fury, which is such and important boon for the spec, but other unique buffs to the bladesongs would be very good as well. I also second this. There are so many times when you have max blades and all your shatters are on cooldown. Even if you reduce the shatter cooldowns drastically, it will still happen fairly often. Shooting out spare blades would make having max blades not feel so much of a punishment and would add to that "death by a thousand cuts" vibe I get from the spec. Also, if blades applied some passive effect based on the number you had (like improved crit chance maybe?) it would also make having max blades feel less bad.

After playing a bit more, I have some updated feedback. Mainly that, if they are going to remove the condi dps traitline, they should make the traits focus on ranged dps vs melee dps. Dual swords with blocking and the cloud of daggers from f4 is a lot of fun in melee, and sniping enemies with f1 is a lot of fun at ranged. I'm editing this to say that I really hope they don't get rid of the condi traitline, I find it incredibly fun and would hate to lose it. I feel that, beyond the issue where you cannot stock blades at max, I would be happy with the spec is.

I tried the healing/sustain build with signet of ether and the inspiration traitline, and as far as I can tell it just doesn't trigger if you have max blades. Like you can't stock a blade when you have max blades so it just doesnt work. I really hope they fix this, because it doesn't feel like an intentional decision. Also I don't think the heal on shatter ability scales to five blades right now, unfortunately

Turning shatter 1 into an ammo skill using the illusions line causes the shatter animation to not play correctly. You create the summon circle visuals, but you don’t shoot out any blades, the enemy just takes damage. Occasionally, the summoning circle thing sticks around after you shatter or just randomly shows up. I like this! Maybe if you make it show up when you have that 5% damage buff or when the shatters are unblockable I think that would be super cool!! Finally. abilities that trigger when you stock a blade, like signet of ether, do not work if you have max blades unless you summon a phantasm. This also applies to the heal on summon ability in the inspiration traitline. With core mesmer, you can resummon clones even if you are at max, which means it can always trigger, so this seems like an oversight. One of the first builds I tried was focused on stocking a ton of blades and sustaining myself through signet of ether and the inspiration traitline, which is something that works decently with the other specs. And it just didn’t work. It’s really bugged at the moment Just editing to say that inspiring distortion does not give aegis on shatter skill 4 like it is supposed to

I’m going to start by saying that I love this spec and as a mesmer main, it's what I’ve wanted for an elite spec for a while. I think the changes to infinite forge and the blocking trait stocking 3 blades were very good, and it feels a lot easier to generate blades now. All that being said, I think there need to be some changes to the traits. Firstly, all the grandmasters deal with generating blades, but for a shatter spec we don’t have anything that doubles down on that. Additionally, I am surprised there is no trait focusing on the dagger (aside from the bleeding one) or on psionic abilities, as these types of traits are really common for other specs. Also, the elite ability should apply some sort of diaable or immobilize something because even pve enemies just walk out of the damage. Finally, I think the blades should give a passive effect, because you often have full blades and no shatters off cool down. Maybe instead of shatters giving 5% damage its 1% damage per blade. For the condi traitline, I really think they need to increase the base duration for the bleeding stacks. It's hard to maintain more than 15 stacks of bleeding without using offhand pistol and deuling, and if you stop attacking, your stacks drop off pretty much immediately. Firstly I think they should combine jagged mind and bloodsong into one grandmaster trait. If you are taking one, you are always taking the other. Or just give the dagger built in bleeding rather than it being a trait. I think the sword should count as a blade weapon as well, but the greatsword is even worse at maintaining stacks of bleeding than the dagger. The big issue I think with it, is that you need to combine high precision and high condition duration, which is just really hard to do. And it means that your condition damage or critical damage have to be low to compensate.

I love the blades. I would like them to maybe have an idle animation when your character is idling, maybe have them sheath with your weapons? But I personally love them and it really cements the virtuoso's visual identity in my opinion.

I love this spec so much!!! It is the most fun I have had in gw2 in a while. I ran around with a friend of mine and we did some open world events, such as palawadon, the octovine, and some HoT hero points. I was able to keep him from dying the whole time and it felt really good. Also, during palawadon, I didnt attack a single enemy and still got kill credit due to rot wallow venom, which is great design. Since I was just focused on supporting my ally, I didnt use my 4 and 5 weapon skills since they were enemy only. I really loved being able to revive people at range, it was super fun. I loved the spec but I had 2 issues. Firstly, despite being able to keep my ally alive really well, it's really hard to keep yourself alive. Maybe some minor self barrier application could help, or it might just be the design of the spec that you are a squishy support, which would be okay. My second issue is that, similarly to the virtuoso, the core trait lines dont work with the new mechanic. Specifically, the traits that add bonuses to your steal dont apply if you use it on an ally. At the very least, I would like to see the trait that makes you stealth when you steal and the one that gives out boons work when you target an ally. But what I would really like to see is some trait that is like "on steal effects now apply additional benefits when used on an ally". So poison on steal would now cleanse a condition from your ally, daze would apply stability, stuff like that. So that if you are just focused on helping an ally, you can still use these traits. All in all I loved the spec and it was super fun. I dont know if it will be "viable" but it feels good to play.

I like the mechanist. For the most part it feels fun, but it does take some getting used to. Right now, the big thing I wouldsay is the lack of toolbelt skills. Also, there is really no reason to stow the mech as far as I found. Often, when I had the mech stowed, it would appear without me summoning it which was annoying. My advice would be to move the stow ability from f4 to f5, to be in line with the other elite specs for engineer. It would be especially nice is the f1 was changed back to the toolbelt skill for heal, because that is arguably the most important toolbelt skill and would allow you to take medkit, which is very useful for a support build. The f2-f4 would become the mech skills. Also it would be nice to have access to the f1-f4 toolbelt skills when the mech is stowed. So much of the core engineer traits revolve around the toolbelt, and to lose it completely sucks. Also, if stowing the mech gave you the toolbelt skills, it would make the trait that calls down an orbital laser beam when the mech is stowed actually useful. If the toolbelt was added back in some capacity, I think this spec would be perfect from a game design perspective (although I'm sure the balance would need tweaking)

After playing around with the Vindicator the past few days and hearing the community's reaction to it, I feel like I am in a good place to give some feedback on the spec. I don’t main revenant, but I probably play my rev 2nd most out of my characters. Firstly, I don’t think it is as bad as people are saying it is. It certainly needs a buff/some of the mechanics need to be tweaked, but as it stands I think it will be a really fun class for PvP, WvW, and open world events like bounties. I’m not a strike/raid player, so I can’t speak to that, but from what I hear, Revenant already has a solid build for endgame PvE. I definitely feel that the spec could do with an overall buff to its power/healing, but will eventually be balanced. Furthermore, the dodge mechanic is really fun, and when using the healing dodge I was able to dodge quite often and it felt rewarding. What is wrong with the spec? What I found to be most problematic with the spec is the elite skills and the profession mechanic. Firstly, the elite skills are underpowered. The spear doesn’t do enough damage and doesn’t have any sort of CC or disable to make up for it. I think it is a really fun skill to use, but it needs to be buffed, ideally by giving it a CC or just more damage. Another way it could be buffed would be by having it drain energy while preparing to throw and reactivate it to throw the spear, dealing increased damage for the time you spent charging it. The urn on the other hand has too many drawbacks to be useful. The fact that it drains both health and energy makes it unplayable, which is unfortunate because it is a really interesting ability. Even if I still have a lot of health left, I can’t keep the urn up for long because I run out of energy. I would suggest making it just drain health so that you can still use other skills while it is active. Also, because the spear requires an enemy to target, if I want to start combat with the urn ready, I can’t because the skill will not flip over unless it targets an enemy. Similarly, if I want to use the spear and I have the urn active, I leave myself open to being cc’d and stuck with the urn out and taking damage because it cannot be easily double tapped as a skill. The profession mechanic, the f2 skill, is also problematic because it doesn’t do anything useful when not in alliance stance. The herald and the base rev’s f2 skills do something unique depending on the legend you are in, and the renegade f-skills are useful no matter the legend you are in. My solution to these issues, in addition to the buffs I’ve already mentioned, would be to swap the profession mechanic and the alliance elite skill(s). Ideally, the spear and urn skill would become separate f2 and f3 skills so that you could use them independently of each other. Then, while in alliance stance, the elite skill would flip your other utility skills and give endurance. This might not be the perfect solution, but I think it would open the door to use the elite spec with other legends than the alliance. For example, the urn gives damage reduction and heals allies, which synergizes with the ventari and dwarf stances. And the spear could become a great long range finisher or opener for shiro stance.