Master Ketsu.4569

I have no idea why people expected Rev to get a Ritualist spec when Kalla is already a spirit spam legend. Renegade is your Ritualist E-spec. That's what you get. Accept it.

The basic way to fight Revs is to recognize their three main weaknesses: 1. Extremely obvious animations. The "just dodge" meme is true for dealing with most classes and builds, but for fighting Rev it's significantly more true. There comes a point where you just gotta accept that your failure to dodge/block when you see massive dragon wings taking up half your screen it's entirely your own fault. 2. Poor CC management. Revs have poor stab access. Revs stunbreaks are either very high energy cost, and thus using them means they are giving up the ability to do much for the next few seconds, or it's the fury facet. This means "Just interrupt" is also added to "just dodge" and "Just block". In fact a surefire way to beat 99% of rev players you see out there is to CC them ( even if it's just a daze ) the instant right after they use phase traverse. 3. Poor condi clear. Revs thus have a similar weakness to thief in that they generally cannot get away with just standing in passive condi AoEs, even if those AoEs aren't very strong.

I suspect that OP is just extremely confused as to what the restructuring actually does.

So one thing I noticed when reading: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/studio-update-world-restructuring-and-the-future-of-world-vs-world/ Is that there is no mention of sPvP rankings taken into account for WvW. This could potentially be a very big mistake that may result in a lot of rage quitting. What's the problem? The issue is sPvP skill generally translates very highly into skill in WvW. And there are a handful of guilds, one of which I am in, that generally expect everyone to be Gold III at worst and play at platinum level consistently. I suspect a lot of people do not really get just how big the gap in skill is between someone consistently somewhere between sPvP Plat~Legendary and your average casual WvW player. The problem comes down to one of the biggest differences in skill between your average WvWer and the average 1500+ sPvPer is that plat+ players tend to be very very good at not dying. What this means is they generally have a good sense of what skills do what, what to watch out for, when to go in / not to go in, and have a keen sense of when they are being targeted. So in the WvW skirmish of 100 plat+ players vs an organized 100 WvW guild-of-friends, the team of sPvP lads could probably be half drunk, be completely uncoordinated, playing random jank builds they ported half a**edly from sPvP... and they would probably still roflstomp the WvW guild 100-0. Because they won't f***ing die. It will feel to the WvW guilds as if they fighting against a bunch of deranged hyenas playing random builds with random strategies that they have never seen...yet somehow all of them have DBZ Ultra Instinct and thus cannot be killed. It will likely be their most confusing and demoralizing experience since their start of playing GW2. As much "fun" as this might be for those of us on the sPvP side of this hypothetical matchup, I have to call it out. Not taking sPvP average rankings into account when matching guilds has the potential to lead to quite a few uninstallations. Not good when an expansion is on the Horizon. Would also likely result in more than one thread popping up accusing an entire guild of hacking. Simple way to fix this is to snip it in the bud before it becomes a problem. An entire guild of 1500+ sPvP Hyenas is something that WvW casuals -in an ideal matchmaking- should never be allowed to even know exists, much less have to fight against.

Rev is considered to have a higher skill floor because the energy system heavily punishes random skillspam, and so new players who don't have full awareness of what's going on will have trouble with the class. But Revenant was somewhat intended to be this games version of the Shadow-Knight archetype, so mechanically it's just a warrior with some thief stuff mixed in, not too hard to understand once you have gotten over the energy-system hump.

A good middle ground would be reverting it to no shroud on self, but also reducing the cooldown on MSS to 4 seconds in PvE and 6s in pvp/wvw. This way it would be balanced by being able to reposition shades more frequently and scourge skills would be more limited by their cooldown on F2-F5 than by waiting to summon shades.

The problem comes down to the fact that Anet caved to the casuals and brought back its shroud skill on self mechanic. Scourge was fine during the time shroud skills only were on shades, because during that time the class actually required a brain to play. I had tried scourge during that time and with good planning, the spec was still entirely playable and dare I say fun. Should scourge be disabled in PvP? No, that would be a lame way to deal with it. The ideal scenario would be to revert it back to no shroud on self and tell the casuals to L2P. Because then the class becomes balanced by the fact that it takes time and consideration to cover the point rather than being able to just walk on to it and instantly say "this point is mine now me scourge me stand on point me press buttons oook oooook AAAAAH EEEEEE EEEEEE EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE". Scourge will never be beneficial for the meta as long as it works like this.

Ventari in general is the worst revenant legend and could just use a rework. Basically useless in PvP save for extreme meme builds. Very situational use in PvE. 100% worthless in WvW.

Pretty good chance OP is right. Looks like heavy armor. Looks like it's wearing a blindfold of some type. Data leaks practically confirm GS for rev.

Because it's already easy enough to exploit how Duo Q matching works in order to manipulate matches, allowing more than that would basically be enabling match-manipulation wars.

75% being gud 25% exploiting duoQ, dodging, and farming AM, etc.

DH doesn't really need any nerfs. The problem is entirely Trapper runes and the fact that stealth in gw2 is very poorly designed.

I noticed that The stability from https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Inspiring_Reinforcement is often randomly unreliable, so I decided to test it out and found a noticeable delay between the initial and pulsing stability of the skill. Considering this is unlisted in the skill description, I am guessing it's unintended. Plus it makes little sense for a window to exist 1/5th way through the skill. The best way to reproduce this bug in a way that makes the delay easy to spot: 1. is to go to the Mists PvP Lobby 2. equip any PvP rune that gives at least +5% Boon duration. 3. Use Inspiring Reinforcement and observe the stability stacks. You will notice that initial stability does not run into the second pulse to create a second stack, but pulses #2-5 do. There appears to be a roughly 200ms delay.

Sword 5 is good. Sword 4 is not. I've recommended changing it into a blocking stance with the slash as a followup.

I like the design of Willbenders F1-F3. Definitely a new feel for Guardian, but it feels like it's losing too much in return. Here's what I would do: Change sword 4 to a version of the old deleted skill https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Duelist's_Preparation Where the first part is a block, and the second part is the large swipe it currently has. This is the simplest way to help the spec out. Giving it a 2s block would be just enough to give it survival without making it broken.

Nah the shroud 5 is good you just have to not be bad at deciding where to place it. Needing things to follow you to be usable is a l2p issue no offense.

Thief: Stealth has been updated so that thieves are now also invisible to the balance team.

Metabattle is semi-correct. It usually gets a trait or two wrong but for the most part the builds it lists get the gist of things. The trick is realizing that "meta" just means the whims of the 'curators', which is obviously biased. Therefore there is no real difference between anything in the "META" and "GREAT" category.

True, sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. Although with this new Rev icon? Really hard to tell anything. The individual pieces look like daggers. But can also look like longbows if from the sides. The entire thing could be a focus, but it would look like a pretty strange focus item. The shadow behind it all looks sort of like a Greatsword. TL;DR no idea. Speculate away but anyone who turns out to be correct will most likely just merely be lucky.

1. Downstate HP never being updated to account for the 30% reduction in damage over the last two years, and Anet ignoring the DEEP balance issues this causes. 2. Nec sustain 3. Match manip 4. jUsT inCreAse ThE coOldOwn BrO 5. ROTT and other faceroll specs that aren't OP, but promote unskillful gameplay.

Rune of Resist is definitely underpowered, especially since it was only "broken" on Condi rev due to busted traits on Corruption that allowed perma-resist. I've found that Rune of Hoelbrak ( -10% incoming condi damage ) or Rune of Divinity ( Free 10% health bonus ) are now better for dealing with Condi builds than Rune of Resist is now. Kind of sad tbh.

This is the correct response. If we went by Icons, Renegade would be a GS. Scourge would be a shield. Mirage would be daggers.

The point of the 300s traits is to be a smiters boon. https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Smiter's_Boon_(PvP) The traits that had this happen all deserved it because anti-death passives are generally bad for the game. They allow people to play by entering combat hyper-aggressive and spam offensive abilities in an extremely reckless and unskillful manner because they know their passive will save them. This allowed people to save their defensive abilities, ie having to actually learn how to play the game, for after their anti-death goes on CD. It's a second-chance mechanic on top of a game that already has a built in second-chance mechanic ( downstate ) and thus they are completely unnecessary in PvP other than allowing bad players to be bad. The reason they aren't reworked is because reworking them mechanically means also changing them in PvE. And PvE is supposed to be marketed for casuals, and casuals tend to complain very loudly when their toys are taken away. Just look at scourge getting its shade-skills-on-self back. The balance team knows it's bad for PvP balance, but they had to do it anyways because the casuals practically threw themselves on the ground kicking and screaming over it. So you really can't blame Anet for taking their time on the 300s traits.

Pretty much this. People are crying they didn't mention much of actual content ( Raids, WvW, sPvP, etc ) but the thing is what really matters in the end is that the gameplay itself is good. A HUGE problem with PoF is that most of the E-specs were designed only to look cool, but mechanically were terrible for the game. If the elite specs are designed to pander to scrubs ( sorry there really isn't a nicer term to use here ) again like they were for PoF IE: lack of interactivity, Mindless AoE circle spam, instant cast attack-while-defending nonsense and other kitchen-sink skills that do VWXYZ with one ability ... then sPvP and WvW will suffer. If they are designed to be both fun to play as and fun to play against, sPvP and WvW will see a revival even if they don't add any new maps. Simple as. So far, things are looking good. Virtuoso seems to exactly match as a fix to what myself and many others have been saying about what makes Mesmer frustrating to play against for a while: Mindless clone spam ( Which enables the kittenous strategy of "run away/play passively while clones slowly tick people down" ) and poor quality animations + instant cast ( Mes F1-F3 ). Both these issues appear resolved with the new elite spec.