The Quickness Herald Rework did not achieve what it set out to do - and how to actually solve it

[Lilodelacroix.8714]

Hello Anet, Hello fellow revenants.
I've been playing Revenant for about 500 hours, 90% of those spent exclusively on Herald, as it is my favourite spec in the game. But ever since the last balance patch i have been feeling uneasy about QHerald, and the patch's impact on how we play.

The good:

• We are playing our class, instead of spamming all our facets on cooldown. 
• ...and that's about it

The bad:

• Energy Upkeep is a big problem, with how Revenant skills have been changed over the years. Qherald is very limited in what it can actually do. We have all these skills, and we are supposed to manage energy cost and play around it, but because we have to upkeep 6 pips at all time, we do not regenerate energy, we just drain it, leaving us with no energy to use skills. This is especially prominent on high energy legends we use for utility, like Jalis and Ventari. One Road, and your energy is gone, while Firebrand can upkeep stability by pressing a single button without a second thought. Another example is Ventari, it's skills are very expensive, leaving you Energy starved. This creates the problem the devs self-reportedly wanted to avoid - us not being able to use our skills after all.
• The 3-second pulse is very clunky. Your ally happened to run away from you while you were pulsing? Tough luck, no quickness for 3 seconds. This is getting remedied in tomorrow's patch with a 1s pulse time, which is a step in the right direction. 
• We are still not using our skills reactively - because we need to upkeep 6 pips, instead of spamming our facet consumes, we don't use them at all, or we use them at times without actually caring what they do, but because our rotation tells us to do it. The patch factually did not achieve it's desired effect

The ugly (Heal Rev is dead again):

• Qheal Herald (my favourite build pre-patch) is suffering. Yes, we have more passive sustain than before the patch, but we have less personal sustain, and at least for me, the build is WAY less fun to play. Having to upkeep Glint facets as much as possible (because we want to provide Might, fury, Swiftness, Protection, Regeneration, bc of course we do, why wouldn't we?) means we are constantly struggling for energy, and would preferably not use ANY skills. The build has been reduced to turning facets on and autoattacking. Yes, we have a ton of passive healing, but it isn't really fun to play. Also, again, we do not use our facet consumes at all, since we want to upkeep them as long as possible, and having them on CD might cause us to not provide quickness anymore. 
• Elevated Compassion's Heal on boon application only affects allies, not us - meaning while we have really good passive sustain for others, Qherald lost a lot of it's self sustain (which came from Generous Abundance + Consume spam), meaning it lost a lot of value and reliability as a tank option - something a healer is expected to be able to fulfil. 
• Facet of Nature for Qheal Herald has become a one-button wonder. Upkeeping it would mean not upkeeping other boons, so it's a spam skill we use to prolong other boons while not in Glint. It's a bit sad that it has become a spam-on-cd skill, when it, and it's upkeep, should be part of the core identity of herald.

 

So how do we fix this? 
Hear me out here. Firebrand has reigned supreme because of it's stupid versatility and ease of use - i understand anet do not want another firebrand situation. However, here is what i would propose, even though it would be really strong.

• Change Elevated compassion to affect the herald too. Remove the quickness pulse on upkeep threshold from Elevated Compassion, and change it to "Facet of Nature now grants Quickness (1s interval) 
  This allows to play around with Qdps herald's damage by requiring more or less boon duration depending on how long the pulse applies. I would propose something around the 0,75s mark, requiring a bit of BD for it to work. Also, since quickness is now a 2-pip upkeep, it would regulate how many boons we could give at once, meaning we would need to think about what to apply when and for how long, and what to prioritize. This doesn't solve the problem of "we are not using our consumes at all" entirely for Heal Herald, but it's a step in the right direction, bc consuming doesn't mean we lose quickness application.
• Spread more boon applications on other Legends. E.g. Ventari desperately needs access to long-lasting Regeneration. Also, the "empowered" mechanic is really clunky and not that transparent. Remove empowered and roll it's benefits into the baseline functionality of the skills in reduced form. This would allow for more flexibility in ventari - and i bet 99% of rev players don't even know the empowered mechanic is a thing 😉
  Jalis could use some access to protection, or a MASSIVE energy cost reduction to Rite of the Great Dwarf. At 40 energy cost, that is a dead button, because it's effects are really not that good (in pve) and you'd rather use the energy for Inspiring Reinforcement. 
• And Lastly, maybe think about rolling the functionality of draconic echoes into baseline. Having to upkeep our boon auras is fine, but if using our facet consumes means we stop giving boons, we'll always be incentivized by design to not consume unless absolutely necessary or convenient for the rotation - no reactive gameplay again.

I know that these proposed changes are very strong, and i honestly have no arguments on how to get that into a "balanced" state, so i would love to have some input from my fellow revenant players - i just want to be able to play Herald again and have fun while doing it. And i really want Qheal Herald back. As it stands, herald has to jump through a lot of hoops to achieve what other classes can do with the press of a single button - And it's way less fun than before. I don't think the changes tomorrow will fix that aspect.
So let me know what you think! 

[SunTheBro.4853]

Love the idea, and honestly think it's the best way to go with Quickness Herald. Fully agree with all the points you made as well. 6-pip upkeep cost overall just feels terrible, especially on Glint where now you have to micromanage your active facets just to maintain quickness. And I'm sure I'm not the only one who would rather just run Shiro/Jalis, as boring as that is. 

 

Quote

This allows to play around with Qdps herald's damage by requiring more or less boon duration depending on how long the pulse applies. I would propose something around the 0,75s mark, requiring a bit of BD for it to work.

I'm not sure offhand about the numbers, but I feel like 1s duration is fine. Keep in mind too that True Nature will leave us dead in the water for at least ~16s. Plus, being able to temporarily overcap on Quickness would allow us more wiggle room for utilities on other legends.

 

 Also, I don't think what you proposed is too strong. For comparison, both Harbinger and Deadeye can both currently provide permanent Quickness uptime with little to no boon duration investment. Not saying Herald needs the same treatment, but the tradeoff in how you gear should be qDPS vs. qHeal/Support. 

 

Quote

Jalis could use some access to protection, or a MASSIVE energy cost reduction to Rite of the Great Dwarf. At 40 energy cost, that is a dead button, because it's effects are really not that good (in pve) and you'd rather use the energy for Inspiring Reinforcement

Hard agree. All the core Revenant skills need some cost reduction/reworks to be honest. Rev has too many dead buttons, and Shiro is by far the worst offender of this. 

[Lucy.3728]

The elite on dwarf is way to expensive.

It is my only stun break I have in that legend and in wvw I have to think twice to use it or I can't use it to try to break free because I don't have the energy left since I'm actually using my weapon skills since I like them and they are there for reason. And ofc I cannot switch to another legend because it is recharging since I have to switch between them on cool down anyway.

I don't do the -6 pip upkeep because that would leave me to not being able to play at all but moving around and look good. (And the auto attack play style is too stupid for me)

Either playing style cripples me.

Sucks.

I don't see any reason why Herald had to be touched in the first place.
Except for the short (bug) time in that we Heralds were almost invincible I don't see Heralds often in wvw.

Edited July 18, 2023 by Lucy.3728

[Thevaultdwellinggamer.4267]

20 hours ago, Lilodelacroix.8714 said:

The 3-second pulse is very clunky. Your ally happened to run away from you while you were pulsing? Tough luck, no quickness for 3 seconds. This is getting remedied in tomorrow's patch with a 1s pulse time, which is a step in the right direction. 

The problem isn't the 3 second pulse, because if was, quickness Harbinger's would be a lot worst off. They have two source of quickness, One from their utility skill, and two, from their trait, Deathly Hastes, which also pulses every 3 second per interval. This means they can go into shroud to give people up to 6 second of quickness per interval (Provided you have the boon duration.) And when they get off shroud, they can throw a potion onto the ground to provide even more quickness to make up for the fact that you're not providing quickness from your shroud anymore.

 

Herald doesn't have anything like that. They have to stress their energy resources by a absurd degree, and they don't have any other source of quickness. Compared to Harbringer, which can provide Quickness easily, in a form that allows them to deal more damage, especially in a less clunky/infuriating playstyle, Herald pales in comparison.

If anything, The 1 pulse per second is only going to make things harder, because you also have to take into account that they also cut the quickness duration into 1.25 second. So they made Herald's quickness upkeep that much harder to maintain, because again, elevated compassion is their only source of group quickness they have.

Anet can't balance quickness or alac worth kitten.

Edited July 18, 2023 by Thevaultdwellinggamer.4267

[Jijimuge.4675]

39 minutes ago, Thevaultdwellinggamer.4267 said:

If anything, The 1 pulse per second is only going to make things harder, because you also have to take into account that they also cut the quickness duration into 1.25 second. So they made Herald's quickness upkeep that much harder to maintain, because again, elevated compassion is their only source of group quickness they have.

Why does that make it harder?  Prior to this patch, one would give 3 seconds of quickness for 3 seconds spent at upkeep -6 (equivalent to 1s quickness per second).  Now it's 1.25 seconds of quickness for every 1 second spent at -6 upkeep.  That looks like a 25% increase in the amount of quickness granted.

[Ekko.9854]

I thought about the herald situation a lot too and your solution is actually a really good starting idea compared to what we have now, because no matter how much I try to make upkeep work, I keep finding the pre-patch 'spam' herald version just a lot better and less clunky. Most players didn't mind the spamming anyway and with a bit of over-capping on concentration you didn't have to spam anyway after like 2 rotations. The upkeep now just does not feel right imo, Anet tried, experiment failed, be the bigger person and revert the patch until you have a manageable solution AND THAN TRY IT OUT IN A BETA FIRST so you don't have to scroll over the rev forum and see 25 pages on how herald is clunky and is worse off to last its last version when compared.

Edited July 18, 2023 by Ekko.9854

[Otter.3841]

Honestly one of the better, more well thought out design ideas yet. Fingers crossed someone listens to you!

[Polar.8634]

So it seems quickness is easier to maintain now and we got free might. It appears 1.25 sec duration in 1 sec interval is more then 3 sec duration in 3 sec interval. Oh, and free concentration 

[Lilodelacroix.8714]

1 hour ago, Polar.8634 said:

So it seems quickness is easier to maintain now and we got free might. It appears 1.25 sec duration in 1 sec interval is more then 3 sec duration in 3 sec interval. Oh, and free concentration 

Yes, it is easier to maintain, but it doesn't solve the main issue:
We still don't use our energy for using our abilities, and we still don't want to consume reactively, bc that would mean we lose quickness. 
All this change did was to make it so that qdps herald can now maintain 100% quick uptime on full dps gear, which is just... that can't be the goal. And it still feels bad to play.

And Qheal Herald is in exactly the same spot as before, minus an additional 20% BD we don't need anyway on healer gear.
Nothing changed.

[Szymon.5369]

30 minutes ago, Lilodelacroix.8714 said:

Yes, it is easier to maintain, but it doesn't solve the main issue:
We still don't use our energy for using our abilities, and we still don't want to consume reactively, bc that would mean we lose quickness. 
All this change did was to make it so that qdps herald can now maintain 100% quick uptime on full dps gear, which is just... that can't be the goal. And it still feels bad to play.

And Qheal Herald is in exactly the same spot as before, minus an additional 20% BD we don't need anyway on healer gear.
Nothing changed.

I don't follow. Won't wearing boon gear allow for using consumes reactively?

[Polar.8634]

2 hours ago, Lilodelacroix.8714 said:

and we still don't want to consume reactively, bc that would mean we lose quickness. 

i don't understand how is that possible. Heal skill is on demand, stunbreak is on demand, elite is on demand. We overcap quickness and after 10-15 seconds in the fight have 20-30 sec of quickness prebuffed on full dps gear.

2 hours ago, Lilodelacroix.8714 said:

And Qheal Herald is in exactly the same spot as before, minus an additional 20% BD we don't need anyway on healer gear.

this one prestacks even harder now, no need to upkeep every other legend swap which gives ton of energy to use. I was tanking hardest golem yesterday which not every healer can do(this easily that is).

[ZenDrake.8316]

4 hours ago, Polar.8634 said:

this one prestacks even harder now, no need to upkeep every other legend swap which gives ton of energy to use. I was tanking hardest golem yesterday which not every healer can do(this easily that is).

It's still a pain to upkeep protection on fights where you have to reactively heal (swapping to ventari). Especially protection is hard to come by since shield 4 is kitten, meaning your only source is the Glint elite skill. You always want to keep up regen, fury and swiftness. That's just a pain at this point if the boss has high damage pressure (like VG).

And prestacking obviously isn't a thing for raids and strikes.

On 7/17/2023 at 9:44 PM, Lilodelacroix.8714 said:

And Lastly, maybe think about rolling the functionality of draconic echoes into baseline. Having to upkeep our boon auras is fine, but if using our facet consumes means we stop giving boons, we'll always be incentivized by design to not consume unless absolutely necessary or convenient for the rotation - no reactive gameplay again.

This would solve so much already. Allowing heal heralds to swap to another legend (for stab or heal) while still pulsing some boons would honestly be enough for me already to alleviate the stressful boon management when you also need to heal a lot.

Edited July 19, 2023 by ZenDrake.8316

[anbujackson.9564]

Okay so, you have almost 40% boon duration for free. Your GM trait is absolutely broken (stat conversion, healing, quickness every second which also makes you pulse 18 stacks of might just by giving quickness). And you think thats bad?

Like you can reach maximum quickness duration so fast that you can do whatever you want on your second legend, for quite some time if I might add. On glinth you also have at least 2 ways to get to -6 upkeep. Like F2, elite or F2, 6, 7, 8, 9 or whatever. Seems to me that you can consume a few however you want.

And you still suggest to make draconic echo baseline? Not enough powercreep already for you? Come on.. What you people seem to forget is that there is always a second supporter in your group for alacrity, who most likely also provides a buttload of boons. 

Edited July 19, 2023 by anbujackson.9564

[Polar.8634]

2 hours ago, ZenDrake.8316 said:

It's still a pain to upkeep protection on fights where you have to reactively heal (swapping to ventari). Especially protection is hard to come by since shield 4 is kitten, meaning your only source is the Glint elite skill. You always want to keep up regen, fury and swiftness. That's just a pain at this point if the boss has high damage pressure (like VG).

i normally don't upkeep swiftness too much, and i use ventary bubble for prot too. use f2 in ventary to empower tablet again and then bubble for more prot.

[Polar.8634]

15 minutes ago, anbujackson.9564 said:

What you people seem to forget is that there is always a second supporter in your group for alacrity, who most likely also provides a buttload of boons. 

to be fair alac providers often don't give too many boons. But ye, if you know most builds you can predict what they provide and adjust own boon output.

[ZenDrake.8316]

7 minutes ago, Polar.8634 said:

i normally don't upkeep swiftness too much, and i use ventary bubble for prot too. use f2 in ventary to empower tablet again and then bubble for more prot.

Not having swiftness in combat feels pretty bad tbh. I consider it one of the "core boons" a healer should try to keep up.

22 minutes ago, anbujackson.9564 said:

Okay so, you have almost 40% boon duration for free. Your GM trait is absolutely broken (stat conversion, healing, quickness every second which also makes you pulse 18 stacks of might just by giving quickness). And you think thats bad?

The free boon duration is irrelevant for heal builds. Right now, keeping protection and fury up is pretty annoying, and regen is also something you have to look out for in ACTUAL encounters where you have to reactively heal and swap legends. You can't stack these up quickly because they tick with a fixed rate, and as soon as you need to swap legends you are locked out from giving those boons for quite some time. They should make qdps herald have to take boon duration (like how it used to be) and remove the free boon duration imo.

22 minutes ago, anbujackson.9564 said:

What you people seem to forget is that there is always a second supporter in your group for alacrity, who most likely also provides a buttload of boons. 

If I am playing heal, then it's the expectation that I provide the majority of boons. Builds like alac bladesworn don't do much apart from alac for example.

Edited July 19, 2023 by ZenDrake.8316

[UncreativeGreen.2019]

What I don't get is all this talk about "lack of energy from having to upkeep facets"... How about we remember that there's a trait called Charged Mists. For the DPS build, of course Roiling Mists is better to be crit capped, but for the heal build? c'mon... Something like this lets you keep up perma regen/prot/swiftness/25 might/fury/quickness and basically over-cap all of it. Supper easy too, just turn on literally every facet except nature for the start of the fight, swap to ventari below 10 energy, turn on bubble, (use some other ventari spenders), swap to glint when below 10 energy, turn on every facet besides nature, (use some weapon skills)..... repeat forever.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?PmwAw6ZlpQJMLiidRTMMqiJShsCagnskZrC-zRJYqRHfZUdFkeK47lIA7h3S7bWAA-e

This should leave you with extra 60 energy to spend in Ventari with the -6 bubble permanently up, So use that however you want. And in Glint with minus -10 you should have between 30-35 energy extra to spend on whatever skills you want.

There's way more min maxing you could do cause the gear overcaps boon duration, you could swap out strength facet for nature and leave that on permanently (however that'll drop you Ventari pool from 60 to just above 40, but that's solid aoe heals still) and put on mace for some fire blasts. Or even just camp staff and let someone else in your group apply 3 might to finish off your perma 22 might from keeping quickness up.

For Dps quick, yeah there's some juggling to do and the minus 6 is a bit weird to manage, but for heal quick the energy management is beyond easy.
Still wished that it was like .25s of quickness per pip upkept per second or something. Would be strong, but then would make it a bit easier for the dps quick builds and have a bit more flexibility. 

Edited July 20, 2023 by UncreativeGreen.2019

[draxynnic.3719]

Heal herald has traditionally used Retribution, not Invocation. While there are uses for Invocation in a heal build, it's not exactly a sacrifice-free choice.

Also worth noting that part of the criticism is that it's a big hit to things like, say, accepting reduced healing in order to take Jalis for Stability.

[UncreativeGreen.2019]

23 minutes ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

Heal herald has traditionally used Retribution, not Invocation. While there are uses for Invocation in a heal build, it's not exactly a sacrifice-free choice.

Also worth noting that part of the criticism is that it's a big hit to things like, say, accepting reduced healing in order to take Jalis for Stability.

Why Retribution? I'm honestly curious. Back in the day when I raided it was either invo for more group heals or deva for ferocity buff when that existed. There doesn't seem to be anything good in there for support. Everything is selfish other than augmenting RotGD and a bubble on heal cast.

Plus nowadays in Ventari you have stab on empowered elite. You don't even need to use bubble in Ventari since you overcap like crazy and can fit 3 elites off during your time in that swap, then when swapping to glint quickly double tap the facet of nature and go back to turning on all the facets.... Surprise, now you also have perma resistance and about a 90% uptime on 3 stacks of Stab.

[draxynnic.3719]

Vigor provides extra dodges, which translates into extra heals with Salvation. It also sets up a synergy that generates additional Might while also reducing the damage the healherald takes, especially from conditions.

[UncreativeGreen.2019]

If you're running Heal or Power Herald out in wvw or something then yeah, both those make sense and would help as the endurance regen is more vital and the might durations are lower out there (however that's only personal might)... Speaking for PVE, you can get vigor on the ventari burst heal with decent uptime and with the buff to shared empowerment theres no way you ever need extra might, its beyond ridiculous how easy it is to cap it out at 100% boon duration. And I know the boon pool when in ventari is kinda pick and choose and situation dependant, so you cant have it all.... But i'll add that there's no way that passive heal on dodge roll can compete with charged mists healing. You would need to do 12.3 dodges every 20s to equal a single natural Harmony. But thanks for the insight on what people run, was curious

Edited July 20, 2023 by UncreativeGreen.2019

[draxynnic.3719]

I do suspect that the new Elevated Compassion does make Retribution less important, since a large part of it is ensuring that Shared Empowerment triggers every second.

I've been running it in the pavilion (well, a condi variant of it, but that doesn't really change a lot), and I do think that from a design perspective, the change is a bit of a miss. From the perspective of non-Glint legends, as long as the upkeep skill is the skill you want to use anyway, it functions well. From the perspective of Glint... well, there's actually a bit of a conflict there. Generally, the facets you want to upkeep on Glint are Nature, Light, and Darkness (consuming the first before you swap out, and the other two are more reactive in use). Elements, Strength, and Chaos you generally want to be using the actives with (primarily for CC in the case of the latter). So you generally end up having to keep one of those up - often Chaos - even if you wouldn't otherwise want to, just to hit your six pips.

You can get away with it, simply because the application is a little overtuned. You're building up about 75% excess even in zerker gear. But this feels more like a matter of "anything is viable if you pump the numbers up" rather than being good design. It doesn't solve the problem of having so many resources tied up in quickness generation that you have trouble doing anything else (yes, there are ways to mitigate it, but the same was true with old quickherald, so it's not really an improvement). To me, it feels less fun - which I know is subjective, but I think the arguments in favour of new quickherald are equally subjective.

I do think it would be a lot better - and possibly more fitting with other herald traits - if instead of having a strict threshold, the amount of quickness you gave was proportional to how many pips you have upkeeping at once. A baseline of 1/4s per pip would generate the same performance at 6 pips as it has now, but higher performance at any other upkeep - it would probably need to be lower than that in order to avoid supercharging the build even more.

[Kozumi.5816]

Quickness herald dps is crazy and basically an LI spec that gives tons of boons very easily so I don't understand this threads complaints.

[Sereath.1428]

The latest obscene buffs to quickness application are still not enough for the revenant PVE "mains" who refuse to legend swap for more energy, something that was always been key to revenant's smooth and active gameplay loop.
The average low effort player really is... something.

Like bro/sis, please read your skills and traits. Maybe make use of Charged Mists if your energy management is poor?
Perhaps include more boon duration so you only have to upkeep -6 for 3 seconds every now and then?

How did you people even manage to play Herald when Draconic Echo wasn't even a thing?

Edited July 21, 2023 by XxsdgxX.8109

[LucianTheAngelic.7054]

The changes on the 18th effectively solved the problems. Overcapping on quickness is insanely easy, even in berserkers, and the 1.25s base duration for quickness on a 1s interval is insane. While I don't love the changes overall just because I don't like it being attached to upkeep, my original criticisms (inflexible rotation, clunky) are pretty much entirely assuaged with how high the uptime on quickness is, which lets you do plenty of other things if you need. It feels easy and effective to play, even in hard CM content.

Edited July 21, 2023 by LucianTheAngelic.7054