Janthir Wilds Spear Beta Event Feedback: Revenant

[Angesombre.4630]

What's more, there are only 2 loads on Competence 5 for Competitive.

Then I'm less of a fan of skill 4, as I've already said, it's the fact that it stuns in competition that doesn't do any damage.
Why doesn't the revenant have the right to an immobilization instead of slowness for example. Or in the case of pop mines, to send them to the target afterwards.
Or even an interrupting skill.
And why a power buff I don't understand, to boost this weapon even more, make it powerful enough so you don't have to spam.
The rodeur has a system with its stealth, the return thief with skills 2 and 3 for example.

And especially as it's a button-press weapon, we've had the vindicator with the F2, then the renegat rework where you have to chain skills and now the spear. Because this weapon gives me the impression that it can't be used with all the returning specializations.

It's true that if he'd made a system like for the trident revenant, it could have been great. But that's either beyond Anet or too complicated for them.

Don't forget to rework your scepter, which is in a terrible state. Especially now that we see the guardian spear after the thief scepter.

[Shagie.7612]

This is the second time they've released a condi weapon that's bad at it and better on pure power builds in competitive modes.

Once is an oopsie, twice becomes concerning

[Ephyr.2175]

Can we please change the dev responsible for revenant? We need someone who is committed has knowledge of the class as well as its history and can create something useful, nice and enjoyable.

[Wulfhearth.7962]

Rev spear has been one of my favorite weapons this patch and i look forward to using it, even if it could be improved. 

I like that rev is getting a non-projectile ranged (?) condi weapon and feel like it could be a lot of fun in wvw.  I do feel like it's damage is quite dependant on Abyssal Chill however, which competes with Demonic Resistance. 

The range could be a bit higher, 600 feels quite limiting, especially with the skills being rather slow to land. 900 would let it feel more like a ranged weapon and be more versatile. 

2: The combination of a long cast time, a delayed impact and it not tracking on moving targets feels a bit much in combination, making it quite unreliable. I would prefer having either a long cast time or a delayed impact. 

3: The skill feels fun to use, is versatile and looks good. 

4: The skill looks good but the animation feels a bit loud for how little it does until its final impact. Having the chill on the first strike and the pull on the last one (with maybe a second chill for Abyssal Chill Damage) would make it feel more useful.

5: Cool animation, it feels meaty and satisfying to land. Rather than making it feel rewarding to land multiple Razes in a row, the cooldown reset mechanic, the long count recharge and shortish stack duration feels frustrating and punishing to not hit optimal resets with 4 or keep your 3 as a defensive tool rather than spam it. 

[Lionwait.4815]

From a WvW perspective. 2nd post after more testing.

 

Skill 1: Increase cast speed and range.

Skill 2: Increase cast speed and range. Remove line-of-sight.

Skill 3: Make it have two charges. Remove evade from skill. I would say using this skill is a nightmare when trying to run away. Any mob or person running into the mines keep you in combat. The point of a mobility skill is to run to or away from the fights. Offensively I see this skill being useful if it had two charges. As for defensively this skill with one charge at 450 range is a nightmare but if it had two charges, I wouldn't mind the long cooldown timer and that would give the option of using it offensively and defensively. On a side note, it baffles me that Willbenders get 2 charges with 600 range mobility on their spear when they are one of the most mobile classes in the game already.

Skill 4: Really does nothing with a high energy cost in WvW. The idea I have to make it better is to apply blind each impact and keep the pull and chill at the final impact. It does cast a dark field, so the blinding aspect is justified.  Or just give us back our damage. What is Anet thinking when taking that away? it makes the whole crushing abyss function worthless. 

Skill 5: Increase cast speed and range and make stacks per use 2.5. Add another condi or increase dmg because they removed dmg from skill 4 making the crushing abyss function worthless. Synergize with skill 2 for simpler abyss functionality.

 

I tested the engi and guardian spears and they just need small tweaking and its laughable how people complain on the forums about them, the people complaining on those posts need to test out revenant spear and maybe they will be thankful for what they got. The only skill that can be fun is skill 3 but it only has one cast, and the CD is too long, making it not as fun. As for all the aoes. I love the idea for aoes and it really sets itself apart from other revenant weapons but how they went about it has no thorough thought for competitive modes. Cast time to slow, range to short. Every time I cast skill 2 I get the out-of-range message because it casts so slow, and the range is so short, and it needs to be line-of-sight. If they took out the line-of-sight junk this skill would maybe hit something. I know the dev did say on twitter skill 2 shouldn't be line-of-sight because he doesn't want people to shoot past walls. I would like to point out you can't shoot anything on the other side of a wall at 600 range and even if they increased the range to range to 900 it would barely hit anything.  I would like to point out that skill 4 and 5 can shoot over the wall. So, I don't understand why it matters if skill 2 can't. Because he is the same dev that said the skills should be 900 range. That means skill 4 and 5 will have more range to shoot over the wall more. If anything, I would argue the point that the skill 2 shouldn't be line of sight, to keep alive the faction of crushing abyss stacks. You're not going to use skill 1 a zerg or waste your mobility skill 3 on a zerg and as for skill 4 it is just an energy sink hole that does nothing to keep up the abyssal buff. So, all you have is skill 2 and skill 5 for the whole function of abyssal raze to work. Remember WvW and PvP is a fast pasted playing style. The whole building stacks is a bad idea when all the skills are too slow to cast and range to short and skills wasted to keep up this buff. Skills should be held back for key moments in a fight depending on how the fight plays out. Even if you use all the spear skills just to keep up this buff, what is the point? You took away all the damage from skill 4 and just made it an over costs cc that will miss most people. The abyssal buff at 5 stacks giving 50% more dmg to skill 5 would add up to being 1,152 dmg. Now when I look at my short bow 4 skill with the same stats it does 1,624 dmg with 4 burn stacks. The point I'm trying to make here is the whole crushing abyss stacks function seems worthless when comparing what the short bow does. Sure, I only talk about short bow skill 4 but really all the short bow skills over match spears damage and if there was a rating scale for ease of use. Short bow would overtake spear with no comparison. Now why am I making this comparison you might ask? We, players of the revenant class need to be excited for new weapons coming out. But if the new weapons don't even compare to the existing weapons, then what is the point? So, please, please! hear our feedback. Every skill needs to be tweaked. Please take our feedback to heart. I still want the abyssal buff to work just make it more simple working with skill 2 and 5. You don't have to disable the function of crushing abyss, just tweak every skill and make it more simplistic. 

 

 

Edited Sunday at 02:37 PM by Lionwait.4815
Updating good idea info. TY Nokaon.4603

[arazoth.7290]

21 minutes ago, Lionwait.4815 said:

From a WvW perspective. 2nd post after more testing.

 

Skill 1: Increase cast speed and range.

Skill 2: Increase cast speed and range. Remove line-of-sight.

Skill 3: Make it have two charges.  Using this skill is a nightmare when trying to run away. Any mob or person running into the mines keep you in combat. The point of a mobility skill is to run to or away from the fights. Offensively I see this skill being useful if it had two charges. As for defensively this skill with one charge at 450 range is a nightmare but if it had two charges, I wouldn't mind the long cooldown timer and that would give the option of using it offensively and defensively.

Skill 4: Really does nothing with a high energy cost in WvW. The idea I have to make it better is to apply blind each impact and keep the pull and chill at the final impact. It does cast a dark field, so the blinding aspect is justified.  Or just give us back our damage. What is Anet thinking when taking that away? it makes the whole crushing abyss function worthless. 

Skill 5: Increase cast speed and range and make stacks per use 2.5. Add another condi or increase dmg because they removed dmg from skill 4 making the crushing abyss function worthless. Synergize with skill 2 for simpler abyss functionality.

 

I tested the engi and guardian spears and they just need small tweaking and its laughable how people complain on the forums about them, the people complaining on those posts need to test out revenant spear and maybe they will be thankful for what they got. The only skill that can be fun is skill 3 but it only has one cast, and the CD is too long, making it not as fun. As for all the aoes. I love the idea for aoes and it really sets itself apart from other revenant weapons but how they went about it has no thorough thought for competitive modes. Cast time to slow, range to short. Every time I cast skill 2 I get the out-of-range message because it casts so slow, and the range is so short, and it needs to be line-of-sight. If they took out the line-of-sight junk this skill would maybe hit something. I know the dev did say on twitter skill 2 shouldn't be line-of-sight because he doesn't want people to shoot past walls. I would like to point out you can't shoot anything on the other side of a wall at 600 range and even if they increased the range to range to 900 it would barely hit anything.  And the skill doesn't even do much dmg. If anything, I would argue the point that the skill 2 shouldn't be line of sight, to keep alive the faction of crushing abyss stacks. You're not going to use skill 1 a zerg or waste your mobility skill 3 on a zerg and as for skill 4 it is just an energy sink hole that does nothing to keep up the abyssal buff. So, all you have is skill 2 and skill 5 for the whole function of abyssal raze to work. Remember WvW and PvP is a fast pasted playing style. The whole building stacks is a bad idea when all the skills are too slow to cast and range to short and skills wasted to keep up this buff. Skills should be held back for key moments in a fight depending on how the fight plays out. Even if you use all the spear skills just to keep up this buff, what is the point? You took away all the damage from skill 4 and just made it an over costs cc that will miss most people. The abyssal buff at 5 stacks giving 50% more dmg to skill 5 would add up to being 1,152 dmg. Now when I look at my short bow 4 skill with the same stats it does 1,624 dmg with 4 burn stacks. The point I'm trying to make here is the whole crushing abyss stacks function seems worthless when comparing what the short bow does. Sure, I only talk about short bow skill 4 but really all the short bow skills over match spears damage and if there was a rating scale for ease of use. Short bow would overtake spear with no comparison. Now why am I making this comparison you might ask? We, players of the revenant class need to be excited for new weapons coming out. But if the new weapons don't even compare to the existing weapons, then what is the point? So, please, please! hear our feedback. Every skill needs to be tweaked. Please take our feedback to heart. I still want the abyssal buff to work just make it more simple working with skill 2 and 5. You don't have to disable the function of crushing abyss, just tweak every skill and make it more simplistic. 

 

 

Lowering abyss stacks to 3 maximum while gaining 1 stack max + 50% reduced cast time/energy cost. Conditions apply already on first stack. And more power damage on 5th skill.

1 torment, 1 poison, 1 vulnerability stack, stack amount increases with abyss stacks. In pve the amount of conditions can be even 2/abyss stack.

 

You have less rng, faster applied while ramping up but worth it still and more hybrid/condi cover.

(and more things on all skills overall, but said that before. Just wanted to repeat most important one ^^)

[Nokaon.4603]

1 hour ago, Lionwait.4815 said:

From a WvW perspective. 2nd post after more testing.

 

Skill 1: Increase cast speed and range.

Skill 2: Increase cast speed and range. Remove line-of-sight.

Skill 3: Make it have two charges.  Using this skill is a nightmare when trying to run away. Any mob or person running into the mines keep you in combat. The point of a mobility skill is to run to or away from the fights. Offensively I see this skill being useful if it had two charges. As for defensively this skill with one charge at 450 range is a nightmare but if it had two charges, I wouldn't mind the long cooldown timer and that would give the option of using it offensively and defensively.

Skill 4: Really does nothing with a high energy cost in WvW. The idea I have to make it better is to apply blind each impact and keep the pull and chill at the final impact. It does cast a dark field, so the blinding aspect is justified.  Or just give us back our damage. What is Anet thinking when taking that away? it makes the whole crushing abyss function worthless. 

Skill 5: Increase cast speed and range and make stacks per use 2.5. Add another condi or increase dmg because they removed dmg from skill 4 making the crushing abyss function worthless. Synergize with skill 2 for simpler abyss functionality.

 

I tested the engi and guardian spears and they just need small tweaking and its laughable how people complain on the forums about them, the people complaining on those posts need to test out revenant spear and maybe they will be thankful for what they got. The only skill that can be fun is skill 3 but it only has one cast, and the CD is too long, making it not as fun. As for all the aoes. I love the idea for aoes and it really sets itself apart from other revenant weapons but how they went about it has no thorough thought for competitive modes. Cast time to slow, range to short. Every time I cast skill 2 I get the out-of-range message because it casts so slow, and the range is so short, and it needs to be line-of-sight. If they took out the line-of-sight junk this skill would maybe hit something. I know the dev did say on twitter skill 2 shouldn't be line-of-sight because he doesn't want people to shoot past walls. I would like to point out you can't shoot anything on the other side of a wall at 600 range and even if they increased the range to range to 900 it would barely hit anything.  And the skill doesn't even do much dmg. If anything, I would argue the point that the skill 2 shouldn't be line of sight, to keep alive the faction of crushing abyss stacks. You're not going to use skill 1 a zerg or waste your mobility skill 3 on a zerg and as for skill 4 it is just an energy sink hole that does nothing to keep up the abyssal buff. So, all you have is skill 2 and skill 5 for the whole function of abyssal raze to work. Remember WvW and PvP is a fast pasted playing style. The whole building stacks is a bad idea when all the skills are too slow to cast and range to short and skills wasted to keep up this buff. Skills should be held back for key moments in a fight depending on how the fight plays out. Even if you use all the spear skills just to keep up this buff, what is the point? You took away all the damage from skill 4 and just made it an over costs cc that will miss most people. The abyssal buff at 5 stacks giving 50% more dmg to skill 5 would add up to being 1,152 dmg. Now when I look at my short bow 4 skill with the same stats it does 1,624 dmg with 4 burn stacks. The point I'm trying to make here is the whole crushing abyss stacks function seems worthless when comparing what the short bow does. Sure, I only talk about short bow skill 4 but really all the short bow skills over match spears damage and if there was a rating scale for ease of use. Short bow would overtake spear with no comparison. Now why am I making this comparison you might ask? We, players of the revenant class need to be excited for new weapons coming out. But if the new weapons don't even compare to the existing weapons, then what is the point? So, please, please! hear our feedback. Every skill needs to be tweaked. Please take our feedback to heart. I still want the abyssal buff to work just make it more simple working with skill 2 and 5. You don't have to disable the function of crushing abyss, just tweak every skill and make it more simplistic. 

 

 

adding 2 charges to spear 3 would be op af though, they gotta remove the evade frames for that to work tbh.

[Lionwait.4815]

1 hour ago, Nokaon.4603 said:

adding 2 charges to spear 3 would be op af though, they gotta remove the evade frames for that to work tbh.

I am totally on board with that! Removing evade from that skill would balance it out better. I'll edit the main post to add to your idea. 

Edited Sunday at 02:14 PM by Lionwait.4815

[Gazrul.3086]

59 minutes ago, Nokaon.4603 said:

adding 2 charges to spear 3 would be op af though, they gotta remove the evade frames for that to work tbh.

Why? Willbender has 3 charges of evade on its F skill. 

[Ravenwulfe.5360]

1 hour ago, Gazrul.3086 said:

Why? Willbender has 3 charges of evade on its F skill. 

Yea, I never understood people trying to say it would be OP on revenant meanwhile we got other classes that do the same thing with more tools.

[Buran.3796]

1 hour ago, Gazrul.3086 said:

Why? Willbender has 3 charges of evade on its F skill. 

   Flowing Resolve has 2 charges at PvE/WvW, one at PvP; Rusing Justice a single cooldown.

   Tried Ele and Necro spears; Ele has tons of work, but the skills are sometimes a bit weak. I think they should have used a Tempest template as default since the Weaver one included makes navigating the skills confusing as hell.  Also, they should tune down the transparency of the symbols in the gound since uttely block the attacks from foes. Necro had solid damage and very good mobility, but the visuals are a bit weak.

   My rankings of the beta weapons would be :

Mesmer > Ranger >> Necro > Ele > Guardian/Thief >>  Warrior>Engie > Revenant.

[youle.5824]

PVP review only:

quick background, I have played since launch and played all class and specs in pvp extensively, yet I truly believe rev spear is actually the worst weapon in pvp since launch. YOU COULD TRIPLE THE DMG ON ALL SKILLS, IT WOULD STILL NOT BE VIABLE . The obvious issues, high cost, long cast, low dmg, you litterally do more dmg on power vindi by not equipping any weapon than wasting energy on using spear skils.. Your dodge do more dmg. 

SKILL 4, your cc, huge part of a pvp weapon, it can be walked out of even without swiftness...... only thing you might land it on is a downstate situation but with that cast time and delay .. the down will be resed or cleaved or rallied before you actually get to pull anything. 

rating 1/10 (still a cc even though it will never lands so 1 )

SKILL 5, your burst skill ? it does less dmg than your vindi dodge, well same but dodge actually lands , inflict vuln, and evade, so don't bother casting skill 5 , waste of energy , ofc you can walk out of it while taking your time, as long as opponent holds w key they will never get hit by it...

rating 0/10 ( waste of energy if you use it in pvp)

SKILL 2, dmg skill ? If you want a good laugh compare Greatsword 2 vs this. Be it cast time, energy cost, aoe radius, damage, everything is sub sub sub par..

rating 1/10 ( it is range dmg so 1, though terrible so might be better to never press this skills )

SKILL 1 , autos, they are broken in a good way, you can cast them backwards like nades smh.... too bad dmg and cast time is trash so not worth using unless you have nothing else.

rating 1/10 ( if they double triple dmg and reduce cast time, it would be good, but now it is a waste of time to cast it)

SKILL 3, best skill , only viable one, not busted or even rly good, but okay for pvp, evades plus obnoxious condi application (slow)

rating 7/10 ( good skill wouldn't need buff or nerf as a skill on it's own)

 

Overall conclusion, you can win games playing power vindi with spear, just dont press spear skills and dodge hard on opponents. Seriously though anet, CONSTRUCTIVE feedback, if you want to stick to this design of the weapon, then for for pvp you need to half the cast time, reduce energy cost a bit, and double damage at least and skill 5 need larger radius or way faster cast or it will never land. All these together. To be honest meta would prob still be hammer/gs. But at least you could play spear in rank without knowing you are griefing your team.

 

 

Edited Sunday at 04:31 PM by youle.5824

[otto.5684]

No need to rehash that the weapon slow and sucks. What I don’t understand is what roll is it for. We already have a melee and a ranged condi weapons covering torment and burning. This doesn’t add anything. It feels like we need to meet a quota vs being useable. 

[Ravenwulfe.5360]

4 minutes ago, otto.5684 said:

No need to rehash that the weapon slow and sucks. What I don’t understand is what roll is it for. We already have a melee and a ranged condi weapons covering torment and burning. This doesn’t add anything. It feels like we need to meet a quota vs being useable. 

Honestly this weapon should have been a melee condition weapon to give a pairing for mace/ax like greatsword has with sword/sword. I really do not get this idea lately that ANet has of taking and making revs use weapons backwards.

[GrayListen.3587]

2 minutes ago, otto.5684 said:

No need to rehash that the weapon slow and sucks. What I don’t understand is what roll is it for. We already have a melee and a ranged condi weapons covering torment and burning. This doesn’t add anything. It feels like we need to meet a quota vs being useable. 

I think the weapon plays different enough from SB that it can stand as a viable alternative for mid-range/melee condi with some tweaks.  Never been a huge fan of SB, due to the prevalence of projectile hate in things like WvW and because I just don't think the weapon feels interesting.  "pew pew pew", it's fine but it's got little or no feedback and just feels hollow to me.  Never been much for strafing around pew pewing.

Spear was a fun alternative, and with skills like the #3 evade and 4 & 5 kinda serving as AoE deterrents, it felt a bit more chaotic in a good way.  Bit more influence over a fight in terms of dictating where enemies might want to go, when they have to use their evades, etc.

SB isn't bad but I'd love an alternative to it, and while you could argue mace/axe function fine for melee they more force you into it, whereas spear I think has the potential to allow for more mobility.  Once things are...fixed up a bit.

[Angesombre.4630]

I hope we'll get another beta or see if there are any changes to the spear, because right now I wouldn't buy the expansion in this state.

[Kalus.2406]

I would like to see some condition diversity, maybe bring confusion back to rev on one of the spear skills?

[arazoth.7290]

1 hour ago, Kalus.2406 said:

I would like to see some condition diversity, maybe bring confusion back to rev on one of the spear skills?

confusion is a really annoying condition I don't like to see on rev, along with stealth not

[nosleepdemon.1368]

I gave it a go just now for an hour in WvW using the Celestial stats and your standard Vindicator, Salvation, Invocation setup with Jalis and Alliance. Where to begin? It’s not great? It’s WAY TOO SLOW! You hit NOTHING with it unless that something is already locked down, in which case you could have just been spamming Mace/Axe. Couple the slow speed with the small AoE the skills have, and the lack of movement/defensive skills - that mongoloid dash doesn’t count since it covers zero ground. I found myself just camping staff waiting for an opportunity to attack, but when it came I could barely get anything off since nobody will give you more than a few seconds to hit them. And that’s about one skill cast on Spear. This is as bad as Sceptre - skills that are overly complex, have weird synergy and are hard to work into existing kit. Previous expansions have had me buy them mostly for the additional builds/skills. SotO did NOT deliver with sceptre, even if the story was initially enjoyable. Janthir will not be a buy for me, since I can tell from past performance that ANet will refuse to make this weapon useful as the design direction itself is just at odds with enjoyable gameplay.

[Vargs.6234]

Focusing more on feel than numbers, I like the flavor of this weapon. The abilities look cool and I dig the castery vibe. What I really do not like is the 5. The weapon is designed around trying to spam the 5 as much as possible. But that skill is a ground targeted AoE which is unbelievably annoying in much the same way as other ground-targeted AoE-focused playstyles can be, but even worse because the AoE is tiny and takes forever to use. Turn it into a line/cone AoE or something and I'd be way more into it.

[Audrium.9782]

I actually kind of like spear as a condi weapon. it feels a little... clunky? as all beta weapons have thus far but it seems odd to push out a two-handed condi weapon for a class who's condi build was nerfed into the ground. I mean, 2 seconds for summons? that's hardly enough time for them to hit anyone, let alone support the weapon. This spear feels good to use but has no skills to back it up. I don't know what Anet was thinking with the revenant nerfs but I hope they fix this. 

[AttackCactus.4712]

Overall I've been enjoying spear combat in beta, but it feels a bit slow and clunky but overall shows amazing potential for condition dps builds, it's got a great moveset that meshes well with most condi-focused builds i've seen. I will say, though, the potential the spear has is severely overshadowed by recent "balancing" of revenant elite specs. The spear mechanics have no support from the elite skills with a recently added 2 second summons and decreased damage ticks for the renegade class which previously were 5 seconds with multiple damage and condition ticks and would have been a fantastic support to spear combat, especially with the slower attack speed of the spear. I would love to understand what Anet was going for here giving revenants the potential for a fantastic condi dps weapon only to nerf the main condi damage elite spec directly into the ground.

[Narrenwinter.2637]

The skills are way too slow and only apply torment. It's really hard ramping up any value with this weapon.

Animations are cool, though!

[Xaylin.1860]

I tested all Spears in a rather casual PvE setting. So this is more of a first impression than a thorough assessment.

While the skills look great and where interesting in isolation, Revenant Spear was probably my least favorite with Necromancer. Yes, it is slow. I don't mind it as much because I prefer differences between weapons. But with this one I'm just not sure if I'd replace Mace/X (or god forbit Shortbow) with it aside from tagging mobs. It also lacks cover condition which probably makes it very unappealing for PvP unless numbers are cranked up. Not sure what the vision was here.

[Matt H.6142]

Along with ranger, I thought this was easy to pick up, and the damage was there, so I was able to move on to other professions quickly after picking it up.  I didn't like the stacking buff asks you switch weapons though.  Points on having more condis on it I think are fair.