Feeling lost and useless. Hammer Rev (wvw)

[aaron.7850]

I love healing as support herald, the mechanics are simple enough and I always feel like I am contributing to the fights.I cannot say the same about hammer power herald, I want to be good at it but I dont know what I am supposed to be doing.People recommend the hammer, but I find it too slow, half the time my abilities dont hit because enemies just move away quickly, I often just switch back to support out of frustration.

What am I missing? What should I look out for? People say the hammer is very fun and most wvw sites recommend it, I feel like I am playing it wrong.

[Virdo.1540]

Hammer was very fun. But its already over with that.

Imo hammer power rev got nerfed a bit too much in the wrong direction. It feels clunky, slow and just doesnt make fun anymore.

[Funky.4861]

We need a ranged power weapon similar to mesmer greatsword/conjure fiery greatsword abilities, preferably with beam/ranged attacks which don't all count as projectiles.

[Buran.3796]

@aaron.7850 said:I love healing as support herald, the mechanics are simple enough and I always feel like I am contributing to the fights.I cannot say the same about hammer power herald, I want to be good at it but I dont know what I am supposed to be doing.

What am I missing? What should I look out for? People say the hammer is very fun and most wvw sites recommend it, I feel like I am playing it wrong.

If you want to play power Rev in large teams in WvW probably you should focus in support: using Glint to share/enhance boons and Jalist to provide stability or protection. I would say that at the moment for power Rev in zerg vs zerg at the goal is not to provide damage (a role in which will pale in shame compared to Necros or Eles). Hammer had a long run, from initially being mediocre for PvP, subpar in PvE but amazing in WvW to its current status in which is a ballast in every game mode. If you want to both provide support and deal damage a condi Rev will serve you better, because Mallyx + Jalis have good synergies and is tanky while dealing a hell of short to mid range AoE damage. Anyway you will found better sources than me in this forum; I leaved my WvW 3 years ago, and talk about what I see while roaming...

[Justine.6351]

The people still recommending hammer rev are people who have never played it. Coincidentally are also the people who cried for it to be nerfed into uselessness.

Tl,DrTell them if it's so fun to go play that trash themselves.

[DutchRiders.2871]

Hammer kinda works, it's slow and clunky but you can play around it. It is just real sad that it doesn't feel like rev anymore.

[Turkeyspit.3965]

I only play Hammer Herald with 1 commander, and that's because he does mesmer pulls for focused spikes. Heralds save their phase smash for his temporal curtain pull and when you have 3-4 phase smashes landing simultaneously on players stripped of aegis = pile of downed players. Following any other commander I'll bring my Burn DH or one of my support builds

If your commander isn't using those tactics, your best contribution to the squad will be camping in Jalis with Inspiring Reinforcements for stability spam and it does decent damage on a melee push.

Worth noting that Vabbi now recommends backline Heralds uses Mace/Axe as secondary weapon set over Staff, presumably for use during the melee push. I haven't tried it out yet as even though Surge of the Mists sucks hard, it's still very useful to reposition if you get caught in a gravity well or a spectral grasp, and Staff 4 is a good cleanse, and also can be used to silently blast smoke fields so Scrappers don't give away your tactics by using Medi Kit 5.

Few months back Herald was a top DPS contributor with Scourges in a zerg, but these days they are fairly mediocre unless your driver uses them strategically.

[Jobber.6348]

Hammer sucks.

Right now, Renegade with Shortbow fares way better than Hammer Rev does.

[Buran.3796]

Tried the hammer this morning for first time in months (maybe even in a year?).... Is such a monstrosity, such disgusting pile of garbage. Fortunately was just in PvE testing the scaling damage with different stats on different weapons, but I still shocked of how BAD the weapon is, even for open world content.

Seriously, ANet should either DELETE this weapon from the Revenant and replace it with a long bow, a rifle, or something else or REVAMP the entire skill set and turn it into a mele defensive weapon (maybe the like of the Scrapper hammer). Is totally useless in every game mode and the first impulse after checking it was to gave it to my Guardians (then I remembered that Guardian hammer is neither in a good spot so I'm on the verge of salvaging it). I won't even touch this weapon again, makes me feel filthy and muddy.

So that's the curren status of the Revenant armory at the moment:

Mainhand sword: good.Mace: good.Offhand sword: useful, decent.Axe: good.Staff: weak, almost decent.Shield: weak but useful.Short bow: decent, but lacks a movenet skill and/or a block/evade.Hammer: abysmal.

Spear: excellent.Trident: excellent, but needs a block.

[Draygorn.7012]

I miss hammer. It was a fun weapon to use. Now it just feels bad to use compared to all of the other weapons. Even in open world, and no weapon should feel weak there :P

[Mini Crinny.6190]

Hammer Rev is pretty strong, issues come with the amount of projectile hate there is in the game and using Phase Smash when there is skill lag one thing i would do is either remove the knockdown on Hammer #5 and add the damage back to it, or reduce the cast time of it.

[Buran.3796]

@Mini Crinny.6190 said:Hammer Rev is pretty strong, issues come with the amount of projectile hate there is in the game and using Phase Smash when there is skill lag one thing i would do is either remove the knockdown on Hammer #5 and add the damage back to it, or reduce the cast time of it.

What are you talking about? The only skill from hammer affected by projectile hate is the auto attack, and no one ever run a hammer Rev in WvW based on the auto (you have plenty of other builds as long bow Rangers which are better at pew pew), The reason Rev hammer was picked were CoR, PS and DtH, none of them are projectiles, but long range AoE damage skills wich worked nicely in volleys against crowds. Hammer is absolute garbage and there's no reason to run such ballast in a WvW team instead of a mele Rev with condi weapons or a Necro/Ele if you want to reatain the long range AoE volleys. ANet should just delete the weapon and bring us main hand axe, a focus or something instead, because ranged Revenant won't comeback, ever.

[Mini Crinny.6190]

@Buran.3796 said:

@Mini Crinny.6190 said:Hammer Rev is pretty strong, issues come with the amount of projectile hate there is in the game and using Phase Smash when there is skill lag one thing i would do is either remove the knockdown on Hammer #5 and add the damage back to it, or reduce the cast time of it.

What are you talking about? The only skill from hammer affected by projectile hate is the auto attack, and no one ever run a hammer Rev in WvW based on the auto (you have plenty of other builds as long bow Rangers which are better at pew pew), The reason Rev hammer was picked were CoR, PS and DtH, none of them are projectiles, but long range AoE damage skills wich worked nicely in volleys against crowds. Hammer is absolute garbage and there's no reason to run such ballast in a WvW team instead of a mele Rev with condi weapons or a Necro/Ele if you want to reatain the long range AoE volleys. ANet should just delete the weapon and bring us main hand axe, a focus or something instead, because ranged Revenant won't comeback, ever.

Auto on Hammer is still hard hitting, ofc thats what i was talking about when it came to projectiles, CoR and PS are incredibly strong aswell as being 1200 range, idk why you would delete a weapon that is amazing in WvW

[Buran.3796]

^The aa cast time is 1 second, doubling both sword, staff and mace, but the damage is nowhere near to doubling of any of those. With the hammer you can only aa two times in 2 seconds, whereas both sword and mace lets you to deliver the full 3 hit chain in 1.75 seconds, with extra benefits in the last hit.

Before the nerf (removal) of quickness in Impossible Odds hammer's aa was a valuable addition to the main appeal of the weapon: CoR (IO was also a powerful booster of Phase Smash and Drop the Hammer). But no one would have run hammer in the past for the aa alone, and much less after the butchering of IO (specially when classes as Ranger, Mesmer or Thief can do the single target sniping role way better than us).

Hammer WAS amazing in WvW; even in roaming some players (Justine is a good example) were able to extract the best of the weapon despite having some clear weakness (very slow and telling animations, very risky once a foe reached mele range). But tons of things happened to the hammer in the last two years: from indirect nerfs (weakening IO, reducing procs related to critical hits...) to direct reductions in the damage numbers from the skills of the hammer, the two revamps of CoR (both failed and turned into a bugfest) and a 150% increase in the cooldown time. At the current moment is a ballast with no use in any part of the game for a class which always lacked in weapon variety and already has the most rigid set of utilities in the game.

Since ANet turned the staff into a support weapon, we already lost the block while moving in off hand sword and the main hand sword is lagging behind the mace in PvE performance I would like to see a entirely revamp of the hammer, either as defensive for WvW/PvP use or as a dps oriented to PvE. They changed entirely how Mallyx and the off hand sword works, now that hammer has no purpose they could do the same.

People is asking for a change in the energy system in Revenant (despite currently performing well in evey game mode); hard to see how they could "fix" that non-problem without breaking a lot of things when they were unable to fix CoR in 2 years and seem unable to revamp a single weapon into something useful...

[Thornwolf.9721]

@"Buran.3796" said:^The aa cast time is 1 second, doubling both sword, staff and mace, but the damage is nowhere near to doubling of any of those. With the hammer you can only aa two times in 2 seconds, whereas both sword and mace lets you to deliver the full 3 hit chain in 1.75 seconds, with extra benefits in the last hit.

Before the nerf (removal) of quickness in Impossible Odds hammer's aa was a valuable addition to the main appeal of the weapon: CoR (IO was also a powerful booster of Phase Smash and Drop the Hammer). But no one would have run hammer in the past for the aa alone, and much less after the butchering of IO (specially when classes as Ranger, Mesmer or Thief can do the single target sniping role way better than us).

Hammer WAS amazing in WvW; even in roaming some players (Justine is a good example) were able to extract the best of the weapon despite having some clear weakness (very slow and telling animations, very risky once a foe reached mele range). But tons of things happened to the hammer in the last two years: from indirect nerfs (weakening IO, reducing procs related to critical hits...) to direct reductions in the damage numbers from the skills of the hammer, the two revamps of CoR (both failed and turned into a bugfest) and a 150% increase in the cooldown time. At the current moment is a ballast with no use in any part of the game for a class which always lacked in weapon variety and already has the most rigid set of utilities in the game.

Since ANet turned the staff into a support weapon, we already lost the block while moving in off hand sword and the main hand sword is lagging behind the mace in PvE performance I would like to see a entirely revamp of the hammer, either as defensive for WvW/PvP use or as a dps oriented to PvE. They changed entirely how Mallyx and the off hand sword works, now that hammer has no purpose they could do the same.

People is asking for a change in the energy system in Revenant (despite currently performing well in evey game mode); hard to see how they could "fix" that non-problem without breaking a lot of things when they were unable to fix CoR in 2 years and seem unable to revamp a single weapon into something useful...

Kinda wish they would just revamp all the weapons, make them function like trident in they change based on legend in use. And give us two more sets one ranged condi-core weapon and something else just for spice..

[Turkeyspit.3965]

I still hold hope that they will tweak the numbers some more in WvW. Hammer Herald can be functional in a group designed to use its strengths, that being a coordinated phase smash strike. Get a mesmer to Temporal curtain a group together, Scrappers use Hammer 5 to CC while 2-3 Heralds drop phase smashes on them = bags.

But outside of such tactics, the biggest contributor a Hammer Herald can provide now is Inspiring Reinforcements, and it isn't as if the Rev Hammer is any good in PvP or PvE. If nothing else, they should massively adjust the damage output so a Rev can at least use Hammer for PvE content.

GW2 already has Warrior Longbow, it doesn't need another weapon that is relatively useless in each and every game mode.

[Explosia.9164]

The change on CoR to make it a skill shot was the last drop. Honestly even the damage and cd nerf was a little bit over the top, it was still ok. It was still playable. But this skill shot thing absolutely destroyed the weapon. Just revert the god damn thing, the weapon is over nerfed already.

[Fueki.4753]

Arenanet murdered or hammers with the full intention of making soldier professions having no good ranged weapons.

Most players hate this idea, but Arenanet doesn't seem to care.

[Buran.3796]

@"Fueki.4753" said:Arenanet murdered or hammers with the full intention of making soldier professions having no good ranged weapons.

Most players hate this idea, but Arenanet doesn't seem to care.

The thing is that this game is pretty terrible at range weapons. Aside from pew pew lb Ranger and maybe gs Mesmer the rest is garbage: in PvE everything is killed stacking foes and players against a wall, and even ranged weapons as Guardin's scepter are used mostly as mele weapons. Strongest roamers teams play in close formation, and strongest large guilds rely in the mele train instead of the "pirate ship" tactics. So is not that plate armor users have weak ranged weapons, is that aside from Eles and Necros (and CoR Revs in the past) everything works worse at range than in mele (with a few roaming exceptions). I don't run any WvW guild, but I wouldn't see a reason to use hammer Revs in that content: Phase Smash is a single spike in damage every 12 seconds, with a slow cast and telling animation, and such Rev will run glass cannon stats so the sustain will be weak; a condi Rev is WAY more tanky, produces much more AoE pressure at constant rate and sitill has condi burst, and if ranged is needed you can use longbow and mix it with Citadel Bombardment. Hammer is just bad, even worse than Warrior's rifle, and has been a while since the last time I found a Warrior running a rifle in eithe WvW or PvP.

[Justine.6351]

@Mini Crinny.6190 said:Hammer Rev is pretty strong, issues come with the amount of projectile hate there is in the game and using Phase Smash when there is skill lag one thing i would do is either remove the knockdown on Hammer #5 and add the damage back to it, or reduce the cast time of it.

Hammer Rev ate like 5 huge rev nerfs in a few months. There is more to hammer Rev then hammer believe it or not.

[Scoobaniec.9561]

What hammer? Is it some upcoming new elite spec weapon?

[anduriell.6280]

@aaron.7850 said:I love healing as support herald, the mechanics are simple enough and I always feel like I am contributing to the fights.I cannot say the same about hammer power herald, I want to be good at it but I dont know what I am supposed to be doing.People recommend the hammer, but I find it too slow, half the time my abilities dont hit because enemies just move away quickly, I often just switch back to support out of frustration.

What am I missing? What should I look out for? People say the hammer is very fun and most wvw sites recommend it, I feel like I am playing it wrong.Hammer is not for roaming, you are playing it wrong. You have other weapon sets for that, and for roaming/small groups you go condi.Hammer is for zergs, you use your herald utilities on passive and spam CoR/Hammer#3. Not very high gameplay.

[Justine.6351]

@anduriell.6280 said:

@aaron.7850 said:I love healing as support herald, the mechanics are simple enough and I always feel like I am contributing to the fights.I cannot say the same about hammer power herald, I want to be good at it but I dont know what I am supposed to be doing.People recommend the hammer, but I find it too slow, half the time my abilities dont hit because enemies just move away quickly, I often just switch back to support out of frustration.

What am I missing? What should I look out for? People say the hammer is very fun and most wvw sites recommend it, I feel like I am playing it wrong.Hammer is not for roaming, you are playing it wrong. You have other weapon sets for that, and for roaming/small groups you go condi.Hammer is for zergs, you use your herald utilities on passive and spam CoR/Hammer#3. Not very high gameplay.

Never understood that argument,It's zerging...what is high level there?

[Arkantos.7460]

mayby... just maybe the hammer gets so hard nerfs because the new expansion offers A NEW RANGED POWER WEAPON O_O

[Justine.6351]

@Arkantos.7460 said:mayby... just maybe the hammer gets so hard nerfs because the new expansion offers A NEW RANGED POWER WEAPON O_O

See you in 3 years rofl...