ArenaNet is starting to roll out the big guns in beta with the forthcoming release of the Heart of Thorns expansion to its popular buy-to-play MMO Guild Wars 2. This last weekend those who preordered Heart of Thorns had the chance to try out a limited-form of the new class being added to the game: the Revenant.
Hands on, the Revenant is a heavy-armor utility-based melee-caster with a lot of support. In the beta we had access to three different “stances” or legendary heroes that the Revenant can channel: Ventari, Jalis, and Mallyx. Each of these stances changes the 6-0 utility skills that the Reveant has access to, but the weapon remains untouched—and Revenants do not have weapon swap.
To best understand the Revenant we should go over what each of the channeled legends does.
Ventari the Centaur: this legendary stance is primarily healing and support with a great deal of condition cleanse. After switching to the Ventari legend, the heal skill (usually ‘6’) summons a tablet that then becomes the focus for utility spells; hitting the heal skill again allows the Revenant to move the tablet. Much of Ventari’s stance is centered around healing, condition cleansing, some projectile defense. It is very support oriented.
Jalis the Dwarf: this legendary stance is heavy on the tank support. After switching to Jalis, the Revenant gains access to a few utilities that provide resistances, one that makes an AoE field that pulses stability, and a pair of rotating hammers that inflict PBAoE damage. The elite skill of Jalis also provides heavy resistance to the entire team for a short time. Jalis is very much a tank utility and support.
Mallyx the Demon: this legendary stance feels very necromancery with condition-control and support built in. In the Mallyx stance players find themselves putting conditions on themselves a lot, but also building up resistances from those conditions. Utilities here either pull conditions off friends, or spray them onto enemies, or even change enemy boons into conditions. The elite skill increases stats and then starts copying conditions from the Revenant onto foes.
The Revenant can run two different legends at once and switches between them with the F1 key.
Everything a Revenant does uses energy and energy builds up over time (and generally sits at 50% when idle but certain things cause it to increase.) Weapon attacks as well as utilities use energy, which means often there’s a push-pull between attacking with the weapon or using utilities.
As for weapons, the Revenant beta only had access to three sets: two-handed hammer, staff, and mace plus axe.
The two-handed hammer appears to be fitted for Jalis. It had a ranged attack in the autoattack and a ranged heavy-slam that knocks foes down. It also has a few AoE’s and the like with a slow-to-slam-crushing-blow that fit a hammer.
The staff weapon is a different take on the way other classes use staff because it’s a melee weapon and not a casting focus. This one is tied to Ventari and it includes some martial-arts twirls and smacks. There is also a twirling missile absorption. Mixed in is also a healing cone sweep and a massive-charge that knocks enemies out of your path.
The mace axe combination fits nicely with Mallyx. It provides a certain amount of melee combat damage combined with some interesting ranged hits. Amid them are one that throws the axe at enemies, and then shadowsteps to the target (while freezing anything caught between.) Overall this set felt a lot more into-the-fray than the other weapon setups, but it still lacked punch.
Conclusion
From the beta the Revenant felt extremely incomplete. Only three of the five legends were available, it only has three weapon sets (and they’re locked) and the trait lines did not seem to be very heavy-hitting. As a result it’s necessary to take this review with a grain of salt, because it’s looking at what’s obviously an unfinished profession.
Overall, the Revenant feels like it doesn’t hit very hard. Even the two-handed hammer doesn’t deal the sort of damage blow-for-blow that you expect from its slow strikes and the utilities did little to mitigate this. The mace-axe combination didn’t feel very much like it was doing much pummeling (compared to how warriors feel) and even when using Mallyx it just provided a way to better position and deliver conditions—sadly, though, even with condition delivery there was no “they’re melting!” to go along with it.
The Revenant damage overall felt extremely lackluster: it could get the job done, but it lacked any sort of functional burst or nuke within any of the combinations.
This problem felt exacerbated by the lack of weapon switching. This meant that there wasn’t a way to follow-up or combo better with different utilities or weapon skills.
Currently, legendary stances have 5 fixed utilities that cannot be changed. Perhaps ArenaNet intends to add more that can be switched in per legendary? It may become necessary because right now Revenants have almost no customizability as a result, especially without weapon swap, and only two legendaries that can be equipped at once time.
Ideally either the legend equipped needs to passively add (or change) weapon skills, or add a passive bonus/effect, or weapon swapping needs to be added. Utility skills really need to have more customization—perhaps even utility skills that can be slotted on any legendary, or just 1-2 more skills per slot per legend. Otherwise even additional legends will not fill this customization void.
The future of the Revenant
From what we know so far, there are two more channeled legends that are coming to the Reveant: the first is Shiro—a legendary blademaster—who was teased today by Anet as being a reveal for this week. And the second will likely be the ultimate specialization for Revenants, which is thought to be the heroic dragon champion Glint.
Since the beta Revenant felt so incomplete it means that we’ll have to look forward to a lot of potential changes before this class becomes a fully fledged profession that is ready for release. The beta was very much just a taste of things to come.
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