Renegade is a great concept but poorly executed.

[Abelisk.4527]

It's a unique take on a support class. Buffing allies so they do bleeding, steal HP, as well as reducing incoming condition damage is all pretty unique I would say. It's just so poorly put in the game.

 

Why does Revenant get all of the clunky mechanics? First the Tablet, now spirits that can get CC'd and killed. It's like healing somebody but if the player who got healed got CC'd, he'd lose a lot of the health received. It doesn't make sense.

 

As a result, Renegade is virtually useless in PVP/WVW thanks to CC.

 

What if all the spirits acted like the elite? You'd need to upkeep all of them. However, the spirits are invulnerable and follow you. They follow your target for you. You can stand on a point and your spirits will chase down your target for example.

 

I think that would be a good start at making Renegade viable.

[otto.5684]

Renegade is not a great or even a good concept. It is redundant and coneptaully dysfunction. It is neither succesful support, useful dps or, you know, can hit and run, like a “renegade.” It lacks any functional theme and has zero uniqueness in any shape or form, aside from it having a bunch of Char.

 

As for effectiveness, there is no need to beat a dead horse. It is nothing more than power creep to the pre-existing condi PvE build before PoF.

 

Without any doubt, this anet worst work to date. And they refuse to fix it. All the changes to it in PvP and PvE can only describe as a blind man throwing darts.

[Coldtart.4785]

Before path of fire I had a hard time deciding whether I thought tempest or daredevil was the worst designed elite spec. After path of fire there's no contest though; there is not a single good thing about renegade. The only value it has is acting as an example of what not to do. People talk about trying to fix it but there's no saving it. It's doomed to be a +dmg for condi builds in pve until the game shuts down.

[narcx.3570]

> @"Abelisk.4527" said:

> What if all the spirits acted like the elite? You'd need to upkeep all of them. However, the spirits are invulnerable and follow you. They follow your target for you. You can stand on a point and your spirits will chase down your target for example.

 

I feel like at some point in development all of the spirits were probably upkeep skills (since that' generally what Rev's are all about) and changing them to single cast explains the seemingly random strength and cost of them: "10 heal pulses, 50 stacks of bleed, 6 dazes, 20 hits of vulnerability/cripple, etc..."

 

They likely had to change this since they realized that if you have to upkeep your spirits, there would be no available energy to cast any of your F-Skills, since even a single point of upkeep massively drops your 10 second energy total since it halts your regeneration.. It's actually more dps in it's current state tho since it lets you work in Citadel Bombardment without having to sacrifice any spirits or mace/axe 2/3/5 casts.

[Arkantos.7460]

created in late afternoon and dont had enough attention to invest more time so it result in a copypaste for every other skill ...

[messiah.1908]

> @"otto.5684" said:

> Renegade is not a great or even a good concept. It is redundant and coneptaully dysfunction. It is neither succesful support, useful dps or, you know, can hit and run, like a “renegade.” It lacks any functional theme and has zero uniqueness in any shape or form, aside from it having a bunch of Char.

>

> As for effectiveness, there is no need to beat a dead horse. It is nothing more than power creep to the pre-existing condi PvE build before PoF.

>

> Without any doubt, this anet worst work to date. And they refuse to fix it. All the changes to it in PvP and PvE can only describe as a blind man throwing darts.

 

i disagree on the concept part.

the concept was the make a class which lead ppl to the front line of the battle and buff them with unique abilities for short time, than disengage and able to support them while doing so

as a concept its great one . as we have boons spamming guard and mesmer now renegade gives life leech dmg and heal, bleed buff (which is like 10% direct dmg), and aoe dmg and aoe cc and heal buff over time and condi dmg reduction for 10 sec

 

if i told you i will create a class which can do all the above i think anyone would have wanted it.

 

BUT the execution fail miserably as we know

 

the aoe is good 360 which is good in pve and pvp but hardly useful in wvw group fight with constant moving

the spirit rection time is about 2 sec which is TOO slow

the spirit cannot stand dmg and CC

so all in all cannot be used

[Rym.1469]

It's not a great concept, the Legend with it's spirit mechanic restriction is surprising to see in current design, when we and balance team know that being reliant on lasting AI in this combat system is uneasy to put it lightly and we've been moving from this concept for a while. Spirits themselves don't interact as a kit and with each other very well. The Elite is pretty cool, but it suffers from being bound to the rest of the legend and AI restrictions.

 

I think the biggest issue with Kalla is that mechanically it's the legend that should feel close to Ritualist and it's spirits, but in practice I never had such feeling.

 

F2 is a good solution to a problem that doesn't exist - managing Kalla's Fervor "mechanic". You overflow with it without trying so realistically you pay Energy cost to gain might, a very common boon nowadays that Revenant can more easily get in other, more efficient ways.

 

F3 is the animation ArenaNet tried to sold the entire elite spec with and it's a very flashy animation indeed. Probably too flashy of an animation for a skill not worth dodging. I imagine that if this could function as some grand Renegade's finisher the elite spec is centred around the animation would make sense with it's massive tell but that's not the case.

 

F4 is the best freebie you get by picking Renegade and the best out of 3 new F skills, but that's mostly because Alacrity is just an great value boon, not as a result of some clever skill design or synergy with the rest of the elite spec.

 

In general, F skills feel tackled on.

 

Shortbow is so out of touch with reality of gw2 combat it's not even funny. We got a meme weapon in place of something condition revenant actually wanted for so long. A weapon full of skills that could be good when separated (not counting #4 it's legit atrocious skill) but make no sense bundled on one weapon. Giving feedback on this weapon during the beta had actually a negative effect on it's gameplay so I should probably stop writing about it right now. No place in any of the 3 game modes.

 

I try to be positive and objective, but Renegade is probably the worst class design creation ArenaNet's made since the antitoxin heal.

[DiogoSilva.7089]

Renegade is a mess.

 

During the video reveal of new elite specs, Anet devs said that the revenant's elite spec was the last one to be finished, after a previous iteration had been scrapped, which implies that they might have had a potentially interesting idea that they couldn't make it work in time, and rushed something else (aka, the renegade) out of the door to meet deadlines. We already know that this also happened with other specs (elementalist's and ranger's PoF specs, if I'm not wrong, were meant for HoT originally).

 

Even the trailers were uninteresting. All other specs had mechanic changes that developers were all clearly excited for (Petless ranger! Dervish-mesmer anti-magic warrior! Sword elementalist with dual attunments!), while for renegade they were just "hey, this guy can fire arrows through portals and has spirit allies" before skipping to the next spec in line. Even the devs didn't seem interested in hyping this one.

 

Everything about the design shows it. It's safe, generic, bland. It offers nothing new to the class, mechanically. It's a collection of tried-and-true formulas tacked on in a kit without a sense of synergy or thematic unity. We've gotten a ranged condition weapon focused on damage(?), but our legend is actually meant to be about leadership. We've got generic boon or damage skills for f2-4. We've got no attempt at fixing the revenant's core energy problems - in fact, renegade's costs were so incredibly high, that it feels as though its designer was completely clueless about non-herald design issues. And all our utility skills consist of the same copy-pasted mechanic with different tweaks on its effects.

 

What is Renegade supposed to be? A condition-focused spec? A leader-ish/ offensive-support spec? It's a bit of both, yet it's underwhelming and clumsy at each of them.

 

What are the main combos that can make it potentially fun? They are barely there. You simply spam the spirits that are appropriate to each situation, and hope they don't get CC'd, while casting your shortbow skills in whatever order. Yawn. How are shortbow skills even meant to synergize with the spirits?

 

Finally, if "portal arrows" are meant to be the most exciting thing about the renegade, where exactly are the creative mechanics behind it? What, exactly, does the concept of portal arrows offers befire an inverted and clumsy cone-radius skill? If this elite spec was as interesting as others, we would probably have f2-4 mechanics that would allow us to create and interact with portals, giving us massive control on where our skills would hit regardless of directional positioning and range, but having counterplay because the opponent could merely walk away from the portal's direction, or something.

 

As it stands, "portal arrows" is as exciting as saying "wow, revenant's hammer and mace can crush the ground when you use skills nº2!" You are actually not interacting with the ground in any unique way. It's just an _animation_.

[Carighan.6758]

Actually, you could replace "Revenant" with "Guild Wars 2", and it'd be just as true.

 

But yeah, Rev also suffers from GW2's extreme focus on hyperspecialization. On a class which inherently swaps specialization by changing legend, that's not going to work well.

[Einlanzer.1627]

Yeah the Revenant has a very deeply flawed execution. The main problem is that there's no skill customization, and the legends each have a specialized role. That renders legend swapping a lot less interesting and useful a mechanic than it should be - I'm not sure why this wasn't obvious when the class was being designed. I mean, it's not like you can swap your gear and traits mid-combat.

 

To make things worse, each weapon ALSO has a specialized role, which creates a severe rigidity to the way the class is played. Want to be condition oriented? Well, here's your exact loadout to a tee - no experimentation or customization for you!

 

In short - there are too few skills, and there's too little synergy between the ones they have. If Revs aren't going to have skill customization, then both weapon and legend swapping should feel more fluid than they do, with skills that synergize better between different groups, allowing for some degree of versatility and customization.

 

I think the class would probably feel a lot more complete if either Glint or Kalla (probably Kalla) were made core and we got a new more specialized elite in its place. Then Kalla would make sense in its current design because it's fairly non-specialized and can supplement several other legends.

[Ephemiel.5694]

Honestly, i feel a lot of you guys' points fit, not only other professions and specs, but GW2 as a whole.

 

Many good, if not amazing, ideas, yet extremely bad execution. Renegade should feel like you're a true leader, a commander in your warband while you order them to destroy the enemy [especially since they're Charr, it should all FEEL devastating]. Short Bow should have been the coolest weapon in the game with their animations alone [you're firing arrow barrages and heavy artilery fire through portals, it should feel amazing] and yet....it's just so bland.

 

I honestly wish we were told what exactly was their original idea.