Guild Wars 2 players are getting no shortage of new expansion info lately, between last week’s fishing and skiff stream and last month’s preview of the first three elite specs. If you are still waiting on info for your favorite class’s new elite spec, perhaps you will see it in this week’s Guild Chat stream, where ArenaNet discussed End of Dragons’ new specs for Revenant, Warrior, and Elementalist.
The Revenant’s new Vindicator spec uses the new Legendary Alliance stance to channel the power of both Saint Viktor of the Kurzicks and Archemorus of the Luxon Armada, who joined forces to defeat Shiro Tagachi in the prologue to Guild Wars: Factions. Each time The Vindicator uses one of their slot skills, it will flip between red (Luxon) and blue (Kurzick) versions that are damage focused and support focused, respectively. For instance, the healing skill Selfish Spirit heals you and damages nearby enemies, granting might for each enemy struck. The skill then flips over to Selfless Spirit, which, after the cooldown, heals up to five allies in an area. You could run this as a hybrid damage and support class, or, if you feel like specializing, you can press the F2 skill to flip all of your blue skills to red and vice versa. Its new greatsword weapon and slot kills grant the Revenant some much-needed melee AoE.
The Warrior’s Bladesworn elite spec forgoes its in-combat weapon swap (the way the Engineer or Elementalist does) in favor of a new gunblade gunsaber weapon, which is drawn with the F1 button. The Bladesworn has also ditched the Warrior’s traditional adrenaline resource, which was built per hit, and replaces it with flow, which is built over time. Flow can then be spent with Dragon Trigger. When the player presses F2, they sheathe their gunsaber and begin accumulating charges (which look like little bullets above the flow bar), up to a maximum of 10 after five seconds, getting ready to unleash a powerful Dragon Slash ability. Each charge will increase the power of Dragon Slash exponentially, making the fully charged Dragon Slash immensely powerful. Guild Wars 2 developer Cal Cohen demonstrated the Dragon Slash hitting for 25k damage… and then realized he forgot to equip gear. The actual damage potential of a fully charged Dragon Slash, used with a set of buffs simulating what you would get in a optimized full squad (and while the character is not naked), is in excess of 450k. Obviously this will be nerfed down a bit in PvP so that you aren’t simply one-shotting people, but this is still an incredibly powerful burst damage spec.
Finally, ArenaNet demoed the Catalyst, the new spec for the Elementalist. The Catalyst gets a new mechanic that summons a magitech jade sphere, which functions similarly to the Scrapper’s gyros. Spheres charge up energy per hit, and can unleash that energy in the form of AoE buffs and combo field which change types as you shift elemental attunements. The hammer is a mid-range weapon in fire and air attunement, and a melee weapon in water and earth. Perhaps the most interesting part of the hammer is that its 3 skill is consistent across all four elements. It causes a projectile of your current element to orbit you, giving you buffs and damaging enemies it comes into contact with. When you switch to another attunement, it continues to orbit you up to its duration, and pressing 3 in your new attunement adds a projectile to your orbit and refreshes the duration of any other orbiting projectiles. Pressing the 3 skill flipover, called Grand Finale, then hurls all of the elemental projectiles currently orbiting you at your target for a big burst of damage and conditions.
If you want to check out all of the information for yourself, you can watch the replay below. Be sure to watch to the end if you want all the geeky details on traits and tooltips. If you want to give these three new specs a try for yourself, you don’t have long to wait, as they will be playable in the next beta event this Tuesday, September 21st, and keep an eye on Massively OP’s Flameseeker Chronicles column for more in-depth analysis of each spec.
