I wasn’t expecting that yesterday! ArenaNet unleashed a new blog post detailing the Revenant and its class mechanic. Firstly, the user interface for the Revenant is bloody ugly. It looks squashed, a little too busy and its skill icons pretty ugly. Fortunately the rest of what’s on offer in the blog post looks pretty awesome.

Its suprised me as to how many layers the Revenant has and although I’ll reserve judgement as to whether it’ll work (the Elementalist is hard enough to master) it’s certainly going to challenge new and existing players.

So what have we learnt? Well, you’ll be able to use Hammer, Mace and Axe. As well as that, there’ll be a sort-of push/pull mechanic relating to the Revenant’s skills. If you’ve ever played Guild Wars, you’ll likely be familiar with the energy increase and decrease pip system.

This energy bar is a new resource that the revenant relies on in order to use skills. Some skills will have a low energy cost, allowing you to use them more often, while others have a large cost with a very large payoff. When you invoke a new legend, you’ll begin at half energy and generate more energy over time. This creates a push-and-pull feel with the energy that you manage as you use your skills.

As for the skills and weapons they’ve talked about, it sounds as though there’s going to be a fair few new mechanics involved for all classes, not just the Revenant. For example, the Hammer (a ranged weapon!) creates a cascading eruption of energy when you use Coalescence of Ruin.

This skill uses new tech that you’ll start seeing in many areas of our new specializations as well. It creates a cascading attack that starts at your character and extends forward over time. This specific skill’s damage increases with distance. This allows us to create very impactful attacks that have a lot more play to them for both yourself and the foes you use it against.

There’s also Field of the Mists that provides a mobile projectile barrier which changes direction based on which way the Revenant is facing. My favourite previewed skill has to be Manifest Toxic that’s available on the Mace. The skill is the third attack in a melee chain and unlike other skills in the game that have a predefined output, Manifest Toxic will cause a chain attack to opponents only if they appear behind your target. Skills such as this should work really well to take combat to a new level.

There’s also news in the blog post of several new Boons, Conditions and Status Effects. Resistance is a new Boon that when placed on a character, this boon will temporarily relieve them of all the negative effects that conditions have on the character. ArenaNet used the example of if a player is being Feared and received Resistance, the Fear will be prevented and should Resistance be removed, the Fear will continue for its remaining duration. It sounds interesting and it’ll hopefully give rise to even more support based characters.

Where the new Condition is concerned, it’s called Slow. I suspect this Condition has been added because of the Mesmer and what I expect is its Specialization: Chronomancer.

Slow will slow down animations and casts, allowing more time to dodge or interrupt the incoming massive attack. We’ve also improved both quickness and slow. Currently, quickness will cause your cast bar to cut out early. With the improvement, your skill cast bar will smoothly update when you gain quickness or slow, even during the middle of using a skill.

Lastly and this is a biggie, there’s a new Status Effect called Taunt. As you might expect, using Taunt allows you to reposition or change your foes’ targets. The game has been screaming out for Taunt since day one and it finally receiving it will instantly change the landscape of PvE design. Without Taunt there’s no viable way to control any encounter and that’s partly the reason why Fractals, Dungeons and open world bosses have felt so chaotic.

Taunt will be used to both reposition foes and change your foes’ targets. For example, when used on players, it will force the taunted player to run at their target with their skill bar locked—minus stun breakers—and only use their auto attack skill to attack. This gives us the opportunity to use taunt in multiple ways, not just as a player skill, but also as a tool to create interesting creature encounters that utilize this taunt effect against players.

I’m off to Rezzed in a couple of weeks so I’ll get some hands-on time with the Revenant and hopefully the new Boons and Conditions. Stay tuned.