Oberon's Passive Makes Most Of His Kit Redundant
Intro) This passive feels entirely out of place on the frame meant to make others health tank. It has such high up time that you never need to health tank or use your abilities for their intended purpose, let's go through them.
Smite) This abilities main purpose is to kill Eximus units and is the only one that's basically unaffected by his passive positively or negatively.
Hallowed Ground) This abilities main purpose is to give you status immunity and buff your renewal while applying light cc to enemies, it has the side benefit of proccing Universal Fallout.
The status immunity and buff is made completely pointless when your discount mesmer skin makes you status immune to status effects and invincible in the first place, so all you're left with is the minor cc and an ability to proc Universal Fallout.
Renewal) This abilities main purpose is to give you health regen and a boatload of armor, so much so that you are able to healthtank even as a squishy frame.
The ability is rendered entirely useless by his passive, between the up time of it with Universal Fallout and any amount of shield gating you are given way too little time to make use of your health tanking. This ability may as well be subsume fodder with the uptime of his passive.
Reckoning) The main use of this ability is to armor strip enemies and provide you with a chunk of armor. It has the side benefit of being a minor source of health orbs and a minor proc for Universal Fallout as well as a minor amount of CC.
The armor from this is made entirely pointless from being invincible. The orbs you get only go further to make this pointless. I don't even think the armor strip is that useful since the most heavily armored and hard to kill enemies are usually Eximus which your first ability nukes, that's getting a bit off topic though.
Conclusion) By this point I think I've adequately explained why his passive goes against his kit and even theme of a paladin/druid and makes his kit feel relatively lackluster due to it. What can we do about it?
Well I do have a suggestion and I think it will be disliked by people who enjoy level cap content, but I do not think the game should be designed around that content nor does DE think that.
My proposal is that instead of health/universal orbs giving mesmer skin they should instead give overhealth that is consumed as you take health damage. This makes his entire kit actually have use again and even on top of that makes the armor he gives teammates becomes even more important as it lets them actually use the armor to tank hits. I think this is the perfect solution to wrap his whole kit together and if your only liked him for his passive then you still have Revenant with his augment to do exactly that but better.
Posted Oct 28, 2025, 4:47 PM UTC