Mesmer and SR changes June 7th update.

@ANET, take a leaf out of Blizzards book when it comes to updates/nerfs

Quite a few of their skills end with, "when used on PvP targets."

Open for discussion yes, but you don't have a "right" to know anything beyond it was an error.

If I ASSuME that the erroneous descriptions are the actual word-for-word update to go live later in the month, then the SR change is an improvement from the 5sec limit. Why? Because in PvE things always die at the same time in waves of two or three. And where you could only get the energy from one creature the change effectively triples that (1 x 3 = 3. See? Yay.) in realistic conditions. Here's a typical current game example:

1. You walk through a portal and pull the first group of 6 in the instance.
2. Dual SF and Sandstorm + other shit goes off
3. You setup preliminary defense - wards, Aegis, daze, hexes etc
4. Enemy monk heals the nearest-death target taking physical damage from your warrior/ranger/spear-chucking legendary survival 'assasin'
5. Nearest-death target's hp goes up a bit to that of those around it (already under fire and close to death)
6. Second round of SF etc goes off
7. Previously nearest-death target and those around him fall to AoE
8. You get 10 energy from SR for 3 deaths instead of 30 pre-nerf
9. You finish off the remaining 3 enemies at staggered periods.
10. Collect loot and move to next group. Note that your 30second skills have not even recharged yet.

With the 3/15 SR proposed rule, you would get 30 energy at step 8, just like you did before the nerf in the first place. Any kills above that would be wasted until the 15 second interval they were in is over, which isn't very long at all and much of which would have went to waste due to a full energy bar at the end of a fight. Remember those times?

Now since the 3/15 rule would return much of the power to the players abusing spirits/SR in PvP, they added the stipulation regarding your own spirits. This solves the N/Mo foolishness but gives more incentive to add some restoration or weapon spells on the N/Rt bars.

Overall I think the change would be one of ANets better moves as PvEers get an improved energy flow under typical conditions, close in fact to that of golden times, and PvP lamers get a few of their toys back that were originally taken away for being naughty.

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Oh, kill a spirit and win? I love you guys.

So, FC might affect Signets, eh?

I wonder if this is a good time to contemplate a Keystone Signet driven build? If you use primary and secondary signets at 30% off the cast time with Keystone recharging them all... hmm. Me/P? Me/W? Me/Mo with some spite?

This has potential, methinks, for creativity.

its seem like anet doesnt make much change this weekend
where is my bow buff ?? ^_________^||

necro's shouldn't have to worry about energy, because THEIR PRIMARY ATTRIBUTE IS ENERGY MANAGEMENT! - monks should have to worry about energy because THEIR PRIMARY ATTRIBUTE IS NOT ENERGY MANAGEMENT!.

it's not rocket science, I invest over half of my attribute points into soul reaping so i don't have to worry about energy... monks get to buff up 2 attrbiutes, pluss their primary because they don't need to max their primary for energy management, i would love to have points in two attrbiutes and not max myy primary - but i need energy.

I wish necros get SR back to normal again!

Nope, my vision is fine. Either you've been trapping without paying attention for quite awhile, or you don't trap ever because the traps have not been changed. I, however, spent most of the nights last weekend and this week duo trapping the UW.

My spike traps NEVER did 70 damage in just one trap. Laying multiple spike traps in the same place, yes, they did that much - more, even.

The damage and durations are both the same as they were before yesterday's update. Spike trap and flame trap haven't been touched for months.

[QUOTE=Stellar SixTen]Generally, the mesmer will have more important things to interrupt with his 25 sec recharge interrupt than your chants. Exept maybe if you're running Defensive Anthem, which is majorly annoying.
Maybe if they're running power return you'll get interrupted every once in a while.
The only interrupts that really saw play were Savage Shot and Dirstracting Shot anyway (maybe power drain every once in a while as energy management), and those worked on chants already.
In short, I doubt you'll even notice it as a paragon, and if you do comfort yourself with the thought that they could've spent that interrupt on something a lot more valuable, so you actually helped your team.

EDIT:
I don't see why everyone says this change to soul reaping made it even worse than it was.
After soul reaping first got nerfed everyone was like 'omg it sux now'
I was like 'dude, you can still get like 3 energy per second from it. That's pretty huge! All this did was put a cap on the exploits'
And everyone was like 'yeah, but in PvE things tend to die in packs. If you nuke effectively, they will all die at once, and then you'll have to wait a bit till the next group all dies at once, so this nerf basically left us with only one trigger from soul reaping per group.' WHICH IS A VALID ARGUMENT
In this new system, you'll get 3 triggers per group. Yeah, according to yourselves this would triple the energy you'd get in PvE (while keeping the same cap on abuse builds). How is that worse than it was before? (I'm generally curious. please tell me)

The buff to arcane conundrum is actually pretty big in PvE. Slowing down a whole group of casters with one hex? yes please.
MAKE UP YOURS MINDS, PEOPLES
and last but not least
no u

About soul reaping why not just change it imo to give 1 point of energy whenever a creature dies for each 2 ranks in soul reaping ,so u would gain 8 points of energy at 16 soul reaping,that would be preety fair for everyone y think

No no no, that is a horrible idea! Who is gonna run 16 SR?? That's a waste of your attributes right there and you won't be able to max out your Curses, Death or Blood magic depending on whichever you focus on.

Necros get up to 48 energy free, every 15 seconds, in addition to the four pips of recharge.

This isn't enough? Give mesmers that much unmanaged juice and they'd be the most dominant class in all aspects.

I really can't accept any complaints as justified.

Come on, how can you guys come up with statements like this?

Usually you come in a fight at near full energy right? Then you cast a ton of spells and THEN you get the SR benefits... I'll conceed that MMs may not benefit as much as other builds from the new SR system tho.

thank you for being the voice of reason...

All the complaints after the first SR "nerf"(in truth a good fix to a HUGE exploit) were in regards to how a mob dies so fast and that if all 5 creatures died within 5 seconds you would only get SR's effect once. With this update, seeing as this happens all the time according to you complainers out there, SR will now trigger 3 times instead of one. So, exactly how is this worse?

its worse for 2 reasons
first, because its so horribly overcomplicated and a perfect simple fix has been suggested by hundreds of people and anet completely refuses to do it for some stupid reason and keeps on making it MORE COMPLICATED.
second, as I said in a post between the one you quoted and this one, it can trigger on those weak mobs that go down in a couple hits, while you're still at near-full energy, leaving you out of luck for the stronger stuff in the group.
for pvp yes this is better. for pve, its better in some instances, but worse in general. and in any case, it shouldn't be this complicated. there is a perfect simple fix that is so obvious. no time constraint, no energy from spirits and minions.

No. Usually, when the fight starts the necromacer sends in the first wave of minions, and the Torment mage's deep freeze or Greater Blood drinker's Icy Veins causes a Minion armageddon before any (or many) spells have even been cast. These minions were at high degen or low health anyways and usually dont last but a few hits, even non AoE is painful. At this point, you are SOL for energy for a full 15 seconds, having gained little to no energy before triggering the timer.

I could adapt my playstle to fit the 5 second timer. And in truth, the 5 second timer hit MM least because 2 waves of minion attacks take almost 5 seconds anyways.

The new SR system is painful for any builds using minions in PvE.

Its lazy to throw three bad nerfs to compensate for one bad nerf.

This thread alone made me lose all respect for this community.

QQ more imo. If you hate this game and ANet so much, go play in your garden with the butterflies and stop ruining the game for everyone else please. Shoo.

1) Overly complicated? lol
You trigger soul reaping, and then you can only trigger it twice in the next 15 seconds. What's so hard to understand.
And not "almost everyone" can agree to it, just the riverside scrubs.

2) How irrelivant and pointless. I'M CONVINCED!

I mean seriously, do you need to cycle MORE than 50 passive energy in 15 seconds (if you start at 0 energy and trigger soul reaping 3 times you will end up getting 50 energy in that 15 seconds, pretty damn powerful)? If you are killing more than 3 at a time, then do you really need MORE energy. I mean the group is dying or dead and you should be on full-ish energy.
People talking out of their asses drives me insane...

It's not.

DIDN'T YOU HEAR! IF SR ISN'T AS POWERFUL AS IT WAS PRE-PRENERF, THEN ANET HAS FAILED! NOOB LRN2UNDERSTAND 12 YEAR OLD UNLIMITED ENERGY PLX GIMME WHAT I WANT MENTALITY !

OK, if this is your plan, give necros permanent HCT 100% on all spells... not so cool now, is it?

.....

You know nothing for Mesmers do you?

Regarding SR:

1. 3 every 15 is a mild improvement over 1 every 5. You've got a better chance of actually receiving something at least close to SR/5 e/sec over the long term. You no longer have to hit the 5-sec mark exactly with every kill. The biggest problem is that you can be absolutely screwed if you get nailed with 3 hits at the start of the battle that overflow your energy meter.

2. To quote myself from the other thread:

Presuming this is their intended fix, I'm less than enthusiastic.

Some folks have questioned whether this is a restriction to "nearby" range. I don't think it is. I think the term "near" is used in its colloquial sense instead of its technical sense for two reasons: (1) It would be so mind-numbingly stupid that I can't believe they'd really do it. (2) The current SR uses the same terminology, but is not limited to the "nearby" range.

On paper at least, this strikes me as a sloppy/hasty/poor implementation of the battery solution originally proposed by Phoebus. I suspect that this implementation is going to repeat some of the same damn problems with the current timer (ie the "4.999 Second Problem," the "Overflow Counted Against the Cap Problem," etc). And that's a crying shame because, not only have they had 2 months to work on it, but they've been handed the blueprint for a similar implementation that solves all of those problems and they didn't use it.

I'll want to see it in action before passing final judgment. I want to examine the "recharging" mechanism and that's something that's not clear from the description. (Is it 3 independent 15-sec timers? Is it 1 15-sec timer triggering on every 3rd hit? Is it a global timer each necro is patched into, like /dance*?) Like I said, I have very strong misgivings, but I'll wait and see.

If I had to put into my final 2 cents before I see it working, I'd STRONGLY suggest:

• (1) Don't recharge 3 "hit counters" for SR. Instead recharge points of soul-reap-able potential energy, up to a max of 3*SR, at a rate of SR/5. Allow a partial hit if you don't have 1*SR worth of potential energy charged up yet. That solves a whole bunch of "herky-jerky"-related problems.
• (2) Do not count overflowed energy against the cap. A large part of the frustration for PvE minion users, in particular, is that the energy from the first death is always lost as overflow because theretofore there were no corpses, and that wasted hit of SR counts against the cap, thereby preventing you from gaining energy later when you actually need it. (Note how nicely this dovetails with suggestion 1: overflow control can be tailored down to a single point of energy.)
• (3) Put it in the GUI. Keeping precise track of one 5-sec timer so that I know when to hold back to avoid screwing myself due to this misbegotten mechanic is difficult. Keeping track of 3 15-sec timers is nearly impossible. Give us some sort of GUI element that, at the very least, warns us when a kill is going to be wasted.

All of the above pales in comparison to a larger issue though: There's still no good reason for a cap. There just isn't. SR was never globally overpowered. Its abuses were narrow. The solution should have been narrow. There's simply no justification for an across-the-board nerf to the attribute.

Spirit Spam is dead. Good. Excellent. Great. It deserved its fate.

This seems to imply that it will be full energy for spirits you control. N/Rt is a pretty darned small niche, but I suppose I'm glad to see it's getting full energy.

Some folks have pointed out that this also means no energy from killing enemy spirits. They'd like to see "You only gain energy from hostile Spirits and Spirits you control." I suppose that, in principle, they are probably right. You did fight and kill an enemy, so I guess you do deserve the energy. However, I'm not too bothered by it. In PvE, given the very low spirit :: monster ratio, it's a very small loss. And I'm not too bothered by it in PvP because (a) it saves the the spirit ritualist from shooting himself in the foot against a necro-heavy team, thereby helping rit viability, and (b) killing a spirit is so much easier than killing a PvP opponent that I'm not sure killing a spirit really "earns" the energy as well in the PvP context.

In sum:
I'm less than impressed. Not only did they make the wrong balance decision regarding whether to have a cap at all, but it looks like they picked another sub-optimal implementation of the cap. I'll have to wait and see before forming a final opinion. Perhaps there's more to the timer mechanics than the description reveals. I certainly hope so.
I've been telling myself for awhile that it will be time to quit GW for good if this update doesn't make playing my necromancer fun again. If this is a-net's "final solution" to SR, things are looking very iffy. After 2 months of "working on it" and enormous amounts of player feedback, I was expecting something a lot better.