Mesmer and SR changes June 7th update.

I'm so confused as to why these changes aren't listed on the official site. Was it a mistake?

Anyway, if the Necro, Mesmer and Ritualist primaries are to be changed I hope that monks' Divine Favour will trigger on all monk skills.

yeah it was a "leak" of info that wasn't "supposed" to be released yet. or in other terms, a-net putting up temporary changes to gauge our reactions and decide how many pitchfork-deflectors to buy.

Or just a developer sent the wrong build to be used. Mistakes do get made.

Please just make it so SR is unaffected by spirits and/or minions. It would make everyone so much happier

Oh well, I guess I'll have to see this new update in action for myself before I judge it too harshly.

I dont like the SR Nerf at all. This is not one SR nerf but several nerfs.

(1) SR now gives no energy from spirits, except spirts you control, where it now gives full energy.

Mild Dislike I'f I am in pvp and I kill an enemy "shelter" I think that I ought to be rewarded for winning. I like that "spiritway" soul reaping monks are dead.. but this nerf is too harsh

(2) SR now only gives energy for "nearby" deaths.

HATE this nerf is awful. Nearby is way too little range. It's not like you ever saw necro flag-runners in pvp anyways. Many minion deaths happen outside of "nearby" range (which, btw is the range of the Aoe that pvE AOE uses (Deep Freeze, etc), and non-minion deaths are in more trouble. For Example, the SS farming the UW with a 55 monk trys to stay an aggro bubble away... and builds like orders or BiP dont want to be anywhere near teh action. HATE THIS NERF IS UNCALLED FOR.

(3) SR now has an even more retarded timer.

HATE I guess the solution to "players dislike the timer" is another timer. At least I was used to teh old stupid timer. This new timer is probably better for pvp but its awful for pvE. Again. the common situation... you run into a fight.. the monsters deep freeze ur minions killing them... now you have full energy (most of the SR was wasted and never seen) and you cant cant get energy from SR for 15 seounds... godawful...

But its the "Nearby" nerf thats going to screw the necromancer the most.

The current soul reaping descriptions says "creature near you", but we know it doesn't work like that.

Yes and my necro would love to have a 5 energy spell that completely heals myself BUT that is a Monk skill...I would love to have +80 AL BUT that is for Warrior and Paragon, I would love to be able to cast my minnion spells instantly, BUT that is for fast cast Mesmers...geez everyone tries to compare classes and make everything the same for everyone..what is the effing point of having different class if they are all the same?? SR is a necro attribute and it should be reverted back to before last nerf..and if PvP don't like it then the nerf could remain the way it is for PvP and go back for PvE to the way it was.

What about non necros that kill a spirit where is there reward for "winning"?

I was worried there for a second till i found this on

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Game_updates

Would hate it if they had implemented that SR update, but I'm not worried now, will be if they do, but no point worrying when its not an actual update

To PvErs who feel the need to complain all the time:

PvPers did not demand this SR nerf at all. PvPers simply said that spirits should not give energy return for SR. THATS ALL. Old SR wasnt overpowered in PvP. Why? Because people dont die in PvP nearly as much as in PvE.

Signet speed: I could come up with some uses, but nothing great for PvE. My Mesmer is my favorite character, and fun to play. But whenever I play my Necro (even now), warrior, monk, or even my ranger... I see how ineffective my mesmer is. Fortunately he has good heroes. Maybe the signet speed will be useful with the PVE skills.

This leak seems to confirm some of my fears about the mesmer fix. Namely Interrupting Shouts, and some changes that I can only see helpful in PvE depending on Sunspear Skills. Thus, it seems likely that only Nightfall Mesmers will be getting the PvE buffs, since nobody outside of nightfall uses chants, or can get Sunspear skills. I have Nightfall, so I'm not overly concerned for myself, but I fear for my Mesmer Brethren.

I expected a more wide reaching fast casting update. Something like reducing casting speed, helping E management (either by building it in, or moving some emanagement skills into it and buffing them). The chants thing... Honestly, There's never been a time when I wanted to interrupt chants.

Not seeing the help to PvE here. Someone will need to explain it to me.

Where is the link to this update?

Well said Keithark, this comparison of classes is pointless. Every class has their strength that is supposed to be inaccessible by other classes. Complaining that it is unfair for a necro to not have to watch their energy is ridiculous considering that the necro class uses its primary attribute for energy management.

Before the SR nerf was implemented, did anybody ever complain (on the pve side of the game of course) that necros were getting the lion's share of the action due to their supposedly limitless energy? No! Every pve pug wanted a tank, 2 or 3 eles for damage, a minion master to provide some additional tankage/damage and the poor mesmers got left out altogether. I remember being in tombs advertising my services as a curses necro and almost never getting on a team. If the old SR was unfair, they would have been saying; ZOMG, GRAB HIM, HE'S A NECRO WITH LIMITLESS ENERGY AND WILL TOTALLY PWN EVERYTHING! The point that I'm making is, before the SR nerf the necro class was much more fun and no other classes were being hurt or disadvantaged by the supposed "unfair" energy gains from SR (again, for those of you out there with half a brain, I am talking about pve, not pvp).

Some hexes, Arcane conundrum for one, were given adjacent range Aoe. With some Aoe (instead of none) mesmers look much better in pvE.

Right. Which is exactly why it makes no sense and I do not understand why SR was not simply changed to not give energy return from spirits.

PvErs dont feel the need to complain all the time. Most of them anyway. There's a great many nerfs that reduce farming efficiency and play that makes PvE more and more frustrating. Most of us just roll with it and grumble about it to ourselves, save some of the more vocal ones, but Anet really could take a moment and realize what they do in a big picture view. Make a few unhappy with this, a few unhappy with that, a few more unhappy with this other thing - leads to a lot of unhappy people. Some of these changes are necessary, and that's fine. You'll still get people unhappy about any sort of change. Some, however, are far from necessary and the changes to SR as implemented is one of them.

The new AOE AC, is imho still poor. The Range is adjacent and still requires me to load up with interupts and then hit every skill the affected monster uses.

So usage would be something like AC(10 en)+10 en per interupt(on average)

Much better still to take cry of Frustration and select a slower casting monster and still interupt all of the mob than try and race about trying to interupt another monster. By which the first skill you hit would have recharged,

By far, the best way to shut down a mob is dazed, alas something mesmers cant do without dipping into secondary professions,

[QUOTE]Erm, this could be a problem, since I use Anthem of Flame in almost every build to trigger echos and refrains, and as a general "timer" (10 sec duration, 10 sec recharge).

But I don't see this as a "delete Paragon" nerf, more of an annoyance.

This cant possibly be the Mesmer PvE updates. If it was then serious phail, but changes against Chants is to nerf Paragons in PvP, and their abusive Defensive Anthems, and fast cast signets is just a nice addition to fast casting, that Mesmers in GvG (signet of humility) will benefit from.

Because this does not benefit PvE Mesmers, this cannot be the Mesmer update.


@ Spawning Powers change: its adding longer passive defence from weapon of warding, with other weapon spells being not worth it for length.
If they want spawning power to be awesome, then make item spells not take away complete benefit from your caster items. For each point in Spawning Power you cast spells 2% faster, and they recharge 1% faster when holding an item.

Thats just my opinion, but lengthening defensive weapon spells is gonna be annoying.

Anet, I think the community deserves to know what is going on. This correction on "erroneous" descriptions has generated a lot of turmoil and there's still no explanation on it. Saying it was a bug won't cut it, because obviously someone thought up and wrote thoso descriptions and they somehow (maybe unintentioanlly) ended up in the game with the recent update. Anyway, it's out now, I think we have the right to know why and how it got there.

I'm not ranting or complaining, I just think that since it got out it should be open for discussion.

Yeah, s'kinda weird..I'd like to know what goin on.

Although I do like the idea of Spawning Power making weapon spells last longer..

@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.

------------------------------
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.