Eternal Aura

The new Sunspear-only Dervish skill lets you maintain a form indefinetly. The skill should be nerfed.

OK, be more exact. WHY is the indefinite form of an avatar bad in PVE?
WHY should it be nerfed?
HOW should it be nerfed, in your opinion?

ok no no no no no and no, im already pissed they nerfed the ele pve skills. if pve skills are no better than regular skills, why take them? pve skills are ment to be better, ALOT better, and well the ele skills are not even as good as regular skills because of nerfs so i say LEAVE SS SKILLS ALONE!

how exactly do pve only skills being powerful detrimentaly affect your gaming experience? They are meant to be the way they are as a reward to working on the appropriate title. They have already been nerfed to hell once to many times already and to call for more nerfs is pathetic.

Its not like their balance affects any kind of competative play in the game, so please dont come on these forums and start calling for nerfs without even providing any kind of evidence or convincing argument.

It's not so much that they won't affect PvP, but that they TOTALLY unbalance PvE. Many of the sunspear skills on release were basically YOU WIN buttons, so long as you used them correctly with your other skills, which isn't very hard. Good games don't introduce them except in cheat code format. Now, you might say they YOU as the PLAYER can choose not to equip them, you may have noticed that this is an ONLINE game, where everyone else is going to equip them.

It's not fun to mindlessly do things, as stimulation to think of strategies and interaction with other players provides much more entertainment. Thus, the calls to nerf them OR upgrade them to elite status. ArenaNet obviously wanted them as normal skills, so they had to be toned down. Eternal Aura itself isn't worthy of the nerfstick yet, as a direct comparison to GvG would reveal roughly half a minutes' uptime per encounter. Since you have many encounters in PvE, it raises the level with which Dervishes can fight, as without their Avatar, they're just subpar in every way over Warriors who would have better damage output and better utility. What I'd say is better is to increase the duration of Eternal Aura, so that the Dervish pretty much has to strip it themselves for timely recharge rather than wait out the low 10 second duration.

Other Sunspear skills, like Intensity, should be changed to Elementalist skill damage, and increase the duration/reuse ratio, and so on. Each of the skills should be used better by their primary than as a secondary, and not only rely on the Sunspear title track as their attribute.

HOW?...
the only reason its used now is to keep avatars up if they make it so it cant be used with forms no-one will use it because pretty much all dervish skills have a recharge of 10 or less. it would be used less then the ele skills.

Changing it so you no longer can keep up a form indefinately would defeat the purpose of the skill. IMO.

The whole point of a skill is this and it is NOT overpowered. Instead of waiting 30 seconds after killing some mobs to put up your avatar, you just hit it and go. It isn't like some other professions that got very powerful skills, Dervishes just got the ability to use their elite form all the time instead of 90% of it.

I vote for "nerf everything"

I havnt tested the skill myself but arent the Avatar skills Disabled rather than recharging after use? and so shouldnt the skill fail to recharge them like the other skills?

It recharges them - and completely ignores the "disabled" feature of the forms.
I suggest - Enchantment spell - for xx sec. all of your dervish skills recharge 50% faster or smth.

I would have thought thats just a Bug then, The simple way is for Anet is for it not to recharge disabled skills, just like any other skill recharge skill (which wont recharge disabled skills)

no eternal aura is specifically targeted at forms..... all other dervish skills recharge in under 10s..... and like i said before STOP NERFING SS SKILLS GAH!!!!

Actuallly... I think Aura is ok as-is. It was intended, most definately, to recharge Avatars... And none of the avatars are *truly* that powerful PvE-wise that it's unbalanced... Indeed, most Dervishes I've seen just seem to want a constant Balthazar

The whole point of PvE only skills is to address the imbalance of power in PvE play. Therefore, the skills for the expansion classes and for mesmer are more powerful than those for the 'favored' classes. Compare to intensity, then compare how popular eles are compared to dervishes...

Eg:

Dervishes get 'Eternal Aura', a high damage enchantment which refreshes avatars, ie perma-balthazar, ie comparable tanking to a warrior. That's an intentional design feature of the skill. Ever tried recharging a disabled skill with flourish or assassin's promise? This is basically a non-elite version for dervishes to increase their power.

Assassins get 'Critical Agility', a combined armor buff and IAS to take their armor to levels comparable to a warrior while giving them an attack speed buff which puts their DPS on a whole other level. Again, this is to give a melee class which has fallen from favor* in PvE a chance to compete with the old staple, the Warrior.

Warriors, on the other hand get 'Whirlwind Attack', a decent AoE attack comparable to cyclone axe, which any class can use and use well. It's not as powerful as the other two, but, it's actually at it's best on a Dervish or Assassin, simply because they can charge it faster. It was clearly designed with that in mind - to increase the standing of Dervishes and Assassins when compared to Warriors.

*Actually, Assassins in PvE were never favored, ever. Since factions came out, every single assassin, ever, has been stereotyped as a leeroying noob with no common sense, usually by people who think things like 'Critical Strikes only works with Daggers**' or such. But we all know that

**2 days after factions came out, had a monk refuse to come into a group in Raisu palace b/c I was a critical barrager and according to him, "wiki says so, so you're wrong and a noob" I lol'ed and we got masters easily without him

Edit for Stormlord Alex: The reason perma Balthazar is such an attractive option is because fully enchanted, they are running at 130 armor all the time with Windwalker Insignia, 120 with Blessed Insignia. Thats higher than most warriors go, even with a shield most do not run the +20 vs elemental/r13 insignia, so overall 'solid' armor sits at 96 or 106 with ~20 from 'Watch Yourself!' for something between 116~126. Therefore, comparable to a warrior, with the addition of a 33% running boost. and attacks that bypass both physical and elemental resistance all the time. It's a similar situation for Assassins. Although the combination of Nightstalkers and Critical Agility at max sunspear ammounts to a boost of 40, putting the assassin on a potential 110 armor, which is lower than both Warrior and Dervish at their peak, it does have the very favorable additional ability of increasing your attack speed by 33% That and Assassins generally have the best melee defensive skills too. So this basically means that frontline characters are now a lot more similar in terms of their power in PvE, while remaining unique to play. About time, I say.

Yes I've been noticing this. I recently made a build for an hammer using assassin. I had a hard enough time getting into a group as an assassin with daggers, yet i still got groups. Now that I've made hammers my sins primary weapon (and btw critical agility + hammers is awesome) i never ger a group.

Eternal Aura doesnt need to be nerfed. None of the pve only skills need to be. They dont unbalance anything. They are there to make hard mode a bit easier imo

~Kyle

The thing is, this skill is only really useful if you have an Elite form. That means you have to either get your dervish to Kourna or buy an Elite Dervish Tome.

As well, that means that in order for the skill to be useful, you need to take two set skills, one of which being an elite.

This skill is nowhere near overpowered.

Nerfing the skill would be useless. Even if they make it "After 1 billion years all your dervish skills will recharge" coz there are tons of other dervish skills that stop an enchantment at any given time making the recharge instant.

And making it so it recharges all skill instead of elite forms is just retarded :\

Forms have always been kinda cheap IMO. They cast like an enchantment but they last much longer, can't be removed, and aren't susceptible to being used against you. The only drawback? A "long" recharge time which was uncircumventable due to its technically being disabled as far as game mechanics were concerned. And now there's Eternal Aura, which eliminates that drawback entirely.

But hey, it's PvE only. I may think perma-avatar is cheap, but if you enjoy it then I don't see how it hurts anyone.

Moa, I'm well aware of what Balth does for Dervs, thanks. I'd still rather have Melandru, for Eviscerate on a 6s recharge.

1) It's a PVE only skill. PvE has never been "balanced".

2) Kale, your argument below seems to be based entirely on your perception of fun. You seem to enjoy the "challenge" in PvE. Me personally I have yet to find any real challenge in PvE even in HM. So for me I like the "kill everything" skills. Mass destruction tickles me. This skill is fun. Fun and challenge are subjective and are not valid points for an argument as to why a skill should be nerfed. Valid arguments would be objective in nature.

It's balanced in the areas where enemies are level 20. Anything higher or below that level, you get either linear decreases in power or exponential increases in power. If PvE HAD been properly balanced, we wouldn't need these skills in the first place.

I don't enjoy any challenge, because there is none. It's far too easy, even without these skills. It should have been made with PvP balance in mind so that you don't have retarded level 28 enemies with far more health and armor than should be possible if a player had been leveled to 28 and gotten appropriate armor. This is the area that needs to be addressed, yet people constantly hang on to the skills as "They're PvE skills, so what if they're imbalanced, PvE is imbalanced!". The fact that so many people acknowledge the issue but won't acknowledge the real fix is distressing.

My post made valid points for why they should be nerfed, but obviously you kept sticking to my point on 'fun' and 'challenge'. I'll re-iterate it. When they were introduced, they were ELITE SKILL worthy, but not actually elite skills themselves. They should not have been so imbalanced, and more importantly, not able to be used by all professions. It should have been more effective in the hands of a primary, yet they weren't on release. A subsequent update changed the more imbalanced skills into something more workable (making Critical Agility and "There's Nothing to Fear!" require primary attributes to make them worthwhile). Note also, that you cleanly forget that I want Intensity brought back to near it's original format. The reason? Because if these skills continue to exist, at the very least, they should be used by the profession as a primary better than as a secondary.

http://gw.gamewikis.org/wiki/Intensity
pretty much balanced -10s duration, 45 recharge...
It's more useful to a fast casting mesmer then an elementalist

Why not then make that ALL the new skills require primary attributes?

When you come up with A.I. that can rival the intelligence of an experienced human player, come back and post here. For now, even the best A.I. out there has the intelligence of an insect.

That skills was meant FOR THAT PURPOSE.

Geez...

Asking for nerfs or balance in these forums is just asking to get flamed

yea it is a bit suicidal, but this is an actual skill that should not be nerfed, like i said before, dont nerf pve only skill, it makes them useless pretty things.... if this was nerfed at all it would be unusable and would never see play time, just like elemental lord......