elite skills to tweak for more popularity

I was reviewing the many elites that either have fallen out of grace or have never seen the face of pvp before and decided to either tweak the the cost, cast time, recharge speed, or even the functionality and description of them. Lemmi know what you guys think:

Word of Healing: Allow to target the caster as well. Doing so will make this healing skill more popular again, which was the biggest reason why people dont bring this elite anymore.

Aura of Faith: Make the energy 5. make the recharge 5. make the duration either 20 sec or 30 sec. With enchantments trying to be a little more prominent but with all the growing enchantment removal, these changes will make it more popular and easier to keep up.

Peace and Harmony: make the enegery regeneration 0..2. Same defense for aura of faith, there are a lot more methods of enchantment removal going around so making this a more powerful enchantment will make it a little more popular.

Mark of Protection: cannot create specific numbers for it but bringing down the duration with the benefit of bringing down the recharge time might make this a nice addtion. Example would be maybe making it last 1..5 sec and the recharge is 20 sec.

Life Transfer: keep the health degen the way it is but perhaps make the recharge much more reasonable. At least a recharge of 20 sec but a more popular way would be to bring it down to say, 10 or 12 seconds.

Soul Leech: maybe make the recharge 10 seconds, making it a scary threat since its likelyhood of being up almost indefinitely. my defense is look at Spoil Victor. that recharges in 10 sec and does a lot more damage. I understand that the damage is more conditional than this elite and the duration of SV lasts almost twice as long.

Glimmering Mark: change the cast time to 1 sec. Maybe make the hex last a little longer too.

Whirling Axe: remove the disable feature, since blocking is everywhere now making this elite VERY useless. You cant be a good warrior anymore, you're just a LUCKY warrior if you can hit with your attacks. Why would quivering blade get a 4 sec disabled feature and this gets 15? doesnt make sense.

Coward: Would be fun if the adrenaline was maybe at 4 or 5. Might be a little too powerful but its definitely worth a shot testing it out at that and seeing if its abused too much or if its just right.

Withdraw Hexes: make the additional recharge time down to 15...3. Your average hex removal recharges in 12 seconds. at 15 energy with the addtional 8 sec (given you have the right amount of divine favor) to remove one hex it recharges in 13 seconds, making it a worse than other hex removal. I understand it can rid a whole team of hexes given they are clustered up, but reducing the downside of this elite a little might make it a nice addition to a team.

Life Sheath: might be a nice spike-prevention method if the elite was a 1/4 sec cast. However if that seems to be too powerful perhaps give it a 3/4 sec cast, allowing it a little more flexibility and possibility on catching some spikes.

Ray of Judgment: make the recharge down to 20 sec. Change the functionality of the second effect to Summoned Creature, rather than just summoned Undead, making it a nice weapon for spirit nuking since spirits can now suffer from burning. Additionally, perhaps add a feature where if it hits a summoned creature it recharges instantly (or twice as fast, whichever).

Lyssa's Aura: make it able to target any party member, then change the recharge time to 20 seconds to balance out the change. If changed to this, it could be a powerful tool against spellspikes (ie. bloodspike, IV spikes, etc)

Mirror of Ice: make it able to target any party member.

Quicksand: add a feature that makes it to where if you are running faster than normal, you lose your speed buff.

Glimmer of Light: make the healing heal for a bit more.

Air of Disenchantment: make the first effect remove 1 enchantment from the targets it hits. then the rest of the description is what the original text says, making it possible for those targets to lose 2 enchantments throughout the course of the elite's effect (one from when it was activated and one from it ending)

Xinrae's Weapon: make the recharge shorter (20 sec is more reasonable but 10 would be better since 25 energy is a lot to keep it up every 10 sec). if the recharge is at 10 sec then keep the disability where its at, but if its at 20 sec make the disability a little more.

Incoming!: this elite has taken many hits and been nerfed to the point of uselessness. If it stays the duration its at then the recharge should be less. otherwise the duration of the skill should be a little longer, or perhaps make the skill adrenaline-based (maybe 8-10 adrenaline with a 5 sec recharge time)

The Power is Yours!: make the recharge 10 sec.



These changes might make these elites more popular, giving them the chance to shine and possibly change the current meta into something more fun.

The biggest reason people don't bring WoH is that is isn't enough to deal with tons of pressure and you are better off being a LoD/prot hybrid monk.

Yeah very true. It just kinda bugs me that LoD is the main elite now. Don't get me wrong its one of my favorite elites in the game but I'd love to see other healing elites find a way into those areas again.

yea i think all elite skills (edit: all skills in general) should be viable for pvp, rather than just the select few... otherwise they'd just be a waste.
It really does suck how LoD is the only elite from healing prayers regularly used..

Haven't scrutinised each of your skill tweaks but i like the motivation ^^

pve... meh they can nerf the environment instead

Yea definitely. Mark of Protection doesn't come close to useful in the fast pace pvp, specifically GvG, environment. Making it recharge faster at the cost of it lasting much less would make it a nice choice in gvg, possibly verse spikes or if you feel your soft characters (ie. your mesmers) are being harassed quite a bit, throw a MoP on him to recover from the onslaught, which can help the healing monk to from having to spam all his heals into keeping him up.

Same with Aura of Faith. The elite has incredible potential but its high energy and rather long recharge time makes it not a pleasant elite to bring, not to mention a lot of enchantment removal nowadays. Bringing down both the energy and recharge time will help maintain as many on your team as possible.

I wish Anet can give these a look and consider looking into buffing the elites and possibly implimenting my ideas to change =)

This thread wasn't to buff already amazing and used elites, its to give the elites that have either grown out of popularity or have never been popular to begin with the chance to shine for once or once again. I still stand 100% on my elite skill changes and seriously wish someone from the skill balancing team could review this.

Plus my changes also benefit PvE too so don't think it's to just make it workable in PvP and that's it.

Well, this is what you get when you combine PvP and PvE games. You can't effectively balance both, so there must be compromise.

Power creep = bad. Instead of buffing so-so skills, nerf popular combos.

well i agree that they should buff some of the older skills so its atleast viable to have a someone that only owns ph to run a bar in pvp.

Thats true but there are tons of elites and non elites that need a buff big time, and i dont really need to name them, and if everything was their strenght youd be better off wanding people to death .

Pfft, suggestions that useless skills, not only elites should be changed or buffed was brought up so many times, and so many times AN technically said "we don't even care" that it's not even funny.

I agree changing MoP, but to reduce the duration, for me at least makes it worse. I don't care how spammable something is, if i have to 'constantly' monitor it, it looks uglier.

Some things also must be considered for PvE too, for example a boss might become invincible to certain groups, forcing a restart and rethink (ah, the good old days of mursaat bosses in prophecies!).

I like ideas that tweak skills for more popularity but i've never been an advocate of 'nerfs' unless it's a case of extreme abuse. Maybe it's just my mentality(?) but i consider all duration reductions a nerf. :/

Some nice suggestions in the thread though. I'll take another look at it tomorow. Past my bedtime!

It's because a lot of the suggestions in the past were very lame or too technical. My suggestions are nice and straight-forward and don't offer any sort of imba.

I challenge ANET to make these elites the way I suggested them and see how the general public favors them. If they don't then revert the ones they don't like the alters to. I mean, this game revolves around players' likings and if you change a part of the game into a favorable outcome, then the company did its job by making people happy.

One of my favorite suggestions was for Ray of Judgment. That elite has hardly ever been tried to be done anywhere, let alone pure smiting is hardly ever tapped into. And with all the spiritway going around, methods of spirit control aren't that great. Since Ray of Judgment causes the fun feature of burning on minions, and minions are hardly ever in the pvp world, changing the functionality to "Summoned Creature" would leave it open to hitting Rit spirits, Ranger spirits, and Necro minions, rather than just minions. Also with the incredibly nice addition to spirits being able to suffer burning now, Ray of Judgments burning feature would make it fun to zap down enemy spirits, not to mention my suggestion to recharge the elite if it hits a summoned creature.

I want you guys to tell me if you like them the old ways or the new, fun ways I've suggested. After all this is about having fun and new things make playing fun, especially with the fact that WE HAVE NO NEW ELITES OUT TO MAKE NEW CREATIVE BUILDS WITH so if we don't have that lets buff the old, useless ones into something that can possibly be worked with and make fun, new metas.

Let's not hijack GiZMo's thread here people. And please keep things civil.

Yeah I would really like to see more buffs so that each profession actually has a variety of different uses.

Keystone Signet - reduce recharge from 20 seconds to 15 seconds.

Phoenix Tears, that is one big wall of imbalanced...

Woopz, just noticed I was late by like 12 hours...left the page open and just hibernated overnight...

It's not just elites that need to be tweaked, but normal skills that don't have any use as well.

yea i love your ray of judgement mod =]
i totally agree with the fact that a lot of builds are boring.
All i see with monks these days in HA, are SoD, LoD, SoD, LoD etcetcetc...

I would like to see some improvements on the MM skills since anet keeps trying to kill the necro. If soul reaping is nerfed, why not make the minion cost cheaper, and maybe drop the recharge time a bit. Make blood of the master the way it was where you only sacrifice a certain amount and there isnt the cost for additional minions. Make it fair 15-20%.

~the rat~

LoD made monking easier and more fun in game especially for elite dungeons (mainly Deep Urgoz etc) Doa =hb/ bonder spellbrker =gg

hmm... I could agree with some of those, escpeacially Insidous Parasite, it's very weak as it is now, but I feel Ritualist Channeling elites should be the ones changed, they are bad, and almost no one uses them.

Yeah I totally agree that there are some normal skills that need some fixing, but for the sake of this thread's topic, let's stick to the elite's I've mentioned or any ideas you have for other elites.

The biggest ones I really want to see changed are:

Mark of Protection
Ray of Judgment
Life Transfer
Air of Disenchantment
Aura of Faith
Lyssa's Aura
Mirror of Ice

... I don't suppose it occurred to you that doing such a thing might damage PvE?

Then again, PvP folks never give a mote of thought to that.
And if nerfing useful skills is bad for PvE, it wouldn't be quite as damaging potentially as buffing skills that are essentially only used by the monsters.

Your Ray of Judgement buff for instance (involving instant recharge)... would turn every creature with that skill (Fleshreaver Hounds come to mind) into an Acolyte of Balthazar level wipeout machine to any party with minions or spirits in (most). It would be quite disasterous.

Mark of Protection I know is used by Dolyak Masters, who can be a pain in the butt because of it sometimes. Admittedly your suggestions for that would probably only make them marginally more annoying.
Life Transfer doesn't seem to see a lot of use in PvE... though I've had it used against me quite unpleasantly in Alliance Battles, and I don't honestly think it needs buffing.

Buffing Aura of Faith would make the most unpleasant Monk Bosses in all of Prophecies even more hated: Coventina the Matron and Willa the Unpleasant. Unless it also involved nerfing other skills they have, I'd call it a completely unnecessary and indeed thoroughly unwanted change.

On the flipside... Mirror of Ice CERTAINLY needs a buff (as do many Water Elementalist skills), and Lyssa's Aura would be great if it wasn't Elite.

This elite would be way over powered imo if the recharge was 10 or 12. At that fast you can easily keep up a constant -7 degen on target. I do agree that the recharge time is way to long though. I used to use it but the only way I use it now is coupled with Arcane Mimicry.

I think 20 would be nice. In order to keep it going continuously (actually you could only cast it 3 times w/o pause) then you would need Arcane Mimicry at least.

water elites are fine as they are,cept for ofc....mirror of ice.

Hey, look! I can keep -7 degen on a target permanently, too! MoR and a Fire Wand is overpowered, aye?
Transfer sucks and really needs a buff.

Actually, I'm all for elites getting buffed - not stupidly overpowered *glares at a certain someone* - but to a useable level... diversity is fun.

Indeed, there's whole lines that need reworking to be useable, tbh - Communing and Blood Magic are the ones that spring straight to mind. Buuut... that's a discussion for another thread

how bout the porr ritualists who keep seeming to get nerfed? there Channeling elite spells suck.

The only decent channeling elite is Offering of Spirit. If you're running a channeling build, there's just no good reason not to take that. The rest of them are so/so. But lets not even get started on how bad Clamor of Souls is...

Yeah, but you are also forgetting the perminent + health regen you'd have from this new life transfer too.

14 health a second is really pathetic, not worth mentioning.
LT needs a low recharge time, a nasty effect on (premature) end, or a combination of both to be a viable elite skill. As it is now, it's really bad and is totally screwed by even the most mundane hex removal.

Life Transfer 5e 1c 10r
Elite Hex. For 6...14 seconds, target foe suffers 3...7 health degeneration, which you gain as health regen. When Life Transfer ends, you steal 30...78 health from target foe.

... I'd almost consider running in arenas, if Blood Magic actually did something.

That's a load of garbage.

PvP based balances might "ruin" your favorite builds, but they won't make PvE as a whole unworkable. Since the opposition in PvE is automated, it will always be easier to find things that work there than it will be to find things that work in PvP. Since ANet has total control over everything in PvE (less so in PvP) and can make the attendant changes if necessary, the game will (and should!) always be balanced around PvP. I remember when they instituted that 5 second Soul Reaping timer (Which I think they should remove, along with SR from spirits), people here and elsewhere were screaming that PvE MM functionality was "ruined" and that their necromancers were "useless" now in PvE. And now one of the most widely used PvE builds uses 3 SR abusing Necromancers.

Something will always work in PvE; that you might have to change a skill or two as the result of a PvP based skill balance won't be the end of the world. There doesn't need to be a compromise at all. Just make PvP the main priority when drafting a skill balance

Personally AM a fan of glimmer of light however healing from it is still low to be an elite skill, I'd say raise to 105hp max heal (at 16 prayers).

- Ganni