/signed
1. Removing the timer isn't about making SR more powerful, it IS about fixing a whole bunch of problems caused by the timer's extremely poor design.
- It's clunky, ugly, and unintuitive.
- It punishes you for playing well. The better you do at eliminating mobs quickly, the worse it cuts into your energy gains, and the worse shape it leaves you in for the next mob.
- It randomizes something that should be consistent. With 10 SR, from a 10-monster mob, you can gain as much as 100 energy, or as little as 3 (or even 0 if you have minions in tow). That's exceedingly random. This randomness...
- (1) Is extremely frustrating.
- (2) Makes it completely impossible to play at the level of skill where you plan for and "manage" your available energy. Supporters of the timer often say that "under the old SR, the answer to 'should I cast this spell now?' was always 'yes, because I don't have to worry about energy'"; but what they don't see is that, with the timer, the answer is "yes, because I have no way to predict whether I have to worry about energy or not, and I can't afford to 'live in fear' and never cast anything." In fact, the timer is slightly WORSE for encouraging energy "management" than unbounded soul reaping. If you fully understood and appreciated the old soul reaping, you could spend down all of your energy gains -- you could even tally up each mob before you engaged it, figure out how much energy you were going to gain, and plan out how you were going to use every point of energy before the battle even began. Few players actually played at that skill level, but it was at least possible. The random behavior under the timered soul reaping is impossible to predict, so "managing" your energy in that way is strictly impossible.
- It conflicts with the intended synergy between Soul Reaping and corpse-exploitation skills. The obvious design intent behind soul reaping originally was to provide immediate energy for casting corpse-exploitation skills at the same time the corpse became available. The timer breaks this. Sometimes you get energy along with a corpse, and sometimes you don't. That's a problem.
(Additionally, some folks like Carinae would say that getting energy when there isn't a corpse is also a problem that needs fixed.)
- It conflicts with the minion cap mechanic. Originally, the high prices on minion spells were justified because some of the energy wasn't actually spent, but rather "stored" in the minion and recovered through SR when it died. The minion cap didn't break this; it might kill a minion early, but you still got your energy back out of that minion. The timer breaks it. The cap may force a minion to die while the timer is denying energy, so the energy "stored" in that minion is lost for good. Moreover, this is somewhat likely to happen because the timer has certainly already triggered at least once by the death that provided the body that turned into the 11th minion.
This problem is worst in the case of shambling horrors that can go into a chain reaction against the minion cap, triggering the timer and continuing to kill off several more minions without returning energy.
2. Removing the timer absolutely has to be done, but it doesn't have to be the only change to SR in PvE. The timer has to be removed for all the reasons I listed above, but independent changes to reduce the overall power of SR could be done as well.
For instance, I could entirely support Carinae's plan of (1) remove the timer, and (2) remove SR from minions, and (3) drastically reduce the cost of all the minion skills. This would remove the "energy but no corpse" scenario, and it would remove the "one minion bomber powering an entire team of necros" gimmick that we see in Sabway.
3. Dividing PvE and PvP SR would also be extremely good for PvP. SR is horrifically weak in PvP. The only thing it ever had going for it was a couple of gimmicks that have been totally eliminated by the nerf to Jagged Bones and the nerf to SR triggering on spirits. Splitting SR allows for SR to be totally reworked from the ground up to make something useful in PvP without having to worry about messing up PvE.
