The Madness That Is Ether Renewal

Hi Asp.

That seems more likely to create annoying difficulty rather than challenging difficulty. Fighting a mob that takes a long time to kill due to its health and that does massive damage isn't challenging - but the one-dimensionality of it is just irritating.

Making the players weaker is not that different to what was done with the conception of Hard Mode - making the mobs directly stronger through damage and speed buffs. It doesn't really change the game, though, or make it much harder: Prot spirit owns just as much, and taking it away breaks the game. The same tactics work, for the most part, and normal mode shows the only tactic you need is attack.

The success of heroes has shown that an AI with a good skillbar is powerful. Hard Mode should have capitalized on that, but it didn't, and ANet putting effort into the wrong developments is a bad sign for the future.

Big problem with giving enemies good skill bars. There would be... what, 4 different builds each profession could run? And thats being pretty generous for some professions. Not that giving every enemy the same stupid buffs was any better.

Now, I never bought EOTN, but didn't ursanway kind of destroy any pve balance? Why complain about these skills when that's still a problem?

Hot damn, have my e-childrenz

On a more serious note, this is exactically whats wrong with the direction that Arena Net is taking this game. They are catering the game towards the Super Casual gamer, which comes on once or twice every couple weeks for a half hour or so and complains that everyone else in the game is further than he is or has better, more vanity stuff than he does.

But why do you care ? So some players grind, use consumables, pve skills etc, but it's pve no one force anyone to do such things, You can stay in pre -sear forever or try to beat all campagins without using elite skills, it's up to you. If people can't find challange in pve for themselves it's really naive to think that developers will do it for them. What's a difference between removing or nerfing some skills and just don't using them if you think they are overpowered, except the latter is easier to be done and not affecting everyone.

I think we have proven the "just because it's there don't mean you have to use it" argument is one of the dumbest things you could say on this topic while trying to express a valid point.

Mainly interruption (from a reaction time standpoint, anyway. If they can interrupt a type of action, they'll do so regardless of whether or not it was what should've been interrupted - if they have a spell interrupter charged, they're more likely to waste it on the [[Fire Attunement] than waiting for the [[Meteor Shower]) and Minion Mastering, from what I can tell.

And don't forget that it can also replace [[Aura of Restoration], saving you an extra slot, which is likely how the vast majority of people will use the skill.

Worse comes to worse we can always petition ANet to slap a "(maximum 3)" onto the number of enchantments it counts (still very powerful and deserving of its Elite status, but would cut down potential abuse; I'd also favor instituting a new gameplay rule of "You cannot maintain more than one copy of a single spell at a time" ).

Nope. Outside of Olafstead and maybe the 'elite areas' (and then really only if you pay attention to those spamming Party Search their LFGs - people who, regardless of builds used or preferred, wouldn't be worth playing with anyways) it's not really a factor.

Ursan isn't much of a gift from ANET to bad players , it's more a skill to stop the profession hate. I stood for 2 ours in toa trying to find a non ursan group as a mesmer , it was futile to explain to any player that I cloud contribute to the team.Don't tell me that i should have looked for better players since they were those who kicked from their groups the most. While as much as I hate ursan i can get in about any group. Does this make a bad player , the only other pve skill i use is pain inverter occasionally?
If the monsters would be more challenging in a good way , not with insane amounts of hp and energy , but with good builds ,people wouldn't use ursan so much. About ether renewal , to make the most out of it you would require pretty gimmicky builds , so it's not so bad.

the problem with the profession hate is that PvE is too one-dimensional.

I'll take your example : a mesmer.

Mesmers are key in any balanced PvP build. It more than justifies the need for the class. However, in PvE, they are not needed because you can simply outdamage the healing instead of shutting monks down. Or outheal/prot the damage instead of shutting the offense down.
The profession hate was caused by what was (in my opinion at least) the wrong approach for "challenging PvE". Their fix (Ursan) was just as bad as what caused it in the first place.

You cannot simply blame Ursan or any other overpowered PvE skill in that case. You'd have to blame the entire flaw in PvE design.

So true. If you still think that ursan helps casual players then stop being naive and think how grinding norn rank is something a casual player would do.

Ah, right, you can even get into groups with low Norn rank, right?


Yay for even more retarded pve elitism.

Profession hate... Yeah. You know, you can't fight racism by killing people from all races except for one.

What the hell am I talking about? When you use Ursan Blessing, you are not a Mesmer or Assassin or a Ranger. You are Ursan. There is no profession hate because there are 2 professions - ursan and monk. Soon there will be (unless everyone will get bored and quit) only monk class and some of them will heal, everyone else will be running UB.

Why do you think Anet buffed Ether Renewal and Shadow Form? Now players have imbalanced skills without grinding. Just Anet just needs to make one for each of the other professions.


Its only a matter of time before ursans start preferring E/mo healers over monk healers. E/mo's can spam so much more, and thats all there is to ursan healing.

If anything the spell should be limited at 1, maybe 2. Getting 12 energy back per cast is effectively infinite energy in every circumstance except spamming 25 energy spells every few seconds. Not being able to maintain an enchantment on more then 1 target creates more problems then it solves, its better just to fix things at the source then leaving the changes in place and fixing the the rest of the game around it.

People care about the game, believe it or not.

Nope. It's because they don't care about PvE anymore.

If only Anet believed in this philosophy instead of making things worse...

Because it's much easier than fixing and balancing pve. Make pve skills even more overpowered and enjoy the love of GW community. Sure, people who want balanced, challenging pve will complain but in the end they are overwhelmed by the majority of players who want stuff to just asplode and give them ph4t lewt.

There is huge difference between "good skillbar" and its subset "top skillbar"

players tend to use only "top skillbars" but there is much much more that works well enough and that would actually challenge player when he has to face it.

Monsters ussually have fail skillbars. Anything is improvement usually.

I would go as far as claiming that each mob can be improved by taking its build "premise" and reworking its fail bars to decent bars without loss of mob identity.

The thing is, I am looking at the people doing the balancing. It's that they are no longer doing a very great job that's become my concern.

And yet they will still become a one-trick pony.

It's less about the build and more about how one reacts to the build. In order for the AI to be truly diverse, you'd have to include it to react to a huge number of skills, a huge number of builds, in addition to future added skills *and* professions which provide even more builds...You can understand why many would rather accommodate by just having to counter the stupid.

It would work in a game of smaller scale. But in Guild Wars, with its rather large parties, it could easily become way too bloated and way too complex.

But why people care about other's people way of playing guildwars especially when in pve it is not affecting their way of playing ?

Well, on the same logic, it should be totally okay for ANet to include a button on your skill bar that kills all enemies in the area. So to an extent, it does affect others.

Wait, so if there are bugs, the is no need to fix them. They don't affect you if you don't use them, right? Or overpowered skills (Seed of Life pre-nerf) that got nerfed. They didn't affect you (in pve ofc) unless you used them. So... why? Or Spirit Bond, not everyone had a /Mo so not everyone could use it. And they nerfed it. Why? Because back then they gave a rat's ass about balance.

Oh, so I suppose that ANet should have avoided fixing glitches such as the gate trick then. I mean, it doesn't affect "our" way of playing is it?

Infact, I think ANet should give all people like you a skill that gives you all titles, makes you deal as much damage as this: [[email protected] 52638523857758563256328] (Put the mouse over the skill), make it AoE in compass range and have 1 recharge, 0.000001 cast time and cost 1 energy. DON'T LIKE IT DON'T USE IT AMIRITE????!

Asp ; thing have gotten so much easier for your goal ; tomes & elite tomes .. almost every mission is runnable or you can be ran to it .

But it's nice to have someone beeing honest about things like this [ especially a high ranked player as you ] . I don't even believe all those ursans can finish fow ; uw ; doa etc without it anymore .. it has completly overtaken high - end PvE and Anet decided the way to counter this , was to make skills as powerfull as ursan , which is wrong ! xD

In my opinion ; Over-powered PvE skills should be usable in normal mode but should be banned in hard mode .

Which would lead to : hm -> better rewards because it's way harder
: nm -> same rewards as they are now ; to help / aid people with the same goal as Asppy .

The complaints of solo farmers who wanted to play the game a certain way made Anet change how they balance the skills of the game. So, we are now forced to care about how other people play the game because Anet wants to make sure the game adapts to EVERYONE's way of playing, and thats going to lead to alot of fail in the future.

You'd probably still get tons of people on this site defending it from 'elitists' saying it helps 'casual players'.

Ether renewal is fine, in PvP you're probably better with ele attunement anyways, seeing as how you have 24 seconds of downtime between castings (30 second recharge - 7 second duration + 1 second casting time)

As for people who keep complaining about how "rigged" Ursan is, there are really better builds out there. The sole reason Ursan is worth bringing is that it allows a PUG to quickly assemble and get started on the mission, farming, or w/e. For the people who want Ursan in PvP, and for those who disagree I have the same answer for both of you. I'm in full support of this idea, and look forward to absolutely annihilating you with a single energy burn.

because honestly, this doesnt help casual players. this helps mid level players the most. the casual gamer that logs in once or twice a week or so, and only puts in an hour here, 30 minutes there, isn't going to be benefited from this whole mess much. The medicore gamer, that doesn't wnt to constantly adjust their skillbars and doesn't probably have a lot of templates saved, or is just plain lazy and wants an easier way of doing things is who this whole seperation/overpoweredness was aimed towards.

The casual crowd isn't going to grind enough points to make Ursan useful, nor are they going to spend every night in Uw farming ectos at 10 a day....

But joe schmoe who has an hour or two to kill every night who is far enough along in the game to make use of all this, well this kind of bullshit is right up his alley...

Let's recap...

1) The game is released, late May 2005
2) First rounds of Skill Balances occur late August 2005, and late September 2005 (which included the Protective Bond Ether Renewal nerf)
3) With every round of buffs and nerfs, another handful of threads pop up including:
-Some PvE folks resentful of nerfs, and PvP folks trying to justify them
-Some PvP folks resentful of nerfs, because they liked their builds
-Some PvP folks unhappy with everything (from "you're not fixing the game right" to "leave things alone")
-Some PvE and PvP folks just calling for more buffs, because they aren't nerfs
-Some other folks who are pretty much content with any change Anet makes
4) Years pass, with dozens more skill balances, and the same cycle repeats. In the meantime, we get content additions, hard mode, tons of bug fixes, summing up to make GW a different game from when it was released.
5) PvE-only skills are introduced to reward title progression, and to help Anet's skill balances (eg: TNTF "forgives" nerfs to Song of Restoration, They're on Fire, and Incoming). Downsides include perturbed PvE players who don't like the reward for grind, and some believe that stronger skills remove challenge for the game.
6) Anet sets a precedence for balance in PvE by limited Soul Reaping, and nerfing a few PvE-only skills. Arguments grow from all sides.
7) Anet resolves to no longer "negatively impact" PvE play with PvP nerfs, so they split a handful of the skills to PvP and PvE versions.

Obviously, there is no possible way to make everyone happy.

In this specific case, I think that splitting Ether Prodigy wasn't necessary, that is, they could have buffed the skill for both PvP and PvE to something like:

10/1/30
For 5..20 seconds, every time you cast a spell, you gain 5..20 health and 1..2 energy for every enchantment on you (maximum 6 energy)

However, what is done is done, and reverting it is more work that could be invested elsewhere, including GW2. I guess I can use that argument, because it isn't the "don't like it, don't use it" argument.

What's important to acknowledge here is that, even if the most vocally hated skills were nerfed a bit, they would only be replaced, which really would not get the game closer to wherever you want the game to be. To help show this, I ask these questions:

-Can't I just as easily spam Heal Party with Ether Prodigy and the occasional Glyph of Lesser Energy, or use the PvE version of LoD?
-Why bond Vital Blessing on your party when you have a Grail of Might?
-What Elementalist-skill build could you not do with Dual Attunements instead?

I think Anet has learned plenty over the past 3 years, and while I think it's good for them to still learn with GW balance, I'd enjoy them to put that learning to test in GW2.

Sadly, Anet doesn't seem to realize this and tries to please everyone at once. As any lady of the night can tell you, this just doesn't work. If they were serious about balancing PvP, they should have bit the bullet and done it, consequences be damned. If they cared more about properly balancing PvE, they should have gone ahead and done it, not beat around the bush. Lastly, if they wanted to make a fragfest in which all the monsters fall over with little or no effort, they should have done it earlier so those of us who didn't want that could get out.

Sadly, Anet tried to do all three at once, and completely dropped the ball on all of them.

I'd disagree. I'd say Anet has done a pretty good job.

PvP is better than the opening days of Smites, Spirit Spam, and Air Spikes. Splitting PvE and PvP skills allows them to refine PvP more without upsetting the majority of PvE.

I know you're exaggerating, because if Anet had actually done those things you said, then a great deal less people would be happy with the game, overall.

It's a good game. The point I'm getting at is that Anet now knows how to have a thick skin. They know folks will be pissed off no matter what they do, or if they do nothing. It's good for them to try, and they succeed more often than they fail, from what I observe.

Soul Reaping was nerfed because of a PvP gimmick build tho.

finally a good argument to prove how wrong the fking dont like it dont use it is.

A build equally overpowered in PvE. People are still in love with N/Rt builds in PvE, even after SR took hits, which should show you how absurd the mechanic was.

i'm 99% positive that you are joking because this argument proves nothing and even if such skill exists it will not make "Don't like it ,dont use it" argument less valid.

yeah, but I think you & I both know it was nerfed because of PvP, even if it is a PvE build as well.

It was brought to attention from abuse in PvP, only because if it steamrolled through PvE, no one would really say anything about it other than its an awesome build. (see sabway that teaches people to exploit the still broken soul reaping mechanic)

This argument was invalidated some time ago. Search for the post, and realize how ridiculous and close minded it is to assume people talk about game balance from a character perspective.

How is it valid to begin with?

It's valid in gw like in every other situation when we have ability to choose doing something or not doing something without being forced and when our choice affects us alone.

I can choose wether or not to rob a bank too. But if I don't rob it, does that mean that the crime is not illegal?

This argument was invalidated some time ago. Search for the post, and realize how ridiculous and close minded it is to assume people talk about game balance from a character perspective.

Yeah, I just copypasted a post.