Nerf ER

This is what the infuse health thread really was about, but I assume its better to make a new thread.

This is not a thread for discussing whether it needs a nerf or not. If you want to talk about that, do it somewhere else but not here.

This thread is about how to nerf ER.


The problem with ER is that E/Mos use it to maintain prot bond (on the whole party if they are decently competent) and spam infuse without any downside whatsoever.

An ER nerf should target the above problem, while avoiding nerfing the skill in a way that makes it completely useless. This has to be done without targeting eles using the skill as general energy management or hero eles using ER, since they arent abusing the power of infuse, nor are they maintaining bonds.

Heres a few of my suggestions:


Whenever you cast a none elementalist spell, your energy is set to zero.

Then thingy is that the set to zero clause happens at spell activation and the usual energy gain from ER happens at spell completion. This would still let eles spam and maintain bond to a certain degree, but getting interrupted/KDed/whatever while casting a spell would kill your energy. Adding a "you lose all bonds" clause could also be done, if you really dont want them to maintain bonds (while spamming infuse).


Remove the health gain

Pretty simple; no more infusing. Bonds and protting would still work.


Only works with ele spells

By bringing burning speed, you could still do everything you could before, though now you cant chain cast infuse in the same way, nor can you prot none stop since youll have to spam a useless skill to gain energy. This would hurt heroes quite a bit though.

Whenever you cast a none elementalist spell, that spell is disabled for 5 seconds OR whenever you cast a none elementalist spell, all your skills are disabled for 3/4 seconds

This would severely limit spamming, both of prots and infuse. Bonding would still be possible, but the party starts to take damage, it will be very hard to spam your energy back up.



Personally, I would love a nerf that makes ER slightly weaker, but also more tricky to play. Mabye "whenever you cast a none elementalist spell, you are knocked down" ?. Come with your own suggestions. We dont need more dead skills, diversity is a big part of this game.

Does the same thing as the idea I had, but doesn't stop normal monks from infusing. Perfect.

/signed to each one

This, if anything. The other suggestions make me laugh and remember of a time when ER was never used.

/signed for the only works with Ele spells. The others don't fit in with the 'Ether Renewal' concept as much, and this is a perfectly good way to fix it.

All you have to do is allowing it to only work with ele skills. Setting your energy to zero if you cast another spell is crap. Then you couldn't cast any PVE-only skills.

I see no reason why someone would use ER if it only works with ele spells, mind to explain why it would still be useful?

Reduce health gain appers as the only non smiters booning option to me; it would reduce the power of an ER Ele to an nearly equal value compared to a monk.

Could combine the health gain thing with the ele skills one.
"Only gain health if the skill was an elemental skill"... something like that.

I don't like the elemental skill only idea, but I do agree that the skill needs a nerf.

I'd like to see some form of nerf which would make ER monks still a viable option in areas of the game, but at the same time I would like the build to be much more tricky to run.

Playing around with the duration of the enchantment wouldn't really work as there are skills and consumables that can be used to dramatically increase it,

Maybe they could stick a limit on the amount of HP and Energy recieved from casting? i.e cap it at 4, so the caster recieves the same amount of energy + HP from 4 enchantments on them as they would from 20.

Just an idea, not really played with the skill so this is the best I can come up with .

/signed only with ele skills

/signed

Your suggestions were overall pretty good.

Am I the only one who finds it funny that the thread is titled 'Nerf ER' - but then the OP posts this? Anyways...

Regarding the E/Mo health infuse spammer - I've tried this on my ele, and while it's an OK gimmick build I found it rather awkward to run. Personally, I'd take a good ole HB monk hands down over an E/Mo infuser anyday. Just my opinion, but I asked a very experienced guildy about this as well, and they immediately said they'd also take the HB monk over the ele health-infuser.

Concerning an E/Mo running party-wide prot bond, is this really a huge issue? It's not like Ether Renewal or Protective Bond can't be stripped - or the E/Mo is 'invincible' like Shadow Form assassins pretty much are. I guess I'd see a problem here if E/Mo prot-bonders were to start replacing monks on a mass scale throughout all aspects of the game. But I definitely don't see that happening. I guess I'd like to get the opinion of experienced monks on this issue, but I know when I run my monk for any ZMission I'm immediately taken by pugs, whereas my ele is not.

Overall, I'm not saying ER shouldn't be nerfed, I'm just saying I don't really see the same issues that the OP does.

Oh, and of course, if an ER adjustment does happen, then please don't swing that nerfbat until Shadow Form gets hit first

1. Like I said before, the heart of the problem isn't ER. It's not even PBond per se. It's the damage-capped-at-a-percentage mechanic itself. Anywhere, everywhere, in the history of the game that a build has been able to keep that effect maintained broadly, the result is to make the party nearly impossible to kill. We saw it in Prophecies with the original 55 monk; We saw in Factions with the original Ritlord; We see it now with ER eles; if ER gets nerfed too hard, we'll see it again with a new Ritlord build. Like any nerf that isn't targeted directly at the root of the problem, a nerf to ER is more likely to push people into a new problematic build than solve the problem.

And here's the second, and much worse, problem: It can't be fixed because you can't aim a nerf directly at the root of the problem. Izzy said long ago that the damage-capped-at-a-percentage mechanic is far too important for PvP to ever mess with PS. Now, after the skill split, that's not a concern, but, in the meantime, the devs went on designing such powercreeping PvE content that it became just as vital to PvE. At this point, you couldn't take away every way to broadly maintain the damage-capped-at-a-percentage effect without making a bunch of content unplayable. In that light, taking away one in particular doesn't strike me as a particularly worthwhile endeavor. A-net is darned if they do and darned if they don't. Personally, I think the status quo is the least bad state of affairs.

2. My comments here are relevant to this discussion, I think.

Yes, let's kill class combinations, because god forbid that we use skill synergy.

This is what has kept ER off the nerf radar for quite some time. People are still in love with bad monk bars (let alone monks) for whatever reason. Only this become the de facto pug healer in UW might move Anet to care.

what's the point of nerfing ER ? I know you wrote not to discuss this here, but that's just not possible

ER needs no nerf

seriously, ER infuse build may not be known by more than 1% of the community...

Even if you took away prot bond and prot spirit, an ele would still be able to outheal and outprot a monk, which doesn't make an ounce of sense. The problem is ER.

Really now. You might as well kill the skill completely. Being restricted to ele only skills (not even PvE skills) is loltastic. In fact, you might as well kill eles altogether.

The only general ele builds that are not subpar to other professions are those based on ER + secondary skills.
Of course, because of ER, monks no longer have any general role that isn't outclassed, which is also a bad thing.

What needs to happen is this:
1) Monking needs to be relegated back to monks - this likely means killing ER's current functionality and changing it to something else altogether.
2) Ele's need to be not useless outside of ER builds. I don't think there is a simple fix to this problem. Ele skills definitely need to be buffed, but not just be giving them bigger numbers. Giving ele skills a bunch of secondary effects and larger radius might do the trick. For example:

Sandstorm {E} 15e 2s 30r: For 5 seconds, target foes and foes in spirit range take 10...40 earth damage and are blinded for 3 seconds.

Quit your whining and just make an ele.

Just because something is efficient doesn't mean it should be nerfed.

What, you wanted ER nerfed and elementalists truly useless for PvE? It hasn't broken the game or anything and I rarely even see Infusers. Only once. Ever.
Besides that, many still even prefer a monk over an elementalist due to the reliability over LOL2SPAM

Nerfing skills just for the sake of nerfing is not very cool. If anything, Elementalists need a buff.
They're almost forgotten these days outside of builds that specifically need energy storage like DoASC

Why am I not surprised? People are getting so used to whining for skill nerfs and always getting what they want they now do it before the previous one even gets nerfed. ER healing is better than monk healing? GOOD! At least now they're good at something other than being a utility bot. You don't get this many people worked up about how the ele's original role got completely destroyed thanks to hard mode's super armor, anti burning and all of those crap. With the amount of pug failure lately thank god there's at least one character that I have confidence in being not horrible.

Since when is using another class's elite for energy to power your build "synergy"? The only reason that the build is E/Mo is because it requires access to Energy Storage. The Ele skills are support only. The devs have repeatedly stated that nothing should be able to outheal a monk, because the game is balanced around a monk's ability to keep things standing.

Exploiting ER or Soul Reaping to get around that breaks the game. There's a reason that the major H/H builds are N/x...

The basic issue with an Ele is that with the huge armor values the monsters have, it's more or less impossible to make an Ele's class skills useful in PvE without breaking PvP. Sure, you could rebalance now given the split, but that's a lot of direct damage to rebalance.

Perfect world solution: ER puts your non-Ele skills on recharge for X seconds, and Ele damage is rebalanced such that they are actually usable in a balanced team for the intended purpose. Back in 2005 before AoE scatter, they were useful for something. Now? Not so much.