Ether Renewal

Ether Renewal
Description: For 10 seconds, each time you cast a spell, you gain 1-4 energy for each enchantment on you. This is an elite skill.
Energy Cost: 10
Activation Time: 1 Second.
Recharge Time: 30 Seconds.


Is this beast being considered in the next wave of nerfs ? I'm not asking for details about the next incarnation or even if there is a new incarnation (NDA-protected). I'd like to know if the skill had been pointed out to A.Net and if alphas had received some kind of feedback about it.

I've been considering various elementalist builds for Feb BWE and I'd like to be sure I won't have to give in to the dark side and to use this energy engine.

I don't think it's that over powered.

It's dependent on having enchantments on you which aren't hard at all to remove. Anytime I see a target with an enchantment I rend them right away. Rending them makes this skill useless and it's elite so you're dropping quite a few other useful skills by bringing this.

I would say ether renewal is one of the only reasons to take an elementalist over a ranger or warrior as a damage dealer, at this point. I wouldn't even be looking at elementalists if ether renewal wasn't in its current state, but then that's just me.

Are you saying that this skill is balanced thanks to ONE necro counter skill ?

The necro opponent has a 10 second window to use R.E. If he uses it before E.R is activated, the elementalist just has to recast a couple of enchants (15s recharge). After that, the energy pool will be refilled in a few seconds.

Compare E.R to BiP. Renewal is simply twice better if you simply have 2 other enchants on you: 7 energy gained per flare and 5 flares in 10s = 35 energy gained as opposed to 16 energy for BiP. Moreover two enchants is pretty common (e.g: aura of restoration or armor of earth or a monk buff...).

You don't have to create a specific build around E.R. It is simply a better energy engine. It does not require timing like Inspiration spells. You just need a couple of buffs and a 10s spam of flares. Moreover your flares will do dmg, while you would have to sacrifice 100+ health to BiP your team mate.

Does that mean you believe all enchants are ok because you can remove them ?

I don't think it's anywhere near as bad as combining Read the Wind and an expertise level of 12 or higher on a ranger. I never run out of energy or skills.

Besides, Rend Enchantments isn't the only enchantment removal available. I think it can be powerful, but it can also be countered rather easily unlike other energy restores such as the one I just listed.

Ether Renewal is mediocre because it requires you to play an Elementalist, when you'd be much better off playing a different damage class. As Aladdar mentions, Expertise gives you crazy returns on your energy, letting you go infinite with a character who does much more damage than an Elementalist.

I'm not a huge fan of Read the Wind, though. The fact that it costs you an attack to use is brutal. For a quick burst of damage up front it's fine, but over time it doesn't do very much.

Peace,
-CxE

I've tried it both with and without read the wind, and the amount of damage I'm able to put out is much much higher than without it as the skills are ready almost twice as fast. Yes, it takes up an attack slot, but imo it effectively adds another attack slot as the time it takes for attacks to refresh is so much quicker. For Focus Fire it's perfect. If I needed to add some other types of attack I might consider dropping it for something else.

Sorry to sound a little obtuse but I still don't get it. E.R is ok because expertise has better returns ? E.R is mediocre because it's elementalist related ? Where is the link ?

You just can't compare a passive bonus and a skill. It's like saying skill XXX sucks because Strength gives more dmg return to a warrior. Are you dismissing all elementalist skills because you have a grudge against this profession ? Note that you can go ele primary without using damage spells.

I have the feeling that I need a babelfish.

Sure you can remove enchantments but many energy skills are enchantments or conditional spells (read: interrupts). Does that mean all energy management enchants are unplayable and one should consider only mesmer interrupts ?

I just haven't seen it be abused due to the things I've mentioned and when compared to other classes doesn't seem to out of whack with the current status quo. (That doesn't mean it's right.)

I'd be interested in having some people test it to see if it's really as strong as you think it is.

That's actually one of the skills I've been meaning to test out. In general, I'm not sure if its overly powerful, simply because it's so conditional. You have to have several enchantments on you to make it worthwhile, it has a 30 second recharge making it unspammable, can only be used to give yourself energy, etc. Even with enchantments, unless you have a spammable low-energy skill on your bar, it will not return much in the way of energy, as most elementalist spells cost 10-15 energy, and aren't spammable.

Compare this to Channeling:
Description: For 8-46 seconds, whenever you cast a spell, you steal 1 Energy from each nearby foe.
Energy Cost: 5
Casting Time: 1 second
Recharge Time: 15 seconds

With a few enemies nearby, you gain a slightly lesser amount of energy per spell as you would from Ether Renewal, but unlike ether renewal, which you can only have active for 1/3 of the time, Channelling can be maintained indefinately, and costs far less energy to use.

BiP is powerful, because you're able to give another character energy- your Necromancer can use BiP to increase the healing abilities of your healers, for example.

In any case, I'll see what I can find out about the effectiveness of Ether Renewal, and if it seems too powerful, I'll make sure that it comes to the attention of the developers.

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There are lots of problems with ether renewal unfortunately.

First, it's elite. That sucks big time.

Second, you have to play with enchantments. Long duration enchantments work best, because otherwise you spend more time managing your mana than doing stuff with it. This limits your selection pool down a lot. Attunements and Aura of Restoration are often chosen for these slots, but then you are using 3 slots, 2 of which aren't very good on their own (attunement and aura).

The next problem involves timing. It seemed that whenever I needed mana, that's when my enchantments dropped. I then had to spend the mana to put my enchantments back up, then cast ether renewal. In the case of Attunement+Aura+Ether renewal, that's 30 energy. If I want to make optimal use of renewal, I need at least 5 energy in the bank when I finish casting renewal, probably even 10. If I have to wait that long, I might as well just forget using ether renewal at all and stick with nuking things with that 35+ energy.

The last major issue is the duration. 10 seconds is terrible considering the cast time of most elementalist spells. With the aftercast calculated in, you can only get off 6 flares while under an ether renewal. Sure, that gains you a fair amount of energy, but you were casting a terrible spell like flare. After trying to make a renewal character work, I couldn't really find any spell or combination of spells that really made this work. An arcane healer may be able to dig something up, but I don't see it happening.

I don't know if you have used channeling, but the only time I can see it used (from playing with it for a bit) is if you are a tank Warrior/Mesmer and need energy. Still the best one is - IMO - Essence Bond.

Aftercasts killed Renewal, basically. You just can't spam enough to make it worth the setup. A straight nuke isn't going to get too much energy out of it at 5-6 casts during the duration - just using spam skills - and that of course means playing a nuker which has its own problem.

You can still do some weirdness with the spammable Monk skills - Reversal of Fortune is great because it has a .25 second cast time, for example - but that's a pretty specialized build. In an age when quick bursts of damage from stacked buffs domination, stuff like Renewal just doesn't matter much.

Peace,
-CxE

Ah, Ether Renewal. As you might or miight not be aware, I long ran an Elmo that was a derivation of what you're all probably familiar with as the Arcane Healer. Basically, that's a heal spammer with Ether Prodigy. However, once Ether Prodigy was rebalanced to be far less useful (probably a little *too* useless for my tastes right now. It's a double hit as you take exhaustion and damage, one or the other should go, the damage would be my choice.) I decided to hunt around for better energy management. Ether Renewal was an obvious choice.

In other words, you people are months behind the time here.

Anyhow, let's look at what you get from Ether Renewal. At its most limited - 0 ES, 0 other buffs - you'll still get 1 energy a cast for those 10 seconds. Ether Renewal counts itself (or did, last I used it) as an enchantment when counting the total enchantments you have. So, all you need to do is find a skill you can cast at least once every 3 seconds for that 1 energy and you've gotten yourself a bonus pip for 10 seconds. Granted, that's only +3 energy every 30 or so seconds, but that's the minimum benefit you'll get. At high levels of Energy Storage, that would be the equivalent of 4 pips or 4 energy every 3 seconds for +12 every 30 seconds. Now we're talking a goodly bonus. And you can cast more than 3 times in those 10 seconds, perhaps not 10 times, but 4 or 5 casts isn't unreasonable, so that's +16 or +20 energy every 30 seconds (or the equivalent of about 2 extra pips over that whole time, you're adding Warrior regeneration to whatever you're doing). Then, you can further increase your gain through having more than Renewal up. With just 3 enchantments, not outside reason, you'll gain 12 energy each and every cast. Cast 5 times and you'll gain +60 energy.

That's really how you use Ether Renewal, as a 10 second window to gain as much energy as possible within your maximum energy store. For characters who'll want to be casting anyway the trick is to make sure that you can get a large number of significant casts wedged into those 10 seconds. Then, you burn through as much energy as you can in the remaining 20 seconds until you can repeat it all over again. It can be doen and it can be exploited pretty well it's just a matter of setting up your build to take advantage of it. That might bother some but if people are going to run Me/Wa to play with Illusiory Weaponry, I don't see much of a problem packing a few enchantments and fast casting spells onto a character that's likely already going to be using some of those already.

My biggest problem with Renewal is that it takes up an elite slot, meaning I'm out on something else pretty powerful in it's own right. I'd rather have something less conditional for my energy management and grab another elite.

You're right, I went back and read the skill description and nowhere does it say skills charge faster. I could have sworn that my skills were charging faster. Maybe I really am losing my mind lately.

An Elmo is the one place where Ether Renewal really shines. You've got the widest selection of enchantments to choose from (useful ones too, unlike an EL/?), combined with the ability to cast more spells in a 10sec period than any other class. It's the only time I'd run ER, as with every other build I've tried with it, I feel as though I'm sacrificing slots for some sub-par enchants (or at least enchants that I wouldn't have taken without ER).

It's an enchantment itself, right? So Shatter Enchantment whenever it's cast is making it completely useless and such (or does Shatter just remove a random enchantment and not the most recent one cast?)? Surely in a 8v8 somone will be running Shatter or Rend?

Yes, but they have to hit you with it.

Firstly, I believe enchantments are removed LIFO or Last in, First Out, meaning the last enchantment you cast is sitting first in the queue to be removed. So, yes, Shatter will hit Renewal if that's the last enchantment you cast. But it only affects one enchantment so you can place a "buffer" enchantment up in short order to protect yourself. Rend is more problematic as it affects multiple enchantments so you can't use that trick. But it also has an abysmally long recharge timer while most enchantments aren't that bad so you can rebuff before you can be rent again. I'd have to check the public information, but I believe it's a long enough recharage that you could complete an entire Renewal sequence in the time it takes Rend Enchantments to recharge.

But, that's if you get those cast on you. You also have to factor in response time. Renewal and most buffs don't have long casting times so someone watching you might miss that ones been cst or not recognize it. That's assuming they're even watching you in the first place which might not always be the case, which they might not be. But even if they do see you cast and do recognize it will take them some amount of time before they can both recognize that removal needs to be cast and then to actually cast it. And, hey, you might have gotten lucky when they decided to remove an earlier enchantment and all their enchantment removal might be recharging.

Shatter hits the most recent enchantment, so usually it's going to run straight into chaff. Same problem all the single enchantment removal has, actually - long cooldowns + hitting chaff = terrible skill.

Rend Enchantments shuts down Ether Renewal hard, though. I haven't seen many teams running more than one or two copies, though, so I don't know how much you should worry about that - they need to save those to punch through defensive buffs on a focused target, after all.

Basically I wouldn't worry about enchantment removal right now - it just isn't good enough to think about. Run your enchantments, because in all likelihood your opponent will be doing the same thing.

Ether Renewal works best with Protection Monks - Guardian and Reversal of Fortune are decent anyway and go crazy with Renewal up. The skill has a lot of potential if the right spammable skills exist, but until that happens it's just too awkward to really take off despite the disgusting amount of raw power the skill has.

Peace,
-CxE

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Rend Enchantments is great until the time you don't pay attention and kill yourself rending. I did like 200 damage to myself the other night and I only had about 205 health left, so down I went.

As an elementalist, unless you're getting focused, you're unlikely to be hit with enchantment removal. Those spells are too important for removing healing/protection enchantments that people aren't going to waste it removing something like Ether Renewal.

On the other hand, after playing with Ether Renewal some, it's very difficult to get it to work effectively- the best situation that I ran across was a protection healer setup, running balthazar's spirit and aura of restoration, and generall casting something spammable such as guardian on myself after ether renewal and spamming guardian and Reversal of Fortune on people to fill my energy pool. It can be quite useful in this situation, but in the heat of battle, it's easy to not have the enchantments on yourself and/or the energy to cast renewal plus other spells. With a bit more experience with it, I could probably do better, but I didn't find it overpowered, considering it made me give up tasty elites such as shield of deflection or even shield of regeneration.

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Well, for channelling, I've had great luck with getting significant benefits from it. This is probably due to playing Monks most of the time, where if you don't have 2-3 warriors attacking you, it's suprising. 2-3 energy gain per orison of healing is pretty significant, letting you pretty much spam your spells as soon as they recharge without having to worry about energy.

Bear with me here since I haven't tried this but I started tinkering with the numbers in my head. Ele/Mo runs the following:

1. Kinetic Armor
2. Armor of Earth
3. Watchful Spirit
4. Ether Renewal
5. Divine Boom (Enchantment 5 cost. no recharge, thanks MasterDinadan for the idea)
6. Crystal Wave
7. Lightning Strike (or Flare)
8. Lightning Orb (or Flame Burst/Inferno)


So you walking around with a stock 80+ armor, 2 health regen and every 30 seconds for 10 seconds you have more health and energy than you can deal with (12 seconds with right staff). Follow up with some incredible damage spells. Against non-disenchanting foes, you should mop up.

Channeling actually works?

It never seems to do anything.

Ever.

At all.

As far as I can fathom, "range" seems to be right next to the enemy.