Problems with Enchantment Removal

Much as I loathe posting things from another site elsewhere, I'm going to do it here because this is an important issue and one I think needs addressing. So, here goes :

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Well, the issue was largely ignored last time around but it's *finally* been broached again here. It's something I'm pretty interested in, myself, but let's face it enchantment removal, at present, is atrocious. Long cooldowns, single enchantment targeters, even the heavy cost of things like Rend before the change, all add up to enchantments being very hard to take off and keep off a target.

To me, this is highly degenerative, as the reasoning to take enchantment removal is poor. Suboptimal, as Chuckles would say. You're using enchantment removal as disruption, as a way of stalling the enchanter momentarily or in spot duty for that miraculous save. It's far better to avoid the situations where the current enchantment removal comes into play and you've got a better chane of doing that with your own, better, enchantments.

In short, enchantments and enchantment removals are part of an extended RPS (There are other, better answers to the dilemma of enchantment, such as stopping someone from casting in the first place, or denying them energy, it's just that enchantment removal is, short of death, the only way to deal with enchantments once up, but we'll simplify the model a bit here so that I can actually keep it all inside my skull), move and counter-move. For a counter to be useful, generally speaking, the idea is to make it more narrow and more efficient than what it's countering. There are lots of ways of doing something, such as damage, and to do it well you're likely devoting a lot of your skill bar to it, but to couter it, using, say, healing to counter damage, you're not going to be needed as many slots nor are you going to be spending as much en per effect - heals resotre a lot more hp over time and per en than damage can take it away, they're more efficient (It's just that not everyone carries around enough healing to erase all damage, to do so would be o limit your options for actually winning rather than just surviving so it's not done, but a team of 8 dedicated healers should, in theory, be able to outheal any damage they suffer). The counter is more powerful, objectively, than the move, yet it's kept in balance by the fact that it's narrow, that you can't always use it or using it always is goign to be too costly. So, a counter is stronger but more situational.

But, that's if things are well designed, if there's a healthy game going on. If things aren't well-designed, you get problems. If, for example, damage could outrace or even equal healing, there's effectively no point to healing. The target will eventually die, no matter how much it's healed or you've reached stalemate. The counter, then, is useless. You're better off without it, because it's not doing you any good. If I can heal for 20 damage and you can hit for 20 damage, the ansewr isn't to keep healing, it's to find a way to deal 21 damage. To beat you to the punch and to make my move stronger than you can make your move. You want healing to outrace damage and to outrace it significantly so that people have both reason and incentive to use healing. And incentive is important, you want people to understand that it *is* a counter, that the strategy it counters has a weakness adn will not have a prayer of getting past the coutner, all things being equal, so that they need to find either a way of overwhelming it or of otherwise getting past it.

My point, then, is that enchantment removal is, as a counter, inefficient and ineffective. It's not doing what it needs to or what you'd want it to do as a counter.

The question is what do you do to fix it? And failing the devs fixing it, what do you do to abuse the current paradigm?

Right now enchantment removal is difficult enough that enchantments are everywhere - Rend Enchantments is the only solid solution that isn't overly conditional (Well of the Profane) or symmetric (Nature's Renewal). Thus Rend Enchantments is even more important than you might assume at first, as not only has the amount of removal gone down but the number of targets have gone up.

I've beaten this to death elsewhere - basically, you lower the recycles on single-target enchantment removal into the 10-15 second range so that they're competitive with standard enchantments, and until then you go out of your way to have multiple copies of Rend Enchantments in your builds. You need real choices about how to deal with problem enchantments, not 'run multiple Rends or lose'.

Peace,
-CxE

Of course, you could always take Energizing Winds and Lingering Curse, as I said here. Barring that, I agree entirely with lowering the time on most enchantment removal to 10 seconds, with perhaps Rend at 20 or 30.