A Brief History of Nerfage (PvP)

Something occurred to me today. Examine the following FOTM/Strategies and how ArenaNet has responded to them:

FOTM:
Air Spike
ANET RESPONSE:
Chain Lightning: cast time increased, damage decreased

FOTM:
Spirit Spam
ANET RESPONSE:
All Spirits: decreased stacking
Nature's Renewal: Removed stripping of enchants/hexes

FOTM:
Iway
ANET RESPONSE:
Iway: Reduced IAS slightly
OoV: Eliminated stacking with other Necro enchants

FOTM:
Dual Smite
ANET RESPONSE:
Balthazar's Aura: Increased cast time, increased cooldown
Ether Renewal: Decreased duration
Zealot's Fire: Decreased damage
Divine Boon/Draw Conditions: added 1 sec cooldown

Strategy:
Gale/Crippling Shot spam
ANET RESPONSE:
Gale/Crippling Shot: slightly increased energy cost

Strategy:
Energy Denial
ANET RESPONSE:
Sig of Weariness: Decreased AoE
Energy Drain/Energy Tap: Reworked mechanics to make it fair


Results of the Nerfs:

First off - I'm not really going to address spirit spam, because I think that was less of a build/strategy and more of an exploit. ANET fixed the exploit and viola, spirit spam was gone. (Though I do want to mention that they did an awesome job on balancing Natures Renewal, which was grossly overpowered to begin with and is now a nicely balanced skill)

Take look at Air Spike, IWAY, Gale/Crippling Shot, and Energy denial. All of those were slightly overpowered, and ANET did a nice job of balancing them. The changes were fairly subtle, making the skills/builds still viable, but not great. IWAY still works (at least for noob fame farming), energy denial is very effective (though doesn't use drain/tap), Gale/Crippling works when needed but is not so spammable, and even Air Spike can work as a holding build.

Which leaves us with Dual Smite

ANET didnt slightly tweak Dual Smite, they crunched it under their boot. They beat it like a redheaded stepdhild. They ripped its pants off and whipped its a.... well, you get the idea. I mean, they completely destroyed the viability of all three skills. Ether Renewal: now useless. Balth Aura/Zealots's Fire: useless (not near enough damage to justify the investment).

It just strikes me as strange. They left all of the other FOTM's viable (though balanced). But they crushed Dual Smiting. I mean, what were they afraid of, that Ele's might actually be able to deal some damage?????

Wait, I better stop, I'm starting to sound like Ensign...

Which is a perfectly good argument for keeping your secret just that, a secret (whether its PvE, PvP or whatever). If you tell everyone about it, within a month itll be gone.

EDIT: but i suppose thats guaranteed in PvP, since you actually beat people with it, and theres observer mode.

I think zealot's and aura was nerfed to cut down on farming... but since aoe AI upgrade killed that anyway, they might as well bring the damage back up now.

And I always thought anet way overkilled Ether Renewal. It went from being the best energy engine in the game to complete crap.

IMO - Ether prodigy is more overpowered now than Ether Renewal was then. I mean, at least Ether Renewal required you to maintain 2-3 additional enchants to make it super effective, and that means half of your bar.

All Ether Prodigy does is preclude use of other 'exhaustion' spells, which is really no big deal...

People used maintained enchants with ER in PVP? Zealots Fire and Aura of Restoration with ER were enough to get endless energy.

No - not maintained enchants - what I meant was that you had to have those enchants on your bar and make sure they were up for ER to work.

You know. Smite was creative and good...therefore people were making their own builds and not using cookie cutter builds. Thats the only difference I really see.

You forgot the invincible All Wammo team FOTM.

What was really done to Ether Renewal? I keep hearing that it was nerfed beyond all reason, but I have no idea what it was like before.

Your opinion is wrong. There is absolutely no way that you could have ever played a good Ether Renewal build and still say that.


No it didn't. You needed to have one other enchantment on you *during Ether Renewal only* to make it good. You needed to have two on you to make it retarded. All three did was let you run with a lot less Energy Storage and still have more energy than you could ever spend.

There was no requirement that you maintain those enchantments yourself. I was perfectly happy running an E/Mo smiter with Zealot's Fire as my only maintained enchantment, while Tainted Flesh, flashing Aegis, and other incidental enchantments filled in the rest. Got 12-15 pips of energy regen out of that setup, actually.


That Ether Prodigy has only a third of the power of the old Ether Renewal aside, losing access to exhaustion skills is not trivial, and you lose access to other enchantments with significant durations as well. Plus that damage when it ends is not trivial at all, because it *will* get shattered on a spike.

The only skill in the history of the game more ridiculous than Ether Renewal was Nature's Renewal. Nothing else should even be mentioned in the same paragraph as those two. Not even the old Energy Drain.


It's duration was cut down by a third, and the energy it gave you per spell per enchantment was reduced from 5 to 3.

If you never got a chance to play with it, here's how it worked: when you cast Ether Renewal, for 12 seconds all of your spells are free, and you could not be killed. When Ether Renewal ended, you were at full energy. You then had to make due with a full clip of energy for 18 seconds before Ether Renewal recharged and you could do it again.

In practice this resulted in roughly 140 energy per minute (7 pips) of raw energy returned alone, plus a comparable amount (6-7 pips) of free spells cast during the Ether Renewal. In the case of the E/Mo smiter, you were doing all of this while dealing the best DPS in the game, in a moving AoE, even though very few of the spells you were casting dealt damage.

The change to Ether Renewal made it much more difficult to profit lots of energy out of - you need a much higher enchantment investment to do so - and you have less time to get the energy out. It is still a dangerously good skill. It's a little too fragile at the moment for competitive play, but the power is still there - a little nudge on the power scale might tip it over.


Peace,
-CxE

Smite was meant to be a weaker or support damage line. If elementalists are going to smite over their damage alternatives their is a real failure in game mechanics. Balths' aura and zealots fire got a needed nerf since they were the best aoe in game. Draw and boon were also needed, because if you want trigger mechanisms their should be a limit to spammable skills. Any strategy that involves casting the same skill more then once a second is really not in the spirit of guild wars.

Ether renewal is a skill that heavily supports these key mashing strategies. It will remain useless until they have another expensive spammable.

Running dual smiters was like parting the Red Sea. Soon as your 2 wars ran into battle you see the foes spread like flies running away. Even if you stripped the balth aura zealots would shread you apart.

Dual Smite added too much DPS for it to stay in its current form. In fact Smiting is still used in some degen pressure builds.

On renewal lets not forget that 120-150 hp heal per CAST. Oh and that 80 maintained enchantments thing that wasn't overpowered at all.

Well - truth be told - I monked through that entire era of Dual Smiting - so perhaps I am not appreciating how ridiculous it was.

But I do remeber that our smiters insisted on one additional enchant (besides ER and ZF) to be effective ... haha maybe that's why we never beat u guys

didnt readover replies, may have been said.
ether renewal: to my understanding this was a nerf to E/Mo's who kept up sickening amounts of maintained enchants.
the other monk skills: a nerf to farming, especially warrior and/or 55 monk farming.

EDIT: i was on break from GW while dual smite was fotm, i thought it was something like smite ball. so if i am kind of ignorant on ether renewal and dual smite involved e/mo's maitaining enchants... yeah =P

Dunno if it fits in your criteria, but you forgot R Spike. There was a time when you could fire all interrupts one after another, making the spike very easy to pull of and harder to stop. Though this was only used after savage shot got a buff so that it fired instantly instead of bow re-fire rate. As a trip in HA will tell you, its still the most popular spikes present (other than blood maybe).

During the Dual smite days, I was only a TA noob, but even then it was quite powerful. I dont think ench removal was popular in the metagame then, as IW mesmers were also very popular.
But I remember the threads here lol, just like iway, "ZOMG! Smite pwning mee" and then everyone replying "stop whining n00b"; "learn2play"; "if you cant beat 'em, join 'em ;o"

They didn't nerf Boon though. A 1s recast is meaningless because of the aftercast on every spell.

I laugh every time I see a 1s recharge on a spell...what are you doing with that, making me write a macro if I want to spam it?


Another thing about the E/Mo smiters that I didn't appreciate at the time (but can in retrospect) is just how much spamming Draw Conditions, Smite Hex, and all those other monk spells on a warrior helps. Not only were you doing a ton of damage, but you were also keeping your warrior clean and topped off so he could do a ton of damage as well.


You needed that third enchantment to be up for it to be ridiculous, you ran out of steam without it. I'm just saying it didn't have to be another long duration thing that you constantly kept up on yourself like the Aura of Restoration. If there were enough other enchantments in the build, and it wasn't too hard to make that happen, then that slot didn't have to be taken.

Personally I ran an Aegis on that slot, and just cast it before the Ether Renewal - it lasted long enough through the cycle that the energy would remain good even if another enchant didn't always show up. That was the thing. You were getting like 12 pips out of Renewal but you couldn't spend all of it, so it didn't matter if you hit a few bumps.

Peace,
-CxE

Wow - absolutely correct - I don't know how I forgot that one.

Ranger spike got a very subtle nerf, keeping it viable (even powerful) yet not ridiculous.

Good one.

I have to agree with the OP. They completely destroyed the dual smiter build. You could already own the smiters with diversion while they were spamming, or backfire while they were spamming, the problem was that there were extremely few competant mesmers (that I remember) from back then. I could see nerfing the skills to some extent, but when you completely obliterate a build I dont think its fair. But hey, whats done is done, and then you gotta find a new FOTM.

Wrong.

Diversion and Backfire was useless.It would be stripped as soon as it when on the E/mo, since Smite Hex is sitting on their bar.

Yeah, e-denial mesmers on the other hand would have been able to keep goiing.
Also, I really don't think the signet of weariness nerf broke it that much.

True about backfire, but half wrong on diversion. See, it may be true that they have Smite Hex, but when you use Diversion, it'll stay until it gets removed( by another player or by you), or until time runs out, but when it does get taken off by you, the last skill you used gets the extra delay.

Backfire, would still gives its damage, but it would only do it one time.(if you used Smite Hex to get rid of it)

Those of us familiar with dual smiting ran mesmers of our own, who had a single job most of the time - to sit on the other team's mesmers so that our smiters could work unhindered.

Peace,
-CxE

completly and utterly wrong about backfire there, If i was an e/mo renewal (which is still doable with a tainted necro, and an old school aegis chains) But on the old renewal, if i see anything other than diversion on me, i just cast through it. Backfire??? LOL i gain twice as much as i lose in 1 cast.

It's just a form of balancing.. get used to the "nerfs". A lot of them will be coming up within the release of Factions.

You left out Fragility/Virulence Mesmers. They nerfed Fragility to inflict 21 max damage per Condition on/off at L16 Illusion down from 34 damage. That's -26 per Condition inflicted, which resulted in a -20% gut in total damage possible from the combo.

Oh, and back then Diversion was a 2s cast with a 6s recharge. A FC Mesmer (for a 1.3-1.4 Diversion cast) with the right skill set and energy management could chain 6-8 Diversions on a target with ease... it DEFINITELY affected a targeted Smiter back in the day for those who used it.

I believe you are wrong, diversion adds a ton of recharge to the next skill cast, so unless the person is casting extremely slowly... And I remember owning smiters with backfire as well (when ether renewal was NOT on). 150 or so dmg per cast, and people wernt exactly fast on the uptake when i casted it on them...

If I had ER up, I just casted straight through backfire. The healing I got from ER was enough for me not to worry with backfire AT ALL.

yeah backfire really didnt do anything to a smiter
ether renewal gave u too much health
plus healing fro reversal of fortune

You obviously never used Ether Renewal back in the day. It was sick.

With a chain of diversions you could easily stop the e/mo entrirely by diversioning most of his skills or just stop him for a while with him not casting anything giving you time to kill the monks.

indeed, that was a pain in the ass - but that's why you supported your smiters...

We ran 2 warrios, 2 smiters, 3 monks and 1 special char to support our smiters - for example by using tainted or shutting down the enemy shutdowner.

You always need to support your strategy somehow... and to support smiters was pretty easy..