Echo, Arcane Echo

How are these possibly balanced?

I fail I comprehend.

Likewise with Chain Lightning.

You need to explain more before I can counter.

As the guy said, we need more explanation. As for chain lightning, it gives you Exhaustion.

Chain Lightning is the best AoE damage spell in the game. Really, it doesn't need that much of a nerf, but it's so much more powerful than any other AoE spell that it just looks horribly unbalanced.

I think Flame Burst is but yeah Chain Light isn't that bad. I more or less wanted to hear about his beef with Echo's

I've been using an echo build for a while. The difference between Echo and Arcane Echo is this: Arcane only copies spells, even more - any signet or attack skill cancels it. Echo copies everything. Nothing cancels it. Now on balance. IMO I feel like they should lower minimum duration of Arcane on 5 secs or something. 10 secs with 0 Illusion is like it could go unlinked as well. 26 secs(the max) is ... - who will wait 26 seconds for the next cast?!?!
Just my thoughts.

I thought meteor was the strongest. To be honest though I didn't test anything but earth and fire builds.

So yout gripe isn't exactly that it's overpowered. It's just that the timing mechanism really doesn't make any sense. I can agree with that.

You can use them both without having any points in the linked attribute. And they allow you to copy another spell. With a reasonable cast time you can copy a spell three times over. You can also use it to cast a spell with a long cast time in quick sucession.

Personaly I amused myself by tripple casting Arcane Thievery with Monk attributes, thieving off other monks in the arena. It was fun. Interesting to see what some monks use.

And Chaining Lightning... exhaustion isn't so bad as to make it not better than everything else.

Yeah, considering the casting cost, and the fairly short term effect, I've always considered them a bit weak. Useful in some builds, but in general not terribly useful. First you have to copy the skill, then use it, whereas if you replaced Arcane Echo with another skill, you'd be able to just use it from the get-go. If it were a choice of AE or no AE, then AE, obviously, but if it's a choice between AE or some other skill (and it is, given the limited slots on your skill bar), it's usually much better to just have some other skill, rather than an expensive and cumbersome to use copy of the first.

I've found Arcane Echo to be nice, but Echo to be basically worthless. There really aren't many non-elite skills that I'm willing to use my elite skill to get a copy of, so Echo really doesn't really make much sense to me. Arcane Echo on the other hand has some nice uses- I used it this weekend on an elementalist/mesmer in order to get a second copy of Ether Renewal, and I've seen people use it on other nice elite skills such as Water Trident or Word of Healing. In any case, spending 15 energy to get a second copy of one skill really isn't overpowered- it's very rare that you won't get better benefit just by taking a different skill instead.

Arcane Echo is balanced by the fact that it costs 15 energy to use, and most skills are not all that impressive once you tack 15 energy onto their cost. Even if you're getting 4-5 uses out of an Arcane Echo, that's still 3-4 more energy per cast, which is fairly pedestrian. When you consider that a slew of elites are just normal skills that cost 5 less energy or cast a second faster or something, it often ends up being not worth it.

Echo is an elite and can only duplicate a non-elite. Your elite is the most powerful skill on your bar - the situations under which you'd want to spend an elite for a copy of a non-elite are rather rare.

Chain Lightning is the best AoE nuke in the game - it's a 3 target, auto-hit Lightning Orb. It's due to be toned down a bit.

Peace,
-CxE