Request for more Aggressive Balancing

Well it's a partial solution to the problem. You'll still see lots of problems with it being abused and trashing enchantments and hexes. It's the entire logic behind NR that is outright ridiculous. Here you have 450+ skills in this game at least 250 of them being a hex or enchantment. Then you have NR which is affected by Expertise and only cost 5 that comes around the corner and just destroys it all. It's just ridiculous, why did they even bother coming up with all these neat skills if no one will use them because of NR ? People in this thread even went out of their way to create a build that can disable one NR caster. By the way guys what happens if they have more than one copy ? You know... cause you don't have to spec WS for NR to be any good. You're screwed basically.

Rebalancing the skill sadly require a nerf to it. I hate to ask for nerfs but it's just way too overpowered and completely destroys the game. Of course this will create an uproar in the community. Regradless what needs to be done is quite simple:
- Nerf NR: link it to WS so that it removes a linked amount of enchants/hexes. Link it to WS so that the increase in cast duration is reflected. Increase the cost from a ridiculous 5 to at least 10 if not 15. Before trashing this prospect, give it some thought and put yourself in a situation where you'd want to design a build with NR being 15 energy and WS linkedd. It would still be usefull just not totally overpowering and build/game destroyer.
- Buff the following skills: Rend Enchantments (decrease cost to 10 or decrease it's cooldown as well as health lost), Chillblains (decrease it's cost), Strip Enchantments (overall revamp)
- Buff hex removal without NR, hex stacking would just overpower every monk or caster class thus recreating another inbalance. Remove Hex is nice as it is, the big one is Convert. Under energy denial it's just impossible to even use. Even under normal circumstances, it's cost is just horrible. Making it 10 energy would certainly aid the situation.
- Maintain Melandrus' Resilience so people learn how good a skill it is if the ''Heal Ball of Doom'' makes another appearance.
- Nerf Fertile Season affecting other spirits: I know this sounds harsh but it makes spirit killing such bad thing for your offense. Here you are taking ressources from the offense to scrap off 250+ health to THEN be able to attack the actual ennemy. This is wrong in so many ways and again is counter intuitive to the way this game is designed.

As I said above, before commenting on these proposed balances actually give this thought. Pretend like you're redisigning your team's GvG or Tombs build under those conditions. You'll see it isn't quite so bad and would make using skills like Life Bond actually useful again.

*already has 4 builds made depending upon how NR gets nerfed*
My friends and I have em and have already started praticing with em so that we will be ready to beat all you people as soon as the nerf that we all(most all) know is going to come. Also already made 3 taking into account possible healing ball nerfs.

Now on topic. No one seems to like my idea for fixing spirits and you all won't even say that it's bad so please explain why you think its bad. (milidly sarcastic)

I would also prefer if there was less flaming and more proper discussion in the thread. My purpose here was to catch the devs' attention and having people flaming back and forth isn't quite a ringing endorsement for the thread.

There are more issues that I didn't include in the original post, like putrid explosion. This is because my main issue was the lack/slowness of balancing itself, rather than the problematic skills themselves, but I think that this one is big enough to go into some detail.

The problem with putrid is not strictly its effect, but rather that whichever team gets off the first one has a huge advantage, especially if they are able to chain them off. This causes necros to repeatedly mash the putrid explosion button (<3 linkie's stealth post), and I've heard of players that use turbo controllers to attempt putrids 20 times per second. You might have seen this before, just watch necros in tombs, standing in one place rocking back and forth. Eventually, which team gets the first putrid is going to boil down to luck rather than skill, and one putrid chain and your team is down.

Also, for the same reasons I explained above, I wasn't too concerned with what specific nerfs I would recommend. But since a lot of the discussion in this thread seems to have revolved around that, I'll give my suggestions

1) NR - Elite, removes 0-2 enchantments/hexes (0 enchantment at 0 survival, 1 at 4, 2 at 12)

2) Ether Renewal - remove per enchantment clause, then rebalance | Zealot's Fire - decrease duration to 30 seconds, add 2 second cooldowns to draw conditions/divine boon

3) Fertile Season - Not affect spirits | Oath Shot - no changes

4) Warrior Armor - remove +20 vs physical from gladiator's armor (I'd still use it)

5) Putrid Explosion - make it cost energy even if you don't hit a corpse. This will stop people from mashing on the button, and tactical use will prevail (hence skill over luck). This should fix the bigger problem, but it might still need a cooldown. I think this is a particularly important skill to fix because by itself it negates the use of pretty much every other corpse exploting skill, hence sacrificing diversity.

---

Back on the larger topic though, I can't agree with the approach of some people that think no balancing should ever take place. We have very good mechanisms to detect when a skill is overpowered, instead of just your or my opinion. Just analyze the environment, see how many people are running it, and if applicable compare that to strategies that in theory are weak against it. I would not be surprised if arenanet has logging mechanisms that monitor the use of skills inside ToPK and GvG. So if every team has a necro with putrid explosion and no other corpse exploiting skills, thats a good indicator. If 80% of teams are running nature's renewal and 95% of maintenance enchantments are benched, thats a good indicator. If most teams are bringing a E/Mo smiter, thats a good sign too. The goal should be diversity - all strategies should be counterable and thus not dominate the environment. The strategies I mentioned are the ones that I considered hard to effectively neuter, or that needed too specific a counter (again, breeding away from diversity).

Just to draw a comparison, look at Magic the Gathering, the game from which the skill system of this game is inspired. Albeit rarely, every now and then an overpowered card escapes their in-house testing and needs to be banned or restricted. Surely, it is a much harder choice for them to do that because it will forever make those cards worthless, which will undoubtedly upset the many people who may have bought it a considerably inflated price. Sometimes it just has to be done, because tourneys will be reduced to one deck using the overpowered card and another deck designed to beat it 55% of the time. Thankfully that is not the case in GW at all. Being a strictly eletronic medium, you can just make fine adjustments to the skill, like increasing cost etc, reducing duration, etc. The decision is much easier then.

Sarus: Sorry for being confusing. Yeah, that was pretty much the point I was trying to make, except clearer and more concise. Here, I'll try to restate myself more clearly. There are ultimately two problems with the current environment.

1. Nature's Renewal is symmetric, so countering a NR build essentially degenerates to making a NR build with the Oath Shot guy (if any) replaced with another character and NR slots replaced with other skills, but this has all the downsides of a mirror match (both sides are running more or less the same skills) but none of the upsides (pure mirror matches are pure skill contests, but these aren't). This is a consequence of a heavy reliance upon symmetric effects from the ranger ritual line. Consider T1 Magic for what is IMO the closest analogy – symmetric disruptive effects such as Smokestack or Balance are extremely powerful (and they need to be to be balanced, because they're symmetric), and as such there are very few of these effects, because by coincidence or intention, Magic devs made powerful symmetric cards significantly scarce that they could never dominate a metagame, whereas this is not the case with ranger rituals as they currently are in GW.
2. GW's general metagame as seen in random GvG and Tombs evolves relatively slowly, and generally sucks. Consider the current GW tournaments, which to my knowledge currently consist of the Alienpod Opener, the ESL 8v8 League, and the SoW Invitational. From what I've seen, the metagame here does not strongly resemble the GvG metagame seen in random rated matches. The great peloton of guilds constitute a significantly more "scrubby" environment. So many incidental guilds just happen to run whatever little crappy builds they have that are effective against the counters to NR that the anti-NR builds cannot currently grow popular enough to advance the meta-game. If NR is causing the GW metagame to be degenerate, I see it more as a sign that the GW metagame is inherently flawed, in that there are too many bad teams out there that still run otherwise good builds, except with the flaw that the builds are countered wholesale by NR. Honestly, though, with the tournament and league scene finally starting up in some capacity, who cares about Tombs or random GvG? Let people run what they feal like – Magic metagames are determined by Pro Tours, not by weekend casual gaming sessions.

Putrid is genuinely overpowered, though. The "counters" to it really just suck.

I Dont think the Duration is much of an Issue its eather on or off, And impact sure but at the moment Have not seen a need for it to be tweaked.

I Can see Adding a Cooldown on Devine boon, Its a Enchantment spell to boost healing powers that in MY opinion is being missused to trigger Zealots fire. Though I Feel that is not needed much eather.

The thing with Smiters that use this type of Setup is they are EASY to Disrupt because they are predictible. One skill can go along way to cut down there offensive abilitys that is Diversion. They Primary use two Low cast No Cooldown spells (Draw Conditions and Boon) Turning there No Cool down spells into 40sec Cooldowns.

Sense Diversion is a good skill to have along reguardless of your Opponent it does not have the side effective of Nerfing you against most other builds (Like the Spirit Spam teams do)

If I take this build and put in fertile season and NR, I have just made a build that can counter an amazing number of builds in the game. I think I might try that.

Damn, putting the broken skill and its counter on the same build, thats crafty.

I agree with Taion. One of the few ways to counter a NR build is to build ur build around NR as well. (i hope im simplifying it...). Making your build not use NR is hard and wastes way too many skill slots...

That's the problem. 1 skill shouldn't wreck 250 other ones. Interupts, for example, are counters to long cast time spells. They have a targetted use, a specific range of shutdown, but nothing more. NR not only pillages existing defences, but it also prevents them from being set back up in a decent amount of time. That double ability, with both of them being incredible, is farcical. Holy Veil, for example, is a completely useless skill. Why use it if NR does everything it does, applys it to the entire party, and gives you offence at the same time?

You can look at NR and see that it was designed to be self-balancing, in that using it would be so costly/limiting that you'd only whip it out in certain situations and thus it wouldn't see a lot of play most of the time. In practice, it seems to have turned out to be so overwhelming in PvP that this self-balancing isn't working, so ANet is going to have to come up with some modification to it.

It's a good rule of thumb that any time something becomes universal in PvP that you might have a balance problem (e.g., every warrior always uses sword instead of hammer or axe). Not always, but often. And any time you have a spell/skill that effect -every- opponent across a wide spectrum with -no- counter, you have to have -some- reason that it won't be universally applied in every situation or you're going to have problems.

The entire point, of course, is that were the metagame more efficient, you'd see both NR and FS often enough that you'd be better off running other skills in those slots. This would then allow builds made to counter such builds more powerful, and onward through the metagame cycle until we're back at NR-focused builds, simply because NR is the best-in-class skill.

I can tell. 5 energy? No attribute investment required? One skill slot? Hoses roughly one third of all the skills in the game? Yeah, that's incredibly costly, definitely something that I'd hesitate to use outside of extreme situations.

*sighs*

Not directed at you, mind you...just, if this is their idea of a self-balancing effect...

*sighs*

Peace,
-CxE

What about making rituals exempt from all 'recharge accelerators' such as QZ, Serpent's Quickness, Oath Shot, etc. That would help reduce the spammability of NR + FS unless an entire team was running it. And at that point the team would likely be putting a huge investment in rituals and have little to offer in the way of damage, energy denial, or interrupts. Of course, then enchantment/hex removal would likely have to be buffed also.

Also, this would preserve the 'oh crap we need to shatter lots of enchantments NOW' aspect of NR for stopping healing balls. Though I don't know if it would be enough. Maybe drop the cast times too with that change so that rituals can be deployed in a more timely manner when needed. That change may make it worth it to slot NR for use in certain situations but would reduce its ability to be spammed. It would also help the problem of level 1 spirits being viable, since a level 1 spirit with a 60s hard recharge time would only be up half of its recharge time. I think it would take a level 6 WS skill before its duration would match its recharge time.

Mmmm. I'm sure they've done nothing else in that time, like all of the stuff they've announced they are working on.

Obviously they failed, which you and I (among others) agree with. Considering the number of skill/spells and class combos, I'm surprised they haven't had more such 'failures'. Have some faith, I'm sure when they figure out how to change it appropriately that they'll do so. No need for excessive sighing.

I wont comment on balance issues, because they are a very complicated field. There is however, a dimenison to this thread that is not really represented:

[since there is a similar thread at TGH, some of my comments where posted there already]

Because of the current state of the game, there is no guarantee that INSERT CURRENT IMBALANCE ISSUE HERE is indeed that pressing. The Grind killed lots of potential competition, creativity - and changed the mindset from experimentation to "do the effective thing as fast as possible". People who had to do 5 fuse runs wont find better ways to do it after they find a good one. People who leveled 3 chars just want to get done with it quickly. The "Skip cutscene u n00b thing" is very telling. People who are stuck farming low level monsters after they run out on refund points dont get the message that experiments are good. Sure it does not affect iQ, or any of the good beta guilds, but it creates an atmosphere amongst the the "scrubs". Putrid owns. So do we
1. find ways around it?
2. be done with thinking and just use it?

People just dont want to explore after they found a really good peak. Who will tell wether there are things everyone of you missed? The first peak in GW retail where wa/mo. Everyone cried nerf (everyone who had no clue). The second peak where e spikers. Now more people called nerf. Then came the spirits.
I agree that it is entirely possible that skills are "overpowered" in the sense that effect >>> cost >>> cost of counter.

However, "nerfing" may have a price:
After release, "the fixes" and THE FIX (aka faction), and with all those balancing issues at hand: do you honestly trust ANET? They may nerf NR, and then just get the taste. The metagame would pick up speed very fast, because now its - like in almost every other MMORPG - dev driven. What do they nerf / buff next month? Thats even less competitive then the game you are playing now.

There is no guarantee that balancing is not a linear process like people claim it was in Starcraft. Maybe it turns into an neverending circle of buff / nerf.

Note that im not really against anything, nor do i support it. But i would really like to read the opinions on the MMORPG metagame vs arcade metagame (no patches, thats why Sirlins articles are so interesting to read in the days of MMORPGS)

While i respect Ensigns opinion on everything concerning game balance, a iQ tag wont make you omniscient. And giving the metagame to the same people who brought us the grind ...?

Nice suggestions.


Someone else also suggested making Nature's Renewal affect enchantments/hexes when it has run full-term (so you can kill it first to avoid that effect), rather than when it is created.

If I understand the general gist of the original poster, this is the essential problem:

Arena Net seems unwilling to make large scale changes for PvP balance.

Some of my disparate thoughts to that charge (since all of the details are merely that):

• This has been true so far.
  
• It's only been a few months, and during that time I don't really feel that the metagame has stagnated for very long. In particular, I at least recall complaints of "wide warrior walls wreck the world." and "eight air elementalist excise us elitely!", before the current metagame.
  
• There's still tons of "rogue" builds being used.
  
• It's entirely reasonable for Arena to mostly make small changes, and only occasionally make big changes. In particular, they really need to wait for the metagame to stagnate for quite a while before making big changes because "the metagame is broken". A "while", in my mind, is up to a month or two of almost the exact same build being used by everyone (depending on when you start counting; even ultimately dominating trends take a while to catch on).
  
• I wouldn't even want them to make -frequent- large changes; I'd prefer they wait a bit, and do them at larger intervals so players know when things are really getting shaken up.
  

That's my initial thoughts. In short, I think large scale changes are and will continue to be necessary as time goes by, but they don't need to and shouldn't happen often.

Guild Wars is still relatively young.


I'm frankly confused by this. Do you mean that warriors armor shouldn't just be better than Mesmer armor, or are you referring to the different types of Warrior armor? Do you mean just high level armors, or that it's bad that there are different levels throughout PvE (seems unlikely)?

Just confused.

He was talking about how there's no reason to be using anything other than gladiator's armor along with knight's boots, and ofcourse stonefists if you happen to be using a hammer, and your +1 helm.

Gladiator armor is balanced by looks only.

[Your thoughts on the metagame seem to go in the same direction then mine do. But there are a couple good arguments, especially the last one by blackace, that the current state removes options that dont really need to be removed. the question is wether there are other, hidden factors that will force this game down to "broken build vs broken build counter" no matter what.]

I think this forum would be much more amusing if it kept the little snippets for deleted posts, so you can have amusing runs of everything being deleted, as you might see in the sister thread on another GW fansite.

Honestly, though, I think the entire alpha process needs to be assessed if we still have these current imbalances. The devs can't possibly be unaware of the gross imbalances currently present, so why don't they do anything? It's been months – surely more than enough time to tweak enough numbers to create a new, more balanced environment, and even if it hasn't, a halfway fix would be better than none. Clearly, systemic changes to a number of skills need to go in, and I think the majority of the community would be happy enough just to see progress toward changes, even if it takes multiple update cycles to finally arrive at a properly balanced result.

Strictly speaking, powerful symmetric effects such as NR do not create a degenerate metagame for reasons I described above (much less so than powerful normal effects such as Putrid, anyway), but the real problem with NR really is that it's just no fun, in the same manner that even now, Fertile Season and a heavily defensive build can create matches that are boring stalemates. I honestly see that effect as a more severe flaw to NR than its actual power level. Again, there's minimal real harm in a skill being pervasive if it doesn't cause a degenerate metagame (and symmetric skills really can't do that, because if one dominates, there must exist some level of tweaking a build for the mirror such that the tweaked anti-mirror build loses to other builds) – to use an analogy I brought up earlier, every deck in T1 Magic that can do so runs Force of Will and to a great extent this defines the flow of play in T1, but this is hardly taken as a sign of imbalance. The only substantial difference between FoW and NR is that NR is seen to make the environment less fun. It's in the nature of powerful symmetric effects that they pretty much do have to be powerful enough to define a game so they can be at the same powerful level as normal effects, but it seems like their presence in the form of nature rituals as they currently are is an intentional consequence of design, not an accidental imbalance.

Taion, all posts that are removed are 'soft deleted' insomuch as they are viewable by the admins and mods. None of them are hard deleted. But trust me when I say that NOTHING is deleted that pertains or is germaine to the conversation. Most of what goes away is spam or flame bait.

Another possiblity might be to have it so that it removes 1 enchantment/hex every X seconds until the spirit dies or is killed off.

146 skills become nearly or completely useless when NR hits the floor - clearly something is wrong.

Seriously...1 skill makes 146 skills unusable...globally.

As for Ethereal Renewal: If anyone says that it isn't overpowered, then they haven't seen the sheer power of 15 pips of energy regeneration, or considerably more if you want to really get it going.

There are actually top 10 guilds out there that run NR and significant numbers of hexes. Yes, NR is probably overpowered, but it helps nobody to overstate the case against it.

Using NR as a whole punch is viable, not using it until necessary. The point: Now every new team build coming up is doing so under the umbrella of 1 skill - that is not an overstatement, but the truth.

Putrid is an interesting case. iQ started running Putrid Explosion back in the healing ball days as a way to fight Well of the Profane, as it's a fast, no cooldown solution to corpses. Just hit Putrid as soon as something dies, and the corpse will explode before it even hits the ground - no need to worry about Wells or anything else potentially dangerous.

Putrid also has the interesting side effect of randomly winning dais maps singlehandedly, as well as savagely owning any team that happens to bunch up.

How do you fight Putrid? Well, one solution is to stick a Mesmer on their Necromancer and keep him under a Diversion lock at all times - energy denial doesn't do anything as Soul Reaping powers Putrid Explosion singlehandedly. That'll shut down the game winning chains. Blackout can effectively neutralize Putrid as well. So you can stick a Mesmer on a Putrid Necro, if you think that's a worthwhile investment of a character slot.

The other solution is to exploit the corpses before the other Necro can, so that their Putrids find no targets. The only skill in the game that's faster than Putrid Explosion at exploiting corpses is Necrotic Traversal, by a whole 1/4 of a second per cast. Now if you don't want to run that, your best option for cleaning up corpses is...Putrid Explosion.

As dedicating a character slot, your Mesmer, simply to shutting down a Necromancer, who's most dangerous duty only matters once people start dying, is simply unreasonable much of the time, is it really surprising that the most popular solution to Putrid Explosion is 'mash on the button faster than them'? Just like Nature's Renewal, you start thinking of ways to counter the skill and you end up running it yourself. Though Putrid is a more ridiculous example as it's simply one skill slot, and the 'skill' involved is mashing buttons.


I'm getting tired of people saying that 'spirits' are dominant. Nature's Renewal is dominant. Fertile Season is a mess on dais maps. The rest of the line varies in power but is otherwise 'fair'.

It's really easy to miss what the real problem is when there's so much else going on. Just look at "Air Gank" - the vast majority of teams thought, and still think, that Air Gank was just spammed air skills, and that this was unfair. It isn't. The unfair bit was coordinated Chain Lightning + enchantment removal. That's it. Every air spike team that didn't do that fundamentally didn't understand the build.


As a whole? No. They have some brilliant people, and some deadweight, just like every other company. For testing? They have some brilliant people, and a lot of dead if not counterproductive voices.

When it comes to skill balancing, though, I trust that Izzy knows what he's doing. He has made some baffling moves in the past (buffing Ether Renewal and Energy Drain, for starters), but in general I get the feeling that he knows what's broken with the game's balance and how he wants to fix it, but that he simply has his hands tied by corporate policy.

Do I trust that if balance changes were to be made, they would be a net change in the right direction? Definitely. Do I trust Arena.net to create a sane game balance policy? Well, look at their track record and tell me.


Slippery slope fallacy.


Perhaps you should ask yourself why an iQ tag carries weight to begin with.


Peace,
-CxE

Only really broken or strong in conjuction with monk skills and enchantments. I think that is more of a reflection of monk enchantments and spells. Trying to work around it within the elementalist realm doesnt place that skill higher than glyph of energy for conservation and energy recharge. It is more efficient with the more pathetic, yet spamable skills like flare and ice spear. Necromancer enchantments and spells dont really add to its efficiency and there are other options within the mesmer realm. Warrior skills dont add anything to the situation and ranger skills would allow the skills to refresh more often, having the uptime versus downtime change for the renewal mostly.

While I have problems with the power of Nature's Renewal and definitely feel it needs examining, some of the hyberbole on here should be scaled back. Nature's Renewal does not completely hose ALL enchantments and hexes (yes, it does remove them all, but it does not hose all strategies involving all hexes and all enchantments). Many (if not most) enchantments and most hexes have a very short duration to work with anyway. Many enchantments and hexes can still be used to good effect even if the opposing team is using NR, and can easily be used if your own team is using NR.

Posting this idea to balance NR for the third time as no one has commented on it

I think NR should be made so that it strips the enchants/hexes at the end of its life not the beginning. And the strip only happens if NR's time runs out not if it is killed by the other team. This would make it a minimum of 30 seconds before the stripping happens and give the other team a chance to stop the strip from happening. Also leave NR as a non-elite if this happens. Allow it to be spammed with oathshot but so long as the other team kills the spirit no stripping occurs. Also this should be combined with Fertil Season being made so that it only buffs spirits by 50% of it's stated effect (If it says +400 health a spirit only gains 200 health).

The hyberbole is fully justified. Will you use up 15en to draw a couple of enchantments, knowing that another NR is likely to be dropped any second?
And all the talk of making NR an elite to solve the problem is nonsense. I can use NR as easily with QZ-SQ as I do with Oath Shot.

I nowadays even hate playing with my ranger, because its gotten so mechanical and boring with NR-Oath Shot. Wheres the thrill of dynamically adapting to your oponent's play. I created my R/Me three months back to be a good ol' anti-caster/healer, not be a bot spamming NR all over the place.

You would have to run spirit duration backwards (higher attribute = shorter duration) because otherwise you would be rewarded for having no points in wilderness survival It would probably take a bunch more code to make it set off by the timer runs out since everything else in this game gets set off by removal (killed in this case).

edit: Except your team will hate you for using QZ all the time.

Well the timer actually wouldn't be that hard (from my experiance with C++ JAVA and HTML) I think.

As for having to run the attribute basing backwards you wouldn't really half to because if a person is willing to trade off all of the skills linked to WS to use this with the shortest cast time than fine by me. The ranger becomes weaker to compensate for the full enchant strip every 30 seconds that he can lay (or faster as Oath Shot would still be allowed so you could get it to like a strip every 10-15 seconds with only 1 person).

This also adds more skill to the game because you have to plan ahead to make this skill work (Like know that the enchant stripping is coming in say 45 seconds and then have someone prepared to drop Frozen Soil so that it starts right as NR ends. Then have the rest of the team all gank 1 target. Now redrop NR after you reapply the enchants that you had your monk(s) start casting right as NR ended so that the enchant satarts and you have all of yours until the next strip and your team can still keep Frozen Soil active and you repaet the whole sequence). You also have to figure out how to weigh the enchant strip vs. the other uses of your WS skills. This would still leave lots of room to play VERY potent builds with NR with an organized team but it ends it as a FoTM build (Hell I alredy have 2 planned if this was implamented).

I know I am probolyl going to get my butt chewed by spammers or trolls but in the hopes of being helpful say what I am going to say.

As you all know way back in the beta the skill that was the butt of every joke when its name was mentioned. I think that this skill if brought back (was removed and if you played in the beta your probolly know what skill im going to say) that it might actually help with this problem. This skill is "Unnatural Signet" sure it would need to be tweeked to fit in the spirit system but if they did reintroduce it maybe just maybe it would balance out the issues going around with NR, FS, what ever spirit spaming is going on.

For those you that never seen or heard of the skill before ill give a description of what it was (please note this was way before the whole spirit system when rituals were global and as I said it would need some major fine tuning but it could be a possible solution).

Remove the most recent nature ritual. All of your skills are disabled for 60-36 seconds.
Casting cost: 0
Casting time: 15 sec
Recharge time: 75 sec
Relevant attribute: Illusion Magic

Some suggestions if this skill was introduced would be to end the nearest Spirit, a much faster recharge time, lower the skills disabled to maybe 10-5 seconds, and drasitcially lower the casting time.

These are just some ideas for this particular skill in helping solving the delema that seems to be going on. Also pardon any spelling mistakes you may find as I am a very bad typist ^_^.

-=MachineKing=-

^^
Wouldn't solve NR as it's most potent threat is as soon as it's dropped.

Not if I was in all ranger team. I do know when to use QZ and when not to

Never suggest a way to nerf something is to slap an elite tag on it. Seriously that's just a half-assed bandaid that does nothing good for the game.

If a skill should be buffed or nerfed it should be done via effect, cost, cast time, or recharge, not by putting in something which really shouldn't exist in the first place.

Sometimes, the elite tag is justified because of its interactions with other elites. In this case, Oath Shot weighs in considerably but ceases to be a factor if Nature's Renewal became elite. This is how the elite mechanic should be implemented, rather than to just create more powerful versions of basic skills.

Even if NR could not be used with Oath shot people still would spam it all over the place and the gameplay would be horribly stagnated anyway. Oath Shot only makes it spammable every 15 seconds with zephyr which is really only useful in breaking up ZF smiters or countering a lucky interrupt through a stance etc. The mere threat that renewal will be there every match in tombs pretty much screws any plans for a maintained enchant/hex heavy build from the start.

You are right that the elite skill system should be used to break up bad combinations but even still it's not a real fix unless a skill is only broken because it can be used in conjunction with another elite.

NR certainly isn't in that category, neither is fertile (the problem there is affecting other spirits). ZF/ER *could* be I guess; ZF hardly seems overpowered to me but ER is absurdly good and is already elite. Imo the only two big balance issues that need to be solved asap is NR (the double hex/enchant cast time is enough of a bonus and should be left at that; rend/strip/lingering/chillbains/shatter E need a big buff though) and Fertile affecting other spirits. Putrid being so good is mainly because of HoH being a stupid KotH and generally being very crowded in the middle of the altar; outside of that it's really subpar. I wouldn't mind waiting another few weeks for the bad skills like wither to be buffed and stuff like ether renewal to be nerfed but they really can't ignore fertile/nr without screwing up pvp further.

I wasn't around when it was put in and have no idea why it is here in the first place; it seems like a lazy man's fix to balance; slap an elite tag and you're good to go rather than actually looking at the skill closely and making adjustments to cost/recharge/effects. Looking at how many elite skills are subpar/plain bad, it seems that attitude was a big reason in implementing the elite system which I find rather sad .

Making NR elite wouldn't fully solve the Oath Shot+NR problem. What you'd see is R/Mes with Arcane Mimicry and either Oath or NR. More energy intensive and slower, sure. but it's doable. The elite tag is not a good option.

NR is fundamentally flawed. Perhaps increasing the "doubles cast times on hexes and enchants" and dropping the enchantment nuking would make a difference, but that's a massive nerf. However, tripling or quadrupling cast times on hexes/enchants could be highly disruptive to a team's timing.

Hm. What about changing NR from the enchantment nuker to something that doubles the cost of enchantment maintenance? Leave the double cast time.

In regards to Putrid ...
I don't really think the skill is unbalanced. After all, it's usefulness is restricted to basically tombs and only in certain narrow situations. Normally, the exploding bodies don't really do too much. The exception here is of course dais maps and the occasional unlucky teams that happen to get stuck in a putrid chain.

That being said the two problems I see with putrid and any other of the super fast corpse exploitation skills is that they basically nullify the use of any wells as the wells casting times make them basically impossible to ever use. In all honesty maybe this isn't a problem and I can't think of a fix that wouldn't totally nerf putrid.

The other problem I see is that when playing a character with putrid it becomes a button slamming mash fest. It doesn't matter if you think someone is actually dead or even if you think they're about to die. You just run around slamming on that hotkey in the hopes you'll beat out the enemy necro who is doing the exact same thing. I really like zraves suggestion that you make failed uses of putrid (i.e., no corpse to exploit) still cost energy. This would limit the amount of button smashing. I think this would be similar to how things like inspired hex work. It still costs energy even if there is no hex to remove but the skill does not get used up.

I'd like to inject a little humor into the post by posting a very exclusive short video.

This is a short video of none other than Charles Ensign himself playing a necro with putrid in a typical iQ tombs run. (It's very short so even slow internet connections should have no problem).

http://www.mekamedia.com/misc/putrid.gif


*In Tribute to Linkie