Skill changes?

It seems that they are making some effort to stop the overall spamming of putrid, but I'm actually looking forward to the return of enchantment stripping skills. It was almost laughable at best to bring them with nature's renewal around, but now teams will have to back it off a bit and maybe the necromancer can get some love. Actually, after thinking about that it's completely not true. Necromancers still suck compared to other primaries, but dangit, they have to realize that eventually.

I agree they need to look at the area of effect within fire specifically, but i dont disagree with the change with fireball when looking at the paralel in application with lightning orb. The fireball aoe is too small to really compare it against the armor penetration. Although, this change does make fireball more efficient than immolate now.

I am not sure about the meteor cost change though, the more limiting factor it has is the cool down time, which all fire spells largely suffer from.

With the others like searing heat and lava font, i wish they would have broke the damage over time model and done something more explosive with them. Even though searing heat has the added effect on completion, i think more of the lasting aoe style spells should have more of their "effect" or damage happen up front, then taper off over time. Say for instance, searing heat does 60 damage when initialized, then the next wave does 30, then 15 and eventually apply the on fire condition, perhaps also applying the on fire condition up front/re-apply with each wave and extending the duration to last after the spell finishes. This helps offset the player awarenes some and still gives a unique spell feeling, while not diminishing the balance between instant effect spells and damage over time efficiency. Other spells like flame burst, lava font, and inferno could stand to have their aoe bumped up slightly more, so that 1-2 character steps doesnt invalidate the positioning. It can be difficult at times to stick with a target as a warrior, never mind having to stop to cast and have after cast times.

The problem with sustained enchantments and normal enchantment removal, is that you never get down to those more important enchantments, wasting time going through cheap and spammable flak like orders, divine boon, guardian, and so on. This is while you are spending alot of energy on very expensive enchantment removal. Nerfing NR almost requires a nerf on the enchantments, unless they want to add or overbuff targeted enchantment removal. (See current version of NR for more details...)

So after reading this, I see that they will beat NR over the head repeatedly with the nerf stick, Rodney King-style. Doubling the cost for maintained enchants? Oh noes, it'll destroy the 105 monks in PVP! Gimme a break.

Let's see how fast it takes people to bring the heal ball back into fashion as the new FotM after the next patch...

Er, how does the old cost 15e, 2s cast time, 10s cool down be less expensive than the 15e, 2s cast time, 5s cool down lightning orb? I am a little confused at your meaning of cost there. Also with the very minimal aoe fireball does have, id say its rather negligable in most instances of intellegent pvp play. Sure you could get more mileage out of it against warrior heavy teams that are trying to gang up on a single target, but then you are using a fireball on a warrior. Even with frenzy up 1 fireball isnt that scary and even then it would be better to knock them all down with meteor and let their target move away. Phoenix is a little more scary to a frenzied warrior, but that also requires positioning and a 3s cast time, which feels like an eternity, except when compared to 5s cast times or restore life.

What i was concerned about is reducing the recharge time and cost of fireball stepping on the toes of immolate for efficiency. The parallel between fireball and lightning orb isnt as bad as it was now and might even be in fireball's favor now for damage over time versus cost. It doesnt change how the entire line works though.

When i read that line again, what it says to me is that they didnt want to spend time coding in a new mechanic for a simple damage spell. Front loaded damage is not the same as a burst followed by an after effect. In essence they have this philosiphy already for fire spells in the form of immolate, incindinary bonds, mind burn, and combination use with mark of rodgort.

"The primary difference between lightning and fire damage is that lightning is meant to be a very powerful single target damage line, while fire should be a very powerful multi-target line. We felt that Chain Lightning was a little too powerful in terms of multi-target damage, and we felt that some of the basic fire spells like Fireball and Meteor where a little too expensive for the damage they did. We reduced the damage and effect of Chain Lightning and lowered the costs on some of the fire spells to help bring these more into balance."

it seems to me they are trying to set it up where a fire ele is a viable pvp build. I don't see how they can do this by just boosting these two skills a little bit.

And the air build doesn't have a viable aoe skill besides chain, why nerf it? I have never heard anyone complaining about chain or air eles. It's always about spirits.

I am no pvp expert but I fail to see how this improves things. If I am wrong, someone please enlighten me

i just hope the buffs to enchant removal area adequate

Long story short, that 1 spell was a more effective (damage wise) aoe spell than the majority of the fire line combined. It was trimmed back to try and bring it inline with the themes of the elements. Combine it with things like thunderclap or glimmering mark and you turn it into something costly, but potent.

It always was. It just wasn't the most desirable compared to other things.

Errr, you can still drop NR, kill enchants/hexes, then oath shot and drop another one, who cares if it destroys the first one, it still does its job.

Unless you have the ability to read:

"Nature's Renewal: no longer removes all Hexes and Enchantments when cast; doubles the cost of maintained Enchantments"

that panic is a little scary... AoE energy degen of 2... +signet dmg

I think they are out there to kill enchant maintainer, NR 2x enchant cost, Panic AoE, Panic signet dmg (blessed signet).

I hope that was only a small list of their bigger version... I mean heck... what about mind freeze? lightning javelin?

what about the case with mind burn and mind shock? mind burn seem to be way better than mind shock in terms of single target?

I am just hoping...

Yea, wow. That sucks ass. I was coming back to edit the post after reading that :P Who woulda figured that they would change it so dramatically.

So perhaps they're angling to make energy denial a part of enchant removal...interesting.

Not bad, not bad. Let's hope this is just the start, because god knows, if Enchantment Removal doesn't get a little boost...Gentleman, start your Healing Balls.

Fire still needs a bit more loving, too. Searing Heat and Invocation of Rodgort need to be made to not suck.

Energy denial is not a sustained endevor typically though, while maintained enchantments are. Sustained enchantments can also be used in a spiderweb style setup, so that draining one character will cause a break in defense elsewhere, but can be covered by another character doubling up on the spells. It also doesnt adress energy engines that are sustainable. Panic only addresses one of those options.

I figure most of you skipped the preface for all the juicy stuff so this you might find quote interesting.

There should be a difference between adjusting/balancing skills and completely taking them out of the game. For example, spirits. The only useful ones now will be QZ and Frozen. Edge won't affect spirits, Fertile won't affect spirits. Why drop an EoE when it will be destroyed in 2 seconds? Won't have the HP boost from fertile, and you can't have more than 1 copy down at a time. Fertile's recharge time...bleh

What they could have done is limit the number of spirits a team can have, and let them be of any type. They also could have just reduced the "solid" radius of spirits so you can still attack them, but also easily walk through them. They could have made an exception for fertile and make it so that it doesn't affect spirits, but leave EoE the way it is. Personally, I think the last two changes would have been enough.
I guess they could have made NR elite. But if that article is true... it will be a terrific counter for...Mending?! Blah

Well, I was fairly excited after reading the changes. I'm hoping the change list is much larger, but the few changes they did list here are great.

Since they haven't rolled out the summer update yet, I think this initial NR change will lead to other enchant removal changes.. but won't be included in this weekend's. Obviously the faction increase is there to get quicker balance feedback (besides testing higher faction rewards as a permanent change), and I imagine more balance changes in the next couple/few weeks to counteract the loss of NR. That will lead to the final balance changes for the upcoming ladder season that's starting with sorrow's.

I think the necro enchant removal skills need a decrease in casting time, profane and lingering need to cost less, and the mesmer line needs one of it's enchant removal skills to be able to strip off more than 1 at a time.

I'd like to see something other than convert hexes for multiple hex removal as well.

The biggest thing I was looking forward to was the change to NR, and I'm glad they didn't hesitate to drastically change it. That keeps the faith for me.

That would be mistake, because the feedback of the players would be only half usefull. Without a buff for enchantment removal healing balls will be all over the place. arenanet will account for this and provide also some enchant removal buffs. They only published a sneak preview of what will come - by no means that will be all.

Fire is the best element in PvP, and all characters should wear Fire-resistant armor.

Oh, wait, you meant *Elementalist* fire, not Zealot's Fire.

All (dead serious) joking aside, Fire is one of the more viable elements in tombs/PvP, in large part because it actually has enough skills to make a build out of. Fireball and Meteor went from good to outstanding with this change, Meteor Shower still shines on dais maps, and skills like Immolate and Incendiary Bonds are decent skills to round out a build with. The problem is that fire doesn't really do anything special besides kick out damage, and lots of builds can kick out damage. Meteor Shower and Meteor just don't cut it. Honestly, Elementalist damage is pretty bad across the board, and it's almost universally overcosted. You're a lot better off using the Elementalist's energy capacity to do something efficient and worth the energy, like smiting or running a protection Monk.


Then you weren't paying attention. Chain Lightning spikes were FOTM for a while for a reason - it's because Chain Lightning is (was?) overpowered, at least for an Elementalist skill. Certainly it fell out of vogue, particularly in Tombs where air gank was neither effective against most hall holding (Fertile) builds nor had much potential to hold itself, but the skill was still well out of line and this nerf, while not *needed* in any real sense, was still called for given the power level that they've outlined for Elementalists.

Of course that doesn't address the real problems, that Chain Lightning was about where Elementalist damage had to be for them to be viable nukers in competitive PvP. Elementalist damage pales in comparison to what a Warrior or Ranger can dish out, so Elementalists either get run for good disruptive effects, for potential one-hit kill combos like your conventional Air spike, or to avoid the inevitible Warrior and Ranger hate that comes from those classes having the most dangerous offenses. To that end, I don't know that you can ever really make Air viable over the much more dangerous, disruptive, and flexible Ranger teams, and Fire is going to have issues until they start to add more knockdown effects to really maximize the line's AoE disruptive capabilites.

They've designed themselves into a corner, with Elementalists designed to be the supposed 'damage kings' of the game, with a ton of skills that do nothing but deal grossly inefficient damage, while Warriors, Rangers, and even Smiting Monks deal more damage at much more reasonable costs. They can't crank up Elementalist damage even more without creating gross instakill imbalances (like what Chain Lightning spikers did to unprepared teams), and bringing Warrior or Ranger down until Elementalists actually were competitive on damage alone would be a huge nerf. I'm not sure what they even can do at this point, but it'll be interesting to see how they handle this problem in the long run.

Peace,
-CxE

I do almost no PVP, and Chain Lightning in PVE is one of my more powerful spells.

This is just bullshit for non PVP people.

Zing! I'm somewhat surprised they didn't make the recast 2 seconds to match it with ROF.

Honestly, though, I think the best way to offset the savage NR nerf is to make spot removals cheaper and faster to even have a shadow of hope of competing with the kind of enchantment jettison people can pump out, or do a bit of balancing on both ends of the scale, making certain enchantments have a substantially long recast to reflect the recasts of enchant removal spells.

Some may argue that all this enchant stacking will make great bait for things like lingering curse or desecrate enchantments, but as long as the enchants are up, all of it is going to be nullified, one way or another. One last note about the enchant/hex/strip balance being turned on its head, smitehex under qz is a 7.5s recast, 1s cast, 7 energy spell. Compare that to some of the enchant removal spells out there.

Oh, not to mention they don't plan on doing anything about respeccing. Now that NR's out of the picture, imagine the kind of ludicrous hold builds you can create.

Part of the problem is that we are being forced to compare spells that bypass armor reduction against spells that do not. Also, we are forced to compare damage methods that cant be "buffed" from an outside source and the only self damage buff is rather minimal and situational, opposed to being all the time like the others are. The actual damage versus cost is about right until you figure in AL and other defenses. Then you have the refresh time issue, or exaustion issue, which forces the elementalist to only operate within spikes to deal damage efficiently. However, spike style casting is easier to counter through protection means. If the skills allowed to be used in rapid succession and repeated use at the same time i doubt there would be this discussion. Having fields of firestorm and meteor shower, maelstorm, or other similar style spells, being thrown out like a trapper ranger does traps and we wouldnt be having this conversation. It is a hard comparison, because ranger and warrior skills are faster to recycle, but in the instance of warrior skills requiring a warm up period instead of a cool down period. Probably the biggest weakness the ele has besides cool down periods, are the long cast time spells it is filled with. The effect it delivers is fine for the cost, but the time till delivery can be sketchy. It wouldnt be as much of a weakness, if monk spells werent all reactionary snap casts, regardless of strength. There is no ~3s uber healing spell. The closest thing is divine healing, but that is a self only spell essentially. Of course the healing spells as they are now, combined with divine favor are more than enough in most instances, especially when combined with protection and other defensive skills.

Except the reasonings for changing it had nothing to do with PvE or PvP but instead was changed for thematic concerns.

Even if it was a PvP change that effects PvE, that's just going to be something you have to live with in a game where skills are balanced for both aspects.

As an elementalist I have always been outraged that a monk is capable of dealing just as much damage with the smiting line. It's outrageous that one class has all the corpseless healing spells, the best damage spells, and most of the protection spells. I understand their desire to make monks more attractive to play in PvE, but it is coming at a large expense (soloing UW? I notice Prot Bond is NOT on the list of nerfs). People seem to think if smiting were removed there would be a lot fewer monks, well so what? How many primary mesmers do you see roaming around town? We're all accustomed to having 2-3 monks in our FoW parties because they make up for any mistakes or incompetencies in the party. Yet no other primary is considered so essential, noone complains when I'm the only nuker, noone complains when we only have one tank. I say slash the healing abilities in half across the board and give other chars the ability to heal themselves beyond one skill.

they didn't say they weren't nerfing prot bond... there are still other changes they are making that we don't know yet... so don't get ahead of yourself... also i don't think prot bond needs nerfing... for it to be trully effective you have to give up a bunch of other stuff

Hmm well I the change to NR is great, and will not make enchantment-relying monks that much happier. I think NR will still be used and many monks (me included, for sure!) will have serious energy management problems, even with spells like OoB, P&H.. We'll have to start relying on outside sources to bring us energy regen and maybe we'll see an increase in support Necro's for this. Blood Ritual anyone? Well of Power now that there [should] be less Putrids flying around?

ima really laugh my ass out when something like this comes up this saturday:

"Healing Ball has won a battle in the Hall of Heroes and keeps the favor of the gods for america"

I complain my ass of if we don't have two eles and atleast 1 mesmer for FoW runs....

These changes look as if they'll better the balance for PvP. I don't truly understand why Nature Renewal took such a drastic hit...it's not even the same skill anymore.

algren... that is a good thing... i actually think that this is the original intention of the devs... make it so that enchantment (the maintenance ones) stacking isn't viable or at least as easy...and somewhat make it harder for enchantment casting... this giving people a better chance of interrupting them

Of course, that is what NR should do (IMHO it should do a bit more, but I won't judge the changes before I have seen how they work out). But there are so many enchants that do not need to be maintained, therefore most monks won't be touched by NR...

Well, I think overall we'll see an increase in Mesmers. I hope they get their chance to shine for a while at least.

if you think the original intention of the devs for Nature Renewal was anything other than the way it used to be...you're a moron. The skill worked the way it was designed to work. Instead of the developers telling you to stop complaining and figure out a counter for it they nerfed the hell out of it and made it a different skill. It's not even close to the same skill it was before. It doesn't have any affect on me and I actually think it will cause more competition in tombs(which is a good thing)...but it's sad that the developers are gonna nerf every skill PvPers can't come up with a counter for.

wow... ok so your reply to a different view from someone else starts with an insult?

in reply to the rest of your post... i think that the devs introduced nature's renewal as a way for a non-caster team to fight a caster time. this means that they wanted to give players the opportunity to use a team that was largely composed of warriors and/or rangers that doesn't "need" enchantments and hexs and give them a way of fighting against the casters that use hexes and enchantments since there are no real skills in warrior and ranger that casts enchantments or remove them... so they made nature's renewal the original way... but i think they didn't consider the way people came to use it which was constant spamming thus actually neutralizing and pretty much making it unviable to use any long lasting enchantment and hexes... thus the "fix" which fits (in my believe, which i know you consider me a moron for it) the original desire of the devs which is to give a warrior/ranger team a way of fighting against casters

Just want to confirm that this is correct. You can all stop panicking now .

Mesmers shine already.

Personally, the most important thing on that spirits area was 'changing the effect and cost of.... qz'. arg, nerf! and i wont know what it is for like 5 days. im going to cry. hopefully its just going up to 10e or something.

Ill live with fertile and nr. fertile is just anti spike for me (i dont spirit spam) so how long do you need? and i think that nr is good. not great, it wont be used half as much, but i suppose its fallen into niche area now, like most spirits.

I couldnt care less about the changes to eles, perhaps ill see some fire spikers running around going lol but in about two weeks nothing will have really really changed. major overhaul needed for fire i feel. as ensign said above, you can get a coherent build out fire now but you wont me find it. you only get 8 slots, the only thing id use is shower, but ive been using that since i saw it on the realease of the first skill listings. and even then i dont use it much.

draw and boon are just not really very good mods. boo suck. its still smiting ftw for a while yet.

Putrid? again, ftw? im afraid except in suicide squads most deaths are more than 5 seconds apart, monks arent that incompetent are they? if it was 10s that might work. if it was 15s id say thats about sorted. 5s just isnt much different.


Panic!!!!!! 7 seconds and a decent radius. the damage was rubbish to start with, but if its keeping its 10s recharge thats really nice. not sure whether id actually use it though, apart from ending maintainables, qz debil is frankly the leader in the field. its now upgraded quite a lot though. up along with lingering curse, which i can now use again. life i good.

Spinal shivers still has the big energy loss, perhaps two guys, one with a cold wand and the other renewal energy upkeeping. or, tfcg :S not a great help.

Dwarven battle stance? still not good. shorten to 3-10, change to 20s recharge, and make it a skill not a stance (maybe dwarven battle rage or something). still cant frenzy and it still doesnt last very long.

I look forward to seeing the rest of the mods.

RUST 4 TEH WIN!!!!!!

agreed. I do believe that was the original intent of the developers. But I wouldn't be the least bit surprised at all if they "fixed" nature renewal just to get people to stop bitching. It wasn't overpowered....Oath Shot and the ability to spam spirits made it overpowered. But yes I do agree that the original intent of the developers was to give a non-enchant/hex based team a viable chance against enchantment stackers.

Nature's renewal was changed as a response to healing ball, it got way out of hand so it is getting changed again. Remember IGN cares little about accuracy or actually getting information (like the error with spirits in this article.) There are very likely changes that aren't included in that list. The unused list is likely a couple of examples because I know there are a lot more skill that are rarely if ever used. Dark fury is the perfect example of this, who has noticed the skill description for dark fury has an error in it? In one of the patches dark fury's skill description now says:

" Sacrifice up to 17% max health. For 5 seconds, the next time any nearby party member hits with an attack+C56784, that party member gains one hit of adrenaline."

It is obvious a hex number snuck in there (might not be the exact hex number, trying to recall it from memory) and was not intended, but this skill is so ignored no one realizes it. It used to be correct at one point too, I forget when though.

Having little faith in arena.net is understandable, but what is listed in the balance list looks fairly good this time. It is a bit thin, but at least addresses the major problems.

Algren Cole: didn't we agree that you'd keep your mouth shut about Nature's Renewal until you did some actual reading-up on it? A person suggesting Edge of Extinction is a good counter to Nature's Renewal's effects has absolutely no place calling someone else a moron, if you catch my drift.

Hmm. Hee are some ideas of mine that might fix it (somewhat)

What they could do is mod some spells so they deal increased damage upon hit, but have after effects that make spiking with similar spells less effective. Heres what I mean: Lightning Strike could deal 75 damage at 16, but would have a downside like "for the next 3 seconds, that enemy gains +30 AL vs lightning" Which would actually make sense b/c if you get shocked in real life, getting shocked again immedeately doesnt hurt as bad. On the other hand, if you wait a while in between, you will experince the full pain of both shocks. Also, if you get shocked, which would hurt more, getting shocked again, or getting burnt? They could make fire skills deal more damage but have the "on fire" condition give extra AL vs fire damage. Come to think of it, they could create similar conditions for each element instead of that iffy "for the next 3s deal. getting hit with strike would give you some condition called "electrified" or sumthin which would last 3s and give you the bonus AL. This owuld give eles back some of their title as damage kings and still make it difficult to spike. This might also cuase some interesting tactics like quad-element nuke teams, trying to take advantage of increased damage and ggetting around the same element penelty. Just an idea though.

Also, exhaustion needs to toned waaaayyy down. Either it needs to be fixed to only drain 5 max energy per ehaust, or far less skills should inflict it. Only the really huge stuff like metoer sotrm should exhaust.

Water needs to be fixed somehow. All the skills look the same. Some of them should inflict damage + complete freeze, not just slow. Some should slow attack rate, cast times, recharge rates, etc. There are many more things it could/should slow down than just movement rate.

Lastly, there needs to be some more cross element combos that people would actually take advantage of. Just about the only one right now is lightning touch + water hex for the oh so impressive +20 damage. I guess you could count enervating charge + stoning. But there needs to be lightning spells that deal TRIPLE damage if the target is doused by water (affected by a water hex) There needs to be Earth magma spells that get better if the target is on fire. If water gets fixed how I want, then freeze in place + meteor storm or the like would be a combo.

Thats how I would start to fix elementalists.