Fixed Ether Renewal

also, the 55 hp build is really good in PvE, and also in some PvP fights, but when someone uses health degen... u are dead. I guess Ether renewal is one of best skills in PvP?

just wondering why it has no exhaustion? Look at ether prodigy, you can see very rarely someone uses that skill... although renewal is still better even if prodigy wouldn't have exhaustion imho.

Thank goodness we arent there yet.

I think you are dismissing the possiblities prior to serious consideration.

for example

Glyph of Energy {Elite} - Glyph
Your next spell costs 20 less Energy to cast and does not cause exhaustion.

causes no exaustion and with a cooldown of 15 seconds, this is almost spammable.

I said before that that numbers were off the cuff, so, for an instance, consider 15% faster recovery from exaustion. Better? Let's face it, the exact numbers are not up to us here, we are looking for a solution to Ether Renewal that leans towards the benefit of Elementalists and not Smiters.

Whatever, it really does not matter to me, but I think all this dependance on enchatments is out of the Elementalist line altogether. Give skills that affect enchantments to the Monks. Like Dwaynas Kiss.

NO NO NO exhaustion for ether renewal pls. Lets downgrade ether renewal but not Nerf it! Exhaustion is the goddamn most annoying thing in the world. The only thing that can remove it is time and it is goddamn slow as hell.
Going back to what someone said before that ether renewal gives much much much mroe energy regen than other energy mangement elites and skills its also much weaker in the sense that it relies on enchantments. As said above most ele/mo smiters have around 4 enchants on their skill bar. Aura is really a waste but all it does is feed ether renewal. Those spaces could be used to do other things. Also making it restore 40-60% of energy and 20 for each other enchantments is like an invitation to use all of the ele's big spells without consequence except for exhaustion. Elemental attunement does that already. If they changed it to that then elemental attunement would need a boost as well and then ether prodigy which needs it even more.

The only advantage I in using another ele elite for energy managment is using glyph of energy to negate exhastion.

Balthazars aura is a nuke comparable to metoer show and it doesn't cause exhastion... If it did I'd bet you'd see alot less smite builds using ether renewal.

The problem with useing rend and diversion is that you need a necro AND a memser or 1 necro/mesmer for each smiter. You need ONE per smiter. That's alot of spaces on ur team to counter one stratagy. Rend takes twice as long to recharge as balths. That's enough time for the ele to get it's enchantments back up and balth again.
What's the rest of my team doing? Trying to keep me alive or on one of the other 2 smiters in the team.
It's beatable and as I sated before we do beat them one on one but the tombs we don't have a cahnce. Just one big smite at the end. Our only option is to pray that the other two smite teams will see each other as a threat and kill each other rather then us.

Zelots is fine. It does fire damage that takes armour into account. With the right elemental prtection/armour even spamming draw and reversal it doesn't add up. If it wasn't for the fact that ether renewal gave sso much HP backfire would be the perfect counter.

Don't try to use logic, the "My warrior/monk and Fire ele Flare/MoR build doesn't dominate the Tombs" crowd has spoken: OFF WITH THE HEAD OF ER DESPITE THE FACT IT ISNT NEAR UNBEATABLE AND IT DOESNT WARP THE ENVIRONMENT!

Well this is a little off-topic, but as for ER it doesn't seem too hard to overcome. I was trying to think earlier of a skill that rangers always seemed to use against my Elementalist in the arenas, and I just now remembered it was Concussion Shot. I read up on that skill and it seems to me like it would be pretty easy to counter the spam with that, or even with a knockdown skill or anything to keep them from casting.
Just because a lot of people use ER (I assume; I don't PvP often), doesn't mean that it needs to be nerfed and it doesn't seem to me at all like it's overtly powerful.

Too bad both balths AND ether renewal have 1 secocnd cast times. We drop natures renewal to take this to 2 and favorable wind to raise the chances of the arrow getting to it's target in time. Concussion shot also cast 25 energy base BTW. Even with expertise the cost is still quite high. Skull crack is another way of casuing concussion but without flurry takes a good seccond to relase (Which means unless you make an acurate guess and start the animation BEFORE enther renewal or a long cast spell is cast you'll most likely miss and wast 10 Adrenalin)

Also concusion is a condition that can be draw/removed.
We also use punsihing shot and distracting shot on our rangers. One aslo uses choking gas.

While this rasies our chances (And belive me we're VERY anti-smite based) we still have a hell of alot of trouble beating smites.

I probably mentioned it before but here are the anti-smite skills we bring.

LEach signet
Power Drain
Drain enchantment
Rend enchantments
Diversion
Chocking gas
Distracting shot
Punishing Shot
Chiblains
Barbed Trap
Savage Slash
Distracting blow
Hamstring
Storm Chaser
Ward Agains Elements
Ward Agains Melee
Favorable Winds
Energy Drain
Dev Hammer
Heavy Blow
Fear Me.

That's what I can remeber off the top of my head.
Can anybody recomend anythign we've negelcted?
Oh we've tried desecrate enchantments. it's nowhere near enough dmage and ether rewal fixes the dmg VERY quickly.
Well of profain is too slow and conditional.
Backfire and Soul leach don't do enough damge to counter the HP regen from ether renewal.

I think the main problem is that ER is so much better than any similar comparable spell. Maybe if they made Ether Prodigy non-elite?

If ER is not "overpowered" and should be left alone, then definitely many of the other energy management skills are "underpowered" and should be buffed.

Just bring a mesmer and strip enchantments and drain energy, problem solved. Maybe you guys should work on countering the stuff out there instead of always yelling NERF.

'Maybe you should actualy try your counters before preaching them here.

I was being sarcastic about all the people who call for nerfs instead of playing with skill. Yes zealots is fine, quite obvious. I was taking the op to a somewhat satyrical and warped sence of retardom, hence my remark of zealots needing to be nerfed(Joke btw kk).

How is it obvious that Zealot's Fire is fine? It outclasses all bar probably 2 skills in the entire fire line damage wise, and everything if you take usability into consideration. It'll put out more damage than anything an ele has to offer, and is harder to shut down.

Just for a quick comparison with a baseline fire spell like Firestorm. For equivalent energy (though less time), Zealots can be triggered 3 times for 111 damage. That's equivalent damage to standing in a firestorm for 5 seconds. Of course, the most hits you'll get out of firestorm is 2, possibly 3 against a bad player, which shows you just how much better the skill is than running an proper elementalist. The fact that it's mobile puts it head and shoulders above almost every othe AoE nuke, and the damage just tips it over the edge.

Yes? It was broken as soon as it was reborn in its latest incarnation. People said so at the time, they ran smite builds 6-7 months ago that were overpowered. The fact that it was never really FotM until now doesn't mean it hasn't been broken all along, it just means that people haven't had it shoved down their throats and hence haven't whined about it.

If you don't think it needs a nerf, coming here and making rather empty sarcastic comments doesn't really help your point, it just makes you look like a troll. Outline some cases and show us all how Ether Renewal is in line with other energy management elites. I'd be quite interested to see.

There are no comparisons because Ether Renewal outclasses every other energy management skill out there. People were playing smite builds effectively during the height of Nature's Renewal use, it didn't stop them at all, only slowed them down. With the NR nerf, smite just took off into the stratosphere.

Ok, I'm going to be an ass and reply despite that fact that you specifically asked me not to Moltov Nothing specifically directed against you, it's just the fact that so many people of late have been weighing into skill balance discussions with little more than "wtf nub, learn to freakin counter", when counters are such a tiny part of what goes into balancing, and it really gets on my nerves. Anything is counterable, and smite in it's current incarnation is very counterable. Any good team will be able to cope with smite just as well as with any other strategy thrown at them, but that's no indication at all of wether the skills are balanced or not. You need to objectively look at the skills that are being used, the numbers they're throwing up, or the influence they're having over gameply, then look skills that fall into a similar category and see how they stack up.

You look at the numbers that ether renewal is throwing in terms of energy regen, and compare it to similar skills (Offering of Blood, Ether Prodigy etc), and you can see that it blows them out of the water. Now you can look at comparitive counterability at this stage, what effects it has on builds that use it etc. Obviously not everyone will run it, because it does put restrictions on your build, so you take that into consideration. Ether renewal is slightly more vulnerable to mass enchant remove than most other energy management elites, but it also has no drawbacks whatsoever. No exhaustion, on health sacrifice, not dependant on enemy energy levels etc etc. Where is the reason to let this skill have 5-6x the possible energy regen of comparitive skills? There is none, so other skills get thrown in the trash and the game becomes that much more bland.

Same with Zealots. Nothing in the fire line can compete. If you want AoE fire damage, then you go smiting. There is nothing in fire that you can't do with smiting, apart from the AoE knockdown that Meteor * gives, but you can get that from other, better lines if you need it (i'm sure many people will argue that, but I've been playing a long time and have never seen a PvP fire build that can keep up with smiting for damage in the real world). The result is you end up with a dead line of skills, and you get an excessively homogenised playing environment, which I'm sure no one wants.

@OP, although the suggestions are good IxChel, I really think it's unrealistic to expect such a big change in the skill mechanics. I'd be happy with a more conservative change, probably something as simple as a cap on the number of enchants

For 10 seconds, each time you cast a spell, you gain 1..3 Energy and 5..17 Health for each Enchantment (max 1..3) on you

from 0..15. I think that should bring it back into line under most circumstances. It's still got the problem that it's better on a monk than an ele, but at this stage I think you'll just have to accept that.

Lol soz I didn't pick up on that. Really hard to tell on these forums On the Hydromancer remark yes, it's an awsome counter to zelots fire. And it also stacks with ward against elements.
On the learn a counter thread as Pharalon stated, even if it can still be counteered it doesn't change the fact that it is an overpowered skill compared to the other energy regen options. (Excpet for Glyph of energy which negates exhastion... To bad balths doesn't cause exhastion .)

Good job highjacking an interesting thread. This thread is NOT a place to discuss if Ether Renewal is balanced or not. It's NOT a place to use the (stupid) argument "balanced because there is a counter" either.

The topic of this thread is to discuss a better Ether Renewal, that is to say, something that would be closer to similar energy engines.

If you can't refrain from posting off-topic arguments, I'll have to keep things tidy. If you want to tell how balanced ether renewal is, or if you want to dazzle us with your awesome anti-ether/smiter builds, feel free to use one of the zillion threads in another forum. The Sardelac Sanitarium is for suggestions. If you can't make a constructive suggestion, please post elsewhere.

This fix is not a fix, it's a completely different skill.

It's too similar to Attunement skill.

The problem with the [original] skill, is that is abused by smiters who enchant everything.

If you were to cap out the energy return, rather than make it a percentage return, then it would be better, in my opinion.

If you don't mind, I'll post an example of what I'd like to see:

For 10 seconds, each time you cast a spell, you gain 1-4 energy and 5-17 health for each enchantment on you. Max 3 enchantments

So, if you have your Energy Storage Attributes maxed out, you could at best gain 12 energy for 10 seconds.

Yes, you could potentially get back 120 Energy, IF you cast a spell once per second, and IF only you have have made energy storage one of your primary attribute slots. The skill would still have use at lower levels, and by of use also if you have fewer points in the ES attributes.

By limiting enchantments, smiters will not be able to maintain so many enchantments as easily. And the skill would only be useful if enchant strippers aren't there. As one stripped enchantment would lower max return of ER from 120 to 80 and then to 40, in 10 seconds.

edit: As health is negligable at the moment, since most are concerned about energy return, I'll mention anyways, that max health would be 51 HP per spell with 3 enchantments.

Agreed, the maximum on enchantments is a better way to keep the flavour of the spell than turning it into an attunement for everything. It should never be able to generate 120 energy though.

The fact is that every other elite energy regen method gives about 3-4 pips overall. To be comparable with other elites you would need to max it at one (1) enchantment - that way, maxed out, just like other elite energy tools, it would generate ~40 energy in 10 seconds, and be capable of being cast twice in a minute for a total of 80 energy a minute, or about 4 pips. On top of that, it should probably lose its health bonus, but we don't need to steal everything from it. If limited to one enchanment it would be a little better than other mehthods, but at a reasonable level.

Anything more than this puts it at twice or more the power of elites like energy drain, offering of blood, ether prodigy, elemental attunement, mantra of recall, peace and harmony (hah!) etc...

Marksman's wager can still generate a ton of energy, but is so conditional that it doesn't tend to. After all, you could conceivably use tiger's fury, a fast bow, distracting shot and dual shot to get about 12 arrows off during the 12 seconds, and if you could guarantee all hits you could generate 9 energy per arrow, for 108 or so energy, every 12 seconds. The only issues are that you have a very low max energy anyway, and can't take advantage of the energy while generating it really as you lose out on energy generation while doing this, and the cost of using TF, 2 dual shots and 2 distracting shots simply to generate energy. Plus you could miss, losing energy, etc.... I doubt it'll ever be an energy engine. You could conceivably fire a bow with a nice flight time delay, switch to your foci and gain the energy up to the focus maximum by switching while the arrows were in flight... but this is getting silly - I don't think it needs to be adjusted as it is ludicrously dificult to milk it.

So 4 pips as a goal for a maxed out elite seems about right; gaining health while using it seems absurd, as none of the others have that poweful an effect - offering of blood causes you to lose health; Elemental attunement only helps elementalist spells, Glyph of Energy only helps with spells that have high costs, energy drain requires targetting an opponent with a lot of energy left, Mantra of Recall occupies your stance slot and so on.

This still generates 3*4*10 = 120 energy over 30 seconds, for 4 en per second -- about 4x what Energy Drain does.

For 10 seconds, each time you cast a spell, you gain 1 energy and 5 health for each enchantment on you. Max 1-5 enchantments

But even this still favors a bunch of small fast-casting spells (like Smiter's protection spells) rather than the core elementalist spells. Perhaps...

For the next 1-5 spells cast in the next 30 seconds, you gain 2 energy and 10 health for each enchantment on you. Max 1-5 enchantments

This would generate 5*2*5 = 50 -10 = 40 energy or 1.3 en/sec. That's much more in-line with other energy recovery mechanisms. The health recovery in this way is at most 50hp, so its not ungodly.

With more enchantments, it is harder, for the skills that strip one enchantment at a time, to remove, so with smaller amounts of enchantments, it's easier to disrupt the spell.

The idea was more in line with the orginal skill, rather than recreating it.

Also, Energy Drain has the added bonus of taking the energy from your enemy rather than conjuring it out of thin air. So, you are depriving your foe of energy while replenishing your own, rather than just replenishing.

Though, the latter redefinition, that has it going for 30 seconds, makes it very vulnerable to spells that can disrupt it, considering it's an Elite. But it would remove the smiting exploit and balance it out. But it would then hurt the Elementalist, since Elementalists tend not to have 5 enchantments on themselves, and usually don't pair up with a monk that would give him/her another 3 enchantments.

The skill needs to be able to work fine without an Elemental being with another monk or having a monk as secondary [for the enchantments]. I play with Aura of Restoration and an elemental attunement skill active, usually, but those are timed enchantments, so I have to watch when I cast Ether Renewal.

So an Elemental with 2 enchantments, which I will assume, is pretty standard, you would get 2*2*2 = 8 energy and 40 health out of an elite spell, which is not worth the skill slot.

The assumption being made is that an Elementalist will automatically have 5 enchantments on him/her, which isn't as common, especially in PvE.

I am in favor of Epinephrine's suggestion of limiting it to one enchantment, so,

For 10 seconds, if you have an enchantment on you, each time you cast a spell, you gain 1-4 energy and 5-17 health.

That way, it still has use if you don't have as many points alloted in Energy Storage.

I think a 60 second recharge time, similar to many ele enchants, would make ether renewal much more balanced.

To be fair, Energy Drain is one of the many energy regen methods out there, and while it has the energy denial as a plus (and a big one) it also depends on your target having energy in order to function. When used in energy denial I never nab full energy - sometimes I barely break even with these spells - for that reason I often prefer Drain Enchantment or Power Drain as they create their own energy and leave your elite slot free, if you really are trying to get energy - I mean, sure, they are both condition based as well, but I'll bet that the mesmer/necro out there will try a 2 second or 3 second spell, and there's always an enchanment around to drain - which is also a useful effect.

As has been mentioned, all the elites are comparable at 3-4 pips anyway, including the effect of elemental attunement, which lasts 45 seconds out of a minute - if you spend 80 energy in those 45 seconds it's the equivalent of spending 160, and you have essentially gotten 4 pips out of it. You could go higher and get more equivalent pips out of it, but a) it doesn't replenish energy, merely makes spells cheaper, b) it's limited to elementalist spells only, and c) to get 8 pips out of it you'd need to have 100 energy at the start of it and burn through all your energy, including the energy you gain in those 45 seconds, so it's feasible to label it as ~4 pips under most circumstances.

I assume that you didn't mean to leave the "for each enchantment on you" on that statement, right? I think that if it is reduced to that level it would be fair, and as a benefit it could be made into a stance like the Mantras, making it much tougher to counter - you would need to remove all encahantments to stop it, as it would only matter if you had one enchantment up, and stance cancelling is much less common than enchanment removal. If you were rended quickly you could still pop an enchantment back up (or a monk could) and you could still generate your energy, though you'd have lost a few seconds.

Simplest fix... only allow characters to carry Elites from their primary profession.

<EDIT BY FROG: Removed reply to off topic post>

How does this fix the given abuse? I mean el/mo is using the elite from
their primary profession, elementalist. The problem with ER is that it
triggers "for-each-spell" and the /mo spamming protection spells allow
about 2x as many spells as one would be able to cast from any other
skill line (they are .25 cast instead of 1s). Even with a 1s cast (plus .75
after cast), ER is still damn powerful.

Ah, good point... it should only work for the elementalist spells.

Apologies. Typed faster than the speed of thought.

Here's another idea that just popped into my head that still keeps the theme of the skill:

(Attribute scale: 1...15)

Cost: 5
Cast time: 2
Recharge: 30

Elite Spell. For each enchantment on you, you gain 3...10 energy and 10...30 health.


So if you have three enchantments on you (an average number) it's about on par with Energy Drain - it gives around the same amount of energy per second and gives health on top of it, but Energy Drain steals from the enemy so you lose that advantage. Adding more enchantments in a solo build will hurt your build and/or make you extremely vulnerable to Rend Enchantments or Lingering Curse. I added a second to its cast time to give plenty of a chance to counter the "have a teammate stack a dozen enchantments on the Elementalist" tactic (while still allowing it to succeed with a good team, as good teamwork should be rewarded)

Thoughts?

How about this, instead of giving health per cast, take away health per cast, give it a "mana burn" effect. You want more mana? Fine, your healths gonna drop a little though. That seems like a reasonable trade-off to me.

just an idea: how about increase the cast time (3+ seconds, perhaps?) without changing its effects?

this way, people can still run the same builds, but if an opposing team recognizes it, they can effectively do something against it...

Yup, this is what I suggested. Cap the number of enchantments and the whole scaling problem goes away.

This is still better than prodigy, so we need to rework that as well. How about lengthening the duration to 30 seconds and removing the exhaustion?

I'd suggest either:

a) Cap the number of enchantments! Simplest solution, IMHO. And it doesn't necessarily have to be a fixed cap... make it something like "Maximum 1-4 enchantments" or something, just to prevent abuse. IMHO this would be the ideal solution, since it wouldn't nerf the living crap out of every Ele out there to the point of making everyone forget the skill ever existed.

b) Make it so that only Elementalist enchantments count (ie: attunements, conjures, aura of restoration). It'd fix the skill almost as nicely, since there's only 3 or 4 useful elementalist enchantments you can have at a time.

c) Make it so that only Elementalist spells trigger the recharge. This doesn't seem as efficient to me, since it's easy to sacrifice one skill slot for Flare or another low-cost, instant-recharge elementalist skill.

At any rate, I still don't see what the big deal is. I mean, there's stuff which is usually hard to counter - impossible, under certain circumstances - and then there's enchantments.

a) and/or b) together seem like the best change. Cap the number of enchantments at 3 or better yet, have a scaling cap from 1-4 and/or only allow elemental enchants to count towards the limit. As it is only elemental attune and renewal can cover elementalist energy costs, they shouldn't nerf ER into renewal into oblivion just to prevent other professions from abusing it.

Do that and make ether prodigy a worthwhile alternative. That way elementalists will have three great elite energy management options instead of one awesome (renewal), one good (elemental attune), and one shitty (prodigy).