Ether Renewal

Infinite enchants ftw. I have a video of this but i'm too lazy to edit it down. Yes I typoed my name.

I think someone already posted a link to this before.

I think we've seen this before, but yes, the amount of enchantments an elementalist can maintain is impressive.

Same time post!

oh.. yeah i've showed this to quite a few people.... someone was like "omg i'm gonna post that everywhere" but i took it down for a while. I'm not sure if htey jacked my screenshot or not but either way, doesn't really matter.

Someone already posted your screenshot.

i think plans are in the works for ether renewal. we all know how obviously strong it is, but it does bring such a smile to face seeing this pick again.

i gave it a try after i saw that. not as easy as you think though.

mmm it's not too hard. it probably took me about 15 minutes to get it down.

15 mins huh, do you really think an opposing team is gonna give you 15 min to get all your friends spelled up?

Because in a real game you always put retribution on your archers.

Actually, I think that if they "nerfed" smiting off other people using Ether Renewal it could be something that encourages diverse builds. Like, maybe a mass enchant Symbiosis Build. That wouldn't be unbalanced becuase we always have Nature's Renewal.

I take that back. Nature's Renewal just increases time it takes to cast and the ammount of upkeep it takes. While this would hurt a Mo/Me encahnt masser a bit, it would by no means hurt an Ether Renewal Enchanter.

desecrate enchantments ftw

That's kind of true.. But with Symbiosis on you would have well over 1,500 health. The Desecrate Enchantments would only do about 600 or less. So you've still got 900 health left

Me/R....symbiosis, backfire, the works. lol...and dedicated fast cast res, in case there is no ether renewal enchantment bastard.

Thanks for reposting this screenshot. I just hope this thread won't turn like the previous one or it will be closed very very soon.

Just a few more words for the next posters. It is NOT some sort of h4xorz build you can use in PvE/PvP. This screenshot was taken as an exercise to exploit ether renewal. The purpose is to demonstrate that
- you have access to a near unlimited amount of energy with this E.R
- you can maintain an unlimited amount of enchantments as long as you have enough targets.

Now if someone would be kind enough to make the same demonstration with a huge minion army, I would LOVE to see a screen full of upkeep icons.

Sure, you can keep all of those Enchants up, but it's not like yuo'll get any benefit out of it. With 14-16 in Energy Storage you'll only be able to put about 9 in Prot and Healing.

There aren't many good sustained enchantments. Sure, you can divert half of all of your allies' damage and take a bit yourself. You can increase their health by 150. You can give them *WOOHO* 5+ damage. You can give them 3+ energy regen. You can make enemies take a whopping 2 damage! Or you COULD Prot Bond them but lose 4 energy every time any of them take a hit (Fire Storm would bring your energy to 0 )

The only way that this would be any good at all is if you used Symbosis and you can only have one of those up at a time on each side and if it dies and your spiriter doesn't have Oath Shot, your build is completely useless.

An interrupt ranger or mesmer - unless the Ether Renewal user has found some way to spam Glyph of Concentration extremely fast - makes that elementalist ineffective, or if they can interrupt Ether Renewal, useless and out of energy.

A good Mesmer can keep any Ether Renewal user grounded. This skill is not imbalanced; it may be very powerful, but not imbalanced or exploitatious.

What about in PvE? Yes, this skill helps alot with UW soloing but we, at times, forget that there are still Mo/W UW soloers out there. I've even heard of a few E/mos using Mist Form instead of Ether Renewal to solo UW.

So, I would say that alot of the hype is just that: hype.

This isn't supposed to be an example of a good build... it's just an example of how retarded ether renewal is.

Sagius, thanks for putting that smile on my face.

yeah ether renewal is rediculous. I'm just confused as to why they thought the no recharge on draw conditions was why e/mo smiting is so good

not too useful, but funny to think about. Rend enchantments = bye bye necro. (well maybe not quite) also, decent energy denial and its all over as well, but whatever. fun stuff.

What this screen shot illustrates is that you can get all the energy you might want and more in a short period of time consistantly. Now tell me there is no use for that...

People seem to think that this is a screen shot about 84 enchantments. It is not.

Ether renewal aint that strong, i used to smite but then someone uses lingering curse and ether renewal is gone (while your energy was low) dead i am

Oh noes! I think someone has found a counter to E.R. Pheww... then we can safely assume E.R is balanced.

Seriously stefan16, you might want to read the E.R threads. Well timed enchantment will stop a smiter for about 40s before his energy engine is restarted.

he said it took 15 minutes, that is 100% useless in pvp.

I'm not gonna get involved into this again, since it resulted in a few warnings on my part.

But this comment just made me laugh. Why would you bother? I mean, you're showing what Ether Renewal could do if conditions were perfect. When are conditions ever perfect? Show a picture of it being overpowered in an actual battle and you'd get your point across better than using a picture of a situation that would never logically happen.

Point is, you only need a couple of enchantments on you to cover for the energy loss of 10 negative energy degen (where further energy loss is negated because of the 10 pip cap), that's 14 pips less than you'd normally have. Generating this kind of energy is quite manageable in practice. Now maintaining enchantments, as is shown here, is just one application of this sort of massive energy generation, this most certainly isn't the best way to spend it, this being nothing more than a demonstration, so it would be really nice if people would stop showing how little they understand about the game by claiming "this isn't practical, this is under perfect conditions". People use this setup to refill their entire energy bar from 20 to close to 100 in a few seconds day in day out, something no other energy management can even hope to achieve. Open your eyes.

And for crying out loud, learn to look at the damn picture. There's six enchantments on him, and there will be seven enchantments on him with Ether Renewal up. One cast of Desecrate Enchantments won't even kill him, even (through a lucky cast) cast at 19 Curses it will do only 242 damage, which isn't even halfway there. If you're still struggling with the basic interface for Guild Wars (or are generally challenged by basic math), why should anyone care about what you think of Ether Renewal?

I think the true way to nerf Ether Renewal is to make it so it doesnt work with Maintained enchantments.

Keeping it on regular enchantments would cut down on the outright overpoweredness of the skill. First off, without the "maintainments", you'd be only working with regular enchantments that wear off aswell. This nerfs ER because part of how it works so well is having a constant supply of enchantments to work off of. Regulating recharge times, just for a 10 second energy boost is going to end up being silly.

It will return the spell to what the Devs probably envisioned when they made it. A 10 Second Infinite energy charge for Elementalists who actually use their Elemental skills. Combining it with say the Elemental Attunements

You said you weren't getting involved again, it'd be really nice if you upheld that promise. Aura of Restoration, Reversal of Fortune and Ether Renewal itself are enough to refill your entire energy in the 12 second ER window, so the idea that maintained enchantments are the problem in this issue is just bizarre.

Hmm, I agree that ER should be reworked, although I hope the other energy gaining spells are improved a little. I'm going to miss my infinite energy when the day comes :P

Well I tried it in team arena Yesterday...and I had some bad luck.


The timing of the thing is very hard. You are completely in your own world, since you are just counting seconds and trying to time when to start spamming boon. I didn't even notice a warrior hacking away at me...actually I didnt care, I was to busy trying to get it right.

Partly success.

Helping out team mates.

Well I had Life Bond, Mending and Shielding hands up on 3 team mates. It helped them in the beginning untill I lost track and the enchants fell. We fell...

Dealing Damage

Balthazars Aura. Well, again I had problems focusing on a target, or should I say who was closest on target or who was getting attacked. The problem was also that I had only 9 in smiting prayers. Thats not enough.

What to change ?

Well I need to find the balance, somehow without sucking on the team. The number of enchants and the upkeep is tricky and I guess I need to try it in PvE eventually to get a grip on it, but just deleted my Ele (why only 4 accounts ?)


Rend Enchantments ?

Not a problem. It will kill the caster that rends you. 8 enchants gone x X damage...

Recommended ?

Well, maybe but you have to be a very good player to pull it off.


I would rather find another place for Ether renewal, for example with my air spike build, such as I can cycle the heavy damage spikes over and over again.

Suggestions ?


Ratatass

Nope. 12 second window = 9 1.25 sec casts of divine boon, net energy gain is 9 * 7 - 10 = 63, that's nowhere close to filling this guy's energy pool and isn't nearly enough to cover for the 10 pips of degen Of course no ELEMENTALIST is going to get nearly that benefit from renewal since they don't have any spammable 1.25 sec casts.

I'd really prefer that people stick to actual numbers in this discussion, this would make finding a solution (because I do believe that ER is overpowered in some situations) much easier.

My solution: Cap the number of enchants to 1-4.

If you're using Divine Boon to recharge your energy (and why are you?), that means you're at 4 enchantments already, which makes your numbers there inaccurate. Spamming Reversal of Fortune/Draw Conditions is faster than spamming Divine Boon, resulting in more energy gain (and more damage output in smiting setups, thanks to Zealot's Fire), but I agree even that won't fill up the energy pool the guy in the screenshot is running. It will, however, fill the energy pool of an E/Mo that isn't running around with 15/-1 wand and 12/15/-1 focus - even if his Energy Storage was high enough to get close to 100 energy total, that would mean ER is kicking in at 5 energy per enchant, netting 10 energy per cast instead of 7, which is adequate to fill up his energy bar.

I'd like the health gaining clause to be dropped entirely (it's an oddity they tacked it on, but compared to Ether Prodigy that actually damages you it's difficult to comprehend how this is somehow 'balanced'), and the energy gain only to trigger on the use of elementalist spells, possibly also only on elementalist enchantments. This to make it more of an elementalist skill again, instead of promoting the exclusive use of secondary skills alongside this brutal energy generator.

I don't think capping the amount of enchantments it triggers on will do much good, since you only need 3 to get excellent results using spammables like flare, stone daggers or ice spear, and 4 is usually overkill already. Someone using ER will typically have high energy storage, so an attribute-linked cap isn't going to influence them. Cap it too low and the skill just dives right into the garbage bin, and I guess that's the difficulty with balancing this skill: it gets better so damn fast as the enchantments pile up.

This is just a demonstration of one extreme part of the game. It follows the trend of all other enchantments: very powerful, yet easily countered. No need to strip or rend a "super bonder" like this. Some simple energy denial, and all the enchantments are gone. The game is fairly balanced in that way.

@ratatass:
I used to run ether renewal on my pve fire e/mo. Carry prot bond, and 2 more monk maintain enchants to keep yourself alive, then cast away. You only have 1 energy regen, but when you get down to about 15 energy, cast ether renewal, and spam flare til your energy is back. Its a more practicle use if you're interrested. good luck.

No, because divine boon and draw conditions both have a 1 sec recharge time (added in one of the later updates). For the purposes of triggering ER they are almost the same. Reversal of fortune has a 2 sec recharge ruling it out entirely. Divine boon does count as enchantment, however it's maintained meaning you lose a pip of regen, not that it matters in the OP's scenario.

Let's compare:

Divine boon: 9 casts, first cast ups the number of enchants to 4. Total energy gained 7 + 8 * (16-7) - 10 - (11.75 * .33) = 53.37 gained (counting the pip of degen)

Draw Conditions: 53 energy, as I calculated before

I don't know what the breakpoint for 5 energy per enchant is, but it's at LEAST 14 in energy storage. IMO if someone wants to go to that length to refill their bar, more power to them.

The obvious answer is that ether prodigy is horribly underpowered. Seriously, comparing it to ether prodigy is silly. Compare it to elemental attunement instead. If they actually make Aura of Restoration worth a damn then fine, remove the health gain from renewal, otherwise it shouldn't be touched. As it is the only reason I (as an elementalist who actually uses elementalist spells) use renewal is because of self heal. Otherwise I'd skip the hassle and switch to attunement.

I don't agree that it should trigger only on elemental spells. There are plenty of secondary class skills that work fine with ER, I don't want to see a bunch of builds disappear into oblivion because a particular combination (E/Mo smiter with Balth's and Zealot's) is overpowered.

No, because a) you're wasting a THIRD of your time spamming a horrible spell like flare or stone daggers to refill your energy and b) If you use a lot of high energy, low recharge elementalist spells (most of the air line, flame burst, immo, lava font, stoning, etc) elemental attunement gives you back more (breakeven point is at about the 4 enchant mark) without the drawbacks of ER. The effect is well in line with its status as an elite IMO, at least in THIS circumstance.

I can easily spend 200 energy every 30 seconds or so using said skills. In that context the relative values of elemental attunement and renewal as energy management tools change drastically.

The main "problem" with ER is the "e/mo smiter", but much of that is due to the design of the smiting line. Consider that:
1) You only need two skills, (zealot's and balthazars) to deal BIG damage, and they are enchants!
2) You can set off Zealot's with a 1.25 sec spammable and recharge with renewal AT THE SAME TIME. This means virtually no wasted time. It's all damage, all the time.
3) You can easily add 3 or 4 MORE enchants that do something useful.
4) The aforementioned damage skills do as much or more DPS at attribute level 12 then any elementalist skill does at attribute level 16!

Cap the number of enchants on renewal and either make Zealot's slightly less powerful or divine boon/draw conditions slightly less spammable and voila, this build no longer looks so overpowering, does it?

I'm talking about alternating spam of Reversal of Fortune and Draw Conditions, not one or the other, but both, which is slightly faster than Divine Boon, it's a pretty popular combo to use on smiting E/Mo's.
It's 14 on the dot, which for a smiter E/Mo with 12 smiting prayers leaves 42 attribute points to use somewhere else, such as 8 points into protection prayers. If 4 energy per enchantment was enough, the breakpoint is at 10 Energy Storage, in which case the Elementalist will only have about 70 energy to fill anyway; the only reason not to go to 14 in Energy Storage for 5 per enchantment is because with just another enchantment on (if necessary originating from a teammate) the energy gain immediately becomes high enough to fill any bar. But my point was simply that you don't need to rely on maintained enchantments to get this to work, so nerfing them wouldn't do anything to address the imbalance.
Unfortunately we can't balance skills based on how the 'honest few' are using them, instead we always have to look at the most extreme situations, and in those situations Ether Renewal is so drastically better than other means of energy generation, and that's where the imbalance lights should start flashing.

It's pretty much a side issue since the health gain isn't what makes ER overpowered, but I simply don't see any reason why Ether Renewal needs to be both energy and health regen in one - mesmers pretty much lack self-healing options as well, but that's where secondary classes come in, it seems they're quite capable of living with an Energy Drain that doesn't also heal them for 20 health per energy stolen.
I consider it excellent because after those 10 seconds you have a full tank to spam your worthwhile skills again, instead of taking twice as long to burn through your energy only to reach a full stop when you hit a rock bottom, and that's pretty much the bane of the Elementalist class: sure you've got lots of energy and lots of expensive but powerful spells, but once you're out of energy you're stuck with the same kind of regen as others but still have those expensive spells sitting around, and at that time you wish you could be casting horrible skills like flare around to at least do something.

I'm just not liking the way enchantments power up ER since it favors E/Mo's so much, perhaps that clause needs to be removed entirely, letting the skill just give a set figure of energy depending on attribute level. Capping it to a certain figure would just tell people to either get that many enchantments on them when running ER, or simply not use it.

And then there's smiting as a more efficient area damaging line than any of the elementalist attributes, yeah. The relative weakness of Elementalist lines is a seperate issue though, definitely needs addressing, but still shouldn't excuse the overpoweredness of ER.

It's (very) marginally faster. You can do two draw conditions and one reversal of fortune every 3.5 seconds. This gets you one extra cast under renewal, pretty pointless if you ask me.

This assumes that you use a superior energy storage rune , but consider the problem here. Normally you'd have to use runes to increase your damage, but since the Smiter's damage is already so good with base attributes you can use it to power up ER. I can't think of a single other build that can do this.

Again the problem is not that the smiter gets full energy...full energy by itself doesn't mean jack. It's that he gets full energy, big damage, and a BIG self heal (by stacking lots of useful enchants) all at once while just mashing divine boon/RoF/draw conditions.

No, this absolutely the wrong way to go about things. This ensures that the people who aren't abusing renewal will get shafted, and for what?

Mesmers have a better self-heal in the form of Ether Feast. Aura of Restoration is much worse because of how it works. Energy drain also serves dual purposes, it both replenishes your energy and denies it to the enemy. I don't see that as particularly different from renewal giving you back energy and healing you at the same time.

Yeah, it's excellent compared to no energy management elite whatsoever. However it's merely roughly equivalent to your other energy management elite (elemental attunement) which is my whole point. (I'me excluding glyph of energy from this discussion because that's tailor made for casting big nukes with exhaustion, a different scenario).

BTW flare doesn't really get you anything under renewal if you're already using a few other 1/2sec cast spells, because the aftercast ruins its efficiency

How does this fix things? Now instead of requiring a certain number of enchants to be effective (which is actually a handicap to most builds), you require none? What's the point?

I disagree, the peculiar properties of the smiting line in combination with renewal are what cause most of the problems. The only other way you could potentially abuse it is by loading up on mass defensive enchants, which is fixed by my cap.

*edit* hah im a nub face.
The problem is minions generate infinite degen. So even if you were to have mending + watchful spirit + verata's sacrifice + blood of the master + healing spring, minions will still eventually die. The maximum threshhold might go up from 90-100 minions to 150ish, but man oh man you could probably get your entire screen filled with upkeep icons. However, minions constantly would be ieing off. Not sure what the maximum amount of enchants you could get going would be.

Easiest way to test would probably be the PvE portion of Tombs. Whos up for it?

What i meant was it took me 15 minutes to figure out the correct way to maintain my energy, not to put all of the enchants up. Once you have max energy degen you can only put up 2 more enchants per ether renewal recharge.

in anycase, no smart team is gonna let you get that many enchants up. I looks like it's horribly unbalanced, but the reality is that it takes time to get that level of things cast and time is a luxury you don't have in tombs and the arenas

Please don't restart the discussion about how (un)balanced is E.R. We've been through this topic many times already. And everything has been said (on both sides) about Ether Renewal.
Simply put, this is wrong. If you can't abuse such a broken energy source, you need to be more creative.
Then you are wrong. It is not 'roughly equivalent' to other energy management elites. Many people have shown accurate numbers on E.R. You get infinite energy for 12s and 15/20 pips of energy regeneration (in average). And these numbers are based on a simple minded flare spamming, not the optimized smiting builds. Compare this to the average energy elites which give 3/4pips.

Full energy by itself does nothing, this is a truism. Using your full energy pool to cast ineffective spells is pointless. Stop waving your hands vaguely and show me another build that doesn't involve smiting which when combined with renewal is so broken and that more importantly wouldn't be fixed by my proposed enchantment cap.

It also appears that you have reading comprehension issues, since I clearly stated that ER is overpowered in certain circumstances, it's just that I don't believe the problem is with ER alone.

No, you are wrong. Consider spamming 3 spells every 6 seconds, lava font, immolate, and flame burst. That's 35E every 6 seconds, or 350E every 60 seconds. With a 20% enchant wrapping you can hit ER for 12 seconds twice, fitting in 6 casts each time. With energy storage 10 and 3 enchants this is a net energy gain of 72 * 2 - 20 = 1-= 124 energy over 60 seconds (not counting the cost of the spells themselves). With 4 enchants it's 96 *2 - 20 = 172 energy over 60 seconds.

Elemental attunement will let you fit in 9 cycles of the above which will give you 9 * 17.5 - 10 = 147.5 energy back in that same time period, and in reality the difference will be larger in favor of attunement since ER will often give you more energy than you can hold while it's up, reducing its efficiency. Of course if you're knocked down or can't cast for some reason during the ER period you're screwed, because you've relied upon those 12 seconds to rebuild your energy, no such problem with attunement. I don't need to mention the problems with enchantment stripping, either.

To put it simply, attunement is a much more robust energy management tool, if you're casting elementalist spells. With 3 enchants it's at least as good as renewal, it's only with 4 enchants and above that renewal becomes better (and it SHOULD, because renewal also has a lot more limitations).

Numbers are similarly high for other spammables, like air combos (strike + javelin + orb + enervating charge for example, which yields 280 energy over 60 seconds). The previous calculations assumed a much more sedate energy output (something like 80 energy for 30 seconds) which perhaps applies to a classic "big nuke" echo meteor shower elementalist but that doesn't matter. Their output is easily covered by glyph of energy (which gets rid of exhaustion too). Ele attunement and ER are overkill and most likely suboptimal for them.

So your logic is: "when I use subpar skills, I can't abuse the energy engine, so the energy skill is balanced". This is called a straw man. No offense intended but this argument has been brought up and countered before. And for your information, good builds for all professions have been shown to exist already.