Curse

Corporeal Ghost · Jan 31, 2010, 03:25 PM // 15:25

I haven't slept in pushing 48 hours, but I'm all coffee'd up, so you guys get to suffer. Not sure if I had some epiphany or if my thought processes just hit some deeper, retarded level when I don't sleep, but here it comes, full-on ramble-style. If you want the cliff notes, skip to the last paragraph. I'm pretty much just following a logic chain to get there.

As most people who actually understand the game are aware, (GvG) problems can be largely broken down into several major categories, all of which can be summed up neatly by the term "power creep". For reference:

Armor levels
Midline damage
Deep wound access
Bar compression
Skill efficiency

These are all pretty self-explanatory--although people seem to misunderstand what bar compression is quite a bit. I'm taking a slightly different tack today. Skills are used more frequently now. This is partially a function of:

-players able to find openings more easily
-players not waiting to find openings
-skills being available more frequently,
-players having much better energy than they used to.

The first is a natural game evolution. I actually theorize that it is the least significant factor, though I have no evidence other than conjecture. The second is actually heavily tied to the third and fourth. The opportunity cost of "blowing a skill" is much less now than it used to be. Dismember charges in five hits. Eviscerate was seven in its heyday--and seven took longer to build than it does now for a number of reasons. The rapid-fire application of deep wound coming from warriors illustrates this really well, but I think the problem is actually most exemplified by the midline.

The current Mirror of Ice (or Me/E snare) bar is a huge offender here. Either of those can pretty much chain cast through an entire match, something that was unheard of pre-nightfall. That is, even if only one in four skills used by this particular character is effective, he's still being as effective as a similar role would have been pre-nightfall--say, connecting with an orb on a spike every ~15 seconds and landing a strong blind roughly once in the same time period.

Because the water bar is such a big offender, people recognize that it is a problem relatively easily. Recharges are usually where the blame gets placed. This is largely because ANet has completely thrown out all other balance tools. Energy cost is not even remotely relevant anymore; it used to be a much more potent balance tool than recharge. Recharge set a hard limit to skill usage. Energy cost set a player-defined limit on how hard a given bar could be pushed. For example, the current water bar has no problem putting out a snare roughly once every two seconds if it has a desire two. It can maintain this for quite awhile.

Nearly all of the proposed solutions I see to this problem are dealt with in terms of recharge. Freezing Gust needs + ~3 seconds. Winter's Embrace (now fine) needed + ~5 seconds. While this form of balancing will actually limit the number of snares the bar can put out--and by extension, the amount of X that bar Y can do while remaining "balanced"--it is a hard limit. The player can't decide to make tactical plays like burning through energy rapidly to enables pushes. Additionally, this adds a luck component assuming energy can keep up. Many a team has wiped--or not wiped when they should have--because critical skills hit half-recharges consecutively.

Recharges can be used to balance in this fashion--to leave the decision of when to push hard and when to play conservatively to the player--but this is dependent on not having an overload of a particular effect. Again, the water ele bar is the perfect example. Increasing the recharge on Winter's Embrace, while it helped the problem, did not actually fix it, because Freezing Gust still does the same thing. That is, even if the water ele has blown his primary snare, he still has two or three backups. In order to effectively use recharge as a limitation, facsimile skills need to be limited.

Anyway, all of this leads into a couple of conclusions I've drawn over the past few months. First, midline characters have too much energy. Their bars are constructed in such a fashion that they can be used to capacity (read: recharge) pretty much for the duration of a match, unless they do something like get their attunement interrupted, or whiff several Power Drains in a row. Most people I've talked to agree that the skills-on-recharge approach is kind of dumb. However, few reach the conclusion that the solution can be found in energy.

I think this really became apparent to me while we were dicking around with some ele bars in codex. Everyone else effectively said eles were only viable with either elite energy or attunement. We basically found that a strong-ish set of ele skills (sometimes two or three spec) was "good enough" if applied in sort of a burst-fashion. Sustained ele skill usage was not viable, but a key Deep Freeze with some damage and Gales stapled on, though horrendous on long-term energy could actually push kills through while the ele made minimal contributions between these pushes. Basically, we made the bar work despite the fact that it didn't have good energy by making good tactical decisions.

Disregarding the question of whether this worked because our opponents let it, or whether it was an optimal build or any of that, I think this mode of play is preferable. My conclusion here is largely met with poo-poo's from the general populace, but I think this is only because people have HAD energy for so long. If they can't operate on full-spam mode, they assume that the bar is useless.

Again, taking the next logical jump by assuming this conclusion has merit, we want to remove energy from the midline.

Eles have a ton of different options. None are particular obnoxious in this regard with the possible exception of Attunements. The real problem is that any ele bar can run three or four of these and just have infinite energy for an entire 28 minute match.

Ranger interrupt spam has been a known issue for awhile. People are divided into a couple of major camps here. The first, and most "obvious" solution is to simply put a few extra seconds of recharge on both Savage and DShot. This puts a hard limit on how many can fly out of a Ranger. Making them cost more--directly, by making Expertise worse, or by forcing some kind of weird attribute split for optimal skill spread (IE, Prophecies Blackout/Distortion/Cripshot) thereby lowering Expertise's effectiveness on the bar--will allow Rangers to maintain their burst interrupt capabilities and set up the chains of shutdown that are commonly praised as good for the metagame while keeping them from becoming what is effectively an environmental effect that poisons half the opposing team and generates random interrupts.

This logic can be extended to pretty much anything in the midline. I'm not sure if it holds true for the current crop of Mesmers (domination rather than water) as I haven't been GvGing really since they made a comeback.

At any rate, food for thought. Instead of hard caps on everything, implement soft caps that allow for increased emphasis on decision-making. This is really apparent if you play Codex, as it forces bars that do not have optimal energy, or a backup snare to blow. It's also quite possible that in order for this scheme to be viable, fewer skills need to be available--and thus it is outside of the scope of the current balance team. And lastly, there are other balance tools than energy and recharge times that are likely worth exploring in any kind of sequel. I don't think the current game has the manpower, though.

Shayne Hawke · Jan 31, 2010, 07:55 PM // 19:55

I'm finding this to be a really good read, and I'm hoping that someone a little more knowledgeable about high-end PvP will be able to comment on this.

Apok Omen · Jan 31, 2010, 09:04 PM // 21:04

It's no secret that Nightfall has changed things up exponentially ever since it's release. but, it's not just bar compression that changed.

Back in Proph era, Eles were still heavy energy enginee with Attunements and Eprod. However, because there was no real reliable elemental elite for Eles (Fire Magic was worthless in PvP, Water Trident saw some use but was slow as hell, Earth Magic had Obs Flesh, and Air Magic only had Mind Shock) they ran Eprod to fuel Heal Party, L-orb, B-flash, Blurred, Ice-spikes, Gale, Ward-Melee, and Aegis. Those were the only real useful skills only an ele could use: 1 KD, 1 water snare, 1 party heal, 2 blocks, 1 spike (3 if you want to count Enervating Charge and L-strike), and 2 blinds. There were no mass amounts of useful skill to give Eles, not even during Factions.

What can Eles do now? Bsurge, MoI, Shatterstone, MB split, SH, UG, etc. They don't even worry about support skills anymore (well, back in the glory days of early NF, we saw Bsurges with Ward-Melee, but that was it). And with no elite energy management to worry bout anymore (GoLE, Glowing Ice/Shock Arrow, 45sec Attunements, and AoR are enough these days), bars are less compressed.

Rangers were significantly buffed from NF, too. Nat Stride replaced Distortion AND Storm Chaser, and Blackout is seldom seen anymore because of Anti-KD skills, Stances, and offensive support from linebacking and conds/hexes that have 12sec recharges AT MOST. With BO and Distortion off their bars, and Mend Touch not needing any investment to be useful, Rangers don't have to spread Attributes as much. BO, however, was mainly affected by player evolution rather than skills.

The main reason that you see more energy on the midline is not just because it's easier to get to, but because the metagame became more fast-paced as it evolved. Go and watch old Proph matches and see how slow it was, and compare it to now. Top players know that being able to use as many skills as possible can assure them victory just from straight pressure; no need for mega-tactical decisions that we used to see.

So, yeah, it's Anet's fault, cuz they gave us more versatile tools to choose from.

*lemming* · Jan 31, 2010, 09:25 PM // 21:25

The MoI bar in its current state just about plays like what you'd like. There's an energy-based tradeoff between outputting damage and snaring defensively, especially when Attunement isn't up (which is pretty much expected).

The issue you raise of overloaded snares on the MoI bar comes directly from Freezing Gust serving double duty as spike skill and snare.

kedde · Feb 01, 2010, 09:13 AM // 09:13

Hasn't really been a secret that energy having been degraded by huge amounts in importance as a game deciding factor has meant that the game changed from a mostly tactically based one to one focusing more on the executional level game with focus on micro.
Whether that is a bad thing can be argued, but that its left this little room for tactics to truly have a say is what I think most people don't like.

Back in the day, there was a clear line between offense and defense.
Very few skills could act both offensively and defensively, at least of those actually useful. That's why you saw so many blackouts and gales.
By todays standard, so many copies of the same skills would probably lead to some people claiming stale and boring metagame, but because both of these skills (along with several others) had no defined goal to achieve. Instead they simply had a very useful effect that you as a team had to use to your best advantage which meant smart people would obviously get the most out of them on both accounts.
There really aren't many of these skills left anymore, and the ones that are left have changed in nature.

One huge difference is also that offense was just more powerful than defense back then.
Offense would simply overpower defense eventually, it was inevitable.
When the defensive skills such as heals, blinds and snares were so expensive and ineffective compared to the offensive powers, it simply meant that energy was the most important factor, just like you so cleverly observed.
You always had to keep pushing out rather ineffective skills where they were needed the most, but in the end one team would always crumble because defense would never be powerful enough to sustain.
The goal would then only be to be the team whose offense would take down the opposing defense first, not the team which could last the longest.

If you go down in lesser details on the energy issue, you'll find that because of the fact that there were no obvious elite skill choices for any proffession, defense could and would need to take energy gaining elites to keep up.
With these energy engines functioning in the way they did back then with burst energy gain at specific timings it developed into a second game around energy which was some of the most fun and interesting subgame you could have apart from split tactics.

With such a huge part of the game you can probably see what a lot of people feel is missing from the game by now.

Kaon · Feb 04, 2010, 12:31 AM // 00:31

Quote:

Originally Posted by Apok Omen

The main reason that you see more energy on the midline is not just because it's easier to get to, but because the metagame became more fast-paced as it evolved. Go and watch old Proph matches and see how slow it was, and compare it to now. Top players know that being able to use as many skills as possible can assure them victory just from straight pressure; no need for mega-tactical decisions that we used to see.

I'd just like to know what makes you think the game is more fast paced now. As far as I know shit died a whole lot quicker back then. This because as Kedde already explained, defense was crap.

Jade Zephyr · Feb 04, 2010, 03:18 PM // 15:18

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kaon

I'd just like to know what makes you think the game is more fast paced now. As far as I know shit died a whole lot quicker back then. This because as Kedde already explained, defense was crap.

1 second spike skills, primal + dismember, coordinated shutdown has lost lots of its value when you need to put as much damage as possible on a target while their stances are recharging.

Spikes are faster and more frequent, and also the only way to score kills.

Corporeal Ghost · Feb 06, 2010, 08:58 PM // 20:58

Quote:

Originally Posted by lemming

The MoI bar in its current state just about plays like what you'd like. There's an energy-based tradeoff between outputting damage and snaring defensively, especially when Attunement isn't up (which is pretty much expected).

The issue you raise of overloaded snares on the MoI bar comes directly from Freezing Gust serving double duty as spike skill and snare.

Pretty much agree on MoI. Look at the bar, though. It only runs one of the pervasive ele energy skills (attunement). This meshes with my theory pretty much exactly. Of course, MoI itself is a problem; it is both overpowered (albeit less so post-nerf in a dom-inclusive meta) and forces extremely linear bars by nature. Effectively, I think a line needs to be drawn between damage and utility and/or defense. It's okay to walk the line, as with Freezing Gust--and I'm in full agreement that the current iteration of Freezing Gust is overpowered--but it's not okay to straddle the line, as with MoI. Smiting is also an excellent example of this phenomenon. Whenever it's good enough to be playable, it's basically overpowered and makes the game terrible.

As for the snare overload, it's not actually an issue if the bar doesn't do ten thousand damage on spikes. The Me/E people are switching to is pretty annoying, but I wouldn't call it overpowered--at least compared ot the rest of the metagame. Anyway, that was a function of both Freezing Gust being too good, which we've all known since it was released, and of Mirror of Ice just being bad skill design.

Quote:

Originally Posted by kedde

Hasn't really been a secret that energy having been degraded by huge amounts in importance as a game deciding factor has meant that the game changed from a mostly tactically based one to one focusing more on the executional level game with focus on micro.

I think you'll find it's a pretty well-kept secret. Or maybe everyone knows and doesn't talk about it. And I'm not really talking about people yearning for the days of EBurn being more than a 90 damage nuke. Energy as a balance tool has been thrown out the window and it's been pretty much ignored, at least so far as I can tell.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Apok Omen

What can Eles do now? Bsurge, MoI, Shatterstone, MB split, SH, UG, etc. They don't even worry about support skills anymore (well, back in the glory days of early NF, we saw Bsurges with Ward-Melee, but that was it).

How are you reaching these conclusions? Bar compression is incredible now. The only reason eles have no utility is because whoever designs the build feels that it is better to have more energy to spam skills A, B, and C rather than 8 useful skills. The common exception is Mindblast, because it simply has infinite energy before you add in three or four skills that it could do without. This is sort of a different angle on the point I was trying to make in the original post. Eles are sacrificing versatility to have infinite energy for the skills that are deemed "most necessary" by whomever is designing the build. Those skills have definitely changed since energy was limited, which is to be expected. But I contend that if the option of just bringing energy to power whatever two or three skills were there MORE, you'd see ele bars capable of deeper tactical decisions.

As Mindblast shows us, we can get deeper bars that can play somewhat tactically through giving one strong elite option rather than many weak options. I'm pretty much fine with that. As long as burst DPS on these elite-powered bars is less than that of a bar with bad energy, I think we're okay here. Basically, I think having good energy is worth approximately one elite slot.

I guess this is somewhat problematic if we start making an elite slot analogous to two or three non-elite slots. That's basically what modern eles have done. I'm not sure how to "solve" this--assuming you agree with me--without simply imposing the somewhat arbitrary restriction that energy MUST be elite. Maybe something like Inspiration Magic is okay because it eats up a secondary slot and a bunch of attribute points. Current ele (and ranger and paragon) energy does neither.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Apok Omen

And with no elite energy management to worry bout anymore (GoLE, Glowing Ice/Shock Arrow, 45sec Attunements, and AoR are enough these days), bars are less compressed.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Corporeal Ghost

Eles have a ton of different options. None are particular obnoxious in this regard with the possible exception of Attunements. The real problem is that any ele bar can run three or four of these and just have infinite energy for an entire 28 minute match.

Greedy Gus · Feb 07, 2010, 03:59 AM // 03:59

Quote:

Originally Posted by Corporeal Ghost

Energy as a balance tool has been thrown out the window and it's been pretty much ignored, at least so far as I can tell.

It feels like that avenue of balancing is far more nuanced or tempered, which is generally a good thing. However, my instinct is that the sledgehammer approach actually is called for with the superficial balance problems that they've been creating & eventually fixing for years. The cycle is really poorly thought-out buffs, then eventually nerfing some hard (sledgehammer) to get those skills out of the meta entirely, and nerfing some slightly only to prolong their effect on metas and still eventually needing to be nerfed out completely, over which time other forces' interests win another token dartboard skill buff update that messes things up further.

This superficial balance layer keeps people busy complaining on forums, keeps the balance team in a persistent & fairly easy job (paid to dig holes & fill them in again), and keeps more interesting underlying balance issues too far down to be practically discussed. Using nuanced balance tools like energy sub-games and forcing decision-making to actually be present for skill use frequency (timing bursts, etc.) are more interesting when you're dealing with desirable characters & skills which is often not the case these days.

Certainly I agree that it's a problem, or at least not as desirable, that energy matters far less than skill availability (recharge, dshot, pblock, etc. given great importance). So you dont really break monks by pressuring their energy, you instead hunt for their too-good skills & disable their use, or just spike warriors & midliners. Monk energy actually used to be somewhat tied damage being dealt to their team, but superpower 5e heals like word & patient go far in removing that link. Ele bars played a lot more interesting when packed with 5-6 solid but not too powerful 10e-15e skills powered by elite energy management because there weren't 2 super skills worth spamming on recharge nor were non-elite emanagement skills any good, and it wasn't worth losing important secondary skills that needed the ele energy power in order to go mesmer secondary for inspiration.

I think some decent character examples still exist, like the curse necro that used a decent but not game defining hex bar powered by elite emanagement that filled a general role in a hex build (somewhat reminiscent of OoB hexers in old degen builds). Or the water mesmer template powering the bar with e-drain. To be fair though, that these were considered worth running in the current environment of super elites and abundant emanagement skills probably says something about the skills that are being powered, but it's still a more desirable track to follow.

Trinity Fire Angel · Feb 07, 2010, 07:50 AM // 07:50

Quote:

Originally Posted by Corporeal Ghost

I think you'll find it's a pretty well-kept secret. Or maybe everyone knows and doesn't talk about it. And I'm not really talking about people yearning for the days of EBurn being more than a 90 damage nuke. Energy as a balance tool has been thrown out the window and it's been pretty much ignored, at least so far as I can tell.

i know what you guys and girls are on about with energy as a balance tool. having played Ele for 3 years i can understand this from having gone through prophecies before ever buying any expansions and having access to all the wonderful nightfall and factions skills.

however, could the problem with balancing around energy be also because pretty much no-one plays e-denial builds or is it because e-denial is not effective enough to play as a build? only once in my whole GW's experience (3yrs) have i come across an e-denial mesmer. i had no idea of what was going on... i had never come across it before and had no idea of why i had no energy. lol. perhaps it's just the meta??? or do people have better access to inscriptions and weapon mods so much so that they can make low sets more easily? or is it just that people are better at weapon swapping in these days that e-denial is not so effective>?

tonight i am going to start training as an e-denial mesmer and see if i can make it work and test how effective this is in low-end pvp. i will let you know if i come up with a good build.. perhaps...

Apok Omen · Feb 07, 2010, 04:46 PM // 16:46

Quote:

Originally Posted by Trinity Fire Angel

i know what you guys and girls are on about with energy as a balance tool. having played Ele for 3 years i can understand this from having gone through prophecies before ever buying any expansions and having access to all the wonderful nightfall and factions skills.

however, could the problem with balancing around energy be also because pretty much no-one plays e-denial builds or is it because e-denial is not effective enough to play as a build? only once in my whole GW's experience (3yrs) have i come across an e-denial mesmer. i had no idea of what was going on... i had never come across it before and had no idea of why i had no energy. lol. perhaps it's just the meta??? or do people have better access to inscriptions and weapon mods so much so that they can make low sets more easily? or is it just that people are better at weapon swapping in these days that e-denial is not so effective>?

tonight i am going to start training as an e-denial mesmer and see if i can make it work and test how effective this is in low-end pvp. i will let you know if i come up with a good build.. perhaps...

It's not that edenial still isn't effective, it's that disabling someone's whole bar is alot more effective. With the pumped up powerblock and everyone running spells from a single attribute, powerblock can make a single target worthless for 12 seconds.

Also, edenial was more effective against boon/prots who needed a bunch of energy back then.

IrishX · Feb 07, 2010, 05:17 PM // 17:17

EDenial was also more effective in the past because good weapon sets were much more difficult to come by. Very few people even ran shield sets, let alone -5e weapons. Quite a few casters would just camp their staff for the +60 health.

Corporeal Ghost · Feb 07, 2010, 06:02 PM // 18:02

Quote:

Originally Posted by Trinity Fire Angel

tonight i am going to start training as an e-denial mesmer and see if i can make it work and test how effective this is in low-end pvp. i will let you know if i come up with a good build.. perhaps...

Not to discourage you from trying new things, but literally anything can be effective in low-end matches. The shenanigans we used to get away with every day in codex, TA dead hours, and guesting for sub-1000 guilds shouldn't be possible, but we still got wins.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Apok Omen

It's not that edenial still isn't effective...

Yes it is.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Greedy Gus

So you dont really break monks by pressuring their energy, you instead

Monks don't break anymore. This is a large part of what's wrong with GvG. I don't HA, so I can't really speak for that. (Disclaimer: I have not GvG'd since the update on the 28th.)

Quote:

Originally Posted by Greedy Gus

powered by elite energy management because there weren't 2 super skills worth spamming on recharge

Very much worth noting. Does this imply that the insanely overpowered skills initially "balanced" by high energy are nerfable via killing stable energy? (non-rhetorical)

Quote:

Originally Posted by Greedy Gus

However, my instinct is that the sledgehammer approach actually is called for with the superficial balance problems that they've been creating & eventually fixing for years.

I don't think this is necessarily true. Certainly it was true for many individual updates that contained skills designed to work as effective tools against denial. Disregarding said skills (and there were a lot of them), I think there is a place for energy denial within the seemingly random balance scheme. There was some fundamental gear switch somewhere between Factions and Nightfall where ANet effectively decided that hard shutdown should not be as useful and that there was not enough raw damage in the game. As far as I can tell, this began the cycle of damage vs. mitigation power creep buffs.

Where I find I usually wind up going with all of this is that a buff to energy denial (which would probably involve blanket nerfs to ele energy, a few monk skills, and probably something I'm forgetting) would effectively serve as blanket nerfs to everything in the game (except autoattacks). I think that's where we actually want to take balance. Hypothetically, physical pressure becomes more viable; off-monk utility becomes necessary as monks can no longer both clean damage and keep the whole team up; instagib spike frequency goes down; people may actually begin dying sans spikes; several skills that are currently problematic become merely strong tactical skills (IE, Freezing Gust); etc, etc.

While I certainly don't believe this would be a return to 2005, I think it would at least move the game in the direction everyone claims to want it to go. Armor levels are probably a more pressing issue right now, but they're already on the table, so I don't feel obliged to post walls of text about them.

Ariena Najea · Feb 07, 2010, 08:18 PM // 20:18

Quote:

Originally Posted by Corporeal Ghost

Where I find I usually wind up going with all of this is that a buff to energy denial (which would probably involve blanket nerfs to ele energy, a few monk skills, and probably something I'm forgetting) would effectively serve as blanket nerfs to everything in the game (except autoattacks). I think that's where we actually want to take balance. Hypothetically, physical pressure becomes more viable; off-monk utility becomes necessary as monks can no longer both clean damage and keep the whole team up; instagib spike frequency goes down; people may actually begin dying sans spikes; several skills that are currently problematic become merely strong tactical skills (IE, Freezing Gust); etc, etc.

While I certainly don't believe this would be a return to 2005, I think it would at least move the game in the direction everyone claims to want it to go. Armor levels are probably a more pressing issue right now, but they're already on the table, so I don't feel obliged to post walls of text about them.

Super skills are definitely the problem in the current balance of the game. Consider builds a few years ago where there was room for variation and adjustments on meta builds depending on what your team was running. Now if you look at say an Axe Warrior, you'd be insane to run anything but the exact meta bar. Take the standard Ranger bar, you shouldn't always need Distracting Shot, Natual Stride, Mending Touch, etc. These super skills remove variety from individual builds and thus from the game as a whole.

I don't think energy management itself is as much an issue as the skills it fuels. If the skills being fueled are changed so they are no longer "must haves" on a skill bar and more utility is needed, the rampant energy management skills will be taken off in most builds in order to add more utility.

Corporeal Ghost · Feb 07, 2010, 09:36 PM // 21:36

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ariena Najea

Super skills are definitely the problem in the current balance of the game.

They are a problem. They are definitely not the problem. I don't think they're even the largest problem; armor levels are.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ariena Najea

Consider builds a few years ago where there was room for variation and adjustments on meta builds depending on what your team was running. Now if you look at say an Axe Warrior, you'd be insane to run anything but the exact meta bar. Take the standard Ranger bar, you shouldn't always need Distracting Shot, Natual Stride, Mending Touch, etc. These super skills remove variety from individual builds and thus from the game as a whole.

No offense to you personally, but this is exactly the attitude that broke Guild Wars. Variety does not a game make. Variety makes the game harder to balance. Variety also makes the game much more reliant on "build wars". One viable build is all that is necessary as long as the majority of the playerbase enjoys it, even if that build is so overpowered that nothing else can possibly win. The Gale metagame is the perfect example here. Gale was incredibly overpowered. People were running five or six copies of it per team. But that era is almost universally looked upon as the most fun.

Tying that into the main point, Gale is actually such a well-designed skill that I believe they should buff it back into insanity. Even if Gale was completely destroying the metagame, it has a built-in effect that is similar to what I'm talking about in the OP here. It is literally impossible to make a build that can spam Gale on recharge for any length of time. You HAVE to use it conservatively and/or in burst-pushes--and these burst-pushes are always an option because it recharges in five seconds.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ariena Najea

I don't think energy management itself is as much an issue as the skills it fuels.

Basically correct, but you're not getting the point. Of course energy itself isn't the issue. The other team doesn't die because you have full energy. On the other hand, Guild Wars is set up such that you can always find an energy outlet. If you play a bar and you are constantly at full energy, you drop an energy-efficient skill for a more expensive one with a better effect.

Historically, giant energy engines have always been a problem. Perhaps the most notorious was Soul Reaping, which enabled SBRI (among other things). Was the SBRI spike ridiculous? Absolutely. But what really made that build scary was they could just overload you with every hex in the game between spikes and still have energy to spike with. If they did not have that capacity, the build would have been beatable.

kedde · Feb 08, 2010, 04:52 PM // 16:52

Quote:

Originally Posted by Corporeal Ghost

I think you'll find it's a pretty well-kept secret. Or maybe everyone knows and doesn't talk about it. And I'm not really talking about people yearning for the days of EBurn being more than a 90 damage nuke. Energy as a balance tool has been thrown out the window and it's been pretty much ignored, at least so far as I can tell.

Well kept secret? I beg to differ. Noone's really been bothering to talk about things like these since they found out that balancing is too requiring on the resources to ever get past superficial changes.
Anyone I know and consider "good" could basically tell you the same I tried to state, but at the same time have had all hope given up on fixing issues so deep a long time ago.

Corporeal Ghost · Feb 08, 2010, 10:28 PM // 22:28

Fair enough, I guess. But for some reason all of the vocal community members have been quiet on this issue even though they continually complain about equally non-viable update targets--midline damage as a whole (rather than just the Glass/Envy engine), armor insignias, etc, etc. This gave me the impression that it was largely ignored.