Curse

Maltare · Aug 10, 2005, 01:08 AM // 01:08

Quote:

Originally Posted by jesh

Nature's Renewal {Elite} - Nature Ritual
Create a level 1-8 Spirit. When the spirit expires, or is destroyed, for creatures within range, 1-3 "Enchantments" and "Hexes" are removed. 50% chance of failure with 6 Wilderness Survival or less. Each point increases the chance of success, 100% at 12 wilderness. This Spirit dies after 50 seconds.
5e /5sec /60 recharge

Would this be good? Yes, it is different.. might be too much? If Arena does stumble upon this by accident, at least they can have something to look at. Suggestions! ^^

Your's is pretty good, I still don't think NR should be an elite.

Anyway, here's what I wrote several hours ago....

Quote:

Originally Posted by Maltare

I really don't think that this skill is THAT overpowered. Yes it changes the entire way certain battles are fought, but so does a prot monk, so does QZ, so does 4 Elementalists. Here are some of my speculations as to what would happen if only NR was changed and it was made significantly different, they're neither good nor bad, just speculations, you can decide for yourself how to take them.

1. Smite groups would dominate most fights.
2. Life Bonds and other -1 energy regen enchants would come back into more use.
3. Hex skills would come back into more use by mesmers and necromancers.

Those are the big ones that I see as of now. But on to how I would change the skill. Since personally I don't see what everyone's problem with it is, I'm going to preface that I would only change it very slightly. It already has a 5 second cast time, and 60 second recharge, so it's interuptable, and unless they use thier elite slot to oath shot, takes a while to recast, even with QZ. A common counter to QZ btw, that for some reason I don't see often with groups that dont run it, is Energizing wind. So, to change the skill...

Skill Name: Nature's Renewal
Description: Create a level 5 Spirit. For creatures within range, all "Enchantments" and "Hexes" are removed. For 60 seconds, Enchantments and Hexes take twice as long to cast. This Spirit dies after 60 seconds. (50% Chance of Failure with Wilderness Survival of 9 or less.)
Energy Cost: 5
Casting Time: 5
Recharge Time: 60 seconds
Skill Type: Nature Ritual
Linked Attribute: Wilderness Survival

And later I wrote an explanation

Quote:

Originally Posted by Maltare

Okay, now I guess I'll explain my nerf.

Skill Name: Nature's Renewal
Description: Create a level 5 Spirit. For creatures within range, all "Enchantments" and "Hexes" are removed. For 60 seconds, Enchantments and Hexes take twice as long to cast. This Spirit dies after 60 seconds. (50% Chance of Failure with Wilderness Survival of 9 or less.)
Energy Cost: 5
Casting Time: 5
Recharge Time: 60 seconds
Skill Type: Nature Ritual
Linked Attribute: Wilderness Survival

I'll start at the top and go down, and only discuss the changes.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
"For 60 seconds, Enchantments and Hexes take twice as long to cast. This Spirit dies after 60 seconds."

This change makes it more difficult to spam NR. It makes it even more difficult to spam FS. 60 second lasting time no matter what makes it so that (unless running zephyr) you can only have 1 up at any given time per character. And with zephyr there is only approx. a 15 second overlap.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
(50% Chance of Failure with Wilderness Survival of 9 or less.)

This is the key. Many good groups who have renewal spamming, don't have a designated spirit spammer(unlike what most people think). What they have are many people casting it at intervals from several differnt players. An example would be a Me/R, R/Me, W/R. Say those are the 3 characters spamming renewal. Well, as you can probably guess, the only character that's going to have 10 wilderness survival is the R/Me. And sometimes not even then. My personal ranger build has only 9 wilderness survival.

Now, the Me/R and W/R with my changes would probably be changed to something other than renewal spamming because they would have a 50% chance to fail in thier cast of it. And, it would force the R/Me to up its wilderness survival to cast it effectively.

Now, some of you will say that there's still spirit spammers, and yes thier are, but as most of you know spirit spammers are just that, spammers. All they do is cast spirits and for those of you experienced in pvp you also know that's a lot of damage lost. So, if someone really wants to spam renewal, my change would make them work at it, instead of just easily casting a level 2 or 3 Nature's renewal for the enchantment removal and double cast time.

I hope that sheads a little more light on my proposed change.

jesh · Aug 10, 2005, 07:19 AM // 07:19

I thought 9 might have been too harsh, but you aren't tagging it as elite, so I guess it evens out. That would be nice too.

tastegw · Aug 13, 2005, 06:11 AM // 06:11

to all those that say just interupt the spirit spammer,

the better teams that run spirit spammers have a very good defense for this.

they make it so you cant even hit them 75% of the time.

the ranger goes mesmer secondary and uses mantra of concentration and or other stances that allow him not to get interupted.

so the spirits still keep on coming down.

thus the only counter tho this i can think of is wild blow to get rid of his stance, but then you need to hit him again with a disrupt very quickly with a energy skill or signet because you will have no adrenaline left after wild blow..

and even with wild blow, you can miss very easily when that same ranger is tossing dirt at you.

manveruppd · Aug 14, 2005, 07:59 PM // 19:59

Ironically enough, there IS a team build that can do without hexes and enchantments: the ranger spirit spamming build!

With their spirits being "nature rituals" and their buffs being "preparations", it's like they're playing a completely different game to the rest of us. KILL ALL RANGERS!

Just kidding: seriously, you don't need to forgo enchantments and hexes completely, you just need to have a balanced team so that you have various tactical options at your disposal and can adjust your plan mid-game according to whom you're fighting. With 8 people each with 8 skill slots, this, you'd think, would be easy, but it doesn't really work that way: when everyone NEEDS 2 healers in their team and would prefer to have an additional protection monk for good measure, and when air elementalists wander around in teams of 2 or 3 MINIMUM, that only leaves a few team members to provide tactical variation. Coupled with the fact that everyone who takes his role in a team seriously will have 16 in his primary attribute (with the rest of his points usually going to his class attribute), that tactical variation is restricted even more! Few air elementalists are likely to be carrying Guild from their Mesmer secondary, for example.

Perhaps the bane of the PvP metagame is the very fact that specialised builds have such a dramatic edge over rounded builds with a variety of attributes and skill combinations. Spirit-spamming or air spike-teams or any other specialised build will usually have an edge over a balanced team, even when the skill of the players in the balanced team is far greater than their opponents'. So ArenaNet's original promise that it's skill, not XPs, that count in this game has not been materialised, except insofar as it takes skill to figure out an effective build - but most people in the game don't even do that, they just copy other peoples' builds, and PvE obsessively to unlock the necessary skills to use them.

Perhaps it's a fault inherent in the game! Maybe we need more skill slots to enable more tactical variation. Maybe the attribute level of 12 is too high, and it should've been lower in order to force people to diversify in their attribute points allocation (or maybe we need more attribute points?). Maybe none of the above, and the only reason the meta-game constantly shifts between various flavours of specialised builds is because I simply haven't met the players good enough to beat ANY build with a balanced all-rounder team. Let's face it, spike teams would tear everything apart (and still do), until they come up against a NR-spaming team. Eventually an NR-counter build will come, and then NR-teams will be at a disadvantage to them (but STILL at an advantage to everyone else). And so it goes on - but nobody's still found a team balance that can beat off everything that gets thrown at it and win against any kind of opponent if played right, but perhaps we're not meant to.

Ensign · Aug 14, 2005, 08:04 PM // 20:04

At the moment I believe that making the skill elite would actually be the best solution to the problem.

Peace,
-CxE

Zeru · Aug 14, 2005, 08:11 PM // 20:11

Hardly the best but probably the fastest. That would just be a band-aid fix.

I'd rather see it be completely removed or the enchant/hexes removal part taken out, and see enchantment removal buffed considerably.

With the time they're taking it would be logical to expect a better fix, but then again, I doubt that will happen for some reason...

Ensign · Aug 14, 2005, 09:01 PM // 21:01

Well removing the enchantment/hex stripping part and making other valid enchantment removal options would be better, certainly. I just don't know how realistic that is given what they have to work with. The single enchantment removal needs a slight cooldown buff, but nothing serious because many of those skills have changed to be useful for their secondary effects - Shatter Enchantment as a conditional nuke, Drain Enchantment as conditional energy management, etc. You really can't floor their cooldowns without making them outstanding for their secondary effects. Your mass removal (Rend, Lingering, Chilblains) could use some minor buffs (energy or cast time buffs, mostly) to make them competitive, but generally those skills are already useful. Basically the enchantment removal options we have are a little weak, but with even slight buffs they'd be outstanding in a general metagame. Spot removal would be good against spot enchantments instead of struggling to keep up, Rend and Lingering can punish a single target, and Chilblains can continue to cause a lot of chaos on a buffed team. The thing is, while all of those skills would be good, they wouldn't be sufficient for cracking healing balls and other dedicated enchantment stacking builds.

I think it's really important to have a skill like Nature's Renewal in the game as a safety valve.

I liken it to the current situation with conditions and condition removal. There are a lot of good, tactical conditions to throw around, and they're relatively cheap, but there are also solid general solutions to conditions - Mend Condition and Mend Ailment chief amongst them - that take care of general usage of conditions. But there are also builds that up and overload on conditions, stacking multiple conditions on every person on the other team. The general condition answers are simply overloaded despite being good skills. But then there's Martyr, which has its own drawbacks but it viciously hates out condition usage. The skill is poor against casual condition usage, and a waste of an elite in those cases, but against the heavy condition builds the skill is just devastating. The threat of Martyr keeps builds honest.

I like Nature's Renewal because it is that hammer that keeps enchantments honest. The problem of course is that the cost of using it is far too low, so it ends up in every build, and instead of keeping people honest it ends up viciously hating out enchantments and hexes simply by being so common. Simply neutering the skill will remove that check and put us back into a situation where enchantments can simply overload the good removal out ther. Hence given what we have to work with, I think Nature's Renewal needs to be made elite. That way the skill will still be available to keep people honest, but the cost would be non-trivial, it wouldn't be nearly as spammable, and enchantments and hexes could work their way back into the metagame without having to worry about facing Nature's Renewal spam in every single match.

The thing that makes me uncomfortable is that Nature's Renewal is a Ranger skill. Neither Enchantment or Hex removal is a strength of the Ranger, except for this one skill that happens to be the best at both. The ideal solution, I think, would be to take the removal aspect off of Nature's Renewal, and to introduce or seriously rework an existing Necromancer skill into an elite that serves the same purpose - a safety valve against enchantment stacks.

At one point I thought that enchantment removal could be buffed up enough to fight mass enchantments. I no longer think that's the case. They can't make the tactical spot removal or strategic rends good enough to both counter a dedicated enchantment stack, but also not completely hate out all enchantments or force people into dedicated hate builds. I might not like a lot of things about the elite mechanic, but safety valves are one if its strengths - it puts the fear into the game, and keeps people honest without making those hammers ubiquitous. A slight buff to current removal options, combined with an elite hammer of some sort, is what the game needs for a balanced and tactical use of enchantments to flourish.

Peace,
-CxE

Tuna · Aug 14, 2005, 09:15 PM // 21:15

I agree with Ensign. NR needs to be 'nerfed' untill it is a skill only to be used as a counter for things like healing ball or against 3 illusion mesmers. It shouldn't really be worth taking unless you know you will come up against these because as said above, it kills all honest use of enchants/hexes. I guess whats being said is that it shouldn't be the end all for curses but a counter against going crazy with them.

If you somehow stuff it in with the necro skills it would be a complete mockery of lingering curse :/

smurfhunter · Aug 14, 2005, 10:19 PM // 22:19

i think theres another post in this discussion that said a warrior build with 'fear me' (energy denial) works good against spirit spammers. i kinda liked that idea because it owned a ranger build. but then i hate warriors =/

and yup i agree with just about everyone here NR should be elite. BUT i just dont see why greater conflag is elite. yay fire damage. woot.

i mean look winter isnt elite. ive seen a winter / mantra of frost mesmer do pretty good. i just dont get it

and arent people overlooking well of profane? (or well of THE profane i really dont remember). that one is just awesome in those king of the hill maps. drop some foolish mesmer near the ghost and then pound him.

i think instead of nerfing NR they should up some other skills to create a build that ISNT heavy on enchantments. then people will make a counter for that which does use enchantments and you can go on forever

(its about time us necros got a face lift. were feeling foolish with our rend when NR is up)

Ensign · Aug 15, 2005, 01:54 AM // 01:54

Fear Me is ineffective against spirits because Nature's Renewal and friends cost 2 energy. Good luck stopping that.

Greater Conflagration is elite because of all the silly combos that chain off of it. Turning all physical to elemental lets you run Elemental Resistance, for example. It gets you around other defenses, like Shields Up and the like. It's a key skill for some builds and well worth the elite for them.

Well of the Profane has a three second cast time. Putrid Explosion has a one second cast time. Good luck.

Peace,
-CxE

smurfhunter · Aug 15, 2005, 01:59 AM // 01:59

ah i see what you mean. but then why isnt winter an elite? more combos im guessing....

about the well of profane... i think you can get around that easily by dropping the necro that has it (lol) so that their corpse popper is the one getting exploited. not to mention not all builds have one.

and if you wanna hear more about the fear me thing theres another post about it. never tried it so i wont argue but apparently it was effective with 7 warriors using it. idk

cookiehoarder · Aug 15, 2005, 10:56 AM // 10:56

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ensign

Fear Me is ineffective against spirits because Nature's Renewal and friends cost 2 energy. Good luck stopping that.

Greater Conflagration is elite because of all the silly combos that chain off of it. Turning all physical to elemental lets you run Elemental Resistance, for example. It gets you around other defenses, like Shields Up and the like. It's a key skill for some builds and well worth the elite for them.

Well of the Profane has a three second cast time. Putrid Explosion has a one second cast time. Good luck.

Peace,
-CxE

People use Glyph of Sacrifice for that, even though I think it's a bit sketchy.

Scaphism · Aug 15, 2005, 06:35 PM // 18:35

Winter used to be elite, and Greater Conflag was not. That was a huge mistake.
But let me ask you instead: Which do you think is more valuable for a team? The ability to convert all physical damage to elemental damage, or the ability to convert all elemental damage to one type of elemental damage?

The problem with Putrid Explosion is very much centered around King of the Hill/Dais/Altar maps. The trouble is that the Hall of Heroes, the pinnacle of PvP in Guild Wars, is just such a map.

Any team you see holding the hall (not stealing a win and exiting one or two fights later) will have a strong defensive build. They know how important it is to keep that necromancer alive for the express purpose of getting off putrids and denying you that Well of the Profane.

Finally, for Fear Me:
If you need to bring 7 copies of it to get an efficient counter to Nature's Renewal and other Spirit defenses that should be another clue that there is a problem.
On top of that, it's time to learn about focus swapping- your ranger has 25, maybe 32 starting energy. You get taken down to 0 due to normal skill use + energy debilitation.
When you hit 0, you will still regain energy, but fear me spam will kill off the energy as you regain it. Still, you will most likely be able to get the 2 energy required to cast a spirit before fear me is used. If you can't manage that, then put away your bow and pick up ANY focus, ANY Staff, and many wands that give +10 or more energy. You went from 0 energy to 10 energy, instantly, and you can now use your spirit. They cannot stop you from doing it. Once you're done casting, put away your staff/wand/focus and let your hidden reserve of energy recharge (they cannot effect your energy once it goes to 0). Repeat as needed.

Quote:

Originally Posted by smurfhunter

ah i see what you mean. but then why isnt winter an elite? more combos im guessing....

about the well of profane... i think you can get around that easily by dropping the necro that has it (lol) so that their corpse popper is the one getting exploited. not to mention not all builds have one.

and if you wanna hear more about the fear me thing theres another post about it. never tried it so i wont argue but apparently it was effective with 7 warriors using it. idk

smurfhunter · Aug 15, 2005, 07:46 PM // 19:46

o,0

yea i was doing a king of the hill map (not hoh) and we were holding up pretty good at 1 min left until one person dropped. then they putrided us back home. sucked.

im still not totally conviced about greater conflag but ill take ur word for it

Entropius · Aug 15, 2005, 08:49 PM // 20:49

@ Ensign:

You appear to be much more experienced than I am at GW, so I'll defer to most of your analysis. (I didn't play in Beta). However, I'm not convinced that non-nuclear enchantment removal "can't be buffed up enough to counter healing balls and other dedicated enchantment-stacking builds, but still not hate out all enchantments."

I play, mostly, Ether Renewal builds, and thus tend to stack lots of enchantments on myself. This is certainly nasty, but rend enchantments / lingering curse seems sufficient to deal with it. Sure, it's not a complete "you are useless now" counter, but it's certainly not the only counter, and it's powerful enough to make me hurt. Ether Renewal builds seem to be at the pinnacle of enchantment stacking, and they seem to be balanced pretty well against non-NR enchantment hate: neither overpowering nor useless against a team packing Rend or Lingering or other enchantment removal.

Healing balls seem to be an extreme case. When you say that the current spot removal/rend isn't enough to counter healing balls, do you mean that the amount of enchantment removal most teams run isn't enough to counter them, or that it's impossible to use a reasonable amount of non-nuclear enchantment removal to deal with them? I doubt many of the more creative non-nuclear possibilities for breaking healing balls have been tried, simply because there's no need: Nature's Renewal, as currently implemented, is the easy solution. I just read your comments in the other thread on healing balls, and suggest that, perhaps, the teams who brought chilblains/well of profane/rend/etc against you failed to break the ball because they weren't as good as you, and because the healing ball wasn't as well known at that point?

I'm sure there's a solution to healing balls that doesn't involve Nature's Renewal. My current guild's build should be able to break through the healing: rend enchantments or lingering curse on one random guy, 6x Obsidian Flame spike, Well of the Profane. (We have other weaknesses, of course, but spot-nuking a single target into oblivion is something we can do well.)

Mana Sama X · Aug 18, 2005, 08:28 AM // 08:28

I was just thinking if A-Net could make a spirit that could make all spirits take twice as long to cast. Spirit spamming would be reduced or at least slowed.

Post merged.
-Scaphism

tastegw · Aug 18, 2005, 11:22 AM // 11:22

there are plenty of ways to shut down a opposing necro then just killing it.

well of profane is well worth taking along.
the thing i like about it most is, it makes one hell of a defense against smite teams.

madness2k4 · Aug 18, 2005, 03:33 PM // 15:33

Even though making NR as elite would be temporary or a temporary counter solution for it. If NR is made into an elite then you would see a large numbers of R/Me running Arcane Mimicry to do the oath shot + NR spam. Then again we're back to the start from nothing and then making the elite is completely useless.

bobrath · Aug 18, 2005, 04:16 PM // 16:16

That's a fair statement... except that making it elite keeps a single person from being able to spam it on their own. Using Arcane mimicry requires at least two people on your team to coordinate. You've forced a team to give up more skill slots and now tied capturing your teammates skill to a 2 second casting time spell (interrupt anyone). The skill lasts for 20 seconds so in a given fight you'll have multiple chances to touch it.

Scaphism · Aug 18, 2005, 06:13 PM // 18:13

-Entropius

Ether Renewal isn't broken because it beats removal- it's broken because of the ridiculous amounts of energy it gives compared to every other energy management skill in the game.

I played a monk in iQ's healing ball, and no one ever really cracked it. I'd like to think it had more to do with player skill than a broken build, but I try not to flatter myself too much on a daily basis. I know we played better than most teams, because we're comprised of good players from the BWEs, but the problem with the healing build (that we ran) is that it required a ludicrous amount of hate specifically designed to even have a chance of beating it.

To do that, you had to sacrifice a ton of utility in other areas. Your best bet was to not allow us to hold in the first place; winning the hall once meant we started off holding every time after that.

It wasn't an issue of general teams not bringing enough spot removal. There wasn't(still isn't) enough spot removal in the game to beat what we were running.
"Normal" teams had no realistic chance of beating us, nor did good teams (barring poor play on our part). In the hall it usually took the efforts of two teams combined to dislodge us, and even then matches were always close. If we saw one team start attacking the other it was pretty much GG.

The problem in that environment is that you either have to bring a counter specifically designed to beat what the holding team is running, thereby potentially hurting yourself in every other matchup, or run it yourself and pray that we're not already holding- because the build we ran wasn't suited to dislodging another defensive team built like us.