Curse

manveruppd · Aug 21, 2005, 06:53 PM // 18:53

Sorry but Nature's Renewal is clearly broken for a 5E skill: it's like Rend Enchantments with half the energy, 100x the area of effect, and taking out hexes as a bonus too.
I much Hiawatha's idea of it reducing duration times rather than dispelling everything outright! Shouldn't be too drastic though, as, with the extended activation time, it would make some spells expire before they're cast!

Hiawatha · Aug 21, 2005, 07:20 PM // 19:20

Well, you could always make them be cast normally. I just think that making things wear off faster would be more, erm, thematically accurate

The main idea is really to prevent people from having too many spirits up at once. In a perfect world, when the spirit dies it will remove all hexes and spirits and stuff too :-S

smurfhunter · Aug 21, 2005, 08:06 PM // 20:06

you seem to forget that NR takes away all the buffs on your team too. thats the point of a spirit: it affects everyone.

spirit builds work because the rangers use certain spirits that mesh nicely into their build: for example fertile seasons is incredibly bad for a spike group, while usefull for just about everyones else. similarly, frozen soil is good for a spike team, while potentially bad for many other groups.

many people dont realise that the same spirits that are killing your team, are actually helping the spirit group. that is the whole point of a spirit group. ive seen plenty of noobs that just spam every spirit they have under the assumption it will kill the other team (somehow)

making it decrease the durations is, well, making NR useless. no one cares if the buffs expire in 10 seconds. by then the buff-ee will be at max hp, and someone else wil lbe the focus.
especially with the 5 second cast time, decreasing the duration will be the same as making the effects of NR something like this: create a level __ spirit. this spirit will do nothing but scare the other team into thinking you are a spirit spam team.

i think the whole point of NR is that it reduces gw to a more primitive level, where everything is about spike heals and damage. thats essentially the problem, the reason everyone is crying about NR is because so many teams are just that reliant on over powerful buffs. i mean if you cant debuff someone what exactly can you do to someone with like 4 prot buffs and 4 heal buffs on him? without NR those kinds of asshole teams with 4 monks will just win...

i think the GW staff need to do some serious thnking about enchantments, and how to remove them. its not as simple as 'nerf NR' because then youre gonna see teams with ridiculous amounts of healing monks just tiring everyone other team out.

im not trying to say GW is fundamentaly broken, i appreciate the difficulty of creating a set of skills where no one team can dominate, but at the moment clearly one build is dominating...

*edit*
maybe people dont realise this but perhaps the most annoying spirit ever is quickening zephyr. this spirit totally destroys most monks, even faster than NR. ofcourse both is fun too

but with QZ up they start to run out of energy real fast, when energy management is the single hardest thing for a monk to accomplish.

but for some reason no one complains about QZ. dont you realize that spirit is the reason you see rangers with incendiary arrows almost permanently on them? and the reason the monk can only heal for about 10 seconds before running out? i dont hear any "nerf QZ" shouts. in fact if alot of you people got off your high seat and actually tried a pre set build (which is probably better than yours

) you would notice that the 'boon healer' can work with NR going up quite nicely. its QZ that kills it. (about the preset char - duh no one uses infuse health. and yes you need healing breeze. obviously this build isnt the best, but clearly its a good base to start from if you want to make a monk that uses mostly spike heals and few enchantments)

Hiawatha · Aug 21, 2005, 08:20 PM // 20:20

I realise spirits affect everyone in their range, that's exactly why they can be so interesting

Reducing the duration of hexes might not do very much (unless you reduce it by a percentage related to the level of the spirit perhaps), but reducing the duration of enchantments would have plenty of effects. It wouldn't completely hose all enchantment-heavy builds which may happen to run into the NR-reliant build, but it would make many of those builds too energy-demanding to be truly efficient. It'd make maintaining enchantments with no breaks very difficult, thus demanding more thought from the people relying on them (such as Elems using ER). The team with the spirits can tactically choose when to drop the NR in order to not affect their hexers too much.

Upon dying, the spirit takes all other spirits and and hexes and enchantments with it, perhaps giving a more conventional enchantment-heavy build a bit of a reprieve, some time to coordinate an attack of their own. Because the spirit affects the duration and life of all other spirits in the area, it becomes less effective to spam spirits, requiring all teams to compromise when it comes to dropping spirits all over the place.

Although I'm not sure I guess OS might mess this whole thing up

smurfhunter · Aug 21, 2005, 08:26 PM // 20:26

whoa if you make a spirit that kills everyother spirit when it dies, guess what no ones gonna use it. back to mister necro using lingering curse and rend.

really if you make NR unuseable people arent just gonna tuf it with NR. theyre gonna go around it. you cant force spirit groups to use a skill

oh and QZ makes just about any casters energy run out really fast. unless you have an ele with like 30 attunes on. in which case NR ftw

i also overlooked the side effects of your new NR bomb - spirit. IF someone actually changed NR to that, i can bet my life *enchantment heavy groups* are gonan bring it ONLY to bomb all the spirit groups spirits. i think any kind of skill, spirit, whatever that has the ability to bomb everyone elses spirits is by default broken. its like making a skill called 'death' which kills an enemy player (btw that would be SO dumb, if there was a 'death' kind of skill/spell) for now at least there is no skill which can drop a target without doing direct HP damage. (phew)

smurfhunter · Aug 21, 2005, 08:39 PM // 20:39

oh and one other thing: if a spirit left a corpse, even if it was just a temporary corpse that lasts say 30 seconds, minion builds would be really awesome. coupled with the corpse popper it would send spirit spammers home.

entropy · Aug 21, 2005, 09:40 PM // 21:40

true but with that just spam less spirits and get more necro's on your side. Spirit spammers with 3 necro's and 5 rangers with a minion army and putrid spamming would dominate even more. the spirit spammers has nothing in wilderness or beastmastery but spams those spirits and then the necro's capitalize on the dead spirits and then bam the necro's have hundreds of minions b4 the match even starts. then once the match actually starts puts points back into them for maximum effectiveness... with around like 10+ bone minions already and it would make targeting the biggest pain in the ass! with 50+ bone minions running around

smurfhunter · Aug 21, 2005, 09:58 PM // 21:58

actually im not sure thats quite right... spirits last for bout 30-60 seconds with no points in WS, and if you try changing attribs on the go it wont last. but yeah, it is a valid point.

yknow i think ill let the gw staff sort out this mess... no ones paying me for this (unlike them)

Hiawatha · Aug 21, 2005, 10:14 PM // 22:14

Hmmm, now that I think about it, having them completely remove everything upon dying does seem like overkill. I still like the speeding-up thing though

Make it sufficiently fast and it'll become challenging without becoming unbalanced.

JokerES · Aug 21, 2005, 10:25 PM // 22:25

For one reason or another, we are complaining about NR, when in fact Spirit Spam teams have been winning HoH less and less. Obviously the smite teams (the people who are winning more and more) are finding ways around it. Sure, the enchant hurts, but you don't NEED enchants. There are non-enchant spells that do much the same sort of things in most cases, albiet not as good. So long as you don't go fully enchant heavy, and you play smart, Spirit Spam will go down just like any other team. Sure, it's slightly overpowered, but heh, aren't some of the skills in the Kd/As slightly overpowered? Some skills are going to be better than they should, or the game would just be two equally powered teams slugging it out. In addition to this, by spamming NR, the ranger's team doesn't have a boon healer of any type. So hit the monks. If you hit the monks hard, they will fall, and spirit spam will die.

As the original thought of the air spike build was and the reason people still like to play it boils down to this. If you keep hitting, switching targets, and working cohesively, you'll win.

smurfhunter · Aug 21, 2005, 11:11 PM // 23:11

people like spirit spam because you can really camp out at the hall with it. thats the major prob

and a good spirit spam team should be a smiters worst nightmare, with NR going up BA and symbol wont be staying up. so im not sure what you mean there, i thought smiters were all over buffs?

pagansaint · Aug 22, 2005, 12:08 AM // 00:08

16 smiting Signet of Judgement on a person laying down any spirit plus either hammer warrior with earthshaker and stoneskin gaunts using aftershock on the ball types or air knockdowns. if a ball type eruption/earthquake/searing heat/phoenix/fireball does some interesting damage to them.

Especially eruption with the blindness at the end.

Made a couple ToPK runs using a build utilizing those actually all 3, but it was a PuG and didn't have ANY cohesion and lost 3 attempts in a run and a couple "too 1337 for losing" types quit and the group fell apart.

JokerES · Aug 22, 2005, 12:28 AM // 00:28

smiters can be over buffed, but lately i've been seeing smite teams carrying additional area spells like inferno. and secondly, to put BA back costs a measely 25 energy off of a ele, and barely any time.

smurfhunter · Aug 22, 2005, 12:36 AM // 00:36

Quote:

Originally Posted by JokerES

measely 25 energy off of a ele, and barely any time.

you forget that the recharge on BA is > 10 seconds. but point well taken.

granted a good smite team can win against a ranger build... whats to say theyl last on the altar?

i think the next 'flavor of the month' is going to be necros and warriors, but thats just me. speaking of necros....

goldfinger · Aug 22, 2005, 01:09 AM // 01:09

Quote:

Originally Posted by Silent Wandarer

nerf natues renewal and

warriors will be useless again and rangers too.

why?

aegis spam and stuff and every1 will buff with heavy enh and no1 can kill each other with fertile season up

Rends and other curses can take care of that kind of stuff. Toss rigor mortis on a target and cover it to get rid of aegis, guardian, wards, etc.

Natures renewal is too much. It is cheap and fackin universal in a battle. Look at it compared to any removal skills and it is overpowered. I think some sort of "polluted mind" style of attack that disables spirits for x amount of time, or maybe a spell with high damage vs spirits. I mean, these are rough concepts at best and it is not in my interest to make spirits useless but there should be a good counter considering how fast they can be tossed up. Maybe an anti spirit spirit lol.

smurfhunter · Aug 22, 2005, 01:14 AM // 01:14

Quote:

Originally Posted by goldfinger

Natures renewal is too much. It is cheap and fackin universal in a battle. Look at it compared to any removal skills and it is overpowered. I think some sort of "polluted mind" style of attack that disables spirits for x amount of time, or maybe a spell with high damage vs spirits. I mean, these are rough concepts at best and it is not in my interest to make spirits useless but there should be a good counter considering how fast they can be tossed up. Maybe an anti spirit spirit lol.

i agree 100% with that... my problem is when people try to 'nerf' skills like NR... its not broken enough to really need to be taken apart

Phades · Aug 22, 2005, 01:22 AM // 01:22

NR is more broken than how broken monk enchantments are, due to how it effects hexes as well. It also has too many effects in it, as it is in effect a mass arcane conodrum and ultimate enchantment removal all at once and every 10s. Any change to NR requires a rebalancing for all enchantments. Refer to other NR discussions as they point out already how imbalanced all other forms of removal are, when compared to the ability to apply and stack the enchantments. Also, too many enchantments have a non-finite duration and combined with a no recast time, making it almost pointless to fight against them, while some are so inexpensive and short on casting time allowing them to be abused with other combinations.

To be fair, most enchantments would likely have to follow the stances route with uptime versus downtime and have a limit to the total amount of enchantments active on a target at a time. To be fair, the same would have to be applied to all other lasting effects, such as shouts, hexes, and conditions. In nerfing both you also open the gap for damage to start to be able to overcome its natural counters, so other forms of defense need to come into play as well and be spread out across the classes.

Any changes to NR that are suggested does not also address the problem with rangers refreshing their skills and bypassing the cooldown timer that was meant to balance the application and cost of every other spirit in the game. This also needs to be rebalanced. Essentially, all of the NR commentaries are the culmination of problem within the foundation of the game and a house of cards of a game built on top of it waiting to fall down once you remove a piece.

smurfhunter · Aug 22, 2005, 01:30 AM // 01:30

you got it in one phades... the ability to have NR go up every 10 seconds, more if you have multiple people doing it, does kind of seem unbalanced.

and as to it being more broken than monk enchantments is open to debate, so really i dont think thats enough of a reason to nerf it..

(you might have noticed im against nerfing things... imo its annoying and really a way of showing you 'gave up' on it. )

bobrath · Aug 22, 2005, 08:15 PM // 20:15

Quote:

Originally Posted by Phades

Quote:

Originally Posted by bobrath

Extending/morphing Glasswalker's idea. Add some sort of penalty into the casting of NR.
"For each enchantment/hex removed, caster loses 30 hp"

Might as well just assign a death penalty on each use of a spirit.

30 might be extreme then. 2 hp? or is the concept of health loss just unacceptable?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Phades

Quote:

Originally Posted by bobrath

"For each enchantment/hex removed, caster is affected by 5 mp exhaustion"
or
"Upon casting, caster loses all energy"

Like energy denial, it would be largely avoided with shifts in the energy pool.

But wouldn't that move it away from one person being able to spam? Or am I missing something about exhastion?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Phades

Quote:

Originally Posted by bobrath

"Upon casting, all bow attack skills are disabled for 10 seconds"

Would need to be all skills are disabled for the duration of the spirit, in the instance of the 0 attribute point wilderness survival characters. Forcing a small hiccup within ranger primaries wouldnt solve alot.

I thought that part of the (large) problem was the use of Oath shot combined with NR to make for overly repeated NR casting. Wouldn't disabling bow attacks (or heck extend it to attack skills to catch pet masters too) prevent the abuse of Oath <-> NR and also afford a large penalty to the caster? I'm also not sure how the 0 point wilderness characters factor in here.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Phades

Quote:

Originally Posted by bobrath

Basically force a choice on the caster. They can put NR out there, but it will dramatically affect the caster in exchange for the power that comes with it. Couple this with making the skill Elite and you've put a pretty big dent in the abusablility of the skill.

The premis is good and should exist within every skill, but the changes need to be a bit more involved than your suggestions.

I've always operated under the perception that less involved can be more powerful and less likely to be abused/loop-holed. Since the more powerful skills for other classes carry large penalties for using them (exhaustion, double damage, extra hp loss), then use those "tried and true" ideas on this one. Everyone admits that NR is very powerful, so the challenge is coming up with the trade-off that makes it a no risk proposition.

UltimaXtreme · Aug 23, 2005, 07:49 AM // 07:49

gale.