Curse

bobrath · Aug 23, 2005, 07:34 PM // 19:34

<.<
>.>

Now I'm confused!

Phades · Aug 24, 2005, 04:07 AM // 04:07

Quote:

Originally Posted by bobrath

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

The way i understand it, is that durring beta spirits caused a death penalty when used. Essentially, it would hurt other spirits that are not as abusive as NR.

Quote:

Originally Posted by bobrath

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

Shifts in pool, whether health or energy affect the bottom of the pool, not the top. So, with focus swapping, you get a limited energy pool that is not affected by anything essentially. To avoid that, you would need the spirits to be more than 30 energy to use as the swing can be greater than that with the -energy +regen items, when combined with the +energy -regen items. Yeah the pool goes into negatives, but denail doesnt affect what isnt there and recovery seems to be the same.

Quote:

Originally Posted by bobrath

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.

Oath shot has a 10 second refresh timer, which gets cut down with quickening zephyr. Serpents quickness helps too, but mantra of concentration is popular as well. Disabiling the expertise skill (but still a bow attack) wouldnt do much, as the skill is already in a refresh cycle and would be ready to use after the time expired. It would have to disable all non-spirit skills for 60 seconds to really force the cooldown time to apply to the "normal" skill useage.

Quote:

Originally Posted by bobrath

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.

Like i said, the idea behind it is good, but the actual problem isnt that there is no trade off. The problem is the nature of enchantments and the way the skill puts a stranglehold on hex heavy builds. Alot more needs to change than just nature's renewal.

Neowulf · Aug 24, 2005, 04:07 AM // 04:07

Has anyone considered simply having NR cause exhaustion... Rangers are low on energy to begin with - You'd only get off a couple of spirits before you'd basically find yourself completely crippled by the energy loss.

I think the skill is great - the devs just need to rework it so it's not so spamable...

*Update - Note to self... READ ENTIRE POST BEFORE POSTING!*

Sorry.

rii · Aug 24, 2005, 08:26 AM // 08:26

Just make it elite. Thats all. all this fanciful rubbish about health loss is not necessary. From what ive gathered, the whole point of having elites is to stop overpowered combos by denying them to be paired togetherer. nr and oath shot is the perfect example. So make it elite, and thusly everyone is happy. spamming will be limited to the following:

qz
arcane mimicry
nr
oath shot

:S
but even though mimicry will be but down to 30s recharge your still only getting 'bursts' of nr, as opposed to a continuous stream.
havent read the whole thread but this seems the most down to earth and above all likely solution.

Phades · Aug 24, 2005, 11:50 AM // 11:50

Unfortunatly that setup would cause no break in the skill useage, due to the likelyhood of the team running 2 rangers that are designed to drop nr and do something else. Also the ranger that possessed oath shot only would have a downtime in the time it took to use oath shot to refresh mimicry and cast mimicry again. The ranger that did not have oath shot, would have down time while oath shot was not available.

This would not stop someone from using ?/r with 0 skill in wilderness survival holding NR for the ranger to copy and drop occasionally as needed. This would be due to the fact that it would be the same as another ranger waiting on mimicry's downtime for oath shot and having the normal 60s timer on the spirit. Also, it does not stop the 0 skill wilderness survival from stripping all enchantments and hexes.

rii · Aug 24, 2005, 11:53 AM // 11:53

ah crap, i always forget the actual effect of oath shot. ah well. at least itd be making nr more expensive to set up, albeit not much different in overall effect except a loss of offensive power on the nr team.

Phades · Aug 24, 2005, 11:56 AM // 11:56

The way that skill refresh skills work and work together need to get changed as well though.

banishd · Aug 24, 2005, 12:26 PM // 12:26

the only people who think natures renewal is overpwoered are the people still using smite builds, i laugh whenever i see a smite build since our ranger will put down a natures renewal and bye bye half their damage, without renewal think of how powereful smite builds, healing balls etc would be.

also a good counter = spike trap, cripple + knockdown and last time i checked knockdown = interupt, oh you see the ranger using QZ? good use it to your advantage ,now you can use ur spike trap twice as much, see natures about to pop up? stadn right next to him and drop a spike trap, and no more natures

asdar · Aug 24, 2005, 01:51 PM // 13:51

NR, the team, team won 87 times this weekend. I'm not going to rehash why it's too powerful because anyone who's been around it knows but thank goodness it's going to get nerfed this weekend. I don't know that for sure but I'd be shocked if it doesn't.

It's not just smite builds that are against it.

Just take a look at the game without NR. Would smite teams rule? I don't think so. Spiker teams were doing just as well against smite teams and well balanced teams were too.

Besides that part of my complaint doesn't have to do with the balance as much as it does with the ruination of so many builds. Close to 50% of caster skills are ench or hex this damages half of the caster game. All for 5 power and zero skill. A war/r with full war stats and zero ranger skill points can cast this.

tastegw · Aug 24, 2005, 01:58 PM // 13:58

Quote:

Besides that part of my complaint doesn't have to do with the balance as much as it does with the ruination of so many builds. Close to 50% of caster skills are ench or hex this damages half of the caster game. All for 5 power and zero skill. A war/r with full war stats and zero ranger skill points can cast this.

well said. there are even alot of ppl who use NR and they even think it should be nerfed in some form or another. Atleast balance it imo.

bobrath · Aug 24, 2005, 05:30 PM // 17:30

Phades, thanks for the feedback, most of it makes great sense!

Just continuing my spewing of ideas for modifying NR...

NR removes a total of caster's wilderness survival level/2 enchantments and/or hexes (in total not from each person). So a level 2 casting would only touch 1 enchantment or hex while a maxed Wilderness would remove 8. There's still the effect but it doesn't take down the entire field and in fact because the algorithim of what gets removed you could end up hurting your own team far more then the enemy. Sure repeated casting might eventually take down all enchantments and hexs on the board but the blanket affect will be gone. Heck folks could cast covering hexes or conditions to make sure their "important" ones stay up. Definite change to the meta game there.

Kind of an aside - does QZ affect all cooldown times or just those based on the skill being cast. So if QZ is up and your pet dies... do all your skills recharge faster then if QZ wasn't up?

Makes sense that if NR dropping disabled your bow shots for 10 seconds that it would have no affect on Oath Shot/NR spamming... and going to a much larger delay would make NR unusable (30 seconds). So perhaps have NR disable a single ranger skill (random in your skill list) for 1 minute. Sure that's extreme, but everyone agrees that NR is a pretty potent cast.

I'm not sure if we're understanding one another on the HP loss idea. So let me give an example. Under the premise that "caster loses 5 hp for each enchantment/hex removed", a ranger that initially casts NR against a smiter team would potentially lose 5hp*4(e or h)*8people = 360hp. Each cast after that could take some lesser or greater chunk from the caster. Sure that can be healed... but that big spike of damage could leave the caster open to a follow up attack for death. If the life loss is too easily predictable (or avoidable with prot spirit), have the loss occur when the spirit dies...

Just thoughts.

Thorivol Liadon · Aug 24, 2005, 06:24 PM // 18:24

<sarcasm>

OMG forget NR - don't you relize that EVERYONE is SPAMMING ORSION OF HEALING? ANet has to do something! Orison is way overpowered - its realy getting in the way of my killing stuff! Its almost as if the other team has a right to use skills that make winning hard for me! I don't think we'll ever see a team win the Hall of heroes without Orsion untill ANet nerfs it! Please you have to do something!

</sarcasm>

rii · Aug 24, 2005, 06:35 PM // 18:35

*common sense*

OMG forget that ---, orison doesnt render half of the skills in the game THEREFORE ITS BALANCED FTWWTFARARGRHARGHAGRHAGHRGRA

*ends common sense*

Phades · Aug 24, 2005, 06:36 PM // 18:36

Quote:

Originally Posted by bobrath

NR removes a total of caster's wilderness survival level/2 enchantments and/or hexes (in total not from each person). So a level 2 casting would only touch 1 enchantment or hex while a maxed Wilderness would remove 8. There's still the effect but it doesn't take down the entire field and in fact because the algorithim of what gets removed you could end up hurting your own team far more then the enemy. Sure repeated casting might eventually take down all enchantments and hexs on the board but the blanket affect will be gone. Heck folks could cast covering hexes or conditions to make sure their "important" ones stay up. Definite change to the meta game there.

Similar ideas have been suggeted before and they arent bad. The thing is that something to this effect should occur after enchantments are given realistic cool down times as well. Personally, i would have prefered to see NR add a blackout and heavy cooldown time to all enchantment and hex skills when it gets laid down instead of being the nuclear bomb that it is. It would have been more of a passive counter and denial similar to diversion to be used in conjunction with other enchantment removal tipping the favor back to the rather underpowered targeted enchantment removal options.

Quote:

Originally Posted by bobrath

Kind of an aside - does QZ affect all cooldown times or just those based on the skill being cast. So if QZ is up and your pet dies... do all your skills recharge faster then if QZ wasn't up?

I havent played around with pets while QZ was up and had them die while watching and timing the reset timer.

Quote:

Originally Posted by bobrath

Makes sense that if NR dropping disabled your bow shots for 10 seconds that it would have no affect on Oath Shot/NR spamming... and going to a much larger delay would make NR unusable (30 seconds). So perhaps have NR disable a single ranger skill (random in your skill list) for 1 minute. Sure that's extreme, but everyone agrees that NR is a pretty potent cast.

What really needs to happen, is have the game have stacking logic for refresh effects and not allow them to be compatible with each other. Oath shot could stand to only affect bow skills as well.

Quote:

Originally Posted by bobrath

I'm not sure if we're understanding one another on the HP loss idea. So let me give an example. Under the premise that "caster loses 5 hp for each enchantment/hex removed", a ranger that initially casts NR against a smiter team would potentially lose 5hp*4(e or h)*8people = 360hp. Each cast after that could take some lesser or greater chunk from the caster. Sure that can be healed... but that big spike of damage could leave the caster open to a follow up attack for death. If the life loss is too easily predictable (or avoidable with prot spirit), have the loss occur when the spirit dies...

Either you end up with dead rangers from spamming it to get through all the flak that can be put up, which results in death penalty, or they will invariably remove too many enchantments and one shot themselves, due to an uncapped removal environment that keeps pace with the rate that enchantments and hexes can be applied.

bobrath · Aug 24, 2005, 08:17 PM // 20:17

Quote:

Originally Posted by Phades

Similar ideas have been suggeted before and they arent bad. The thing is that something to this effect should occur after enchantments are given realistic cool down times as well. Personally, i would have prefered to see NR add a blackout and heavy cooldown time to all enchantment and hex skills when it gets laid down instead of being the nuclear bomb that it is. It would have been more of a passive counter and denial similar to diversion to be used in conjunction with other enchantment removal tipping the favor back to the rather underpowered targeted enchantment removal options.

That sounds to me like a brand new spirit. I like the "real" effect of NR - ie its continuous affect on the field. Though the name "renewal" makes me think the skill should remove all hexes/enchantments and return something to the owner instead of making it harder to cast. /me shrugs

Quote:

What really needs to happen, is have the game have stacking logic for refresh effects and not allow them to be compatible with each other. Oath shot could stand to only affect bow skills as well.

Agreed on the first part, but I disagree on the second. Oath shot might need to be reduced in effectiveness more... easily interupted or a greater chance to miss the shot. Rangers already have a bow skill recharge shot.

Quote:

Either you end up with dead rangers from spamming it to get through all the flak that can be put up, which results in death penalty, or they will invariably remove too many enchantments and one shot themselves, due to an uncapped removal environment that keeps pace with the rate that enchantments and hexes can be applied.

But isn't that the idea? Make the choice to keep casting a dangerous one, but even more dangerous when you choose to spam it.

Thorivol Liadon · Aug 24, 2005, 08:30 PM // 20:30

*stating what should be obvious*

Anet does need to fix NR - its not broke. It hurts the caster as much as the enemy. You can't figure out how to counter NR? Try the obvious. Build a team that uses few enchantments and hexes - then kick their butts while they waste time spamming NR which does nothing to you.

*done stating what should have been obvious*

bobrath · Aug 24, 2005, 09:45 PM // 21:45

Thanks for that input... Did you read all 8 pages?

Phades · Aug 25, 2005, 04:27 AM // 04:27

Not likely.

Savio · Aug 25, 2005, 04:53 AM // 04:53

Irrelevant now, since NR is going to be changed in 2 days.

Mithie · Aug 25, 2005, 11:53 AM // 11:53

A good way to nerf NR is to make the ranger err=7 out everytime he casts it.