Energy Management
Originally Published by Sausaletus Rex
Being successful when playing Guild Wars depends on a many things but one of the most fundamental is using your skills. Characters that rely on weapons or otherwise not using skills are playing with one hand tied behind their backs. Every character has eight skills to use and winning is going to hinge on getting the most use out of those eight skills. A simple way of saying something extremely complex because there are many factors involved in your skills as well. But just as skills are fundamental to success so too is the concept of energy fundamental to using skills.
Casting skills, activating them, using them, however you want to put it, for the most part requires energy. In another game you’d call it spell levels or mana or MP, but in Guild Wars, it’s energy. That’s the measure of how much effort is involved in using a skill. Therefore, one way of making sure you’re getting the most from your skills is to make sure you have the energy to cast them as much as possible. That, in essence, is the idea of energy management and that’s the issue we’ll be delving into.
While some skills do not require any energy – notably adrenal skills and signet skills – that much is true, most do take some amount of energy. It’s be the odd skill bar that doesn’t include at least one skill requiring energy. And as long as you’re spending energy there’s a need to manage it.
An important aspect of the energy system to consider at this point is that while characters have a maximum amount of energy they can have at any one particular time, they’re not limited in the amount of energy they can have over time. Energy regenerates over time. If you spend some energy it’ll eventually come back, it’s just a matter of how long you’re waiting. This regeneration is measured in arrows of energy regeneration, commonly known as “pips”. And a single pip of regeneration in your energy bar means that you’ll recover 1 point of energy every 3 seconds.
The goal of successfully managing your energy is to lose less energy over time than you can successfully regenerate. Like your bank account you want what’s coming in to outweigh what’s flowing out. If you have but one pip of energy, ideally, you want to spend less than 1 energy in 3 seconds.
However, you can spend more than 1 energy in 3 seconds because characters have a maximum store of energy. You won’t regenerate past that number but you will regenerate up to it. This means that just with your bank account you can indulge in the occasional deficit spending. You can spend a few hundred dollars on a new TV or a few thousand on a new car even though that’s far more than the amount of money you’re taking in because, hopefully, you have a bit of money in your bank account to start with. You can’t do that indefinitely because eventually you’ll run out of money, but you can splurge when the need arises. So, a character with a single pip can spend more than 1 energy every 3 seconds by tapping on the stores of energy they begin with it’s just she can’t sustain that level of spending. Eventually, spending more than she can regenerate will result in them running out of energy and being unable to cast at all. What regeneration does when you’re sending out more energy than you take in is to put that point off further and further the more pips you add. So, say our one pip character starts with 15 energy and casts enough a skill that costs 1 energy every 3 seconds. That’s the break-even point. Cast more than that and she’ll lose energy, cast more and she’ll never run out of energy. If she increases her casting by using that 1 energy skill every second she’ll be spending 3 energy every 3 seconds - meaning she’ll be running at a deficit of 2 energy over that time or the equivalent of two pips of “de”-generation – you can see by referring to the following table that rather than running out of energy in 15 seconds, she’ll run out of energy in 22 seconds. Every 3 seconds she’ll gain another point of energy and thereby extend her energy bar for a good 7 seconds. It doesn’t matter if she started with 5 energy or 500, she gains an additional 1 energy every 3 seconds and lengthens that energy bar by a similar percentage. If she were to increase her regeneration by a pip or limit her casting to casting that 1 energy skill twice in 3 seconds to be only running a deficit of 1 pip then she can keep casting for about 41 seconds. And that’s the goal of proper energy management; to be able to keep casting longer. It’s perfectly fine to go into deficit spending for a time just so long as it’s for a purpose. You want to spend that energy to buy something important enough to make up for losing it. You don’t want to fritter it away needlessly. Hopefully, you’ll be able to go back to surplus spending, the levels of spending above the equilibrium of the break point where you’re neither losing nor gaining and are actually earning energy but if not you’ve invested your resources in something that matters.
Table 1: Energy Regeneration's Effect on Casting
*Character beginning with 1 pip of regeneration, 15 energy, and casting a 1 energy, 1 second casting time, and instant recharge skill with no aftercast
Of course, there are no characters with 15 energy and no skills with a 1 energy cost, that’s just a simplified example. Energy and even regeneration varies by character. All characters start with at least 20 energy to spend along with 2 pips of regeneration, which can be increase through armors, equipment, and skills. The armor a character wears can include both bonus energy and bonus regeneration. A Ranger will have an extra 5 energy and 1 pip from most of their armor while Elementalists, Mesmers, Monks, and Necromancers – the so-called casters because they all use spells to cast - will have at least 10 energy and 2 pips. Regeneration isn’t available through equipment but energy is, items called foci and staves will grant some bonus energy to your character. Those are innate bonuses, you don’t have to do anything more to get them than to wear the armor or focus to have that bonus. Skills need to be cast, often taking some starter energy to establish but can bestow your character or another character with some extra energy or regeneration. A character’s energy pool – the amount of both energy and regeneration they can call on – is very much determined by their profession. And since energy management is the concern of properly maintaining that energy pool, it’s very much something that different professions deal with differently.
From the above example you can tell that it’s not so much the amount of energy you start with as the amount of energy you can regenerate. Energy determines what you can do in an instant but it’s regeneration that determines what you can do over a prolonged period of time. The following table shows the basic energy and regeneration as well as the amounts of energy a character will regenerate over time based on their profession in order to compare the particulars of each profession’s needs. We’ll leave foci and skill concerns to the side for now because they add yet more complexity to the picture.
*With starter armor and no equipment
As you can see casters have not only 150% of the starting energy of a Warrior but they also regain their energy 200% faster so they have far and away the deepest energy pools. It’s not so much that they can cast more when the battle starts but that over the course of a battle they’ll be able to cast more, too. A caster can recover 30 energy - they’ll completely refresh themselves - in roughly 23 seconds while it takes a drained Warrior 30 seconds to get their 20 energy back.
Of course, Warriors have far less cause to use their energy in the first place as they have access to very economic low cost skills as well as so-called adrenal skills which don’t take any energy to cast at all – adrenal skills are instead controlled by their recharge times which require the character to land “hits” to gain adrenaline – so while a Warrior would have far less success with a caster’s skill bar it’s important to remember that Warriors are designed and built around the fact that they have less energy and it’s not as simple a comparison as “a Warrior will run out of energy faster than a caster”.
Rangers sit comfortably in the middle ground, more regeneration and energy than Warriors but less than casters. They’re further helped out by their primary only attribute Expertise (and since their bonus energy is a function of armor and armor is restricted by primary professions we are talking only about primary Rangers here), which serves to lower the cost skills. Only certain skills – namely attack skills, preparations, shouts, stances, glyphs, and traps basically anything that's not a spell – are affected but those skills are fairly central to anything you’ll want to be doing as a Ranger not to mention avoiding them is to avoid one of the biggest benefits of play as a Ranger so the net effect is to stretch that 25 energy out much further than normal. You don’t regrow energy faster but what Expertise does is to limit the outflow of energy. Rather than spend 10 energy for a skill like Pin Down you’ll spend, say, 5 meaning you have 5 energy to spend elsewhere that you wouldn’t otherwise have.
Expertise keeps the costs down and makes each point of energy - even if you’re not spending it on a skill affected by Expertise – work that much harder.
Even amongst the four caster professions the specifics are very different even though they have the same base energy, bonus energy, and bonus regeneration from their armors. Most obviously Elementalists have the primary only attribute Energy Storage which grants a character bonus energy of 3 for each rank. That it’s base energy means it’s affected by things like Morale Bonuses and Death Penalty. This means that your average Elementalist is going to be walking around with much more energy than everyone else. As you can see here
*With starting armor and no equipment
+Attribute ranks beyond 12 cannot be purchased through attribute points.
At Energy Storage 10 and Elementalist has double the maximum energy of other casters. It’s not uncommon, thanks to foci and their energy boosting items and skills to hear of Elementalists with 80 or more energy. With that much energy an Elementalist has much less to worry about running out of energy quickly as do other professions. They have massive amounts of energy which they can drain off and their ability to keep casting thanks to that massive energy means they’ll have more time to regrow their energy as well further putting off that point at which the well runs dry. Of course, increased maximum energy doesn’t do anything for them when they actually hit bottom, they have no more regeneration than anyone else and if they’re not careful they’ll need to refill their energy pool just like anyone else with poor energy management.
Necromancers also have an energy related primary attribute. Namely, Soul Reaping, which gives them 1 energy per Rank whenever anything dies within a certain range. That’s energy not regenerated energy. When something dies you instantly gain energy equal to your Soul Reaping score.
Table 6: Soul Reaping Bonus by Rank
*Attribute ranks beyond 12 cannot be purchased through attribute points.
That range is large but not infinite and like energy gained from regeneration is lost and useless if it pushes their current energy value past the maximum. So, if you have Soul Reaping of 10 and have spent 15 of your 30 energy to be at a current value of 15 when the first corpse his the ground nearby you’ll immediately gain 10 energy to reach 25 of 30 energy. However, when the next death occurs a second later you’ll again immediately gain 10 energy but since that would mean you’d have 35 out of 30 energy you’ll effectively only gain 5 energy for a full 30 energy. Soul Reaping, then, is hyper-efficient energy regeneration just restoration with a conditional trigger. The practical upshot of this all is that Soul Reaping works to lengthen a Necromancer’s energy bar. As long as you can keep things dying you theoretically cannot run out of energy. This doesn’t mean you can spend energy however you like, though, as it’s often rather hard to time the deaths of your opponents or yourself for maximum benefit making Soul Reaping work exceptionally well when it does work but something you can’t necessarily rely on. Also note that it doesn’t matter what it is that’s dying, you’ll reap souls regardless if it’s your team, the other team, a monster, your minions, a pet, or anything else.
Even Monks have different considerations for their energy pool than others because of their primary attribute, Divine Favor. Unlike Soul Reaping and Energy Storage it doesn’t directly affect energy but what it does do is add 3.2 health per rank anytime you cast a Monk spell on one of your allies. This means that your energy is doing more for you. Each of your Monk skills adds more health even if it wouldn’t normally. And your healing spells now heal for more health per each point of energy. Consider what happens to a decent healing spell when it’s coupled with the Divine Favor bonus. An Orison of Healing is tied to Healing Prayers and will heal someone for 67 health at a rank of 12, which is, although not stellar, a sizeable chunk of health considering how quickly Orison can be recast. A Divine Favor rank of 10 adds 32 health to that Orison meaning that instead of healing for 67 health, you’ll heal for 99.
*Orison of Healing costs 5 energy
That means your skill is now roughly 33% better. You’ve become much more efficient with your usage of energy because your points of energy now buy you a lot more.
Mesmers don’t gain much of anything from their primary attribute, if anything it hurts their energy management. Fast Casting decreases the amount of time it takes to cast a spell – and only a spell – but what that means exactly is not necessarily that you’ll be able to cast more spells than anyone else. That’s because a spell’s casting time is broken up into several parts. There’s the activation time which is the time it takes before a skill takes effect, the moment of activation which is the time in which your skill actually does whatever it does, and the recovery time, which is the time it takes for your character to finish the casting animation and become able to do another action. The moment of activation is obviously instantaneous, you can’t make that instant any faster, and Fast Casting does not affect the recovery time at all only the activation time. Recovery time is usually appreciably large with a spell, though, at least very close to a full second while the activation time is much smaller. Fast Casting lets your spells take effect much sooner but it doesn’t actually allow you to cast many more spells than the next caster so Mesmers won’t be spending their energy much faster than other professions. However, they do have several tools to aid their energy management – as well as to hamper others’ but that’s a topic for elsewhere – because Mesmers have several skills that let them steal or otherwise gain energy when used. This means Mesmers have ways other than regeneration of regaining their lost energy.
There are some generalities to draw from all of that, of course. You want to spend less energy than you take in. You want to let regeneration work for you. You want to limit your deficit spending as much as possible so that you have the energy to continue to cast. You want to time your skills such that you minimize the actual energy they cost at the same time you maximize their impact. It’s just a matter of how each profession goes about it. Elementalists can run at a higher deficit than longer than a Warrior, for example. Elementalists can splurge a lot better than Warriors. While a Warrior cares much more about the recycle times of things making them much better at reducing their costs by properly chaining their skills together in a well-designed order. But, again, it all comes back to skills. Every profession is going to be casting skills and the idea is to get the most out of them. Slotting your skills is another important part of effectively managing your energy. Skills need to be efficient in order for you to have the energy to keep using them. The first concern is that your skills actually work. You can have excellent energy management and it’s not going to help you if you’re not casting skills that help you win. So, start with making sure that your skills actually do something to help your character. A skill can be extremely efficient but it doesn’t matter if it’s not going to add to your strategy.
Beyond what a skill actually does there are three factors that will determine how it helps or hinders you in managing your energy. These being the energy cost, the recharge time, and the casting time of that skill.
The energy cost is easy to understand, of course. Just how much energy you’re going to pay out to use your skill is about as basic a measure of how you’re managing your energy pool as you can find. Are you using a lot of skills that cost 15 energy on a Warrior’s energy budget? Or have you loaded up with 5 en skills with your Elementalist’s Energy Storage of 12? Even skills that cost no energy to use – those signets and adrenal skills – have an impact here. They do cost you energy it’s just that they cost you 0 energy.
Recharge and casting time are a bit less intuitive. But to see how a recharge time can influence your energy management consider the usage of a skill like Order of Pain which costs 10 energy with a 5 second recharge time and one like Strip Enchantment which costs 10 energy with a 20 second recharge time. When you cast Order of Pain you spend 10 energy and you can spend that 10 energy again 5 seconds later. When you cast Strip Enchantment you likewise spend 10 energy but you won’t be allowed to spend that 10 energy again for those 20 seconds. So, in the time it takes to spend 20 energy with Strip Enchantment you’re able to spend 80 energy with Order of Pain. This example, of course, assumes you’re going to be casting both as quickly as you can but the point being that one skill is going to rapidly drain your energy pool while the other isn’t even though they have the same energy cost and the reason this is so is because of how quickly you can reuse them. And how you measure how quickly you can reuse a skill is the recharge timer.
Also note that you’re constantly regaining energy, too, as your skill recharges. You get that 1 energy every 3 seconds per pip no matter what it is you’re doing. So the Necromancer casting Order of Pain and Strip Enchantment has four pips of regeneration and will earn 4 energy every 3 seconds. In the 20 seconds it takes to recharge Strip Enchantment the Necromancer will have recovered just under 27 energy. Or, to put it another way, enough to cover the cost of Strip Enchantment and more besides. This means that you have the capital to spend on other skills without cutting into your ability to recast Strip Enchantment. About 17 energy worth of capital, in fact. Whereas with Order of Pain you’d actually be running a deficit of nearly 13 energy in those same 20 seconds. Strip Enchantment will let you keep casting itself and something else besides while Order of Pain will utterly drain all but those Energy Storage pumping Elementalists in the same time frame.
Casting time is similar in that you keep regaining your energy even as your cast and the time you’ll spend casting a skill needs to be taken into account when figuring out just how much a skill is costing you. When I calculated things for Order of Pain and for Strip Enchantment I ignored their casting times, which are both 2 seconds. During those two seconds, regeneration will also take place and a Necromancer will gain nearly another 3 energy. There’s also an aftercast of .75 seconds where things will be regenerated. So, when repeatedly recasting those skills, it’s the total time from when a spell is completed until it can be completed again or the casting time, the aftercast, and the recharge time, that’s important and that’s known as recycle time. The recycle time for Order of Pain is 7.75 seconds and the recycle for Strip Enchantments is 22.75. That shifts things to regenerating over 30 energy while waiting for Strip Enchantment or a surplus of over 20 energy. Which isn’t really all that much different, all things told, but when you’re trying to save every point of energy you can, it’s not to be ignored. But a Necromancer will actually regenerate just over 10 energy while Order of Pain recycles. So, they actually can just sit there and do nothing but cast Order of Pain. They’ll be incapable of much more without going into deficit spending so considering the casting time of skills can be extremely important in consider what your character can afford to run when you’re going to be casting things repeatedly.
Order of Pain can be used repeatedly then but some skills will tax your regeneration by design. Repeatedly casting Flare, for example, which costs 5 energy and has a recycle time of 1.75 seconds will cost your character 2 2/3rds energy every cast or the equivalent of 8 pips of degeneration. Or, to put it another way, after a minute of that your character will have lost 160 energy. Obviously that’s not something a normal character can do even those Elementalists who’d use Flare with their increased energy pools. Yet, it’s still possible to cast such energy intensive skills. Adding bonus energy to your character is one thing but your character or your teammates can also use skills, which will affect your energy pool. These energy management skills can be of crucial importance, as they’ll either deny your enemies the energy to cast their skills or grant your character the energy to function or better yet, both. There are a host of options available with such skills and every profession has access to some way of managing their energy through skills. Most of such skills cost energy in order to cast in the first place but just as you need to spend money to make money, the point is to gain more energy than you’ll spend casting the skill in the first place. It’s the net effect on your energy that’s important, not the cost of that skill.
The first way skills will impact your energy is through discounts. Some skills function very similar to Expertise in that they’ll cut the energy cost of the skills you’ll use. The Elementalist skill Glyph of Lesser Energy, for example, which takes 5 energy to cast, will reduce the cost of your next spell by 15 energy, saving your character a net of 10 energy. This skill can be used only once every so often, though, but it will save your character 10 energy every 30 seconds or the equivalent of adding a pip of regeneration to your character – provided, of course, you have the time to cast the glyph and are casting spells that cost 15 energy or more. Others work not just on one skill but on several skills, such as the Monk enchantment Divine Spirit, which will reduce the cost of all Monk spells by 5 energy for a period of time. The savings there depends on just how many spells you cast, of course, and also on how costly they are because while Divine Spirit discounts costs by 5 it also sets a minimum price on skills of 8 energy. Skills that cost 10 energy will cost 8, saving 2 energy per cast. Spells that cost 15 energy will cost 10, saving 5 energy. And so on. A much better version of such a discount are the Elementalist’s Attunement skills such as Elemental Attunement, which will grant your character 30% of the cost of any spell linked to any of the Elementalist’s attributes. The trick here is that you need the original cost of the spell in order to cast it but you’ll immediately gain some of that casting cost back. If a spell takes 10 energy, you won’t be able to cast it with only 8 energy in your bar, you’ll need a full 10 even though you’ll wind up with 3 energy remaining after it’s all over. As with Expertise, the point of discounting your skill costs is to stretch your energy further. Using Flare repeatedly with Fire Attunement means that the effective cost of Flare is 3 energy. It’s still going to be draining energy as 3 energy every 1.75 seconds means that the 2 1/3rds energy you’ll gain over that time period just isn’t enough and you’ll still suffer the equivalent of 2 pips of degeneration. You’ll run out but you’ll run out far less quickly than you would just casting Flare alone.
A further way to prevent that loss of energy is through the use of skills that increase regeneration. Another example from the Elementalist lines is Ether Prodigy, which gives your character an additional regeneration of 4 pips or the equivalent of 1 1/3 energy per second. There are drawbacks to using Ether Prodigy, though, as it causes Exhaustion, a condition that lowers your maximum energy capacity. It’s not overly damaging unless you gain a lot of Exhaustion, as your maximum energy will regenerate slowly at a rate of 1 every 3 seconds, the ratio of a pip, but moreso because it only affects your maximum energy not your current energy. A better example is the Necromancer skill Blood is Power. You cannot cast this skill on yourself but you can use it on teammates or have teammates use it on you. When used it gives a character 3~5 pips of regeneration depending on the caster’s attributes for 10 seconds or the equivalent of 10~16 energy. Using skills that boost regeneration is, reasonably, a way of increasing the energy your character will gain over time. The more regeneration and the longer things go, the more energy your character will reap.
Sometimes, though, you character cannot wait to gain energy. Regeneration is income, it represents a resource you’ll eventually gain, but it’s not very liquid. You cannot turn regeneration into a skill, for that you need energy. Gaining energy can be much better than gaining regeneration or than slowly reducing the costs of skills especially the shorter the time frame you’re concerned about. So, other skills will give your character energy right away, as a lump sum. The aforementioned Attunement skills work this way even though they function as discounting skills. Another example would be the Ranger skill Marksman's Wager, which will causes a character to gain energy every time their arrows strike home. The amount is linked to a Ranger’s attribute and there is the downside of losing energy if those arrows miss. Such energy gain can be compared to regeneration just as the spending of energy to recast a skill can be measured in effective degeneration but it has the benefit of being able to use that energy right away in order to quickly cast a new skill. Take, for example, the Mesmer skill Energy Tap. This skill takes five energy with a recycle time of 23.75 seconds (Fast Casting will lessen the lengthy 3 second casting time but it complicates things a bit) and, with Inspiration 12 it will take 13 energy from a target and give that energy to the caster, for a net gain of 8 energy. Over the course of those 23.75 seconds, that means a character recasting Energy Tap is gaining the equivalent of 1 energy every 3 seconds or a pip of regeneration. However, unlike what happens if Energy Tap were to add that 8 energy as regeneration it doesn’t take 24 seconds to have 8 additional energy to use. It takes that 3.75 casting time so the energy can be put to use right away.
Energy Tap isn’t simply a skill that creates energy out of thin air, though. It takes that energy from a target. In essence it steals from one character’s energy pool to add to another. There are many skills that do so and they can be quite effective. That 8 energy that Energy Tap nets a character, after all, is 8 less energy that another character has to spend. Not only does it allow your character to cast more it causes other characters to cast less. And that, after all, is the real point of energy management. You want to create an energy swing, an energy imbalance, or an energy advantage with your character where you’ll have energy to spend while others will be running out of steam. This brings up the dark side of energy management – energy denial. Some skills are designed only to take energy from a character, denying them the energy they need to use most of their skills or hampering their ability to regain it. A skill like Debilitating Shot will strip energy from them directly, just as Marksman’s Wager will gain energy directly. And a skill like Malaise will give a target degeneration just as Blood is Power gives a target regeneration. Such skills don’t directly influence your energy but they serve to wreck the management of your opposition creating an opportunity for you to put your energy to better use than they can.
In summary, the basic goal of energy management is to always have enough energy to cast your skills. That gives your character an advantage and one that can be easily exploited. Whether that’s achieved by denying your enemies their own energy or through careful conservation of your own is just a matter of detail. Energy management is not synonymous with not spending any energy. Energy is a resource and it’s wasted if it’s not spent, after all, so there’s nothing wrong with going into massive deficit spending if you can reap the benefits of your actions. What’s wrong is if you fritter away your energy without regard for the consequences. Proper energy management means that when you spend more energy than you can sustain you’ll be able to recover with ease. It’s a complex subject because of all the ways and methods that go into the care of your energy pool but it’s one players who want to get the most from their characters will need to consider.
Casting skills, activating them, using them, however you want to put it, for the most part requires energy. In another game you’d call it spell levels or mana or MP, but in Guild Wars, it’s energy. That’s the measure of how much effort is involved in using a skill. Therefore, one way of making sure you’re getting the most from your skills is to make sure you have the energy to cast them as much as possible. That, in essence, is the idea of energy management and that’s the issue we’ll be delving into.
While some skills do not require any energy – notably adrenal skills and signet skills – that much is true, most do take some amount of energy. It’s be the odd skill bar that doesn’t include at least one skill requiring energy. And as long as you’re spending energy there’s a need to manage it.
An important aspect of the energy system to consider at this point is that while characters have a maximum amount of energy they can have at any one particular time, they’re not limited in the amount of energy they can have over time. Energy regenerates over time. If you spend some energy it’ll eventually come back, it’s just a matter of how long you’re waiting. This regeneration is measured in arrows of energy regeneration, commonly known as “pips”. And a single pip of regeneration in your energy bar means that you’ll recover 1 point of energy every 3 seconds.
The goal of successfully managing your energy is to lose less energy over time than you can successfully regenerate. Like your bank account you want what’s coming in to outweigh what’s flowing out. If you have but one pip of energy, ideally, you want to spend less than 1 energy in 3 seconds.
However, you can spend more than 1 energy in 3 seconds because characters have a maximum store of energy. You won’t regenerate past that number but you will regenerate up to it. This means that just with your bank account you can indulge in the occasional deficit spending. You can spend a few hundred dollars on a new TV or a few thousand on a new car even though that’s far more than the amount of money you’re taking in because, hopefully, you have a bit of money in your bank account to start with. You can’t do that indefinitely because eventually you’ll run out of money, but you can splurge when the need arises. So, a character with a single pip can spend more than 1 energy every 3 seconds by tapping on the stores of energy they begin with it’s just she can’t sustain that level of spending. Eventually, spending more than she can regenerate will result in them running out of energy and being unable to cast at all. What regeneration does when you’re sending out more energy than you take in is to put that point off further and further the more pips you add. So, say our one pip character starts with 15 energy and casts enough a skill that costs 1 energy every 3 seconds. That’s the break-even point. Cast more than that and she’ll lose energy, cast more and she’ll never run out of energy. If she increases her casting by using that 1 energy skill every second she’ll be spending 3 energy every 3 seconds - meaning she’ll be running at a deficit of 2 energy over that time or the equivalent of two pips of “de”-generation – you can see by referring to the following table that rather than running out of energy in 15 seconds, she’ll run out of energy in 22 seconds. Every 3 seconds she’ll gain another point of energy and thereby extend her energy bar for a good 7 seconds. It doesn’t matter if she started with 5 energy or 500, she gains an additional 1 energy every 3 seconds and lengthens that energy bar by a similar percentage. If she were to increase her regeneration by a pip or limit her casting to casting that 1 energy skill twice in 3 seconds to be only running a deficit of 1 pip then she can keep casting for about 41 seconds. And that’s the goal of proper energy management; to be able to keep casting longer. It’s perfectly fine to go into deficit spending for a time just so long as it’s for a purpose. You want to spend that energy to buy something important enough to make up for losing it. You don’t want to fritter it away needlessly. Hopefully, you’ll be able to go back to surplus spending, the levels of spending above the equilibrium of the break point where you’re neither losing nor gaining and are actually earning energy but if not you’ve invested your resources in something that matters.
Table 1: Energy Regeneration's Effect on Casting
| Time | Total Energy | Energy Lost | Equivalent Energy Gain through Regeneration | Net Effect |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | 15 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 1 | 14 | -1 | 0 | -1 |
| 2 | 13 | -1 | 0 | -1 |
| 3 | 13 | -1 | +1 | 0 |
| 4 | 12 | -1 | 0 | -1 |
| 5 | 11 | -1 | 0 | -1 |
| 6 | 11 | -1 | +1 | 0 |
| 7 | 10 | -1 | 0 | -1 |
| 8 | 9 | -1 | 0 | -1 |
| 9 | 9 | -1 | +1 | 0 |
| 10 | 8 | -1 | 0 | -1 |
| 11 | 7 | -1 | 0 | -1 |
| 12 | 7 | -1 | +1 | 0 |
| 13 | 6 | -1 | 0 | -1 |
| 14 | 5 | -1 | 0 | -1 |
| 15 | 5 | -1 | +1 | 0 |
| 16 | 4 | -1 | 0 | -1 |
| 17 | 3 | -1 | 0 | -1 |
| 18 | 3 | -1 | +1 | 0 |
| 19 | 2 | -1 | 0 | -1 |
| 20 | 1 | -1 | 0 | -1 |
| 21 | 1 | -1 | +1 | 0 |
| 22 | 0 | -1 | 0 | -1 |
Of course, there are no characters with 15 energy and no skills with a 1 energy cost, that’s just a simplified example. Energy and even regeneration varies by character. All characters start with at least 20 energy to spend along with 2 pips of regeneration, which can be increase through armors, equipment, and skills. The armor a character wears can include both bonus energy and bonus regeneration. A Ranger will have an extra 5 energy and 1 pip from most of their armor while Elementalists, Mesmers, Monks, and Necromancers – the so-called casters because they all use spells to cast - will have at least 10 energy and 2 pips. Regeneration isn’t available through equipment but energy is, items called foci and staves will grant some bonus energy to your character. Those are innate bonuses, you don’t have to do anything more to get them than to wear the armor or focus to have that bonus. Skills need to be cast, often taking some starter energy to establish but can bestow your character or another character with some extra energy or regeneration. A character’s energy pool – the amount of both energy and regeneration they can call on – is very much determined by their profession. And since energy management is the concern of properly maintaining that energy pool, it’s very much something that different professions deal with differently.
From the above example you can tell that it’s not so much the amount of energy you start with as the amount of energy you can regenerate. Energy determines what you can do in an instant but it’s regeneration that determines what you can do over a prolonged period of time. The following table shows the basic energy and regeneration as well as the amounts of energy a character will regenerate over time based on their profession in order to compare the particulars of each profession’s needs. We’ll leave foci and skill concerns to the side for now because they add yet more complexity to the picture.
| Profession | Base Energy* | Base Energy Regeneration* | Energy recovered per second* | Energy recovered in 15 seconds* | Energy recovered in 30 seconds* | Energy recovered in 60 seconds* |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Warrior | 20 | 2 | 2/3 | 10 | 20 | 40 |
| Ranger | 25 | 3 | 1 | 15 | 30 | 60 |
| Elementalist, Mesmer, Monk, Necromancer | 30 | 4 | 1 1/3 | 20 | 40 | 80 |
As you can see casters have not only 150% of the starting energy of a Warrior but they also regain their energy 200% faster so they have far and away the deepest energy pools. It’s not so much that they can cast more when the battle starts but that over the course of a battle they’ll be able to cast more, too. A caster can recover 30 energy - they’ll completely refresh themselves - in roughly 23 seconds while it takes a drained Warrior 30 seconds to get their 20 energy back.
| Pips | Note | 1 second | 3 seconds | 5 seconds | 10 seconds | 15 seconds | 30 seconds | 60 seconds |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1/3 | 1 | 1 2/3 | 3 1/3 | 5 | 10 | 20 | |
| 2 | Warrior | 2/3 | 2 | 3 1/3 | 6 2/3 | 10 | 20 | 40 |
| 3 | Ranger | 1 | 3 | 5 | 10 | 15 | 30 | 60 |
| 4 | Caster | 1 1/3 | 4 | 6 2/3 | 13 1/3 | 20 | 40 | 80 |
| 5 | 1 2/3 | 5 | 8 1/3 | 16 2/3 | 25 | 50 | 100 | |
| 6 | 2 | 6 | 10 | 20 | 30 | 60 | 120 | |
| 7 | 2 1/3 | 7 | 11 2/3 | 23 1/3 | 35 | 70 | 140 | |
| 8 | Cast with Ether Prodigy | 2 2/3 | 8 | 13 1/3 | 26 2/3 | 40 | 80 | 160 |
| 9 | Caster with Blood Magic 12 Blood is Power | 3 | 9 | 15 | 30 | 45 | 90 | 180 |
| 10 | Maximum Regeneration | 3 1/3 | 10 | 16 1/3 | 33 1/3 | 50 | 100 | 200 |
Of course, Warriors have far less cause to use their energy in the first place as they have access to very economic low cost skills as well as so-called adrenal skills which don’t take any energy to cast at all – adrenal skills are instead controlled by their recharge times which require the character to land “hits” to gain adrenaline – so while a Warrior would have far less success with a caster’s skill bar it’s important to remember that Warriors are designed and built around the fact that they have less energy and it’s not as simple a comparison as “a Warrior will run out of energy faster than a caster”.
Rangers sit comfortably in the middle ground, more regeneration and energy than Warriors but less than casters. They’re further helped out by their primary only attribute Expertise (and since their bonus energy is a function of armor and armor is restricted by primary professions we are talking only about primary Rangers here), which serves to lower the cost skills. Only certain skills – namely attack skills, preparations, shouts, stances, glyphs, and traps basically anything that's not a spell – are affected but those skills are fairly central to anything you’ll want to be doing as a Ranger not to mention avoiding them is to avoid one of the biggest benefits of play as a Ranger so the net effect is to stretch that 25 energy out much further than normal. You don’t regrow energy faster but what Expertise does is to limit the outflow of energy. Rather than spend 10 energy for a skill like Pin Down you’ll spend, say, 5 meaning you have 5 energy to spend elsewhere that you wouldn’t otherwise have.
| Expertise Rank | Skils at 5 Energy | Skills at 10 Energy | Skills at 15 Energy | Skills at 25 Energy |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | 5 | 10 | 15 | 25 |
| 1 | 5 | 10 | 14 | 24 |
| 2 | 5 | 9 | 14 | 23 |
| 3 | 4 | 9 | 13 | 22 |
| 4 | 4 | 8 | 13 | 21 |
| 5 | 4 | 8 | 12 | 20 |
| 6 | 4 | 8 | 11 | 19 |
| 7 | 4 | 7 | 11 | 18 |
| 8 | 3 | 7 | 10 | 17 |
| 9 | 3 | 6 | 10 | 16 |
| 10 | 3 | 6 | 9 | 15 |
| 11 | 3 | 6 | 8 | 14 |
| 12 | 3 | 5 | 8 | 13 |
| 13 | 2 | 5 | 7 | 12 |
| 14 | 2 | 4 | 7 | 11 |
| 15 | 2 | 4 | 6 | 10 |
| 16 | 2 | 4 | 5 | 9 |
Expertise keeps the costs down and makes each point of energy - even if you’re not spending it on a skill affected by Expertise – work that much harder.
Even amongst the four caster professions the specifics are very different even though they have the same base energy, bonus energy, and bonus regeneration from their armors. Most obviously Elementalists have the primary only attribute Energy Storage which grants a character bonus energy of 3 for each rank. That it’s base energy means it’s affected by things like Morale Bonuses and Death Penalty. This means that your average Elementalist is going to be walking around with much more energy than everyone else. As you can see here
| Energy Storage Rank | Bonus Energy | Total Energy* | Percentile Gain* | Attribute Point Cost | Energy Points per Attribute Points Spent |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | +3 | 33 | 10% | 1 | 3 |
| 2 | +6 | 36 | 20% | 3 | 2 |
| 3 | +9 | 39 | 30% | 6 | 1.5 |
| 4 | +12 | 42 | 40% | 10 | 1.2 |
| 5 | +15 | 45 | 50% | 15 | 1 |
| 6 | +18 | 48 | 60% | 21 | .85 |
| 7 | +21 | 51 | 70% | 28 | .75 |
| 8 | +24 | 54 | 80% | 37 | .65 |
| 9 | +27 | 57 | 90% | 48 | .56 |
| 10 | +30 | 60 | 100% | 61 | .49 |
| 11 | +33 | 63 | 110% | 77 | .43 |
| 12 | +36 | 66 | 120% | 97 | .37 |
| 13 | +39 | 69 | 130% | N/A | + |
| 14 | +42 | 72 | 140% | N/A | + |
| 15 | +45 | 75 | 150% | N/A | + |
| 16 | +48 | 78 | 160% | N/A | + |
+Attribute ranks beyond 12 cannot be purchased through attribute points.
At Energy Storage 10 and Elementalist has double the maximum energy of other casters. It’s not uncommon, thanks to foci and their energy boosting items and skills to hear of Elementalists with 80 or more energy. With that much energy an Elementalist has much less to worry about running out of energy quickly as do other professions. They have massive amounts of energy which they can drain off and their ability to keep casting thanks to that massive energy means they’ll have more time to regrow their energy as well further putting off that point at which the well runs dry. Of course, increased maximum energy doesn’t do anything for them when they actually hit bottom, they have no more regeneration than anyone else and if they’re not careful they’ll need to refill their energy pool just like anyone else with poor energy management.
Necromancers also have an energy related primary attribute. Namely, Soul Reaping, which gives them 1 energy per Rank whenever anything dies within a certain range. That’s energy not regenerated energy. When something dies you instantly gain energy equal to your Soul Reaping score.
Table 6: Soul Reaping Bonus by Rank
| Soul Reaping Rank | Bonus Energy on Death | Attribute Point Cost | Bonus Energy per Attribute Points |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| 2 | 2 | 3 | .66 |
| 3 | 3 | 6 | .50 |
| 4 | 4 | 10 | .40 |
| 5 | 5 | 15 | .33 |
| 6 | 6 | 21 | .29 |
| 7 | 7 | 28 | .25 |
| 8 | 8 | 37 | .22 |
| 9 | 9 | 48 | .19 |
| 10 | 10 | 61 | .16 |
| 11 | 11 | 77 | .14 |
| 12 | 12 | 97 | .12 |
| 13 | 13 | N/A | * |
| 14 | 14 | N/A | * |
| 15 | 15 | N/A | * |
| 16 | 16 | N/A | * |
That range is large but not infinite and like energy gained from regeneration is lost and useless if it pushes their current energy value past the maximum. So, if you have Soul Reaping of 10 and have spent 15 of your 30 energy to be at a current value of 15 when the first corpse his the ground nearby you’ll immediately gain 10 energy to reach 25 of 30 energy. However, when the next death occurs a second later you’ll again immediately gain 10 energy but since that would mean you’d have 35 out of 30 energy you’ll effectively only gain 5 energy for a full 30 energy. Soul Reaping, then, is hyper-efficient energy regeneration just restoration with a conditional trigger. The practical upshot of this all is that Soul Reaping works to lengthen a Necromancer’s energy bar. As long as you can keep things dying you theoretically cannot run out of energy. This doesn’t mean you can spend energy however you like, though, as it’s often rather hard to time the deaths of your opponents or yourself for maximum benefit making Soul Reaping work exceptionally well when it does work but something you can’t necessarily rely on. Also note that it doesn’t matter what it is that’s dying, you’ll reap souls regardless if it’s your team, the other team, a monster, your minions, a pet, or anything else.
Even Monks have different considerations for their energy pool than others because of their primary attribute, Divine Favor. Unlike Soul Reaping and Energy Storage it doesn’t directly affect energy but what it does do is add 3.2 health per rank anytime you cast a Monk spell on one of your allies. This means that your energy is doing more for you. Each of your Monk skills adds more health even if it wouldn’t normally. And your healing spells now heal for more health per each point of energy. Consider what happens to a decent healing spell when it’s coupled with the Divine Favor bonus. An Orison of Healing is tied to Healing Prayers and will heal someone for 67 health at a rank of 12, which is, although not stellar, a sizeable chunk of health considering how quickly Orison can be recast. A Divine Favor rank of 10 adds 32 health to that Orison meaning that instead of healing for 67 health, you’ll heal for 99.
| Divine Favor Rank | Divine Favor Bonus | Healing Prayer's effect on Orison of Healing | Orison's Healing Per Energy* | Total Healing | Total Healing Per Energy* |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | 0 | 16 | 3.2 | 16 | 3.2 |
| 1 | +3 | 20 | 4 | 23 | 4.6 |
| 2 | +6 | 23 | 4.6 | 29 | 5.8 |
| 3 | +10 | 27 | 5.4 | 37 | 7.4 |
| 4 | +13 | 30 | 6 | 43 | 8.6 |
| 5 | +16 | 34 | 6.8 | 50 | 10 |
| 6 | +19 | 38 | 7.6 | 57 | 11.4 |
| 7 | +22 | 41 | 8.2 | 63 | 12.6 |
| 8 | +26 | 45 | 9 | 71 | 14.2 |
| 9 | +29 | 48 | 9.6 | 77 | 15.4 |
| 10 | +32 | 52 | 10.4 | 84 | 16.8 |
| 11 | +35 | 56 | 11.2 | 91 | 18.2 |
| 12 | +38 | 59 | 11.8 | 97 | 19.4 |
| 13 | +42 | 63 | 12.6 | 105 | 21 |
| 14 | +45 | 66 | 13.2 | 111 | 22.2 |
| 15 | +48 | 70 | 14 | 118 | 23.6 |
| 16 | +51 | 73 | 14.6 | 124 | 24.8 |
That means your skill is now roughly 33% better. You’ve become much more efficient with your usage of energy because your points of energy now buy you a lot more.
Mesmers don’t gain much of anything from their primary attribute, if anything it hurts their energy management. Fast Casting decreases the amount of time it takes to cast a spell – and only a spell – but what that means exactly is not necessarily that you’ll be able to cast more spells than anyone else. That’s because a spell’s casting time is broken up into several parts. There’s the activation time which is the time it takes before a skill takes effect, the moment of activation which is the time in which your skill actually does whatever it does, and the recovery time, which is the time it takes for your character to finish the casting animation and become able to do another action. The moment of activation is obviously instantaneous, you can’t make that instant any faster, and Fast Casting does not affect the recovery time at all only the activation time. Recovery time is usually appreciably large with a spell, though, at least very close to a full second while the activation time is much smaller. Fast Casting lets your spells take effect much sooner but it doesn’t actually allow you to cast many more spells than the next caster so Mesmers won’t be spending their energy much faster than other professions. However, they do have several tools to aid their energy management – as well as to hamper others’ but that’s a topic for elsewhere – because Mesmers have several skills that let them steal or otherwise gain energy when used. This means Mesmers have ways other than regeneration of regaining their lost energy.
There are some generalities to draw from all of that, of course. You want to spend less energy than you take in. You want to let regeneration work for you. You want to limit your deficit spending as much as possible so that you have the energy to continue to cast. You want to time your skills such that you minimize the actual energy they cost at the same time you maximize their impact. It’s just a matter of how each profession goes about it. Elementalists can run at a higher deficit than longer than a Warrior, for example. Elementalists can splurge a lot better than Warriors. While a Warrior cares much more about the recycle times of things making them much better at reducing their costs by properly chaining their skills together in a well-designed order. But, again, it all comes back to skills. Every profession is going to be casting skills and the idea is to get the most out of them. Slotting your skills is another important part of effectively managing your energy. Skills need to be efficient in order for you to have the energy to keep using them. The first concern is that your skills actually work. You can have excellent energy management and it’s not going to help you if you’re not casting skills that help you win. So, start with making sure that your skills actually do something to help your character. A skill can be extremely efficient but it doesn’t matter if it’s not going to add to your strategy.
Beyond what a skill actually does there are three factors that will determine how it helps or hinders you in managing your energy. These being the energy cost, the recharge time, and the casting time of that skill.
The energy cost is easy to understand, of course. Just how much energy you’re going to pay out to use your skill is about as basic a measure of how you’re managing your energy pool as you can find. Are you using a lot of skills that cost 15 energy on a Warrior’s energy budget? Or have you loaded up with 5 en skills with your Elementalist’s Energy Storage of 12? Even skills that cost no energy to use – those signets and adrenal skills – have an impact here. They do cost you energy it’s just that they cost you 0 energy.
Recharge and casting time are a bit less intuitive. But to see how a recharge time can influence your energy management consider the usage of a skill like Order of Pain which costs 10 energy with a 5 second recharge time and one like Strip Enchantment which costs 10 energy with a 20 second recharge time. When you cast Order of Pain you spend 10 energy and you can spend that 10 energy again 5 seconds later. When you cast Strip Enchantment you likewise spend 10 energy but you won’t be allowed to spend that 10 energy again for those 20 seconds. So, in the time it takes to spend 20 energy with Strip Enchantment you’re able to spend 80 energy with Order of Pain. This example, of course, assumes you’re going to be casting both as quickly as you can but the point being that one skill is going to rapidly drain your energy pool while the other isn’t even though they have the same energy cost and the reason this is so is because of how quickly you can reuse them. And how you measure how quickly you can reuse a skill is the recharge timer.
Also note that you’re constantly regaining energy, too, as your skill recharges. You get that 1 energy every 3 seconds per pip no matter what it is you’re doing. So the Necromancer casting Order of Pain and Strip Enchantment has four pips of regeneration and will earn 4 energy every 3 seconds. In the 20 seconds it takes to recharge Strip Enchantment the Necromancer will have recovered just under 27 energy. Or, to put it another way, enough to cover the cost of Strip Enchantment and more besides. This means that you have the capital to spend on other skills without cutting into your ability to recast Strip Enchantment. About 17 energy worth of capital, in fact. Whereas with Order of Pain you’d actually be running a deficit of nearly 13 energy in those same 20 seconds. Strip Enchantment will let you keep casting itself and something else besides while Order of Pain will utterly drain all but those Energy Storage pumping Elementalists in the same time frame.
Casting time is similar in that you keep regaining your energy even as your cast and the time you’ll spend casting a skill needs to be taken into account when figuring out just how much a skill is costing you. When I calculated things for Order of Pain and for Strip Enchantment I ignored their casting times, which are both 2 seconds. During those two seconds, regeneration will also take place and a Necromancer will gain nearly another 3 energy. There’s also an aftercast of .75 seconds where things will be regenerated. So, when repeatedly recasting those skills, it’s the total time from when a spell is completed until it can be completed again or the casting time, the aftercast, and the recharge time, that’s important and that’s known as recycle time. The recycle time for Order of Pain is 7.75 seconds and the recycle for Strip Enchantments is 22.75. That shifts things to regenerating over 30 energy while waiting for Strip Enchantment or a surplus of over 20 energy. Which isn’t really all that much different, all things told, but when you’re trying to save every point of energy you can, it’s not to be ignored. But a Necromancer will actually regenerate just over 10 energy while Order of Pain recycles. So, they actually can just sit there and do nothing but cast Order of Pain. They’ll be incapable of much more without going into deficit spending so considering the casting time of skills can be extremely important in consider what your character can afford to run when you’re going to be casting things repeatedly.
Order of Pain can be used repeatedly then but some skills will tax your regeneration by design. Repeatedly casting Flare, for example, which costs 5 energy and has a recycle time of 1.75 seconds will cost your character 2 2/3rds energy every cast or the equivalent of 8 pips of degeneration. Or, to put it another way, after a minute of that your character will have lost 160 energy. Obviously that’s not something a normal character can do even those Elementalists who’d use Flare with their increased energy pools. Yet, it’s still possible to cast such energy intensive skills. Adding bonus energy to your character is one thing but your character or your teammates can also use skills, which will affect your energy pool. These energy management skills can be of crucial importance, as they’ll either deny your enemies the energy to cast their skills or grant your character the energy to function or better yet, both. There are a host of options available with such skills and every profession has access to some way of managing their energy through skills. Most of such skills cost energy in order to cast in the first place but just as you need to spend money to make money, the point is to gain more energy than you’ll spend casting the skill in the first place. It’s the net effect on your energy that’s important, not the cost of that skill.
The first way skills will impact your energy is through discounts. Some skills function very similar to Expertise in that they’ll cut the energy cost of the skills you’ll use. The Elementalist skill Glyph of Lesser Energy, for example, which takes 5 energy to cast, will reduce the cost of your next spell by 15 energy, saving your character a net of 10 energy. This skill can be used only once every so often, though, but it will save your character 10 energy every 30 seconds or the equivalent of adding a pip of regeneration to your character – provided, of course, you have the time to cast the glyph and are casting spells that cost 15 energy or more. Others work not just on one skill but on several skills, such as the Monk enchantment Divine Spirit, which will reduce the cost of all Monk spells by 5 energy for a period of time. The savings there depends on just how many spells you cast, of course, and also on how costly they are because while Divine Spirit discounts costs by 5 it also sets a minimum price on skills of 8 energy. Skills that cost 10 energy will cost 8, saving 2 energy per cast. Spells that cost 15 energy will cost 10, saving 5 energy. And so on. A much better version of such a discount are the Elementalist’s Attunement skills such as Elemental Attunement, which will grant your character 30% of the cost of any spell linked to any of the Elementalist’s attributes. The trick here is that you need the original cost of the spell in order to cast it but you’ll immediately gain some of that casting cost back. If a spell takes 10 energy, you won’t be able to cast it with only 8 energy in your bar, you’ll need a full 10 even though you’ll wind up with 3 energy remaining after it’s all over. As with Expertise, the point of discounting your skill costs is to stretch your energy further. Using Flare repeatedly with Fire Attunement means that the effective cost of Flare is 3 energy. It’s still going to be draining energy as 3 energy every 1.75 seconds means that the 2 1/3rds energy you’ll gain over that time period just isn’t enough and you’ll still suffer the equivalent of 2 pips of degeneration. You’ll run out but you’ll run out far less quickly than you would just casting Flare alone.
A further way to prevent that loss of energy is through the use of skills that increase regeneration. Another example from the Elementalist lines is Ether Prodigy, which gives your character an additional regeneration of 4 pips or the equivalent of 1 1/3 energy per second. There are drawbacks to using Ether Prodigy, though, as it causes Exhaustion, a condition that lowers your maximum energy capacity. It’s not overly damaging unless you gain a lot of Exhaustion, as your maximum energy will regenerate slowly at a rate of 1 every 3 seconds, the ratio of a pip, but moreso because it only affects your maximum energy not your current energy. A better example is the Necromancer skill Blood is Power. You cannot cast this skill on yourself but you can use it on teammates or have teammates use it on you. When used it gives a character 3~5 pips of regeneration depending on the caster’s attributes for 10 seconds or the equivalent of 10~16 energy. Using skills that boost regeneration is, reasonably, a way of increasing the energy your character will gain over time. The more regeneration and the longer things go, the more energy your character will reap.
Sometimes, though, you character cannot wait to gain energy. Regeneration is income, it represents a resource you’ll eventually gain, but it’s not very liquid. You cannot turn regeneration into a skill, for that you need energy. Gaining energy can be much better than gaining regeneration or than slowly reducing the costs of skills especially the shorter the time frame you’re concerned about. So, other skills will give your character energy right away, as a lump sum. The aforementioned Attunement skills work this way even though they function as discounting skills. Another example would be the Ranger skill Marksman's Wager, which will causes a character to gain energy every time their arrows strike home. The amount is linked to a Ranger’s attribute and there is the downside of losing energy if those arrows miss. Such energy gain can be compared to regeneration just as the spending of energy to recast a skill can be measured in effective degeneration but it has the benefit of being able to use that energy right away in order to quickly cast a new skill. Take, for example, the Mesmer skill Energy Tap. This skill takes five energy with a recycle time of 23.75 seconds (Fast Casting will lessen the lengthy 3 second casting time but it complicates things a bit) and, with Inspiration 12 it will take 13 energy from a target and give that energy to the caster, for a net gain of 8 energy. Over the course of those 23.75 seconds, that means a character recasting Energy Tap is gaining the equivalent of 1 energy every 3 seconds or a pip of regeneration. However, unlike what happens if Energy Tap were to add that 8 energy as regeneration it doesn’t take 24 seconds to have 8 additional energy to use. It takes that 3.75 casting time so the energy can be put to use right away.
Energy Tap isn’t simply a skill that creates energy out of thin air, though. It takes that energy from a target. In essence it steals from one character’s energy pool to add to another. There are many skills that do so and they can be quite effective. That 8 energy that Energy Tap nets a character, after all, is 8 less energy that another character has to spend. Not only does it allow your character to cast more it causes other characters to cast less. And that, after all, is the real point of energy management. You want to create an energy swing, an energy imbalance, or an energy advantage with your character where you’ll have energy to spend while others will be running out of steam. This brings up the dark side of energy management – energy denial. Some skills are designed only to take energy from a character, denying them the energy they need to use most of their skills or hampering their ability to regain it. A skill like Debilitating Shot will strip energy from them directly, just as Marksman’s Wager will gain energy directly. And a skill like Malaise will give a target degeneration just as Blood is Power gives a target regeneration. Such skills don’t directly influence your energy but they serve to wreck the management of your opposition creating an opportunity for you to put your energy to better use than they can.
In summary, the basic goal of energy management is to always have enough energy to cast your skills. That gives your character an advantage and one that can be easily exploited. Whether that’s achieved by denying your enemies their own energy or through careful conservation of your own is just a matter of detail. Energy management is not synonymous with not spending any energy. Energy is a resource and it’s wasted if it’s not spent, after all, so there’s nothing wrong with going into massive deficit spending if you can reap the benefits of your actions. What’s wrong is if you fritter away your energy without regard for the consequences. Proper energy management means that when you spend more energy than you can sustain you’ll be able to recover with ease. It’s a complex subject because of all the ways and methods that go into the care of your energy pool but it’s one players who want to get the most from their characters will need to consider.
