Spotlight on Skills #7
Originally Published by Sausaletus Rex
Every so often this column will shine the spotlight on a particular skill or set of skills for an in-depth analysis of just what that skill can do for you and the best ways to make it work. Keep in mind that Guild Wars is still under development and the information in this column is subject to swift and drastic change.
While we could soldier on and pick apart yet another skill here, the recently unveiled and numerous changes to things which were made public lends itself to standing a bit back and gaining some perspective. So, instead of a detailed analysis of something in particular we shall undertake the task of reviewing the changes made to skills in general during:
March BWE Rebalancing
With the changes made to skills, among other things, made public by the latest beta weekend, anyone looking over a skill list is going to note some pretty drastic changes. The, hopefully, full list of changes can be found here on our forums, but let’s start with a view of the ones that should be most apparent.
Ranger Nature Rituals
To start with, let’s review what’s probably the most drastic mechanical change to the game, namely what happened to the Ranger's class of skills known as Nature Rituals. Long a valued part of the Ranger’s toolkit – indeed, you could say that success during the E3 event was in no small way a result of figuring out the best way to use just the limited ritual options which were available then – rituals have undergone several changes as the game has drawn closer and closer to release.
In the beginning, at least as far as the public is concerned, rituals were extremely powerful as they were global enchantments - enchantments which affected each and every character in an area or map and would last upwards of a minute or more, depending on the skill - with no counter. So powerful, in fact, that you could only use them once per whatever map you were partaking of, just as you can now only use a Resurrection Signet. Back then, of course, any character could use any skill thanks to something known as skill gems. These gems when double-clicked would “discharge” and let your character temporarily, for a few hours, learn that particular skill. Once discharged you couldn’t reuse a skill gem to relearn a skill until you had it recharged, which happened when you traded it to another player or used a certain recharging item. The key, though, was that you could use a skill of any profession, not just the two that your character had mastered and that new skill would appear, not on your skill bar as part of your normal eight skills but in a temporary ninth slot, and you could activate your ninth slot through the use of a gem at any time, even inside of a mission. Since rituals were strong and useful enchantments that lasted a long time they were a favorite of many players to “ninth slot”. I know my E3 Warrior/Monk found good use from several rituals, and I’m sure I wasn’t alone.
That all came to a crashing end, of course, with the introduction of a new Ranger attribute called, appropriately enough, Nature Rituals (Which was introduced around the same time as other attributes, Survival and Beastmastery. Remember, this is far in the distant past. So far in fact, that everyone still believe the Ranger’s still unseen and unimplemented primary only attribute would be Stealth.) and all existing rituals and many new ones were lumped together and linked to Nature Rituals, some through their effects, but many simply by their duration. Previously, If a ritual had a flat two minute duration it might now have a duration of, say, 21~360 seconds linked to Nature Rituals. The message was clear; using a ritual in your ninth slot wasn’t going to be something any non-Ranger could put to excellent use.
There were flaws to this approach, of course, as sometimes even a few seconds with some rituals was enough to be worth having as a ninth slot. While at the same time a Ranger could pump an attribute devoted to rituals and nothing else for the sole purpose of making other rituals actually usable. Granted, the attribute point cap was a bit higher in those days but a line of only Nature Rituals was an overly narrow and easily forgettable line, destined to be ignored in favor of other, better and more well rounded skill lines. But another, unaddressed to that point problem was that rituals had no counter. If someone put up a ritual there was no way of removing it, which lent certain rituals a lot of power. With no way to stop them they could overwhelm a strategy, so around the same time, the Mesmer profession got a skill which would remove rituals the way skills that remove enchantments can counter enchantments and hex removal can trump hex removal. That skill, of course, being Unnatural Signet. Since rituals could only be used once that counter had to be pretty costly and narrow in its own right to prevent just one skill from tipping the scales too much the other way even though they had a symmetrical effect, so Unnatural Signet was a skill with a long casting time, a long cooldown, and a brutal side-effect of locking your skills for nearly a minute. In fact, it hasn’t changed much since it was first introduced, so you can just take a look at the current version to get an idea of what the developers thought was an appropriate counter to single use rituals.
The Unnatural Signet wasn’t quite enough, though, and rituals underwent a few more alterations to make them fit. For one, the ninth slot and even the whole skill gem system were taken out of the game, to be replaced by the forerunners to our current skill acquisition system, further preventing non-Rangers from exploiting the advantages of a ritual. For another, the Ranger attributes and skills were shuffled a few times until they arrived at the place we’re at now, where anyone looking at a Ranger’s attributes can tell that there is no Nature Ritual attribute. The idea of a skill line solely for rituals with, perhaps, one or two miscellaneous skills thrown in for good measure was scrapped. The majority of rituals were folded into Survival and the attribute renamed Wilderness Survival, which became a line for improving or supplementing the other talents of a Ranger. Other rituals landed in other skill lines, spreading the ritual mechanic across the Ranger’s skill list. Which, of course, came as a great relief to Rangers who no longer had to spread their attribute points as thin as they had to in order to access those powerful rituals (And more so after the introduction of the primary Expertise which swiftly became absolutely critical for any Ranger plucking a bow, forming the Expertise/Marksmanship foundation for many Ranger builds which still remain. Expertise was eventually extended from merely affecting attack skills to rituals and others, as well, so most Rangers have a lot of points tied up in improving that reduction to skill costs.) and made the Ranger skill list more sensible and synergistic, in general.
A remaining problem, though, was that “once per map” restriction on ritual use. As anyone who’s played the game can attest skills work the same no matter where you are. If you take a skill to the first roleplaying mission the rules governing its use and effect are the same as they are in the Hall of Heroes. It’s your character and the specific tactical situations you find yourself in that matter and alter how that skill can be used, not any arbitrary changes to things like stuns being shortened to be “fair” to other players. The game’s rules are constant and, mostly, consistent (Don’t get me started on how some creatures, like the Guild Lord or “boss” monsters warp the rules and, thus, “cheat”, eliminating that internal consistency and the reassurance that things will always work as you expect them to because, obviously, we’ll be here a while.) so a ritual would last just as long as it said it would. But, of course, not every map would last the same amount of time.
A ritual could last for an entire round in the Arena, or for most of a match in the Tombs, and be useful again the next time but in maps that lasted a lot longer, such as PvE missions or GvG combat, a ritual was merely a temporary and fleeting boost. And while there’s something to be said for having skills excel in one map and not in another on purpose the decision was made that for a mechanic so central and available in a Ranger's skill list it was unacceptable to have it be all but useless in some cases. Such problems still exist, you can look at the options available for a Death Necromancer to see examples of a character who’ll excel some places and falter in others, but to avoid this with rituals, as well as to reduce the overall effectiveness of the Unnatural Signet counter which could take a character using rituals flat out of a game, the idea of their being used once per map was also done away with. Instead, rituals could be cast as many times as a player wanted. They would still last for a long time and affect everyone on the map but they could now recharge and be cast again. To make up for this new twist, rituals would cost an amount of Death Penalty in order to use. 5% per use, to be exact.
Now, Death Penalty reduces the maximum health and energy of a character. So, every use of a ritual cost a character 5% of their totals. Or, roughly 24 health and 1 energy, in addition to the time and energy spent casting it. This was, to a lot of people, a high cost but, personally, I never considered it much of a barrier to things. Death Penalties can be erased through earning experience points so if a ritual was helping me to slaughter things faster then it was worth that slight amount because I’d earn it back eventually. Still, it did put a lot of people off, especially when they cast several rituals without knowing about the Death Penalty and nearly halved their health and energy before they caught on. Being able to recast a ritual, though, created a problem with Unnatural Signet. It still locked skills for an excruciatingly long time but the ritual it just caused to vanish could be swiftly replaced. In essence, all it did was to cost another player another 5% Death Penalty and the time to recast that ritual. Once again, there was very little way of countering a ritual once it was in place.
And that’s the way things were for February’s BWE but, once again, rituals have been revamped and the Death Penalty is gone. Now, instead of affecting every creature on the map a ritual summons a “Spirit”, a ghostly transparent NPC not unlike a Necromancer summons up a minion. These Spirits are rooted to a single spot and will spread their powerful enchantment over any creature that’s close enough to them, much like an Elementalist's Wards or a Necromancer's Wells or, even, the Ranger skill Healing Spring. After an amount of timed determined by the linked attribute, a Spirit will die and its effect will vanish. But, as creatures, these creatures can also be killed to prematurely end their effect – and Spirits are low-level creatures with few hit points that can be easily slaughtered. And that ritual effect can also be avoided by staying out of range of that Spirit. So, opposing teams now have several ways of countering a nature ritual. The recharge timer on ritual skills was also raised to prevent them from being recast as quickly as before.
It’s, obviously, a big change. Rituals are no longer symmetric, affecting everyone equally, and capable of being exploited only if your team is more prepared for their results than the other team. They’re no asymmetric. They affect one side, one group, differently than another. In this case the groups are those in range of the skill and those not, rather than simply your team and the other team, as with another global enchantment Order of Pain. It changes how rituals are used, how rituals must be thought of in order to use effectively, because they’re now much more tactical and situational in their effects. Many rituals have become suddenly much more useful and others have become much less important.
Favorable Winds was a favorite ritual to use in conjunction with preparations to make Ranger attacks more powerful. It was excellent when the other side had no archers of their own but good because you could put it up and range over the whole map with a more powerful and accurate bow shot. Now, it’s less so unless you can keep your enemy in a small enough area so that you’ll always be in range of your Spirit. Not ideal for open field conditions although it can be brutally effective if you can set up choke points and passages your opponent needs to traverse, such as on a King of the Hill map.
But, consider the uses of a ritual I’ve always been a bit keen on, Frozen Soil, which is now a lot more useful to your team. Because that anti-rez field is now AoE rather than global you no longer have to count on the rest of your team not dying in order to mess up the other side. You can, anti-rez camp a few fallen foes, planting that Frozen Soil Spirit nearby so that the other side has to wait for it to vanish or to spend the time eliminating it before they can revive their teammates. Combined with other body-camping techniques like laying multiple traps you can drastically increase the cost of restoring a fallen comrade. And, at the same time, you can have your team be sure to run out of range so that your own rezes are unimpeded. As I said, a lot more tactical, a lot more flexible. The full accounting of just what’s good, what’s great, and what’s “sub-optimal” among the new rituals will have to wait until we’ve all had a bit more experience with them but it’s an intriguing change that should open a lot of options.
Unnatural Signet, though, remains as trashy as it’s been for a long time so there’s still a little island of sanity in the sea of new skill updates. But, let’s press on and look at how another profession has been altered:
Necromancer Blood Costs
Another change with far-reaching implications is the change made to many skills in the Necromancer list. Many Necromancer skills, especially those in Blood Magic although they can be found in every attribute line, have what’s known as a blood cost. To use such skills your character must first give up - “sacrifice” - an amount of health along with the normal costs associated with casting a spell such as energy and the time to cast it. In the past blood costs were fixed and tied to an attribute. For example, the skill Blood is Power used to have a blood cost ranging from 32 health to 134 health. More than that, actually, because 134 health was the blood cost of Blood is Power at a Blood Magic of 12. If your character had Blood higher than that they’d sacrifice more health, equal to 32+(8.5xBlood). The problem there, then, should be obvious. As you increased the linked attribute a skill with a blood cost became more and more costly. Some skills, like Blood is Power had additional variables affected by the linked attribute making them better and stronger as the attribute was raised but many did not, such as Dark Fury. This meant that, perversely, as you raised your attribute these skills became worse. Instead, of course, of the normal way of raising a linked attribute improving a skill leading many Necromancer characters and many builds to figure out ways of keeping their attributes down rather than pumping them up.
The reason for why blood costs were structured such a way lays in the fact that characters gain health and attribute points as they increase in level. If, say, blood costs worked the other way, if Blood is Power sacrificed 134-(8.5xBlood) then a level 6 character with 200 hit points and 25 attribute points would, at best - with a Blood of 6 – would sacrifice 83 health or two fifths of their hit points. And were that character to be crazy enough to try a BiP unlinked they’d lose nearly two thirds of their health. A character with even fewer levels would be even further into the grave. To say nothing of what would happen if a character managed to get Blood of 16 or yet higher – they’d eliminate the blood cost altogether. Having blood costs scale down as attributes raised would have been murderous on low-level characters, causing, perhaps, their players to swear off such skills altogether, and also be too ripe for abuse at high levels as characters could side-step the penalty built into a skill to keep it in balance. Yet, at the same time, having blood costs scale up was a problem, too. Characters do gain a set amount of health meaning that as a character levels up they need to spend more and more health to have a blood cost be suitably imposing and costly. And they gain a set amount of attributes per level meaning their attributes will be raised higher than someone of a lower level, true, but there’s no set way to distribute those points. A level 20 character cannot be assumed to have an attribute rank of 12, certainly not in all their attributes, there aren’t enough attribute points for that.
Rather than scaling as a player advanced in levels, blood costs were something to be played with by allocating points properly. If your character wanted to use Blood is Power or Dark Fury or another Blood skill with such a blood cost and no other skills in Blood then the smartest thing to do was to keep Blood Magic as low as possible, at zero if need be. If your character had more skills from Blood they were interested in using then it was a matter of finding the “sweet spot” where your other skills were usable and your blood costs were still low enough to be tolerable. At no time were you interested in simply maxing out Blood. And, again, at high levels the blood cost was something to side step or otherwise avoid rather than a penalty to keep skills in balance.
The developer’s solution, then, has been to alter blood costs so that rather than a flat amount of health loss determined by a linked attribute that sacrifice is now a flat percentage based on a character’s maximum health. Blood is Power now costs 33% of your maximum health to use. Other blood costs are similar and range from 33% to 20% to 17% to 10% of overall health. So, such skills have a constant cost as your character progresses. They cost the same amount of health, as a percent of your total, when you’re level 1 as they will when you’re level 20. Blood costs are now unavoidable through shuffling around attributes and remain a consistent barrier. Skills that increase your maximum health will also not help your character to diffuse the blood cost of a skill, as it’s a percentage of your current maximum health, not your base maximum health. There’s perhaps something to be said for letting such blood costs be reduced by attributes as they advance – as your character grows stronger they get less imposing – but eliminating the fact that such skills were antithetical to such attribute raising before is probably a more important concern.
Note, though, that this is actually a subtle increase to the blood cost of many skills. Blood is Power would have, at Blood 12, cost 134 health to use or roughly 28% of a level 20 characters health (provided they weren’t using skills or items that further increased their health past 480, of course) but now will cost 33% of that same health or 160 health. It’s an important note because, as before, it’s possible to actually sacrifice your character to death. If your character has 100 hit points and tries to use Blood is Power, well, you’ll have a dead character. It’s now a little easier to do that. You can view a list of blood costs based on health here.
Now, we’ll move on to another wide-reaching alteration to skill lists, one that’s affected just about every profession:
Fractional Casting Times
Yet another change that anyone looking over a skill list is bound to notice involves casting times. Where before one second was the lowest casting time the game would list for any skill now the game can display casting times as fractions. A skill like Power Leak now has a casting time of a quarter of a second listed in its description. This actually isn’t a change at all as skills have long had casting times ranging under a full second it’s just that such casting times were hidden in skill descriptions and required someone to be aware of them or to time them (and believe me, timing a fraction of a second isn’t the easiest thing unless you break out a stop watch and it’s made even trickier when you’re not sure exactly when a spell takes effect or are trying to actually win a match) in order to know their skill was cast a bit faster than reported. And, while we can all be glad that skill descriptions are now more accurate be aware that there’s still an aftercast of 3/4 of a second applied to almost every skill you’ll cast. A skill takes effect at the end of its listed casting time, Power Leak will interrupt a skill at that .25 second mark, but the aftercast is the time it takes to recover before another skill can be used. So, with that still hidden aftercast skills take a bit more time than they say, depending on how your define “casting time”.
Now, there were many more refinements to the skill lists that just those already mentioned. None were, perhaps, as drastic or as apparent at a glance but to someone, well, like me who routinely pours over such information there were some interesting changes made. Some good, some bad, some puzzling, and a few deserving of a second look, so here’s a quick run down of some of the less apparent changes:
Miscellaneous Changes
The Elementalist skills Mind Burn, Mind Freeze, and Mind Shock all received an overhaul. They’re elite, direct damage spells from the Elementalist’s Fire, Water, and Air lines respectively. They interest me because there are very few elites in those lines and the elites tend to be something other than the massive damage dealing nukes that would seem to draw most Elementalists (Instead they tend to be hexes to supplement damage, defensive enchantments, or energy management skills).
Formerly, those three skills worked to cause a massive amount of damage but only if your character had more energy than its target. Since they were quick cast, low cost, relative to the amount of potential damage per energy, and had fairly quick recharge times they were serviceable, especially given that a primary Elementalist with Energy Storage was going to be the likely winner in any energy amount contest. However, they did absolutely nothing when your character had less energy than a target. Now, that damage is split. They deal an amount of damage, linked to the appropriate attribute, regardless, and then deal that damage again if your character has more energy. Effectively, that damage is doubled and you get a nice side-effect, too, as Mind Shock will cause knockdown, Mind Freeze will snare, and Mind Burn will set a target alight for a bit more damage should you get that doubled damage. Their costs were raised, though, to compensate for this fact. Mind Shock costs ten energy with a recharge of ten seconds. Mind Freeze is ten energy and Mind Burn is fifteen, both with twenty seconds to recharge. They’re all still quick with one second casting times and can deal a respectable amount of damage.
For example, compare Mind Shock with Lightning Strike. Mind Shock is, of course, ten energy, one second casting, and ten second recharge time for - at Air Magic of 12 - 42 damage, doubled to 84 damage with knock down if you have more energy. Lightning Strike is five energy, one second casting, and five seconds recharge for 41 damage. Now, that’s burst damage (damage divided by the time it takes to cause it) of roughly 24 each – Mind Shock will do 48 with more energy – before armor (Lightning damage skills have 25% armor penetration so you’ll do a bit more damage than expected but there’s no difference between these two, only when comparing, say, Mind Shock with Mind Burn) and the damage is therefore about the same. Mind Shock can be a lot higher and will cause knockdown, not to be overlooked, but it’s also elite, you can’t use it as frequently as Lightning Strike, and it causes Exhaustion, too. Exhaustion lowers your maximum energy so what it means for these skills is that you won’t be able to keep pounding away at someone with your higher energy forever, although the higher recharge makes this a bit less of a concern. Somehow, I expect a bit more from an elite slot, although if you’re playing a straight nuker and need another quick damaging skill to add to your build, it fits. I’d grab Water Trident over Mind Freeze and Lightning Surge over Mind Shock but, like a Warrior looking for an attack skill elite, it’s not like you have a lot of options.
A change that’s much more of a useful improvement was the shift of a few Warrior skills from being energy based to adrenaline based. Some, like [Battle Rage had their adrenal costs increased. But both Watch Yourself! and Bonetti's Defense became adrenal skills. It’s a great change to Watch Yourself, a skill I’ve long been fond of – to the point of trying to figure out some way of keeping it out of Tactics so I wouldn’t have to delve into that line of skills – because of something I’ve brought up in the past: efficiency.
Watch Yourself gives your character and any nearby characters a boost to armor for a set duration. +20AL, to be precise, which works out to roughly a 25% drop in any before armor damage your character suffers (The slide-ruler squad will be quick to point out that it’s not quite 25% because of the way things work but it’s close enough that on all but the biggest of hits you won’t notice the difference - +40AL halves your damage, half that is good for a quarter, it’s not perfectly accurate but it’s a lot easier to remember.), so it’s not a massively powerful buff but it’s a good little boost for a tank to make their healer’s job a lot easier.
Before being an adrenal skill, Watch Yourself cost five energy with a recharge time of fifteen seconds, in other words it would cost your character one energy every three seconds to keep it running constantly or the equivalent of a pip of regeneration, and that’s quite a lot for a primary Warrior character. As an adrenal skill there’s now no energy cost associated with the skill so as long as you’re fighting hard, making those hits to charge adren, it’s essentially free to keep recasting, especially since, as a shout, Watch Yourself has no casting time at all. But, more than that, it’s easy not just to keep recasting it but now to keep recasting it often enough to have it up constantly. It has a duration of five to ten seconds linked to Tactics. Before, that meant you could, if you maxed out your Tactics have it up for ten out of fifteen seconds, or 66% of the time, unlinked it was 33%. That’s its efficiency, the percentage of time you gained the benefit of that additional armor, and it’s a key consideration when looking at a buff like Watch Yourself!. Some buffs are useful with a low efficiency. If, say, Watch Yourself! created some kind of shield that absorbed a set amount of damage, say 50~100 points of damage linked to Tactics, then what matters is how quickly that damage is incoming not necessarily how often you can keep that skill up. All you need is to take less damage than the shield would absorb during the time it took to renew it and you’d be fine, if you took more damage during that time then you can’t do much about it. There are, of course, no such skills in Guild Wars but there are skills which will, like Reversal of Fortune, absorb a single hit or grant energy and other things where the point isn’t constant coverage but just what you get out of that coverage where it’s up. Watch Yourself! and skills like it, on the other hand, have a consistent benefit that doesn’t change. You get that +20AL no matter how many people are attacking you, unlike a skill that would absorb a set amount of damage, so it’s better the more efficient it can be. The more time you have it up, the less damage you’ll take. Now, since it has a low adrenal charge of four, Watch Yourself! reaches and even passes that point of 100% efficiency where, by recasting it, you can remain under its protective umbrella indefinitely. Four strikes of adrenal takes a sword or an axe just over five seconds to gain, so that’s the base recharge time now. Simply put, without a drop in Tactics, I can keep running Watch Yourself on a tank as long as I need. I can’t buff it before heading into battle anymore and using it alongside other adrenal skills increases the recharge time, true, but I can use any number of techniques to increase my adrenal gain or just pump up Tactics so I don’t have to be so precise with my timing.
Bonetti’s is an even better example of a massive increase in efficiency to a buff. Before it had a full minute recharge time while it lasted for only five to ten seconds, linked to Tactics, an efficiency of 8~16%, even though it could be quite useful over that time frame. Now, with an adrenal charge of eight, which is about eleven seconds to a sword or axe alone, it’s a lot more efficient – about 45~90% before getting into playing around with adrenaline to make it better. And, it no longer costs any energy to use and since it’s a skill that will net your character some energy when used – you gain five energy every attack you block – it’s now a lot easier to use it to recharge your energy in addition to providing that protection. It does create a bit of a problem, as it was a popular skill for secondary Warriors to use in order to gain that energy. Based on spending energy it could be used whenever, if only briefly, but now it requires a character to attack to gain that adrenaline before it can be used so it can no longer be used by a character that’s not interested in constantly attacking the way it once could. A prime example of this would be the ready-made PvP build, the Protection Healer, where Bonetti’s was once used as both defense and cheap and dirty energy management on a character who wanted to heal away and was likely to get swarmed by Warriors. Now, unless you want to spend the time attacking to charge it up or have some other way of gaining adrenaline, it’s worthless, as you’ll never get to use it.
Other Warrior buffs got an increase to their efficiency without becoming adrenal, though. Deadly Riposte was lowered to a ten second recharge from thirty seconds, at five energy it now costs one energy every two seconds to keep running and, though it has 80% efficiency with its eight second duration it’s only good for the first melee attack against your character, so it’s one of those skills where it’s not so much efficient coverage but being able to recast it rapidly that matters. It can help a bit although it’s something I’d pass by unless I was interested in dueling Warriors and even then there are better options. But something like Disciplined Stance which only ends on the use of an adrenal skill now, can be used for non-fighting casters in place of Bonetti’s. It’s still at that 8~16% efficiency rate but that’s better than the nothing a caster relying on Bonetti’s would gain.
One last skill to note from the Warrior list before we move on. Fear Me! turned a few heads lately as an efficient and potentially nasty way of denying an opponent energy through wrecking their regeneration. It was reduced in effectiveness going from draining one to six energy, linked to Tactics, every use to only one to three energy. Like Watch Yourself, it’s a four adrenal charge skill so you can recast it every five or so seconds. At a maximum of six energy it was enough to drain more than any un-buffed character could regenerate over that time frame and those tried and tested ways of improving adrenal gain made it only more costly, pushing it from canceling out regeneration into the realm of actually causing degeneration. With an AoE effect for no energy it was extremely effective at whittling away a caster’s energy supply. At a maximum of three energy it’s just below what a character can regenerate, meaning that an opponent can get enough energy to cast a few things although you will be putting a big roadblock in the path of their regeneration. It’s still a good skill as you can have more than one Warrior using it to stack the effects. Two Warriors can drain six energy every five second, three can drain nine energy, and so on, and they can recharge Fear Me! as they beat away on their foes so it’s still something to look into it’s just no longer sickeningly good.
And, finally, I’ll mention the change to another favorite whipping boy, Ether Lord. Many people seem to like this skill and try to use it for whatever reason and the word for those people is “prey” because someone using such a poor skill is usually going to be easy enough to beat. Anyhow, the cost for Ether Lord was lowered from ten energy to five and I’m afraid it hasn’t changed my opinion of it at all. It will give your character, at best, three pips of regeneration for nine seconds while giving your target the same amount of energy degeneration.
Now, three pips of energy is worth one energy every second or nine energy over the duration of Ether Lord. You gain nine energy and your opponent loses out on nine energy. And you can spend two seconds, nearly three with aftercast, every twenty seconds to cause that swing of energy. Of course, it’s not really a full swing of eighteen energy because Ether Lord has a casting cost. When you cast Ether Lord you don’t just pay five energy. You pay five energy and “lose all energy”, that means Ether Lord can only be cast when you have at least five energy but it actually costs all your current energy. Which leaves with nine energy total once it’s all over. As the kids say, “big freaking whoop”. All lowering the energy cost has done is to let you cast it when you have a bit less energy than before but you still wind up with only nine energy. Ether Lord, perhaps, has some use in eliminating the regeneration of a target and improving your own regeneration but even ignoring the possibility of that hex being removed it pales in comparison to the ability of other Inspiration skills to swing and deny energy. Energy Tap, for example, will net your character up to eight energy, cost your opponent thirteen energy or the equivalent of two pips of regeneration, and cause a swing of 21 energy in an instant as opposed to over nine seconds with the same recharge time and only a second longer casting time than Ether Lord to say nothing of Energy Drain or Power Drain or Channeling or others. And that’s before you take into account that using Ether Lord will cost you all you existing energy – which sinks it from marginal to avoidable.
There are plenty of other changes to discuss but they’re probably deserving of their own space so from now we’ll move from the review desk to the corrections office and turn things over to the…
Truth Squad
Which is really just me but it sounds impressive, doesn’t it? In any event, there was an ever-present danger to starting up a column such as this one during the beta testing phase of the game. Naturally, that’s the fact that skills can be reviewed and then be drastically changed rending past columns useless. And, naturally, that’s just what happened over the past weekend. So, in lieu of going back and re-editing past columns to be completely accurate, I’m going to give a quick look at the changes and corrections to any skills that have fallen under the harsh glare of the Spotlight here. Perhaps I’ll get around to updating the past Spotlights one day, but just not yet, especially as there’s nothing keeping the devs from altering those skills again while we’re all not looking. Fortunately, this time around there weren’t all that many changes to contend with, and the vast majority of statements made in past Spotlights are still valid. There are a few details changed but the tactics and techniques for those skills remain the same. In fact, of the past six Spotlights featuring a total of twelve skills only two changes of any note were made.
The first and the largest change was made to Skull Crack, the very first Spotlight. That change, of course, was the shift of Skull Crack from being linked to Tactics to being an unlinked, attributeless skill. And it was achieved through the simple expedient of changing the duration of Skull Crack’s imparted Dazed condition from 5~17 seconds varied by Tactics to a flat 15 seconds. Everything else about the skill remains the same from the elite status to the high adrenal cost so the same techniques explored in that first Spotlight hold true. You want to use it against casters to shut down their spell casting ability, you want to find a way to charge up that adrenaline as rapidly as you can, and you need to be in melee range to use it. What’s changed, though, is that you no longer need any Tactics to make that Dazed last for an appreciable length of time. Skull Crack now offers excellent disruption to any character geared towards attacking quickly and keeping in weapon range – in other words, any melee character – so if your character has an elite slot free you could do far worse than to Daze a caster and shut down their spell-casting ability for a long fifteen seconds. It’s still an elite skill meaning it’s a difficult choice to make but it’s now something any melee character can make the most of, no longer just those who’ve dabbled in the admittedly barren skill line of Tactics. Conditions can be removed, though, and there are skills your target can cast which won’t be affected by the Dazed condition at all, which is something to keep in mind considering how much effort you’ll need to go through to inflict it. But, for a melee character focused on disruption it’s one of the best elites available.
The other change occurred with the subject of the second Spotlight, Flourish. A small change, perhaps, but one that opens up a lot of possibilities. Flourish still only works with attack skills so it’s limited to those characters which want to use those skills and, of course, is best when a character has a lot of attack skills to recharge all at once, as it did previously. Before, though, Flourish was a sword skill, it required a sword in order to use. Now, it’s simply a skill. You can use it no matter what weapon your character is wielding. This means that your Axe Warrior or your Hammer Warrior or even your bow-using Ranger/Warrior doesn’t have to deal with swapping a sword in and out in order to use Flourish. So, of course, it’s now a lot easier to fit into a build. It should be popular with Hammer Warriors, given their lengthy recharge times, for one.
Also, as long as I’m updating past skills, there was a bit of confusion on the message board about whether or not I was correct in the third Spotlight (Honestly, it only seems like I’m going in order, this is the last update, I swear) about the mechanics of Defy and Endure Pain. The issue raised was whether the pain pair acted as I claimed, as a temporary boost to current and maximum health which disappeared completely once the skill elapsed or if it raised maximum health and when a skill ended it would drop maximum health by that amount but current health only as a percentage of what it was, which, of course, is a critical question when losing a flat amount of health would drop a character below 1 health which, of course, losing a percentage couldn’t. In other words, if you gained 200 health from the pain pair to reach 400/680 health when it ended would you be at 200/480 health or roughly 280/400? After doing some testing of these skills – not, I’ll add, particularly in-depth or thorough testing, I just happened to throw them on my build on a trip to the Arena – I’m fairly confident that I was correct with my earlier statements. The pain pair, like the energy added from a focus or a staff, is a bonus and one that disappears completely once taken away. This is different from the way a skill like Demonic Flesh works, of course, which is where the confusion began. Demonic Flesh is a Blood Magic skill that requires a blood cost to raise a character’s maximum health. Unlike the pain pair, current health seems to be unaffected. In other words, you’ll lose some health in order to increase your health as a percentage – It’s a flat amount tied to Blood Magic that you’ll raise your health by but the effect is to increase your health by a set percentage, depending on your base maximum health, if you heal while that raised limit is in place when Demonic Flesh ends you’ll drop your maximum health down by that same set percentage, which will also affect your current health. If you gain 25% or 120 health to reach, say, 400/600 health and then gain 100 health you’ll be at 400/480 when it ends, not 380/480. Again, not rigorously tested, but that was the result I found.
While we could soldier on and pick apart yet another skill here, the recently unveiled and numerous changes to things which were made public lends itself to standing a bit back and gaining some perspective. So, instead of a detailed analysis of something in particular we shall undertake the task of reviewing the changes made to skills in general during:
March BWE Rebalancing
With the changes made to skills, among other things, made public by the latest beta weekend, anyone looking over a skill list is going to note some pretty drastic changes. The, hopefully, full list of changes can be found here on our forums, but let’s start with a view of the ones that should be most apparent.
Ranger Nature Rituals
To start with, let’s review what’s probably the most drastic mechanical change to the game, namely what happened to the Ranger's class of skills known as Nature Rituals. Long a valued part of the Ranger’s toolkit – indeed, you could say that success during the E3 event was in no small way a result of figuring out the best way to use just the limited ritual options which were available then – rituals have undergone several changes as the game has drawn closer and closer to release.
In the beginning, at least as far as the public is concerned, rituals were extremely powerful as they were global enchantments - enchantments which affected each and every character in an area or map and would last upwards of a minute or more, depending on the skill - with no counter. So powerful, in fact, that you could only use them once per whatever map you were partaking of, just as you can now only use a Resurrection Signet. Back then, of course, any character could use any skill thanks to something known as skill gems. These gems when double-clicked would “discharge” and let your character temporarily, for a few hours, learn that particular skill. Once discharged you couldn’t reuse a skill gem to relearn a skill until you had it recharged, which happened when you traded it to another player or used a certain recharging item. The key, though, was that you could use a skill of any profession, not just the two that your character had mastered and that new skill would appear, not on your skill bar as part of your normal eight skills but in a temporary ninth slot, and you could activate your ninth slot through the use of a gem at any time, even inside of a mission. Since rituals were strong and useful enchantments that lasted a long time they were a favorite of many players to “ninth slot”. I know my E3 Warrior/Monk found good use from several rituals, and I’m sure I wasn’t alone.
That all came to a crashing end, of course, with the introduction of a new Ranger attribute called, appropriately enough, Nature Rituals (Which was introduced around the same time as other attributes, Survival and Beastmastery. Remember, this is far in the distant past. So far in fact, that everyone still believe the Ranger’s still unseen and unimplemented primary only attribute would be Stealth.) and all existing rituals and many new ones were lumped together and linked to Nature Rituals, some through their effects, but many simply by their duration. Previously, If a ritual had a flat two minute duration it might now have a duration of, say, 21~360 seconds linked to Nature Rituals. The message was clear; using a ritual in your ninth slot wasn’t going to be something any non-Ranger could put to excellent use.
There were flaws to this approach, of course, as sometimes even a few seconds with some rituals was enough to be worth having as a ninth slot. While at the same time a Ranger could pump an attribute devoted to rituals and nothing else for the sole purpose of making other rituals actually usable. Granted, the attribute point cap was a bit higher in those days but a line of only Nature Rituals was an overly narrow and easily forgettable line, destined to be ignored in favor of other, better and more well rounded skill lines. But another, unaddressed to that point problem was that rituals had no counter. If someone put up a ritual there was no way of removing it, which lent certain rituals a lot of power. With no way to stop them they could overwhelm a strategy, so around the same time, the Mesmer profession got a skill which would remove rituals the way skills that remove enchantments can counter enchantments and hex removal can trump hex removal. That skill, of course, being Unnatural Signet. Since rituals could only be used once that counter had to be pretty costly and narrow in its own right to prevent just one skill from tipping the scales too much the other way even though they had a symmetrical effect, so Unnatural Signet was a skill with a long casting time, a long cooldown, and a brutal side-effect of locking your skills for nearly a minute. In fact, it hasn’t changed much since it was first introduced, so you can just take a look at the current version to get an idea of what the developers thought was an appropriate counter to single use rituals.
The Unnatural Signet wasn’t quite enough, though, and rituals underwent a few more alterations to make them fit. For one, the ninth slot and even the whole skill gem system were taken out of the game, to be replaced by the forerunners to our current skill acquisition system, further preventing non-Rangers from exploiting the advantages of a ritual. For another, the Ranger attributes and skills were shuffled a few times until they arrived at the place we’re at now, where anyone looking at a Ranger’s attributes can tell that there is no Nature Ritual attribute. The idea of a skill line solely for rituals with, perhaps, one or two miscellaneous skills thrown in for good measure was scrapped. The majority of rituals were folded into Survival and the attribute renamed Wilderness Survival, which became a line for improving or supplementing the other talents of a Ranger. Other rituals landed in other skill lines, spreading the ritual mechanic across the Ranger’s skill list. Which, of course, came as a great relief to Rangers who no longer had to spread their attribute points as thin as they had to in order to access those powerful rituals (And more so after the introduction of the primary Expertise which swiftly became absolutely critical for any Ranger plucking a bow, forming the Expertise/Marksmanship foundation for many Ranger builds which still remain. Expertise was eventually extended from merely affecting attack skills to rituals and others, as well, so most Rangers have a lot of points tied up in improving that reduction to skill costs.) and made the Ranger skill list more sensible and synergistic, in general.
A remaining problem, though, was that “once per map” restriction on ritual use. As anyone who’s played the game can attest skills work the same no matter where you are. If you take a skill to the first roleplaying mission the rules governing its use and effect are the same as they are in the Hall of Heroes. It’s your character and the specific tactical situations you find yourself in that matter and alter how that skill can be used, not any arbitrary changes to things like stuns being shortened to be “fair” to other players. The game’s rules are constant and, mostly, consistent (Don’t get me started on how some creatures, like the Guild Lord or “boss” monsters warp the rules and, thus, “cheat”, eliminating that internal consistency and the reassurance that things will always work as you expect them to because, obviously, we’ll be here a while.) so a ritual would last just as long as it said it would. But, of course, not every map would last the same amount of time.
A ritual could last for an entire round in the Arena, or for most of a match in the Tombs, and be useful again the next time but in maps that lasted a lot longer, such as PvE missions or GvG combat, a ritual was merely a temporary and fleeting boost. And while there’s something to be said for having skills excel in one map and not in another on purpose the decision was made that for a mechanic so central and available in a Ranger's skill list it was unacceptable to have it be all but useless in some cases. Such problems still exist, you can look at the options available for a Death Necromancer to see examples of a character who’ll excel some places and falter in others, but to avoid this with rituals, as well as to reduce the overall effectiveness of the Unnatural Signet counter which could take a character using rituals flat out of a game, the idea of their being used once per map was also done away with. Instead, rituals could be cast as many times as a player wanted. They would still last for a long time and affect everyone on the map but they could now recharge and be cast again. To make up for this new twist, rituals would cost an amount of Death Penalty in order to use. 5% per use, to be exact.
Now, Death Penalty reduces the maximum health and energy of a character. So, every use of a ritual cost a character 5% of their totals. Or, roughly 24 health and 1 energy, in addition to the time and energy spent casting it. This was, to a lot of people, a high cost but, personally, I never considered it much of a barrier to things. Death Penalties can be erased through earning experience points so if a ritual was helping me to slaughter things faster then it was worth that slight amount because I’d earn it back eventually. Still, it did put a lot of people off, especially when they cast several rituals without knowing about the Death Penalty and nearly halved their health and energy before they caught on. Being able to recast a ritual, though, created a problem with Unnatural Signet. It still locked skills for an excruciatingly long time but the ritual it just caused to vanish could be swiftly replaced. In essence, all it did was to cost another player another 5% Death Penalty and the time to recast that ritual. Once again, there was very little way of countering a ritual once it was in place.
And that’s the way things were for February’s BWE but, once again, rituals have been revamped and the Death Penalty is gone. Now, instead of affecting every creature on the map a ritual summons a “Spirit”, a ghostly transparent NPC not unlike a Necromancer summons up a minion. These Spirits are rooted to a single spot and will spread their powerful enchantment over any creature that’s close enough to them, much like an Elementalist's Wards or a Necromancer's Wells or, even, the Ranger skill Healing Spring. After an amount of timed determined by the linked attribute, a Spirit will die and its effect will vanish. But, as creatures, these creatures can also be killed to prematurely end their effect – and Spirits are low-level creatures with few hit points that can be easily slaughtered. And that ritual effect can also be avoided by staying out of range of that Spirit. So, opposing teams now have several ways of countering a nature ritual. The recharge timer on ritual skills was also raised to prevent them from being recast as quickly as before.
It’s, obviously, a big change. Rituals are no longer symmetric, affecting everyone equally, and capable of being exploited only if your team is more prepared for their results than the other team. They’re no asymmetric. They affect one side, one group, differently than another. In this case the groups are those in range of the skill and those not, rather than simply your team and the other team, as with another global enchantment Order of Pain. It changes how rituals are used, how rituals must be thought of in order to use effectively, because they’re now much more tactical and situational in their effects. Many rituals have become suddenly much more useful and others have become much less important.
Favorable Winds was a favorite ritual to use in conjunction with preparations to make Ranger attacks more powerful. It was excellent when the other side had no archers of their own but good because you could put it up and range over the whole map with a more powerful and accurate bow shot. Now, it’s less so unless you can keep your enemy in a small enough area so that you’ll always be in range of your Spirit. Not ideal for open field conditions although it can be brutally effective if you can set up choke points and passages your opponent needs to traverse, such as on a King of the Hill map.
But, consider the uses of a ritual I’ve always been a bit keen on, Frozen Soil, which is now a lot more useful to your team. Because that anti-rez field is now AoE rather than global you no longer have to count on the rest of your team not dying in order to mess up the other side. You can, anti-rez camp a few fallen foes, planting that Frozen Soil Spirit nearby so that the other side has to wait for it to vanish or to spend the time eliminating it before they can revive their teammates. Combined with other body-camping techniques like laying multiple traps you can drastically increase the cost of restoring a fallen comrade. And, at the same time, you can have your team be sure to run out of range so that your own rezes are unimpeded. As I said, a lot more tactical, a lot more flexible. The full accounting of just what’s good, what’s great, and what’s “sub-optimal” among the new rituals will have to wait until we’ve all had a bit more experience with them but it’s an intriguing change that should open a lot of options.
Unnatural Signet, though, remains as trashy as it’s been for a long time so there’s still a little island of sanity in the sea of new skill updates. But, let’s press on and look at how another profession has been altered:
Necromancer Blood Costs
Another change with far-reaching implications is the change made to many skills in the Necromancer list. Many Necromancer skills, especially those in Blood Magic although they can be found in every attribute line, have what’s known as a blood cost. To use such skills your character must first give up - “sacrifice” - an amount of health along with the normal costs associated with casting a spell such as energy and the time to cast it. In the past blood costs were fixed and tied to an attribute. For example, the skill Blood is Power used to have a blood cost ranging from 32 health to 134 health. More than that, actually, because 134 health was the blood cost of Blood is Power at a Blood Magic of 12. If your character had Blood higher than that they’d sacrifice more health, equal to 32+(8.5xBlood). The problem there, then, should be obvious. As you increased the linked attribute a skill with a blood cost became more and more costly. Some skills, like Blood is Power had additional variables affected by the linked attribute making them better and stronger as the attribute was raised but many did not, such as Dark Fury. This meant that, perversely, as you raised your attribute these skills became worse. Instead, of course, of the normal way of raising a linked attribute improving a skill leading many Necromancer characters and many builds to figure out ways of keeping their attributes down rather than pumping them up.
The reason for why blood costs were structured such a way lays in the fact that characters gain health and attribute points as they increase in level. If, say, blood costs worked the other way, if Blood is Power sacrificed 134-(8.5xBlood) then a level 6 character with 200 hit points and 25 attribute points would, at best - with a Blood of 6 – would sacrifice 83 health or two fifths of their hit points. And were that character to be crazy enough to try a BiP unlinked they’d lose nearly two thirds of their health. A character with even fewer levels would be even further into the grave. To say nothing of what would happen if a character managed to get Blood of 16 or yet higher – they’d eliminate the blood cost altogether. Having blood costs scale down as attributes raised would have been murderous on low-level characters, causing, perhaps, their players to swear off such skills altogether, and also be too ripe for abuse at high levels as characters could side-step the penalty built into a skill to keep it in balance. Yet, at the same time, having blood costs scale up was a problem, too. Characters do gain a set amount of health meaning that as a character levels up they need to spend more and more health to have a blood cost be suitably imposing and costly. And they gain a set amount of attributes per level meaning their attributes will be raised higher than someone of a lower level, true, but there’s no set way to distribute those points. A level 20 character cannot be assumed to have an attribute rank of 12, certainly not in all their attributes, there aren’t enough attribute points for that.
Rather than scaling as a player advanced in levels, blood costs were something to be played with by allocating points properly. If your character wanted to use Blood is Power or Dark Fury or another Blood skill with such a blood cost and no other skills in Blood then the smartest thing to do was to keep Blood Magic as low as possible, at zero if need be. If your character had more skills from Blood they were interested in using then it was a matter of finding the “sweet spot” where your other skills were usable and your blood costs were still low enough to be tolerable. At no time were you interested in simply maxing out Blood. And, again, at high levels the blood cost was something to side step or otherwise avoid rather than a penalty to keep skills in balance.
The developer’s solution, then, has been to alter blood costs so that rather than a flat amount of health loss determined by a linked attribute that sacrifice is now a flat percentage based on a character’s maximum health. Blood is Power now costs 33% of your maximum health to use. Other blood costs are similar and range from 33% to 20% to 17% to 10% of overall health. So, such skills have a constant cost as your character progresses. They cost the same amount of health, as a percent of your total, when you’re level 1 as they will when you’re level 20. Blood costs are now unavoidable through shuffling around attributes and remain a consistent barrier. Skills that increase your maximum health will also not help your character to diffuse the blood cost of a skill, as it’s a percentage of your current maximum health, not your base maximum health. There’s perhaps something to be said for letting such blood costs be reduced by attributes as they advance – as your character grows stronger they get less imposing – but eliminating the fact that such skills were antithetical to such attribute raising before is probably a more important concern.
Note, though, that this is actually a subtle increase to the blood cost of many skills. Blood is Power would have, at Blood 12, cost 134 health to use or roughly 28% of a level 20 characters health (provided they weren’t using skills or items that further increased their health past 480, of course) but now will cost 33% of that same health or 160 health. It’s an important note because, as before, it’s possible to actually sacrifice your character to death. If your character has 100 hit points and tries to use Blood is Power, well, you’ll have a dead character. It’s now a little easier to do that. You can view a list of blood costs based on health here.
Now, we’ll move on to another wide-reaching alteration to skill lists, one that’s affected just about every profession:
Fractional Casting Times
Yet another change that anyone looking over a skill list is bound to notice involves casting times. Where before one second was the lowest casting time the game would list for any skill now the game can display casting times as fractions. A skill like Power Leak now has a casting time of a quarter of a second listed in its description. This actually isn’t a change at all as skills have long had casting times ranging under a full second it’s just that such casting times were hidden in skill descriptions and required someone to be aware of them or to time them (and believe me, timing a fraction of a second isn’t the easiest thing unless you break out a stop watch and it’s made even trickier when you’re not sure exactly when a spell takes effect or are trying to actually win a match) in order to know their skill was cast a bit faster than reported. And, while we can all be glad that skill descriptions are now more accurate be aware that there’s still an aftercast of 3/4 of a second applied to almost every skill you’ll cast. A skill takes effect at the end of its listed casting time, Power Leak will interrupt a skill at that .25 second mark, but the aftercast is the time it takes to recover before another skill can be used. So, with that still hidden aftercast skills take a bit more time than they say, depending on how your define “casting time”.
Now, there were many more refinements to the skill lists that just those already mentioned. None were, perhaps, as drastic or as apparent at a glance but to someone, well, like me who routinely pours over such information there were some interesting changes made. Some good, some bad, some puzzling, and a few deserving of a second look, so here’s a quick run down of some of the less apparent changes:
Miscellaneous Changes
The Elementalist skills Mind Burn, Mind Freeze, and Mind Shock all received an overhaul. They’re elite, direct damage spells from the Elementalist’s Fire, Water, and Air lines respectively. They interest me because there are very few elites in those lines and the elites tend to be something other than the massive damage dealing nukes that would seem to draw most Elementalists (Instead they tend to be hexes to supplement damage, defensive enchantments, or energy management skills).
Formerly, those three skills worked to cause a massive amount of damage but only if your character had more energy than its target. Since they were quick cast, low cost, relative to the amount of potential damage per energy, and had fairly quick recharge times they were serviceable, especially given that a primary Elementalist with Energy Storage was going to be the likely winner in any energy amount contest. However, they did absolutely nothing when your character had less energy than a target. Now, that damage is split. They deal an amount of damage, linked to the appropriate attribute, regardless, and then deal that damage again if your character has more energy. Effectively, that damage is doubled and you get a nice side-effect, too, as Mind Shock will cause knockdown, Mind Freeze will snare, and Mind Burn will set a target alight for a bit more damage should you get that doubled damage. Their costs were raised, though, to compensate for this fact. Mind Shock costs ten energy with a recharge of ten seconds. Mind Freeze is ten energy and Mind Burn is fifteen, both with twenty seconds to recharge. They’re all still quick with one second casting times and can deal a respectable amount of damage.
For example, compare Mind Shock with Lightning Strike. Mind Shock is, of course, ten energy, one second casting, and ten second recharge time for - at Air Magic of 12 - 42 damage, doubled to 84 damage with knock down if you have more energy. Lightning Strike is five energy, one second casting, and five seconds recharge for 41 damage. Now, that’s burst damage (damage divided by the time it takes to cause it) of roughly 24 each – Mind Shock will do 48 with more energy – before armor (Lightning damage skills have 25% armor penetration so you’ll do a bit more damage than expected but there’s no difference between these two, only when comparing, say, Mind Shock with Mind Burn) and the damage is therefore about the same. Mind Shock can be a lot higher and will cause knockdown, not to be overlooked, but it’s also elite, you can’t use it as frequently as Lightning Strike, and it causes Exhaustion, too. Exhaustion lowers your maximum energy so what it means for these skills is that you won’t be able to keep pounding away at someone with your higher energy forever, although the higher recharge makes this a bit less of a concern. Somehow, I expect a bit more from an elite slot, although if you’re playing a straight nuker and need another quick damaging skill to add to your build, it fits. I’d grab Water Trident over Mind Freeze and Lightning Surge over Mind Shock but, like a Warrior looking for an attack skill elite, it’s not like you have a lot of options.
A change that’s much more of a useful improvement was the shift of a few Warrior skills from being energy based to adrenaline based. Some, like [Battle Rage had their adrenal costs increased. But both Watch Yourself! and Bonetti's Defense became adrenal skills. It’s a great change to Watch Yourself, a skill I’ve long been fond of – to the point of trying to figure out some way of keeping it out of Tactics so I wouldn’t have to delve into that line of skills – because of something I’ve brought up in the past: efficiency.
Watch Yourself gives your character and any nearby characters a boost to armor for a set duration. +20AL, to be precise, which works out to roughly a 25% drop in any before armor damage your character suffers (The slide-ruler squad will be quick to point out that it’s not quite 25% because of the way things work but it’s close enough that on all but the biggest of hits you won’t notice the difference - +40AL halves your damage, half that is good for a quarter, it’s not perfectly accurate but it’s a lot easier to remember.), so it’s not a massively powerful buff but it’s a good little boost for a tank to make their healer’s job a lot easier.
Before being an adrenal skill, Watch Yourself cost five energy with a recharge time of fifteen seconds, in other words it would cost your character one energy every three seconds to keep it running constantly or the equivalent of a pip of regeneration, and that’s quite a lot for a primary Warrior character. As an adrenal skill there’s now no energy cost associated with the skill so as long as you’re fighting hard, making those hits to charge adren, it’s essentially free to keep recasting, especially since, as a shout, Watch Yourself has no casting time at all. But, more than that, it’s easy not just to keep recasting it but now to keep recasting it often enough to have it up constantly. It has a duration of five to ten seconds linked to Tactics. Before, that meant you could, if you maxed out your Tactics have it up for ten out of fifteen seconds, or 66% of the time, unlinked it was 33%. That’s its efficiency, the percentage of time you gained the benefit of that additional armor, and it’s a key consideration when looking at a buff like Watch Yourself!. Some buffs are useful with a low efficiency. If, say, Watch Yourself! created some kind of shield that absorbed a set amount of damage, say 50~100 points of damage linked to Tactics, then what matters is how quickly that damage is incoming not necessarily how often you can keep that skill up. All you need is to take less damage than the shield would absorb during the time it took to renew it and you’d be fine, if you took more damage during that time then you can’t do much about it. There are, of course, no such skills in Guild Wars but there are skills which will, like Reversal of Fortune, absorb a single hit or grant energy and other things where the point isn’t constant coverage but just what you get out of that coverage where it’s up. Watch Yourself! and skills like it, on the other hand, have a consistent benefit that doesn’t change. You get that +20AL no matter how many people are attacking you, unlike a skill that would absorb a set amount of damage, so it’s better the more efficient it can be. The more time you have it up, the less damage you’ll take. Now, since it has a low adrenal charge of four, Watch Yourself! reaches and even passes that point of 100% efficiency where, by recasting it, you can remain under its protective umbrella indefinitely. Four strikes of adrenal takes a sword or an axe just over five seconds to gain, so that’s the base recharge time now. Simply put, without a drop in Tactics, I can keep running Watch Yourself on a tank as long as I need. I can’t buff it before heading into battle anymore and using it alongside other adrenal skills increases the recharge time, true, but I can use any number of techniques to increase my adrenal gain or just pump up Tactics so I don’t have to be so precise with my timing.
Bonetti’s is an even better example of a massive increase in efficiency to a buff. Before it had a full minute recharge time while it lasted for only five to ten seconds, linked to Tactics, an efficiency of 8~16%, even though it could be quite useful over that time frame. Now, with an adrenal charge of eight, which is about eleven seconds to a sword or axe alone, it’s a lot more efficient – about 45~90% before getting into playing around with adrenaline to make it better. And, it no longer costs any energy to use and since it’s a skill that will net your character some energy when used – you gain five energy every attack you block – it’s now a lot easier to use it to recharge your energy in addition to providing that protection. It does create a bit of a problem, as it was a popular skill for secondary Warriors to use in order to gain that energy. Based on spending energy it could be used whenever, if only briefly, but now it requires a character to attack to gain that adrenaline before it can be used so it can no longer be used by a character that’s not interested in constantly attacking the way it once could. A prime example of this would be the ready-made PvP build, the Protection Healer, where Bonetti’s was once used as both defense and cheap and dirty energy management on a character who wanted to heal away and was likely to get swarmed by Warriors. Now, unless you want to spend the time attacking to charge it up or have some other way of gaining adrenaline, it’s worthless, as you’ll never get to use it.
Other Warrior buffs got an increase to their efficiency without becoming adrenal, though. Deadly Riposte was lowered to a ten second recharge from thirty seconds, at five energy it now costs one energy every two seconds to keep running and, though it has 80% efficiency with its eight second duration it’s only good for the first melee attack against your character, so it’s one of those skills where it’s not so much efficient coverage but being able to recast it rapidly that matters. It can help a bit although it’s something I’d pass by unless I was interested in dueling Warriors and even then there are better options. But something like Disciplined Stance which only ends on the use of an adrenal skill now, can be used for non-fighting casters in place of Bonetti’s. It’s still at that 8~16% efficiency rate but that’s better than the nothing a caster relying on Bonetti’s would gain.
One last skill to note from the Warrior list before we move on. Fear Me! turned a few heads lately as an efficient and potentially nasty way of denying an opponent energy through wrecking their regeneration. It was reduced in effectiveness going from draining one to six energy, linked to Tactics, every use to only one to three energy. Like Watch Yourself, it’s a four adrenal charge skill so you can recast it every five or so seconds. At a maximum of six energy it was enough to drain more than any un-buffed character could regenerate over that time frame and those tried and tested ways of improving adrenal gain made it only more costly, pushing it from canceling out regeneration into the realm of actually causing degeneration. With an AoE effect for no energy it was extremely effective at whittling away a caster’s energy supply. At a maximum of three energy it’s just below what a character can regenerate, meaning that an opponent can get enough energy to cast a few things although you will be putting a big roadblock in the path of their regeneration. It’s still a good skill as you can have more than one Warrior using it to stack the effects. Two Warriors can drain six energy every five second, three can drain nine energy, and so on, and they can recharge Fear Me! as they beat away on their foes so it’s still something to look into it’s just no longer sickeningly good.
And, finally, I’ll mention the change to another favorite whipping boy, Ether Lord. Many people seem to like this skill and try to use it for whatever reason and the word for those people is “prey” because someone using such a poor skill is usually going to be easy enough to beat. Anyhow, the cost for Ether Lord was lowered from ten energy to five and I’m afraid it hasn’t changed my opinion of it at all. It will give your character, at best, three pips of regeneration for nine seconds while giving your target the same amount of energy degeneration.
Now, three pips of energy is worth one energy every second or nine energy over the duration of Ether Lord. You gain nine energy and your opponent loses out on nine energy. And you can spend two seconds, nearly three with aftercast, every twenty seconds to cause that swing of energy. Of course, it’s not really a full swing of eighteen energy because Ether Lord has a casting cost. When you cast Ether Lord you don’t just pay five energy. You pay five energy and “lose all energy”, that means Ether Lord can only be cast when you have at least five energy but it actually costs all your current energy. Which leaves with nine energy total once it’s all over. As the kids say, “big freaking whoop”. All lowering the energy cost has done is to let you cast it when you have a bit less energy than before but you still wind up with only nine energy. Ether Lord, perhaps, has some use in eliminating the regeneration of a target and improving your own regeneration but even ignoring the possibility of that hex being removed it pales in comparison to the ability of other Inspiration skills to swing and deny energy. Energy Tap, for example, will net your character up to eight energy, cost your opponent thirteen energy or the equivalent of two pips of regeneration, and cause a swing of 21 energy in an instant as opposed to over nine seconds with the same recharge time and only a second longer casting time than Ether Lord to say nothing of Energy Drain or Power Drain or Channeling or others. And that’s before you take into account that using Ether Lord will cost you all you existing energy – which sinks it from marginal to avoidable.
There are plenty of other changes to discuss but they’re probably deserving of their own space so from now we’ll move from the review desk to the corrections office and turn things over to the…
Truth Squad
Which is really just me but it sounds impressive, doesn’t it? In any event, there was an ever-present danger to starting up a column such as this one during the beta testing phase of the game. Naturally, that’s the fact that skills can be reviewed and then be drastically changed rending past columns useless. And, naturally, that’s just what happened over the past weekend. So, in lieu of going back and re-editing past columns to be completely accurate, I’m going to give a quick look at the changes and corrections to any skills that have fallen under the harsh glare of the Spotlight here. Perhaps I’ll get around to updating the past Spotlights one day, but just not yet, especially as there’s nothing keeping the devs from altering those skills again while we’re all not looking. Fortunately, this time around there weren’t all that many changes to contend with, and the vast majority of statements made in past Spotlights are still valid. There are a few details changed but the tactics and techniques for those skills remain the same. In fact, of the past six Spotlights featuring a total of twelve skills only two changes of any note were made.
The first and the largest change was made to Skull Crack, the very first Spotlight. That change, of course, was the shift of Skull Crack from being linked to Tactics to being an unlinked, attributeless skill. And it was achieved through the simple expedient of changing the duration of Skull Crack’s imparted Dazed condition from 5~17 seconds varied by Tactics to a flat 15 seconds. Everything else about the skill remains the same from the elite status to the high adrenal cost so the same techniques explored in that first Spotlight hold true. You want to use it against casters to shut down their spell casting ability, you want to find a way to charge up that adrenaline as rapidly as you can, and you need to be in melee range to use it. What’s changed, though, is that you no longer need any Tactics to make that Dazed last for an appreciable length of time. Skull Crack now offers excellent disruption to any character geared towards attacking quickly and keeping in weapon range – in other words, any melee character – so if your character has an elite slot free you could do far worse than to Daze a caster and shut down their spell-casting ability for a long fifteen seconds. It’s still an elite skill meaning it’s a difficult choice to make but it’s now something any melee character can make the most of, no longer just those who’ve dabbled in the admittedly barren skill line of Tactics. Conditions can be removed, though, and there are skills your target can cast which won’t be affected by the Dazed condition at all, which is something to keep in mind considering how much effort you’ll need to go through to inflict it. But, for a melee character focused on disruption it’s one of the best elites available.
The other change occurred with the subject of the second Spotlight, Flourish. A small change, perhaps, but one that opens up a lot of possibilities. Flourish still only works with attack skills so it’s limited to those characters which want to use those skills and, of course, is best when a character has a lot of attack skills to recharge all at once, as it did previously. Before, though, Flourish was a sword skill, it required a sword in order to use. Now, it’s simply a skill. You can use it no matter what weapon your character is wielding. This means that your Axe Warrior or your Hammer Warrior or even your bow-using Ranger/Warrior doesn’t have to deal with swapping a sword in and out in order to use Flourish. So, of course, it’s now a lot easier to fit into a build. It should be popular with Hammer Warriors, given their lengthy recharge times, for one.
Also, as long as I’m updating past skills, there was a bit of confusion on the message board about whether or not I was correct in the third Spotlight (Honestly, it only seems like I’m going in order, this is the last update, I swear) about the mechanics of Defy and Endure Pain. The issue raised was whether the pain pair acted as I claimed, as a temporary boost to current and maximum health which disappeared completely once the skill elapsed or if it raised maximum health and when a skill ended it would drop maximum health by that amount but current health only as a percentage of what it was, which, of course, is a critical question when losing a flat amount of health would drop a character below 1 health which, of course, losing a percentage couldn’t. In other words, if you gained 200 health from the pain pair to reach 400/680 health when it ended would you be at 200/480 health or roughly 280/400? After doing some testing of these skills – not, I’ll add, particularly in-depth or thorough testing, I just happened to throw them on my build on a trip to the Arena – I’m fairly confident that I was correct with my earlier statements. The pain pair, like the energy added from a focus or a staff, is a bonus and one that disappears completely once taken away. This is different from the way a skill like Demonic Flesh works, of course, which is where the confusion began. Demonic Flesh is a Blood Magic skill that requires a blood cost to raise a character’s maximum health. Unlike the pain pair, current health seems to be unaffected. In other words, you’ll lose some health in order to increase your health as a percentage – It’s a flat amount tied to Blood Magic that you’ll raise your health by but the effect is to increase your health by a set percentage, depending on your base maximum health, if you heal while that raised limit is in place when Demonic Flesh ends you’ll drop your maximum health down by that same set percentage, which will also affect your current health. If you gain 25% or 120 health to reach, say, 400/600 health and then gain 100 health you’ll be at 400/480 when it ends, not 380/480. Again, not rigorously tested, but that was the result I found.
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