Elite Skill cooldowns

Elite Skill cooldowns

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Posted by: fourhim.3584

fourhim.3584

Are there any plans to reduce some of these in the future? 3 minutes seems like an awfully long time to get to use a skill again (I don’t know if other MMOs have these long cooldowns too though.)

I’m still relatively amateur in skill, and play almost exclusively PVE, but it seems a shame that there are all these neat skills out there that I deliberately DON’T use just because of the long cooldown. I find myself choosing the 60 seconds or less skills just because I can use them more often Seems to be 90 seconds should be considered a good maximum cooldown. Reduce the damage/power accordingly if you need to, but at last then we get to actually see the skill occasionally.

Has there any discussion about reducing these?

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Posted by: EphemeralWallaby.7643

EphemeralWallaby.7643

Are there any plans to reduce some of these in the future? 3 minutes seems like an awfully long time to get to use a skill again (I don’t know if other MMOs have these long cooldowns too though.)

I’m still relatively amateur in skill, and play almost exclusively PVE, but it seems a shame that there are all these neat skills out there that I deliberately DON’T use just because of the long cooldown. I find myself choosing the 60 seconds or less skills just because I can use them more often Seems to be 90 seconds should be considered a good maximum cooldown. Reduce the damage/power accordingly if you need to, but at last then we get to actually see the skill occasionally.

I see elite skills as skills you activate only occasionally, hence why they’re so powerful. For me most of them are my ‘oh-kitten’ button; a skill not needed for most combat.

They’re not elite if you “reduce the power/damage” in order to balance with a cooldown reduction… then they become just another utility skill.

Has there any discussion about reducing these?

Probably. It’s rare a topic comes up that hasn’t already been touched by someone. Most likely you’ll find such discussions in each profession’s sub-forum where they can be discussed with more specifics.

~EW

(edited by EphemeralWallaby.7643)

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Posted by: joneirikb.7506

joneirikb.7506

Many elite skills have already been improved a good bit over the years, and also reduced in CD. At launch it was much worse, and some classes didn’t even have viable elite skills at all. The racial elites suffers even more from this.

Some classes have thankfully gotten some variety, with some low and some high cooldowns, so you can pick the kind you want. Which helps a lot, some prefer to just have an extra utility skill, others wants a big finisher, some wants a good way to survive a kittenstorm.

Personally I’m mostly fine with how it works on the professions I play the most. But I do really wish they changed how the Norn Transformations worked, love them for style and thematics, but not how they work. Considering how weak they are, there really isn’t a point in not letting you remain in them for as long as you wish, and let you use your normal stats instead of getting nerfed by the transformation stats, or not use your utilities etc.

Elrik Noj (Norn Guardian, Kaineng [SIN][Owls])
“Understanding is a three edged sword: your side, their side, and the truth.”
“The objective is to win. The goal is to have fun.”

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Posted by: Orpheal.8263

Orpheal.8263

I’m at the opinion, that the whole skill system of GW2 needs to be rebalanced around “Maximum Cooldown Time Limits”
There should not exist in the whole game any utility Skill with longer CD’s than maximum limited 30 Seconds

All Skills with CDS longer than currently 30 seconds should get rebalanced, and their CDs be reduced to 30 seconds.

Same treatment to Elite Skills. All Elite Skills should be rebalanced and should have Cold Downs of 120 Seconds. All Elite Skills that have longer or shorter CDs than this hsoudl get changed to 120 seconds and be either improved or nerfed according to what has been done with the CD

Examples for Thief:

Blinding Powder – Cooldown has been reduced from 40 seconds to 30 seconds.
Numbers of Targets reduced from 5 to 3. radius increased from 240 to 360.
Stealth increased to 5s, Blindness reduced from 5s to 3s
Added new unique effect: When used against an enemy successfully, Blinding Powder will be the first and only Stealth Skill, that can “cure” for the Thief “Revealed”.

Shadow Refuge – Cooldown Reduced from 60 to 30. Stealth Duration halved from 10s to 5s by each Pulse giving only 1 second Stealth and not anymore 2.
No more Self Reveal when running out of the Circle.
No more Red Circles that tell every idiot where exactly you are when you use it.
Radius increased from 240 to 360
Healing changed to Removal of up to 4 Conditions, 1 Condition per Pulse after the first one. Give the Thief a Trait that lets Thieves gain Health per removed Condition instead.
Duration increased from 4 to 5s

Shadowstep – Cooldown reduced from 50 to 30. Range reduced from 1200 to 900
Removes now only up to 2 conditions, not 3 anymore, but steals now a Boon instead from your Target Enemy when using Shadow Return.
Rename Shadowstep into Shadow Assault and turn the first part of the Skill into an attack that deals damage with the Shadowstep, if a foe was at the target location to where you shadowstep
Remove the 10 second restriction in which Shadow Return is avaibable that is also part of its Cooldown. Cooldown starts now first, once you used Shadow Return.

Assassin’s Signet – Cooldown reduced from kitten to 30 seconds.
Damage Boost reduced from 15% to 10% for now 10 attacks/hits instead of 5.

Ambush: Cooldown reduced from 35s to 30 s without any further changes.

Shadow Trap: Cooldown reduced from kitten to 30s, Range reduced from 10000 units to 5000 units, Duration of the 10 Stacks of Might halved from Shadow Pursuit.

Haste: CD reduced from 50s to 30s, Quickness and Fury reduced from 6s to 5s,
Grants now also 5 seconds of Super Speed when used out of Stealth.

Roll For Initiative: CD reduced from 60 to 30. Initiative regain reduced from 6 to 4. adds the new unique Effect, that the next used initiative Skill after RFI will deal 10% increased damage and costs 2 initiative lesser within the next 10 seconds.

Scorpion Wire: CD increased from 20 to 30s. This skill pulls now up to 3 targets towards you, poisons foes and using this Skill will enhance the effects of Venoms will giving you for attached Venoms 1 free Charge.
Means with Basilisk venom attached you can basically stun a foe twice with 1 Charge again, but you have to use Scorpion Wire to regain this, what will cost you at least one Utility Skill Slot as part of the balancing.

Devourer Venom – CD reduced from 40 to 30. No further changes, just normalizign this skill with nearly all other venoms that have 30s

Personally I like the idea behind sub classes ~ quoted from Chris Whiteside

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Posted by: Orpheal.8263

Orpheal.8263

part 2

Ice Drake Venom – CD reduced from 36s to 30s, Duration increased from 24s to 30s like all other Venoms. Skill renamed to Snake Venom, Cripple and 1 Boon Steal.

Bandits Defense – CD increased from 15 to 30. Block Duration in that you can block incoming attacks increased from 1 1/2 s to 3s

Distracting Daggers – CD increased from 25 to 30. Number of Casts increased from 3 to 4. Activ Duration increase from 15 to 20s

Fist Flurry – CD increased from 20 to 30s. Pulmonary Impact Damage slightly increased. Target gets a Boon stolen now when Pulmonary Impact deals damage.

Impairing Daggers – CD increased from 25 to 30. The Daggers bounce from the target enemy off to a nearby other target and deal the same effects to that target as well with half the damage.

Basilisk Venom: CD increased from 40 to 120s. Stone Duration increased from 1,5s seconds to 3 seconds. Petrificated Enemies suffer 10% more damage from their conditions and critical hits now, because they are in that time litereally defenseless and lose per second a boon. If the target had Aegis, this will always be the first lost boon, to make Basilisk Venom still unblockable, so using BV will be most effective against aegis-less victims.

Dagger Storm: CD increased from 90s to 120s. Duration decreased from 9s to 6s, but the damage interval has been increased, the range of the daggers and their precision of hittign targets around you has been improved, so that staying in the range of a rotatign dagger storming thief will be now alot more deadly and dangerous for an unprotected enemy, so that the skill will force enemies strogner to retreat and movee away from you how this skill shoudl be designed and work actualy from begin on by its design.
Affected again now by quickness and slow to further increase the DPS of this skill, or to decrease it as a counter agaisnt you if slow gets used agaisnt you.

Thieves Guild: CD reduced from 180 to 120s. No further changes. the ai for them is simply too dumb to justify a nerf to the duration of them of 30s, because they are mostly always killed already before they lasted maybe even 10s >.<

Impact Strike: CD increased from 40 to 120s. Damage significantly increased. by the multi attack chain. All hits unblockable now. All Hits deal now also Vulnerability Stacks and Uppercut deals now also a long lasting Bleeding as you crush your opponents JAW

Thats how id change those skills based on their CDS for Thief on the basis of limitign all skilsl to either 30 or 120s of CDs
I think with limiting all Healing, Utility and Elite Skilsl to the 30/120 system, the games combat system would feel alot better, quicker and fresher compared to now, where the partwise way too long CDs feel more like a punishment…

Personally I like the idea behind sub classes ~ quoted from Chris Whiteside

Elite Skill cooldowns

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Posted by: Vissarion.6509

Vissarion.6509

I see elite skills as skills you activate only occasionally, hence why they’re so powerful. For me most of them are my ‘oh-kitten’ button; a skill not needed for most combat.

Are you serious? Most elites are crap compared to some utility skills.

Look at Eles(+tempest) elites for example.

They called us TEMPESTs, but we can use our elite to cheat death instead

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Posted by: EphemeralWallaby.7643

EphemeralWallaby.7643

I see elite skills as skills you activate only occasionally, hence why they’re so powerful. For me most of them are my ‘oh-kitten’ button; a skill not needed for most combat.

Are you serious? Most elites are crap compared to some utility skills.

Yes I am. There are exceptions, of course… but the ones with the long CD’s, yeah… either highly situational or are ‘oh-kitten’ buttons…. skills not meant to be spammed or used in trash-mob combat which is a large majority of the game’s PvE combat. If you need elite skills in trash-mob combat, then you’re doing something very wrong.

~EW

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Posted by: OriOri.8724

OriOri.8724

@EphemeralWallaby

That sounds like what Anet envisioned elite skills as, but imo they have failed to implement them like that. I think most of them have CDs that are too long considering their relatively weak effects at least for PvE.

Take mesmer elites for example. In PvE SoH is used almost exclusively against breakbars because of its CD. At 3 min why would you waste that on a regular mob? You wouldn’t, hence its only used for breakbars, but then that defeats the original intent of the skill since it never actually transforms anything in PvE. Not to mention, that on a CD of 180 seconds, its breakbar damage per second is actually incredibly low, one of the lower ones in the game, its really only useful because it deals so much damage at once. Considering that, its CD should be lowered to 120 seconds and the effects of the skill remain unchanged.

Time Warp. Anet has essentially admitted that TW is ok on a 76 second cooldown (since they haven’t nerfed its synergy with CS even after more than a year of HoT being out), yet without chronomancer we are stuck with a 180 second cooldown, 2.5 times as long. Besides that, WoA provides 3 sec of quickness on a 25 sec CD, which is 12% uptime. A utility skill provides more uptime on quickness than our traited elite does. And the utility skill deals damage (albeit an insignificant amount). Leave the effects alone but decrease its CD to 90 seconds. Doesn’t make it any stronger than it already is when combined with CS and makes it much more useable if you aren’t running the chrono line. That is still less than 15% uptime on TW, yet makes it feel much more like an elite since you can pop it off twice as often (and its barely more uptime than WoA so its still balanced). This would also actually make it our skill with the most quickness uptime, which it should be considering its an elite.

MI. This one is actually almost in a decent spot. 5 second invisibility for you and friends on a 90 second CD. Not bad. 7.5 seconds uptime if you take PU. Without PU you have 5.5% uptime on invisibility with this skill, with PU you have 8.33% uptime on this skill. Superficially this seems like its in a good spot, until you compare it to weapon skills. The Prestige gives 3 sec of stealth on a 30 sec CD, and applies damage, blind and acts as a blast finisher (which can provide another 3 sec of stealth if there is a smoke field down already) for 10% uptime on stealth untraited, 15% uptime traited with PU ( 20% uptime on stealth untraited if you are with someone that can reliably put down smoke fields, 25% uptime if traited with PU). Granted, MI is a groupwide stealth and the Prestige is personal, but that doesn’t change the fact that an untraited weapon skill has more uptime on stealth than our traited elite, while the weapon skill also deals damage, blinds enemies and works as a combo finisher. Not to mention that MI is on an almost 2 second cast time whereas the prestige is not. Hardly comparably really.

And this isn’t even comparing MI to skills from other classes. Shadow refuge provides 15 seconds of stealth on a 60 sec CD, Hidden Thief (a major trait, not even grandmaster) gives thieves 3 sec Stealth when stealing, which is 10% uptime when Stealing isn’t traited for CD reduction, 12.5% uptime on stealth when it is traited. I know thief is a class that revolves around stealth, but its a bit ridiculous that a kittening ELITE skill for mesmers provides less stealth uptime than a utility skill or a kitten major trait on thief. Reduce MI cooldown to 60 seconds in PvE, that leaves it with 8.33% uptime on stealth without PU, 12.5% uptime with PU, which I think is much more reasonable in PvE for an elite skill.

Do note, EW, that mesmer elite skills are generally regarded as one of the better sets of elite skills in the game in that they are always useful (compared to say elementalist elites), and yet even with our elites all of the CDs are way too long considering the actual effects of the skills.

Overall I just feel that in general the CD on core elite skills are so long as to make the elite skills no longer elite. They are fun and cute yea, but the uptime on the effects they provide is so low, its worse than what you can get from utility skills, weapon skills, and in some instances worse than what you can get from traits. Reducing the cooldown on most if not all core elite skills is a must in my opinion, as they are no longer strong enough to justify only being able to use them every couple minutes as opposed to once a minute or so. At the very least this should happen in PvE. These CD changes I proposed could be much more impactful on PvP (specifically reducing the CD on MI by 33%) than would be ok, but at least these reductions need to be done for PvE. And similar balances should be made to the elites of other classes. These skills just are not strong enough to justify cooldowns that are longer than a minute.

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Posted by: Harper.4173

Harper.4173

Honestly – the game is fine as is.

Elite skills are nothing to write home about but reducing CD would create a LOT of power creep.
And nerfing them to compensate would mean they would be as weak as a regular skill – so why call it elite?

I don’t see a good way to fix this without a complete overhaul – which they’ll never do.
Overhauling elite skills means they’d have to change the way classes balance against each other in PvP – where they’re already having issues and a very fragile balance has just been implemented.

If here they fall they shall live on when ever you cry “For Ascalon!”

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Posted by: OriOri.8724

OriOri.8724

Core spec elite skills just don’t feel like they are elite right now. Overall they don’t feel that impactful in PvE because of how rarely you can use them. When I hear the term “Elite skill” I envision a skill that changes the tide of the entire fight, and unfortunately most core spec elites don’t do that right now. SoH breaks a bar, once. Even though most fights require you to break a bar more than once, SoH will still be on CD after the fight and the next one are over. TW will allow you to substantially increase your DPS for all of one fight, and then be on CD for the duration of the next fight or two. MI lets you skip parts of PvE, but with such little uptime it can be argued that the Prestige is more effective, and using the Prestige with Portal still allows you to help your entire group skip content (not to mention that a thief would be better for group stealth anyway).

Due almost entirely to the long cooldowns, these skills do not feel like what they are sold as. They do not feel like a skill that will change the course of the entire fight. They feel more like they give you a very temporary boost, similar to what a utility skill should be doing.

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Posted by: Harper.4173

Harper.4173

They are like that because of PvP.

Take rampage on warrior for example. Great skill. Lasts 15 seconds and takes a LONG while to recharge.
Worthless in PvE – but if you make the cooldown lower or the duration longer it would be really really strong in PvP.

If here they fall they shall live on when ever you cry “For Ascalon!”

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Posted by: joneirikb.7506

joneirikb.7506

Since launch, wanted to just be able to use the elite slot as a 4th utility slot.

They have fixed the Guardian elites a bit since then, at least we have options now. But sometimes I still just want to stuff some utility skill in there, “Stand Your Ground” is arguably more powerful than the elites anyways. And Sanctuary was originally planned to be an elite, and still feels more like one that some of the elite’s we’ve had

Elrik Noj (Norn Guardian, Kaineng [SIN][Owls])
“Understanding is a three edged sword: your side, their side, and the truth.”
“The objective is to win. The goal is to have fun.”

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Posted by: OriOri.8724

OriOri.8724

They are like that because of PvP.

Take rampage on warrior for example. Great skill. Lasts 15 seconds and takes a LONG while to recharge.
Worthless in PvE – but if you make the cooldown lower or the duration longer it would be really really strong in PvP.

Because its completely impossible to separate skill cooldowns between PvE and PvP, oh wait……

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Posted by: Harper.4173

Harper.4173

Oh wait – I agree with that but it’s been 4 years and Anet has barely done it.

If here they fall they shall live on when ever you cry “For Ascalon!”

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Posted by: Khyan.7039

Khyan.7039

I see elite skills as skills you activate only occasionally, hence why they’re so powerful. For me most of them are my ‘oh-kitten’ button; a skill not needed for most combat.

Are you serious? Most elites are crap compared to some utility skills.

Look at Eles(+tempest) elites for example.

EGS elite and rebound are usefull. Tornado is usefull in spvp. Don’t know where you come from.

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Posted by: fourhim.3584

fourhim.3584

I also wish that I could just use the Elite slot for a regular old Utility skill that I’ll actually USE. Wish we had that option, for PVE at least.

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Posted by: Amaimon.7823

Amaimon.7823

Especially in case of the engineer, I’d love to just equip a utility skill in the elite slot.

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Posted by: InsaneQR.7412

InsaneQR.7412

I see elite skills as skills you activate only occasionally, hence why they’re so powerful. For me most of them are my ‘oh-kitten’ button; a skill not needed for most combat.

Are you serious? Most elites are crap compared to some utility skills.

Yes I am. There are exceptions, of course… but the ones with the long CD’s, yeah… either highly situational or are ‘oh-kitten’ buttons…. skills not meant to be spammed or used in trash-mob combat which is a large majority of the game’s PvE combat. If you need elite skills in trash-mob combat, then you’re doing something very wrong.

~EW

The only Elite you can use to do that is entangle from ranger which is basically a stronger utility skill (and the best elite in the game IMHO)

Pale Raiders united.
9 Sylvari, 9 unique Builds.

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Posted by: InsaneQR.7412

InsaneQR.7412

They are like that because of PvP.

Take rampage on warrior for example. Great skill. Lasts 15 seconds and takes a LONG while to recharge.
Worthless in PvE – but if you make the cooldown lower or the duration longer it would be really really strong in PvP.

Or make it a Rage skill and swap it with headbutt, all the sweet sweet burn from Rage Trait on Rampage with Adrenaline generation would be enough to balance this.$
And headbutt would fit to be a physical skill (i would remove the stun thou)

Pale Raiders united.
9 Sylvari, 9 unique Builds.

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Posted by: rabidsmiles.5926

rabidsmiles.5926

As a Tempest, I would kill to be able to slot Ice Bow in that elite slot rather than the nerfed into the ground Firey Greatsword or the only here for a few seconds Elemental. I don’t find myself using the elite all that much because my standard rotations are just more effective.

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Posted by: OriOri.8724

OriOri.8724

As a Tempest, I would kill to be able to slot Ice Bow in that elite slot rather than the nerfed into the ground Firey Greatsword or the only here for a few seconds Elemental. I don’t find myself using the elite all that much because my standard rotations are just more effective.

Elite summons definitely need a CD reduction. They’re most useful for taking aggro anyway, so as an elite I don’t see why they can’t be out more often.