Guild Wars 2

Roy Cronacher.1576:

There are no plans to add skills or traits which affect energy gain, upkeep gain, or energy cost of skills for the Revenant. These traits very quickly become mandatory choices as it means you can use your skills more often and in the case of energy, it would apply to all your skills since they all use energy. This is a dramatic increase in power across the board.

These kind of traits makes for less interesting choices and cause many problems with balance, often forcing skills to be weaker to compensate for the possibility of a player having all these traits equipped meaning they can use skills much more often then a player without them. But of course there will be balance on on energy costs and recharges of skills to make sure everything feels good and balanced for what it does in the toolkit of the revenant.

I agree. I’ve been saying that in many of my comments in similar sections.
However a little reduction on some energy costs would be nice.

Roy Cronacher.1576:

There are no plans to add skills or traits which affect energy gain, upkeep gain, or energy cost of skills for the Revenant. These traits very quickly become mandatory choices as it means you can use your skills more often and in the case of energy, it would apply to all your skills since they all use energy. This is a dramatic increase in power across the board.

These kind of traits makes for less interesting choices and cause many problems with balance, often forcing skills to be weaker to compensate for the possibility of a player having all these traits equipped meaning they can use skills much more often then a player without them. But of course there will be balance on on energy costs and recharges of skills to make sure everything feels good and balanced for what it does in the toolkit of the revenant.

I agree too.
No matter how you look at it, adjusting costs it’s always better than a “energy pool power creep”.
It may seems boring with no active energy gain, but in the long run it’s gonna keep us free to choose anything without having to spec for the mandatory traits.

I don’t know why people keep saying we have no active energy gain when we actually have and a huge one. Legendswap is an instant +50 energy (up to).

Roy Cronacher.1576:

There are no plans to add skills or traits which affect energy gain, upkeep gain, or energy cost of skills for the Revenant. These traits very quickly become mandatory choices as it means you can use your skills more often and in the case of energy, it would apply to all your skills since they all use energy. This is a dramatic increase in power across the board.

These kind of traits makes for less interesting choices and cause many problems with balance, often forcing skills to be weaker to compensate for the possibility of a player having all these traits equipped meaning they can use skills much more often then a player without them. But of course there will be balance on on energy costs and recharges of skills to make sure everything feels good and balanced for what it does in the toolkit of the revenant.

And so we are done with those kind of requests for some time now and maybe until some fancy Elite Spec.

Thanks for clarification, Roy!

P.S. Could you make a statement on “adding more utilities for each Legend to the pool” when you’re ready?

Roy Cronacher.1576:

There are no plans to add skills or traits which affect energy gain, upkeep gain, or energy cost of skills for the Revenant. These traits very quickly become mandatory choices as it means you can use your skills more often and in the case of energy, it would apply to all your skills since they all use energy. This is a dramatic increase in power across the board.

These kind of traits makes for less interesting choices and cause many problems with balance, often forcing skills to be weaker to compensate for the possibility of a player having all these traits equipped meaning they can use skills much more often then a player without them. But of course there will be balance on on energy costs and recharges of skills to make sure everything feels good and balanced for what it does in the toolkit of the revenant.

What if it was something like more regen but lower max energy? Guild wars 1 had something like that. Or rather you could increase the max pool with lower regen. Just some sort of variety would be nice to fit different play styles.

skowcia.8257:

Care to name these “other professions” and what utilities?

I main necro in pvp. I use spectral armor, well of corruption and I forget the name but it gives speed boost and life force. Those are almost always used every fight. My elite is used 3-4 times a game normally.

Standard d/d ele with earth. The utilities are used basically every fight. Elite about 3 times a game.

Power block shatter Mesmer. I use the mantra and a clone skill every fight. Portal is use varies. Elite about 3 times a game.

Medi guardian. Standard utilities I use most fights. Elite on group fights.

Those are my most played.

Rym.1469:

P.S. Could you make a statement on “adding more utilities for each Legend to the pool” when you’re ready?

Mallyx could use a 4th utility skill that consumes health to regenerate energy. Kinda like a blood mage.

Roy Cronacher.1576:

There are no plans to add skills or traits which affect energy gain, upkeep gain, or energy cost of skills for the Revenant. These traits very quickly become mandatory choices as it means you can use your skills more often and in the case of energy, it would apply to all your skills since they all use energy. This is a dramatic increase in power across the board.

These kind of traits makes for less interesting choices and cause many problems with balance, often forcing skills to be weaker to compensate for the possibility of a player having all these traits equipped meaning they can use skills much more often then a player without them. But of course there will be balance on on energy costs and recharges of skills to make sure everything feels good and balanced for what it does in the toolkit of the revenant.

Ok this makes sense for traits, but I don’t see how it precludes energy gain on skills. Given that the possible combinations of weapon and utility skills are completely locked down for Revenant, there would be no way for builds to cherry-pick energy-gain skills.

uhohhotdog.3598:

skowcia.8257:

Care to name these “other professions” and what utilities?

I main necro in pvp. I use spectral armor, well of corruption and I forget the name but it gives speed boost and life force. Those are almost always used every fight. My elite is used 3-4 times a game normally.

Standard d/d ele with earth. The utilities are used basically every fight. Elite about 3 times a game.

Power block shatter Mesmer. I use the mantra and a clone skill every fight. Portal is use varies. Elite about 3 times a game.

Medi guardian. Standard utilities I use most fights. Elite on group fights.

Those are my most played.

Necro – untrained as it may wary on builds
Spectral armor – 50cd
Well of power – 40cd
Signet of the locust? heals and gives 25% move speed, 30cd on use
Elites – 180cd’s/ 60 if golem but olny after it die.

Ele – trained

Flash – 32cd
Fire – 32cd
Earth – 60cd
Gs – 180cd

Mes – untrained as it may wary on builds
Blink – 30cd
Mantra of disctraction – 20cd, cd counts down once you use up charges
Portal – 90cd, very situation.
Elites – all on 180cd except mass invis on 90

Guardian with trained cd’s;

Purity – 48cd
Judge – 36cd
Smite – 16cd
Focus – 72cd
If burn medi – flames, 28cd

So how that stuff is even close to revenant and his 0 cd utility skills? Lots of them are situational, sustain tools and cant be used on a offensive way unlike revenant if you play smart with energy and by that i dont mean autoattacking 24/7. Sorry but i think all you want is spammy class to use jade widns back to back while also bursting opponents with weapon skills and no punishment for doing so. Revenant may not a be a class for you and at this point and you should stick to your listened classes..espesially guards that suffer from high cd’s on both wep, class mechanic and utility skills.

+As you mentioned you use elites 3 times a match. Im pretty sure revenant can pull off double of that amount in Jalis/Shiro combo without any problem not to mention other utility skills. So i fail to see whats the issue.

Roy Cronacher.1576:

There are no plans to add skills or traits which affect energy gain, upkeep gain, or energy cost of skills for the Revenant. These traits very quickly become mandatory choices as it means you can use your skills more often and in the case of energy, it would apply to all your skills since they all use energy. This is a dramatic increase in power across the board.

These kind of traits makes for less interesting choices and cause many problems with balance, often forcing skills to be weaker to compensate for the possibility of a player having all these traits equipped meaning they can use skills much more often then a player without them. But of course there will be balance on on energy costs and recharges of skills to make sure everything feels good and balanced for what it does in the toolkit of the revenant.

I totally see where you’re coming from, and I agree that traits that simply add ‘more’ resource to classes don’t encourage varied playstyles.

However, what is your opinion on the Thief in this regard? They still have a trait that increases their max initiative, and as other players have already said, that trait is pretty much mandatory regardless of what build you run, since it lets you do everything better.

a previous mistake is not a valid reason to make another one.

Now I’m just speculating here, but I believe the energy cost that we currently have for the weapons were initially balanced for having one weapon set. If you play the revenant without changing weapons the energy management is not that bad but when you change weapons like in other classes and not the legend you still don’t have the energy you lost from the previous weapon. I’m not promoting one weapon set, I’m just sharing where I think the problem came from in hopes they re-balance the energy cost of some skills.

I agree with Roy and am absolutely fine with no +energy skills. Energy management is in managing what you have and how/when you use it. If you burn through energy then whose fault it is for not having energy for that stun break ?

All we need to do with energy is adjusting the cost of skills. We can start with Inspiring Reinforcements because 10s CD and 30 energy for 1s stab every 1 sec is MEH. make it 5s CD and 30e or 10s CD and 15-20e. Triple nerfing sucks.

process execution.8014:

Ok this makes sense for traits, but I don’t see how it precludes energy gain on skills. Given that the possible combinations of weapon and utility skills are completely locked down for Revenant, there would be no way for builds to cherry-pick energy-gain skills.

Of course there is a way:

• “Sword regens 1 more Energy than Mace, Mace is Trash”

There is no way to equal out all weapons to have the same Energy Gain on every single skill unless you make them all a copy/paste of each other. There will be one optimal Weapon with the optimal Energy gain/Damage Ratio and it will be cherry-picked by the min-maxers and the rest will be labled as utter trash and never be used again.

It is fine as it is. If you can not manage your energy properly you have a few options:

• Go back to your spammy Professions, there are 8 of them
• Get out of the Mindset that Revenant is about spamming skills
• Go play a bit of Guild Wars 1 to get a feel for Energy Management it might improve your Revenant.

Roy is no Idiot, he is a competent Developer that listens to Feedback. If the Energy Costs for certain skills are way to high, he will put them down, just like Cooldowns. Everything else is just a matter of learn to play the Revenant how it is meant to be played, and that is not a “I spam everything I have on Cooldown”-one, sorry.

Raven.8531:

Now I’m just speculating here, but I believe the energy cost that we currently have for the weapons were initially balanced for having one weapon set. If you play the revenant without changing weapons the energy management is not that bad but when you change weapons like in other classes and not the legend you still don’t have the energy you lost from the previous weapon. I’m not promoting one weapon set, I’m just sharing where I think the problem came from in hopes they re-balance the energy cost of some skills.

Well if you equip staff or sword with hammer then theres not many reasons why you would swap to one or the another based on who you face. I basically didnt swapped once with hammer vs pewpew ranger and in other cases i used hammer olny as a opener just to swap staff and camp it from there vs warriors/eles etc. due to the fact that hammer lack kiting options and you need to be at range to deal any decent damage.

Ps. I dont think mixing up sword/sword with staff makes much sense atm too. Both are quite good for melee dps with sword pulling ahead due to buffs. Now theres also a trick vs condi classes if your offsend tend to be a hammer which is another reason to not run dual melee. A lot of condi applications in this game are projectiles – ranger shortbow/torch, engi pistols and granades, p/p thiefs etc. Once we will end up in danger we can use field of the mist, swap to melee set and start bashing them. Field of the mist is not attached to wep and will not disappear upon swap. That give us a option to dance between melee set with evades/blocks once the field end and hammer which also happen to have evade now and 50% projectile uptime block. All in all we will be camping one set most of the time tho vs power builds. That may be a reason why Roy didnt added any condi cleanse.

what if in a previous iteration energy gain was 5 pips, then they added 5 energy on mace AA and then they noticed other weapons needed it too, so they simply added 5 more pips baseline, giving our current 10?

If we add energy gain on AA in’t it worse then simply having passive energy gain?
Of course it is, you won’t even use skills, just AA and upkeeps. And we already are a bit inclined to do so, because AA is free, so it’s basically just energy gain.

And what if instead of adding more energy regen we simply don’t adjust the cost on some skills?

Seriously, energy mechanic is fine, only some numbers need tweaks.

+1 Kidel, NapTooN.

Basically Rev is not meant to be spammy as in bursting through all of its utility, heal, elite, weapon skills.

Rev is meant to have them ‘on-demand’ but not on demand 24/7 but on demand as in not limited by cooldowns. You have the option of using elite every 10 seconds (jade winds) if you focus on AA and that. Effective? Maybe not but that option is there.

That is our strength and design. We can’t burst through 1-10 but we can use each of them (with few exceptions) a couple of times back to back if needed.

Couple Phase Travesals for example. Or if we get to 100 energy we can do Jade Winds and instantly do another. Who else can do this (not counting continuum shift chrono :P).

It’s fine. Adjust costs for skills and we are golden.

skowcia.8257:

uhohhotdog.3598:

skowcia.8257:

Care to name these “other professions” and what utilities?

I main necro in pvp. I use spectral armor, well of corruption and I forget the name but it gives speed boost and life force. Those are almost always used every fight. My elite is used 3-4 times a game normally.

Standard d/d ele with earth. The utilities are used basically every fight. Elite about 3 times a game.

Power block shatter Mesmer. I use the mantra and a clone skill every fight. Portal is use varies. Elite about 3 times a game.

Medi guardian. Standard utilities I use most fights. Elite on group fights.

Those are my most played.

Necro – untrained as it may wary on builds
Spectral armor – 50cd
Well of power – 40cd
Signet of the locust? heals and gives 25% move speed, 30cd on use
Elites – 180cd’s/ 60 if golem but olny after it die.

Ele – trained

Flash – 32cd
Fire – 32cd
Earth – 60cd
Gs – 180cd

Mes – untrained as it may wary on builds
Blink – 30cd
Mantra of disctraction – 20cd, cd counts down once you use up charges
Portal – 90cd, very situation.
Elites – all on 180cd except mass invis on 90

Guardian with trained cd’s;

Purity – 48cd
Judge – 36cd
Smite – 16cd
Focus – 72cd
If burn medi – flames, 28cd

So how that stuff is even close to revenant and his 0 cd utility skills? Lots of them are situational, sustain tools and cant be used on a offensive way unlike revenant if you play smart with energy and by that i dont mean autoattacking 24/7. Sorry but i think all you want is spammy class to use jade widns back to back while also bursting opponents with weapon skills and no punishment for doing so. Revenant may not a be a class for you and at this point and you should stick to your listened classes..espesially guards that suffer from high cd’s on both wep, class mechanic and utility skills.

+As you mentioned you use elites 3 times a match. Im pretty sure revenant can pull off double of that amount in Jalis/Shiro combo without any problem not to mention other utility skills. So i fail to see whats the issue.

No I’m not looking to use jade winds back to back. Most the time I played rev I rarely even used it. The skills you listed aren’t exactly what I use but either way the point is that in any fight that requires any effort I’m using them all often within seconds of each other. I don’t feel rev has close to that capability without sacrificing offense.

NapTooN.6283:

Go play a bit of Guild Wars 1 to get a feel for Energy Management it might improve your Revenant.

If the Revenant’s energy management took more inspiration from GW1 then I’d be very happy indeed. Unfortunately with the exception of pip-based regen, they have nothing in common. Active skills with conditional energy gain like Power Drain and Falling Lotus Strike were what made energy management in GW1 interesting and rewarding, and I think similar skills could benefit the Revenant.

NapTooN.6283:

Roy is no Idiot, he is a competent Developer that listens to Feedback.

And that’s why I’m offering mine. The thing that you don’t seem to understand about feedback is that a variety of opinions is actually helpful.

process execution.8014:

NapTooN.6283:

Go play a bit of Guild Wars 1 to get a feel for Energy Management it might improve your Revenant.

If the Revenant’s energy management took more inspiration from GW1 then I’d be very happy indeed. Unfortunately with the exception of pip-based regen, they have nothing in common. Active skills with conditional energy gain like Power Drain and Falling Lotus Strike were what made energy management in GW1 interesting and rewarding, and I think similar skills could benefit the Revenant.

That’s an interesting point. Even though energy traits would lead to all the problems Roy described, it would be cool to see some energy management effects in the skills themselves. It’s not like revenant can customise said skills to “make them mandatory”, so energy gain would, instead, be part of a weapon’s/ legend’s playstyle.

process execution.8014:

NapTooN.6283:

Go play a bit of Guild Wars 1 to get a feel for Energy Management it might improve your Revenant.

If the Revenant’s energy management took more inspiration from GW1 then I’d be very happy indeed. Unfortunately with the exception of pip-based regen, they have nothing in common. Active skills with conditional energy gain like Power Drain and Falling Lotus Strike were what made energy management in GW1 interesting and rewarding, and I think similar skills could benefit the Revenant.

NapTooN.6283:

Roy is no Idiot, he is a competent Developer that listens to Feedback.

And that’s why I’m offering mine. The thing that you don’t seem to understand about feedback is that a variety of opinions is actually helpful.

The Problem with Energy on Weapons is that one Weapon will be superior to the other and be considered “the way to go” and the others will be considered useless. I am not interested in “Revenant Sword or Kick”, but that will happen if we get Energy on Weapon Skills.

I am 100% against any energy regen weapon skills, traits, sigils, runes as that would lead to making them mandatory. 100% on this with Roy for reasons stated and several others.

Cut costs down instead.

NapTooN.6283:

The Problem with Energy on Weapons is that one Weapon will be superior to the other and be considered “the way to go” and the others will be considered useless. I am not interested in “Revenant Sword or Kick”, but that will happen if we get Energy on Weapon Skills.

I suppose it’s possible but I don’t see it as a foregone conclusion. It’d merely be an issue of balancing numbers; no different to damage, cooldown, or energy costs themselves.

I mean, we’re likely to get “Revenant sword or kick” anyway simply because it’s the best DPS. If hammer gave 10% more energy/sec than sword but only dealt 60% of its DPS, I highly doubt that it’d automatically become meta.

Keep in mind that I’m only interested in conditional energy gain on skills that reward skilled play. Skills that you simply spam on cooldown for X energy are no different than a flat boost to energy regen rate which I agree is a bad idea.

Balancing is already hard. We don’t need more stuff that’s hard to balance and having to balance energy costs around no-energy-gain and energy-gain as well as how often they are used and so on would just be a pandoras box.

Energy gain is a pandora’s box in this case. Lets not open it :P

Wiuld you prefer 0 passive upkeep and refen skills or 0 regen skills and 10 passive upkeep?
Scale 0 euth any number, the passive regen is always better.

Relatively you already gain energy with AA because it costs 0

Killyox.3950:

Balancing is already hard. We don’t need more stuff that’s hard to balance and having to balance energy costs around no-energy-gain and energy-gain as well as how often they are used and so on would just be a pandoras box.

Energy gain is a pandora’s box in this case. Lets not open it :P

Yeah, it would be more complex, no doubt about it. I suppose I’m being a bit naive given their track record but I’d hoped that ANet were capable of handling it, especially given that they chose to introduce energy specifically for the Revenant.

It’s like they brought this shiny, enticing box into a room where everyone was happily living box-free, and announced, “Hey everyone! We found Pandora’s Box! We’re just gonna plonk it here and never open it kthxbai.”

If there was ever a time to look inside the box, it’s during beta. If it does in fact turn out to be a bad idea, now is the one time where it’s actually possible to close it again.

NapTooN.6283:

The Problem with Energy on Weapons is that one Weapon will be superior to the other and be considered “the way to go” and the others will be considered useless. I am not interested in “Revenant Sword or Kick”, but that will happen if we get Energy on Weapon Skills.

Killyox.3950:

I am 100% against any energy regen weapon skills, traits, sigils, runes as that would lead to making them mandatory. 100% on this with Roy for reasons stated and several others.

Cut costs down instead.

I can see where there might be that problem IF they only put it on a couple weapons, but what if they put the same energy gain on ALL weapons, for purhaps one skill? It would certainly eliminate the Sword or Kick issue.

However, I do agree cut costs down because some skills seem to still require a bit too much energy.

Kidel.2057:

Wiuld you prefer 0 passive upkeep and regen skills or 0 regen skills and 10 passive upkeep?

Why not have both?

Lonewolf Kai.3682:

NapTooN.6283:

The Problem with Energy on Weapons is that one Weapon will be superior to the other and be considered “the way to go” and the others will be considered useless. I am not interested in “Revenant Sword or Kick”, but that will happen if we get Energy on Weapon Skills.

Killyox.3950:

I am 100% against any energy regen weapon skills, traits, sigils, runes as that would lead to making them mandatory. 100% on this with Roy for reasons stated and several others.

Cut costs down instead.

I can see where there might be that problem IF they only put it on a couple weapons, but what if they put the same energy gain on ALL weapons, for purhaps one skill? It would certainly eliminate the Sword or Kick issue.

However, I do agree cut costs down because some skills seem to still require a bit too much energy.

Kidel.2057:

Wiuld you prefer 0 passive upkeep and regen skills or 0 regen skills and 10 passive upkeep?

Why not have both?

If we put the same Energy gain on every single weapon in a copy and paste fashion, we can just lower the Energy Cost of that Skill by the amount it would generate. Hence why i said earlier that it is useless to come up with something that can basically be achieved by just reducing the cost by X.

@Lonewolf Kai

But if you put the same energy regen on every weapon, then it’s basically like increasing the passive pips.
No, it’s even worse, since AA will have a negative cost and will be (even) more attractive then regular skills.
And if you increase the passive pips then you have to increase upkeep costs, and it’s basically just like lowering costs on some skills. Everything is relative so you just need to FIX a value (max energy and positive upkeep) and move the others (energy costs and negative upkeeps).

Why can’t you just address the problems (= feedback) and let professional game designers to do their job?
Just say “energy is low” or “skills cost too much”. They will know how to address those problems in a wise way that doesn’t ruin the class as you’re suggesting to do.

Kidel.2057:

@Lonewolf Kai

But if you put the same energy regen on every weapon, then it’s basically like increasing the passive pips.
No, it’s even worse, since AA will have a negative cost and will be (even) more attractive then regular skills.
And if you increase the passive pips then you have to increase upkeep costs, and it’s basically just like lowering costs on some skills. Everything is relative so you just need to FIX a value (max energy and positive upkeep) and move the others (energy costs and negative upkeeps).

Honestly, I don’t really care one way or the other as long as whatever is in place works functionally well. I can see both sides, which is why I suggested “why not both.”

Kidel.2057:

Why can’t you just address the problems (= feedback) and let professional game designers to do their job?

ROFL! Hello Mr. Pot, meet Mr. Kettle, aka Mr. IDemandWeaponSwap.

Kidel.2057:

Just say “energy is low” or “skills cost too much”. They will know how to address those problems in a wise way that doesn’t ruin the class as you’re suggesting to do.

I already have, but why also not propose alternatives that may have not been thought about? And ruin the class? Really? Come on. /eyeroll.

I just addressed the problem that swapping legend/utility is not enough to make up for the lack of weaponswap. Then when people started suggesting crazy or limiting solutions (like conjured weapons lol) I said “isn’t it better to just add weaponswap?”
They ended up adding weaponswap and I’m happy about it, but THEY added it, THEY are the designers, not me. So I don’t see any contradiction with my previous post.

And nope, you didn’t simply address the problem, you’re going against Roy’s post saying that attacks should give energy, which is also a bad idea for the reasons I said above (and I’m sure there are also other reasons but, again, I’m not a game designer).

He already said that they won’t modify energy gain, but just energy costs, and it’s fine. Everything is relative, so increasing energy gain or lowering the costs gives the same results, what changes is the effort.

Kidel.2057:

I just addressed the problem that swapping legend/utility is not enough to make up for the lack of weaponswap. Then when people started suggesting crazy or limiting solutions (like conjured weapons lol) I said “isn’t it better to just add weaponswap?”

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/contradiction