Guild Wars 2

Ark Bladesteele.2943:

I would also be okay with traits that could help with energy generation. Passive generation is boring. Give us something more to play with, make it even more complex.

And what would those Traits be? For example, the idea that is thrown around that Weapon Skills give you Energy (Baseline, or under certain Circumstances) is basically just a cost reduction and nothing complex at all. There is no giant difference between:

• Phase Smash returns 5 Energy
  and
• We reduced the Energy Cost of Phase Smash by 5

The only one would be that you can use the second one at 5 Energy and the first only at 10 (in this example it has a Cost of 10).

I can not think of a fancy way for Active Energy Management that can not simply be trumped by a Cost Reduction. And asking for fancy stuff for the Revenant just for the sake of fancyness is silly. If the Weapon Skills are too expensive, Roy will reduce the cost, that is all that is needed. The Revenant has enough Swag already.

NapTooN.6283:

Ark Bladesteele.2943:

I would also be okay with traits that could help with energy generation. Passive generation is boring. Give us something more to play with, make it even more complex.

And what would those Traits be? For example, the idea that is thrown around that Weapon Skills give you Energy (Baseline, or under certain Circumstances) is basically just a cost reduction and nothing complex at all. There is no giant difference between:

• Phase Smash returns 5 Energy
  and
• We reduced the Energy Cost of Phase Smash by 5

The only one would be that you can use the second one at 5 Energy and the first only at 10 (in this example it has a Cost of 10).

I can not think of a fancy way for Active Energy Management that can not simply be trumped by a Cost Reduction. And asking for fancy stuff for the Revenant just for the sake of fancyness is silly. If the Weapon Skills are too expensive, Roy will reduce the cost, that is all that is needed. The Revenant has enough Swag already.

That idea is still boring. Nothing I have in mind is for the sake of existing. While I do think costs could be reduced on many skills, having skills that simply return energy as a baseline feature is… still boring. I’m more interested in if/then situations, like many traits and skills already in the game. This follows the logic of every other class that has traits to reduce the cooldown of skills.

Some ideas:

Corruption
- When you have a number of conditions on you, the energy cost of your next skill is reduced by 25% for each condition (Threshold: 3, ICD 10s)

Retribution
- Incoming disabling conditions (stun, knockdown, etc) generate 25 energy. (ICD 5s? 10s?)

Salvation
- While regeneration is active, gain +1 energy pip.

Devastation
- Gain 15 energy when you interrupt a foe. (No ICD?)

Invocation
- Gain 10 energy when removing a condition. (No ICD?)

Alternatively,
- Your next skill after swapping weapons has a 50% reduced energy cost. (ICD 9s)

Etc. I’m not saying that all of these traits should be a part of the class, or that they should go in the game as-is. I made them up based on similar traits that exist in other classes as well as attempted to synergize them with each trait line and style of play.

Ark Bladesteele.2943:

NapTooN.6283:

Ark Bladesteele.2943:

I would also be okay with traits that could help with energy generation. Passive generation is boring. Give us something more to play with, make it even more complex.

And what would those Traits be? For example, the idea that is thrown around that Weapon Skills give you Energy (Baseline, or under certain Circumstances) is basically just a cost reduction and nothing complex at all. There is no giant difference between:

• Phase Smash returns 5 Energy
  and
• We reduced the Energy Cost of Phase Smash by 5

The only one would be that you can use the second one at 5 Energy and the first only at 10 (in this example it has a Cost of 10).

I can not think of a fancy way for Active Energy Management that can not simply be trumped by a Cost Reduction. And asking for fancy stuff for the Revenant just for the sake of fancyness is silly. If the Weapon Skills are too expensive, Roy will reduce the cost, that is all that is needed. The Revenant has enough Swag already.

That idea is still boring. Nothing I have in mind is for the sake of existing. While I do think costs could be reduced on many skills, having skills that simply return energy as a baseline feature is… still boring. I’m more interested in if/then situations, like many traits and skills already in the game. This follows the logic of every other class that has traits to reduce the cooldown of skills.

Some ideas:

Corruption
- When you have a number of conditions on you, the energy cost of your next skill is reduced by 25% for each condition (Threshold: 3, ICD 10s)

Retribution
- Incoming disabling conditions (stun, knockdown, etc) generate 25 energy. (ICD 5s? 10s?)

Salvation
- While regeneration is active, gain +1 energy pip.

Devastation
- Gain 15 energy when you interrupt a foe. (No ICD?)

Invocation
- Gain 10 energy when removing a condition. (No ICD?)

Alternatively,
- Your next skill after swapping weapons has a 50% reduced energy cost. (ICD 9s)

Etc. I’m not saying that all of these traits should be a part of the class, or that they should go in the game as-is. I made them up based on similar traits that exist in other classes as well as attempted to synergize them with each trait line and style of play.

I am fine with Energy Management that can not simply be translated to “We reduce the cost by X”

And as far as I can see, your ideas are unique enough to not fall into the above category.

Ark Bladesteele.2943:

Shrubsy.9720:

Ark Bladesteele.2943:

If you want to eat my energy to burn weapon skills, fine. If you want to eat my energy to burn utility skills, fine. If you want to do both, you can’t make skills that completely shut the entirety of the class down, weapons and all.

That’s not objective. Why can’t you? If you get in a situation where you have no energy, and legend swap isn’t up, you’ve put yourself there by using too much energy. There’s no objective reason that that doesn’t work as a mechanic. Do you really think it’s impossible to balance the class otherwise?

I have yet to hear any real reason why people think weapon skills need both a cooldown and energy cost, or why they’re okay with the current energy cost.

I wanted to focus on this a bit. I’m not Roy, and can’t speak for his reasoning, but the way I look at it is this: The reason why we have both CD and Energy burn on Weapon skills is to keep them balanced. The Energy burn is there to keep the Cooldowns low. The Cooldowns are in place to prevent Weaponskill spam.

It makes sense, and if we had to get rid of one, I’d rather it be Cooldowns. If you get rid of Energy burn, then Cooldowns go up, and I definately don’t want that.

Ark Bladesteele.2943:

I have yet to hear any real reason why people think weapon skills need both a cooldown and energy cost, or why they’re okay with the current energy cost. And I absolutely do think that it’s possible to balance the class without tying energy to everything. Why do you think it isn’t?

And, yes, it is entirely too easy to put yourself in a position where you can do nothing but autoattack. I’m merely advocating to make it less so. Currently, to avoid putting yourself in a position where you can do nothing but autoattack (i.e. to conserve energy), you need to… do nothing but autoattack. Because everything uses energy. Do you want to improve the class, or not?

From my perspective, I haven’t seen any good arguments to remove energy from weapon skills. In fact, I have a suspicion that no objective arguments exist on either side.

It’s essentially a clash between two different perspectives. The push to remove energy from weapon skills seems, from my perspective, to be based around increased usability and lowering the skill floor – giving a ‘safety net’ in the form of weapon skills to protect against being left with only the autoattack in the case of depleting your energy, which both makes the profession more forgiving, and avoids the issue of it being not fun to be left with autoattack as your only option (although unless you’re really blowing through your energy, legendswap is always an option). Leaving energy costs on weapon skills, on the other hand, is a matter of increasing the skill ceiling by giving the player more freedom in making the best usage of their energy, at the cost of also having enough rope to hang themselves. While the revenant could work either way, removing energy cost on weapon skills would require rebalancing elsewhere to even this out – and the cost of which would be that the player who remains aware of their energy and avoids energy-starving themselves except when they’ve made a deliberate decision to do so for a tactical benefit.

All of the arguments basically boil down to this strategic distinction: should the revenant be a more conventional profession that’s forgiving for newer players, or should it give a little more room to excel at the cost of being a little bit more difficult to get the hang of to start with?

My gut feeling is that the latter is the option that’s more likely to stand the test of time. Apart from thieves, we’re used to being able to press every key on recharge with no penalty except that the specific skill used is unavailable for a time. As a result, people are still adapting to the revenant’s different mechanics. When our current level of experience (measured in days) extends to weeks and months, though, I think people will grow accustomed to it, and the little bit of extra newb-friendliness (we’re all newbs with the revenant) of removing energy costs from weapon skills at the cost of lowering the skill ceiling would, if implemented, come to be seen as a mistake. Removing energy cost from weapon skills is essentially like a set of training wheels that will actually make the profession less competitive (after appropriate balancing) in the long run.

After all, we were able to handle having energy costs on everything except adrenaline skills and signets in GW1, and getting stuck with autoattack as your only option was far more punishing then than it is now.

(It’s also worth noting other professions can be stuck into having nothing but autoattack too – if they blow all their cooldowns. Revenant has an extra limit to balance cooldowns being much less of a limiting factor.)

All that said, though, I think pretty much everyone agrees that Forced Engagement is currently overpriced.

“Skill floor” and “skill ceiling” are two terms that I consistently see being used when people argue that energy costs are fine, don’t need to be changed, everything is fine, I’m fine, how are you? …etc.

While I like classes that have high skill ceilings (one of my 3 mains is Ele, after all, the other two are melee Ranger and Guard), I think a distinction needs to be made between “requires a lot of skill to learn/master” and “exceedingly punishes the player to the extent that it loses viability.”

It gets a little tiring every time someone says “if you’re running out of energy, you just don’t have enough skill” or things like as another commenter said “just keep yourself above 40% energy” — without explaining how he or she is managing to do that without autoattacking all the time. If you continually use skills, yeah, you’re gonna run out of energy. There is no way around that.

What I’m trying to do is tweak things a bit so that energy doesn’t disappear as quickly as it currently does, as in 2 or 3 weapon skills and one utility = empty. With the addition of Glint and more upkeep skills, I foresee weapon skills becoming even more of a problem. I don’t want the echo chamber of “everything is fine, don’t change it” to be the only thing Roy or the other designers hear. I spent as much time as anyone on Revenant this past beta, at about 30+ hours across the entire weekend, so I take offense when claims are thrown around that it’s an issue of skill or taking the time to learn with the class. I played a dozen or so hours in duel arenas. Unranked matches. Ranked matches. WvW roaming.

No PvE. I don’t care about what happens to Rev in PvE, because your skill level is not competing against that of other players.

I guess the TL;DR version: I’m posting this for the devs to read. It really makes no difference what anyone else thinks.

Ark Bladesteele.2943:

I spent as much time as anyone on Revenant this past beta, at about 30+ hours across the entire weekend, so I take offense when claims are thrown around that it’s an issue of skill or taking the time to learn with the class.

That’s kinda my point: Everyone’s a newb.

However, the potential to energy-starve yourself is also one that existed way back in Guild Wars 1, where it was in fact more punishing to get energy starved. After all, autoattacks in GW2 are often quite good, such that for some situations and weaponsets your best damage output comes from the humble autoattack and your other weapon skills are more situational, while in GW1 autoattack really was just something you did while waiting until your skills were available – and in GW1 we also had the potential for others to drain your energy for you and otherwise interfere with your energy management, which the revenant probably will not face. (Energy regen for the revenant is also quite a bit faster).

Energy costs on weapon skills are low enough that you can spam them on recharge and still have net energy gain. Utilities are what you tap into when you need something extra, but it will cost you. Draining yourself entirely is punishing, but a) you can always switch legend (unless you’ve done so in the last ten seconds) and b) keeping in mind that removing energy from weapon skills would have to be balanced somehow, I’d rather have the safety net of being able to use that last 20% or so of energy that I’d normally use for weaponskills in order to use a utility skill that will save my life, or alternatively, to be able to use a particular weapon skill again faster because I’ve been disciplined with my energy and the skill is balanced by recharge and energy both rather than not being able to do it because the skill is balanced by recharge alone.

It’s a philosophical difference – having the profession balanced based on weapon skills costing energy gives you more rope in order to both excel and to hang yourself. However, in the long run, as people get more used to it, I think having that extra rope will be more rewarding. As I said above, nobody has the experience to know how much of a problem this will actually be for players who’ve been playing for weeks or months instead of days.

And autoattack… really isn’t the end of the world.

At the bottom of the line, you may be more interested in giving your opinion to the devs. However, people who support the other side also have the right to do the same.

We’ll just have to stay in disagreement, then. Don’t forget that Glint will be providing energy degen, so access to weapon skills will be even more limited.

Assuming that both of us put in an equal amount of time on Revenant, and we’re both talking about playing competitively, what you say about “being disciplined” to me, in my experience, means “avoid skills” which in turn means “autoattacking” or “doing nothing.”

You don’t see it as a problem. I do.

You’re right: I don’t see sticking to autoattack when appropriate as doing nothing or a bad thing. This depends on profession, of course, but I play a lot of guardian with sword, both in PvE and PvP. When you’re using guardian sword, it is often the case that your best option is to just sit in autoattack. Flashing Blade and Zealot’s Defence are both situational skills, used to deal with certain situations rather than something you include in your rotation just to increase DPS. The same is true for the skills on offhands (except torch for burn guardians) and most of the utility skills you see on typical guardian builds apart from Feel My Wrath. And even with weapons that do rely more on non-autoattacks, you often find yourself autoattacking anyway while they’re on recharge.

At least some of the revenant weapons give me the same feel. If you’ve got multiple targets, sword feels like it will do more damage through autoattacking than Unrelenting Assault (the explosions from the third attack do exponentially more damage the more targets you hit, similar to how Coated Bullets on Explosive Shot used to work firing into a tight-packed mob). Staff has a similar feel – most of the staff skills are things you’re going to want to use tactically for best effect than being buttons you press for more DPS. Mace and hammer are a bit more reliant on non-autoattack skills for contributing to damage, but on the whole, I don’t think being restricted to autoattacks is such a crippling penalty for draining all your energy, particularly since you can top it up every ten seconds by legend swapping (you may not want to legend swap, but choosing to stay in your current legend despite having no energy is still a choice!). Bottomline: Revenant seems to be designed so that autoattacking is a viable option, at least with some builds, rather than some other professions where if you’re not pressing all the buttons in all the right order you’re just not carrying your weight.

As an additional thing that struck me:

Energy cost on weapon skills may actually be part of what makes the Herald actually work. If weaponskills were free to use, there would be little to stop a Herald from sitting at or close to neutral energy regen through running facets. When you need energy for weapon skills, though, this becomes a more difficult choice – if you’re at 5 pips of upkeep, or even if you’re at 4 or 3, sooner or later you’ll have to release one if you keep using weapon skills. With weapon skills being free energy-wise, there would be nothing to stop a revenant from just sitting on 5 upkeep permanently (Light, Darkness and Strength for regeneration, fury and might, say) like a signet warrior unless they’re really pushed into doing otherwise.

Now, this all doesn’t mean that there might be an issue that it is in fact a little too easy to completely drain yourself, or that you don’t get enough from doing so to be worth the price (coughcoughForcedEngagementcough), but I think the potential to get locked out of everything if you drain yourself completely is the profession working according to ArenaNet’s vision for it. As we get more experience with it (again, this is not a LTP directed at anyone in particular, nobody outside the internal testers has more than roughly a week’s total experience playing it) we’ll get better at learning how to deliberately make the best use of our energy.

You’re right about Herald only working if weapons have energy costs, and in fact is pretty much the best way to balance the cost of weapon use against signet degen. If there were no other energy costs besides degen, then yes, it just becomes another passive signet build. That doesn’t fit with the idea behind tying skills to energy. It likely means that most weapon energy costs won’t be changing, because if they’re too low Herald becomes too useful, etc. The only thing I hope for is that energy costs on other legends gets a solid look. I really hope they haven’t painted themselves into a corner with this one, because if it ends up being a problem that weapon cooldowns become too long with Herald, and they attempt to balance them against that (because, let’s face it, they can’t really change how Herald functions in terms of energy consumption now), it doesn’t become a problem with other legends. It’s certainly an interesting situation they’ve put themselves in.

Traditionally, utilities have been balanced against each other, because they can be changed at will. I certainly wouldn’t want to be a designer in charge of balancing Rev.

The best way to use any legend is to finish the energy in a reasonable amount of time, then legendswap for 50 free.
It can be calculated that this is the best way to maximize the skill throughput, so 0 pips and just AA is a bad strategy. It’s the equivalent of waiting.

@Kidel: That assumes that the effectiveness of the skills you’re using is directly proportional to the energy cost. If they’re balanced well that will be true on average, but I think part of the theory behind the revenant is being able to choose the best use of energy out of what you have on your two legends. Sometimes, waiting for your energy to build up so you can keep using the skill that is ideal for the situation is more efficient than swapping and having more energy to use a skill that is less effective.

@Ark Bladesteel: That’s pretty much my thinking at the moment – the key is to balance the energy costs so you can make good use of at least some of your stuff without the energy management being trivial. Mallyx, from last time I ran him, felt like his energy usage was a little too high: Mallyx seems based around using the various skills to complement one another, but you often can’t afford to actually use them that way. I’m a bit concerned about Jalis too, given that the road has been nerfed, the hammers have been repurposed, and the taunt has been overpriced for a while.

draxynnic.3719:

@Ark Bladesteel: That’s pretty much my thinking at the moment – the key is to balance the energy costs so you can make good use of at least some of your stuff without the energy management being trivial. Mallyx, from last time I ran him, felt like his energy usage was a little too high: Mallyx seems based around using the various skills to complement one another, but you often can’t afford to actually use them that way. I’m a bit concerned about Jalis too, given that the road has been nerfed, the hammers have been repurposed, and the taunt has been overpriced for a while.

Wasn’t the taunt reduced to 40 energy? Still too much for a skill that’s going to almost decimate your reserves, IMO. I also think that putting an energy requirement on heal skills was done simply because there’s a pervasive “everything must cost energy” mantra going on in the design circle. Unless you’re precasting swiftness or regen or something like Ranger’s Resounding Timbre, or to an extent the Shiro heal, people generally use burst heals like Jalis or Mallyx as a panic button. I know it only takes a second to regen 5 energy, but why do they have energy costs at all? It doesn’t happen often, but 1 second when you really need that heal can mean the difference between life or death.

The Jalis road and heal were easily the best skills it had during last BWE. I rarely used any of the others. Hopefully this is being taken into consideration with the addition of the (very useful-looking) Herald.

edit: just read the changes, and no, Forced Engagement still retains its 50 energy cost. I guess I know what legend I won’t be using.