Guild Wars: Warning, Contents Under Pressure

I was looking through the updated skill lists the other day. Specifically, the Elementalist. I have an ele character, after all, and I've been playing one since my days in the test when I went at it bassackwards through the fast-casting Me/E route. Let me just say that once upon a time the best storm skill was Chaos Storm and you put that together with Maelstrom and good things happened – the clicking sound of spells being interrupted is music to my ears. And, well, I'm just trying to refamiliarize myself with the game's skills and the changes to them one profession at a time.

So, as an old school fan of glyphs – whether you're talking about GlyphSac fun and games or even Glyph of Recovery instead of Echo for some profession flexibility - this leapt out at me:

Glyph of Lesser Energy. Glyph. 5en, 1cast, 30recharge. For 15 seconds, your next two spells cost 15 less Energy to cast.

And obviously, saving 30 energy every 30 seconds for the price of spending 1 second casting is a damned good deal for non-elite energy management. That's the equivalent of one energy every second or a full three pips of regen. That's a Good, by the way.

So GLE is now even better than it was (Used to affect only the next spell.) But what really caught my eye was the similar buff to GEP:

Glyph of Elemental Power. Glyph. 5en, 1cast, 5recharge. For 15 seconds, your elemental attributes are boosted by 2 for your next 5 spells.

Likewise, GEP only affected the next spell which made it useful only for boosting enchantments or other long-lasting effects. You'd get a slight boost to your damage but taking one second to cast every five seconds to do so wasn't the best thing to do. Now, since the next five spells you chain together actually benefit – and I'd say that's worth it to add 10 points of damage to each of your next five spells. More than that, generally, though. Fireball, pretty much the gold standard for Fire damaging skills causes 7 damage plus 7 for each rank in Fire Magic. +2 to Fire Magic translates into 14 more points of damage. That's about what you'd get setting someone On Fire for a second and I'd pay 5 energy for 5 seconds of Burning, I think (Although you only get to use Fireball twice before GEP fades about 7 damage a rank is pretty standard, if I'm remembering right. And if you're playing an Ele and you can't figure out how to cram five spells into 15 seconds then you need to find another class.). I can think of a few old builds of mine that just got a bit more lethal thanks to that. Good.

Then you throw the new skills like Searing Flames into the mix and things get pretty exciting:

Searing Flames. Fire Magic. Elite Spell. 15en, 1cast, 2recharge. Target foe and all nearby foes are struck with Searing Flames. Foes already on fire when this skill is cast are struck for 7+(7xFire) fire damage. Foes not already on fire begin Burning for 1+(0.41xFire) seconds.

Told you that 7 damage a rank shows up a lot. Anyhow, that's 91 damage or 6 seconds of Burning (Which is 84 damage in and of itself.) that you can hammer someone with every two seconds. Sure, that's 15 en which is an obscene amount to spend that much and that fast but, well, that's what GLE's for these days and it's not like Elementalists are hurting for other effective means of energy management. But although the math gets a bit tricky since you have to deal with both degen and damage Searing Flames kicks out a lot of damage in a short amount of time. Get several casteers doing that and you don't even have to co-ordinate your damage, if Burning's been cleaned off then you the next time someone attacks it gets put back on and everyone just keeps doing their damage.

You know what that sounds like to me, don't you? Pressure. I touched on the subject a bit before in this post about eurospike. But I'm going to touch on it again because it's an important one. Spiking is what you get when you time your attacks to maximize their effect – it attempts to overwhelm defenses by stressing their ability to react. Pressure is the opposite way of doing things and it doesn't require you to rigidly time things, just to keep attacking in order to wear out the other side – it attempts to subvert defenses by stressing their ability to sustain. As you cause damage the enemy has to recover it when they can't is when you start getting kills. For pressure that's the point where the enemy start to run low on energy or gets stuck in recharge hell – conditions that will be gone momentarily but that doesn't matter when bodies start hitting the floor – or they just plain start making mistakes. The longer you draw things out the more likely it is that someone's going to miss a cast or press the wrong button or nub things up or any of dozens of things that can potentially go wrong. Pressure can take a while, then, even though of the two styles for dealing damage it's the one that's easiest to start doing – there's no great deal of co-ordination required to start beating on the enemy and doing as much damage as possible while doing so (Now, doing so effectively, on the other hand, takes a lot of co-ordination and skill which is why a lot of people think pressure is the way to play. Of course, saying hitting people a lot is pressure is like saying counting down from 3 is a spike – that's where things start but if you want to do it right and survive on the highest levels it gets a whole lot deeper and more complicated. Again, most people have absolutely no idea what they're talking about. Including me.). So, if you will, spiking is running a sprint while pressure is a marathon.

Elemenatlists – who, by rights, should be to caster based offenses what Warriors are to melee and Rangers are to, well, ranged – have been, historically, absolutely horrible at dealing pressure, though. It's not that they can't deliver hits on people it's keeping it up that's the problem. Because just as defenses have to be geared for the long haul to survive against pressure offenses have to be continuously hacking away at those defenses. And there's a reason why Elementalists have such nice e-management options – e-prod, GLE, even this nice looking new Master of Magic among others – they need them. Because to do their thing Elementalists burn through a massive amount of energy (To say nothing about the time commitment.) while other classes are effective even without spending a drop. Throw in all the counters to intensive energy use and casting in general and you have problems sustaining caster offense. So, if you wanted to kill people with Elementalists (Or, to a lesser extent Necros and Monks and whatever else) you were restricted to going with spike-based strategies. Those are ones that burn through a lot of resources in the hopes of punching a hole in defenses then recharge before trying again. Obviously, the faster you can spike and respike again the better but there's time to regain energy or spend casting skills that manage it rather than hurt the enemy.

With skills like Searing Flames, though, Elementalists start to have options in terms of pressure. It's something I think has been tried before with spells like Mind Burn (And Mind Shock and Mind Freeze, etc) that traded on an Elementalist's naturally high energy to power out the damage. But they didn't work quite as well or for quite as long as Searing Flames. Indeed, I'm not the first person to notice this and I've seen teams in obs mode running with Searing Flames Ele for the offense. Rather than, you know, using the naturally high energy and good management of the Elementalist for utility stuff like spamming out Heal Parties. Sure, it still costs them a metric ton of energy which is just going to be a problem as long as every other class can use an Elemenatlist's skills, too. Things like big energy costs and exhaustion are in the game to keep these sorts of spells in the hands of primary Elementalists and out of everyone else's. Or, at the very least, to make them jump through a lot of hoops before they can use an Elementalist's bar with their own primary attribute's benefit (This can be done, of course, and when you do you get things like, well, fast-casting Mesmer/Elementalists.).

But Searing Flames is fast. And cheap. Not in terms of energy but in terms of time. The time it takes to cast and recharge is the other big resource that most skills deal with (Adrenal skills substitute adrenaline for energy. Which works a little difference but isn't all that dissimilar.). Most Elementalist skills are awful there, too, usually taking either a long time to cast or a long time to recharge. I suppose that's because Elementalists are supposed to be the “nukers” - squishies who deliver large packets of damage at great cost - and things can get a little wacky when nukes fly around freely. Or even too quickly. It's one of, I think, the remnants of old ways of thinking about designing and balancing the game. At one point Warriors were supposed to trump Rangers who were supposed to thwart Elementalists who were supposed to mop up Warriors in a kind of rock/paper/scissors balancing of the game's offense – that's why, I believe, at one point, Warrior armor was incredibly weak to the lightning damage that only Elementalists would kick out, for example, and why Rangers have a lot of interrupting and defensive options. But the idea that casters have to be standing there waving their arms for long periods of time in order to keep things in balance doesn't really fit with how the game actually gets played today.

So, since I think Elementalists should be able to apply pressure the same way that Warriors can spike their adrenal things, I've long thought the answer wasn't giving Elementalists big, fat overpriced skills but giving them cheaper, less potent but more efficient ones. Things that are better than continually spamming Flare, for example, just to keep pace with the damage that a Warrior relying on their standard attack. Searing Flames would be exactly that kind of skill because while it costs a lot of time and energy to use it can be used over and over again. Causing a lot of damage and a lot of problems that the enemy has to deal with. It's not the only skill to do so that I can see – the spread damage that would help to mask a spike is a real draw for people, no doubt – but I think it's a positive development. And an elegant solution to making Elementalists actually matter in terms of offense.

So, yes, Searing Flames is Good.