Guild Wars: Why Soul Reaping Will Still Cause Problems
I've gone over the recent changes a bit more. Noticed things like Otyugh's Cry actually becoming playable now. Figured out that a 2 second increase on the recharge time of Diversion is practically worthless to how it interacts with the MoR. You know, the usual. I've also done some thinking about what the alteration to Soul Reaping means. The favorite suggestion made was to convert it, somehow, to energy regeneration rather than flat energy gain. I'm glad they've taken steps to address it – even going so far as to take the Soul Reaping tax off some minion skills - but I'm not sure it's still not going to be the source of awful builds like Discord spike and SBRI.
If I'm understanding the patch notes right it will now provide its benefit, at most, once every five seconds. So, three things dying in the space of three seconds is not as good as two dying in six. So, it's objectively worse than it was before.
That doesn't mean much, however, since it was formerly completely batshit insane. Now it's only down to being completely insane. Say, for example, you have Soul Reaping 10. A healthy investment but not an unreasonable one now that there are some interesting skills in that line. Under the old way of doing things you'd get 10 energy (5 for a spirit) whenever anything died and the only limit on how much energy that could mean was how many characters could fit in a given area. Now, it means that your maximum efficiency is now 10 energy every 5 seconds. That's the equivalent of 2 energy every second or six pips of regen. If you can reliably ensure you'll have a lot of things dying regularly – like spirits or minions – then your energy pool is still shooting through the roof. It's just going to be a little harder to pull off. But, honestly, it's hard to spend energy as fast as Soul Reaping was able to return it and a lot of it was being wasted in the real spirit and minion spamming builds.
If you only have a moderate 5 in Soul Reaping, that's up to a full 3 more pips on your energy bar. If you have, say, 15 or close to it – which isn't unreasonable given skills like Reaper's Mark and Icy Veins – then you top out at 9 pips.
So, it's still a lot of energy. It's still extremely strong in the right circumstances. And those circumstances are still out there waiting to be exploited. Maybe a bit less and maybe the old SR abusing builds have been destroyed but it's only a matter of time before someone finds the right conditions to exploit it again. So, good first step but hopefully only the first of many.
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2 comments:
I'm a bit confused by your math - 14 SR = 7 energy from spirit deaths every 5 seconds. That's 4.2 pips by my count.
8.2 pips is still a lot, but it's certainly better than the 15-20 that horribleway necros were getting.
Right, from spirit deaths you get half energy. So at SR 10 you'd get 5 energy every 5 seconds or 3 pips. And at SR 14 that's indeed 1.4 energy per second or 4.2 pips added on to your natural regen. 8.2 pips or something like 2.75 points of energy every second isn't as bad as the crazy amounts you can get to now but it's still a lot. It's only slightly worse than having an Ether Prodigy running constantly only without drawback. Better than 20 odd pips but when you have six or seven characters running at that level of regeneration, as in, say, a Bloodspike or SBRI now, you're still going to see wacky results.
There are a few caveats there, though. First, the phrasing on the description is awkward. It says "now only provides Energy at a maximum rate of once every 5 seconds." Is the maximum rate referring to the number of times it can proc in a given time frame, as you'd think. Or does it mean that you can only gain your maximum energy once over those 5 seconds? What happens, say, when two spirits die, do you get 1/2 your SR bonus and then the other half or is it just cut off after one death? That would be monumentally stupid but stupider things have happened.
Second, you only get half energy from spirit deaths. If I'm not mistaken, minons provide the full bonus when they die. Part of my point is that this will kick the current builds which abuse SR to the curb but that just means people have to go back to the drawing board. Fueling them with spirits might be untenable. But there are other ways to get massive Souls reaped. Remember in the past, for example, when people would sac themselves to death and acrue a huge minion army before the match had begun. With skills like Jagged Bones, you can keep those large minion hordes going. What if players figure out how to build up, say, 10 or 15 minons and then pick off the ones with Jagged up with, say, Feast for the Dead every five seconds? You get a return, at SR 14 not of 4.2 pips but 8.4. For a total of 12.4 pips or 4 energy per second.
It might take a little time, it might take a little more setup, it might take a little more effort, but the potential to abuse those kinds of energy returns is still there. And it's always going to be there as long as SR has these sorts of conditional returns - once it's figured out how to create those conditions, it's full team of Necros time.
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