Guild Wars: Why You Should Still Use GLE

After a rebalancing the natural impulse is to flee from those skills that are seen as being nerfed. If that holds true here people are going to stop using things like Diversion, Reckless Haste, and especially Glyph of Lesser Energy. That's a shame because those skills are still eminently playable.

Glyph of Lesser Energy, for example, has been linked to Energy Storage, one of the most useless primary attributes, no doubt because it was fueling all sorts of wackiness among people who'd go secondary Elementalist just to pick that skill up. That's a sure sign that something's wrong with a skill, of course, and in this case it was giving any caster too much energy management from such a cheap, unattributed, and non-elite slot.

Now, the patch notes are usually written in 1...15 attribute layout notation. Why, I have no clue, but that's the way it's always been done. So, if I'm doing the math right that means the breakpoint for getting a GLE to function at its former efficiency of 15 energy per spell (And that's really all you need to get to. 16+ is only important for 25 energy spells and not only are there precious few of them, most characters aren't going to be slinging around multiple ones. Maybe with high enough Energy Storage this changes but I doubt it.) is somewhere around the 8 or 9 in Energy Storage mark. That's high but not unreasonable. If it's in 1...12 notation then it's somewhere around the 6 or 7 ES mark, by the way. Otherwise, you're talking about a skill with far less efficiency than it used to have.

For a secondary Elementalist who doesn't have access to Energy Storage, now GLE will only take 10 energy off of the next two skills. That still means a potential saving of 15 energy for the cost of 5 every 30 seconds or roughly 1.5 pips of regen. Before this “nerf” it used to be 2. So it's worse, but that's still great e-managment from a non-elite, if you ask me.

Take, for instance, a common Reaper's Mark Necro bar and their energy costs

Reaper's Mark – 5en

Parasitic Bond – 5 en

Reckless Haste – now 15 en

Price of Failure – 10 en

Faintheartedness – 10 en

Shadow of Fear – 10 en

Resurrection Signet

Glyph of Lesser Energy

You've only got one skill on there that's not going to get the full discount from the new model GLE. And that's only because it was tweaked in this skill update. The probable way you were using GLE would have been to pop it off and then cast Price of Failure and Faintheartedness, say, before covering with Parasitic or Reaper's. There's absolutely nothing different now about how you can do that. Sure, if you were running Suffering or Rotting Flesh you'd be having more of a crunch but, again, it's only a difference of .5 en and you likely weren't hitting enough 15 energy skills already to be that efficient. Pretty much the same thing for weapon rits and other casters.

Where this actually hurts most is with the Monks. It's going to be a lot harder for them to keep up an Aegis chain (Although, with the change to Rending Sweep that might not matter so much.) or spam Heal Party now. It's still got plenty of use though to help with things like Divert or Shield of Regeneration. But, as always, Monks get shafted when it comes to energy management.

So, it's still playable and doesn't do much about secondary Elementalists abusing it. But I think the root cause of that would be this statement here: "Glyph of Lesser Energy has been very successful in diversifying elite selection on Elementalists and bringing more high-cost skills into play" The reason it's been successful in bringing high cost skills into play is because they're overpriced. And the reason why it means people can use non-e-management elites is because the only way you'll play the expensive, overpriced stuff is by having the energy engine to make it affordable. Fix Elementalist pricing structures and you won't have broken crap like GLE.