User:Raine Valen/Musings/Easy Balance

Hey, ANet. You seem to be having trouble balancing stuff a choice few skills, so I'mma help you out.

Aura of Thorns

Problem:

It cripples everything you look at, no questions asked. There's nothing wrong with that, really, when a Ranger does it. When a Dervish does it, though, you end hurting seven times as hard because lol dervish damage. While the dude mollywhops you with his scythe, he also gets to spam flash enchantments and blow you up with magical damage. And you don't get to run away. That's why the Cripple on this instant, completely uncounterable skill is a problem.

Solution:

Undo all the other changes you've made since the big change. Instead, swap the order that the conditions are applied in and decrease the duration to 12 seconds: Bleeding on cast, Cripple on removal. Why this and not punish the energy or nerf the recharge or something? Well, let me explain.
Cripple on cast allows the dervish using the skill to cripple you with no downside, period. They lose like 8 energy or something, and they don't really care because dervishes are back to the "lol what's energy" state that they used to be back in the NF preview. Unless you want to shaft the energy costs of the entire profession, a class with 4 pips that only uses energy for like half the skills on their bar, anyway, will never, ever have energy issues. Increasing the cost to 10 energy didn't do anything at all for this very reason: you cut into Dervishes' copious energy pools enough that they're still freakin' copious.
Of course, you can always limit its spammability with a hard cooldown, and you guys tried that, too. Well, that's fine and dandy, except that in order to knock it out of the meta, you'd have to make it all-around meh for good and bad players alike, which is back where we started.
Now let's look at my solution.
By swapping the condition application order, we're giving the user of the skill two ways to apply cripple: they can either use a teardown skill or they can wait for the enchantment to expire. They can't just push-button-receive-bacon; they either have to wait around for the cripple or do something proactive to bring it about faster. If they want to use a teardown, this means that they're either using an attack skill or they're popping Pious Fury (and, thereby, cutting into the enchantments available for teardown attacks AND their Energy pool just as hard as the current Aura of Thorns does). In the former case, we've created an opportunity cost RIGHT THERE: if they want to apply their Cripple through a block or blind or whatnot, they can, but they risk also failing the associated teardown attack while they cause Cripple.
Alternatively, they can wait for it to expire naturally; then, they're not using it more frequently than they are now, period AND their spikes get put on a hard, predictable timer.