Feedback:User/Silverdawn/Taking energy one step further

The History and Status Quo sections describe the development of energy in the Guild Wars franchise. They can be skipped if you don't want a history lesson, but you may miss out on context if you do.

History
The energy system in Guild Wars was a quickly-regenerating short-term resource that was inseparably bound to Guild War's skillbar and armor systems. In order to understand energy, you must also understand these other two components.

The skillbar consisted of 8 skills chosen from two professions, with the goal of finding those skills that worked the best with each other. Skills were comprised of two parts: a benefit and a cost. The most common kind of skill had three kinds of costs: energy, casting time and recharge time. The developer strove to make each skill as good as any other by making the combined total of its cost "pay" for the benefit it gave.

A character must pay a skill's energy cost to activate that skill. If he didn't have enough energy, he must wait until his energy regenerated. This provided a constraint on choosing eight skills - if a character had too many high-cost energy skills on his skillbar, the rate he used energy could outstrip his energy regeneration and leave him unable to use skills for a short time. Energy management skills effectively traded valuable space on a character's skill bar for extra energy at certain intervals, making the prospect of bringing along one or more high-energy skills feasible. Light armor also provided extra energy capacity and regeneration at the cost of protection against conventional damage.

The energy system in Guild Wars 1 had a several purposes. It provided enough nuance to prevent build-creation from devolving into simply taking the most highly powered skills possible. It prevented heavy armor classes from effectively using the powerful area-of-effect skills that were meant for light armor users. It set a pace for how often skills could be used, both offensively and defensively.

In the developer's eyes, the Guild Wars skillbar and its energy system had several problems. The skillbar only had 8 slots and skills had narrow utility, making solo play impossible with the exception of a few gimmick builds. As a result, players were forced to spend too much time waiting for other people to join them or settle for the help of NPC adventurers who lacked common sense. The developers found that a vast number of skills could not be independently balanced by matching their cost to their benefit because their true value only appeared when combined with another skill - often with completely unforseen, wildly overpowered results. Energy pressure in a team's backline could very easily lead to a party wipe. The energy system itself was very complicated, involving forethought and experience in both building and playing characters. The level of energy management expertise required to be successful in PvP provided an almost insurmountable learning curve that discouraged new players.

You can see how prominently these problems stood in the minds of the Guild Wars 2 development team. In order to prevent some of the balance and learning curve issues the awesome freedom in Guild Wars was responsible for, the developers got rid of secondary professions and set a much more rigid format for character builds to follow. These two changes were enough to take away the biggest reason of the original's energy system for existing - and, initially, the developers thought about removing it entirely.

Status Quo
Eventually the developers decided that there was a place for the energy system, after all: as a means to limit defensive play. From there, they began to add things. They wanted a measure of success in battle that fell somewhere in between total success and total failure, and they didn't want to bring back the temporary health and energy penalty for dying that existed in the original. They didn't want the frustration that came with running out of energy. They didn't want the energy system to be a barrier to learning the game. They thought it would be nice to have an extra reserve of energy when you need it. And, oh yeah, a gold sink.

The energy system they settled on is a slowly-regenerating energy pool augmented with potions, which are a consumable above-the-bar skill that has a short out-of-combat and a long in-combat cooldown. A character can cart around a large stack of energy potions. They can be purchased cheaply from vendors and they have a high drop rate. Attack skills have little or no cost while defensive skills, healing skills and dodging have a high cost.

This energy system has one big flaw: potions. Potions are an integral part of combat that provides an energy reserve when you need it, contributing to the developer's goals of making combat more than just who runs out of energy first. However, because of their consumable nature, potions just delay this problem instead of curing it. The only real way to make sure that players never run out of energy is to make it an unlimited resource - but an energy bar that never provides a constraint has no reason to exist. Potions remove or mitigate that constraint but exaggerate it with no good way to recover if a player should run out. I think that if a system requires an energy reserve to function properly, it did not have enough energy or regeneration to begin with.

An energy reserve with a high capacity of uses provides a significant advantage that must be balanced for in the strength of enemies in order to maintain the desired difficulty of an area. This can be good in early areas for giving inexperienced players a bit of slack while they learn the system, but it comes with the disadvantage that even end-game combat will be balanced with the expectation that players will burn potions. Players who have expended all of their potions will be forced to make a decision between heading back to town or continuing to fight without the "panic defense" buffer the encounter assumes they have - a decision ArenaNet shouldn't be forcing their players to make.

Potions also fill the role of measuring the success or failure of any particular encounter by how many potions were expended, giving the energy resource a long-term component. However, this is simply unnecessary and not enough of a benefit to be worth the hassle posed by their consumable nature. Guild Wars had a way to measure the outcome of a battle between total success and total failure without needing an explicit guage. The success of the encounter could be measured by how fast you killed your enemy, how active your allies' health bars were (and how many of them hit the ground during the fight), and whether you had to wait for your monks' energy to recharge afterwards. If your hands were shaking at the end of the encounter, you knew it was a tough one.

One reason that I've heard justifying the existence of potions is that they provide a gold sink. I don't buy this: potions are an integral part of combat, and combat must be profitable or the game will run into problems. For that reason, potions aren't a true gold sink - they merely slow the rate at which gold is acquired instead of removing gold from the economy. If potions can be sold to vendors, they will have quite the opposite effect - they will ADD gold to the economy if an efficient player accumulates them through drops and sells them to merchants.

Potions are also conceptually awkward. The idea of sheathing a weapon, reaching into a belt for a vial, popping off the cork and downing potion in a gulp while under direct physical assault is pretty silly. Very few games have the style to actually animate imbibing a potion, making it seem even more like a superficial mechanic. Most games are set up so that combat is impossible without them, leading one to wonder what warriors did before their invention.

I have a personal gripe about potions, as well - after playing Diablo, a game that relied on potions and gear and left me in situations that deprived me of one or the other, I have come to prefer games where a character's power comes from the character itself. I love that in Guild Wars you can rush out into an explorable in un-runed armor with any half-decent weapon and still be viable. It makes the character feel competent and heroic. Conventional games lack that feeling; your character is just a stooge who owes his success to the gear he takes with him and literally cannot function without it.

Suggestion
Energy should be scaled back to fill its main purpose to the virtual exclusion of all else: to encourage offense, support and control by limiting panic defenses like dodging and self-healing. This means that only dodging, self-heals and personal defensive skills that do not fall under the categories of damage, control or support cost energy. Damage/Support/Control skills that cost energy should be the rare exception rather than the rule; these skills are paced by cooldown rather than energy cost.

An arbitrary energy cost should be assigned to dodges. The number of dodges a character can perform per minute (independent of traits) should be determined; this should tell the developers how much energy regeneration a character should have. Next, the developers should determine how many times in a row a character can dodge; (the maximum number of consecutive dodges * dodge energy cost) - (time spent dodging * energy regeneration) should give a good idea about what a character's maximum energy pool should look like. Other energy costs (such as healing) can be derived from that by asking how many times per minute a character can use it and comparing that cost to energy regeneration; how many times in a row a character can use a non-dodge defensive skill or self-heal is often a moot point because such skills typically have a cooldown/recharge cost.

A character needs to pay the energy cost of the defense or heal to use it, and must wait for his energy to regenerate if he doesn't have enough. Optionally, he might be able to do a tired, less-effective dodge if he doesn't have enough energy for a full one, but generally, if a character is out of energy, he must avoid damage properly through movement, control, positioning or his enemy's negligence, or he will die. Energy is a buffer for mistakes and bad play - once it is exhausted for a certain time period, his buffer is used up until he can regenerate enough energy for another dodge or self-heal. Note that a character with no energy can still engage fully in "proper" damage/support/control play.

An on-demand energy reserve and an explicit, mechanical measure of how well a character is playing is useful to new players, so a learning aid might be provided in a starting character's elite skill slot that works like an infinite-use potion. It could be called something like "Vitality of Youth". During the course of an encounter, it could change color to show how well the player is doing. It could start out as green, but turn yellow and eventually red as it is used. In combat, it will slowly shift more towards the green end of the spectrum. Outside of combat, it immediately turns green. The goal is to not use it at all. If the player does use it, tips might show up to help the player play better. When the character gets an elite skill, this skill is replaced.

If there must be a drawback to this learning aid, it should be an experience penalty. It should work something like this: during combat, experience gained is stored in this skill. When combat is over, a percentage of this experience is actually earned based on the color of the skill. Green would be full (maybe even bonus?) experience; red would be little or no experience. This is better than a gold penalty because it prolongs the tutorial areas for people that need it (and speeds progress through it for people who don't). It ensures that when this safety net is discarded, the player is ready for it.