User:Raine Valen/Musings/Energy Potions

"Energy in Guild Wars 2 is a long-term resource."

"Energy in Guild Wars 2 is a long term resource. It lasts over multiple fights. Every skill uses energy. It is a way for players to gauge how difficult a fight was and how cautious to play. This makes encounters a lot more diverse and in our more solo friendly environment, it allows players to push into higher level and more difficult areas and get into more challenging fights without killing them outright."

Energy in Guild Wars 1 is a long-term resource. If you've ever played a RA match, you know that your energy bar is full when you start the match and probably won't be full again until the match is concluding in most situations.
It is fine that you want Energy to last over multiple fights; it is not fine that you feel that this encourages "Having fun, rather than preparing to have fun". Shopping for potions and consumables to replenish energy is not fun for me, nor is waiting for it to naturally regenerate (slowly, from the sound of it).
Being in the encounter is a very great way for players to judge how difficult a fight was. If a fight is supposed to be difficult, why are we measuring it in how much of a blue bar we deplete, rather than the amount of effort it takes to succeed at? In Guild Wars, I can measure the amount of pressure I am under as a monk by how much energy I am expending in order to keep people alive and healthy (and, if it is too difficult, I will not be able to keep people alive and healthy for prolonged periods of time!), by how closely I need to watch the field in order to catch spikes, by how much effort it takes to do my job. As a warrior, I can tell how difficult a game is for me by how much damage I am inflicting, how much adrenaline I am gaining, how often I can land Bull's and Disrupting Chop, and even by when the opposition allows me to Frenzy. It's never been about "this fight was difficult, so I'll be mildly inconvenienced for a while because this blue bar says so".
I am not sure whether it is nice, at all, that people in PvE will be able to deal with more "challenging" content by expending more energy. Again, this relates to your definition of "challenge"; mine does not equate "challenge" with "risking having to pop another potion".

"Guild Wars 1 did not have a long-term resource."

"Guild Wars 1 did not have a long term resource. Energy regenerated immediately outside of combat. This created a number of problems for us. The greatest of which was there was no good way to balance encounters. Encounters were very binary – you either won or lost and there was nothing available to tip the scales of the fight in your favor. The only way you could tell if a fight was difficult was if players died. Most of the time this was either because they made a series of mistakes that they couldn’t recover from once they realized it."

Again, Energy in Guild Wars is a long-term resource; I will spare you the reiteration.
Yes, it regenerates quickly outside of combat, but the "issues" that it "created for you" were not flaws with this, but rather much deeper flaws with other systems. However, I don't feel that it is necessary to detail those flaws here, as the much more relevant truth is that the only difference between waiting a few seconds for energy to regenerate after an encounter and waiting a few minutes for energy to regenerate after an encounter is the amount of time spent not having fun.
Encounters were not very binary, at all: there is a huge difference between a good 600/smite/famine trio effortlessly cleaning out a dungeon in a few minutes and a typical pug dragging through the same dungeon over the course of several hours. This is not an exaggeration. There is a difference between wiping [be] guilds inside of a minute (blindfolded) and duking out 20-minute balanced-v-balanced matches with [yumy]. You don't either "win or lose", you can win or lose well or badly.
And there are things you can do to tip the scales in your favor: you can play better. No, you can't burn through your big blue bar faster to make up for your lack of skill in most situations; is this a bad thing? If you are losing, you can play differently. You can alter your strategy to produce different results.
Finally, the only way to tell if a fight was difficult was not "if players died". Not even close. In Guild Wars, you could tell if a match was difficult by how hard it forced you to play in order to win.
Yes, losses are caused by series of mistakes. But where you go wrong in that statement is where you claim that these mistakes cannot be recovered from: inability to recognize or recover from mistakes is characteristic of a bad player. Why are we operating under the assumption that everyone is bad? Why are we penalizing everyone with potion dependence under that assumption?

"A long-term resource allows players to learn from their mistakes..."

"A long-term resource allows players to learn from their mistakes, makes the game more approachable, and together these things make the game more fun. You don’t just win or lose – you have time to react and time to recover from errors instead of being punished by death for not playing perfectly."

Because it is immediately relevant, energy is not the sole reason that recovering from mistakes is difficult. Way back when, a team could be pushed hard and come back relatively easily once the pressure let up. That's not true anymore. Bigger, faster damage demands bigger, faster heals and prots, not monks wearing more Radiant insignias. The reason that there is so little time to react is that skill balance moved to a different state and the energy system that every other system was built on did not change to accommodate this.
That being said, a long-term resource does allow players more room to learn from mistakes, but, at the same time, it also gives players less of a reason to. Engaging a higher-level monster and having to spam Fireball more won't discourage me from engaging higher-level monsters, will it? Why should it, when I can pop a potion or two (depending on the recharge!) afterward and do it again?

"Energy regenerates slowly on its own..."

"Energy regenerates slowly on its own, however, all players have a potion button attached to their energy bar. Drinking a potion returns energy and puts this button into recharge. Out of combat, this recharge is short. During combat, the potions recharge slower, allowing us to reward skilled play and balance difficult encounters against a finite resource pool, so that challenging bosses can’t simply be defeated by bringing more defensive and healing skills. Energy potions are the only kind of consumable that is usable in combat."

Effectively, you've limited a player's energy regeneration to their natural regeneration plus the rate at which they can guzzle potions. What does this accomplish?
Yes, the recharge makes the system better than "I have lots of potions so I can never run out of energy", but how is it an improvement over a system that directly relates a manageable rate of energy spending to the amount of combat that a player can endure? How is basing the amount of energy a character can spend on a potion's recharge any better than basing it primarily on natural regeneration?
In your next sentence, you confuse me very much. Throughout this post, you've said that energy was supposed to be a long-term resource. At one point, you specifically said that it was supposed to last for multiple engagements. Here, you say that out of combat (between engagements), energy potions will have a short recharge. My question is this: if I can spend several times the normal amount of energy on an ostensibly difficult fight (I will have that much energy available because I should have enough for several fights, right?) and then immediately go into power-chug mode afterward, how is energy a long-term resource at all?
I understand that potions recharge slowly during combat; why, then, would one use a potion in combat at all, given that they'll have reserves large enough for several fights and they can negate the in-combat use penalty by simply using them between fights? How is that skilled? Overcoming balance in one scenario by using things in another scenario is something we're all well-acquainted with. True enough, a longer recharge in combat allows you to balance fights against a finite energy pool; is there a reason that all of Guild Wars is balanced around the fact that high energy sets don't exist?
On a similar note, challenging bosses in Guild Wars can't simply be defeated by bringing more healing and defensive skills because energy regeneration only permits use of 5 energy every 3 seconds or so. Bringing more healing characters must be what you're referring to, and the only reason this can work is because your "challenging" bosses don't require a solid damage output to beat. The tradeoff for bringing more defensive characters is damage and offensive utility; if very little of these things are required, what's to stop players from running 8 healers and grinding through bosses' health bars? Have you ever seen someone degen and wand the Great Destroyer to death? What about the Flame Djinn? You're misplacing design mistakes.
Here, I also feel inclined to point out that bringing more healing and defensive characters will work in Guild Wars 2, too, as long as respectable damage isn't required because everyone can deal respectable damage. Furthermore, because the healing will be spread out over multiple characters, they'll be able to guzzle potions faster. How have you accounted for this? Will water eles not be able to team up with other water eles?

"Hopefully this addresses some of people’s concerns..."

"Hopefully this addresses some of people’s concerns with potions in the game. Remember, Guild Wars 1 and Guild Wars 2 share a lot of philosophical similarities, but this is a new game."

Not really, no.
It's clear that they're different, but how is this system better?
I'm just not seeing it.