If alacrity effected energy regen would it be op?

[KantaUO]

I like the idea people have posted about alacrity effecting energy regen, but how much alacrity would be needed to make it useful and how much would make the class op.

 

I play a lv 50 sage and a lv 39 dawning.

[Trimanir]

i'd put alacrity affect global cooldown before changing energy regen. i'ts a lot easyer for developpers.

[Lokiliesmith]

The abilities of the class are balanced around their limited pools. Rather than making alacrity effect regen (which then produces issues of scaling in future content as there becomes more alacrity available) the better solution is to have the abilities cost a lower percentage of a player's resources. It does not make the stat any better, but if resource management is actually a problem, that would be the more balanced solution.

[hrelas]

To answer the question in the title yes.

The reason should be obvious.

[dargor-]

It would simply force the developpers to build encounters around player awareness and skill rather than managing their yellow bar.

 

But seing as Bioware is relatively new at MMOs, its probably better like this, for now.

[Andreasus]

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=262142

 

Can someone confirm that alacrity ist also not working anymore?

 

Someone told that in the german forum so I tested it yesterday.

 

I casted 5 kolto inj. and checked the time. The tooltip told me it should take 5x 1.82s (I have 4% deadly directive and 133 alacrity) this makes 9,1s but my char needed 10s.

 

So I created with bio chemie a 150 alacrity buff and checked it once again.

 

Same result. I needed 10s to cast 5 kolto Inj but the tooltip told me it should take 5x 1.74s = 8,7s

 

Can someone confirm that? I tesded it 5 times and for me I guess this is a bug.

 

for me it is not working at all. Only the tool tip changed

[RuQu]

One of the (many) current problems with alacrity is that it increases the Effective Cost of any ability it effects.

 

If we take Adv. Medical Probe as an example, it has a base cast time of 1.5 seconds, and costs 2 Ammo. Its base Effective Cost is 2 - 1.5*0.6 = 1.1 Ammo, assuming it is used when you are in the max regen zone.

 

Now, use Alacrity to reduce it to 1.2 seconds (easily done with lvl 51 gear). Now the Effective Cost is 2 - 1.2*0.6 = 1.28 Ammo.

 

Similarly, reducing Medical Probe, with the proc to make it cost 1 Ammo) from 2 seconds to 1.6 seconds (the same alacrity as for AP above) changes the EC from a GAIN of 0.2 Ammo to a loss of 0.04 Ammo.

 

Now, these might seem like small changes, but look what it does to a simple rotation, in the format: Ability/CastTime/EffectiveCost

 

0 Alacrity

AP/1.5s/-1.1

MP/2.0s/+0.2

HS/1.5s/+0.9

 

Total Time: 5seconds, Total Rotation Cost: 0 Ammo

 

360 Alacrity

AP/1.2/-1.28

MP/1.6/-0.04

HS/1.5/+0.9

 

Total Time: 4.3 seconds, Total Rotation Cost: - 0.42 Ammo

 

Repeat 7 times, and the second rotation is down 2.94 Ammo, and ahead by 4.9 seconds. So what can they do in these 5 seconds? Well, they need that Ammo back, so the only option they have is to cast Hammer Shot 3.26 times, which, in practice, is 3-4 times, which will take 4.5-6 seconds.

 

This may seem, at first glance, reasonable, in that it increases your healing by allowing those extra Hammer Shots in the same time window. In practice, it does not. In the Combat Medic guide stickied on this forum there is a Stat Calculator that does long rotations, and many times positive changes of Alacrity results in negative HPS changes over time. Looking into it, the cause is because the high alacrity doesnt "allow" extra Hammer Shots, it "forces" them, because you need them to get your Ammo back. You can't afford to ever use that time for a full price Medical Probe. The high Alacrity rotations, over the same number of casts, were swapping out Medical Probe casts for Hammer Shot, and since Hammer Shot is so weak, that leads to a net decrease in HPS.

 

One possible solution would be to tie Alacrity to cast time spells such that it kept their Effective Cost steady, but did not increase overall regen. So Hammer Shot would still regenerate 0.9 Ammo during its 1.5GCD, but AP and MP would refund 0.18 and 0.24 Ammo after they cast, respectively, at 360 Alacrity. If the effective cost stayed constant, then the 360 Alacrity rotation would remain Ammo neutral, but take 0.7 seconds less time, which would make it exactly the rotation at 0 Alacrity, only faster. Philosophically, I feel this is what was intended by Alacrity, so is probably the route they should pursue.

 

The lack of effect on instant ability GCD is another issue, and a big one faced by both Commandos and Scoundrels. Resolving that and the Effective Cost issue are not mutually exclusive.

[Iheamylap]

I think if it had a % of reduction to Energy cost of abilities, it would be more useful and not OP. You are giving up damage and defense for Alacrity, and it's a fair trade.

[RuQu]

You have to be careful not to just take the easy route and allow it to increase regen all the time. With that I could stack enough Alacrity to make spamming full price Medical Probes non-punishing, and you have just broken the resource mechanic entirely. This happened in WoW, generally towards the end of each expansion, as mana tended to become an essentially infinite resource pool and you didn't need to think about resource use. Then healing is just playing whack-a-mole and is insanely boring.

 

We want to maintain the fun and thought required to play within the interesting resource mechanics, and have to make interesting choices (can I afford to cast that Medical Probe? can that Sentinel afford for me not to? Since he is dps, do I care? Does it matter that he chose the ugliest Zabrak model possible?)

 

I think the Devs need to decide what the philosophy of Alacrity is. Right now, it appears to be "cast that clutch heal faster" but our rotations are so cooldown and resource limited that stacking something on the assumption that you will need an unplanned emergency nuke heal more often than once every 2 minutes seems to be really poor itemization usage. If the philosophy is closer to WoW's haste philosophy "let's you do more stuff in the same time," then they need to allow it to reduce GCD on instants, potentially reduce certain rotation specific cooldowns (but not emergency cooldowns) and maintain the Effective Cost of all abilities it effects.