Tutorial Managing Energy

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Energy ManagementBeing successful when playing Guild Wars depends on a many things but one of the most fundamental is using your skills. Characters that rely on weapons or otherwise not using skills are playing with one hand tied behind their backs. Every character has eight skills to use and winning is going to hinge on getting the most use out of those eight skills. A simple way of saying something extremely complex because there are many factors involved in your skills as well. But just as skills are fundamental to success so too is the concept of energy fundamental to using skills.Casting skills, activating them, using them, however you want to put it, for the most part requires energy. In another game you’d call it spell levels or mana or MP, but in Guild Wars, it’s energy. That’s the measure of how much effort is involved in using a skill. Therefore, one way of making sure you’re getting the most from your skills is to make sure you have the energy to cast them as much as possible. That, in essence, is the idea of energy management and that’s the issue we’ll be delving into.While some skills do not require any energy – notably adrenal skills and signet skills – that much is true, most do take some amount of energy. It’s be the odd skill bar that doesn’t include at least one skill requiring energy. And as long as you’re spending energy there’s a need to manage it. An important aspect of the energy system to consider at this point is that while characters have a maximum amount of energy they can have at any one particular time, they’re not limited in the amount of energy they can have over time. Energy regenerates over time. If you spend some energy it’ll eventually come back, it’s just a matter of how long you’re waiting. This regeneration is measured in arrows of energy regeneration, commonly known as “pips”. And a single pip of regeneration in your energy bar means that you’ll recover 1 point of energy every 3 seconds.The goal of successfully managing your energy is to lose less energy over time than you can successfully regenerate. Like your bank account you want what’s coming in to outweigh what’s flowing out. If you have but one pip of energy, ideally, you want to spend less than 1 energy in 3 seconds.However, you can spend more than 1 energy in 3 seconds because characters have a maximum store of energy. You won’t regenerate past that number but you will regenerate up to it. This means that just with your bank account you can indulge in the occasional deficit spending. You can spend a few hundred dollars on a new TV or a few thousand on a new car even though that’s far more than the amount of money you’re taking in because, hopefully, you have a bit of money in your bank account to start with. You can’t do that indefinitely because eventually you’ll run out of money, but you can splurge when the need arises. So, a character with a single pip can spend more than 1 energy every 3 seconds by tapping on the stores of energy they begin with it’s just she can’t sustain that level of spending. Eventually, spending more than she can regenerate will result in them running out of energy and being unable to cast at all. What regeneration does when you’re sending out more energy than you take in is to put that point off further and further the more pips you add. So, say our one pip character starts with 15 energy and casts enough a skill that costs 1 energy every 3 seconds. That’s the break-even point. Cast more than that and she’ll lose energy, cast more and she’ll never run out of energy. If she increases her casting by using that 1 energy skill every second she’ll be spending 3 energy every 3 seconds - meaning she’ll be running at a deficit of 2 energy over that time or the equivalent of two pips of “de”-generation – you can see by referring to the following table that rather than running out of energy in 15 seconds, she’ll run out of energy in 22 seconds. Every 3 seconds she’ll gain another point of energy and thereby extend her energy bar for a good 7 seconds. It doesn’t matter if she started with 5 energy or 500, she gains an additional 1 energy every 3 seconds and lengthens that energy bar by a similar percentage. If she were to increase her regeneration by a pip or limit her casting to casting that 1 energy skill twice in 3 seconds to be only running a deficit of 1 pip then she can keep casting for about 41 seconds. And that’s the goal of proper energy management; to be able to keep casting longer. It’s perfectly fine to go into deficit spending for a time just so long as it’s for a purpose. You want to spend that energy to buy something important enough to make up for losing it. You don’t want to fritter it away needlessly. Hopefully, you’ll be able to go back to surplus spending, the levels of spending above the equilibrium of the break point where you’re neither losing nor gaining and are actually earning energy but if not you’ve invested your resources in something that matters.

[ArtOfDarkness067]

It does seem a bit obvious lol

[12955]

very obvious....and block of text i broke....