It did it was i13, although there was some bleed over like Energy Transfer animation increase
Energy Transfer's animation change occurred at the same time as a significant number of other powers' animations were altered for a variety of reasons. Although PvP concerns might have been one of them, had PvP not existed at all Energy Transfer's animation would have still been changed. Every power with animation duration less than 0.84 seconds was targeted, as was any power whose DPA was considered wildly outside the current norm. The original rationale for Energy Transfer's extreme damage and fast cast time was that this was counterbalanced against its self damage, but that rationale was no longer considered credible. PvP might have been the cherry on the top, but it wasn't the only reason that power was changed.
In fact, the same logic that produced the Energy Transfer change also reduced the mag 4 stun in Energy Manipulation's total focus. Not many people blame PvP for that because no one can come up with a PvP rationale for that change, but it happened for similar reasons, namely the rationale for why it existed in the first place was something the devs no longer agreed with, and that made it an outlier.
Eventually it was going to be targeted, and the only question was when the devs would decide to schedule time to address it. Which, by the way, is another question the players often asked. "If it was really because of such and such reason, why didn't they change it long ago" presumes that if a change happens now, the reason for it must be something that itself happens right now; either something caused it now, or something was brought to the attention of the devs right now. That's not how people work.
Actually, the context of the Energy Transfer change is even bigger than that. The same logic that caused Energy Transfer's animation time to be increased is the same one that caused many melee attacks' animations to be *decreased* around the same time, including powers in, say, Battle Axe. I know because I played no small part in getting the devs to think carefully about the fact that animations were not primarily cosmetic, but were actually the beginning and the end of offensive power performance. The two parameters the devs used to control power performance originally come from the original game design which regulated endurance and recharge as the two primary moderators of performance. But its really animation rooted time that is
the singular measure of an attack's value. That notion didn't even
exist until long after launch, and while quantitative players had accepted that fact for the most part by I6 it really didn't hit home for the devs until Stupid_Fanboy's inspired Claws adjustments happened. The devs were predicting 8% increase in performance from their changes, I was predicting 50%, and only one of us was right. My belief is that spectacular failure of the power design rules to predict the output of Claws, and the success of DPA-based and attack chain calculations to predict it accurately (by that time I wasn't the only one using attack chains to analyze offensive sets, so a few players made similar although not identical predictions) finally caused a shift in thinking about what it meant for an attack power to be "balanced" and that eventually caused the devs to start looking at DPA more.
That was the steamroller that was bearing down on Energy Transfer, and I saw it form over a period of years. PvP or not, it wasn't going to survive forever as a DPA 4+ attack.
