The skill limitation is a natural way of making teamwork neccessary, all players arn't ment to do everything. But against certain classes like Ritualist and Elementist, who use a skill that lasts for a few seconds and can't be used again for a minute, those skill slots sufficating, and for classes like Assassin who need a minimum of 3 skill slots just to make a reasonable combo, it is difficult to afford other skills.
A Good Assassin combo takes at least 3 skills, often 4, along with the supporting skills for his manuevers and survival, it is easy to run out of slots, and with such a defenseless class, hard to justify a rez sig, if they are a /mo or /rit, a reusable rez is alright, but a one time rez on a stressed skill build, is hard.
I always hoped that swimming and climbing mechanics would be added to the game, and that two skill slot exclusive to swimming and climbing be added that way exsisting class builds can still be used along with new exploration based features.
If they just add more skill slots than all classes will improve in functionality, with appox the same balance, I don't think it is a bad thing, but what we have is alright. If they added more skill slots, I can't see them adding any more than two.
There are alot of skills which have very low frequency, making the cost of a skill slot very unfavorable, for a powerful skill the character can only use one minute, means he is down one less function for the majority of the time, and often the short term function doesn't provide enough punch to match the usefulness of most frequent skills. With this limitation in skill slots comes the need to have skills which are balanced in output and frequency, if the frequency is so high that even a strong output doesn't match a simple reusable skill, than it isn't balanced, and I think that is the largest balance flaw in A.nets skill selection. With such massive recast times it is almost neccessary to have additional skill slots in order to remain active during combat.
As for the sterio typical 3 hit combo Assassin, that only inclucdes a hand full of skills. The most popular builds are two interchangable 2 hit combos, which often require particular triggers, adding at least one more neccessary skill to the mix, on top of that, there is the lack of frequent knockdown skills which makes one of Assassins favorite skills difficult to meet, often requiring 2 trigger skills along with the other 3 combo skills (as well as Falling Spider). With a useful Assassin build you will be lucky to have 3 slots for defensive and raise skills, and that often excludes mobility skills, the one good mobility skill is an elite, any other "in and out" function will cost you 2 skills, and to make that even more difficult, many of those skills are infrequent themselves. Beyond that, mega combos that include Mobius Strike can easily take 5 slots, reducing available slots for mobility, hexing, survival and rez to 3 slots, and most of those functions can easily take 2 slots. All slots are not equal, for a class that requires a chain of skills to even execute, it is very difficult to manage skill slots, not all attacks have a 10 second recast, and not all spells can be recast every 20 seconds either, so don't bring up a mindless cliche build when you don't know what your talking about, just because Assassin attacks involve lead, off-hand, and dual attacks doesn't mean they default to 3 skill slots to make a useful build.
Just because something would work differently doesn't mean it couldn't be balanced, assuming current balance is the only balance is ignorant, and pretending like the balance we have is uncontested is also ignorant. The balance we have isn't perfect, not by a long shot, the only real balance we have is that A.net shoots down any overpowered and broken builds so no one combination is unbeatable or unfair, it certainly doesn't make all skill combinations equal, nor does it mean that each skill has the same value as any other skill in its best combinations, there are plenty of imbalances. Adding a 9th skill slot is a new threshold, it means new options, it would probably require that some skills be altered, but it doesn't mean that the game suddenly goes broke. The game could work on 6 skill slots, it could work on 10, all that really matters is that it functions well and that players enjoy it, and the game most certainly woln't be less enjoyable if you have more skills to use.
