Are there too many skills?

I know this may be heresy for some, but I find there are way too many skills in GW. There are so many combinations especially when you couple that with a secondary profession.


The real problem is there is not a good quantitative way of evaluating the skills effectiveness especially when many of the skills are synergistic and dependent on other skills that are on other team members.

I guess the metric for evaluating the effectiveness has to be team based, but there are so many permutations its a very complex, difficult, and daunting task. Its also situational, base on the expected foes and their skills that you are up against. In general speed to perform the specific goal, such as mission or quest, would be a possible metric. So how do you quantitatively determine the optimum team build?

I think it's less that there are too many skills and more that there's too much to handle on ANet's plate.

yes there are too many skills

yes, this isn't news

I love you Bryant, I really do.

No. Lots of skills with tons of combinations in sets of only 8 is what makes (made) GW great - the fact that one actually has to find out what works, rather than having only a few skills to choose from. Each skill or skillset has something better than it in any given situation. There is no one "optimum" team build - there's always a counter, unless ANet decided to buff WS further (somehow?) or something else stupid like that.

Lies. It's very easy to calculate the base effectiveness of a skill (DOT s.t. energy and time constraints). Calculating synergies is a bit tougher; the best way to do that is to consider the opposition's removal and the load you put on their energy and time (and max removal capabilities s.t. recharge constraint).

The tricky bit is figuring out how to evaluate the value of disruption. I argue that this is a step function: either you want to produce NO disruption, enough disruption to prevent caps in HA, or enough disruption to produce kill windows, but no more (since 95% of the disruption skills in this game are overcosted and the remainder go on EVERY bar of the class in question). This follows from the fact that disruption invariably has diminishing marginal returns, so you want to produce JUST enough to get kills given player skill. (As a rule, using disruption to not die only works out against spikes or bad builds and bad teams like spiritway.)

The problem is that Izzy and the rebalance team don't think like this. I guarantee you that the better theorists in this game (not that there are many left around) think in this fashion. Lord only knows what Ensign was keeping from the masses, but I'm willing to bet that he had a comprehensive theory on the matter, given his arguments about adrenaline.

This is what keeps me interested in the game. Too little and it would be this is the skill set you must have to play as a ele or mes or whatever class you are. The ability to try so many combos make it interesting and fun atleast for me. So bring on more skills why not

well, there definitely are way too many. this is what makes GW, GW. on the other hand there are also very useful skills that fill multiple roles which i think is the direction anet is heading in for GW2.

a particular line that has a lot of this is the water magic line. almost every skill benefits from water hexes, as well as giving the utility of snares.

[freezing gust] , [Glowing Ice] , [Frozen Burst] , [Blurred Vision]

the fact that most of the skills use water hexes in the first place makes everything more viable, and great splitability.

now if only more lines were like water

Yes, there are too many skills in the game. There are too many professions, too.

this is very true, and not only that, they've diversified what each skill line can do. I talked about water eles in the Skill Balancing thread, but another example is rangers. Bow rangers especially used to be crowd control, interrupting and spreading conditions (esp cripple + a cover). but with the lastest skills in bow, they've become a really good spiker. they diluted and diversified the jobs of most of the skill lines too much.

I don't necessarily think there's too many skills, there's just too many USELESS skills. i'm all for diversity, as long as everything is actually useable.

Yes, there are too many skills(and too much on Anet's plate). Hence EoTN, instead of Utopia and GW2 in place of any more future campaigns.

Communication. It works wonders.

I think there are too little skills

I think we have to much access the secondary skills, it should have been a limit of 2 attribute not 3, for example anyone can be a Spirit spammer in PvP, it's true the spirit don't have enough HP, but controlling spirits should be in the hands of a Rit only, hopefully GW2 will fix it and leave certain skills out in the secondary profession, there's should be a tie in, Necro controsl the dark arts so a Nec should have more access to the Assassin Shadow Arts than any other class.

But that severely limits customization and basically pre-determines how you play the game....

its not so much there are to many. I compare GW to MTG alot, similar balance. anyways, there are thousands of cards in magic, and they are mostly balanced. GW designers just need to use a little bit of thought when designing and fixing skills.

The current team obviously lack the skills to do this (look at smiter's boon, what kind of fix is that?) so they either need to hire some people that can balance skills or have less skills.

I find no problem with number of skills available to use with accessable primary and secondary attributes. The diversity is one of most attractive thing in Guild Wars or perhaps makes GW better than many other MMO which have too much restriction on attribute and skill setting. Playing different combination over time is what keeps me playing GW

there's too many combinations. while some people believe this is a good thing, it also causes problems. anet simply doesn't have the time/people to devote to testing EVERY build, and that's where broken builds. they have to change certain skills from time to time, but they won't know how it will work with every other skill.. if we had less skills, we wouldn't have as many of these problems, imo