Are there too many skills?

Too many skills? Maybe, maybe not, I like having a lot of options.

Problem is there are way too many bad skills that either don't have a practical application to actual gameplay, or are utterly ineffective compared to other more viable options.

As I was around at release I can tell you that there were FOTM builds then too, but the real reason one'd see more "unique" builds then was that the proportion of players who were really inexperienced at designing builds were higher.
Today players are more skilled and more experienced, and no-one would even consider fielding a mending wammo team, but back then it was actually a pretty common build.

Where anets logic stumbles is that while having hundreds of skills and rotating skill changes makes it impossible for anet and it's relatively few testers to foresee and test all possible builds, it doesn't stop the much larger playerbase from testing all possible builds, and finding the optimal ones.

I'm sure anet will make sure they don't have as many skills in gw2, in order to keep complexity low enough that they can test all possible builds, but I think that's the wrong lesson to learn from buildwars.
The real lesson to learn is that individual player skill should be more important than build, something I don't think is possible to achieve with a combat system based on scissors-rock-bag/magic the gathering.

more playable skills= more options, but I wouldn't say too much that would destroy the game.

Ill have to say there are a bunch of useless skills. But looking at the many useful skills, there are never enough.

yes there is, and this is one reason the game is fun and one reason A-net fails at skill balancing, too many ways layers can make new builds, which was what they intended but not in this way, and they can really nerf/buff all the skills in balance.

Magic: The Gathering produces 1000 "skills" a year, and there are very few "balance" issues.

The difference? MtG is balanced by competent people.

I'm not talking about non-serious builds/scrubs in the first place, so that's beside the point.

Even after obs mode there was a degree of build diversity within the definition of 'balanced build'. The only comparable situation was the winter tournament (core+NF only), which had very poor diversity - mainly because of many severely overpowered skills.

It's true that greater experience cuts down 'creative' builds, but that happens whether you have 400 skills or 1000 skills. It's a situation that's easier to deal with when you have less skills as well, as tweaks can be more easily made.

You don't. That's the point. If you could, then the game would be too easy.

yes i think there are too many skills i think the duplicets can be removed and the useless should be spread out and given to the new races so everyone has equal amounts.

Maybe a TINY bit too many. The dupes are lame, for example. But having a huge diversity of skills is one of the cool things about GW - people are constantly dusting off old skills and inventing awesome new builds with them. The cycles of nerfing and buffing keep things interesting too. Everything old is new again!

A few too many skills is way better than not enough. There's already a problem with cookie-cutter mentalities; the game would be practically unplayable if cookie-cutter builds were also enforced by sheer supply of skills.

Bullshit. First of all MtG isn't balanced, and it's history is filled with FOTM builds ("rat packs" and shit, with a new one cropping up every expansion due to the power creep necessary to get people to buy the expansions), secondly it can't be updated the way GW can, so instead too grossly imbalanced cards are "banned".
People perceive MtG to be balanced because it's effectively a game of chance*: if all builds in GW were drawn at random from a large pool of skills, as is done in MtG, the game would appear to be balanced too.


* MtG players always claim that MtG isn't a game of chance. Well, guess what: even poker is largely a game of chance, and if you've ever played these two games you'll know that the influence of dumb luck is much, much, much, bigger in MtG.

there are too many unused skills
the rest is fine for me

GW, like any game that adds new skills/abilities beyond the initial concept, is subject to a form of Natural Selection: with each new "mutation", there are some that will fare better than others, and may dominate/completely eliminate others.

With hundreds of thousands of players, this happens fairly quickly, with some skills excelling in PvP and others in PvE. And when a new "mutation" dominates, its kind of like the "weaker" skills - or those getting dominated - are crying: "Foul! Hey - that's no fair! You're OP compared to me!"

Power creep is the way of Nature. Heresy to say so, but maybe some skills should be "retired" if they simply can't compete. Or, as ANet has been doing, it can be completely revamped given the new game environment and dynamics.

There cannot (as far as I'm concerned) be too many skills.

It is easy to make some builds that work for individual characters. It is relatively easy to put together some of these builds for a balanced and pretty effective team.
Many bright and creative players enjoy putting together team builds that get really good synergy and tinker with these for a long time to optimize them. If you took that away, I would guess PvP would lose a lot of the players who have been playing for a long time.