Are there too many skills?

One of the primary excuses, when they bother to have one, to swing the Nerf Bat is that too many people are using the same skills in an unbeatable manner. The expression of the skills should be what one generates in unique ways or visual effects. The plethora of unused skills, or skills which are nice on the monsters because that makes them easier to beat, makes the majority of skills near useless.

Inspite of the fact that skills are expressed in all possible combinations, the same combinations come to the forefront through the efforts of the bean counting min-maxers. Then these are coppied by the rest. The function of being social, and a community, is to share that information which leads to community success. When this is done people are ridiculed for using cookie cutter builds.

Some variation is needed because there are a variety of groups of people. Everyone is unique just like everyone else in their clique. Some people simply will never be good interupting as a Mesmer but do great as a Ranger. The variation of skills plays to that advantage and is inclusive. The problem is knowing which skills should be viewed as fodder for the monsters and which can be used effectively.

GW has from the outset provided so little information about the way their game works as to be equal to the manual parents get when a baby is born. Let me be real clear - they don't say anything helpful in understanding how the game works and what you can do. Hence, if you want an elder pet, you either have to cap one or repeatedly guess at how to make one. Most people opt out for a Dire pet because those instructions and a clear path to success are available (or they end up with a hearty pet by doing next to nothing). It is the same with skills and skill combinations. There is insufficient time and instruction on the game for most people (especially occasional players) to do more than copy from the few builds that work.

GW has forgotten that the point of the game is entertainment, which is most readily achieved when a player feels successful. The mash they have slammed together, nerfed up, and pureed over the last few years has resulted in a game to broad for the general player to walk in and grasp. So, most quit and only use the few things that works for those around them. Instead of fostering ingenuity, the excesses have quashed it.

I have to agree with the statement. While I've grown to be used to it, I think that the amount of skills is rediculous. I also find GuildWars to be too much skill-based. (Read: in-game skill, not playing skill)

I don't request any changes for GW1 tho, this would require way too much work. But I'm glad that Guild Wars 2 seems to be having a more balanced approach in which equipment and experience share an important role together with skills to determine character effectiveness.

There are at the same time way too many skills and not enough skills. The 'too many' part comes from having a zillion uninspired skills doing essentially the same thing and it's just a matter of choosing the most efficient one. The 'not enough' part comes from insufficient depth and synergy between skills, preventing the creation of really ingeniously original new builds (there is an abundance of original builds all right, it's the 'ingenious' part that's missing) since the available depth is pretty soon exhausted.

What we have heard about the skill system of GW2 makes me believe that ANet is going into the right direction with stuff like emergent phenomena.

Way too many.

I would like to see more skills.

you make the build and test them? lol i find that extremely fun and hope there are more skills

The whole point of having so many skills and constantly changing skills is to make it difficult to calculate optimum team builds. If it was easier to calculate optimum builds, what little build diversity there is goes right out the window.

We have seen this happen over and over and over again, as optimum builds are found despite there being so many skills, and do lead to local optima where everyone runs the optimal build or an optimal counter to the optimal build.

Basically, you're arguing to make guild wars even more into build wars. The logical end point of your suggestion is rock-paper-scissors.

There are too many skills.

To make optimal build, you had to take multiple skill lines from different professions. You picked a strength that only one class had, the covered that class's weakness by adding an appropriate secondary. which was fun

There's so many skills now and each skill line has lost it's unique identity (this is what i mean by diversity) that you can do essentially everything you used to be able to do with just 1 proffession, without the seconday prof. and do it even better, partly cuz the skills are over powered, and partly because you don't have to split your attributes.

Going on this logic, we would see less builds being prevalent the fewer skills were in the game, ie: Prophecies.

This was not the case.

Too many skills, too many proffessions, NightFall was a bad addition. ANet came WAY over the top with OP skills and has been attempting to find balance ever since.

Look at RaO and SandStorm pre nerf to see my point.

They ment well with NF, but no, they failed, added WAY too much shit.

At least with EotN it was only a handfull of unneeded PvP able skills, but the PvE Only Skills that were added aare sooo beyond OP it's silly.

Maps and dungeons an, I guess Hero Battles were a good addition, but the skills and new Proffessions were bad.

It is pretty overwhelming, especially when you're new, the amount of skills that are available to you. And only a handful ever see regular use - in PvE, I can't speak to the PvP aspect of the game.

Compound that by adding all 4 campaigns, with some redundancies, and you start to go: "Crap! WTF do I use this skill for? Agh - I'll just go back to my tried and true whatever."

Diversity is good, and flexibility. I like having options. But, in PvE, it basically comes down to: does this help kill things faster, or heal/protect me more? All the "tactical" e-denial skills in the Mesmer line, for instance. Not much use in PvE.

I don't know. The same thing was true in Magic the Gathering. There were a lot of cards that, while they had cool artwork, just didn't see much play. Certain skills just worked better than others, and had better synergy.

diversity in the game is good. diversity in a single class is OP

Too many pointless skills is the issue I think. They nerf overpowered skills and do nothing to underpowered skills. To me it seems that the number of efficient skills that do synergize well is becoming smaller, and the number of skills that are nerfed to deter usage is increasing with absolutely no change to the skills that aren't used to begin with.

Collecting the skills were and still are an entertaining side activity of this game. Getting UAS and UAX was something fun to do before and after the titles. I have two toons with every skill in the game on them and enjoyed the hunt. I realize and respect that many don't feel that way and so they make tomes and faction for those people, but to take away the skills makes the game less not more. Also there is great entertainment value in taking some skill descriptions with you and maybe sitting in the office away from the game late or on a long ride to the cabin for the weekend theorizing about different builds was kinda like working a crossword puzzle. I believe with the separation of pvp and pve nerfs and updates to the skills have solved many balance issues. They will be manged more effectively in the future and even more fun in GW2. As far as people who find the skills overwhelming and too complex. Anet will just have to decide who they want as customers. Those who want a shallow grindy game and those who want a complex game of skill and adventure may not be the same market.

I have Skill Hunter on my primary character (about 40 more to Legendary). All of my characters collect every skill in their class and those needed for builds. I understand collecting skills out of a need for use and profesional action of that character. I see no reason to collect ALL game skills on one character, especially since it seems about 40% of the skills have no use except for monster fodder.

100% wrong fyi, maybe you should read some update notes sometime.


The problem is not that there are too many skills, it is the method with which we were exposed to the skills that failed for the most part. Releasing huge numbers of relatively untested skills in a single shot (with new chapters) is a recipe to create piles of unbalanced crap that can take years to fix.

We'd have much better balance and many more viable builds if the number of skills we have, had instead been released in smaller skill packs (once a month or so) so that their interactions with existing skills could be thoroughly tested. This probably also would have helped generate a lot of continuing interest in the game.

I'd say 50% wrong. Anet used to nerf overpowered skills and do nothing about underpowered ones. They only started to actually buff alot of underpowered skills pretty late in GW's life.

But one thing for sure is that the way Anet used to nerf skills for PvP resulted in also in more useless skills in PvE (where the skills would be fine). The current method of creating PvP version of certain skills is a good way to go but I felt had been adopted too late.

No, there are not to many skills, just to many bad ones.

Remember when people found out for the first time that guildwars only lets you equip 8 skills at a time? how people were outraged and said well all other MMOs let you equip and use every skill you have whenever you want.

Then remember how the game Fury was suppose to be the answer to all things wrong with GW. let you equip like 50 skills, and you grind and grind to get more skills only to find out that as you get further in the game every class has virtually the same skill with different names and trivial alterations.

I don't know if GW felt threatened by Fury, which I never understood why, but that's essentially what GW has started turning into. Aside from the of the new mechanic spells, if you tried to recreate some of the popular skillbars now with only prophecies + core it would require you to tap into 3-4 professions, 5-6 skill lines, and 12-20 skill slots. GW still only has 8 skill slots, but there are single skills now that do what 2-3 different skills used to do, except better. or 2 skill combos that do what 3-4 different skills used to do. virtually letting players fit 12 skills into 8 slots.

sometimes, less is more

additionally, new mechanic skills, shadowstep, weapon spells, shouts, chants have too few counters to them, especially counters that punish people who use them, like shatter enchant.

Over 1,000 skills over 10 professions. Don't forget that ANet aren't the best at balancing them.

Yes, there are too many.