What do you think is a balanced skill?

To me, a balanced skill is a skill that is powerful in the hands of a good player, and weak in the hands of a bad player.

[distracting shot][frenzy][bull's strike][diversion][infuse health][reversal of fortune] are all skills that I believe are very nicely balanced.

Actually it takes too much energy, should be around 20 imho, or lower, but cause your character to fall backward or something you know like using such strong force to cause a concussion that causes the user to fall down backwards. OR if you are shooting from far away place daze-less, if you are close up, daze longer, 25 energy is just unacceptable. :P~

This is the only (if not mistaken) attack skill that cost 25 energy for a class that has low energy pool.

Well, it does cost 12 energy. Expertise, you know.

well it does make a difference if u catch a wand attack with it or a hammer spike :P.

then how come Dshot isn't 25 energy? it does same type of dmg, interrupt action and disable skill for 20 seconds, cost only 5 energy, with expertise who knows .... see. if you compare it to mesmer skills, its even more unbalanced. some mesmer skill cos very little can shutdown an ele or monk or etc for good until they are dead.

Dshot iz gud
Diversion iz gud
Bulls Strike iz gud

Best 3 skills in the game (also most balanced imo)
The fact that they are on every ranger, warrior, and dom bar doesn't make them imbalanced. They are strong skills with uses and draw backs. Diversion is strong if you catch a key skill, but it is easy to see incoming. If your midline can't interrupt, they can atleast inform the backline that is it coming. It has a different cast anim than the other reg mes bar, considering its around 2 seconds with fc. Bulls strike is also a big one, considering it cannot be cancelled easily. If wasted, does nothing. If utilized, does aloooot of goodness. Dshot as well; if you spam this like a nub, it wont do anything. I also heard battlefield awareness is good to bait out interrupts?

Alot of 'pro pvpers' on these forums are just taking the conventional route and saying "since everyone uses it, it must be imba". Of course, what majority of the population uses these skills properly? Even some of the top guilds still can't use these skills properly. All 3 of these skills can be countered easily; if you think they're broken, you're simply not doing it right.

Predict bulls and..stand still.
Keep an eye on the ranger and bait interrupts.
Prevail, call incoming hexes.

MMMKAY

The core skills of Guild Wars are balanced and imbalanced at the same time. It depends on what side of the looking glass you gaze through. If you gaze through skills that have gone through a power creep and are now imbalanced in the sense that they can be exploited or spammed with no real skill, the core skills are balanced or slightly underpowered.

If you look at it from the perspective of skills that are extremely niche or rarely used (because they lack specific functionality, are just plain useless in 99% of situations, or lack versatility), then the core skills of Guild Wars are overpowered. This debate is in the eye of beholder, literally.

A bad mesmer with diversion is not overpowered, but a good mesmer with diversion is overpowered to a player/team with less skill than said mesmer.

A ranger with dshot who spams will eventually get lucky, this is true. However, a good player going against a bad spam ranger will win, because dshot does have a 10 second recharge, and the ranger can be dealt with. Arrows are still bound by the laws of the game; line of sight, blind, hexes, anti interrupt, etc. Mesmers are far better at interrupting, but it takes more finesse to use their skills in a correct and useful fashion.

No one skill is overpowered unless it can be visibly exploited, or used by a bad player with the same effectiveness as that of a great player. But, put a normal skill in the hands of an excellent player, and that skill becomes overpowered to the majority of players who are not as skilled. Skill = skill. If a skill is truly overpowered, it is changed.

The examples in this thread are not valid.

is there any alternative to dshot ? the only ranger interrupt providing additional skill reload is magebane, an elite

and if you don't see the difference between savage and dshot, and why both are important, don't talk about ranger skills anymore

mesmers are not outperformed by rangers, ranger disruption is much more conditional and easier to shutdown

It's much easier to define balance through that which is not balanced. A skill can be overpowered, balanced or underpowered.

Underpowered is the most obvious category. There's no reason to ever run an underpowered skill. Either the effect is worthless, or the effect can be provided more cheaply by another alternative, or the skill just doesn't do/prevent enough damage to justify the cost, or the recharge/cast time is just unacceptable for the effect. It's pretty easy to get a community of players to agree on what is underpowered.

Overpowered is where the debate comes in. There are two levels of overpowered: *environment-defining* or *undercosted*. By *environment-defining*, I mean that the skill is so dangerous or so pervasive that it compels other teams to dedicate skills and design their gameplan to counter that skill. By *undercosted*, I mean that the skill gives you more bang for the buck than other skills of comparable cost, so there's no reason to run anything else.

The problem with both types of "overpowered" is that they crowd out build diversity. This defeats the purpose of a game where you select a few skills for use from a wide array of options. If I want to play a balanced game where everyone runs the same thing, I can fire up a shooter. Dragon Arena may be won by the more "skilled" team, but it gets boring quickly.

Environment-defining skills are more insidious because they limit what entire teams can do. Undercosted skills just lead to sameness within class and within teams. A few of these aren't a large problem, but a large number of them lead to stale metas where everyone has to run the same thing and strategies standardize.

Something like Mark is environment-defining. Every team in GvG runs it, and it levels standard damage counters, so you have to build and play with that threat constantly in your mind. Something like Lingering is undercosted - six iterations of an AoE hex like that (more when landing quick recharge) every minute for 5 energy is just brutal. However, Lingering requires heavily speccing into a relatively weak attribute line and is only appropriate for builds that intend to kill through pressuring through entire teams, so it's not environment-defining.

If the game were in "balance", there would be multiple packages of standard skills for each class, but no packages that are almost always observed on a team. The fact that Monk bars are standardized suggests that the class is badly out of whack; the dev team justifies this on the grounds that the class is by far the hardest to balance. The fact that midlines, runner bars and frontlines are well-established is more troubling.

The community's belief that disruption skills such as Distracting Shot, Bull's Strike and Diversion should be the most powerful skills in the game is the primary reason for the stale metas of the last couple of years. Metas require that some offensive skills be more powerful than disruption skills in order for balance to obtain. If disruption is more efficient than raw damage output, you get what we have observed in GvG for a couple of years: successful teams running as much defense as possible, with just enough offense to get kills occasionally. The problem is that there is no competitive advantage to running aggressive builds; there is no reward to justify the risks incurred at the highest levels of play. The efficient solution if offense is undercosted is to maximize the defense function subject to the constraint of having just enough offense to spike things out periodically.

People argue that the Prophecies meta was balanced because there was greater build diversity (except in backlines and on Mesmers). Whether this was because people simply hadn't iterated strategies enough to find optimal skills or because the skills really were balanced is unknowable. What I can say with certainty is that creating a knockdown for Warriors infinitely superior to existing options was a poor idea. Creating an uncounterable block mechanic with a short recharge was also unhealthy. The skills may require "skill" to use, but they are simply too cheap for what they do.

It is because it doesn't cause daze.

Daze is easily removed, 20 seconds recharge on interrupted skill is way more powerful.

Sure but look at how the power scales with the skill level any less energy and it would have to be an elite. Compare [Broad head Arrow] to [Concussion Shot]
notice how the non-elite skill matches the elite skill in daze duration point for point. This with a silencing string is the longest daze duration in the game. However the non elite is much more conditional in its application and much more punishing if mishandled. Also notice the nice recharge time on c-shot a mere 5 seconds. Not to be spammed by scrubs least they deplete their energy but again if in the hands of a good ranger its ready to refire on demand. IMO [distracting shot] is not balanced because it does not punish incompetence. At 5 energy this skill is spammed with reckless abandon with no downside. To balance it out the recharge time could slide with a 7 sec recharge for a successful interrupt and a 20 second recharge for a missed interrupt. This would reward skill, prevent spamming and punish incompetence without destroying the skill.

a balanced skill has advantages & drawbacks.
A balanced skill if it has very little or no draw backs, gives only a minor advantage.
A balanced skill is a skill that synergizes with the skills around it, but does boost them or degrade them to ridiculous levels.

A balanced skill doesnt have to have immediately realized drawbacks and immediately realized advantages.

I think dash is a relatively balanced skill.
It has draw backs in it's energy & Recharge. Unlike other IMS skills it is not a consistent skill, and as such it's not as good as other IMS's overtime.
However, it's still quite a useful skill useful for kiting or chasing, or even dodging that projectile.
The advantage it gives is so short lived, it's not significant enough to over centralize anything.
It does what it needs to do just fine.

This was first thought as well. I feel as if [Vengeful Weapon] is equally balanced.