Simpler Balancing: Limiting Skills

I can safely assume most people hate it when a skill gets destroyed because some gimmick build was abusing it. There are a lot of skills right now that are all but unusable because they were too powerful when mixed with another skill.

I've noticed something interesting though; unless I'm mistaken, a fairly large number of broken gimmicks (not all or perhaps even most) are created by layering things like hexes, stances, or enchantments.
A normal build doesn't stack a large number of these, but a lot of gimmicks are set up to abuse them.

I think an effective way to improve balance would be to apply the same sorts of limits that Elite and PvE skills have on other types. For example, perhaps you could only take one stance on your bar at a time, ~3 hexes, ~3 enchantments, ~3 spirits etc.
No more untouchable Rangers stacking block stances, no more invincible enchant-stacking monks/elementalists.

They could take it a little further and limit people to maybe 4 attacks or 3-4 heals on the same bar. They could even limit Rangers to maybe 2 traps on the same bar, so they no longer have to be balanced around covering half your bar with traps and stacking them.
This could easily force the much more balanced builds they deemed necessary for Guild Wars 2.

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Alternative option (Posted below)

A similar option might be to just make specific skills unusable with each other. It would be a little ugly, but I would definitely like that a lot more than ruining one of the skills.
As an example, they could stop you from taking both Lightning Reflexes and Whirling Defense, or Escape and Jagged Strike. (Probably not great examples, but whatever)
They could make that even more specific, and block combinations of maybe 4 different skills, so they could actually target and remove that exact build they don't want people using while doing little or no harm to others.
I suppose how ever many combined skills are causing the problem, they could block from being combined.
They even have the option of differentiating it from PvE and PvP.

"balanced" builds can actually have hexes, enchantments and etc. stacked on the same build (think a Curses Necromancer with [Insert Elite Skill here], Defile Defenses and Faintheartedness, or a Protection Monk with Reversal of Fortune, Guardian and Holy Veil).

As for the limitation to one stance, this would severely damage Warrior builds making use of a cancel stance for Frenzy/Flail.

All in all I don't believe this to be a very good suggestion, sorry Riki.

(in case you want to turn this around and limit the amount of hexes/enchantments can be active on a player, I believe this has been suggested before)

I agree with Fabez here.
Being able to have so many hexes is necessary to Mesmers and Necros because they need to be able to cover them. As Fabez explained for warriors, cancel stances are necessary in some cases. There will always be ppl that come up with these gimmick builds, there is no one solution for it.

Also, if you wanted to balance the bars like that, you would have to re-work some skills like Divert Hexes, Withdraw Hexes, etc etc. And just a final thought, what about PvE monsters that use hex-based bars? you would have to go back and give them entirely new builds. All in all, this aint happening =/

I didn't suggest that they should only be able to have one or two hexes/enchantments, just a few. Just disallow a whole bar composed of them so they have to balance their bar out a little.
As for monsters/NPCs, they wouldn't need to have the same restrictions, since they have preset skill bars that were made to be balanced. If NPCs were all running ridiculous gimmicks that required specific counter builds I think we would have much bigger issues. Few if any even have a full skill bar.

With stance-canceling, I think the issue of needing to cancel out a stance that is supposed to benefit you and having no legitimate/straight-forward way to do so is an issue in itself.

And skills that turn into others, like Echo or whatever, would take up a slot for whatever they really are, not what they copy.

-Edit- I actually did say 2-3 hexes/enchants whatever. That was a mistake, and I corrected it.

They are having that type of "restricted" skill bar in GW2, they're not restricting our skill bars in this GW. First of all, covering enchantments and hexes is REQUIRED to keep hex/enchant based bars viable. With not ability to cover some already cast key hexes, lets say as example Spiteful Spirit necro becomes technically useless and so does MOST prot monks as their bars are built on enchants.

That would mean that to keep things flowing smooth, they'd have to increase partysize with 2-4 only because you would need that much extra members to have damage-wise balanced team that really can survive in HM DoA or FoW.

I think that is exactly what they should do; try to replicate a similar set-up in GW1. They clearly felt it was a necessary change. Not doing something similar would mean they've just given up on GW1. This would be especially bad since it'll be at least half a year before GW2 comes out.

If enchant/hex covering is absolutely necessary, that's probably an issue with enchant/hex stripping skills being too strong. I also happen to think that many enchantments and hexes themselves are a little too strong, since I know that those stripping skills are also pretty necessary.

It's a pretty massive issue in itself in my opinion that builds have an arms race between hexes/enchants and the removal of hexes and enchants, because if someone else uses them and you can't get rid of them you're screwed (since since many are too strong), and if you use them and they get stripped you're screwed (since the stripping is too effective with some skills, rendering those skills slots worthless at best, and in some cases getting you killed).

This would require hundreds of skills being changed in order to actually balance from having this. How bout only 2 dagger skills per bar? See how you'd like that.

I know you're just trolling, but if you said 3 I honestly wouldn't care that much. With 2 attacks you can't even get off a full combo. Slows also usually count as weapon attacks though, which would lead to some stupidly drawn out matches. That's the only reason I suggested 4.

This doesn't really solve any problems.

I think you just don't understand how it would help. I could understand if you said it wouldn't help enough to be worth the effort, but I haven't seen any better suggestions made.
It's certainly better than the vicious cycle they've resigned themselves to of randomly changing skills and just slapping down certain skills into uselessness that are used by whatever overpowered gimmicks that crop up.

Gimmicks aren't overpowered cause they have too many hexes or too many stances, or too many enchants. If YOU don't understand that, I think you just don't understand balancing.

Some are, and some aren't. I said right in the OP that not all, or even most are.
I only came up with this idea because it's the same basic method they've come up with to fix the issue in Guild Wars 2.
Minus the lack of a secondary profession.. that's what really hurts this idea.

You've basically stumbled upon one of the reasons why Anet abandoned the idea of a 4th campaign. the re-occurrence of skills and possibility of gimmicks kept increasing because of repeated skills or ones that are similar.

It created things like blood spike and the abuse of shadowstepping (Ok not so much of an abuse but SpNV showed what shadowstep/shockwave can do), and sway rangers.

Skill synergy became a joke because instead of finding a good combo, why not just pile on OP skills? Codex Arena tried to recreate the feel of simple prophecies gameplay, but back then the damage of skills wasn't that high and therefore healing wasn't that strong either. Plus the fact that games are won and lost in 4v4 depending on one interrupt.
Basically playing with high stakes all the time now.

For the case of GW2, they are not planning to have such an extensive list of available skills. They are also planning to never repeat a skill. And if you've been reading some of the articles, you are given 5 skills depending on your weapons, some skills branch off to combos, other slots are race or situational specific, such as these skills which become available when you are about to die, like throw a rock (funny, but if you manage to kill with it, you come back with full HP and you've effectively turned the momentum.

Nice to see that people still care though <3

Depends, really. If the skill is only usable in gimmick builds (like IWAY) I have no problems with a nuke.

Ah, the old stacking issue. This is mainly an issue with Hexes and Chants/Shouts, though. I don't see how this has much to do with Stances and Enchantments.

That wouldn't fix much (Hexways generally have a few characters with 3ish Hexes, Empathy/Backfire/VoR is what Mesmers run for example) while closing off legimitate builds such as Prot Monks (which always use 3+ Enchantments). People have suggested stack caps in the past, which I think is a rather bad balance method, but it's better than this.

hmmmm instead of solving the problem we RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GO up 90% of channeling/communing rit bars by limiting them to 3 spirits?

You are limited to 8 skills. A balanced character could take skills covering several differen functions, range from attack over protection to healing and energy management.

Guildwars is a team oriented game in which individual team members perform specialized functions, a chararater can be 'dedicated' to protection, others to disruption, offence etc...

Guildwars 2, as I understood, is not as team oriented, and it makes more sense to have each character perform a wider range of tasks, rather then the specialization in GW1.

You can't stack stances, you can only chain them, but doing so takes up room on the skill-bar.

Your suggestion would radically change team composition, it could also favor some classes, since not all classes have the same range of different skill types to their disposal and some simply don't have the energy to use the skills from secondaries, a warrior or ranger is limited to defensive stances and can not use defensive enchantments as easily as casters, who could use both.

You'd have to rebalance every skill in the game.

You could as well take traps out of the game then, or they'd have to be made a lot stronger; traps need to be stacked because they are so weak on their own.

The difficulty with GW1 balancing is not that you can bring too many skills of one type, but that it has so many skills available that can interact in overpowering ways.

A similar option might be to just make specific skills unusable with each other. It would be a little ugly, but I would definitely like that a lot more than ruining one of the skills.
As an example, they could stop you from taking both Lightning Reflexes and Whirling Defense, or Escape and Jagged Strike. (Probably not great examples, but whatever)
They could make that even more specific, and block combinations of maybe 4 different skills, so they could actually target and remove that exact build they don't want people using while doing little or no harm to others.
I suppose how ever many combined skills are causing the problem, they could block from being combined.
They even have the option of differentiating it from PvE and PvP.

You already can't use Whirling Defense together with Lightning Reflexes (and they have pretty long recharges). What's the obsession with them anyway?

Some skills are already organized like you propose, Barrage removes preps, many stances and enchantments end when attacking, hitting, casting a spell or when using any skill.

I think I only mentioned them once. And the issue with them is that you can use one right after the other for nearly 30 straight seconds of blocking. That, I'm pretty sure, is the whole reason they increased the recharge on the PvP version of Lightning Reflexes; before you could use it again at the end for nearly 40 seconds of blocking.

I'm not in favor of being restricted to one stance. Pretty much all balanced ranger and warrior builds have two stances. Cripshots aren't OP and stance-canceling actually requires some thought.

As for the actual idea, I'm not really sure.

LR nerf had nothing to do with Whirling. IIrc, it was mostly due to Dual Ranger in GvG, Rspike, and Sway.

many speed clear builds actually meet your requirements so it wouldn't do anything other than make one or two builds need to be reworked. It would hurt balanced builds more than it would hurt speed clear and solo farming builds imo