Deleting Skills

Would anyone be down with ANet deleting certain skills to help bring some balance into the game a bit more? I just want to see what everyone's opinion of that is.

It's very hard coded to delete skills as i remember being told.

That's why Smiters Boon (PvP) was made so unusable, they can't just remove it.

In Beta, they were able to remove skills, but it's a bigger coding pain now-a-days to strip a skill outright. It's just more logical to change the function of the skill.

Plus, they would have to re-imburse with skill points and any gold/platinum that has been paid for them.

This is a biggie.
Plus people who have based their whole playing style around certain skills would be screwed over completely.

I wouldn't mind banning certain skills in certain PvP settings, a la Codex.
Mainly just so people would have to experiment to find a way around the lost skill.

But erasing them from the game completely?
/notsigned

Nerfing works just fine or redesign. Also, people invested time through quests, gold or what not. Not to mention the confusion this would cause to people wondering why their skill is missing.

/1 Star (worst idea I've seen in a long time)

What skills would be worthy of being deleted then?

Here, I'll pick three at random:

- Atrophy
- Burning Shield
- Flame Burst

Are these worth keeping? In fact, do you see anyone use them? Personally, every skill is worth keeping.

They would? Is anyone going to rage over a few k and some skill points?

"A few k" is a lot to some of us.

As for the OP, deleting skills is a bad idea imo. If they are going to put effort into balance, I would rather them put the time toward fixing skills than toward deleting them. Plus, there wouldn't really be any point in deleting the underpowered skills (some people use them in gimmick builds and its not like they are causing any problems in the game anyway). The skills causing problems are the overpowered ones, and honestly, id rather have dartboard, no-time-put-into-them nerfs than complete deletions. Of course, ideally, they would be carefully nerfed so as to be balanced with the next tier down of skills, but you get my point.

The exception to this is eotn PvE skills. They should be deleted - every last one of them.

Kinda what I was thinking. I doubt there'd be a huge uproar over the loss of 1 skill point + (a maximum of) 1 plat. I don't think this is on their list of reasons to not delete skills.

But jerking a skill out of the game could cause imbalance elsewhere. Plus it might be a pain to have to reassign skills to creatures who previously used that skill. I would think it'd be a better idea to just completely redo the skill and change its function entirely if it's bad enough that they're considering deleting it.

I figure there would be of an uproar over the loss of useless skill x y z.

For all the good it would do, it feels like the work and pay-off do not come close to compensating for the effort or end effect.

Redesigning skills on the other hand sounds more appropriate, that and ignoring the problem due to a lack of manpower and time.

Now while i don't agree with deleting any skills i did have a thought(i'm in no way au fait with programming and coding skills). How about making it so that skill bars have to contain at least 5 skills from your primary profession(the other 3 being secondary or PvE only skills).
Just an idea i had even though i know the majority of people would be against it as they then couldn't run their cookie cutter builds, but i believe in actually using the main profession for what it was designed for.

The only place where balance is needed imo would be pvp or should I say that is where skill imbalances seem to cause the most problems.

Don't need to remove skills but I imagine it wouldn't be that hard to limit skill choice for different games/areas of pvp.
I believe similar thoughts have been expressed in the past.

The snowball games of winterfest seem very popular so whats wrong with creating similar skill lists for other aspects of pvp.

I believe balance is only possible when the total number of available skills is far fewer that we have atm.
To avoid players getting bored the list of skills usable could change every couple of months.

Lot of work initially but once set up it would just run automatically.

the idea for limiting your skill bar to a certain number of your primary skills seems like a good idea....which is probably why it is going into Guild Wars 2 (in a sense at least) it may be a bit late to change that in Guild Wars because it would change the gamestyle a lot. Perhaps they could add it into the next content similar to what they did with Hearts of the North

Would take ALOT of effort to remove skills now. Aside from having to pick and choose which skills get the chop, all the coding, there's also tons NPC's who's skill bars have to be changed etc. You're better off just trying to balance problematic skills at the moment.

Delete? That's stupid and pointless.

They've done this to TA, only to replace a niche format with non-standard problems with a completely redundant format, ridden with even more problems. I think they've learned by now that 'deleting' a problem doesn't quite fix the core problem itself.

You can't really expect to have a balanced game with 1000+ skills, 10 professions and various different PvP formats, each using the same PvP stats for skills, items, upgrades and professions.

Besides, the game is still pretty much balanced with core six in mind, and every kind of gimmick is balanced against that old prophecies model, though this claim can be freely challenged after the announced GW2 development and the work of Live team.

It's just like that, unfixable ... the core mechanics, features, idea behind the PvP was GvG with 6 core professions and 300+ skills. Everything on top of that just makes matters worse. You can't really 'repair' anything here without redesigning the whole game from scratch ...

... and truth be told, things such as nerfing 'Smiters into oblivion added more salt to the injury than anything. We could see an interesting venue of smiter support to enrich the meta long ago, but hell no, it was better to make it a half-baked feature so the whole build relies primarily on one OP skill, and then just remove that skill from the game if it turns out to be an unmanageable feature in the long term - and to this day the smiter guys are either RA/AB gimmicks or solo farmers.

You see, this kind of mentality is the problem - not only the core balancing model of the game doesn't hold the weight of expansion content with existing PvP formats, not only they have no resources to actually balance the game (I think Stumme said something along the lines of 'we'd rather shake up the meta and make things more interesting than keep it balanced'), but they simply aren't interested in any long-term PvP support of this game.

If they invest time in something, it's a minute feature, that is intended to 'fix' something in coming 1-3 months, and then be completely obsolete in a grander scheme of things. So yeah, count on more illogical buffs and nerfs to skills and professions in the coming months, out of which none fix the core problem with the PvP itself.

Which has no place in Guild Wars 1, as already proven by Codex Arena. It's against the core philosophy of it's game, against it's very own audience. In no way, shape or form GW2 builds upon achievements and pitfalls of it's predecessor, it's a completely new game, with different development philosophy, different development focus and different development habits.

Expect very scarce post-release PvP support of that game, they focus so much time and resources on it now so that the niche, compact, predictable PvP branch can be maintained with as little resources and as little care as possible after the game launch. I don't really see much philosophy behind designing a good FPS multiplayer arena, as it's all down to the map design, supported team formats, victory goals and weapon design.

That's it folks, GW2 follows exactly the same minimalist philosophy - nobody is going to balance 10+ professions with XX possible secondary profession combinations and a pool of 1000+ skills, modified by core attributes and items at will.

Bad idea. Nerf them if needed. Its massively more difficult to delete something outright than simply make it half as powerful.

I suppose you wouldn't be against me robbing you as long as I stole only a few dollars?

As long as I wasn't hurt or otherwise inconvenienced I'm sure I could shrug it off.

I don't see how a complete redesign is any better for the people to whom 1k is a big deal. To draw an equally bad analogy to the one above, that's like if I paid $100,000 for a car and then a year later I lost my car and it was replaced with a house. Sure, it may be of equal value but I'm still being screwed out of $100,000 I paid for something I wanted.

Chances are a complete redesign makes the skill useless for the purpose this player originally paid his hard earned platinum for.

First you say:

then you say

Why would you make an exception to the skills you want deleted and discount the skills others want deleted? Kinda causing the same problem aren't you? The regular skills can be balanced in the normal way but I don't think there would be much point in nerfing or deleting skills altogether. And rather than nerfing something into oblivion, it's much more beneficial to have the skills balance correctly, i.e. to give it some decent benefit when combined with other skills but fairly innoccuous when randomly placed. Some of us don't just take cookie cutter builds and run with em...

Secondly, eotn skills were introduced along-side eotn as a mechanism to assist players who find the eotn content difficult. After all, it was intended for experienced players from the other campaigns.

The fact that they were so popular only reinforces the fact that cookie cutters and easy skills prevailed amongst those who just don't get how to play, and these are the main bulk of guildwars players, the ones who are paying all the money to keep the game going and therefore Anet wants to make them happy too. It doesn't completely remove the challenge of the game, just eliminates some of the difficulty for people who would rather not spend time discovering ways to combine skills in a fluid manner. I don't have an issue with people using those skills, they're isolated to individuals in PvE areas and they don't affect competition, can't be used on heroes and really only make the game more enjoyable.

I just don't get why someone has a problem with someone else actually enjoying their game. Those who want the challenge of figuring out a challenge without these game hooks are free to do so.

Pretty much sumed my point... It would be nice if populated arenas were " a la Codex" ( when will they realize this.................)....

On the other hand , i don't believe it's a way to do , although some nerfs they did ruined a lot of people playstyle( 2 arenas , no sense skills nerfs linked to GvG ( i'm using this build for 2 years , 1 guilds discovers how to abuse it --> nerfed 2 days later , cool!)).. so /notsigned

I wonder what skills he is thinking of? Might be interesting to know what is in line for the chop.

I'd start with SF

Huh?

My problem with PvE skills has very little to do with difficulty. The overall difficulty of the game would still be pretty much the same as it is now if EVAS, PI, and Ymlad were removed. Plus, by your logic, no overpowered skill should be nerfed because that would kill the enjoyment or add to the challenge. This is beside the point, however, because like I said, my problem with eotn PvE skills does not have to do with their OPness.

I don't like the eotn PvE skills because they detract from the differentiation between different professions and the skills available to different professions. Though it seems like this is becoming more the case with each skill update, I wonder what the point of having so many different professions is when they all can accomplish the same roles in a party. I like having 10 professions, but I hate that there are skills available to any and all professions. I very rarely use secondary prof skills, and pretty much never use eotn PvE skills. However, I hate joining a group and being asked why I'm not using my 3 pve skill slots, or being asked to bring ymlad or PI.

So yea, I guess what i'm trying to say is that I don't like skills that are useable by all professions because it detracts from the differentiability between all of the professions. This is the reason why I have no overall problem with the luxon or sunspear PvE skills (though some, like SY, do need nerfs).

I'd much rather see a skill be deleted than have to put up with things like the Smiter's Boon nerf.

Really it just blows my mind how they could do that to the game. It still irritates me.

I would much rather see skillbars limit the type of skills you can bring than outright removing them from the game. In fact I would be 100% on the bandwagon to limit skills on skillbars.

This is pretty much how it should have been when eotn came out.

No thanks, I sometimes use that skill on my smite hero monks.

I'd like to see straight up deletion too, but it brings too many problems such as having to re-imburse the players who bought the skills, and QQ from deleting content. Most of the skills that deserve deletion are NF and eotn, but they might feel inclined to delete less deserving skills from Prophecies in an effort to keep things equal and fair between the campaigns.

Well now that I think about it they did delete two PvP formats, so it's not beyond them to delete skills.

Deleting skills is kind of anti-game in that it stagnates our pool of options that much further down the line. Now I know that skills might be useless, but if Anet were to change their functionality as opposed to just ripping them away from the game entirely, then the game can potentially become way more interesting and fun. This game is pretty old, and the last thing it needs is less stuff to play with.

Get the Smiter's Boon treatment isn't a substancial deleting?

What about a PvP Arena that only allows you to use your primary profession? Anyone have any links to threads that are already created for that? Balance and updates seem to be such a hot button topic for the past year + is why I ask. It would be nice to see some things done that could address that issue.

Izzy Cartwright even stated when talking about Guild Wars 2 that GW1's skill system was hindered because of secondary profession's causing imbalance. It would be nice to see an arena that did away with them. Thoughts?

All PvE skills

that is probably the best idea for pve though. anet sold their copies of eotn because of those skills. man, eotn would be so fun and challenging without pve only skills

Pretty much what i was saying over and over in most Sardelac topics regarding the matter.
In short. There are too many skills in GW1. There are too many combinations of skills on one tab, with different primaries, to make the-ultimate-balance even remotely possible (aka buff the mesmer, buff all x/me; nerf the mesmer because of x/me, kill me/x).
It'd be necessary to either limit how many skills of secondary you may use (and something done unto secondary attributes, as well), or link most of the skills to the primary attribute. Then, again, it'd kill one of the most important GW1 features - the flexibility.
Too bad it comes for the great price of balance, and with a crapload of useless shit lying around in the skill window.