Leadership change

To all that say shouts are OP b/c they are uninteruptable and unstrippable. They are simply different not OP. One only needs to prep for them via anti shout/chant measures....ie...vocal minority...well of silence...cacaophony...heck blind/blurred vison will shut down a para. It's not hard to counter these things. One just needs to take premptive action instead of reactive measures. Anyone that plays a para knows how badly these shut paras down. I am more of the opinion that ppl simply do not want to bring said skills in their bars. People don't want to bring them because they are completely useless otherwise. If the other team is not running shouts, you then may as well have dead skills on your bar.

A game like Magic The Gathering can get away with effects that practically require a specific hard counter, or set of counters, because you have a sideboard and can tweak your deck between matches to prevent metagaming. You can also get away with having some cards, like Torpor Orb, that have extremely limited uses because you aren't forced to throw them in the deck for every matchup. Guild wars cannot because there isn't anything like a sideboard mechanic. As such it has dozens of effects that must be useless by necessity.

Any time you are FORCED to bring a skill to counteract some other effect, especially when that skill has next to zero use otherwise, you run into problems. Either you end up running sub optimal builds much of the time, or you end up playing an enormous game of rock paper scissors where the winner is largely favored before the match even starts.

The problem with shouts isn't that they cannot be countered, it's that the counters for them are so narrow in focus that they essentially have no other use, and as such you take a big risk bringing them. Furthermore, many of the counters are hard counters, meaning that if you do have them shouts are next to useless. It is far easier to just make shouts suck from a balance perspective than it is to bring them to any appreciable power level. You can simply make it so they do not see play, or you can try to balance them, and make counters actually have some use if you aren't facing shouts.

Remember, the best skills are seldom the ones that specifically ruin a particular strategy or excel in one area, but rather the ones that are universally useful, even when they are eclipsed by other, more limited, skills in specific areas.


OT, awaiting paragon rework. Put the imba out of it's misery already.