Guild Wars: More Problematic Skills

Found an interesting thread over at TGH while trawling for the latest round pairings. Basically, it's a laundry list of skills that people have problems with at the moment. Aegis tops the list and rightly so, if you ask me, because it's blunting the ability for player skill to triumph over build advantages. And while there's a balancing act there and the game does need simple, basic skills that are easy to use and understand as it tries to draw more and more players into the PvP side of things, it should always be tilting a bit more towards having mechanics that reward players with the skill and experience to take advantage of them. Like, say, Frenzy. Useless in the hands of a novice but in a pro's bar, it's the best Warrior skill around (Since it's spawned any number of IASes it's no longer exactly the hottest thing around so I'm not sure if I'd run it if it was elite anymore. But I'd have to think about it before switching to Flail or BoA or something.). What with the live testing and all, it's a good look at prepositioning for the next round of tweaks.

However, I think Squidget is on to something, the problems are more systemic than simple skill balances. It's easy to get trapped into the prism of seeing everything on the skill mechanics level but a lot of the game's current failings have to do with the basic design concepts of the various professions.

Take, again, the Elementalist. They've always had overpriced skills. If anything they're priced a lot fairer than they originally were - Deep Freeze was 40 energy way back when, if memory serves and with other stats nowhere near as good. The reason is just how Necromancers pay a Soul Reaping tax on a lot of skills, Elementalists pay for having Energy Storage. And that's a design decision that was made way back when - ES was what set the Elementalist apart (except for runes which, since people are less likely to run majors and superiors to protect agaisnt spikes, are less important than ever.) from the other professions. The massive energy that Elementalists were supposed to have would allow them to cast those heavy cost spells while other characters couldn't. In practice, that hasn't worked out rather well because of how the game has developed, of how damage is dealt and how active characters are supposed to be. There's not as much downtime to recover that energy. And what you wind up with in Elementalist are not only characters than need an effective 8 or 9 pips to function. But ones that have the tools needed to function with that level of energy burning away. It's why skills like Heal Party become Elementalist skills. And why when other characters can get ahold of the Elementalist's excellent management that lets them pull off some crazy things.

So, the question is whether to take the bat to GLE or whether the fundamental nature of the profession needs looking at. I'd favor the later but to do so means taking away that distinctive flavor. Given how useless ES is beyond those few nice skills, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing but it would be a major shift.

And from there, you can extend toother professions. What, exactly, is it that the developers want Ritualists to be doing? We've seen that having them be offensive – which, as casters, means spiking – isn't the best idea. But now they seem to be trending towards being a burly Warriors weapon bitch. It's a support role and, thus, not exactly glamorous but tossing around buffs is pretty sexy at the moment. And, at the very least, it's a far cry from the spirit shitting that the Ritualist was relegated to but it's an example of how the paradigm for a profession can be shifted with some timely adjustments. It's thinking on that sort of level that we should be doing rather than focusing on things from a solely skill based perspective.