User:Falconeye/Revamp/Skill Changes

One of the biggest issues in balancing Guild Wars (if not the biggest) is the pure quantity of skills available to players. To be precise there are:

• 140 Warrior skills
• 140 Ranger skills
• 141 Monk skills
• 142 Necromancer skills
• 137 Mesmer skills
• 144 Elementalist skills
• 110 Assassin skills
• 110 Ritualist skills
• 85 Paragon skills
• 85 Dervish skills
• 54 Common skills
• 20 profession-specific PvE-only skills

Note: I did not include Signet of Capture.

Making 1308 skills which must be balanced to each other, and 1235 of which have to be balanced for two completely different formats (PvE and PvP). My suggestion? Reduce the number of skills so they're easier to manage. Now, I do not mean simply pick some out and toss them into the historical content section of the game, as I detest having resources and not using them. Instead, I mean making them not available in certain conditions!

Step 1: The goal

Obviously before setting out to reduce skill numbers, one should decide on the number of skills remaining which should be kept. Originally I suggested 100 skills (20 elite). However, as pointed out on the talk page, this would reduce warrior and elementalist playability.

Thus my new suggestion would be to have 25 skills per attribute - this creates 100 skills for most professions, but 125 for warrior and elementalist. In terms of elites, I would suggest 5 per attribute (thus 20 and 25 respectively).

This means, through my suggestion, we'll be:

• Removing 15 warrior skills (4 reg, 11 elite)
• Removing 40 ranger skills (25 reg, 15 elite)
• Removing 41 monk skills (26 reg, 15 elite)
• Removing 42 necromancer skills (27 reg, 15 elite)
• Removing 37 mesmer skills (23 reg, 14 elite)
• Removing 19 elementalist skills (9 reg, 10 elite)
• Removing 10 assassin skills (5 reg, 5 elite)
• Removing 10 ritualist skills (5 reg, 5 elite)
• Adding 15 dervish skills (10 reg, 5 elite)
• Adding 15 paragon skills (10 reg, 5 elite)

This line up creates an equal amount of regular and elite skills to each profession with an exception of warrior and elementalist due to their additional attribute.

Step 2: How to do it

Now, as I said, we won't simply be removing the skills. So this is where it gets tricky. I suggest three forms of altering skills to reduce the total effectiveness to 100 (125). And to note: By 100 skills, I mean 100 (125) available at any given time. In the end, skills will take 4 forms:

1. Monster-only skills
2. PvE-only skills
3. PvP-only skills
4. PvX skills

Monster-only skills

There are a lot of skills in the game which hold similar effects but differing in energy cost, recharge, casting time, and most importantly, effectiveness of the effect (aka what target sees and feels) - take note, I am not referring to duplicate skills here, but they can be included in what to do. One such example is Conjure Phantasm and Conjure Nightmare - in this, for an additional 5 energy, one can add on a -3 degen to the skill's effect. It is for these skills primarily that I suggest an altering to Monster-only skills. How to do it?

Take one of the skills and alter it so that it is in the middleground of effectiveness of the two skills. This skill will remain available to players. The other skill - altered or not - will be locked from players (and heroes), thus being kept usable only by enemy AI.

For a reason stated below, no elites will go through this process.

PvE-only skills

Whether affected by attributes or titles is irrelevant, but taking skills which are a hassle for PvP (e.g., Smiter's Boon) and locking them from being used in PvP (and removing any PvP form of the skill if there is one) to effectively make them PvE-only skills will help reduce the number of skills needed to balance in PvP.

Whether doing this cuts skills off from heroes or not is up to debate. On one hand, doing such reduces the usefulness of heroes compared to henchmen (who can be given these skills - or may have them already), thus creates a more challenging mindset out of the steam-rolling 7 heroes (and if you have heroes, the only reason you don't use 7 is either to handicap yourself or because you don't have 7 yet, therefore you won't be too affected by it). On the other hand, they can keep their effectiveness for the harder areas (WoC HM anyone?) where such be very helpful.

PvP-only skills

Akin to the previous option: take skills which are a hassle for PvE but not PvP (such as Shadow Form) and making them only available in PvP outposts.

Arguments and Counterarguments

There are only two side-effects I can think of which are harmful:

1. Doing this will screw up a lot of existing player and monster builds.
   • To this I say: all skill updates do or can do this. Make new builds for yourself, and for the latter - the monsters need new builds anyways in most of the game (read: all sans Eye of the North and Beyond content).
2. Removing elite skills from players will affect the skill capture titles, making it easier than before.
   • To counter this: Don't turn any elites into monster-only skills. It'll force some people to PvP (those who don't have the skills yet), but that's not a large harm since people have to PvP for a title anyways (or so is the intended idea, at least).
3. Elites should be available, in some form, in both PvE and PvP
   • The issue with this is that there are some skill abilities that just don't fit in one form or another (invulnerability doesn't work in PvE due to farming, but short-term invulnerability works in PvP; skills like Shroud of Silence don't work in PvP but are excellent for PvE). As such, either the functions have to be drastically different between the two (which just makes more balancing for the Live Team), or removing one works.