Guild Wars 2

Imagine if the developers could not “tweak” existing skills, lowering their cooldowns or increasing damage a bit, and the only thing they could do was to add new skills that counter existing ones.
What would happen with the game, what do you think? I believe it would have made the game much better, without this stupid number-tweaking metagame changes, but with substantial changes and a lot of existing counterplays and depth.

I don’t think it’s that relevant. You can do a good or bad balancing job through tweaking just as you can with introducing new skills.

It would end up like GW1: constant flow of flavor of the month builds and hundreds of skills in the useless pile.

There would be a hundred different skills, many of them almost identical, except they’d be good against different things. Also, skills that just weren’t good to begin with, due to having too long cooldowns and dealing too little damage, etcetera? Well, they’d never get better. There’d just be other skills that were almost identical, except that they were the ‘tweaked’ version.

I don’t think it would improve anything, aside from giving people with every skill and no interest in Legendaries to spend their skill points on. It would probably make things worse, balance-wise, and lead to such a cluttered, tangled mess of skills and code that it would be almost impossible to balance or bugfix (going by the current treatment and proliferation of Turret issues).

They’d run out of names real fast.

ZoroDaOtter.3859:

It would end up like GW1: constant flow of flavor of the month builds and hundreds of skills in the useless pile.

Aye. One of my main issues with GW1 was just how many skills got added, seemingly for absolutely no purpose.

Complexity != depth.

Plus it really doesn’t help a newcomer if they have 500 skills and have to understand which 20 are useful.