Guild Wars 2

The new healing skills have been called bad, they’ve been called good.

I for one am just glad to see new skills, but here’s the thing. People are not measuring whether a new skill has its uses or not, they are measuring a skills effectiveness by how many situations the skill is good in, which is fair to certain point.

Basically players will find themselves in different kinds of situations in this game, or any game. Players are doing well identifying what scenarios skills are useful in. The thing is that you don’t want a skill to stand out as superior in every situation. What you really want are baseline skills that are “good” in every situation, and you want other skills that are great in some situations, but weak in others.

I see the reactions to some of the new healing skills and feel like people are forgetting this. If a skills is superior in every situation it’s OP. It becomes mandatory and the thing that happens is you go from having many choices to only 1 choice, which means you have no choice.

This is not to say people don’t have valid concerns about the new skills, but keep in mind that the skills are supposed to have strengths and weaknesses.

I would imagine that there are many who don’t know about the Gw1 skill system. Simply put it had a lot of baseline skills that were good in numerous situations and a lot more situationally useful skills. This was important, bcs it allowed for a lot of build diversity, but also coordination, because some of these specialized skills were extremely useful if you could coordinate to exploit the situational effectiveness, but they wouldn’t be useful unless you had that coordination. Gw1 Vets probably most recently remember the Panic buff.

Obviously we want it now and to get lost in coming up with good builds sometimes, but with iterative releases that won’t likely happen. We’ll have to wait for an expansion for a moment like that.