A Different Slant - Bad Skills: Why They Exist
Edited and Published by: Magi
Guild Wars has often been compared to the trading card game Magic: The Gathering, mainly with regards to how players in both games must carefully construct a cohesive "deck" to play with - in Guild Wars, this deck is your skillbar. There is one other trait the two games share: both have bad skills.
Before I go any further, a disclaimer is in order. I am well aware that all skills can be useful in the right situation. Everyone reading this has seen or been a part of this discussion before. Thus, in this article the term "bad skill" will refer to those skills that are seldom used unless you're specifically trying to build around them, the ones you frequently just gloss over as you scroll down the list as you're setting your bar.
Now that I am free to label skills "bad" without being condemned as a Guild Wars heretic, it is time to return the discussion at hand. The developers of Magic have discussed at length why there must exist bad cards (and even bad rare cards) and in this article I plan to do the same for Guild Wars. Why are some skills labeled as "bad"? What makes a bad skill? And most vexing, why are some bad skills elites?
The easiest answer to why there are bad skills is that there has to be. As anyone familiar to Hero's Ascent is aware, there will always be flavour of the month (FOTM) builds running around. Even in GvG and - especially when it comes to high-level farming areas - PvE, there are certain preferred builds that utilize the "best" skills. People used to go nuts for nukers in farming groups; now that they're fairly useless for quickly dispatching large groups of foes; Spiteful Spirit Necros are all the rage.
The point is, there will always be established, and polished builds that are viewed as the "best". It's mainly a matter of the build being already perfected; when an SS Necro looks up a build online or copies it from someone in-game, there is very little customization that is left up to him. The attributes are set, the skills are (mostly) set, and the build is widely held to be the best that it can be. When making a completely original build, a player has to go through many different iterations before reaching something that is acceptably powerful, and even then there's no guarantee that it's as good as it could be. It is also a matter of perception: this game is full of people who apparently believe that if it's not an established build, not only is it inferior, it's downright useless.
A related reason why bad skills exist is that, in any game that relies on a player's skill, there needs to be a learning curve to teach new players what skills belong in which builds. It is a hard lesson for every new warrior to learn that Power Attack isn't exactly as "1337" as they think it is. This is comparable to awful cards in Magic that the developers put in specifically so new players will learn how to tell what an awful card is (and I'm being perfectly serious here, they've admitted that they do this).
Now this is all fine and good as far as normal skills are concerned, but why must there be bad elites? Shouldn't they be by their very nature better than everything else? The answer to this is that in this game "elite" doesn't necessarily mean that a skill is simply better; it also means that it isn't balanced to use it with other elite skills. Take Wither and Panic for instance. I love Wither, and Panic's AoE energy degen is very nice, but many hold that these two elites are utter trash. However, imagine if you could combine those two skills, along with Malaise? If I could, I would, but obviously ArenaNet doesn't think -6 energy degen should be so easy to come by. There are many other examples: Practiced Stance and Incendiary Arrows are two skills I would like to combine, but since they're both elites that is impossible. Even the "worst" of the elites, Skullcrack, might see use if you could combine it with 100 blades or Battle Rage or Dragon Slash (once Factions comes out). It is after all a repeatable daze: if it were easier to charge up it would see a use. The point is this: elite skills are elite for a reason. Yes, some take a bit more work to make a build around than others, but if you made those same skills non-elites, they could be combined with skills that would make them overpowered.
The key difference between Guild Wars and Magic when it comes to this discussion, however, is that ArenaNet can at any time alter underused skills to make them better and nerf overpowered skills. This is good news for us as players, because it means that the meta game is constantly changing without the need for adding entirely new skills every season. So, when you see a skill that you think is a piece of trash, don't get mad at ArenaNet. Maybe that skill wasn't designed with players of your skill level in mind. Perhaps it was meant for a different game type: PvE instead of PvP, or GvG rather than Competition Arenas. You might even be completely missing a specific situation in which the skill shines. In the end, everyone can take heart in the fact that no skill in this game is constant. There are no bad skills in Guild Wars, it's all just a matter of perception and current incarnation of the meta game.
So what did you think of this article? Did you like it? Did you find it useful? Or maybe you didn't like it at all? Be sure to tell us about it on this thread!
