Guild Wars: Skill Balance Update

To encourage faster victories in GvG without reverting to ganging up on a defenseless Guild Lord, which was a popular strategy in early Guild Wars GvG. To review skills that are performing better on secondary professions than on primaries.

While Guild Wars Gold PvP focuses a lot on character combinations and build-making decisions, some skills that are balanced and designed with their primary profession in mind become used more frequently by secondaries.

February PvE and PvP Skill Balances
 

There are a couple of main goals to this month''s balance update. First, we want to encourage faster victories in GvG (without reverting to ganging up on a defenseless Guild Lord, which was a popular strategy in early Guild Wars Gold). Second we wish to review skills that are performing better on secondary professions than on primaries.

While Guild Wars PvP focuses a lot on character combinations and build-making decisions, some skills that are balanced and designed with their primary profession in mind become used more frequently by secondaries. This is due to a number of factors:

Some professions rely more on elite skills than others. For example, many of the best Mesmer skills are non-elite, but Assassins and Dervishes get unique, important functionalities from their elite skills.

Different professions manage Energy pools differently, so high-cost skills are more readily-available to some primary professions than others.

Professions that can use secondary skills that behave more like primary skills are more likely to take them. For example, an Elementalist or Mesmer can use Assassin skills easily within their arsenal of other spells. Typically, spells designed for melee classes are faster because their reliance on positioning makes Guild Wars Gold long-casting skills undesirable.
Measures that allow characters to be proficient using skills within their primary profession let us balance those skills better. This narrows down the hundreds-of-thousands of possibilities, making it easier to reign in skills when there''s an issue. This update includes a few different methods we use to enforce primary profession choice.