Quote Originally Posted by Dzian View Post
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The more clever that you become with ability effects, the more opportunities there are to break fights. Rather than try to predict these or patch them out, they make your ability set just a little more narrow and a little more tightly constrained the next time. Hallowed and Cover as you mentioned being used to reset stacks are good examples of these. Another interesting example is Holmgang being used to interrupt otherwise uninterruptable abilities. That's one major reason we don't have draw in/knock back abilities in PvE anymore.

Utility doesn't need to be clever to not fall into one of those three categories. Movement is a major one. An in-combat movement speed buff could be used to help you respond more quickly to a mechanic, or it could be used to improve your uptime. Similar thinking could be applied to your casters if you gave them a warp point between two parts of the arena.

What else could you do? Reduce recast on next cooldown. Prevent/cleanse a vulnerability stack. Increase resource generation. Haste buff. Reflect damage.

The more complex you make it, the bigger a dev team you need to balance it. They're just cashing in for cheap.