IGN has blogs?? whatever woot more skills i thought it would just be this

   Reading through it..
   "As we went through each Demigod, we came up with ideas that would make that Demigod play more uniquely. Examples included (depending on the Demigod in question), sacrificing speed for toughness, increasing money received from mines, decreasing cool down times on spells, increasing XP gained from killing creeps, increasing damage done to structures, increases toughness of nearby minions, and so on.

    When we put together our first list, we quickly realized that just from the skills, you could make one Rook play quite differently from another rook and that was before we even started messing with items and equipment."

   This sounds okay, on paper.  But in practice, it'll be the term i've liked to use a lot that the balance will be "cracked".

   With skills so simple, anyone who knows how to type numbers, *'s, +'s, /'s, and ()'s into google and copy the numbers into a .txt file can pretty easily calculate what skills are the best.

   It's like in Diablo2. The skills have neat effects and function and all (I loveeee frozen orb! Going out. spinning around shooting out ice circles in a circle around it!) but.. everyone knows what the best combinations of skills and equip in that game is.  It's very simple math.
In DotA theres a certain skill you get first, item you get first, and recipe you get first for each character.

   You look at Guild Wars though, and a group of people can have completely different opinions on whether a skill is good or not, whether a build is good or not, whether a combination of builds together is good or not, and they can argue with each other about it endlessly and never agree.  The skills have so much depth, there are so many factors that change how they perform, they are different in some situations instead of others, and what your allies  are using makes a huge difference on whether your build is good or not.
   GW has like 900 skills, but you can only use 8 of them, so it's not like it has all this deep balancing justbecause of the high level of skills.  It's because the skills work more like the abilities in a card game like Magic:The Gathering more than they work like in a traditional RPG.

   Just because you ALLOW people to play differently, and give them different options, doesn't mean they WILL.
   I think asking the question "What sort of skills can we put on this Demigod" isn't as important as the question of how to get people to actually use the different variaty of skills and not all use the same ones.

Stun mines are actually nice.

But i wish they held someone in place, but they could still attack and cast spells(except for teleports) for 7 or 8 seconds rather than stun.
Or maybe less duration but you leach health from them when they are rooted, or they take more damage.  Then root+snipe and you gain a lot of health if it's leach, or a lot more damage if it makes them take more damage.

And if snipe wasn't homing it would be a lot more useful to keep someone still.

Skills need to work together.. both for the Demigods own, and allys skills cross-working-together.  The only cross-working-together that exsists now is stunning. :/  Only Demigod with synergies is the Rook.

GW?

With the skills we have now the game extermly fun i can only wait and see how great this game will become.

I hope we have 1000's of player online all the time this is going to be so cool.

Everything is balanceable if the designers spend enough time at it. Obviously the more skills they have the more change they will mess a few of them up but there is no law saying it is unbalanceable just because there is x amount of skills. They just have to make sure that they add meaningful skills. As someone said a +damage -speed on the rook would be popular but a +speed -damage would be less useful to most people. Some demigods would be more or less suited to certain playstyles than others and if they can recognise this then it should be easy enough to balance.

innociv,

I have to partially disagree with your last comment:

+build damage skill for Rook like mentioned in the article.  That sounds fine, but why would I pick it over +damage to players?

That is where the difference and uniqueness happens.  What if I want to be a building smashing fiend and don't really need to worry about the lesser things.  I have allies attacking the creeps while I go for what really matters in the games; portals, flags, and the stronghold.

Some people will want a creep/hero oriented hero others will take a building oriented approach while others go for health and others an all around balance of power and abilitly.

It is just like in Sins.  SOme people spam LRM's while other's build their eco and other's play a more balanced strategy. 

There will be as many builds per character as there are skills.  The only difference is whether or not people will use them.  I don't disagree that a lot of people will go for a "uber awesome" or publicly hyped combonation of skills.  What will matter most in the end though is how you interact with your fellow teamates and create a synergy between the heros and not just a bunch of single glory hogs that get mowed down by a coordinated attack.  Becuase if I know that some noob is going to take a certain path because its "over powered" I know there is a way to counter it and I will and I will win. 

You know that all too well in beating many people in Sin's who liked the LRM spam move.

Exactly, if you are just going to be playing by yourself then you can have your ultimate build, but in teams a lot of the skills will shine, a couple torchbearers can stun/fireball/aoe the players/creeps to oblivion while you destroy the buildings. An entire team all with the ultimate 'solo' builds will probably kick ass 1v1 but once you get some 3v3 or above battles the other team will probably be better able to support each other.