Guild Wars: Skill rebalance started

First skill changes are up. Previously, one of the ArenaNet people (Gaile, I think) had suggested that it might take a few days for all the changes.

Initial impressions:

• Gale was rightfully nerfed, both via raising cost to 10 and fixing the exhaustion exploit.
  
• Order of the Vampire won't stack with Order of Pain any more. That will hurt ranger spike teams.
  
• Holy Veil's recharge nerf to 12s means that other point hex removal may have to be used.
  
• The whole Elementalist Fire line got buffed a fair amount. Predictable since now it's harder to exploit area-of-effect skills in PvE. We'll see if it's now worthwhile.
  
• Mend Ailment going to 5s recharge hurts it but it should still be viable.
  
• Significant boost to warrior-hate hexes via the hex helm nerfing and a fix of a bug that meant that attack speed hexes weren't working at full power.
  
• As I previously posted, IWAY was nerfed. Hopefully it will no longer have the raw power that was making it the most common build in Heroes' Ascent.
  
• Eviscerate was previously the best Axe skill. I'm no Warrior expert so I'm not sure if that's still the case or not - adren cost is now 8.
  
• Crippling Shot was nerfed so now its cost is 15 and duration scales with Marksmanship. May have been a little zealous on the nerfage there - we'll see. Certainly was too good previously, though.
  
• All the damaging pet attacks were buffed. Not sure that that'll make a difference, to be honest - the pet AI is pretty weak.
  
• Offering of Blood's sacrifice now at 20% means you'll actually feel it. Should still be usable though.
  
• Distortion's breakpoints got moved. Shouldn't be quite so easy to splash with just 4 points of Illusion.