[KaVir]

That was also my attitude on the original God Wars mud, and was the main reason the balance got so out of whack - the classes kept leapfrogging over each other, getting stronger and stronger.

As has been pointed out already, it's really not that simple. But generally speaking, if you've got a skill which is overpowered, it's almost always better to bring it back in line with the other skills.

If you instead decide to buff the other skills, you will likely be giving yourself a lot more work - and there's always the possibility that you buff one of the skills a bit too much...does that mean you should buff all the other skills yet again?

I do buff sometimes of course, but not without careful consideration.

Well sure, in theory, but that's like saying if you test your software properly you'll never have any bugs. In practice it just never works out like that. You can certainly reduce the problem with a good design and careful testing, but the more complex a mud becomes the more things are going to slip through (particularly as active muds are being constantly developed and improved).

It's not enough just to test the skill itself, either - you need to test everything it can interact with, and retest it any time you modify something else which might impact the skill in some way. Sometimes a previously well-balanced skill may later become overpowered as an unavoidable side-effect of a newly introduced feature.

I've actually been running a "nerf week" this week on God Wars II, fixing several imbalances that have accumulated over the last few years. I decided to do it all in one go to get it out of the way, expecting to get mobbed by the players, but feedback has been surprisingly positive.