What are the worse alternate abilities?

Gonna go with lifeburn.

Pretty sure a level 12 shaman dot could do more damage...and it nukes the necro for about 200k (hp percentage based - assuming 105 raid geared).

I cast it sometimes to freak out our healer and screw someone out of a debuff slot.

You don't use Act of Valor to heal somebody. You use it to make a statement.

You mean healing a wizard isn't making a statement?

I remember when that hit group in Underfoot/HoT (whenever it got added). Ranger, necro, and 2 healer mercs versus that one fire slug named in Convorteum. After the fight I realized I forgot to turn my merc on cause the Summer's line + ranger healing AAs + reluctant benevolence was some of the most insane group healing there was.

Yea

Yea it used to be pretty decent but what they did to it might as well have made it Hcharisma

Its honestly like RB was nerfed someone thinks it still works that way.

Self-Sacrifice is another good one, it used to be a means to get necros below 80% health had a tiny pet heal tacked on just so it wasnt purely hp drain. Now its continued forward like its useful as heal.

The first three ranks of <Tradeskill> Mastery.
(The 4-13 that give extra skill cap is cool...)

Why are the first three ranks useless?

What annoys me with lifeburn is that it can be partially resisted on Ragefire MoTM npcs.

I don't think it is a joke. I thought I read somewhere that the first three ranks can only take you to the maximum success rate of 95% so that it is useless on anything trivial, and only truely helpful on combines far above your skill cap.

Banestrike. I don't feel like going through 4 pages to see if anyone said it. But Banestrike takes the cake.

I put Banestrike on my spam button, its free dps!

I use it while waiting for "forces" to refresh.

I use BaneStrike to pull all the time - don't have to stop to cast it..?

TL;DR, but... has someone said Identify?

Not sure actually...
I think Identify should be a passive autogranted ability for everyone, once you reach a certain level.
or would that change, interfere with quest-mechanics?

Just put the Identify-text on an always visible lore-tab.

The original ranks of it which only add to the base stats are the result of all of the individual stat increase AAs into a single AA. Also, I would have to go look again, but I am fairly sure that the EoK ranks do more than just add to the base stats.

Still works just fine for me, very noticeable difference.

It Identifies the item on your cursor; there are hundreds of items involved with a multitude of quests where the quest asks for something that is not the quest items actual name; such as the gold nuggets from Frontier Mountains (the Kunark zone, not EoK). I still have a Silvery Mask in my shared bank for such items on alts. The AA was simply so that level 100+ people would not need to be finding casters who have the spell or a clicky to identify the right items. There are uses for it, that you choose not to make use of it is your choice.

It's not so much a joke, as a statement. Ngreth has long disliked the original 3 TS Mastery ranks; because they made it too easy to successfully make TS items. They first lead to the Devs adding guaranteed failure rates which were not well liked by anyone. Those TS Masteries were also part of the reason for a long time that they would not raise the skill cap more. Ultimately, those first 3 ranks of the different TS Masteries lead to the insanely high Trivials that we see today; so with the higher TS raw skill that EoK brought access to expect the Trivials to start going up again on items (if not in RoS then in subsequent expansions).

No, it is not a very noticeable difference on a Monk. Parse bare handed. Parse with one hand weapons with AC, the highest you can get access to. Parse with a two hander with the highest AC you have access to.

Results pre nerf. Two handers were the best mitigation without question.

Results post nerf. Any one handers that combined total 20% or more AC than a two hander will mitigate significantly better than a two hander. Practically any set of one handers that have level appropriate AC will mitigate about the same as any two hander. Two handers mitigate better than bare fists or level inappropriate one handers by about 20% no matter what AC the two hander has.

I'm going with the thread title. "What are the worse alternate abilities?"
So to me these are the worst thing they have done to tradeskills. Oh, they are absolutely useful, but did horrible things to the design space.

Nearly exactly this.
We didn't raise the skill cap more because of a problem with the formula for gaining skills with tradeskills, not necessarily this AA. This AA does make it less appealing to do the work!

It's never become a priority to fix the formula for MANY reasons. One of the main is that we would either have to have it be an algorithm and not a formula or it would change the difficulty to get to 300 for people. So it kept being pushed off.

Dzarn made a workaround to the normal way of gaining skills, with the new AA, that get skill to 350.