Skills - What is the future of them?

I read in the Beta Manifesto that there are currently 50ish active skills and they're pushing to have 100 by release. There are very few elemental magic skills... Really only a few "mage-worthy" spells of each type, and it certainly makes me hesitant to specialize in any specific elements as I only have a few spells to choose from.

I'm just wondering; What is the ULTIMATE goal? In a year from now, how many skills will there be? Only the 100 at release? Or will they continue to be released steadily with each patch, maybe 25 at a time?

I think about 1000 total active skills sounds about right, don't you? Then customization would be completely unparalleled in any other game of the genre, and as other games come out, like GD, D3, GW3, LE, etc. in the next year, at least this game would be "That game with the ridiculously awesome skill system.

That's how I see this game succeeding. I'd love to hear from anyone who knows if this is the intention!

The manifesto is a tad out of date. There is currently 72 (maybe 71 or 73, I lost count somewhere) active skills across the three attributes, with 42 support gems.

I would be highly surprised if Act 3 and Open Beta came without more active skills in play. There are some pretty glaring holes in the lists.

To be utterly honest, I'd like to see fewer active skills than support gems, but more dynamic changes from support gems. This is what ThatOtherGame promised and delivers at max level: a base skill that can be modified dramatically in several ways. In some, but not all, cases, the change is sufficient to consider the modified skill a totally different skill to the base.

This is what I think Path of Exile is poised to pull off.

Also, I don't think the game should be subject to the skill overload that plagued Guild Wars 1. There's a reason Gw2 has a massive reduction in skill count -- many of the skills of Gw1 were copies or served a similar function.

So far, Path of Exile has avoided that trap. A thousand skills is impossible for me to imagine without some unnecessary overlap.

That's why I advocate more support gems. Add one active skill, that's all you've added. One skill. Add one interesting and clever support gem, and you've potentially added dozens of skills.

You're right about GW1 having way too many skills. On top of that, they weren't much to look at, either. At the moment, the same might be said about PoE, because the magic is so far, forgive me for saying, incredibly generic. I'd like to see more variety.

Here are some ideas that I haven't seen yet that I think should be in the game:
A spell where you blow fire from your mouth into a wide cone in front of you.
A spell where you cause a blizzard effect over a large part of the screen, slowing and moderately damaging enemies.
The various "wall" spells, like "Fire Wall" and "Ice Wall".
A spell where you very briefly summon flies from the surrounding corpses to deal a couple attacks to enemies on screen and disappear. More corpses=more flies.

I just think there's a lot of untapped potential here. I won't buy that "less is more" with the active skills. Support gems are just as important for sure, but more can and should be done and I certainly hope that the goal is at least 200 active skills before they stop making new ones.

That said, if the support gem system is really made into something special, then I'm all for that as well.

I think most people would agree that there aren't enough skills in the game. Most builds feel rather sparse.

The good news is that GGG intends to continuously add more skills to the game. They've been averaging a few new skills per patch since Closed Beta started. 0.9.9 added the completely new trap and totem skill mechanics to the game.