Where did my secondary profession skills go?

So, I came back to the game after a two year hiatus, and I noticed that all my secondary professions had lost all of the skills I had accumulated over the years. I know I had access to these skills previously as I have numerous build templates that made use of them.

What happened during my absence?

*You can't lose skills, with the exception of temporary ones you get in missions such as Raisu Palace (plus the explorable), Nundu Bay, and Venta Cemetary.
*Just because you have templates, doesn't mean you ever had those skills. You could have found the templates on a website or been given them by friends and saved them for future use (or for heroes).

I'd recommend going to a Priest of Balthazar and seeing what skills are unlocked. If the skills you thought you had are locked, then you never had them in the first place. For that matter, are you sure you obtained them and not just unlocked them?

I have a whole lot of skills unlocked. And yes, I'm sure I had them. I did a lot of alliance battles and GVG on my PVE character. I'm sure if I look hard enough I can dig up some screenshots as well.

Get diggin' then. Unless Anet's servers had a hiccup, you can't lose skills you've learned.

Did you maybe switch the view and need to open the skill displays under each attribute?
You sure you didn't use a different character? Forget to actually switch to that secondary profession?

isn't it that you COULD only use them on your pvp character, i mean, skills must first be bought or unlocked via quests for pve characters

Oy, whatever. Maybe I just dreamt the 4 years I played this game. I guess I'll just buy everything again, I've got the money and the skill points to do so.

Fredicus, that happened to me two or three years ago on just one character. I had been gone from the game maybe 6 months or so. This hiccup is very rare. Nobody believes the story unless it happens to them.

There is nothing to be done about it but go get the skills again, what I did. No loss of skills since.

Sorry, human memories are more fallible than servers, IMO. Especially considering the fact that both of you had extended hiatuses before the "hiccup", it's far more likely that you just forgot which character you were playing on. You were probably using a PvP character with all of your skills unlocked.

I respect your point of view Skyy, it sounds so reasonable! I think this is just a very rare server hiccup or bug.

My Ranger was not a PvP character and I did not and do not have a PvP Ranger. The Ranger being my primary since Prophecies went live, I was not confused. And yes, I had a couple templates that used the missing skills.

Keep in mind that every part of those servers were programmed by fallible human minds, and the custom software (ArenaNet's) is the most fallible of them all. There are tens of millions of moving parts that may all interact with each other in unusual ways, developer hacks to fix one-off problems that only show up in rare cases, and subtle bugs in maintenance processes that don't get caught quickly.

As someone who works in the tech industry, I can say that a bug that only comes up once a year in just a few dormant accounts is one that's easier to punt on than spend the money to fix. Possibly.

Glad to see I'm not crazy. Exact same situation for me. This is the character I made 6 years ago when I bought the game on release, and played through every campaign with. I don't think it's even possible for me to only have 4-5 skills per secondary profession.