Guild Wars 2

maddoctor.2738:

tom.7468:

Aevic.9675:

Except most of GW1’s skills came from future expansions. There wasn’t so many options when GW1 was released. We had about the same amount of options.

Look here http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/List_of_Prophecies_skills
So you’re wrong but i hope they add more skills when they release a new expansion.

Aevic is correct then. Do the math

Warrior in GW1: 35+41 = 76 skills (Common + Prophecies – at release)
Warrior in GW2: 75 + 9 Burst skills + 15 skills in skill chains + 9 Banner + 5 Rampage + 8 downed/drowned = 121 skills, Even if you get only the 75 skills they are equal in number

In conclusion, the “Guild Wars 1 had more skills” argument, is invalid

Sir, I’m afraid your calculation is invalid.

What you forgot to add is the second profession. In total there were 10 professions. So add to that list another (rough estimate) 1200 skills or so. This includes PvE only skills, which you failed to add too.

All in all to skill bar options (and the whole system of it) in GW is far superior than what they are in GW2. Making it a valid argument.

GW2 Mesmer is a fail design and a one trick pony class who serve no different than other class. PvE can be done through 1 F1 only till level 80. GW1 Mesmer is more interresting as they can build to 2 shot a all purpose pvp monk although my monk is slotted with elite skill stance from Ranger which convert all debuff and gain regen which is hard counter to that meta mesmer/necro.

i have to laugh when they say there wont be any grind for the fun stuff…. i have to grind money , i have to grind levels to get to the first fun thing and thats a dungeon ( personal story aside or decent boss battles.) some dynamic events feel forces and are hard when you have to solo it especially in lower level area’s , the game is beautifull and it needs more decent events.
personal story is all about you , no not really this is how i became a commander working under trahearne its still all based around him not me it aint right. course i dont mind a character like trahearne but they schould not say stuff that aint true.
i get to make decisions yet the true impact is that he gets the credit for everything the player does while he waves his wand around and dying every 5 minutes. No to Trahearne please kill him off.

I played GW1, I prefer GW2.
Im starting to see a charm in GW1 that I had long lost, but GW2 is still preferred.

I play multiple games, Secret World has a skill even more up in the air than GW1, with a dodge key (that I don’t know how to fully use) Planetside 2 has that big massive pvp world. S4 league got a whacky vibe, GW2 has this controlled loose environment, fluid combat, no pvp barrier and I look good. GW1 feels very stiff.

If anything I’d be more interested if GW1 became open to mods or something to make it less stiff but in general GW2 has more of what I want.

GW1 felt Black and white at times, that annoyed the hell out of me. We called it Build Wars for a reason.

Volcane Crucio.4723:

maddoctor.2738:

tom.7468:

Aevic.9675:

Except most of GW1’s skills came from future expansions. There wasn’t so many options when GW1 was released. We had about the same amount of options.

Look here http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/List_of_Prophecies_skills
So you’re wrong but i hope they add more skills when they release a new expansion.

Aevic is correct then. Do the math

Warrior in GW1: 35+41 = 76 skills (Common + Prophecies – at release)
Warrior in GW2: 75 + 9 Burst skills + 15 skills in skill chains + 9 Banner + 5 Rampage + 8 downed/drowned = 121 skills, Even if you get only the 75 skills they are equal in number

In conclusion, the “Guild Wars 1 had more skills” argument, is invalid

Sir, I’m afraid your calculation is invalid.

What you forgot to add is the second profession. In total there were 10 professions. So add to that list another (rough estimate) 1200 skills or so. This includes PvE only skills, which you failed to add too.

All in all to skill bar options (and the whole system of it) in GW is far superior than what they are in GW2. Making it a valid argument.

Now go through all those “builds” you assert exist in GW1 and remvoe from that list all the oens that don’t make any sense. Remove all the builds that are 8 skills from different attributes, skills that require a secodnary profession’s primary attribute to be non-0 to work right, all the builds where your attributes are spread too thin to be meaningful, builds where energy management is impractical, builds that lack survivability skills, etc.

You’ll find that GW2 offers about the same level of customization—better than GW1 did at launch.

Don’t believe me? Let’s do the math again, but right this time.

The actual pool of skills you can select from is not the set of skills that exist in the primary and secondary profession combined. Most skills are not viable without enough attribute points. You can spread yourself thin over 4 different attributes. 3 was usually my limit, and i tended to strive for 2. Some skills don’t really need a lot to be useful; we’ll add all those back in—these are the skills that tend to have a chance to fail when you have less than X in the attribute.

We also get to eliminate skills that require more energy than you have.

We also have to eliminate a slot for a rez, and another for a heal. We’re talking about builds that are just as team friednly, and everyone in GW2 has a self heal and a rez. As a result, we’ll eliminate the heal and rez skills from the pool, while striking out those slots.

You also need to have a defined build. Generally, this manifests as an elite skill and 2-3 supporting skills. Searing Flames makes a great cornerstone, but is an energy management nightmare—Glowing Gaze and Fire Attunement do wonders for sustainability. Similarly Hundred Blades is a gret skill, but you need the extra oomph of Whirlwind Attack, and that often comes hand-in-hand with For Great Justice. You have some room to play with these supporting skills, but not a lot.

So you start off with 8 skill slots, and 2 are removed for rez and heal. 3 of the remaining 6 are given to your eltie and supporting skills, and the remaining 3 are a grab-bag across up to 4 attributes. This means there are (# of elites) * (4 * # of skills in an attribute)! / (4 * # of skills in an attribute – 3)!

Since we’re tlaking vanilla content, this becomes (for a given primary profession) approximately:
30 * 12! / 9! = 39,600 builds.

Now, these are just builds composed of slapping together random skills. Many will have no internal synergies; how many minion manster builds are represented with no means to heal the minion. How many hex- or condition-removal skills are present? The actual number drops considerably. But we have an upper bound; for each primary profession in Prophecies, there are fewer than 200,000 viable builds. PVE skills factor in, but you’re limited to 3, and there really aren’t that many. The number is within the noise of useless skills. If you want to realyl go nuts, you can remvoe the heal/rez restriction and arrive at 14m builds per primary profession, but, again, the real number is much lower because a lot of these builds are vastly sub-optimal and mix things that just don’t make sense.

So lets stick with 200k.

Weapon Combinations * (# Utiltiies)! / # Utilities – 3) * (# Elites)

For a warrior, this is 19 * 20 * 19 * 18 * 3 = 6,627,960, and I haven’t even considered racial skills or weapon swaps.

Is this not enough build definition? You have 14 traits as well.

Gear options dwarf what was available in GW1.

GW2 has many more possibilities, especially when you look past your skill bar.

You want an added bonus? It is harder for a GW2 player to make a bad build than it was in GW1.

Nayru.3947:

Fildydarie.1496:

Now go through all those “builds” you assert exist in GW1 and remvoe from that list all the oens that don’t make any sense.

Because GW2 has such a wide range of useful builds to use, right? 5 Skills that you can’t change, a WHOPPING, what, 16? utility skills, and a few useless elites. Take out the ones that “don’t make any sense” and you’re left with ~4 utility skills to choose from, and 1 elite.

There were hundreds of builds in GW1 that worked just fine. I probably couldn’t make a build that doesn’t make sense in GW2, because there aren’t enough skills.

If anyone tries to say that GW2 has more skills/builds/gear choices than GW1 then they are just… I can’t, I don’t even…

I generally don’t use turrets on my engineer, but if I put them in, they work just fine; I don’t have energy management problems, nor do I have issues with my stat allocation. Tehy jsut work. Similarly, I can swap to stability skills, or consecrations, or spirit weapons, or anythignelse on my guardian and it still works just fine. It might not be the most optimal build, but it works.

These builds are all viable because the skills lack the dependencies that GW1 skills had. You say you “can’t change” 5 skills, but what you really mean is you choose a set of 5 skills from (in the case of a warrior) 19 different sets. This is like choosing your elite, except you have 19 choices in GW2 instead of 16 (warrior in prophecies) or 30-31 (warrior + secondary, but lets face it, a lot of those weren’t viable as a secondary profession). Those “skills you cannot change” are really “a group of skills that you can change for a different group”

You’ve really gotta take off those rose-tinted glasses and look at what the GW1 system really was. I was being generous with those numbers; removing the ability to create downright bad and useless builds (how many assassin builds only had dual attacks but no lead attacks?) is a service to the community.

Oh, I jsut realized I had forgotten to compensate for ordering…

40k → 13k
200k → 75k
140m → 1.16m
6.6m → 1.1m

This is even more favorable for GW2.

Even when you discount the terrible builds that there is no reason to run, GW1 still had many more viable options to choose from. Heck, the idea that GW2 did away with “useless” or “bad” builds is false, there is still huge room to screw up a character, just not as badly as you could in GW1 if you ignored all common sense.

GW2 will have more options as time goes on and expansions are out, but it’s not “rose tinted glasses” to realize that GW2 has less build variance than GW1 does or that GW2’s setup is much more limiting than GW1 was. The game isn’t that old for nostalgia to be an issue and I, for one, still play it.

I also think narrowing it down to a smaller number of abilities and builds that are viable is a good thing. I remember in Wow there were a lot more abilities and builds but somehow people always ended up doing the same cookie-cutter build and you were not taken seriously in raids or pvp-circles if you felt experimenting with other builds.
In Gw2 I never feel pressured into specing a certain way.
On the other hand Gw2 might be a bit more forgiving and taking a sub-optimal build is not as obvious as in other MMO’s.

Of course not. I know for certain other people who didn’t play gw1 but still dislike guild wars 2. It would just be silly to think that only gw1 players can find gw2 boring.

I’m also pretty sure a lot of old gw1 players like gw2. I don’t know any myself but I do see a lot of people with hom titles and some other ones from gw1.
So I assume they played gw1 and enjoy playing gw2. The risk of the account being bought exists though.

you lost all credibility saying you know what 99% of a group of people thinks. I don’t understand these posts, i get it you are unhappy but why not speak out of your own experience and not pull in 99% of all gw1 players. It serves no use and it directly makes your argument invalid

I play GW2. I have never played GW1.

1.) By level 45 I can have every single skill available to my character. by hunting down skill point locations. This means for another 40 levels I gain 0 new skills. Wtf is that? Yes, I want to work towards getting new skills, but I don’t want to have to go 40 levels without getting anything new. At that point the game just feels like I’m leveling up just to be able to wear stronger armor which is not fun for me.

2.) PvP is just Zerg vs Zerg.

3.) I’d like to wear more armor styles. I’m running dangerously low of different types of fashions and I’m losing interest .

4.) Story Quests are too easy.

5.) I’m out of story quests.

6.) I don’t like to farm Fractal Dungeons every single day. Not only that, but I have to struggle to find a party with players the same level as me that are willing to stick around for more than one dungeon run (i.e. Meet up again later that week, next day, or whenever) because often the people are casual players and casually doing Fractals when they feel like doing them. Also, there are disconnects which force us to start over and when we restart players often says they are going to leave. This forces me to struggle to find MORE people willing to do Fractal dungeons the same level as me.

Even using http://gw2lfg.com/ it is still difficult to find someone my own fractal level that wants to keep playing. The game now revolves around this dungeon and everyone is at a different level setting than everyone else. It is no longer a one-of-a-kind game and I’m really starting to lose interest.

It isn’t the ascension gear that has ruined the game for me as I don’t care about the gear. It’s the fact that I have to jump through a ton of freaking hoops just to play in the content involved in this game. It’s almost disgusting.

This is why I’m finding the game boring.

I still play it too—although less frequently than I used to.

Remember we’re talking strictly prophecies content here—it is unfair to compare 4 expansions of content against 1.

A lot of builds focused on 2-3 stats. This limits you to about 50 skills. Some of thsoe skills are energy management skills. Some are heals. Some are hex- or condition-removal or resurrection. If you want to bring a rez and you are a W/N, you are forced to bring rez signet. If you’re a W/E, rez signet. If you’re a W/Mo, you have a couple options. If you’re a warrior primary, there are a lot of necro skills that require 25 energy that place an unreasonable demand on a warrior’s energy management. Why bring riposte (tactics) if you don’t wield a sword? Why bring conjure air when you don’t have a lightning damage weapon?

Let’s take a quick look at a factions favorite, the assassin. We’re stepping outside the bounds of prophecies, but for the sake of an example, an assassin that has an off-hand attack requiring a lead attack, but no lead attack, has a useless slot on their bar—possibly multiple.

These are the bad builds we’re talking about, not merely sub-optimal builds, but builds that malfunction. These are builds that spend 75% of their time regenerating energy instead of contributing, builds that have skills they cannot use to any effect, builds that have skills they cannot use at all.

There are a lot, and they are the reason that you can’t just do abstract math to arrive at the number of viable builds.

GW2 has fewer bad builds. People keep bashing on the GW2 elites but you miss the fact that the GW1 elite has become your weapon set. That archetype-defining skill that caused you to take a couple supporting skills is now your weapon set, and gives you 5 skills. This ensures you have a certain level of functionality.

Stat allocation generally is more tolerant in that the only stats that can be considered worthless are condition damage, condition duration, and boon duration, for any build that lacks conditions and/or boons.

Looking at the stat distributions, you’ll find that they tend to be “sub-optimal” as opposed to “useless”.

You also neglect traits when comparing builds. 14 major and minor traits is a non-trivial augmentation to the build system. I can assure you that my guardian plays very differently than an AH guardian. Keeping skills identical but changing traits, there are differences.

Go ahead and list for me 20 significantly different viable GW1 warrior builds using only prophecies and core skills, as implemented at launch. I’ll give you 19 for GW2 right here: Each distinct weapon set a warrior can equip. I still have traits and utilities to make further distinctions if necessary.

Fildydarie.1496:

Don’t believe me? Let’s do the math again, but right this time.

Your analysis fails on so many levels frankly I’m not sure why you bothered:

• not considering the second profession’s skills. this is a major if not the most important aspct of the GW1 skill system
• not compensating for choosing from multiple attributes
• not compensating properly for skills that were viable with minimal attribute points in them
• not compensating for the much higher degree of skill interactions in GW1 (hexes + enchantments, energy effects, effects based on adding/removing conditions/hexes/enchantments)

More than anything a numerical analysis of possible builds is a poor substitute for actual gameplay experience. To any reasonably experienced player of both games it’s plain that GW2 has far less real choice in builds compared to GW1. Even if you’re willing to play a build that under-performs vs the optimal GW2 optimal, the difference in potential builds is so much smaller than GW1. In GW2 it’s basically condition vs dirct damage, dps vs support. In GW1, you could build for interrupts, energy denial, hexes, conditions, enchantments, heals, direct damage, degen, control, support, and you usually had multiple and very different ways of building for those things by comboing different primary and secondary professions.

GW2 doesn’t remotely compare for choice.

mjharrison.3209:

Fildydarie.1496:

Don’t believe me? Let’s do the math again, but right this time.

Your analysis fails on so many levels frankly I’m not sure why you bothered:

• not considering the second profession’s skills. this is a major if not the most important aspct of the GW1 skill system
• not compensating for choosing from multiple attributes
• not compensating properly for skills that were viable with minimal attribute points in them
• not compensating for the much higher degree of skill interactions in GW1 (hexes + enchantments, energy effects, effects based on adding/removing conditions/hexes/enchantments)

• I did include secondary professions; it doesn’t change much.
• I did permit multiple attributes, however I capped it at 4. Anything beyond this is not properly balanced at 20 and has seriously sub-par performance. Some skills are exceptions, but they are in the noise. Honestly, there were so few of those skills they aren’t worth bringing to light because just as many skills were useless due to energy demands or other considerations.
• If you want to bring synergies into this, you’re reducing the number of viable builds because you’re raising the performance threshold any build must pass to be considered viable. Minion skills without a minion heal are sub-optimal, as is death nova without something willing to die.

Look at the prophecies skill lists, as they existed when the game launched, not after several rounds of skill balancing.

You’ll find your options were a lot more limited than you remember.

You also need to filter out skills that are not significantly different. At launch, there were no identical skills (as was the case after factions) but there were skills that were similar. The difference between Sprint and Rush, for example, is fairly minor. You won’t have a huge build disparity because you chose one over the other, you have the same build with slightly different resource management concerns. It isn’t just enough to slap a different set of skills on your bar, you need to actually do something different with them… although, if you want to insist that different skills make that much of a difference, we just added every possible rune combination and sigil to the list of GW2 build offerings.

Edit: Lets look at GW2 builds from a completely different angle: Traits. Lets assume that you only choose weapons armor and utilities that support your stat allocation. You only allocate traits in 5-point increments. There are 30 different stat allocations that use a 30-30-10 split. If limit yourself to traits 11-12 in the GM slot, etc., you have, for each of these, 13824 possible trait combinations. Granted, you can change these on-the-fly, but right here you have over 400,000 builds for a profession based solely on traits. There are certainly other stat distributions to consider, but that just makes the number of trait builds increase, not decrease.

I love the massive variety of builds that GW2 offers, and not just in terms of choices; I’m talking in terms of this-actually-works builds that hold their own and play the way I want them to. I am not pigeonholed into a certain role+implementation because there are only 1-2 viable paragon builds, or a choice between bonder or healer or smiter monk.

Fildydarie.1496:

You’ll find your options were a lot more limited than you remember.

I realise where you are trying to go with this but the theoretical analysis doesn’t stand up to actual experience. Also saying choice of secondary profession in GW1 doesn’t affect much is incredibly disingenuous.

Case in point of GW2 lack of choice: there is only 1 “good” build for a solo PVP Ele right now – D/D with cantrips. This is due to inherent glaring deficiencies with the other (3) weapons, plus close to zero choice in utilities as cantrips are by far the most effective way to break stun & mitigate burst on Ele (also mandatory to avoid being 1-2-shot by BS thieves/warriors/mesmers) as well as being instant case and having good offensive and defensive uses.

Because cantrips are mandatory, and all the good cantrip traits are in water line, and 20+ arcane is virtually required to play Ele, and factoring in the other 1-2 “must-have” Ele traits, there is also minimal real choice in trait allocation.

1. “good” Ele builds in GW2 in practise: 1.

mjharrison.3209:

Fildydarie.1496:

You’ll find your options were a lot more limited than you remember.

I realise where you are trying to go with this but the theoretical analysis doesn’t stand up to actual experience.

Case in point, there is only 1 “good” builds for a solo PVP Ele – D/D with cantrips. This is due to inherent glaring deficiencies with the other (3) weapons, with close to zero choice in utilities as cantrips are by far the most effective way to break stun & mitigate burst on Ele (also mandatory to avoid being 1-2-shot by BS thieves/warriors/mesmers) as well as being instant case and having good offensive and defensive uses.

Because cantrips are mandatory, and all the good cantrip traits are in water line, and 20+ arcane is virtually required to play Ele, and factoring in the other 1-2 “must-have” Ele traits, there is also minimal real choice in trait allocation.

1. “good” Ele builds in GW2 in practise: 1.

ut right there you have choen to limit the scope of utility to a single aspect of gameplay, and one that is largely dominated by the metagame.

If you want to do an UWSC, you need to have one of 8 builds, depending on which slot you fill. That is all. There was no variation then either. If you are a paragon and not playing imbagon, you are doing something wrong. No PvE warrior in GW1 could match the damage output of a HB+Whirlwind Attack warrior against multiple targets, or Dragon Slash for single targets. There were minor variations to the implmentation of these builds, just like there are minor variations to the implementations of D/D Ele builds in GW2, but there were only a couple viable builds, and this is after 4 expansions total (including original content)

Staff on Ele in GW2 is great, although, you’re right, not in PvP. Sure, that is a weakness, but we’re not talking about one tiny aspect, we’re talking about the whole game. You can take a staff into WvWvW and do fine, or any PvE content.

Edit: There are guardians that swear by Altrusitic Healing. They swear that there is no other way to play a Guardian. I, and many others, do just fine without. A direct result (or cause) of this is we have a different playstyle—it is effectively a different build, and it is completely viable. Some playstyles are better suited form some applications than others, however that does not mean the other styles cease to exist.

Worth also noting that (as you said) even “optimal” GW1 builds tend to only focus around the choice of elite and 2-3 supporting skills, and leaving a fair degree of scope for customisation, whereas GW1 builds are almost always fully specified, because GW2 builds tend to focus on a specific utility type and weapon, and any deviation tends to weaken the build.