Guild Wars 2

If you’re looking at skills as a means of character progression, then I have to commend you for it. A wider choice of skills breeds build variety and trying out new ways to play is far more enjoyable than grinding for higher numbers (tiers of gear).

I hope you consider revamping or at least tweaking your weapon skill system somewhere down the line.

I would love if that would be true, but I think Anet is still traumatized from trying to balance GW1. They probably have involuntary twitches that trigger when you say the words “55 build”. Their kneejerk reaction was limit GW2 players to 10-14 total skills max, so it will take a while and a lot of therapy to get them to the point that they are willing to expand beyond that .

I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Tol, they’ve already told us that we’re getting new skills and traits…..before the end of the year even. That we’ll be unlocking them and that they will be a means of horizontal progression for our chars. =)

Now, when it comes to skills….we don’t know if they’ll all be utility skills, or if we’ll get new weapon skills too. That hasn’t been clarified, if I recall. Still, I look forward to seeing what we get.

I would love it to be weapon skills. Especially on my ranger. I’d love to swap out all the abilities on the short bow for something useful.

There been a lot of horizontal progression so far all the new gear types they been adding in most live events. This will just add a lot more horizontal progression and this is what the GW2 community seems to wants.

It truly breeds variety as long as they are well balanced. I’d rather have them take their time to make sure the new skills/traits won’t give birth to overpowered builds. It’s better to have 20 viable skills rather than 10 viable skills and 20 skills nobody uses, imo.

This post is not related to the current state of GW2 balance, which features plenty of useless traits/skills

Skills as a means of progression is better than what we have now which is ZERO progression.

You are still very limited with just 3 utility, 1 healing and 1 elite skills however. Will be interesting if we are having new weapon types with all new skills, however.

On traits I hope they get rid of or merge all the useless ones that exist now, especially the ones that you have no choice to have if you invest 30 points in a line…

Tolmos.8395:

I would love if that would be true, but I think Anet is still traumatized from trying to balance GW1. They probably have involuntary twitches that trigger when you say the words “55 build”. Their kneejerk reaction was limit GW2 players to 10-14 total skills max, so it will take a while and a lot of therapy to get them to the point that they are willing to expand beyond that .

I wouldn’t hold my breath.

It’s already been announced that that’s the direction they’re going in and, frankly, I couldn’t be happier. I agree 100% with the OP – adding new ways to build and customize your character and new to approach and experiment in combat absolutely trump hyperbolic stat progression as a compelling way to approach endgame.

I honestly can’t believe any MMO is still using the carrot on a stick approach. There will come a time when people look back and say “that was terrible”.

That said, part of me does think they should expand the number of skills available in a build. Maybe something like 8 and 8 instead of 5 and 5 – 5 MH weapon skills, 3 OH weapon skills, 6 utility skills, 1 healing and 1 elite skill, but that would probably have a very dramatic impact on balance so who knows.

Can only wish but that’s what this game needs. Like im not playing your game to hear “we had a hard time balancing gw1 so this time around we have 1/10 of skills available to you so we can balance easier” so stop with this crap and give me new skills, not two three or five new ones but in hundreds.

They can add new weapon skills to existing weapons, add new weapon accessibility to existing professions, add new weapon types, and add new utility skills. I’m personally hoping for a bit of all four, but most of all I’m wanting some flexibility and customization for existing weapons.

I’m all for off-hand swords for thieves, stakitten for rangers, hammers for engineers, etc; and I’d LOVE to see two-handed axes added to the game. But I think every profession having every weapon is a waste of resources, and I’m not too keen on whips, scythes, etc being added.

Most of all, though, I want the option to run a weapon because I like the aesthetics of the weapon and still have some say in how my character plays. Right now our weapons define our roles – a hammer warrior is a crowd control warrior, a pistol engineer is a condition damage engineer, etc. Having the ability to customize our weapon skills means I can run a shield on my “tanky” guardian instead of a focus.

But I fear that once again PvP is going to get in the way of things. If the developers want PvP to be an e-sport, they’re probably better off having everything uniform. Right now, if you see a rifle-wielding warrior you know exactly what it’s capable of doing. You know what attacks you can eat and what attacks you should block/dodge/interrupt/otherwise avoid.

Customizable weapon skills means there’s going to be less emphasis on “knowledge is power” for PvP players; a bad thing for those with e-sport aspirations.m Now I hope I’m wrong – I really hope we do get customizable weapon skills. But I don’t think that’s how things are going to go.

I would love it to be weapon skills. Especially on my ranger. I’d love to swap out all the abilities on the short bow for something useful.

Tell me about it; I haven’t touched (and have no intention of doing so) my ranger since they needlessly changed Hunter’s Shot two weeks ago.

Random musing: now that they’re going to add new skills, I wonder how many names of GW1 skills used for GW2 traits they wish they’d kept available.

I have lots of fond memories of GW1 equipping a signet of capture and head off to hunt for that bad guy that had the skill I wanted..

So I really hope that when new skills are added (already anounced), it’ll be something like that and not just “purchase with X skill points” and done.

locoman.1974:

I have lots of fond memories of GW1 equipping a signet of capture and head off to hunt for that bad guy that had the skill I wanted..

So I really hope that when new skills are added (already anounced), it’ll be something like that and not just “purchase with X skill points” and done.

Because they specifically mentioned new ways of obtaining skill points, I suspect it’s going to be just that…purchase with X skill points and done. Of course, skill points could also be used in the crafting of ascended and legendary tiers of weapons, armor, and trinkets; so maybe I’m wrong.

Tolmos.8395:

I would love if that would be true, but I think Anet is still traumatized from trying to balance GW1. They probably have involuntary twitches that trigger when you say the words “55 build”. Their kneejerk reaction was limit GW2 players to 10-14 total skills max, so it will take a while and a lot of therapy to get them to the point that they are willing to expand beyond that .

I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Nothing killed a “55” build more than life stealing spirits….

In GW1 they made 2 mistakes. First of all dual classes were made too easy too abuse. They made it too easy to access the secondary class skills to the point that for example necro’s were better restoration healers than the ritualist class itself. They should’ve never allowed so much access to secondary classes.

Secondly, they made the mistake of thinking you could use the same skills in pvp and pve equally. This doesn’t work because pvp and pve are inherently different. Unless you completely redo mobs in pve, they cannot go on equal footing.

This led to them bringing out pve only skills and having pvp and pve versions of each skill.

So what happened in GW2? They got rid of dual classes, but still decided they could balance all skills around pvp and pve equally. Whoever decided they should go that way again should be fired. What a completely stupid decision that was.

Another thing that happened in GW1 was that new skills were introduced with new campaigns. The bad mistake that was made there is that they made those skills more powerful than the existing ones, making the older campaigns totally easy to beat, taking all challenge out of the game.

So what will happen with GW2? My guess is more powerful skills needed in new content again completely making current content even easier. That’s my prediction.