Guild Wars 2

With the introduction of the 9/9 patch the unlocking of skills and utility slots mechanism changed quite a bit.

I read about the changes on the forums and Reddit, and tested them myself.
I am posting this after giving it testing and thought, I am trying to be serious with this.

We now unlock the skills on a level base, for the standard attacks these are at level 2, 4, 7, and 10.
In the old system where you would unlock skills with that weapon by killing enemies with it.

I have been playing GW2 since the Betas and have over 1.000 hours of gameplay.
I made a fresh character, a Charr Necromancer and played it until I reached lvl 11 and unlocked my primary 5 attack skills.

According to what Developers said the new Skill Level Gating was implemented because new players felt overwhelmed with the skills, so yes, gating or limiting the usage of future skills to let the player learn skill nr. 1 and 2 first sounds perfectly logical.
But then my question is… what was wrong with the previous Skill unlocking system?

It was clear, you saw the icons and when you hovered over them you could already read their descriptions and consider their possibilities. Upon killing an enemy with the weapon the greyed out icon would gain a yellow leveling bar over it very much like a level up bar, signifying progress. It had a natural flow of learning to it.

Now you have black squares with locks on top of them and when you hover over it they just say: You will unlock this slot at level XYZ.
You are left completely in the dark of what you might expect from your weapons unless you find the Weapon Skills tab in the Hero Panel, which requires a few clicks to dig up.

If the old unlocking system was going too fast why not increase the amount of kills required to learn the next skill on the bar? Because the current system does have a rather major flaw in it currently.
This happened to me and when it did I scratched my head and thought: this might be confusing for a new player.

Having the new level unlocking mechanism looked clean and straight forward, I started playing and the leveling up flow was nice and it all worked fine until I did something every new player does when it happens… you find a new usable weapon and you equip it out of curiosity.
My Necromancer went from an Axe/Warhorn combo to a Staff.

Suddenly there are 5 new skills on the bar, ready to use because you are level 10.
(this was in my case, but it can happen at any level between 2 and 10, up to lvl 23 if underwater skills are included).
A new player will have no idea what the skills do and did not have any gates that would slow them down a bit and let them learn 1 before 2, and the others. There were no gates.

So isn`t this a major problem? Didn’t this scenario just obliterate the new gating system and left a new player with skills they never used before?

Would it be an idea to fix this by taking some elements from the old system and fuse them with the new one? Let the players hover over the grayed out icons and already read the description of what they can prepare for while keeping the level rule.
And when they switch to a different weapon? gray the icon out and let the player kill 4-5 enemies with it before giving them the nr. 2 skill and so on until all 5 are neatly learned?

I do not know if this is the best solution for it.
We could discuss this. What do you readers think?
-sorry for the long read-

Kind regards,
-Kenyon

Increasing the number of kills needed would have kittened off the veterans just as much as level gating. Let’s be perfectly honest. They already grumble about the 1-80 “grind”. Making ANY part of that grind more tedious was going to kitten them off, no matter HOW it was done.

It just seems like the best way Arena.net could have applied this new leveling method if they absolutely had to was that once you “unlocked” something on your first character, it was unlocked for ALL future characters.

chemiclord.3978:

It just seems like the best way Arena.net could have applied this new leveling method if they absolutely had to was that once you “unlocked” something on your first character, it was unlocked for ALL future characters.

That would in fact be what the “give us an option” and “vets don’t need their hands held like this” generally boils down to. I totally agree that this would go very far in calming down much of the uproar.

It would calm down the uproar, but it wouldn’t retain new players… which was ultimately Anet’s gold.

Chameleon Dude.1564:

It would calm down the uproar, but it wouldn’t retain new players… which was ultimately Anet’s gold.

Except that nothing would change for the new players; they would still have the new leveling system in place. Thus, adding account unlocks for vets of level gated features would retain just as many new players as it would right now.

The old system was fine and should be put back. If skills unlocked too quickly then this was only because the skills unlocked much more quickly at higher levels than at level 1 (wrong scaling).

The learning problem was not the unlocking of the skills but the subtlety of the GW2 weapon skills compared to other MMOs. By this I mean that other MMOs let players mash keys for extra dps whilst skill 1 gives dps effortlessly in GW2 and skills 2-4 offer interrupts, mobility, defense, etc. Skill use needs to be timed to be effective. If a thief mashes infiltrator’s strike as skill #2 then they literally go nowhere and they are not going to learn how to use it without wider game knowledge coming from experience with more skills.

New players should of course have access to 5 weapon skills. Part of the elegance of the game design was the completeness of some weapon sets, giving you all the skills you needed from level 1. Now that’s gone and the weapon sets just do not function properly with less. Who’s want to start a thief only just find yourself standing in front of a centaur in Queensdale stabbing it like a idiot with low health and little armor?

I wouldn’t assume btw that this change was made purely for the benefit of the players. This change may allow different commercial opportunities such as free trials at low levels. There’s no point arguing that the unlocking system is worse than before if the accountants are the ones who demanded the change.