Guild Wars 2

So I read the article on changing skill points and what not and realized, isn’t this all pointless? We already use our skill points to buy Miyani’s materials so what is the point of having spirit shards if they do the same thing? Or did I misinterpret the article entirely. Can someone explain please.

It changes skill points into a form of currency. Essentially it will do the same thing, but instead of having skill points per character, it seems that spirit shards (aka skill points) will be account wide. Thus accessible across all your characters.

Additionally, skill points as they currently are are changing heavily, so it wouldn’t really function the same anymore.

think about expansion and future new specializations. We will use hero points to progress specialization tracks with new skills and traits and more.
If we would use old skill points , that everyone have more then they need, lots of people would instantly unlock all things.
And now because we will get only few hero points , we will want to do these new hero chalanges on new maps to earn more of them.
So it will be more fun and will take some time after expansion (and thats good too). You want to play the game, not unlock everything in first 5 minutes.

I might be wrong but the way I read the article was that we keep skill Points for skills from skill challenges and levelling up.

Only the excess skill Points from consumeables will be converted into spirit shards.

But that will give a problem with characters with 100 % map completion and currently 0 skill Points since they have been used. If Anet introduces new skills that I have to buy – how do I gain more skill Points when the consumeables on give spirit shards?

they said: leveling up to 80 and skill chalanges we have now will give you more then you need to unlock all core specializations.
If they add more specializations , they will also add more skill (hero) chalanges on new maps (in new expansions in future)
So you will have to do these chalanges , explore new maps, and then you will have enough hero points to unlock all thats new.

I think it’s likely they are going to reset everyone’s skills and refund the points used to get them into hero points as appropriate to your account. Otherwise the track system of skills might have some strange issues with people having the Mist form skill unlocked in the track, but not preceding things. This would also fix the issue of people not having access to many skill points because they used up what would have been ‘hero points’ as spirit shards.

This may ruin certain player characters.

Knighthonor.4061:

This may ruin certain player characters.

Definitely. I’m sure they’re planning to just outright destroy a good chunk of player characters.

Ceit.7619:

I think it’s likely they are going to reset everyone’s skills and refund the points used to get them into hero points as appropriate to your account. Otherwise the track system of skills might have some strange issues with people having the Mist form skill unlocked in the track, but not preceding things. This would also fix the issue of people not having access to many skill points because they used up what would have been ‘hero points’ as spirit shards.

There is no issue with hero points. The game only needs to know how many skill challenges you have completed and what your current level is to figure out the number of hero point the character should have.

The only issue is figuring out how many spirit shards they should have.