Guild Wars 2

Please add option to let us rearrange the placement of our skill bar buttons. Like how we can in Guild Wars 1, Diablo III, etc.

This is especially important for players who customized their hotkeys for skills—so their hotkeys no longer match the same placement order as the UI.

This has been requested since day one, not that hard to implement, if they havnt implemented it yet 23 months in its because they dont want to.

why wouldn’t anet want to add this ability? it’s such an important combat customization concept, that they even had back in GW1.

My guess is Balancing issues and PvP/WvW.

For example, let’s say all Off-Hand items can have their skills swapped. Well, I -love- the look of a shield on a Guardian but I’d be an idiot to use anything but a focus as the Off-Hand as it’s #5 skill is more powerful than Annie’s Hair Curlers. If I could put that skill on my bar while wielding a Shield? I’d be happy, very happy indeed. But it’d probably confuse people in WvW or PvP if I did that.

Not to mention imagine what else I could put there? There would be certain combinations of skills that would ultimately become devastating and imbalanced.

I understand your request (and I am ok with it!), but I don’t understand what’s the matter with the image.

Just in case it helps you, you can change the key binding for the skill bar, so that you ckittene any other key to activate the skills.

Vexander.9850:

My guess is Balancing issues and PvP/WvW.

For example, let’s say all Off-Hand items can have their skills swapped. Well, I -love- the look of a shield on a Guardian but I’d be an idiot to use anything but a focus as the Off-Hand as it’s #5 skill is more powerful than Annie’s Hair Curlers. If I could put that skill on my bar while wielding a Shield? I’d be happy, very happy indeed. But it’d probably confuse people in WvW or PvP if I did that.

Not to mention imagine what else I could put there? There would be certain combinations of skills that would ultimately become devastating and imbalanced.

I don’t think the idea is to let you use focus skills while holding a shield… I think the request is to be able to move the 1-2-3-4-5 hotkeys around on your bar (without having to rebind keys)

Vexander.9850:

My guess is Balancing issues and PvP/WvW.

For example, let’s say all Off-Hand items can have their skills swapped. Well, I -love- the look of a shield on a Guardian but I’d be an idiot to use anything but a focus as the Off-Hand as it’s #5 skill is more powerful than Annie’s Hair Curlers. If I could put that skill on my bar while wielding a Shield? I’d be happy, very happy indeed. But it’d probably confuse people in WvW or PvP if I did that.

Not to mention imagine what else I could put there? There would be certain combinations of skills that would ultimately become devastating and imbalanced.

He means the position on the action bar, not the skill that goes there.

This by the way shows how much gw2 has regressed the development of the genre.

Changing keybindings does not help, because key binds on this game are to positions not skills. What he wants to do is to is have the sword teleport and the GS teleport on the same button, not one be on 2 and the other on 3 when they both perform the same function.

You know, i asked for this way back then, thats why i know and tell you, this has been brought up before, it is perfectly logical, too bad logical is just not Anets game. Has not been for a while now.

meanwhile anet is busy making more content for the living story. if i wanted episodic stories so much, i’d watch a good tv series—not settle for video game puppet shows.

seriously, GW2 is supposed to be a game and anet doesn’t seem to know the priority is supposed to be on core gameplay features.

Bloodlust.3672:

meanwhile anet is busy making more content for the living story. if i wanted episodic stories so much, i’d watch a good tv series—not settle for video game puppet shows.

seriously, GW2 is supposed to be a game and anet doesn’t seem to know the priority is supposed to be on core gameplay features.

My advice, take a hiatus, i took a 1 year hiatus a while back when warriors were essentially unplayable in pvp and the game was one big kite fest, took them about a year, but warriors are decent now.

Bloodlust.3672:

why wouldn’t anet want to add this ability? it’s such an important combat customization concept, that they even had back in GW1.

The question is what do you mean by arrange? Do you mean swapping for example skills 1 and skill 2? Or by arrange do you mean you want a big pool of skills from which you can choice (like they had in GW1). The issue with the latter is that GW2 has half your skills bound to the weapons you’re using and half of the other half are fixed (healing and elite). GW2 was designed around weapon skills, not around the skill pool system like GW1 and some other MMOs.

Bloodlust.3672:

seriously, GW2 is supposed to be a game and anet doesn’t seem to know the priority is supposed to be on core gameplay features.

Um… eh… oooh. Well I have to disagree with you there. Core gameplay can engaging but I kinda like my video games to have a story. I like it when there’s a story so I can care about the why and who of the action. For me it’s immersion that’s important.
Although I guess we’re on opposite poles of the spectrum here, I can understand how some players can be more invested in the mechanics of the game though. Trying out new build and skills combos and all that. Me I just settle for what works and then go out on an adventure.

It’s really the only MMO I know you can’t do anything – GW1 included. What were they thinking? Also add – FOR GOD’S SAKE – additional bars for mini pets, bufffood, weapons etc… It’s so annoying to always open the god kitten inventory and look for the food, weapon, mini you want to use.

Good luck. At this point I think that the legal team has convinced management that allowing UI configuration and client side particle options will lead to liability lawsuits.

We’ll hurt ourselves doing things like that, possibly poking eyes out.

Bloodlust.3672:

This is especially important for players who customized their hotkeys for skills—so their hotkeys no longer match the same placement order as the UI.

Not necessarily true as you can see in the attachment below. I’ve set skills 6 to 0 to Shift+1 to Shift+5 and it shows the correct hotkeys.

And at least you can swap three of the five utility slots.

You can use different hotkeys and they will also show correctly.

Saying this is needed because it was possible in GW1 is silly. I could explain the multitude of differences between the 2 skill systems and why the current GW2 skill placement just makes sense and is easily recognizable to any player, but I have the feeling nothing anyone would ever say to the OP would make a bit of difference.

Bottom line: The current skill placement is a design choice by the Devs and it’s pretty obvious they have no intention of changing that choice because your (possible OCD) situation makes you believe you need to change the keybinding (nothing wrong with that) and the skill images on the bar MUST match up.

Get over it, not gonna change.

Brother Grimm.5176:

Get over it, not gonna change.

This is the attitude that killed pvp in this game. That is saying a lot for a GW1 successor.

Brother Grimm.5176:

Saying this is needed because it was possible in GW1 is silly. I could explain the multitude of differences between the 2 skill systems and why the current GW2 skill placement just makes sense and is easily recognizable to any player, but I have the feeling nothing anyone would ever say to the OP would make a bit of difference.

Bottom line: The current skill placement is a design choice by the Devs and it’s pretty obvious they have no intention of changing that choice because your (possible OCD) situation makes you believe you need to change the keybinding (nothing wrong with that) and the skill images on the bar MUST match up.

Get over it, not gonna change.

One simple question. How would his skill bar customization effect your game, or any other players game in a negative manner? You would not even know, it would be client side. The skills themselves would not be affected.

It would be a simple QOL feature, client side. I really don’t understand the harsh reaction and hostility.

As someone that played quite hardcore pvp in a certain other game, going up to 50 custom keybinds back then (although admittedly, I will never go down that route again :P). I too was disappointed that you can’t move skills to different hotkeys. The way it is now, if you use 2 weapon sets with skills on certain buttons you can’t take the route of ‘just change the keybind’ because not only does it change the keybind on all your chars, you would have to do it in combat? Almost every single MMO I played allows people to swap their skills to different buttons. The OP isn’t asking for people to use sword skills on an axe etc, just to move the buttons around on a per-character basis. In many games I bind certain type of skills to certain keys, you can’t do that in GW2. Although I’ve accepted the way it is now, I still am a big pro to allowing players to swap their skills to different hotkey locations. They already use this for utility skills so it seems they have part of the backend work for it already. Most games tend to have this sort of thing turned off by default because it’s apparently too complex? But GW2 could do the same thing, keep it off by default and those who would like to use it can.

How would this work with the weapon swap function? Also, another problem I could forsee, as we’ve seen with the utility skills and the underwater bar effecting the CDs of skills when you swap them on land, I’m wondering if the CDs on weapon skills aren’t similarly tied to the weapon AND the active skill slot. Notice when you use an Icebow skill and then drop it to pick up the other, that skill/slot is still on CD. If the programming is similar, like the in and out of water utilities, a change like this might be very abusable. Say, for instance, a Fast Hands, dual Greatsword Warrior has Hundred Blades bound to one slot on one of his weapons then to another slot on the other. With reduced CD on Greatsword skills, this Warrior would be able to infinitely loop Hundred Blades. The Thief’s Dual-Attacks might present some kind of problem as well but I doubt that (it might just be strange when weapon swapping). Also, the system is very simple and user friendly right now and I think they just like it that way. I use this weapon and get these skills here. I equip this other weapon in my offhand and get these skills.

I’m not saying this is all necessarily the case or even good reasons for that matter nor am I saying it’s impossible to implement something like this, but it might be more of a pain to tackle than we realize. What about Elementalist’s Attunement swapping? What about Engineer’s Kit swapping? What about the different ‘Transform’ skills? What happens to the skills when you remove a weapon and replace it completely and/or later re-equip the weapon? I think this is more complex than just moving some pictures around tbh.

It won’t effect me at all because it’s not going to get done. Discussing “what if’s” for something like this is pointless.

Apolo.5942:

Brother Grimm.5176:

Get over it, not gonna change.

This is the attitude that killed pvp in this game. That is saying a lot for a GW1 successor.

The reality that limited resources aren’t going to be applied to unnecessary changes? Ok.

Brother Grimm.5176:

It won’t effect me at all because it’s not going to get done. Discussing “what if’s” for something like this is pointless.

Apolo.5942:

Brother Grimm.5176:

Get over it, not gonna change.

This is the attitude that killed pvp in this game. That is saying a lot for a GW1 successor.

The reality that limited resources aren’t going to be applied to unnecessary changes? Ok.

Are there any changes, developments, etc that are necessary ? Aren’t they all optional in an effort to give (some) people what they might like to see in game ?

I’m not 100% sure but I think the problem is something to do with weapon swapping and how the game “remembers” which slot each skill goes into.

In GW1 I sometimes tried rearranging the skills you got from things like the Junundu or Scarred Psyche. It worked but when I switched back to my normal skills they’d all be in the wrong places. If (for example) I’d swapped skills1 and 5 on the Junundu bar my normal 1 and 5 skills would be swapped too.

I suspect GW2’s skill bars work the same way, except now swapping skills is intended to be a regular part of combat. (Through swapping weapon sets, ele attunements, engi kits etc.) Obviously I can’t test it in this game but given it was built on a modified version of the same engine it wouldn’t surprise me if moving skills around had the same effect – moving one would affect all your different weapon sets etc. I think this is why most tonics, environmental weapons etc. don’t affect your utility skills – you could have those in any order and the game doesn’t have a way to make sure they go back where they were.

It might still be possible to implement (I’m not sure though) but I think it would require a lot of work for a relatively minor benefit.

Having said all that if it was possible it’s something I’d like to see. When the game first came out it really bothered me because in GW1 I always had my skills arranged roughly in the order I’d expect to use them – stuff I’d do when entering combat on the left, attacks in the middle and heal/rez skills on the right. Both because it made sense to me and because it meant I could sit my hand in the middle of the row, on top of the ones I used most, and still reach all the keys easily.

But I adjusted. Most importantly I shifted to using the number pad (with my heal on 0 because it’s a big, easy to find button) which is a lot easier to navigate without looking. It would still be nice to be able to move skills around but it’s now something I could live without.

In the end they must create configuration settings for each possible weapon
combination x 2 for both slots + 2 × 2 × 5 for underwater weapons since you ckittene of cause 2 ranged or 2 melee (ok ele and engi need less)

If we take warrior that would be a hell lot of different configuration bits you have to create.

so you guys think anet is just too lazy to program the skill bar to be more customizable

Bloodlust.3672:

so you guys think anet is just too lazy to program the skill bar to be more customizable

Personally as a programmer i’m always to lazy to do things like that where you
have to create 100s of new variables and then program the save and load functions
to set the correct values to every single one of them.

Its simply tedious and the the danger to fall asleep and forget one or load a wrong
value is very big

I prefer much more writing real code instead .. don’t know if its lazy or not .. maybe ..

Topics issue is what killed whole serie for me, not even sure if i ever got 30 hours played after release.
Not gona buy any future guild wars games ever again.

Guild Wars 1 = Epic
Guild wars 2 = Huge disappointment

Biggest mistake is that i bought collectors edition for this game and development team got lot of extra cash.

Well, i guess statue is still cool enough to cut my losses little bit.

i wish i had the perspective of desiring this so that i might understand why

As this thread has run its course, we’re going to go ahead and lock it.