Guild Wars 2

Personally, I feel it takes away from the immersion feeling. I wouldn’t mind having less “styles” if the styles were more fleshed out. Currently, I feel a total lack of immersion because 80% of our character build/diversity comes from passive stuffs. :<

What do you guys think?

I really like it, it makes it easier for anet to balance the game, and with weapon swapping you get access to more skill to synergize better. It’s much better than say in a game like WoW where you get tons of skills but you only ever really use a few of them and the rest are useless or extremely situational at best.

I don’t understand what the no. of skills on your skill bar has to do with immersion?

I love the skill system. I dislike games which have vast numbers of skills and hundreds of keybinds. And in GW you still retain flexibility and a range of options because of the weapon swaps.

I see alotta people making the claims that alotta the skills in WoW were useless.. When infact they were not, lol.
I’m not sure where this got started, but as an Enh Shaman, fury/arms/defense War, and Feral Druid, there was never any lack of useful skills you had at your disposal going from vanilla-wotlk WoW (which is where I stopped).

The weapon swapping in this game also feels terrible atm imo due to the HUGE cooldowns on the weapon swap ability.
I can see why it was supposed to be awesome, but it just feels so janky in pvp atm as a Warrior switching from melee to range.

I like it the way it is. I can swap weapons and go from a ranged build to a melee build on the fly. Plus my choice of skills can be changed on the fly whenever I am not in combat or on cool down. There’s nothing cookie-cutter about your character right out of the box. For once, I can play my character any way I want to.

Only thing that is passive in your build are the traits isn’t it? Most of the utility slots are skills you have to use. Signets and such have a passive part but if you don’t use the effect they give when used you are kind of missing out. Not sure what any of this has to do with immersion though. But I kind of feel like there are more then enough diverse skills. Compared to other mmorpg with maybe 30 skills where you have a lot of skills that kind of do the same kind thing. Like fireball, frostbolt, arcane bolt and so on. I play elementalist and love how many different skills and combos you can do compared to a “mage” in some other games. Even if I only count the 5 weapon skills.

Spryt.8012:

Only thing that is passive in your build are the traits isn’t it? Most of the utility slots are skills you have to use. Signets and such have a passive part but if you don’t use the effect they give when used you are kind of missing out. Not sure what any of this has to do with immersion though. But I kind of feel like there are more then enough diverse skills. Compared to other mmorpg with maybe 30 skills where you have a lot of skills that kind of do the same kind thing. Like fireball, frostbolt, arcane bolt and so on. I play elementalist and love how many different skills and combos you can do compared to a “mage” in some other games. Even if I only count the 5 weapon skills.

Well, with Ele it honestly feels different then with classes like the Warrior.

See, with a Warrior, you’re weapon swapping because you need something situational, and that situational thing won’t always take even half of the duration on the weapon swap cooldown to acomplish. Then once done you don’t need that weapon anymore, and most of the time need your primary again, but can’t get back to it.

Where as with ele, it’s more like.. Ok, you used this element, now you can swap to this next one, which has all the same survival/utility/raw dmg type stuff as the last element, but with different gimmicks to it.
Regardless tho, you can get by with any of those elements, and don’t NEED to be on another one to 100% perform.

Swapping between a melee/ranged wep as a War does not feel anywhere near as smooth as ele swapping for an elementalist. :/

Also, Elementalist basically gets 20 skills with smooth swapping due to them all being viable for 99% of situations, vs a melee char switching to a ranged wep to catch up to someone or hit a fleeing mob that then turns around, and stuff of that nature.

I dont like the skill system at all. There is little sense of improvement or advancement. They add this feature of slowly learning new abilities but it is a joke. You learn all your wep skills for a certain wep in like 20 min.

The idea of slowly unlocking wep skill sis GREAT…but they needed to have a lot more skills per wep.

What they should have done?
Use the same idea as they have but make the high lvl skill smuch longer to attain.
It would be awesome if even at lvl 80 you were having to do storyline quests to get new wep skills.

What they should have done?
Allow you to actually adventure to gain new abilities.

That is the true heart of Adventure gaming. Wizards that have to go to far off lands to learn new spells or Warriors that have to defeat an imposing monster to find a special sword.

That is truely awesome.

Imagine if you had players that truely were different than other players of the same class because they had chosen different story lines and pieced together skills because of what they have done in the game not just that they attacked with a certain wep for 20 min.

I love it. I came from WoW and SWToR, and I’m tired of the bajillion skills they throw at you. It becomes more overwhelming when you roll an alt. Then you have to rebind some abilities, hold shift and control to activate some other abilities.

With the limited skill set, it feels like you control your abilities. You will have your own rotation and prioritization. And while things are in cooldown, you have to worry about dodging and positioning.

I don’t so much mind having few options per weapon (although having more available if they were truly useful would be nice), but I’d really like to have more weapons to choose from because frankly the skills on half the weapons, at least for a ranger, aren’t very friendly or even useful.

long/short bow plus axe/horn. Maybe 2hs for pvp, but with the dodgy targeting the leap into action skill can cause more trouble than it’s worth. The bouncing axe trick is neat, when you want it. Irritating half the time because it aggros more than you want and you can’t stop it from doing it.

1hs is horrid. The autoattack animation makes you feel like you’re trapped inside your own body screaming to get out and completely destroys the ability to move while it’s cycling through. The retreat attack shoves you backward into an area you can’t see, so who knows what might be waiting there for you. The spin around and poison the foe skill simply fails to work 80% of the time unless you, the mob and the terrain are perfectly positioned to begin with.

Dagger/torch are “meh” at best.

The swap cooldown is just too long as are the duration of most skills.

Traps are a joke unless you spec for them since there’s no real way to pull in this game, at least not effectively. You either spec to make them targetable, or run in to drop them at the feet of the mob. Bad. And even then they do so little damage and the debuffs last for such a short time it feels like a completely wasted play style.

So… yeah. I’d like to see more diversity in the weapons and skills.

It’s not the # of skills on your bar that I don’t like, it’s the # of options for customizing my skills.

Ideally what I would like to see is 8-10 skills per weapon and 5 to load out into your 1-5.

Treble.9378:

Well, with Ele it honestly feels different then with classes like the Warrior.

See, with a Warrior, you’re weapon swapping because you need something situational, and that situational thing won’t always take even half of the duration on the weapon swap cooldown to acomplish. Then once done you don’t need that weapon anymore, and most of the time need your primary again, but can’t get back to it.

Where as with ele, it’s more like.. Ok, you used this element, now you can swap to this next one, which has all the same survival/utility/raw dmg type stuff as the last element, but with different gimmicks to it.
Regardless tho, you can get by with any of those elements, and don’t NEED to be on another one to 100% perform.

Swapping between a melee/ranged wep as a War does not feel anywhere near as smooth as ele swapping for an elementalist. :/

Also, Elementalist basically gets 20 skills with smooth swapping due to them all being viable for 99% of situations, vs a melee char switching to a ranged wep to catch up to someone or hit a fleeing mob that then turns around, and stuff of that nature.

Well that’s not really how you “should” play Elementalist. Going fire then buring all CD there, swapping to air, burning all CD there and so on. And no damage/survivability/cc/support and so on are not all the same in all attunements. The skills are very different. And not sure what you mean by 100% perform. Perform what? DPS? This game is not about “look at the damage meter and max dps”. If you try that in sPVP you will fail.

Swapping weapons or attunements on Elementalist is a tactical decision. Not just a hot key to get “hot bar no. 2”. If you want to use a skill on a different weapon set you need to think to yourself, ok I know I won’t be able to swap back for x seconds. Do I really NEED to swap or can I do something else? And if you do swap then try to think out something else you can use on that weapon set before you can swap back. I have not played Warrior but there must be something. OK it may not be optimal but that is the trade off for swapping because you just had to use that one skill on that set. And it works exactly the same for Elementalist. The CD is shorter but the idea is the same.

If you swap to range to catch up with a melee mob and thats all you want to do maybe consider using a utility slot for that.

Treble.9378:

I see alotta people making the claims that alotta the skills in WoW were useless.. When infact they were not, lol.
I’m not sure where this got started, but as an Enh Shaman, fury/arms/defense War, and Feral Druid, there was never any lack of useful skills you had at your disposal going from vanilla-wotlk WoW (which is where I stopped).

I haven’t played WoW, but games with similar skill set ups (SWTOR, WAR, AoC) you had a lot of skills that did very similar things in a slightly different way – there was so much redundancy it seemed quite poor design to me. Then you would have a few skills that were so situational they weren’t really used much but you felt obliged to make room on your bar for them just in case.

Treble.9378:

The weapon swapping in this game also feels terrible atm imo due to the HUGE cooldowns on the weapon swap ability.
I can see why it was supposed to be awesome, but it just feels so janky in pvp atm as a Warrior switching from melee to range.

If this is a problem there is a trait in the discipline tree that reduces that. I like to swap weapons a lot so it was a priority for me, and I’m constantly switching.

I like it, I also like simplicity in things.

I also believe people are looking at it from a wrong angle. We have a different load out for each weapon 6-7 weapons plus each ones load out is a lot of diversity. In reality we and more moves then any game I can think of, take Wow any class you have many weps but the same spells or move for each wep. We are actually getting way more choices overall in this game.

Campana.9216:

If this is a problem there is a trait in the discipline tree that reduces that. I like to swap weapons a lot so it was a priority for me, and I’m constantly switching.

Yeah, 20 points deep, which basically means im forced to play a glass cannon style burst warrior and give up my toughness for survival in pvp (which helps immensely).

Basically this means that Warriors are pigeonholed due to a design flaw.

Kinda kills the fun of things.

I dislike MMO’s that force us to use too many abilities and keybinds. I’d like to see that come to an end.

I really like it. Will be easy to expand with more weapon types or additional skills and selectable mode later.

Treble.9378:

Where as with ele, it’s more like.. Ok, you used this element, now you can swap to this next one, which has all the same survival/utility/raw dmg type stuff as the last element, but with different gimmicks to it.
Regardless tho, you can get by with any of those elements, and don’t NEED to be on another one to 100% perform.

Swapping between a melee/ranged wep as a War does not feel anywhere near as smooth as ele swapping for an elementalist. :/

Also, Elementalist basically gets 20 skills with smooth swapping due to them all being viable for 99% of situations, vs a melee char switching to a ranged wep to catch up to someone or hit a fleeing mob that then turns around, and stuff of that nature.

Lemme take a stab in the dark here. You really haven’t played an Elementalist, have you? Virtually 100% of what you just said here is 100% incorrect…

And not sure what you mean by 100% perform. Perform what? DPS? This game is not about “look at the damage meter and max dps”. If you try that in sPVP you will fail.

Hell, as an Ele, if you try “look at the damage meter” in PVE you will fail, and fail hard.

I can understand why they went for the system they did, after not only having to balance all the skills GW1 had, but also the cross-profession combos.

That said, the new “weapon skill” system is far too bland and static. Maybe giving the ability to customise slots 2-5 with a small-ish pool of per-weapon unlockable skills would provide a nice middleground between GW1’s overload and GW2’s blandness.

Ultimately, having no dual profession system alone makes balancing far easier. So it should be easy to add a little more variety without requiring a massive overhaul of everything.

As mentioned before, it’s easier to balance (GW1 went into a lot of regular balancing due to all the skills and secondary profession system). I personally really like the current system as it is, even tho Mesmer is still lacking that main hand Pistol haha.

I hate it, but what can i do…. The limited skill options is the only big thing that i hate about GW2.

I love the game otherwise, but i would be way happier with GW1 style skills.

The system overall is fine, but does begin to get somewhat bland after extended use. I think the main problem here is that most traits are rather weak so we have limited methods to customize how we play. I was hoping to see traits have a larger impact on gameplay, but currently most have a minor one (if they even work at all)

I like it initially, but I also think that after you reach lvl 80 there should be some extra skills you can mix into your 1-5 slots like you can choose skills for your 6-9 spots.
It could reflect how legendary your prowess is with that weapon. It would also give ArenaNet some new ways to make a weapon more interesting.

Atlas.9704:

I like it initially, but I also think that after you reach lvl 80 there should be some extra skills you can mix into your 1-5 slots like you can choose skills for your 6-9 spots.
It could reflect how legendary your prowess is with that weapon. It would also give ArenaNet some new ways to make a weapon more interesting.

I like the idea of having some new additions at lvl 80. Would be nice.

Imo tho, I think the only thing warriors really need, now that I’ve thought about it alot, is a reduction to their base wep swap CD, as opposed to something that pigeon holes you into certain traits.

Sort of.. I would like to choose between skillsets, even if I cannot mix them. Although mix them at will would be the best. Like in GW1. Some weapons I dont use because of the current implementation.

This is probably the one thing (or at least the biggest) I dislike about this game.

As people have said, it makes things easier to balance sure, but I get all my weapon skills before I hit level 10. The utility and elite skills are completely situational, and usually boring, just like the traits. The few skills that I do have any kind of fondness for are tied to long cooldowns thanks to the lack of any kind of energy or mana.

If I am going to get through 80 levels and beyond I need to feel like there is something greater coming to me. I’ve got my guardian to 50 and I can’t press on anymore. I am completely bored with what I got and nothing is going to change him.

I’ve rolled alts and they’ll be great for a short time but again, by level 8 I likely have all the weapon skills for that class and… that’s that.

I suggested this in beta, I feel like if they aren’t going to add skills they need a way to modify skills to keep things fresh.

Regardless of how one feel’s about Diablo 3, I think being able to “rune” an ability to give it new looks and effects helped keep the small amount of skills more interesting longer. At the very least, I’d know I’d have something ‘new-ish’ to try the next time I leveled up.

I like the system well enough. Though thinking on it more, I wouldn’t be opposed to what people here are suggesting about being able to customize the 2-5 from a small pool of choices. Even if each slot used a seperate pool with only 2 or 3 options, I think it would add a lot more depth.

Honestly, though, I see this as being something they might potentially add in an expansion, since it would take quite a bit of balancing on it’s own.

Immersion =/= number of skills

Or am I missing something with your point?

I like the general idea, but dislike how restrictive it currently is.

I like the 5 slots, but I am hoping we can have a couple options per weapon in the future. What I would really like right now is the ability to swap more than two weapons. If we had three or four weapons sets for a quick swap, that would be fantastIc. I think the cool down on the swaps should be whatever length of time your highest cold own currently is on your weapon / weapon set.

Kinda unrelated but you should be able to rearrange the weapon skills.

I honestly don’t have a problem with it. All the skills compliment each other if you know how to play that profession and weapon correctly, and I can’t really see myself ever wanting to switch those skills out.