Guild Wars 2

IMO, this game, unlike GW1, is too static. I like the idea of “single profession”, but there is NO room for character growth. for each classs, there are a LIMITED number of skills, a LIMITED number of “trait points”, and becuse of these limitations, character “stagnation” results.
In GW1, regardless of your character “class”, whether primary or secondary, there was a CONTINUAL ability to “learn more”, “grow more”, “become more”————since you COULD, in theory, learn and use EVERY skill from EVERY class———both standard AND “elite” (yes, my GW1 characters DID learn EVERY available elite skill, but still have a LOOOOONG way to go to learn EVERY skill).
There is NO such “goal” available in GW2—————-every skill is already available, just requiring weapons use to “learn”, or “skill points” to add.
If your character can’t “grow”, can’t become “better”, can’t “learn” anything new, then why bother playing it??
As a suggestion, once a character reaches level 80, allow that character to “learn” new skills (unavailable to “lesser mortals”) and/or add additional “trait” points (over and above the current 70).
None of these additives should be cheap, or easily acquired. A combination of a trainer, a tome, and a substantial amount of both GOLD (not Silver or Copper), and skill points should be required. (Something on the order of 10 GOLD and 100 skill points per trait point is probably the LOWEST cost conceivable). Any “new” skills to be learned would have a MUCH higher cost in both Gold, Skill, and KARMA. Of course, it is expected that these increases would also be “balanced” to play, so that these additions aren’t “godlike” in their effects.
Allowing for “character growth” in this manner MAY assist in keeping interest in higher level characters alive for a lot longer.

As always, comments are welcome and I hope ANET is reading them!!

There is also a limit to these things in GW1. Once you’ve learned every skill in Guild Wars 1, you’ll hit the same brick wall. GW1 doesn’t have traits, they open many different doors of possibilities of varying builds.

I agree with the skills. The “having to learn skills with new weapons” system is such a disappointment. Like what’s the point of implementing that system if it only takes like 5 minutes to learn all 5 skills for a new weapon?

I expected that it will take months and months of game play for one to learn all skills with one weapon. So that’s what it truly means by mastery of a certain weapon.

Oh, well.

I have to agree with this. While traits do provide a certain degree of flexibility, in GW1, the choice of skills alone defined the build. Take your necro for example — there were the minion masters built around AotL, curse necros, blood magic necros … you could conceivably have several different necros all set-up differently — I did, and allowed me, when logging in, to consider which of those I wished to play at that particular time. And that’s just one profession, without taking into consideration the secondary. There is an old addage about variety and it being a spice … this is very true. And the more limited amount of skills available to each profession, and the limitation to a single class, denies a certain degree of that spice.
Do we need a hundred skills, the majority of which are useless except in very specific situations? No, not really. But with GW2, if I’m a necro using a staff, would it be horrible if there were more weapon skills available other than the 5 provided? And would it not but add a little more depth to the game that if I wished to unlock further skills for that staff to have to seek those skills out from a specific trainer, or to capture them as GW1 did with the capture elite functionality?
Do not get me wrong … I enjoy the kitten out of GW2, and have over a dozen chars, but at some point, they begin to feel like carbon copies of one another …

Also note, when GW1 launched it didn’t have a s many skills as it does now. They added 4 professions with skills for them plus new skills for the others as expansions were added. We are only in month 4 of GW2, who says new skills won’t be added like in gw1?

If they did that….

…. then gold would actually be useful, then I would play the TP….

as it is I have no interest in skins.

To wooklar’s point, though, I’m going to assume the reason they added all of the additional skills after Prophecies, even if they hadn’t added the expansions of Factions/NF/EotN, was because they realized that less isn’t always more … GW2 was in development for more than a few months … and while I’m confident more options will become available over time, could there not have been a few more available at the get-go?

And, of greater concern, are further race/profession expansions going to suffer from the same limitations when they’re first rolled out?

Let’s say Kodan is the next playable race. Based off the current model, you’ll get a half-dozen racial skills and that, aside from visual differences, will be all that separates you from an Asuran.

And let’s say another heavy-armor class is added that perhaps centers on martial-arts. Based off the current model, you’ll still only have the same 1-5 skills no matter how many chars you roll, and perhaps 15 or 20 skills to pick from to fill slots 6-10. Or 7-10, rather, because the healing slot is limited to 3, maybe 4 tops.

I’ve seen so many threads about new races and new professions … I think that could be set on the back-burner for now for future, major expansions, like Factions and NF (EotN really didn’t introduce anything new along those liness) and greater focus could be placed on expanding the skills available for the current professions.

I’m a warrior who uses a sword … what if there were different skills available dependent upon the type of sword I opted to use? A rapier and a cutlass and a broadsword would all be utilized in very different ways. And for two-handed, a claymore would be utilized very differently than a katana would.

Rifle … shotgun or sniper?

Dagger … dirk or poinard?

Just tossing out a few possibilities there, and I welcome thoughts on types of staves, scepters, horns, etc.

Point being, with a game so long in development, there could have been more options available at day one, and then, as a plea to the devs, don’t devote the focus on rolling out an expansion that introduces a new race/profession. I think people like those we have already … they’d just like a little more variety to choose from.

I do miss the build flexibility of GW1, I also quite like the idea of having of 2-3 skill options per skill, per weapon. It would make Elementalists have a lot of sorting out to do per weapon though or perhaps they wouldn’t get that option as they essentially have it already.