Guild Wars 2

I hear a lot about how healing signet warrior is easy to play, spirit ranger is easy to play, and, personally, I feel power wellomancer is easy to play. So they have a low skill floor. I challenge the community to come up with a reasonable definition of ‘skill floor’. Spoiler: I believe it’s a nebulous term that cannot be satisfactorily defined to really mean something. Prove me wrong; I don’t have the brain cells to burn in this question anymore. Lol it’s kind of vexing and makes you think deeper about your perceptions and/or what you think.

The skill floor level of skill you need to play correctly.

Correctly is indeed a little subjective but the notion of “skill” too.

But what is the minimum level of skill required for something to be nerfed? Your attempt at a defintion—brave of you because it’s very subjective like you said—fails because you’re referencing the skill floor itself. It’s a bit like saying “what car do I need to get to work” and answering “the car that gets you there”.

I think people conceptualize the skill floor as being the performance a player can expect a class to generate when the player has a novice level of knowledge about the class and a small amount of experience playing the build.

People complain about the skill floor of terror necro and spirit ranger because they feel that just about anyone can pick up the class and perform decently well with it even when they have very little knowledge of the class or experience playing the popular builds.

Fair enough. Then define the minimum effort a novice needs to put in to understand how to play a build. Where do we draw the line? (see the logical issue here?)

Chopps.5047:

you’re referencing the skill floor itself

“Skill floor” and “skill” are not the same things, smarty pants.

Chopps.5047:

It’s a bit like saying “what car do I need to get to work” and answering “the car that gets you there”.

I lold, what a silly comparsion.

Lol I was struggling at coming up with an analogy, give me a break. You see the issue though right? That we’re all discussing an ill-defined concept and then making balance changes based on that? Just my opinion, that’s all.

Chopps.5047:

Then define the minimum effort a novice needs to put in to understand how to play a build. Where do we draw the line? (see the logical issue here?)

Okay, now i am not sure if you’re trying to troll someone or just very stupid.
/exit discussion

Oh I guess I’m stupid. Nice ad hominem. If you don’t know what that means, perhaps you are the stupid one? Just a thought.

Chopps.5047:

Fair enough. Then define the minimum effort a novice needs to put in to understand how to play a build. Where do we draw the line? (see the logical issue here?)

That varies depending on how fast the player learns. Mastering something in week for one person could only take maybe a few days for another.

IMO, low skill floor means you don’t need to do anything exceptionally well to do well. For example, shooting a person with a shortbow is a low skill floor. On the other hand, hitting someone with an autoattack on the greatsword is a higher skill floor (maybe not by much, but it’s pretty hard getting in there and landing hits compared to ranged autoattacks).

On that note, I don’t think anything with a low skill floor will be approved by time investment. Just because a guy spent 1 year mastering ranger (sorry for picking on this class btw), doesn’t mean I will acknowledge that him playing a build with a low skill floor is anything praise-worthy. In fact, I will get pretty ticked off if he beats me often when the amount of effort he has to put into it is less and it produces better results than me putting in more effort.

The only thing that would make these low skill floor builds more ok is if they had a cost that you could really ‘exploit’ so to speak if you were good enough—-essentially an opportunity for countering if you were skilled enough. For example, using the shortbow example earlier; if we allow the greatsword user to destroy the bows if he times his autoattack well enough (sort like Link vs. Ganondorf). This gives skilled players a better way of dealing against it and it requires a decent amount of skill level to play against, but the effort pays off.

At the end of the day, low skill builds should only be able to cheese the crap out of noobs imo. They should not be able to be played competitively without having a good window of soft counters. I know the builds nowadays aren’t as easy as a shortbow AA vs GS AA, but the idea is that everything should have a decent counter if you are skilled enough and shouldn’t require a hard counter just to beat it or the perfect game (lots of rng x_x and things happen to just go your way)

Chopps.5047:

Fair enough. Then define the minimum effort a novice needs to put in to understand how to play a build. Where do we draw the line? (see the logical issue here?)

That would be an entirely arbitrary line. For some it could be a few hours for others it could be a few days. I would imagine that everyone who’s ever started a new class knows the feeling of being almost entirely ignorant of the class though.

the
minimum
effort
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novice
needs
to
put
in
to
understand
how
to
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a
build

So, which word you didnt understand? I’m not very strong in english, but if you have problems in understanding any of words above, then you should look into vocabulary.
Thats all. Cya.

Most players seem to think of it as APM required to play effectively. That’s not quite right though; it’s more like abilities/decisions per minute, but even that leaves some aspects out.

Cutepicshunter, that’s not precise enough for me, especially when skill floor is used as evidence to nerf rangers as hard as they just did. Do you understand english well enough to know the word “precise”? Do you understand the difference between a formal and informal defintion? Your hyperbole is too informal.

Israel.7056:

Chopps.5047:

Fair enough. Then define the minimum effort a novice needs to put in to understand how to play a build. Where do we draw the line? (see the logical issue here?)

That would be an entirely arbitrary line. For some it could be a few hours for others it could be a few days. I would imagine that everyone who’s ever started a new class knows the feeling of being almost entirely ignorant of the class though.

Like when I play wellomancer and destroy lives all day long? Same with healing signet warrior. And i know nothing of either class.

Skill floor in spvp.. when one player does not have to think about casting move or do elaborate skillchaining to be succesful.. (also 1 skill to rule them all builds, protection/zerk/stance you name em.)

So:

Well-o-mancer = pretty low skill
Bunker guardian = pretty low skill
Spirit ranger = pretty low skill
Stealth Thieves = low skill (depending on build i suppose)
Sig warrior = pretty low skill

Builds that don’t require you to be aware of your surroundings etc.

Merlin Dyfed Avalon.5046:

Skill floor in spvp.. when one player does not have to think about casting move or do elaborate skillchaining to be succesful.. (also 1 skill to rule them all builds, protection/zerk/stance you name em.)

So:

Well-o-mancer = pretty low skill
Bunker guardian = pretty low skill
Spirit ranger = pretty low skill
Stealth Thieves = low skill (depending on build i suppose)
Sig warrior = pretty low skill

Builds that don’t require you to be aware of your surroundings etc.

I agree with everything but the bunker guardian one. That build takes more skill than all the others you named put together.

yeah, i had the same feeling about that one. but once you know the class.. its fun times!

You beat me fair and square? It must because your class has a low skill floor and mine requires too much effort.

But that said, Ranger is quite a passive and boring class to play. It’s not that the players want it that way mind you. It’s simply that way because ANet has forgotten they even made a Ranger class and a year later have no idea what they want the class to be.

Players have begged ANet to improve the QOL of Rangers for a year now. Nada.

“Skill” roughly equals the rate at which a player must make both actions and decisions. I also believe there’s a third factor, which is how many poor actions/decisions you can make before you lose.

In other words, spirit ranger was the ultimate low-skill build because:
—you didn’t have to make many actions (rotate through evades and…we’re good!)
—you didn’t have to make many decisions (one strategy fits most situations)
—you were allowed a lot of mistakes before you lost (oops, let’s heal back up real quick…)

I play a bunker rifle engineer, which requires a lot of actions, a lot of decisions, but is also pretty forgiving (so much healing…) So I’d say it’s a well-above-average skill floor, but not the highest.

“Floor” roughly equals how good you have to be to be significantly above average. Anyone who is over 50% or so on the solo queue leaderboards is playing their build at or above the skill “floor.” (With some exceptions, since leaderboards have issues such as 4v5, bad MM, etc.) Skill “floor” does change as the community gets collectively better at playing the game, unlike PvE, where as soon as you’ve mastered a few basic concepts, you can level to 80 and run dungeons no problem.