I’ll give you a quick rundown on skills.
Your 1-5 skills are based on your equipped weapon. With your main hand giving you skills 1-3, and while your offhand gives you skills 4 and 5. A two handed weapon will give you all five skills. Engineers are a good start to get used to that system because they have the smallest number of weapons, and can’t weapon swap. But later you should try another profession with more weapons and weapon swapping in combat, that way you can play around with different combos.
Your 6 skill will always be a heal skill, and every profession has three options, plus a fourth from your race. Different heals work in different ways, so you do have a bit of customization there. Your 7-9 skills are utility, you get to pick these from a tiered list of abilities, and once you unlock five from a given tier you can start unlocking the next tier of skills. Your 7 slot unlocks at level five, 8 at level 10, and 9 at level twenty.
Your 10 slot is for your elite skill, or Ultimate if you play LoL. This slot unlocks at level thirty, and you’ll only have about five or so options to pick from. Elites are very powerful but have extreme cooldowns, so don’t expect to use them often.
Your F1-F4 skills are for profession specific mechanics, these are different from one profession to the next. In the case of engineers we have a “tool belt” that basically acts as four more skill slots. What we have in our belt depends on what we have on the utility side of our bar. For example taking the healing skill Elixir H will give you the tool belt skill Toss Elixir H, and taking the Grenade Kit (a popular choice) will give you the tool belt skill Grenade Barrage.
Kits are a special skill type that engineers use. Kits act as weapon swapping, and once used will change the skills on the left –weapon- side of your bar. For example you can take a Bomb Kit on the utility side of your bar and get the tool belt skill Big Ol’ bomb. In addition using the Bomb Kit itself will replace you 1-5 skills with the bomb kit skills Bomb, Fire Bomb, Concussion Bomb, Smoke Bomb, and Glue Bomb. While you have a kit toggled on you can’t use your weapon, but there is nothing stopping you from just toggling it off again if you need your weapon skills. I called out kits because they are important to know, other skills are pretty self-explanatory like elixirs, turrets, and gadgets.
Finally unlocking skills is done by using Skill Points. You’ll be awarded these points every time you level up starting at level five. In addition you can find skill challenges all over the world (the little blue chevrons on the map) that will award a point each the first time you complete them.
Now as to the doom and gloom, most of that comes from the “no endgame” crowd, although the anit-RNG crowd has been pretty vocal of late too. As far as the endgame one…well that depends on you. Once you hit level cap there won’t be a change in the game or its content. You’re not going to unlock raids or anything, and you’re not going to be working to gear up for any instances. Endgame is the same thing as leveling content; exploring the world, doing Living Story content, collecting skill points (used for crafting certain prestige skins), doing dungeons, and if you choose a bit of PvP or WvW. Running out of content is entirely your own choice here. If you rush through now you’ll feel bored later, so I suggest you take your time and have fun. Do not under any circumstances grind to level cap. Just don’t. Especially not with your first character.
