Has Factions made you skill lazy?

With prophecies you did quests and got skill unlocks for your toon.
With factions there's no skill unlock rewards and instead you have to purchase them.

Apart from there being no incentive to actually do quests ... I've found that my faction toons have become skill lazy.

I have no reason to change my skills.
Basically I use the same skills coming out of KC for the rest of the game.

I get a combination of skills which works pretty well right at the island or at KC and stick with them for all of factions,..... I mean why spend 1k on skills?!?
(Of course I load up on sigs of capture but don't really use the elites)
It's quite easy to finish the factions game like this.

I'm wondering am I the only one doing this?
2 of my toons has factions finished - with tons of unfinished quests and hardly any skill unlocks for their class.

I hope nightfall does better on the quest incentive side....

I've noticed that too. There really isn't much diversity between enemies across cantha to really justify changing a build drastically if at all. That's why we have all these MM and SS groups just conquering things.

So far, I've not even passed the 200g cost to get skills for my assassin, and yet, I have all the skills I feel I need (just missing one elite).

I liked how in Prophecies my characters coud get a large number of skills, which I could then explore and test. But in Factions, I just see what skills look good, buy them, then ignore the others because they cost so much.

I hope that in Nightfall they can find a good mix of all the best parts of the two.

About the only place where I have changed any skills is doing the Arborstone mission. I keep trying to find a good non interuptable skill set for my chars(except tank) there.


P.S. I love (hate?) that mission.

A lot of people take their Factions characters to Tyria (assuming they have Prophecies) and do skill quests and cap elites there...

I've spent upwards of 200k on skills. I love trying new builds.

BRING BACK THE QUESTS WITH SKILL REWARDS!

I try new skills as I get them. That is part of the fun! XD

When you buy them in bulk you don't get the fun.

That's why I fight til 1plat every time I buy a skill. I use the skill while fighting for the experience.

Factions didn't have many useful skills.

Another "Bring back skill quests" thread in disguise.

There is already plenty of those, so please merge with the countless other ones in the Nighfall forum.

And no I don't see the problem the OP mentions.

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At this point I feel like stabbing myself in the eye because how dense people seem to be.

There is no fricking advantage with the Prophecies way of doing it, please get a grasp already.

In factions you get much higher XP rewards = more skill points plus higher money rewards so you are BETTER off than you were in Prophecies.

I actually skipped a lot of quests in Cantha too..

Really, the big difference here is the amount of skills you get at certain stages in each game. In Prophecies, you only get a small handful of skills, which you don't have to buy since you get them as rewards, which also allow you to try certain builds you otherwise wouldn't had you had all skills to choose from. This pretty much forces you to 'diversify' your technique and causes you to play certain ways based on your limited skill options. As the game progresses, you get a wider and wider selection of skills, but at a slow pace, allowing you to try out different builds leisurely and freely. This can be too slow and in some cases, boring for some people.

In Factions, they tried to emulate that feeling of diversity and freedom right from the beginning with the handout of various useful skills. This time, the amount of time it took to learn your character was very short and dropped you right into Kaineng Center with just about every skill to choose from at your fingertips. For some, this can be a sense of overload, which causes you to just find the most useful (or 'best') skills that fit your play style. When you do that, you tend to no longer feel like changing up any skills, or trying out other builds because you 'already have the best there is'.

Not saying one way is any better than the other, just different. Although I tend to be in the latter boat, agreeing with many of you here. I went through Factions with my Ritualist, and briefly tried out some Channeling skills (the ones I, personally thought were the best), then tried a healing Rit (again, just buying the few skills I liked), but went back to my original Communing spirit spammer (once I got Ritual Lord), and never went back, never bought any more skills. I've captured a few skills here and there, and tried some weird builds (like an ashes trapper, and a pet/spirit build), which were fun, but there are so many skills I haven't bought and see no need to buy.

On the other hand, my Necro from Tyria has almost every Prophecies skill, and loads of elites, a handful of Factions skills and a couple elites. I have used almost every skill in one build or another. This could be a flaw in the design of the Ritualist vs. the Necro, possibly, but I think a lot also has to do with 'raising my character' through the different campaigns.

I dunno, this is all my opinion, of course. Just the way I see it.

I've noticed that with any character i make in Cantha will have the select few skills that are given along with any i purchase till they become 1k...which happens fast
Just can't afford to keep my rit up to date with every good skill i find, so yeah i've been relying on my first ones quite a bit

I havent really used any Faction skills. The only one that i really use is Triple Chop for a farming build. Otherwise i use Prophicies skillsets.

Excellent post arcanemacabre!

I think that the Prophecies way encourages more experimentation (since it basically forces this). in that way, it's better. however, the (valid) complaints are that (1) it can be a bit too limiting as in the case of being forced to play a fire elementalist for a large part of Prophecies, and (2) it gets really tedious to have to go through the storyline multiple times if you create new characters.

maybe a good way for Nightfall is to go both ways... have all the skills available soon, and have skill quests which give skills (with the skill quests perhaps a better deal moneywise)... in this way you can choose to play in whatever way you feel comfortable with.

Guild wars iliminates the unessasary grind, So I am still trying to find how i acquire my skills without grinding to pay for them. Unfortunately i have yet to find it, so I have neglegated to buy any new faction skills.

Getting skills is the biggest grind in GW. Anything ANet can do to make it less of a grind is a big improvement. In my opinion the skill grind is still too much in factions (I'm still working at it, and I've been working what in my book constitutes as hard). But in my opinion, the greater ease of getting skill points and the ability to not be encouraged to use certain skills is a good thing. The strong point of Factions in fact. I just hope they go more so in this direction.

And lazy? GW shouldn't be thought of as a career, it should be thought of as a leisure activity for entertainment. Yep, it's still a video game. Personally, I don't get the big obsesion in the gaming industry to throw unlockable things all over the place. I understand the academic reasons for it, but the modivation it's supposed to inspire is lost on me. Modivation comes from replayability, not unlocking objectives for me. Fortunatly GW has the replayability, but unfortunatly the replayability really only reaches it's peak once all is unlocked. Once again, maybe it's just me.

Thats cute.

Prophecies: Do mindless, drawn out quests to get 1 useful skill. Continue this method all the way up to Droknar's.

Factions: Buy exactly what I want from the start saving myself an overwhelming amount of time.

I pick having exactly what I want on my character over having 50 skills I don't anyday. Good thing I UAX fast, so I do it like that anyway.

Dear god I hate the way they organized skill collection in Factions by only allowing you to buy them.

Then again, it's only really a downer for people who want ALL the skills.
Which I don't,
but at least earning them in quests give you some sort of variety to choose from.

The only benefit to buying skills is you get what you want off the get-go, but then if you want to change professions, you have to rebuy a crap-load of skills just to experiment with, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.

I don't really care.

And that's no different in Prophecies.

Despite a phonebook full of skills, i still see way to many monks who only know Word Of Healing,orison, Healing Breeze and Heal Party.

Oh well you can't force people to get the most out of their game...

personally i like to have all the skills i can get. i like to switch skills, try something new, even if in the end its a catastrophic failure thats why all my characters have all skills and all elites from their primary profession unlocked. i have 4 tyrian characters and 2 canthan ones. if i do need a specific skill from a secondary profession, i just go out and buy/capture it

There is no point in factions to do any of the side quests, im lv20 already so i dont really need the exp! Atleast with GW:P you get skills as a reward, it gives you a incentive to do them

3/4 of those skills are still the most reliable on any healer's bar, would you rather a healer in your PUG picked possibly worse skills just for the sake of appearing original or experimental?

So you actually need an incentive to do them in the first place, personally I do all the quest available regardless of the reward.

Im too lazy to do something for nothing

I think the OP is quite right.

Little diversity in the mob composition, I hardly had to switch builds either.

Prophecies was much more diverse in this regard. The Canthan mass battles dumbed that down IMO. I hope Nightfall offers more specific challenges. Factions is a MM and SS Necro paradise funnily biased against the chapter specific Assassin class...^^

I agree. Getting skills you would never concider buying makes for more diversity in builds.

I never use the same build twice in a row, but that's because i am allergic to cookie cutter builds and other authistic behavior.

Also imo Style > Effectiveness

what good are skill points if you dont have the money to buy the skills? and higher money rewards? yes 300 gold for a skill, now all i have to do is haggle with the skill trainer and get him to take 300 gold....

atleast in ch1 i could get alot of the skills free if i wanted or go to a trainer and buy them, but ch2 you only have the option to buy them

in a game without grind and about skill it seems rather ironic that you have to grind to get the skills

Everyone also has to remember that there are 2 teams working on gw meaning that the same team that made prophecies will have made nightfall which i see as a big plus......so i think that u will unlock skills be able to run places and other things we liked about prohecies that factions was lacking

I am a noob. I still test every skill, and just keep on buying new ones. I don't read the forum for popular skill combinations either. I like to keep my options open, and try out new stuff. Like all noobs, I don't see a problem here

The problem with the factions "we give you XP and gold" reward system is its loaded for the low end of the skills scale, where skill points cost you the experience to level up and skills are a couple of hundred gold each. After the quest rewards, we are left buying the rest of our skills at 15000XP and 1k each because of the knock on effect of skill cost inflation.
In Prophecies we got to use the cheap end of the scale for our own purchases and the quest rewards, being entirely self contained, did not add to the price infaltion. As such the many 2 skill quests in prophecies are essentially worth 30,000 XP and 2k - this is far greater than the quests you regularly see in Cantha.
I can see what they were trying to do in Factions - by not giving set skills, people could choose their own and we would see more diversity... what actually happened is people see costs out-stripping the gains and choose to buy nothing - no diversity.
I would like to see soem sort of "skill credit" system in Nightfall, where by quests offer skill credits as rewards that entitle you to buy a skill from a skill trainer at zero cost, no skill points, no gold; the skills bought in this manner would therefore not contribute to the price rise of subsequent skills. In this way people are free to choose and thus the diversity idea lives, at the same time people have no reason not to buy the skills avoiding the previous pitfall.

Why don't you guys just buy the skill you like first and the rest of them (with niche uses), when your character is six months old or something?

for me there were a lot of incentives to do all the quests i could get. im still trying to go for legendary survivor and all those quests which offer a lot of xp for reward come in handy.

Yeah, something like this might be the best of both worlds.

I like meaningful quest rewards, and I like having my skill choices unrestricted.

this is anything but true for a Mesmer, if you don't know the area, you can easily make a build that will render you near- useless to your team until you map out.

SO not true.

This is something i have complained about since the release of Factions. It is good to see it revisited.

Very true. Typically those skill quests in Ch1 had one skill from your primary and another from your secondary. That equals 2 skill points (30,000xp) and 2k gold. I have yet to see several quests, as there were more than one skill quest in Prophecies, in Factions that even comes close to that reward.

Awesome idea and is something like what they already have with the monastery credits. The abuse for that would be no different for the credits.

The problem of skills being so expensive in Factions is further compounded that it's relatively difficult to make any sort of real money (by farming) using the two new classes.

My Rit and Assassin are continually poor and always taking IOU's from my axe warrior and 55 monk

Also all this has a knock on effect on the LFG for quests - there's only a handful of quests now where you stand a chance of getting a PUG together.

No ones doing quests only missions