return of Skill Quests

I always wondered about why skill quests were removed at 1st place. I guess it was because theese reasons:

* It makes creative build creation harder as you have limited skillset from quests.
* It discourages buying skills from traders that you know you will get from quests later.

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Solution is simple:

Quests with random skill rewards. This skill will give player one random skill that he does not know yet. That way, player never has to postpone buying skills and is encouraged to buy skill he does no know yet and which he needs because that way he wont make some quests in future pointless.

To make it it actually usefull, there should be some priority classes to give players best reward he should wish for:

1st) character learns locked skill for his primary
once all skills are unlocked, quest rewards change to:
2nd) character learns unlocked skill for his primary.
once character knows all primary skills, it will start getting secodnary skills,
3rd) locked secodnary skills first
4th) unlocked after that.
once character knows all skills, he will start getting
5th) Cap Sigs.

Player will know what skill he is getting only after finishing quest to prevent possible take-abandon quests gamble with rewards.

Pros:

* Player can buy skills and do quests in any order, he never has to postpone buying skills because it will be reward for quest much later. He also does no necesarily have to buy skill and throw away 1k just for sake of buying it - it might be reward later. It allows once to acqure skills at their own pace - buy em all in 1st town. buy nothign and do quests or jsut buy some and do some quests.
* Everyone will have very diverse skillsets, while all players will propably buy most important ones at trainers, optionals will vary a lot.
* Because player receives new skills 'for free', he is free to experiment with them. He would get skills he woudnt buy on his own and could discover neat use for em now that he got it.

I think anet got rid of them becuase they found that people didn't change their skills enough in the proph campaign. I would like something that is a cross between that one and factions myself. Give everyone about 15-25 skills for their main class and 15 or so for their secondary.

My big problem with how the other games did it is that skills get too expenisve to keep up on and the fewer you are given, the more you have to farm and grind to get all your class skills. I don't think people won't not buy skills, but they'll take longer to get some of them.

Or.... just being back skills as rewards in quests! We dont need some big eleberate system of random skills, we just need the old system back.

Or atleast, (as the other poster said) give us a select few skills as rewards, and then make us buy the rest. Maybe about 25% of them.

To make us buy all our skills doesnt benefit anyone. It just leaves noob players limited to what they can use because they dont have the gold or skill-points to purhcase new ones.

The end result is that you have a lvl20 player in factions who rushed their lvling, but might only have a fraction of the skills and a limited spell bar. Im not suggesting we give all skills away, I think buying most is a good thing, but not all.

And it adds to the huge variance between the compaigns in how they function. We need some consistancy like how skills are attained between campaigns, or its just frustrating.

The prophesies skill system sucks. It stifled changes to skill bars. The nightfall system w/ hero skill points is far superior.

/sign

What the RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GO were you thinking anet.

Oh please god no... You do realise that they changed the system because so many people had the same god damned build it made it even more boring than it had to be

umm, did you read op?

It is what i am trying to prevent. if skill rewarded from quests are random and thus different for everyone, noone getting skills just from quests will have same build.

I had a talk with god, after sex, and he told me yes.

From my memory, people did have some similar builds, but not through the entire game, only in noob zones. Now that the game is different, they can still have the skill quest system in place while still having versatility.

The Hero Skills trainers are the best solution for this.

First, the profession specific skill quest should stay the same (training quests). No change in them.
Second, the Skill Quests should give away Hero Skill points.
Third, you go to a Hero Skill trainer and choose from a list.

Done!

With the current skill quests, if you have already purchased the skill, you'll lose the reward. You'll get nothing. With this, you'll still get a free skill, and you may use the point in any trainer, so no more 'same skills'.

Explain to me how the current/new skill system in factions or nightfall is stopping people using all the same exact skills and builds?

The current system gives you very, very few free skills as rewards for quests. This means you can only get more if...

1) you have gold to spend on them.
2) you have skill points to spend on them.

...to buy new ones, and as we all know the cost soon rises to 1000g very fast.

Due to this, you are limited to what skills to use from the start. You probably spend about the first 15% of the game using the same skills, until your able to find a decent skill-trader to buy more.

So how does this cut down on people using generic builds, or identical skills? It doesnt.

By the time you find a decent skill-trader you might only be able to afford 5 or 6 more skills before they get to the grand price of 1000g and you run out of your current skill-points.

But your only talk about gaining around another 6-10 skills. In factions or nightfall, you might only have around 20 skills to play with by the time you reach lvl20 due to this (obviously thats not accurate, ive never counted).

How does that allow you the chance to experiment with builds?

The old system which gave you alot more skills as free rewards, gave you the chance to builds up a decent number of free skills to experiment with, long before you had to spend gold or skill-points on new ones.

That system was alot more open-ended and allowed for variation, alot more then the new system.

In prophercies people used bog-standard, identical skills not because of the skill system, but because it was a new game.

Obviously when a new MMO or RPG is released people dont know about the different builds and copy everyone else such as nukers, MMs and tanks. It had nothing to do with the skill-system, it was because the game was new and hadnt been explored enough.

Ok, prophecies big problem... before getting to Lion's Arch, everybody had roughly the same build... especially fire ele's, it was always the same and extremely boring...

They changed it so that you have more choice over what you get and so you could get more skills much more quickly (especially witht he speedy lvl'ing and aquisition of skillpoints in factions), meaning there are less cookie cutter builds and more chance for people to experiment earlier on in the PvE...

Also, it means that you can buy more skills much more quickly than you could in prophecies, as i mentioned before, the skill point aquisition in both Factions and Nightfall enables the use of the skil trainer at a much earlier point and allows more rapid creation of PvP ready characters

Your still making the statement that the way we get skills in factions and nightfall is a vast improvement on prophercies. I dont understand how!

The only thing they changed was to limit the number of skill traders and give you more choice at them at an earlier point.

And they increased experience from quests to level you up faster to give skill-points faster and easier.

But they gave you less skills as quest rewards. The first two are improvements, but being restricted to buying most skills is not an improvement.

If your strapped for cash or reach the 1k cap, or you few skill-points or run out then your stuffed until you make more.

Your still put under a restriction and your still limited to using generic builds.

We need a happy medium of what they changed in factions and what we had in prophercies.

Give us more skills as rewards,
Give us more skills to purchase from skill traders at earlier points,
Make skill-points easier to aquire at an earlier point,
Reduce the rate at which the cost increases for skills or cap it at 500g.

That way we have what was good about prophercies skill system and what was good about factions and nightfall.

The main one being to give back quests as rewards, instead of relying on buying 95% of them from the trader.

The more they give us for free, the more we can experiment.

But I dont agree that the skill system in prophercies was the reason for everyone using pre-cut builds throughout the first game. As I said, it was more because the game was new and people were bound to pre-fere the stereotype builds of MM and nuker and tank and healer.

If you start playing a new phantasy game for the first time and your an elemental, then ofcourse your going to want to play with fire and burn the hell out of people.

If you start playing a necromancer in a phantasy game for the first time, then ofcourse you want to control minions, and so on and so forth. It was more due to GWs being new and having these character which we had stereotyped for decades and wanting to play them as we saw them.

But then we learnt to experiment and change their builds. The prophercies skill system wasnt perfect, but it had more going for it then the factions one.

Ok, hopefully someone can put it a way you can understand, as i obviously can't...

However, in factions and Nightfall, I can makepretty much any build I want with in 5 or 10 minutes of making a character, and i could even before i bought the pvP unlock packs... The reason? because i have access to a skill trainer so much quicker...

In prophecies you are spoon fed skills, in Nightfall and Factions, you can walk straight to the trainer and read all the skills that are available there and make a descision of what to have for yourself... I agree that its a pain having to get to the end of the campaign for some skills, however, thats for some sort of skill progression, my point is, unlike in Prophecies, where an ele can ONLY be a Fire ele until he gets to, lets say, Lion's Arch, in factions and Nightfall, I can make and build an air or earth ele straight away adn have a choice of skills straight away at the first trainer

With factions and nightfall out..you see alot of people running different builds. Anet needs to bring the skill quests back. Some people cant afford to pay 1k for every little skill they want.

P.S.- I can but I am just saying

Maybe put skill quests on noobie island, then use the Factions/NF system after that.

Why hasn't this been done yet? It's such a great idea, simple, effective, giving players choice in their skills AND encouraging them to do the quests. It's easily the best suggestion I've seen yet about the whole "skill quests vs. buying all skills" issue.

The old quests don't even give you a skill point if you already bought the skill, or are one of the specialist classes from the new chapters.

I hated it, I always had to look up if I could eventually quest a skill I wanted to get.

If you are suggesting hero skill trainers that will give skills to RP chars to use and not just heroes, I think that would be a nice idea. However if you run off and buy the skills before you get to the trainer, you are still stuck in the same boat as you were before.


Yeah. Mithran's idea would help with that some. However for some of us, the problem isn't just skill points, it's cost. If I want to get all NF warrior skills with my factions or proph warrior, that's 25 plat right there.

I love the current system over Prophecies skill quests as it (hopefully) makes people read the actually skill descriptions and (hopefully) figure out how the skills work, how they'd work together and how to make a good skill bar...

It also makes them think more, or is that the issue that people are having here? do you really want to be spoon fed and take it as it comes with out thinking about it? or do you actually want to learn something about the game?

I completely agree its alot better to have fuller equipped skill traders in starting zones at an earlier stage. Your right to say it offers the chance to use more skills if you buy them.

But as I said in my last snipped reply, I think we need a combination of old and new and something different.

I still feel we need more quests giving skills as rewards as it was in Prophercies, because to make us purchase most of them at an early stage is wrong.

But to fix the issue of cookie cut builds, give a choice of about 4 skills to choose from. Each one being a different side to a profession:

For instance if its a elemental, give them a choice between a fire, water, earth or lightning skill. They can then experiment and choose what path to follow.

Plus not everyone finds it easy to make the gold for skills, and they soon reach 1k in price.

Ah, but its also another system to weed out the idiot players from the semi competent...

the former by stupid amounts of useless skills quickly, then then come on Guru or TGH and whine and bitch about skill aquisition and how it stinks

the later actually think first, ask questions, maybe go and look up skills on Guild Wiki or on guild sites (as the competenet ones look for a guild straight away, the really competent ones actually research the game before buying it, but thats a different topic) and then buy the decent skills that are available first

Skill aquisition is fine, its the players that aren't

bring back the skill quests. I'm too busy farming for my new chars than actually play them. From 20 hours a week i farm for, like, 10 and the other 10 spend them with my new chars. If skill quests were back i could play 20/20 with my new chars and i wouldn't be obliged to bloody farm and spend bloody time in a bloody boring place.

I feel like an idiot entering and exiting an area over and over again just to buy some skills for a new build i just thought of.

I can see why some people don't want them brought back and I can see why some do!
What we really need is some cool incentive to do more quests. There are so many quests out there.

Offer quest rewards like the commendations or contracts, but make those rewards tradeable to a skill trainer to learn a skill without paying the 1000gp!

What, like the factions and nightfall quests giving people a skill point and gold instead of a set skill so that people have a friggin' choice... hmm, can't see a better way personally

So in the current system you get ~700g and a skill point. It basically means you can choose what skills you get as a reward.
Why change something that works?

I'd like to see yet another way to increase skill purchases/availability from trainers. The first was simply to have your oldest characters unlock skills for multiple classes, making them available to your "next generation". This is still an expensive method, since you won't have a great many quests that give points after lvl 20 (especially if you don't own multiple chapters). Perhaps a way to acquire a "tier" of skills at a time...for instance, all the core Monk Healing skills, or all the non-elite Ranger preparations?

That tier idea is an interesting one lab. I'm not sure you should get all the core monk healing skills at once, but several sets of 4-5 skills might be a big help.


IMO the biggest deterrent in people not trying new builds is they don't have the money or the skill points to do it and that would help both (so long as the costs/skill points required stay the same for a tier as they do for single skills).

How do you think cap siggies should work? 1 for 1 or several for one?

Hero skill trainers would be added to all campaigns, so you'll be able to get the Hero Skill Points in Prophecies and use then in Factions or Nightfall trainers!

I am not sure it was nice having skill quests as a reward but maybe skill tokens so this way skills won't cost us 1K only a skill point.Skill tokens be would used to get 1 skill primary and secondary.

Awesome! You just solved the problem in one very simple step. I had an idea similar to this a loooong time ago. 1k per skill gets absolutely ridiculous, especially if you have more than one character your trying to outfit.

I say get rid of all those different types of "rewards" (IE: trade contracts, ancient artifacts, Imperial Commendations,Luxon tokens, Kurzick tokens, those purple things in realm of torment, and on and on) and replace with skill tokens. I think its fricking ridiculous to have all these different types of reward tokens that you trade in for the SAME danged items. WHY do they have so many different things to trade for the same stuff???I only ever use them to get Sup. Salvages anyways and sell the rest. (except trade contracts which you can trade for jewels).