The number of possible PvP Skill Bars

Have you wondered how many possible PvP skillbars there are in Guild Wars?

The answer is 7,546,483,168,121,141. This assumes all possible skillbars with 8 skills (plus the empty bar). This does not take into account how the skills are ordered.

Here are a few other facts (also assuming only PvP skills)

• 270,006,654,759,760 of these bars have a resurrection signet in them. A randomly generated bar given a random primary and secondary (including blanks) would end up with a res sig in about 3.6% of them.
• There 188,735,881,177 possible skillbars consisting of assassin skills only (Res Sigs are too heavy to bring). The typical HvH Assassin utilizes less than five of these bars.
• There are 7,715,399,966,892 bars consisting of only skills from one profession. The ability to mix skills from another profession multiplies the number of possible combinations by 978.
• The number of possible GvG team compositions is approximately 10^127. This is around 50 orders of magnitude larger than the number of atoms in the observable universe.
• The amount of space required to store a wiki entry for every build is likely greater than the amount of space required to store every word uttered by every human being ever in existence, as a transcript of text.

Assumptions and restrictions made:

• Skill order is disregarded, including the type of skill itself. This includes lots of bars with assassin combos that can't be performed, and bars with seven glyphs.
• No skillbar can have more than one elite.
• Skillbars disregard primary and secondary profession. A Warrior/Necro, and Necro/Warrior with the same skillbar is counted as one.

Spreadsheet used to make calculations is attached.

you have too much free time...

Thanks .. i guess thats something to know.

Now work out how many of them will be actually effective.

50% of skills out the window at least.

Weird, I was thinking how many skill combinations you could make in gw yesterday lol. Well atleast I know now. Thanks

The number of bars that are "playable" is certainly subjective. Assuming 25% of the skills in the game are usable, and that they are combinable into a working bar, that number is about 69 billion skillbars, or about 0.00091% of all possible bars.

Now consider the probability of getting one of these builds when you play sealed deck.

And people wonder why GW PvP is unaccessible to new players...

Seconded. Not only that there are so many, but that many PvP players bash on newer players for trying to use effective bars from PvX Wiki. Apparently PvP players would like you to go through all 7,546,483,168,121,141 bars yourself, instead of learning from others mistakes and success. This is why the only form of PvP I go to is Alliance Battles. I got my Bambi from HA and I'm now sick of that shit.

A template code is only ~15 bytes. I'd love to see your math calculating this claim

Most of the builds on PvXWiki could be classified as a stub. A stub is generally considered to be 1Kb or less, which I assumed the maximum of. This seems reasonable, considering many builds include icons links and discussion pages.

Assuming a stub for each build would require 7.5 Exabytes. A rough estimate of the number of human beings ever to exist is 100 Billion. This leaves about 82 Megabytes of space per human to record his conversations.

I dropped a 1,000 somewhere in my original estimate. I thought it was 82 Gigabytes per person, which would likely have been enough.

To the OP: what you should now ask all the PvP players: how many different skillbars do they actually use, over the entire time Guild Wars has been in existence.

Fun with math, I approve.

The number of viable GvG skillbars: 8.

That's right. If you check observer that's all you see, exactly same skillbars.

Um, what? What do you think taking good bars from obs mode constitutes?

Incredible..

oho, icwutudidthar.

You're wrong.

Anyway, at the OP, that number maybe be true for all combinations of skills, but realistically, the number of usable bars would probably be less than 1% of that.

This is a little like doing some math and proclaiming that there are 3,000,000,000! (! being the math symbol, not the punctuation) different possible pairings between people on Earth. Man, how are we not all married yet?!

Probably because that doesn't take into consideration age, gender, location, or even basic compatibility. No one would care about that number because it doesn't consider anything.

Why would anyone care about a "number of possible PvP Skill Bars" that includes as part of it's figure bars that have 7 glyphs, or Assassin combos that don't work? It's just a big number. Who cares.

Geez Sha and others just leave him alone. The point of this isn't to find viable bars, its just about the mathematical challage of the problem. For example, a buddy of mine for his Thermal Pyhics class calculated the odds of a 1000 monkeys typing for the history of time to have typed Hamlet (its under .01x10^-6 %). Its not like the problem will ever happen or the answer would matter, its just the mathematical challenge of it that appeals to some people.

Now calculate all skill bars with all possibe runes, weapons, weapon mods, insignias, and... armor ^_^

Impossible

therefore, GW is the equivalent of Chuck Norris.




btw... the impossible was a joke........