Obtaining skills - cheaply

Recently, I found out about turning in Handbooks for easy rep points in GWEN - something I didn't know about previously. Could have saved me a lot of farming. This has made me think that there might be other preconceived notions I have about the game that could be wrong, so I have a question:

In Prophecies, a huge amount of your class's skills could be obtained via quests, as opposed to buying them (obviously I'm not talking about Elites here). In Factions though, this seemed to be changed and not as many quests had skills as their rewards.

This made me think that getting skills in Factions was really expensive. My Factions Ranger has almost no skills in Beast Mastery for this reason (I didn't want to focus on it).

So now, I want to try out Beast Mastery, but the costs of obtaining a range of skills for it would be astronomical.

So, is it possible that I've missed some other way of earning skills post-Prophecies, that doesn't involve buying them from a skill trainer?

Tomes for rangers can easily be 300-500g. That halves the price of a trainer at worst.

That really only works for accounts that already have the skill "unlocked" though, whereas in most cases, I don't.

go pvp imo get some faction unlock it easy as pie

The price shouldnt be "astronomical", just get the skills for the build you want, then as your using that build, you should come across enough gold to cover any other skills you may want.

I played through Prophesies with 3 characters so that I can get all the free skills from all 6 professions in quests. I did it more to unlock skills for Heroes than for my other characters.

Like mentioned before, after doing all the skill quests in Prophesies, you can buy cheap tomes and transfer them to other characters that need it more.

Having said that, be aware that you make a lot more gold in Factions and Nightfall, that buying skills is not a problem. Characters not "born" in Prophesies cannot go over and do the skill quests.

Aye. Do some Alliance Battles and build up some Balthazar faction and buy out some skills to unlock. Then use the skill tomes.

Quests in Factions (and maybe Nightfall) generally provide a lot more gold and a skill point as a reward, so it shouldn't be that hard to get skills. Just complete a few quests and you'll have a few K.

You could also do the skill quests in Tyria. All post-Lion's Arch are available (which is quite a lot).

you can also go and open all the treasure chests in nightfall, first time through you can easily get 10k...

Considering they already cheapened buying skill (from variable increasing price to fixed 1k) you shouldn't be asking more.

Yeah, y'see, this is the crap I was talking about! I didn't know they did that; when was the change?

Or buy the skill unlock packs and them use the tomes (if you have a credit card and a tiny bit of cash to spare).

Quite a long time ago. Before factions came out, but after Dakk was introduced.

not completely true. There are about a dozen or so 'free' skills quests that core professions can do to get skills without paying the plat. (starting from LA you can do graven images....continuing thru the desert and belated betrothal). I have taken my Canthans and Elonians thru these just for the free skills (I have done them with these characters and know that you will get the 'free' skills for doing them). Its not alot but 12plat saved is almost one piece of elite armor!

(check out this link for a list of prophecies quests....note that under the "kryta" area all characters can do the quests, and if you have a core profession you will get the skill listed for completing the quest:
http://gw.gamewikis.org/wiki/Quests_%28Prophecies%29 )

I hope this helps somewhat.

If you simply need unlocks done easily and you do not like PvP then do the Team Trials stuff (http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/The_Team_Trials). It shouldn't be hard to get the gold/skill points to unlock specific builds from a skill trainer after that. There is no real reason to have skills unlocked that you aren't planning on using - especially in PvE.

That is the so called PvP training quests - basically PvE in PvP arenas. You are capped at 2000 exp/day (two normal skill unlocks) and you can use your PvE character and hench or your heroes. I use it quite a bit for unlocks - it takes roughly 15-20 minutes once you know what you are doing. If you go on to the later PvP "training" quests you can get up to 6000 faction per day but I, personally, do not find it worth the effort (others disagree - it is up to you).

Of course, a full campaign unlock in the in-game store is now only 5 dollars. I've got pretty much everything I want unlocked (I would guess over 80% of the skills - but I have been playing for over 2 years) and the little I do not I can easily get. However if you need most of them it is fairly cheap.

I just brought the skill unlock sets and use tomes. before tht though I went through a few characters that I deleted, but before I deleted I just went to the Skill Trainer and spent my whatever skill points I had and brough the skills cheaply. This way I unlocked a heap of skills. Its easy to do with Factions and NF because you start of in Kamadan/Shing Jea, but less so Prophecies (stupid pre)

Another option is to go to all the prof changers and change proffession. All of them will give you some skills.

or of you have one prophecies character, change the second profession then go back through Tyria picking up all the profession specific quests for your second profession. These are quests given from NPC's scattered around Old Ascalon area and as far as Yak's Bend. I think the last one is Artemis, a bit north of Yak's.

Alternatively, if you're really desperate to save a few gold, you could be a bit more complex about it... make a new character and get a few skill points then get a guildie to run you LA, go over to Kaineng and unlock the skills you want at the lower price (since the new character won't have purchased other skills it should start off at around 50g). Then buy the tomes for around 300g for the character you want them on.

Lol that solves nothing he still has to buy them with Plat, you told him to unlock it 2 times with this hint 1 for pvp and 1 for pve.

Umm.. no. If you unlock the skill, you can use a Tome to learn it, and Tomes are 300-500 gold. So you can get two skills (at least) for 1k, and you only need 2k Faction for it. Like the others said, you don't need to be a good pvp player to get 2k Balthazar Faction.