Shortened skill descriptions

Eh, my general rule for MMOs, shooters, Elder Scrolls games, etc; (anything lacking in story and RP, such as the aforementioned list) is already "If it moves, kill it."

At least they gave the option to toggle from the start this time, rather than cramming the update down everyone's throat like most of the updates of this type they come up with.

yeah this is true for most of the anomaly skills, like Illusionary weaponry, or redundant information like "and that foe suffers from bleeding for xx secnds, slowly losing health"

I suppose it really is concise. I like how it states Initial effect and End Effect. I'll have to get used to it, the descriptions are a lot more accurate.

People have been complaining about this, for some time.

I think it mainly affects PVP'ers who will often switch classes and think up new builds. A lot of the skill descriptions are long and need to be read a couple times before you really understand what they do. This makes things simpler, because you can see exactly what they do without all that pointless grammer inbetween.

You just had to throw in an ursan comment didn't you

Get over it, Ursan is here to stay.

Changed to concise.. cuts out the "bla bla bla" and gets right to the point. Come to think of it I don't really read skill descriptions anymore :S

QFT

If they felt some skills were difficult to understand - fix em. There are much more important things they could have done then re-write skill descriptions. Completely unnecessary update.

The only good thing about it are some of the bug fixes. Now those are what needed the attention, not skill descriptions. Stop adding stuff no one cares about and start adding/fixing things people DO.

This update FTL.

I left it alone. Doesn't matter either way.

They fixed a lot of bugs that were bugging me and that's the part of the update that mattered. The pork had to be added at some point. Might as well have been today.

and this was important to fix, why????????????????????????????????


ANET please fix BUGS and PROBLEMS, quit it with these silly worthless updates!!

(oh yeah, I would love to just turn off the skill descriptions altogether)

(just read the wiki---they actually DID some fixing as well.....but still)

Fix the bugs? You mean like the 8 bugs they fixed this update?

Seriously, you have no reason to complain. ANet have been fixing bugs quite a lot recently. I'm pretty sure they're allowed to make other updates if they please.

Deep Freeze is wrong, but otherwise it's good to see these come out hiding from the dat.

Concise.

Screen Realestate > Needless words.

Consise.

Just 10 minutes before this update came in, I was arguing on alliance chat because someone didnt know and outright refused to believe that clumsiness was AoE now. He thought it still only affected one foe and wouldnt believe a word of the skill description because it used to say 'That foe is struck for ... damage' so he thought it ended after it hit just one foe still.

Then the new descriptions are put in and he gets pwned somemore

I like what little I've seen so far. Not terribly necessary, but it's nice. Probably a precursor to the system in GW2.

This is me also.

@ Celestial Beaver
This was actually suggested on Sardelaic quite a lot for over a year.

Traditional here. Doesn't matter to me since I know all the skills already.

I've said it before and I'll say it again; this kind of update is good if it was done WHEN THE GAME IS GROWING.

When you know you will introduce tons of skills to the game with new campaigns, you should have a format for your skill wording that is a standard among all of your skills. That way, when people read new skills' description, they know right away what the skills can do without the need to experiment with each of them.

But the game as we know it isn't growing anymore. Worse, we had to deal with the messy skill description for a very long time (even for GWEN's skills). This update came too late, to the point that they shouldn't have bothered.

I'm not even gonna go down to how their so-called "concise" skill wording isn't really an improvement, either; it's just shorter.

Seems a waste of time to me. I'd rather them spend that time with... moar content! Moar moar moar!

Maybe they had a free intern working and needed to keep him busy with some 'elite' intern capable work.

I do think that I now see more people playing than I did pre-EOTN. I mean, back then there were some really dead places... and now there always seems to be at least couple folks hanging out even in the most remote places (factions end missions). It seems like the user base is growing, not shrinking.

XD

Plus with a tanking economy, watcha gonna buy.. a pay per month or a one-time discounted award winning game? I think the value case is still there.

I wish GW2 wasn't coming out. Long live GW!

I wish for a pony while I'm at it. And a million dollars.

Well it was pointless of anet staff to spend however long they did rewording every single skill. That time could have been better spent on a little more skill balancing or even just on GW2. I also have never seen this suggested on sardalec. The new wording is nice, but still a huge waste of time and effort.

traditional. totally pointless, almost harder to read skill descriptions dont interest me. having a 2 year old watered down version of the game really isnt what we could have REALLY used in this game...

There have been small threads a plenty about "fixing up" skill descriptions.

I chose concise. I feel some of the descriptions were overly wordy. The shortened descriptions are quick and to the point.

I chose traditional. Concise grays out parts of skills that have an end requirement.

Lol

I'm dubious about Concise. As others have said, I actually like the extra detail about the skills. I guess at this point I should already know what exactly they do, though. *shrug* Whatever.

I like concise. Matches the way I think about the skills.

This is really good for certain skills such as [skill]Dismember[/skill], [skill]Sever Artery[/skill], and [skill]Restore Condition[/skill]. Wordy and redundant skill descriptions FTL. Of course, they could've just fixed those few, and come up with a more consistent wording for similar effects. I do rather like the "(xx seconds)" at the beginning of the descriptions in concise for durations. That's really nice for quickly checking what the attribute breakpoints are.

people have been bitching about shitty descriptions for a while now, redundant old descriptions like evis and RC are good examples.

I think this is one of those "need-to-be-there" update, it really makes the game much easier to learn and understand; I mean if you spend more than 15 sec to read a mesmer skill description + the time to understand it, that is really "arcane knowledge".

I love these kinds of updates, since they're not "needed" but just add a bit more craft to the game. I'm very happy with it : )

I chose concise, but found the difference to be minimal.
Make it shorter! XD

SOI
2,0,5
3 spell use illusion.

Haha, I could see this:

Enfeeble
5,1/4,5
(31 Seconds) Weakness.

Life Siphon
10,2,2
(22 Seconds) Him 3 degen. You 3 regen.

I kept traditional.

If someone had created a thread in Sardelac Sanitarium suggesting the implementation of shortened skill descriptions, it would have been /notsigned all around.
People would have said, "A-net has much more important things to work on right now, wait for GW2!"

And yet, everyone seems to be happy with using the new "concise" skill descriptions.

... Oh, the irony.

In general I like the new templating, but I wish all the relevant info was preserved. For example, it's typically not clear what is a targeted enchantment and what is a self-only untargeted enchantment.

LiSi
1022
22s-3hhim+3hyou

or maybe

0110
10110
01110010001

There was this thread back in January, and linked to the info on wiki. While it is more on conflicting/wrong/misleading text in descriptions, it does address "sensationalized skill descriptions." Anet has been aware of these issues, and maybe they just decided instead of fixing all these problems, they'd just change all descriptions to this "concise" system. Not sure which sounds like more trouble, honestly.

The only reason I could see that they would want to spend time doing this is that there will be a similar system in GW2. They can gauge everyone's reaction to it, and maybe spot trouble areas (such as the duration at the beginning of skill descriptions) to tweak before testing. Just my guess, though.

EDIT: This is funny, here's something I said in that thread... kinda spooky.

pointless update. id rather they fix glitches instead of this. better use of time ftw?

/signed!

Sever Artery-Bleed-4A

Searing Flames-Burn 6s, vs. Burn 82-15E

Ooo this is fun...Keep em comin'!

Another person who seems to have missed the 8 bugs they fixed in this update, and all the other bugs they've been fixing recently.

You don't know what ANet are doing. You don't know how many people are doing what. Therefore you have no right to say they need to use their time better.

Sure, many people consider this a pointless update. But at least it's an update. ANet don't need to fix bugs. They don't need to change over a thousand skill descriptions. Still, they do. For all we know, 2 people could have changed the descriptions. 15 could have changed them. They could have been working on them for a week. They could have been working on them for 3 months. Since we don't know, we shouldn't say they need to spend their time better.

I'm an oldschool player but I've chosen concise. But I'm not truly satisfied with what the new option offers, the concise wordings could use some more work.

I love the new way of describing triggered effects, like "End effect: ", "Interruption effect: ", "Removal effect: " or "Drop effect: " or some really short and to-the-point skill descriptions (like Life Sheath "Negates xx damage" - it's 2 words and a number! nothing more needed! wow)

But most importantly there are things I don't like about the new wordings and which still need some work:

*Some skills descriptions are actually longer than traditional!
Single word "Creature" got replaced by "ally or foe".
The word ~other~ (ally) was removed and a whole sentence "Cannot self-target" got added. See Arcane Mimicry or Aura of Stability for example, seriously, see them yourself!

*Half Range Spell - looks like a new type of spell, nonsense!
This half range thing should be at the end and grayed out (consistently with other negative effects/conditions), or should read: "Spell. Half Range. Texttext...".
Or maybe change other skills to be consistent with this new templating, make for example Heal Party read: "Party Wide Spell. Heal for 69." (LoL j/k)

*Extra unneeded words added in concise descriptions, sometimes misguiding = wtf? Example - Pain Inverter - concise description uses the word "attack" while the skill affects damage not only from attacks but skills and spells aswell.

*Too big parts of key skill functionality description grayed out, the main part is often far away from how the skill really works - the most important phrases being hidden grayed out at the end. example: Shame.

*Mesmer hexes reducing casting speed still use 2 types of wording - it's either "100% slower casting" (Enchanter's Conundrum) or "Doubles spell casting time" (Migraine). Still it's better than the oldschool Arcane Conundrum with it's "spells cast by ...foes take twice as long to cast"

*There are still inconsistencies in describing the same type of effect on different skills
- example:
Recurring Insecurity "Renewal: if target foe is hexed again",
Mental Block "Renewal: every time an enemy hits you";
but this one is different:
Kinetic Armor "Renewal bonus: cast a spell" - the 'bonus' word and much simplier description - using the standards from above examples it would look like this "Renewal: every time you cast a spell".

*Concise description for Infuse Health is the best example why putting any negative effects of a skill in a separate sentence, grayed out at the end is just wrong.
"Heals for 120% of half your current health...." oh come on!
The oldschool "Lose half your current health. Target other ally is healed for 120% of the health you lost" is far easier to immediately understand.

Still it's a move in the right direction, hope they will make a few improvements though.

I barely read the descriptions as it. Usually just read them the first time I come across them.

I went with Concise, because its nice to have the extra space but if I do want to read what a skill does I still can. =)