GW Skillbar: How well did it work

You should get Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, it's the game for you.

Clearly, you lack the skill to play Guild Wars - the simplicity and laughable ease of an FPS would be better suited for you.

An ad hominem argument, also known as argumentum ad hominem (Latin: "argument to the man", "argument against the man") consists of replying to an argument or factual claim by attacking or appealing to a characteristic or belief of the person making the argument or claim, rather than by addressing the substance of the argument or producing evidence against the claim.

The process of proving or disproving the claim is thereby subverted, and the argumentum ad hominem works to change the subject.



Zahr Dalsk
Join Date: Aug 2007

Yeah teach your daddy how to reproduce.

Yeah, let's actually address issues instead of flaming. A novel concept!

Anyway, though, GW is one type of game, and it's not an FPS. You want an adrenaline-MMORPG, start groveling to Bethesda. I've heard rumors of both a Fallout MMO (though that isn't Bethesda, I think?) and an Elder Scrolls MMO (would be soooo awesome). Those are shooterly RPGs. Guild Wars isn't. That's not the kind of game it is. In the meantime, if you're craving that kind of action, why not just play a multiplayer FPS?

And re: teams that don't coordinate or all run the same thing - dunno about you, but I do PUG, and I actually look at other people's bars when they ping and change mine accordingly... and about the latter... well, it's ANet's fault for adding dumb skills like Ursan anyway.

The 8-skill Bar has caused me much grief, countless hours of lost sleep because I was Build Wars-ing, and no end of irritation.

I love it.

I have played other games, and I keep coming back to GW. Whenever I tried playing [insert random game name here] and it didn't have a skill limit, I always tried to set up an 8-skill bar.

Long live the 8-skill bar.

It frustrates me, it flaunts its limitations, and like a complete slave, I come back for more punishment.

Why?

Because it's that damned good.

lucky number 8
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Kitchen Measures

Barring Ursan, someone had to make those identical skillbars in the first place. Someone figured out a way to make 8 skills work for them in order to get those bars. Their being popular and everyone running identical skillbars has absolutely nothing to do with the base limit of 8 skills in the first place - it's a matter of people gravitating towards a bar that they see as effective and workable.

Also, re Ursan: why do you think so many people were upset?

- Why have over thousand different skills if only ~200-300 of them are ever used? Say you have a healing spell that heals some points and another healing spell that heals some more but has higher recharge. You test both, but because you can have only 8 skills, you can likely afford just one. You don't know conditions of PvP match before starting, so you take skillbar which is so well-rounded that it will be effective on its own. Then the skillbar gets shared and everyone starts using it, because that's about half the "skill" there is. Other half is knowledge of undocumented features and abusing design flaws like the ridiculous armor-insignia nullification.

It's a question of design choice to have fixed number of skills with limited effects, not what that number is. It's not very entertaining to let the game play itself, which tends to happen with excess rules and restrictions.

- Apparently some were upset that their achievements gained with then-overpowered skills were being devalued with now-overpowered skills.

No, this is one of reasons why pugging sucks so much that you rather play with ai than humans.

If you have 10 skills with basically same effect, some will be simply good with one being best and some will be pretty awfull.

Give people too much choice, they will choose to use some awfull stuff. Leads to skillbar related angst on all sides involved.

Face it, you do not need 10 straight heals. Not when you can realistically fit only about two to skillbar before they get redundant. Choice makes you feel good, but truth is, there is no choice as it is now.

From what I was told the 8 skill bar was based on rings, then that changed but the number stuck there.

In some games you cannot change the bar as much, and sometimes not at all. Let alone the player would have more then 8, or not even 8 at all. Having 8, and changing them out in outposts is a Luxory to have, with such a fantastic game.

What I love about it is the elite skill captures, how it adds a point to the title, your bar, your heroes, and of course the benefit of the skill itself. It's a great concept.

Quite honestly, I love it. GW will always be a major breath of fresh air when playing all the other standard MMO set-ups.

To each his own. The "FPS" direction is one of the reasons why Oblivion was shunned by so many of the longtime Elder Scrolls supporters. That doesn't make Oblivion a bad game, it just went a far more different and drastic direction than the rest of the series had ever gone. While a bit of an over-the-top analogy, it's akin to Doom 4 being a turn-based strategy game.

There's nothing wrong with the gameplay of Guild Wars. ANet just wanted to emphasize a majority of a player's skill in coordinating a good build set-up. Just like in Dawn of War 2: Just because there's little to no building macro doesn't mean the game loses depth, it just puts it somewhere else. This doesn't exclude the massive amounts of problems existing all over GW, though.

Complete truth.

I love the Skillbar. It's true - having to choose the skill you use rather than having an endless number scattered round the edge of the screen is what makes GW a challenge. In other games you do the grinding to get the cash to buy the skills - as it implies on the box, it does all boil down to the length of time you've been playing.

And sure, more experienced players scoff at the naff skills and rely on a select few, but remember the first time you played, and didn't know which was which? It's easy to assume that everyone just looks up builds and copies them, because sure, most people do. But as has been pointed out, before those builds could be posted, someone had to have the (dare I say it) skill to play the game blind and learn what worked and what didn't.

In the bluntest terms, using the wiki is a close equivalent to using the cheat codes available for offline games. For the players that are naively unaware of the Wiki (I have a brother that fits that category, and I would imagine a vast proportion of the noobs fit there as well) they really are relying on their own skill. It shows. Because that was the whole point. Guild Wars isn't about overpowering enemies by having superior armour. It was about using your brain more. And in a game that focuses on that, some people are bound to lack the requisite skill to make good builds. Unless they use the wiki.

(Don't get me wrong, I'm not against the wiki, but when it comes to picking skills, it does seems a shame that it only takes one person to post a good build, and then everyone else loses the satisfaction of working it out for themselves - and yes I am aware that you don't HAVE to use it.)

I've always wanted a 10 skill bar after I played WoW a bit.

Has there been any word on GW2 bar size? Hmmm since it won't be instanced I guess you will have to talk to an npc to change your bar/attributes.

I Like the fixed 8 skills, it means that when my insomnia kicks in and I get really bored cause I've been awake for 30+ hours, I can sit down and read descriptions of skills and try to come up with a bar that all of the skills work together to make an effective build. I have a great dislike for builds that involve nothing more than spamming 1 or 2 skills.

However with GW2's Persistent/Instanced world, what I would like to see is a bar with 8 'Fixed' skills which can only be changed when in a town/outpost, and 2 semi 'Hot Swappable' skills which can be changed at designated locations or specific NPC's outside of towns/outposts a limited number of times (say 3 times, after the 3rd change those skills are locked and player has to return to town to reset). Those 2 skills would give the player the ability to adapt to unexpected events some what on-the-fly but at a limited capacity making it so they still have to actually plan ahead and think about what skills would help in that situation.

Keep 8 skill bar, PLEASE. One of the most strategically intriguing concepts in the Guild Wars universe. Clearly, effective builds can be compressed down to 8 skills. Hybridization is one of my favorite things in Guild Wars... we've got only 8 skills and 200 attribute points and yet we can create builds that specialize in certain characteristics or are hybrids and can even be effective with two or three different attributes represented by skills on their bar.

I am NOT a fan of thousands of unusable skills. The amount of regular skills we have that are plainly and simply unusable is ridiculous. The amount of elite skills we have is *almost* perfect. Elite skills are, in my opinion, what really makes a skill bar what it is, which is why no matter what Monk bar you're running, you'll probably be identified by the elite. A Word of Healing hybrid probably has more Protection Prayers than Healing, but they're identified by the elite. As such, I think that the number of elites should be toned down a bit, sure, to better control balance between them, but don't give us too few, as elites are the biggest part of skill bar customization.

And the rings thing? Never knew that. Pretty cool though =).

Prefer the GW 8 skill bar in the GW context.

In WoW my characters have a control system more complex than the average airliner. But, in practice, you are usually using just a small number of skills in any ordinary combat.

The 8 skillbar was a great idea. Having to actually think about what synergises well in a limited build is pretty fun

Wish they hadnt overun us with skills though , far too many overall and a huge hunk of them were/are utter pish

I think the game for you would be the upcoming borderlands fps/rpg

You are right about the skill overload and ANET realizes there mistake and said there is going to be a smaller number of skills in GW2.

The limited skillbar is one of the things (of a list of many) they got very right. I hope it carrys over to gw2.

This.

I think it makes PvP and PvE much more interesting, and reinforces that team dynamic that everyone keeps talking about.

With 8 skills you actually got to think what skills your combining for them to be most effective.

Having only 8 skills at a time really is the thing that makes GW unique. It stimulates players into learning the skills (instead of randomly pressing whichever one is closer/recharged), creating and using different builds for different situations / areas / teams, and actually working as a team. If you can bring everything by yourself, then why bother with a team build?

I think 8 is a good limit to realistically be able to hotbar on keyboard/mouse in order to make use of all of them reasonably quick (think pvp). Adding more would just make them harder to slot in and use. Being used to having 8, anything less than that would feel weak

I played AoC for a while, and one the main reasons I left was that I felt there really didn't feel like there was any strategy involved in the skills. Yes, you could change the builds, but it was costly and took forever. So the free skill changing system (and free attribute changes now ) is also really vital.

In PvE it might be worthwhile to have say 1-2 skill changes in an instance to prevent the awesome "omg we forgot xxx - resign and restart" groups. But I'd like it to be strictly limited for each instance to force people to still think about where they're going and what to bring.

Imo, limitation stimulates creativity.

Just read the rest of the thread, and this really just sums it all up

I think it works. It's large enough that you can set up decent builds and synergies together, but it's small enough that it's easy to keep a handle on the skills you use in an instance and to allow for customisation.

Frankly, the ability to experiment is one of the things I really enjoy about Guild Wars - while I pay attention to what the flavours are, I tend to prefer to make my own builds and sometimes to go outside the flavour to give something a go - which has allowed my to pre-empt some of them, but is, on the whole, fun. In a conventional MMO, what you've got is what you've got, but the limited but easily changed skillbar is tight enough to feel like you're almost playing a different character with a sufficiently rejigged bar. Since my practise in previous games like Diablo 2 has been to only get up to the point at which the build has all its tools before growing bored and looking for a different build, this ability to rebuild a character to feel completely different is one of the pluses of the game.

Regarding persistence - I expect there will still be safe zones equivalent to outposts, where builds can be changed regardless (although you may find that what you face isn't what you prepared for). I expect there will be some zones that remain instanced as well.

I have a suspicion this is pretty much exactly the sort of thing they're looking into - having fewer skills in total, but making those skills that are available more customisable on the fly. Maybe not to the point of being as 'twitchy' as you're typical FPS, but with the same skill having different effects depending on how its used.

(Although, to nitpick, it doesn't always hit - in fact, I get regularly frustrated when some projectile spell goes wide due to the prediction algorithm going horribly wrong...)

i'm probably wrong but looking at screenshots of games like WOW etc they have so man icons etc on the screen which i assume are spells ands skills. It looks like it could get pretty confusing. the cool thing about the skill bar is that everything is been thought about well in terms of balance. With a max level cap of 20 we have a certain amount of attributes to play with aswell, this prevents things being overpowered (well at a limit, i don't want flaming for this).