A couple of questions about the Core Skill Unlock Pack

I was thinking of purchasing this unlock pack for my Prophecies + Eye of the North campaign. Is purchasing the skills before you've done the quests to earn them considered cheating by most GW players? Or is it looked at as a way to help support NCsoft since there is no subscription fee?

Also, once I get access to these skills, can I obtain them from any skill trainer, or does it have to be from just certain skill trainers?

Thanks in advance!

SG

I consider buying skills unlocks as being very lame. You don't need them for anything and you can easily unlock them by just playing the game, be it PvE or PvP. You never need all skills at once and if you properely manage your balthazar faction and/or gold you will not feel you actually miss those unlocks.

You also have to remember that the unlocks are just for PvP characters and for heroes in PvE, and enable learning the skills in PvE through tomes or any skill trainer (without having to reach specific skill trainers). But if you play just one character through the game you can learn any skill when needed thanks to the ability to change secondary profession. And in PvP it's really worthwhile to always keep a couple thousand faction in case you want/need a specific skill immediately. Play wise.

I don't think its viewed as cheating by many, if any, people. i bought a couple of them myself. It made life a lot easier and allowed me to make builds using any skills in the game immediately rather than waiting to get enough balth faction.

For a person that focuses on making a lot of different unique builds, being able to buy them all for use was a big plus for me. Alsto since you it doesn't give your pve characters any skills theres even less reason to view it as cheating.

I could have sworn that it gave your PvE characters access to all but the elite skills (earned through tomes) and your PvP characters only certain PvP skills. Now, there is a PvP Skills Unlock Pack that unlocks PvP skills, but I'm looking at the Core Skill Unlock Pack which, if I understand correctly, is more focused toward PvE.

SG

It doesn't give your character the skills. It simply unlocks the skill for your account so you can purchase it from any trainer, rather than having to progress further into the game to get it for the first time. For pve players, the packs aren't really worth it, since you can stumble along in pve without the skills found in later areas.

Okay... Allow me to explain and/or answer all of your questions to the best of my knowledge:



I don't recommend doing this, You can unlock the skills FREE by simply playing through the game and/or using Balathazar Faction to unlock the skills.


No. It is not considered "cheating". But, it is highly looked down upon by many people.

All transactions that you or anyone else makes with them supports Arena.Net.


Yes. You can purchase the skills from any skill trainer in the skill's respective campaign. For a list of which camapign the skills are located, I recommend using the Official Guild Wars Wiki, located here


No problem.

That's why I was looking specifically at the Core Skill Pack versus the individual campaign skill packs. The core skill pack, as I understand it, are skills that are used across all three campaigns.

SG

Skill unlocks make skills them available to your account, but you still must acquire them from the skill trainers that normally carry them or from a tome/quest/capture. The advantage is NO PVP required to unlock a skill and it is immediately available to your heroes. I'm sorry but ten bucks for not having to PvP 150 hours is an awfully good tradeoff in my economy. I don't know anyone would be worried about how you acquired your skills; tomes and quests and unlock packs are all part of the approved game content.

the skill unlock packs are usually bought by pvp'rs, in which it takes a pretty long time to get everything unlocked.

in pve, you gain access to skills much earlier than you generally unlock them (unlocking involves purchasing through skill trainer or obtaining through a skills quest). the advantage of unlocking skills in pve is for usage on heroes and learning through skill tomes. i highly do not recommend buying the unlock pack just for earlier access via skill trainers. for two reasons:

1) skill trainers are much more expensive than buying skill tomes.
2) a 'complete' skill trainer can be reached quite early on in the game (if your pro, it will take you less than a day; if on first normal playthrough about 2 weeks depending on whether or not you bother with the useless sidequests).


your best option, imo, if you have a decent amount of money (or a nice/friendly guild) is just to get a run to select skill trainer locations (first 2 i'd stop by would be droks & la).

and people wount know you purchased skills, so dont care about them.

For someone just starting out (and willing to spend the money) it's a very good investment since it makes heroes actually useful - without quite a few skills heroes are much worse than henchmen.

go ahead and buy it, no-one will think ur lame or anything.. only big noobs who think they're awesome because they earned their UAX,
and the fact that ur giving anet more money to make gw2 awesome makes me quite happy at all,
dont worry no-one will think ur lame
also welcome to the game

I bought all the Skill packs and I don't play PvP. Since I bought them all my heros have access to all the skills whether I've unlocked the skills or not. And since I don't plan on playing as some professions I wouldn't really unlock them anyway. If you have the money it's a nice thing to have. Many people in my alliance don't have them and whenever they find a new build for a hero or something they always end up spending time going to find a skill trainer to purchase it. If I find a new build for a hero I can just save it, set it, and use it.

A Search showed that asked the threads on this topic mostly go back to 2009 So I wanted to ask what people think is the best Skill Pack one might purchase based on current popular hero builds and updated skills?

Factions, by a huge margin. It unlocks almost all the Ritualist skills, and most of the commonly used necro skills too (icy veins, discord, spoil victor). Also RoJ, Shockwave and Starburst.

For the record, i'm a new player with about 10 months under my belt. After a few months of serious struggle staying alive with my heroes i got fed up and bought all the skill unlock packs and my play experience went from frustrated to fun.

If you have the money to spend and if you rely on your heroes rather than other people at least some of the time i wholeheartedly recommend buying them. I doubt i'd still be playing GW if i hadn't.

If you only want to get one of them factions is a good choice as well as the prophecies unlock pack (imho).

There's 1319 skills.
If you remove PvE-only skills, there's still 1235. Needless to say, that is A LOT of skills.

If you have cash to spare and no skills unlocked, they are a good investment. Heroes will have all those skills available, and so all trainers in their respective regions.

What I did was paying a visit to the last trainer and buying all the skills there with my main character, even those of other primary professions. That probably took me over 1000K, about 250K or so per campaign, even after removing skills I got for free while playing.


So, to put it simply, the sooner in your game history you get the packs, the more you'll benefit from them.

Thanks everyone! I appreciate the replies.

@Ishmel - It sounds like we are in similar positions, I started GW1 again about that long ago. Only I ended up buying the mercenary hero pack instead of skill packs because I thought that would make the gameplay less frustrating lol But without the right skills my PvP-cloned mercs were only marginally helpful.

Thanks for the perspective. I've guess I should have bought the skill packs instead lol

@MithranArkanere - Yipes! That certainly gives the effort of getting all those skills a sense of scale. The amount of cash is scary but the time all that must have taken is something I doubt I could manage with my current schedule. Sounds like I'll be visiting the NCSoft store

I can't recall but I actually think i bought three of them for my newest account. Needed a secound acc and I wanted it ready to play at once so I just bought them I think. For hero use

Yeah, just buy the unlock packs. Before heroes, when you were gimped to running henchway, your own build sucking was kinda ok.... but you really don't want to be gimped to the point where half your party has shitty skill bars. Sure, you could still play with henchies.... an idea so appealing, I've bought all the skill unlock packs on all my accounts.