Unlocking Items/weapons/runes/skills

Since we all have to look forward to release and accumulation of the different goodies therein, I pose this to you guys.

When a rune is found and passed to an ally, does this unlock for that individual? I have not tried this yet with my guild, but if so it will make getting the neccessary stuff so much easier!

On this thought, I think the first week at least is going to be strange GvGing. If anything it will be slow out of the gate until everyone lvl's up, gets their skills and the celestial sigil. It would be laughable to see guilds battling it out with Ascalon skills only. Not many suprises there!

You can only unlock items, if you, yourself, used an identify kit to identify the item. I tested it with a rune and it didn't work.

Yes, it's all based on your character discovering it for themselves in the game. If not, then I guess groups would just be trading all kinds of items just to unlock them. I like it how it is. There's a nice feeling of accomplishment when it tells you that you unlocked something

ah well, I agree Kha it is for the best. Makes me want to solo every mission just to make sure I get all the wonderful drops.

So what do you think about the slow guild start? I think the lack of skills may result in some people choosing to wait for a bit.

Thanks
Half

i dunno.. i like playing from scratch even if it is slow it makes it more challenging and thats how the game was designed.

not much to do after you rush threw everything.. and i dont want to spend all my time just PvPing.

Yeah, it's similar to why they got rid of Skill Trading, I wouldn't like to meet low level characters with high class skills that there friends got for them in Lions Arch and places further on.

I still disagree with skills being considered low class and high class. They don't require a higher level. I think a skill is a skill. There is no skill tree, why have they been arbitrarily broken down into levels.

I can see how the "Elite" skills, or ones that generally have a very significant effect on a battle or characters abilites should be held off for later in the game, but I would agree and say that it'd be nice if all other skills were available earlier on in the game. It seemed like each time I found a new trainer, they only had one or two more skills available, and usually they were nothing I wanted (at least not until I got Apply Poison).

I'm still slightly annoyed by the elites in any form, but I have learned to live with them. That said, I don't think Elites are any more powerful than other skills. From my perspective, elites were mainly introduced because a combination of them with other certain skills made them overpowering so they were both made elite so they could not be used together.

Elite skills are the best in the game. Decline to use one at your own peril - some of them are just downright ridiculous.

The 'breaking up broken combos' excuse has been done to death. The broken combo is spam skill + broken energy regen. That's it. What are you going to stick together that's overpowered, Mist Form and Obsidian Flesh? Please. Elite is a sledgehammer of an excuse to get the overpowered skills out of people's bars while still leaving 'em in the game. There might be a few exceptions but that's the rule for the dozens of elites that are actually used.


Back on topic, I'm not particularly excited about having to unlock skills in game. I thought part of the point of PvP characters is the ability to test out or up and play a character completely different from the characters you play with all the time. To that end unlocking skills is a failure, as you'll only have skills available from classes and types of classes that you've already played - you still have to build each character in PvE in the first place.

If you want to unlock every skill for a PvP character in a reasonable period of time, you're going to have to create a new character, run him to the advanced trainers, spend all their skill points, delete the character, repeat. Not exactly fun.

Unlocking the various items can at least be done by your primary characters. It isn't a perfect system and can get quite annoying as you can't trade for the last few items to fill in your list - but it isn't as critical or annoying as having to fill in your skills.

I'd just unlock the skills of a given trainer or boss as soon as you see them with any character, not when you learn them.


I think there's a real danger of PvP equipment being better than what people can reasonably acquire in PvE. The point of PvP characters it to allow people to make a new character and be on roughly level ground with other people's regular characters - letting them avoid having to re-create characters every time, basically. As it stands, once upgrades are unlocked PvP equipment is pretty close to the top-notch stuff that people have a hell of a time finding in PvE - making a PvP clone of your PvE character strictly better in many cases. I don't think that they need to nerf PvP equipment, but they need to make sure that PvP players have access to the same sort of gear that a PvP character will have.

Peace,
-CxE

I posted in the suggestion thread that they should unlock on salvage, and add to the description on indentify. That way someone can ID an item, and choose to sell it, or allow someone else to salvage it so they actually get the item unlocked for PVP. That way if you have a dedicated Monk in your Guild for instance, and get a Monk Rune, you can let them salvage it for PVP. Or if some players don't PVP at all, they won't really care about unlocking stuff, but can still help out those members in the Guild that do.
Not the best solution, but based on whats available here, sounds like a minor change that would give a little more flexibility for unlocking items.

I think the signet of capture just became more useful. Unless you are going for a specific skill, it may be worth your while to leave a slot for the signet and capture whatever you can when you bump into a boss that is of your profession. Sure it won't help you immediately, but it may allow you to be more creative with your PvP char over time. Not to mention saving your PvE char $$.

On that note, does sig of capture use up a skill point?

since you are getting a skill i think it does otherwise skill points runarounds for money would be the result

EDIT

possibly not
here is what the archive says on it

Use Signet of Capture on a Boss who has just used a skill that you want to learn. Signet of Capture is permanently replaced with that skill. (You can only learn skills of your professions.)

it looks as if the signet is replaced at no cost of a skill point

It costs one skill point to aquire a Signet of Capture in the first place. If you get a SoC and don't use it, you are actually -1 skill points from what you should have at that time.

thank you

never having bought one i did not know of tyhe skill point cost

it seemed like getting something for nothing and was suspicious

if the capture fails i wonder if the soc and point still go poof?

If you fail to capture a skill then the signet will remain on your bar.
You can never use your signet of capture and get nothing in return for it.

You can, however capture a skill you didn't really want.

Using a signet of capture is fairly simple- target an enemy and use the signet when you see a skill you want to capture. A small bar will appear on the middle of the screen and start charging- it looks a lot like the bar you see when you cast a spell with a cast time greater than one second. When the bar finishes charging, you will capture the skill, and the old icon for the signet will be replaced by the new skill.

If you want to cancel the capture, you can simply start moving, or I believe you can press esc while it is still "charging". You may have to cancel a bunch of times to get the skill you are looking for. (Assuming the boss does in fact know the skill you want.)

Hope that helps.

Since I will likely be using the sig of capture, it seems that Yaks bend is the closest location. Does anyone recall whether the sig was available pre-sear?

I noticed another problem with the system, but possibly I did not test this far enough.

If you unlock something and then sell it you no longer can use it with a PvP toon.

I had found a sword hilt with a character, then I identified it. Trying to test the system, I then sold it to a vendor. I logged and immediately made a warrior PvP player. I tried to use the sword hilt... of course, it didnt work.

My other character with the unlocked major rune in his inventory always allowed me to create a character with that.

This is very bad if it remains this way. Not only would you waste time unlocking things, if you deleted a character with a lot of unlocked skills, are they just lost until you relearn them all with a new one? I am pretty sure that was not the intent, but maybe it wasnt fully implemented yet.

it says at the GW site that the retail skills will stay with the account and not be deleted with a character

Once you've unlocked a skill or magic item, it remains unlocked even if the roleplaying character used to unlock it is deleted.

Another nice thing, according to one of our game designers, James Phinney, is that when you do choose a new secondary profession, you will keep all the skills that you have acquired with your other choices. So, if you selected Elementalist as a secondary profession when you first created the character, then changed to a Mesmer secondary, if in the future you decide to revisit the Elementalist again, you'll be stocked with all the skills that the character had on board before moving to that new profession.

The bottom line is that you could have a primary character who has experimented with all five available secondary professions. That character will likely have good stock of skills in each of those lines. In fact, that character could have every skill in each of the five available secondaries. The character then, in ways not yet to be revealed, will be able to shift to a different secondary and take advantage of a long history of roleplaying character development.

I was hoping that was the intent. Although it still hinders casual gamers because time now will still be a factor to reach the level everyone will want to be playing on.

Now hopefully this process will not benefit hardcore gamers so much more than casual ones in the long run.

Not at all. So long as the game doesn't allow big-bad PvPers to run around outside town, ganking everyone 19 levels lower than them, "hardcore" gamers won't get any benefit. The game fully allows the player to define the pace at which they develop, so there's no rush.

I am assuming you mean that with the eventual release of an expansion, we could modify the character with a new secondary class introduced, but keep the primary that we had from before. That would be nice, to see a character progress through the World of Tyria, with the understanding that you would need to lvl the newly created character back to lvl 20. (thats not so bad, it doesn't take long) However, you would lose the armor I believe (That is not so good, as it takes forever to get all those materials!)

Nice to see that the account holds the goods for future characters.

That is definitely not so good; spending as much as I do, it's hard to come across the resources to be able to craft myself the best armor, either in rare crafting materials such as pelts, or simply having enough gold to be able to craft them. I would hardly considering finding enough gold a problem, but losing the armor/crafting items you used will definitely suck.

But, keeping the skills more than makes up for it in my book, since it will get to a point where if you keep trying to unlock all the skills with on character that it would be insanely expensive.

That isn't what I meant. I actually mean they will be able to acquire more runes and weapons and upgrade components to create better PvP characters. So people with limited time still will be hindered in equally matched skill PvP, because of this unlocking system. Although the hinderance may seem insignificant, it is still apparent.