From ANet: Most skills will have to be purchased or captured in Factions

From FPE Q&A
Q: In Guild Wars Prophecies, most skills can be obtained by completing the quests, but in Factions we could not see skills being available in this manner. Can skills be obtained from the skill trainer or by capturing the skills in Factions?

A: Some early skills will be rewarded through quests. However, more Factions skills will have to be bought with skill points from a skill trainer or will need to be captured. This will help create more of a variety of builds in Factions than were used in Prophecies.

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That kind of pisses me off. I wouldn't have a problem with it if the drop rate in Factions stayed the same as it was in the FPE, but I have read several times that they plan to lower the drop rate for the game's release.

If you are a casual player, usually you don't make a whole lot of money. It seems like you usually get maybe 1.5-2k per mission or run in the Southern Shiverpeaks or Ring of Fire, and completing your run usually takes around 2 hours. Drops seem to suck more in earlier areas of the game, except the Ettin run or the Griffin run, which are only good when soloing. But, on average, you don't get a whole lot of gold for the time you spend getting it, so unless you play frequently (10+ hours per week) your cash takes a long time to add up. I know you can make farming builds and do 2-man UW or 5-man tomb runs, and so on, I'm just saying people should not feel obligated to make a 55 monk or B/P Ranger or SS Necro, etc and farm a handful of areas repeatedly to get a decent amount of money. Money wasn't that big of a deal before since there wasn't a lot of important things to spend your money on, but now that's changed since we will have to buy the majority of our skills in Factions. Money just became more of a necessity.

Will changing the acquisition of skills to a system where non-starter skills must be purchased help or hurt the average player? And if you feel it is potentially bad, how can they balance the issue aside from giving players gold as quest rewards?
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EDIT: Response from Gaile

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It would help to hear other people's opinions on this issue. After reading Gaile's reply it still sounds like a potentially bad change to the skill acquisition system for PvE players, but we'll see if they provide sufficient EXP and gold (500g early on, 1k in later quests) as quest rewards to balance out the changes.

From what I understand, Anet wants to cut down on "cookie cutter" builds by making skills harder to acquire.

All that's going to do, though, is discourage the use of new skills, because they are harder to acquire. People will post where the best skills are to be found, and that's the only skills people will get.

IMO, this "solution" will totally backfire, and it seems like a big step back from "skill, not grind."

EDIT: This was my first reaction. Now that I've heard from Gaile, the new way actually sounds better. Time will tell if I'm right now, or was right then. I'll leave this post "as is" to cover my a... I mean, to show people the virtue of waiting until having all the information before spouting off!

Yeah I didnt like hearing this as well, I guess it was easier on them/less work if they had to make less quests and thus less quests with skill rewards :b

So much is focused on the battle back and forth, fork over the big plat and skill points for the win eh? Actually the biggest hit seems to be on the new classes then where they wouldn't have core prophecy skills. Or even on new made characters (depending on how far back you can start in chapter 1). But linkers might get some respite? Will new characters be able to start in Lion Arch and go forth (or even backtrack) to get skills, even the new character classes possibly (for the ones that werent class dependent)?

Will there be 'shield missions' for skill points in Cantha, and how prevalent? Will even the non-uber alliances have access to the better loot and ability to get xp/skill pts? How much will not having the ideal merchant prices hurt?

No matter how you slice it linking will be >> unlinked for chp2 players for those of us willing to redo once again :b or new players. Skill pts through those shield missions at the very least, and I'd think quests too - at least for any prophecy primary/seconday, but I'd think a chance for faction class too, once again for the non-specific class quests. I suppose there's even a chance they'd add some specific faction class quest/skill ones in but that might be a reach, especially as they say they're not doing much to chp1.

T-minus 17ish days...

I have to say this is a boneheaded idea. The only possible benefit I can see to it is that it creates another money sink for people to throw disposable income down. For those of us that don't have that kind of scratch though it's like saying." Here buy our game just don't expect to be able to do much of anything." Thanks a lot ANet. I'll remember that when it's time for Chapter 3 to be released. Compound that with the fact that I want to get these new skills for my old characters in order to maximize my enjoyment of the merged game. Well I've already had to purchase several skills so even my lowest progression character has jacked the skill trainer price up into the thousands. So I'm going to go to Cantha want this skill or that skill and guess what? I end up blowing all my cash on just skills and with the decreased drop rates I'm stuck like Chuck. This will encourage farming which will in turn encourage nerfs of the drop tables which makes the game pretty much pointless. I can see it now." Sword found, selling for 100K" Not because it's special but just because it's a drop with some decent mods.

Exactly. What did any of us do when shooting for UAS? Get the skills we knew worked first, and as we got more we played and tried some more. The most obvious and leet skills will be all had quickly, and the more questionable ones remain almost invisible until the grinders start posting about what they came up with (if they do).

I'm really suprised they've chosen to do this now too, going crazy hitting every single skill quest was a bit part of my chapter 1 pve life for 3-4 characters. The more that comes out the more I'm wondering what the heck I'm in for

edit - one more big dislike then too, heaven forbid I wanted to make a chp1 primary class in Cantha. Now I have to believe not only might that be a bad idea for chp2 skills but maybe double jeopardy, how much can I get from my chp1 linked as well now. Those in the best position by far will be our current characters it seems if new ones can't even effectively skill up without serious resources :b

I don't know... think about how many skills you got for nothing or next to it that sit on the sidelines unused. What you'll see, likely, is people being more selective in their skill choices.

My ranger, for example, has Otyugh's Cry. Why, I ask you?! WHY?!

I'd complain, but I'm not sure how to interpret it yet;
My first thought was exactly as above. That this was just going to be the opposite of the box promise.

However, upon further consideration, I'm not sure;
The exp bonuses for quests in Prophecies was small. There weren't many quests, and often, they were a waste of time to complete.

The quests in Factions that we saw, on the other hand, gave much larger exp bonuses, 1k minimum, 3k often, and even up to 10k. Now, that could be because the area we explored was the location you'd arrive in Cantha from Tyria, which may be a 'high-end' area. Considering the monster levels and difficulty of the quests, I don't think one could have called it 'high-end' though.

If repeatable quests (running the supplies/the jade arena) and many simple quests, all found in abundance, are present in factions, this could not be to get us to grind, but to give us more flexibility in our skill purchases, and speed up our leveling to 20 (much of Cantha is supposedly aimed towards level 20 players, I believe I'd read). Rather than relying on whatever a quest awards us, we buy what we want, with gold and experience gained from the quests.

Now, 2 skills, the standard award for Prophecies skill quests, is something hard to beat in pure exp bonuses, so unless there're a LOT of quests along the way, it may not even compare. If I end up having to do the Jade Arena over, and over, and over, again, like I did to cap out my luxxon faction, I'll go insane though.

I hope one of the skill quest awards for a NORMAL quest will turn out to be a skill point or two. Or at least repeatable missions for skill points.

There's my positive spin on the matter.

My worries are that without more details, pinning the hopes of people on an unpromised possibility isn't always successful. Anet is made up of humans, and humans get strange ideas and make mistakes (such as the Lyssa's Balance spell in terms of balancing it with other enchantment removal). It's wholly possible that they've decided to slow down the skill acquisition rate massively to force people to play for longer to acquire them all. We won't know until we play though.

I hope that the dev's at least make the quests give out a minimum of 5k experience so newbies can skill up easier. In addition to farming money/exp on my warrior, I now gotta crank out the 55 monk to get him some skill points along with my ranger (guh, FoW here I come)...

Oh well. :]

How are first time players gonna cope with this?

When i first started GW my first 3 chars did most of the quests in order to get skills. Now i have plenty of cash i just rushed my 2nd account and bought plenty of skills. I am still going around in order to get some skills though (perhaps its cos im cheap...) rather than buying them.

First time players in Factions are gonna have no money at all by the sound of things, while the richer players get to buy all the skills they need straight away and go solo farm things before they get touched by the Anet Fellblade of Nerfing.

I'm fine with Capturing elites, but capturing normal skills too? You've gotta be kidding. If i'd of known Lord Timot had Summon Bone Fiends i'd of capped that from him rather than from Droks, that been the only non-elite skill i have ever considered capping.

I just hope they make the normal skills a joke to aquire... and add in lots more harder areas. I'm really disappointed by the lack of overall real high-end content like Tomb's/FoW/UW that isn't soloable (well, Tombs ain't... yet) It would be nice if they made the new zones a lot harder since it would actually give me some incentive to play through it with different builds. :]

Are skills in Factions going to be less expensive to buy? Because the way ANET makes it sound like, is that they are turning skill acquisition into a gold sink. The core game revolves around the skills and skill combinations you have, it should not become a gold sink.

FoW Armor, better weapons, keys, all are optional items that don't make you a better player, since max weapons can be acquired from Collectors. Those are gold sinks, optional things you do.

Skill acquisition is required to become a better player and have versatile builds.

then farm faction like a madman to get that elite content .

they are not going to cater to the neat elite solo ho player (VFF) compared to the casual (dare i say semi noob) mainstay population that would bail if it got to difficult

faction farmer first class emote

Nothing personal Loki, but you're a goredengining retard if you think we saw the high-end zones. We saw the equivalent of the desert, most likely. Why would they show us the really cool high-end zones in the preview?

Making skills harder to get, is going to make people want to get them more, or use the best ones less. Who at ANet could actually believe this?

I think its pretty clear that ANet's marketing department is pretty crappy. The only reason I want to buy factions is because I like playing GW and I want the new skills. They haven't said a single thing that makes me actually want to play it or that it will be better than the original...I can only hope and get lucky that turns out to be good.

it says to get skills will be through capping or skill trainer not many from quests. they did not say though you still have to use money. this would mean you wolud have to grew alot more levels if you want skills

I know. I think I would be more excited if I knew nothing about it at all...

as it is now, I'm more excited about the new weapons and armor than anything else.

EDIT: That's not true. I'm also excited about the Ritualist's back up dancers!

This is perfectly fine

More money/exp = more skills = More money/exp = more skills = no more skills = perfectly fine = new builds

wow gg anet....

first they ignore the issue of skill unlocking/grinding.

and then they go and make it even harder by screwing over the best form of unlocking (via quests)

so what? theyll provide us with repeatable quests that give out lots of xp for skill pts? wow great idea, so now instead of doing a quest and getting 2 skills, ill have to grind through a repeatable quest like 5+ times to get those skill pts to get those skills.

all in the name of promoting variety? wtf

if you want to promote variety - promote accessibility.

if you make it HARDER to get skills, you dont diversify choices, you just invent a new section in fansite lore that includes the 'necessary' skills to unlock for 'blah' purpose. ie. you motivate everyone to spend their skill pts on the proven skills rather than experimental ones, so everyone ends up with the same boring builds.

</rant>

"IMO, this "solution" will totally backfire, and it seems like a big step back from "skill, not grind.""

Sadly, Mordenkia, that feels like my interpretation as well. I'll admit quickly, few of my characters have skills outside of those from quest rewards or elites I captured. I'll only buy skills if they fit my build perfectly and I know I absolutely will use them. Money (and skill points) are hard to come by.

EDIT: I recently liquidated my assets -- I sold all my excess dyes, stored crafting materials, backup runes, etc. (I did this since all four of my character slots now have Droknar's armor and are level twenty). Playing since April, casually as I do (10 hours a week or so), I've netted a total worth of 50k. That's enough to buy probably 15 skills for each character. Fortunately, a vast amount of each character's ~150 skills are already available due to questing. (For the record, each of these characters has about 20 skill points).

/me thinks you will be able to buy skills using luxon or kurzick faction, and that faction will be available doing quests...problem solved?

So instead of having to grind for XP and Gold to unlock all the skills, you'd have to grind for XP, Gold -and- Faction [via PvP]?

and again ppl are complaining about something they don't really know.

I am sure it will all work just fine.

I agree but, atleast I didn't have to shell out gold for it only to find out it is worthless.

I don't remember... was Otyugh's a reward? Pretty sure I paid for it. (Not the full plat, mind you...)

Also remember that your first handful of skills purchased are for less than the 1K. Be selective, an das your account grows so will your skill base.

Also... merge accounts, import gold from Prophecies.

Man, I hope so. Unfortunately I seem to remember having to pay with gold and a skill point when I bought skills during the FPE. That's a good idea to offset the cost for people who don't have a substantial amount of gold though

Bingo. Imagine how much more pissed you'd be to buy a skill and have it suck, especially if the only way you could get just about any skill is to buy it.

That's what I was thinking too. If you have to burn a skill point and up to 1k on each skill from now on, what incentive do you have to try different builds unless you have a lot of money and skill points and nothing better to do with them?

Thanks to everyone for bringing up so many valid points on the issue! I hope they are able to implement the skill acquisition in a way that does encourage variety in our skillbars. And I especially hope ANet is reading this since they only have 17 days left before release to implement any important changes like this

I completely agree. People, a.net is not retarded. They put a lot of thought into this game. I'm sure that everything will work out. Quit complaining about a game that isn't even out yet (and which you all know you are still going to buy anyway...)

It's not our fault that their official responses to Q&A have stated they are changing a core aspect of the game in a way that seems bad. They even said they are changing it to "encourage build variety" when it seems to encourage the opposite. So it's not like people are reacting to a rumor, this news comes from ANet and we are providing feedback and opinions in response to it. They have said "This is how it will be" and we are saying "hey we do (or do not like that)". With just over two weeks until the game is out, it's not like they're talking about things that might go into chapter 3 or things that we'll see in a few months, this is something that they have confirmed will be in the game when we get it in 17 days.

I think of it like the attribute point refunds system, it seemed like a good idea since you wouldn't have to completely delete your character to modify your attributes that you chose, but with community feedback they made the attribute point system even better and gave us the system we have now. It seems like they are intending to encourage variety but are instead going to cause inconveniences when there are better ways to change the skill acquisition system.

I really can't say I care about this change. I mean, don't we already only buy certain skills? I certainly don't buy every new skill I come across...that'd be a huge waste of my money. You buy what you need to improve your build when you come across it, and then later when you have the money and want to finish up getting your skills, you'll come back an get it.

This changes nothing.

Just stop buying what you don't need. Its like the Storm Bow I bought last night...after modding it, it now has the same exact stats as my Gargash's Recurve Bow. Just only buy what you need to improve your build, and when you've got some extra moneys lying around and nothing to do, you can run around to skill trainers and buy skills you need, or go around capturing those last few elites.

This is going to suck, my PvE ranger has spent about 90 of 92 points, repeating those damn galen trask quests is going to drive me crazy, then when they tell the community there won't be any way to get new skills except buying, I was pissed, where's the logic in doing that??

This.... doesn't sound good. The only reason I did PvE for the 3rd and 4th time was to do the skills quests and get skillpoints.

Hopefully it's not as bad as I fear.

I do not like the way this change is sounding.

Mostly because of the loss of the variety of rewards for performing a quest - getting XP for a skill point or some faction is just boring - particularly later in the game. I like the interest of getting some skills or a weapon from doing a quest - in addition to the fact that it is much easier on your pile of gold and allows you to save skill points for the elites.

Perhaps if they want to add variety to builds they could have skill quests which have a pool of skills you could pick as the reward (although I suspect people will still end up running the same sort of builds as each other), or it looks at the skills you have on the character and randomly picks some you haven't got yet.

Asumming skills in Factions are gonna be hard to get by quest in PvE is bascially gonna affect either: GWP toon moving to GWF to get faction skills, or Faction created toon starting out in Cantha playing the PvE from the beginning.(which i assume the former is what we are more concerned about or is in question).

What this translates bascially is that Anet telling old timers from GW:P to del our toons and make new ones in Cantha, or we better start farming gold and skill points to get the new skills in Cantha. So much for rewarding brand loyalty.

PvPer wont care that much at all since it wont be as hard for them to unlock those skills from the PvP component of the game w/o having to touch PvE at all. Perhaps with Factions, Anet is finally making the push to make their game more PvP focus even more obvious.

If it is gonna be applied universally to both ascended toons from GWP and new ones from GWF, its gonna create quite the unbalance that ANet is always sprouting against.

Its skill not time spent playing that matters the most? GG ANET GG.

Despite my tone in this or most of my Faction related post, i am pro Anet (otherwise i wont be here posting anyways) but merely concerned at the lack of clear concise information that fail to address players concerns and when new information are released, it seems more questions are raised from each of the answers we get...

Actually, it takes much longer to get skills in PvP than in PvE, at least in Prophecies, so PvPers do care.

I think you got that wrong. People who played through GW Prophecies would only use skills that they got from quests. Those were pretty much all the skills that you could get before the Desert.

Now, though, you'll be able to aquire skills from the Skill Trainer and cap them earlier instead. Much like how we did in the PvE preview.

If this really does suck like everyone thinks its going to then maybe they can look into my skill refund idea.
Basically you select a skill and give it to the skill trainer for one skill point. You lose 1k but at least you save some time on getting skill points for the skills you do want.

It's still limited by which skills skill vendors sell, unless from the get-go all vendors sell all the skills.

I still resent that there's that skill trainer in the Ring of Fire that sells ALL the skills, eliminating at least three towns from being exploration destinations.

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I was refering to the situation where a PvP player from GWP would link Factions and import characters over and those players who have UAS in GW:P will still have faction left over and banked in to bring over to unlock those new skills they want for PvP asumming they also did so for both of the preview events.

The PvPer compared to the above PvE player, who has ascended toons in GW:P to import over to Faction and finding themselves having the need to spend countless plats and possiblity time (hours?) in specific missions having to cap some skill which isnt even an Elite, playing the PvE mission is bad enough in GW:P having some players who join parties quiting after they cap the Elite they want screwing over their teammates doing the mission by leaving. This is gonna be a even bigger problem in Factions if we are expected to cap normal skills apart from Elites from those mission.

Hope this clears the air abit about what i am talking about which in that sense would seem to provide PvPers easier access to the said skill than PvEers who have to cap that same skill for different toons if they need it for a build.

Edit for spelling

I think this is an AWESOME idea.

Ill get right to acquiring all the skills right as soon as I find that Ethereal Tyreal's Might Ive been looking for.

Well, as some people have said, we don't really know for sure how the game is going to look until we actually play it. That being said, i think it makes sense to have our voices heard when we don't like something. Anet keeps on saying that it checks fan boards often and therefore, if that are really doing things this way, and they see a bunch of their potential customers complaining about it, they might change it. we'll just have to see now won't we.

Lacking skills only promotes FOTM builds... Here's why:

If you went to HA with a build that was not included in the current FOTM, even it if were an ingenious new build that would soon impact the metagame, you simply will not find a non-guild group willing to accept you. Since generally, all PUG's run FOTM builds, you must make a FOTM build to join one. If you think Ranger Spike, Rainbow Spike, Euro Pressure, and cursed IWAY are only products of uncreativity and unskillfulness, you are mistaken.

Arena.Net is only forcing players into using the same builds as everyone else to have a chance of competing at all. If this is, as we have interpreted it: more grind, then the game has just fallen into oblivion.

If the grind is, of all things increased for Chapter 2, I can gaurantee I won't be suckered for Chapter 3 (even if the PvP remains amazing enough for me to slog through the grind, PvPers will leave beause of it, and no new ones will join.)


We can only hope this is some terrible mistake not on the behalf of A.Net.