1 week of Factions: making people buy skills is the stupidest move ever?

What do you really think about the new skill system in Factions?

IMO it's crap. Althou I stated it that people will pay attention to what skills they use/buy I start thinking it's crap.

First of all, it doesn't help casual players who can't afford sh*t with this new system. And just doing the quests and trying to buy skills with the money they get from drops and quests rewards will take some... ages.

Let's face it. If you were poor Tyrian before Factions, you are screwed. If you have only Factions and you don't want to ebay some money, again you're screwed.

I personally spent like 400k on skills, armour and stuff... I didn't buy any factions items. Just got an imperial armor for my assasin, that's all. The rest was spent on skills, runes (grrr... lucky few who found what every1 needed) and some other stuff i can't remeber. But only esential stuff (or so i think).

Now. Knowing all the above the new skill system is mre than BS.

Gaile said somewhere that it was done to diversify builds .... or at least something similar. So that you wont be able to predict skills just from the profession combo. Something like that and i think she refered to AB, the 12v12 pvp.

Even greater BS. Since you can pring PvP only char in alliance battles, you can make whatever build you want without having to pay a penny for skills you dont have on PvE chars.
Also you can't really show off in AB, so noone will really want to bring a PvE char that is inferior to a PvP-only character.


So what was really the point in making us pay for skills? I understand that it's an expansion like thing and most of the mainland was made for lvl 20 tyrian characters. But why not make the island closed to tryrian chars or at least block them from getting the skills as rewards from quests.

Also hardcore pvp players already have everything that counts unlocked. So GG and good thinking Anet.

I guess what Anet wants to achieve is to keep newcomers busy 6 month till ch3 comes out. In 6 month a casual mofo can gain enough xp, skill points and money to get all skills for charcater or two.


What are your toughts?

Edit:
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First of all i didn't overpay for anything. Didn't buy any weapons at all, just some runes...
Actually 2 sup dagger mastery runes, cost me 24k total (both).
Now, in the head start day on the 27th i bought every non-elite Factions only skills for all proffesions except some ritualist skills (just ran out of skills points).
That much about my expenses.

30 hours of play to unlock all non elites and getting the money, all that for 1 proffesion right?
With a daily 2 hours that's 2 weeks for a casual player. Now getting everything including elites and all skills for the secondary profession would take like how many hours?

Now. In Prophecies once you had a lvl 20 char, getting the second one to lvl 20 and unlocking skills was alot easier. In Factions i have the feeling it will be the same amount of time and same level of difficulty as for your first one. Also if you tend to be flatbroke all the time, you will need to spend 30 hours to get all non elite skills and stuff.

In Prophecies in 30 hours of play, with some running and stuff you could easily unlock all main class skills with 1/4 of the expenses.


Also I repeat, I`m not whining about anything. I had saved enough gold to be able to afford everything i needed (within reasoanble limits of course). As I said before, I`m just thinking about how others mange to survive.

Uh? Besides that this is a pointless rant.

Alliance battles are no different than any other PvP in its setup. You can use a PvE or PvP character for them.

It takes 30 hours of play to unlock all non-elites in a single profession in factions. This includes getting the money.

Quests in the city give 3k exp and 150 gold each
THat means when you get your 15k exp for a level you would have gotten 750 gold. The other 250 can be made up for items you get and sell.

Quests in Luxon or Kurzick territory give 3k exp and 250 gold or 2k exp and 150 gold. Each will leave you above 1k gold per level. The only time you should have a money problem is when you are buying your new armor after getting to kaineng city.

They give you lots of skills at the start for free.
400k? How the HELL?
I put a 25k investment into my assassin character, who is now UAS'd except Assassin's Promise. He now has 35k in his inventory and 6 skill points that I have yet to decide what to do with.
I also put a 25k investment into my ritualist who already has 2 of the 4 skill lines unlocked minus elite skills. Currently has 10k in her inventory but is not nearly finished with the game. If I didnt put the investment it would only take me longer to aquire the money and resources to get my armor. But it wouldnt have made a difference in the long run.

Eventually, you get the money. In addition challenge missions are a good place to get gold, depending on how well you do you get a lump sum of gold at the end. A pretty sizeable amount if you do well.

All in all, buying skills is far better than having to do quests for them. I dont have to worry about wasting skill points over a skill that I might later on be able to get for free. Instead I am able to buy all the skills I need for my build, and then buy extra skills as my character developes (though I am unlikely to use those skills anyway).

How you managed to spend 400k?

I've started an Ele, Me and 'sin and I haven't spent more than 50k on them, probably a lot less. 'Graduating' a char from starter isle yields some 7-9k gold depending on how much you quest around, and there are no gold sinks there (collectors for armor are easy to find and the stuff is easy to get).

With the money they've gotten from the isle, they can already afford the 'max AL' armor, or get few easy-to-get collector items for the armor. And skillcosts for new charas buying their first skills aren't that hard, 150g is enough for almost 3 skills at starting prices, and should cover atleast one to the point when player has enough to make a "build", plus all the money from the drops.

Collectors for weapons and focus usually yield very good stuff at very low price, so only gold sink for new charas would be skills, but I make more gold off the drops than the skills costs, my vault has actually gone up from 60k that I started with to 120k, granted there's a lot of crafting materials that I sold away.

I have a theory as to why the system of getting skills was changed. To sum it up: future expansions. A lot of people have complained that there are no skill quests for the rit and assassin over in Tyria. It would take quite a bit of reprogramming to change this, given that these classes did not exist when that part of the game was made, and thus there are no existing quests with the appropriate skill rewards. Now think about the new system- EVERY class can use skill points and money as rewards, so there is no re-programming needed if they add more expansions and more classes down the line. I'm guessing that, like it or not, this is probably how they will be doing skills from now on.

1K is less money than it was 10 days ago. With repeatable quests that give money rewards, the Guild Wars currency is inflating. 1k is no big deal for skills, unless of course you are over-paying for weapons nad mini-pets.

I don't know what "essential" stuff you spent your 400K on, but even with 15K armor, a full set of runes, crafting a weapon... that's not even close to 100k. So you unlocked 300+ skills in 1 week?

Personally I think this is a huge improvement to the old system. You should be able to make 1k gold easily by the time you level up. The bottleneck for unlocking skills for me in Prophecies was skill points. The new system lets you get skill points very fast. Also, I don't have to create 3 different characters to do all the skill quests, not to mention that the skill quests take quite a bit of time to do. The quests themselves were not that difficult, but there was a lot of other stuff in between that you have to get through to get the skill quests (you have to get to the desert to get the last of the skill quests). I think the unlock rate is much faster under the new system (try getting a skill point as a Mesmer in Tyria, the farming that I have to do is ridiculous and I still have to pay for the skill).

The fastest way to get skills probably is still using a 55 Monk, loading up on experience scrolls and doing troll runs. You can easily get a skill point and enough gold to cover your scrolls and 1k to buy your skill. However, the new system lets the non-farming classes have a chance at unlocking.

Well Before faction i unlocked every non-elite skills for all prof's and that was pretty hard in my eyes. u had to be over 600exp just for the skill points and it cost around 50k per char

this new system may end up killing me

I like the system so far, its very easy to gain skill points even with only 500kxp, I like it how you get alot of skill points because you can unlock pretty much everything on just one char for most or important professions, rather than making a pvp char and not using you pve char that you worked so hard on but cant use him since he doesnt have enough skill points to unlock the required skill. It does cost a lot but that doesnt bother me.

This is what happens when farming wealth becomes a central aspect of a game the developers need to keep you playing.

If you think the new system is a bad idea, blame those people who only play Guild Wars to grind out wealth.

I've heard "repeatable quests" before... which quests can you do over? Maybe I haven't gotten far enough yet.

Gold sinks implemented everywhere.

I haven't had any problems, more gold is going into my pocket than ever before. Gold from quests, gold from missions, gold from lots of drops (there are honestly a lot more items dropping than there used to be). I now don't have to buy materials, because they drop in stacks of more than 10, I can sell those too. I can salvage for more than 5 raw materials an item. It's so easy to make money actually, that I have spent a heap on skills for my ranger (1k each, because he's an ex-proph character) and bought him a new armor set and I'm now 5k in the black.

The thing that makes that so impressive? I started with 500g and a superior salvage kit.

You get nearly as many free skills in Factions in the first hour of play as doing all the skill quests in Prophecies.. plus you get skill points hella fast, and if you need to complain that 1k is a lot for a skill, then you must be throwing away your money.

By the time I hit the mission with the dragon chase, I had 70+ plats from playing through the npc given quests, I had collectors max armour..

People farmed like mad before factions in order to buy everything they could, then turn around and complain that theres nothing left to do and that they 'beat' the game too easily.

Try playing without farmed cash or using greens from storage on the first trek through the game.

Nowhere near. And Prophecies makes you feel you earned them.

Hmm, I've spent less than 50k for my assassin...

and I wasted 30k on two pieces of imperial armor. Honestly, you don't HAVE to buy 15k armor...
Skills are pretty cheap - you just need to plan better. My next skill will still cost only 475 gold. You wasted your gold buying a bunch of skills you won't use... gg you
Runes? I have 15 dagger mastery... I can wait until runes are slightly more plentiful for a tiny boost of damage that sup rune will do. I paid 5k for major.

Bwahaahaha

Right... The thing about the new system is that not everyone is a clone. I hated having to wait until most of the game was done to be able to trap as a ranger, and not having anything but fire magic available essentially and so on. Factions is great in that you can simply get the skills you want. So much nicer.

.... because wanting to own all the skills, in order to be flexible and able to experiment, is crazy. Silly PvEers--if you want to unlock skills, get Balthazar faction! Your PvE doesn't need skills!

-_-

Ya know, I can't help but think that making people buy the bulk of their skills isn't effective at, as the OP related, keeping builds diverse and unpredictable. Rather, instead of letting players have many skills to experiment with, they're only slowing the process down by making sure we can't get so many skills quickly. Instead, we must play through quests and missions and slowly add skills to our repitoire one by one. In this way, someone who -may- have been fooling with their skills late one night will not be able to make a build they could have otherwise; or someone who, reviewing all the skills from a Priest of Balthazar, sees 2 or 3 or 4 possible ideas will have to purchase many skills (which probably = many platinum) simply to ty them out.

"GG you", huh? I'm glad one or two specific builds worked the entire game for you. The rest of us want the freedom to try six or ten, without having to grind or play FedEx for them. I know that a few of the skills in Guild Wars seem mostly useless, but the bulk of them have a home in -some- type of build. Is it so insane to expect players to want access to them, to experiment at will?

Or does ANet not have confidence in their new profession being otherwise sufficient to keep us occupied until the next expansion?

I stopped running pve when I realized that there aren't going to be any more skill quests.

I play GW for pvp. I don't play to grind out skill points, gold to pay for skills that I need unlocked for pvp, armor/weapons to be able to grind those skills, etc. I dislike having to pve in order to pvp. It was a worthwhile trade off, imo, in Prophecies, as the skill quests could be knocked out faster than I could get the faction to open the skills.

Not interested in grinding the wealth to open up two full classes of skills at the skill trainer.

Patience is the key here. Do you need ALL assassin skills? Do you REALLY need the sup. runes which were hard to get in the first week?

If you had a character in Tyria, you already have most weapons you'll need, or can find a collector that has. Cantha has many collectors and some have some VERY nice items.

Skills.. read through the description, see what would fit into your skill bar, buy the ones you think are necessary, leave the rest till you have money. Maybe this way, people will actually know what build they're playing instead of sticking random skills into their bar and hoping for the best.

btw, when Prophecies came out, wasn't there a problem with getting materials/runes to a even worse extend to what we saw when factions first came out? How do you think they coped back then, or when skills weren't capped at 1k each?

Blah, blah, blah this system is like 6+ months old. Think before you buy and save money, you can only have 8 skills at a time so it's rather obvious that you don't need to buy them all at once. The system is rather annoying if you are after unlocks but it's still better than farming RA for 2k faction per hour.

This is a smart move- you can't have all the skills so you have to think and see if you will really need them, this forces people to actually come out with their own builds which is probably very frustrating to most of the PvE crowd.

Agreed, we are having way to many spam threads on buying skill points. Before Factions people were buying skills left and right for 1 plat a skill.

Money is really MUCH faster in Cantha than in Tyria, or rather, the high level play comes much earlier in Cantha than in Tyria. Lvl10 character can pull in similar amounts of cash as an lvl20 tyrian doing missions, if not more. As soon as you get on the main land, the money is ample.

Anet said lets make less skills in quests and lets give gold.

So instead of getting a skill that you might not want from a quest you get a gold to buy a skill YOU want. What is so bad about that?

ok, and the fact that you can now only 20 mins into the game have a good look at a load of skills and already afford a few of them and have the skill points to buy the bloody skills is a bad thing???

WTF They've gotten rid of grind, the only real expense now is the cap sigs, you actually have a choice on wether to buy a bloody skill or not now, UAS is not needed on normal skills, both for pve and pvp, all you need is the elites!

They needed a money sink... this is a good one...

It has taken me from ~900K to ~600K for my six characters. As I finish the progression I will still be able to build up the money though.

Wasn't this game supposed to be about equality for casual players and hardcore players? Not about grind, not about time spent?

Argue all you want, but it's a lot cheaper and a lot faster to get skills in Prophecies than in Factions. Why did they change this? Why did they feel the need to add more grind to a game that's supposed to be about the opposite?

OK, 2 reasons... This was done for 2 simple reasons...

1/. The skill aquisition is now on par with Balth Faction from PvP and so equal in time for PvP players to gain skills unlocks...

2/. To give PvE players more choice over the starting skills they use on new toons, instead of using teh same presear skill set all the way to at least Yaks bend if not before that...

if you think thats slower, you are in serious need of a reality check... Most pvp players i know In Gmae are actually happy to play PvE to get skill unlocks for thier account as its so much bloody quicker than before and they get the choice straight away instead of a good 25 to 50 hours into the game

and one other quick point, all you need to do is play factions through and you've gained enough skill points and gold to buy all the prophecies skills from the skill trader in Lions Arch and thats just a 2 minute boat journey that gives you another skill point and 1k exp, plus some gold aswell for your trouble

Maybe for you who apparently knows exactly where all the quests are and the fastest way to beat them but I can tell you back when I was new and playing through Prophecies the skill quests absolutely sucked. They were annoying to find, boring, painful, in some cases way too long, and on top of all that there was the paranoia before buying any skill from a trainer to make sure I couldn't get the skill from a quest somewhere I haven't found because I couldn't afford to waste skill points (which were in very short supply back then and even now aren't exactly abundant for Prophecies only characters).

In short, I hope I never see another skill quest again. I will gladly pay 1,000 gold per skill to not have that and despite doing exactly that I've had a net gain in Factions of about 30,000 gold and that's without farming anything (although I did do some zones multiple times to capture all the elites I could find)

My only complaint about the whole thing is that there's no reward to using a Signet of Capture to capture a normal skill, which could potentially provide an alternative to those who think buying them all from trainers is too much.

Is anyone aware that you get a good dozen or so highly useable skills from quests for free right in the monestary? Primary and secondary?

Take those free skills, add in the skill points and gold for the quests, and you are not losing out in the current system. You actually gain... you don't get the "Otyugh's Cry" class of unused skills for free, you actually get pretty good ones.

It's clear why they did this, and I agree with their reasoning. However, I feel there are simply too many money-sinks. Max armor costs considerably more than Droknar's(tons of rare materials), skills and signets of capture, guild hall NPCs, the list goes on. Unless I'm completely missing something, the amount of money-sinks far outweighs the means to make back the gold you spend. That's my only frustration with Factions; spending so much and gaining so little back. You can't always depend on carrying keys everywhere you go to make profit. I'll eventually find some way to efficiently earn gold, it's just very frustrating right now as I try to advance my many characters through the game and get them all equipped.

If you want to own a bunch of skills you won't use, thats your deal. I personally have no use for most of the assassin skills (I researched, realized my build early, bought appropriate skills).

Think of it like a warrior. If you plan on planning a hammer warrior, are you going to buy a ton of sword skills? The day may come when you want sword skills, but then you can just go buy a few real quick.

I was simply saying he wasted his money buying skills he will never use - ever.

You're right, your PvE doesn't need ALL skills, just the useful ones.

Not at all. The fact that 1 hour into the game and you've got every skill you're not paying for is.

I'm not familiar with the term UAS, but from context it seems you're refering to a capture signet. You didn't need one in Prophecies either, since the introduction of the skill trainer in Ember Light Camp, with all non-elite skills.

You say that they have removed the grind. However, now it's grinding money, grinding skill points, grinding for the materials for armor. I certainly don't have enough cash left, not that I was rich before by any means, to buy another max stat set of armor. I don't intend to get another character to the point where they need it though, due to the lack of skill quests.

Perhaps I missed the free money/armor vendor, though.

I much prefer not being forced to take whatever skill they give us through skills quests and much prefer being able to choose to buy whatever skill I want. I cant believe some of you are complaining about having to choose your skills (the ones not complaining about the lack of gold I mean)

And if you've spent 400k, I can't believe you're actually complaining about a lack of gold. Especially since you've spent 75k total on a set of 15k armor. I have actually made more gold than I spent while playing Factions, WITHOUT farming at all.

However I do agree that the gold reward could be increased slightly with some of the quests. 150 gold for a quest reward seems pretty pitiful. But overall, this new system is far better. Not everyone wants their hand held through the game and being given specific skills at specific points in the game. Some of us like the freedom of choosing skills.

in one beta event to test all skills they had an *Unlock All Skills) button.

when GW was released there was a howl of outrage from the pvp crowd that they couldnt have all skills instantly as they had in that one beta test event.

UAS unlock all skills

Armor or runes have no place in this argument. Prophecies and Factions have the same system. When Prophecies first came out, steel cost 2-3k gold. It has always been the same, items (in this case, materials and runes) in high demand costs more.

One major complaint in the old system was the "grind" of having to create at least 3 different characters to unlock skills. The current system addresses that, since a single character can unlock at the same speed now.

Another complaint about the old system is that many of the skills from the skill quests were useless in both pvp and pve, and it severely restricts what type of builds you can have, the new system addresses that too.

There is a still grind in the new system. Yes, that is true. Do you want to finish the game in 1 week and then throw it away? In the old system, many of the skills you unlock through skill quests were not that useful. In the new system, all the skills you unlock are the most useful, since you get to choose. So you can actually create a competitive PvP character much faster under the new system if you choose to unlock stuff through PvE.

The new system costs more gold (since you can think of the skill quests as giving you 1k gold and 1 skill point, if you assume that all skills are equally valuable to you), but much less experience (since sig cap and quests gives a ton more experience). I don't know about you, but I always had a much larger problem with getting skill points than getting gold. I can get 1k gold in a 5 minute farm run. A skill point takes much longer. For non-farming classes, such as a Mesmer, getting 15k experience takes forever. You can actually unlock skills quickly now without a 55 Monk build.

Under both systems, the fastest way to unlock skills is still farming with the 55 monk and lots of experience scrolls. Farming gets you enough gold to buy scrolls and you should have more than 1k extra by the time you gain a skill point. So if you are just concerned with unlocking rate, the fastest known way has not been changed at all.

Yep. I'm not buying any skills for Core professions until I can eek my way back to Tyria to do some of the few quests available to them. I hear tell that for some reason all of the Ascalon and Shiverpeak quests are closed to them!

Or its the best move ever...Because they give you so much cash I got all the skills I wanted 5 times faster.

Please leave out quests in ch3...quests are lame.

eh.. play almost any other mmorpg or orpg or whatever you want to call it.. most games remotely similar to this require you to buy your spells or skills... Personally, I like it.

I have every nonelite skill unlocked, and it cost me absolutely ZERO gold out of my own storage. I even ended up making money from gathering all the skills the way I did. For this reason I like the new skill acquisition system.

I do have a problem with the elites. SoCs should be capped at 500 gold. They always used to cost less than normal skills, and there's no reason they should have been changed way back when. It's a pain gathering 1k gold just to go buy a SoC because I'm too cheap to spend all the gold I've horded in my storage. The elite unlocks are considerably faster this time around though. This last weekend alone I capped 32 elites, while I took my monk through the storyline to Unwaking Waters.