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

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.