Curse

Zsig · Jun 22, 2007, 04:59 AM // 04:59

This is a compilation of suggestions concerning GW2, most precisely discussing how the Skill system should work, and thus leading to a brief discussion of Professions, Races, and Equipment (?) since they relate directly to Skills.

Keep in mind that the numbers (and names) adopted here are only illustrative, so that the person reading it may have a base of comparisson to GW1, since this is a game we all know. So, when replying to this post remember that the whole point is the idea behind it and not names, number and conventions.

The Skill Bars

Every character should have 3 distinct Skill Bars:

-The Profession Skill Bar (6-9 slots, i’d say 7), which will include Skill from both your Primary and Secondary professions only, as well as Master Skills (discussed below);

-The Item (or Equipment) Skill Bar (2-3 slots, i’d say 2), which includes generic Item Skills available for every profession, some example Skills includes the many Signet skills (Healing Signet, Ress Signet, Cap Signets, and so on) as well as new types of Item Skills, like Warp/Teleport Skills and Artifact Skills (I’ll discuss them later);

-The Racial Skill Bar (1-2 slots, i’d say 1), which includes the unique maneuvers of every race (brief ideas and examples below).

Following the numbers I suggested, there’d be skills using the keys from 1 to 0 (1-7 regular skills, 8 and 9 item skills, and 0 for the racial skill) for a total of 10. Which is fair enough IMO.

Skill Types

Following the lines of GW1 every Skill will be entitled one or more types and subtypes:

-[Skill],[Shout],[Stance],[Spell], [Hex], [Enchantment], along with others I don’t comment, are all common to us, and they’d keep sort of what they are right now, so that i don’t need to go into much detail.

-[Elite] will also remain as it is right now, although the limit of 1 Elite per skill bar still apply, and in this case it applies to all bars, which means, doesn’t matter in which of the 3 Skill Bars they belong to, it’s still Elite, and thus you’re using the one allowed to you.

-[Master] new type of skill that represents your combination of profession’s (primary/secondary) unique abilities. As well as the Elite, you have a limit on the number of Master Skills you can carry, and this number is 2-3 (3 suits well). (More information below).
(Note: one skill could be both Master AND Elite at the same time, counting towards the limits as both an Elite skill and as a Master skill)

-[Artifact] is a type of skill granted by rare (or unique) magical items (weapon, armor, etc), and they are equipped on the Item Skill Bar. Once the item is equipped the skill will be available for use on your Skill Tab (that one that appears when you hit [K] ), by unequipping the item will also unequip the skill (It might be a good idea to rule that you can use such skills as long as you have the item on one of your weapon sets though).

-[Signet] , which are common to ALL professions, dealing with everything. This sort of represents other games’ potions. Some of them might come with a specific number of charges/uses before they expire (just like Signet of Capture, but with greater number of charges), to avoid abuses and overuses.

Considerations: Keep it clean and intuitive

Professions and Skills

Upon combining your Primary Profession with your Secondary Profession you’re now allowed to learn unique skills that you can’t learn otherwise. I’ll call these skills “Master Skills”, as i mentioned before, these skills works somewhat like elite skills meaning you can only have about 3 of them on your skill bar.

These skills unites the concepts of both your primary and secondary profession to allow you to achieve incredible results. For example a N/E could be able to make a Fire Golem, a W/E could have a Far Slash (he swings his sword, and the wind slices his foe from afar), and so on.

Also for better use of these abilities, I’d like to introduce a new mechanic refering to how Attributes works towards some of these skills, and this is Multi Linked Attributes. This mechanic gives out some oportunities of interesting combos and could work on two ways (or both):

-The skill has it’s effect based on two (or more) attributes. Each Attribute governs one (or more) variable(s) of the Skill;
-The skill has it’s effect based on one Attribute or another, whichever is higher.

I’ll give some examples:

Animate Fire Golem (Master) (Ne/Ele)
Master Spell. Exploit nearest corpse to animate a level X Fire Golem. Whenever a Fire Golem strikes, its foe is set on fire for Y seconds. When the golem dies it explodes dealing Z fire damage to adjacent creatures.
(X= Death Magic dependant variable; Y and Z= Fire Magic dependant variable)

Prismatic Blast (Master) (Ele/Ele)
Master Spell. You launch a missile of energy that combines all the elements dealing X fire damage, Y cold damage, Z lightining damage, and W earth damage. This spell causes exhaustion.
(X= tied to Fire Magic; Y= tied to Water Magic; Z= tied to Air Magic; W= tied to Earth Magic)

Illusionary Fireball (Master) (Me/Ele)
Master Spell. You create a huge projectile made of the illusion stuff that resembles a ball of fire that deals X damage. The damage dealt by this spell deals BOTH “illusory” damage (mind affecting) as well as elemental damage.
(X is tied either to Fire Magic or Illusion Magic, whichever is higher)

Remember that not every Master Skill needs to be “multi-linked”.

Also note, that while/when choosing your secondary profession, you have the option to not chose any, essentially chosing the same one again, so that, a Elementalist that choses elementalist as a secondary profession (E/E) , would instead just be an Elementalist. And, as much as it means that, this option wouldn’t give him a second list of skills to chose from, it would still make him able to access the most powerful spells that only a “pure” Elementalist could learn (see the Prismatic Blast above as an example).

I’d like to add, as a personal opinion, that the professions on GW2 should be kept as basic/generic as possible for the above to work properly. As much as i’d like to post my own ideas for such profession concepts, i’ll try to keep on-topic.

Considerations: At first the Primary/Secondary mechanic of GW1 sounds amazing, but the more you play, the more you realize that most builds you come up doesn’t need the secondary profession (except for a couple skills that doesn’t need to scale), as it feels like a waste to spend points on other attribute lines just for one or two skills, which then encourages specialized builds. By adding blended skills and multi linked skills, you have options to customize your character the way you want it to be, and not just because it works better. While it might feel that this is hard to balance, it is worth mentioning that, it’s even easier, since all the troublesome skills would be alocated into specific lists, consider the following example:
Boiling Blood (Master) (Ele/Ne)
Master Spell. Your blood boils, increasing your attunement to the elements that surrounds you. All your elemental attributes are increased by X for Y seconds.

Now combine this with Prismatic Blast which I gave above and what you get? Yeah right, but since they’re both Master Skills from different combinations one can’t have both. And that’s what makes it easier to balance, keeping the troublesome skills on a “safe place”. Finaly, i’d like to say that the skill system along with the Primary/Secondary profession system together provides the coolest features of GW, and changing that so drastically so that it doesn’t “feels” like GW anymore is not a good thing to do (at least not to me). So I say, stick with it!

Item/Equipment Skills

These are the skills that everyone has available for use regardless of profession/ race/ whatever, some might come with charges to avoid mindless spamming like resrrects and the likes. Once wasted you go back to town and buy the skill again (just like Signet of Capture).

Nothing much besides what i meantioned earlier under “Skill Types” with Artifacts and Signets. Maybe other types could work as well, like runes that you drawn on the ground that teleports you to some given location and have a longer “casting time” so that you can’t use them on the heat of a battle.

The Artifact Skills would work somewhat as i mentioned above, they’d give an extra flavor to that extremely tough boss, and would work as an extra “unique” ability for a “green” weapon (or even armor since we don’t know how they’re going to work anyway). So, hum, this guy, “Brobolin, the Merciful”, could have a sword “Blade of Mercy”, that when equipped allows it’s wielder to use it’s unique skill “Merciful Strike” (*smacks head*

) which deals an huge amount of damage on the target when he’s close to die (similar to Final Thrust). Such powerful skills could have or not effects tied to specific Attributes, that would vary accordingly to the given skill.

Also, some “special” equipment skills might exist, powerful ones, Elite ones, and thus they obey all rules for Elite skills.

Considerations: On some interviews we see the devs leading us to believe that GW2 will be more “soloable” (giving power and survivability and removing heroes), and for that to happen we need tools to survive, every character needs access to such tools on an equal basis. So it feels right to me to use an approach like that.

Races and Skills

Every Race should have skills for every profession, at least 2-3 of them, and possibly some Elites.

The only racial ability we got so far is the Norn ability to shapechange to a Bear-like warform, but it’s also been said that Norns worships some animals instead of Gods (being the Bear their greatest one), but it doesn’t necessarily means that only the Bear confers them with abilities, or that the only “racial ability” of Norns is their ability to shapechange, they could have skills like “Eagle Eyes Shot” for rangers, “Death Omen” given by the raven for necromancers, and so on. This would mean that every race would then have several abilities instead of just one, and that these abilities are tied to Attribute lines of those Professions (Bearform is tied to Strength for instance).

So, considering this, and that every Race would have then 2-3 Skills per profession, being some of them elite skills, it would be fair to give the characters at least one extra skill slot for the Racial Skills.

Considerations: The way to add Races in GW2 is to avoid innert/passive buffs/nerfs. Also, they can’t be left with only a couple of abilities for just one or 2 professions, which would lead to total discrimination of a given race using a certain profession. (For example, if the Norn had only the ability to use the bear shape, then noone would want a norn in their group unless he’s a Norn Warrior).

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Notes:
This is my first post in this forum, I often post on the other one, so, sorry if i’m posting this on the wrong place, i’ve checked the GW2 Suggestions Thread, but it feels kinda “widespread” with discussions regarding everything on GW2, though if any moderators feels like moving my post I won’t mind (and i’m sorry), I just wanna hear some opinions about the suggestion above.

Well i think that’s all!
My apologies if I made you read through all the junk i wrote, but thank you for reading anyway.
Please do comment.

mazey vorstagg · Jun 22, 2007, 07:47 AM // 07:47

Wow, excellent ideas all round. I came up with similar ideas to this although I never posted them.

The items idea is very similar to WoW and it works great there so I think it's definatly something the developers could think about.

I don't agree about races though. The norn are warriors and strong, it doesn't make sense for their racial skills to not be related to warriors/sins/knights. Races should come with passive buffs as they do in every other game.
E.g

Norn +x strength
Asura +x intellect
Humans +x dexterity

or whatever. I seriously doubt that the Norn will have any other professions availible to them except warriors, rangers, healers, knights (or whatever, you get my point). All physical attackers save their priests.

The Asura on the other hand are likely to have only casting professions open to them and so it makes perfect sense for them to have a boost to stats that help in that area.

I go on to say, humans should still be able to pick all the professions but obviously a human mage will not be as a good as an Asura mage at casting. However the asura mage would not be as good with his weapon, due to the human's dexterity boost.

But, just like you said there should be skills too. The Norn can (from what we've seen) only turn into bears although it is likely that they can also assume other forms such as tiger/hawk and other vicious animals. Therefore the Norn's skills should suit their combat role, e.g their forms.

The humans on the other hand should have skills representing their diversity, ingenuity and quick thinking. For example, a skill that boosts all your stats for a time, or allows you to detect invisible foes/players.

The Asura are a casting class so it makes sense for them to have skills that only benefit casters. Similar to intensity or mana regaining boost. I have a feeling they are also good diplomats and live in a structured society so a few commanding shouts may not go amiss.

There racial skills should not be uber powerful but they ought to make a nice difference to that races lead/flagship class.

Good ideas Zsig!

Div · Jun 22, 2007, 09:51 AM // 09:51

Very good suggestions, and if they followed this along with some other suggestions around, would make GW2 very fun to play.

Free Runner · Jun 22, 2007, 12:02 PM // 12:02

I like the way you tie the spells to multiple attributes.

Though we still dont know if the attribute system is coming back do we? if it does hopefully come back i would like to see of these skills that have multiple attributes in them.

I'm not really a fan of the items that give unique skills. If it was kept to PvE only that would lighten it abit i suppose

Zsig · Jun 22, 2007, 04:28 PM // 16:28

Thanks everyone !

Quote:

Originally Posted by mazey vorstagg

I don't agree about races though. The norn are warriors and strong, it doesn't make sense for their racial skills to not be related to warriors/sins/knights. Races should come with passive buffs as they do in every other game.

Yeah, that would work, but that would encourage discrimination all over the game. Not to mention that limiting profession choices to specific races is a bad idea. Also, i haven't explained the reason behind "no innert/passive bonuses/abilities" to races, and that's because GW should be a game os skill and not encourage passive play.

I know that, as you said, "they do in every other game" , but i expect GW2 to be different from other games.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Free Runner

Though we still dont know if the attribute system is coming back do we? if it does hopefully come back i would like to see of these skills that have multiple attributes in them.

Yeah, we don't, but I wanted to give the suggestion anyway.

The thing about "weapon skills" came out while i was typing so i didn't evolve too much on the idea... so i do recognize it's kinda missing something there.

EDIT:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Free Runner

I'm not really a fan of the items that give unique skills. If it was kept to PvE only that would lighten it abit i suppose

Hum, i guess i didn't get what you're trying to say about that, (or if i was clear enough on my first post). But you're totally right about it, and not just about unique items' powers but concerning item skills as a whole. Their use in PvP would cause some problem, then I guess i could see 3 (possible) solutions to that:

disable the item skill bar when your character enters PvP
forbid some skills from that list for PvP (the same way some skills are forbidden on the PvE arenas)
make it so that those 2 slots are saved for the same skills (say, Ress Signet and another basic one) for everyone