Is GWs the only RPG not to use a skill tree?

I'm just curious about something. Is Guild Wars the only RPG/MMO on the market or to have existed which hasn't used a skill tree?

Ive played a few other MMO's or RPGs and they all require you use the typical "skill tree" system of restricting skills to levels and entering points at certain levels to unlock further levels, which ultimately sets your build in stone and doesnt allow for real variation (or it costs to change).

Where as GWs on the other hand just lets you buy or unlock any skill you wish, at any level and use when ever you want.

I'm playing hellgate at the minute and it uses this typical system and my build is now set in stone as you cant currently change it at alll. I messed up a few builds on previous attempts and had to delete the char and start again.

The same goes for WoW to an extent, although you can reset your skills but it costs you!

If im right in thinking Anet's game is the only one which doesnt use a skill-tree system, I think they hit the nail on the head by scrapping that. It's much more fun and offers a lot more variety.

Lets just hope the same system moves over into GWs 2!

Sorry, random post!

probably not.

Lots of RPGs dont use skill tree thingie. Its usually more tactical ones (which also offer a lot more character development freedom).

Skill tree in RPG is usually poor excuse for ballancing (they have IMBA skill at end of tree and tree makes sure that you cant get more of IMBA skills.) or for character "integrity" (water mage cannot use fire, ffs!)

Pleaase, GW is no RPG.

I dunno about WoW. Its much more forgiving than GW. Like when I go disarmed by a bigger than usual baddie and I had 0 in Unarmed. I just went to the noob area and punched wolves and bandits for like 20 mins and my Unarmed became 50. I was also able to put my weapon classes in the 70's(Dagger, Sword, and Crossbow) in a day. This was on the 10 day trial just so you know. In GW, if you're not an experienced player you often buy the wrong skills early and are forced to play through the game with them until you have $$ to buy new, better skills. When I got to the Crystal Desert my bar was [skill=text]Rotting Flesh[/skill], [skill=text]Shadow of Fear[/skill], [skill=text]Suffering[/skill], [skill=text]Faintheartedness[/skill], [skill=text]Parasitic Bond[/skill], [skill=text]Empathy[/skill], [skill=text]Chaos Storm[/skill], and [skill=text]Resurrection Signet[/skill] due to the fact that I'd spent alot of money on horrible skills and was too poor to afford any more. 1k was serious bank back then. In WoW, you just have to stand around and do something repeatedly(aka grind) and your skill increases. I remember spending 5 mins making Heavy Linen Bandages so I could qualify for Journeyman First Aid. Sadly I didn't have enough money to buy it and my trial ended the next day.

Flyff has a skill tree, but it do not limit what you can learn, It only makes harder to learn the next thing, you can get anything.

In Ultima Online you can max anything, but you will lose skill if you stop doing something, so it's more or less the same.

GW it's the best. Anyone can learn anything. No re-rolling.
I hate re-rolling.

Even if you have a tree, once you reach certain point, getting new skills or increasing an attribute should cost the same and be infinite until maxing them all.

I hove they make GW2 so you can max all attributes, (get up to 200 to use in PvP, but being able to put all skills to 12 in PvE, like some monsters can already)

Most games in the RPG genre aren't RPGs. Your point?

GW isn't what you can call a real rpg
it's not even a MMORPG
anyways
GW just lets you buy skills and then use them in all variations you want
a skill tree such as the one in Dark messiah was quite uhm hatefull

You had not found out that you actually get most of the Prophecy skills as quest rewards?
Anyway, most people do not have very efficient skill bars in the beginning, at least not if starting from scratch and learning by trial and error.

However, in the early history of GW you had to earn points during leveling, that was charged every time you changed build. Removing that changed the whole concept of skills in GW, imho.

Regards,
Cloudbunny

Well, it is actually less forgiving in long run because change of build costs money so build improvement always costs something.

In gw you just buy skills and they are yours forever, so while entrance barrier might be high-ish, in long run it is grindless.

Btw: your "desert bar" looks like actually decent one if one takes into account prohecies only skills and how early it is in game. Not good example how gw style debilitates you.

In gw you can make make bad chocies early on but it is so easy to undo them ... Coprate it to "set to stone" style games where you have to reroll character because of misclick.

imo the Skill Tree System is much better, because its ordered and and brings the player on planning, how you develop best your character.

and then it should be resetable, either without any cost, so just for free, or for a very small fee, nothing ridiculous insane high priced what raises more and more, so farer you are, until it becomes unpayable ...


I love it also, and i hope so, that this will be part in GW2's new Skill System, that players don't raise the strength of their skills by just increasing attribute points ..

no, players should use the skills which they want to become stronger, to receive experience with them and then leveling their skills up ...
By leveling skills up, then the character will also learn new skills for example.

Guild Wars used to have "attribute refund points" which basically limited the amount of levels you could swap around at any given time. Refund Points were regained by gaining experience.

They deleted that pretty fast though, and i still consider it one of the best updates ever made.

GW is probably not the only rpg without a skill-tree, and GW doesn't need a skill-tree either.

I remember doing that on D2 once, got my necro to level 80ish until i found out i wasted 20 points on skills that were never used and useless.

I see a bunch of nerds bringing up a semantical argument over what an RPG is, when they keep forgetting it's literally just a roleplaying game; which in turn is pretty much any game where you are pretending to be someone.

Also, might I add, most GW skills aren't bad at all. Bad skills are generally only bad when they aren't given good synergy with others. Or when it's a really underpowered elite.

Not wanting to detract from my own post, but I would love to know how you can argue that Guild wars does not involve "role playing" a character!

You do realise RPG stands for "ROLE PLAYING GAME"... so if pve isnt role playing then what is it?

Are you not required to role a character from lvl1 to lvl20 and play them through a storyline to do it?

It may not a traditional MMO, but it is an RPG!

Anyway, back to my thread....

There is one prime example:

1. Ultima Online,
even older than EverQuest, probably the first "MMORPG" ever.

It had a point system and no classes. It still exists today, but is quite dated despite a recent graphics update. But I wonder why the system is not more popular than that of EverQuest. You could really craft things, chop trees, build your own house and things like that.

About the system:
You have 700 points, and can train a skill to 100 points. You can wield any weapon that you want, but if you do serious damage depends on your training. No char levels are present in this system.

So you can have:
100 Swordsmanship
100 Parry
100 Magery
100 Anatomy (boosts damage)
100 Healing (to use bandages)
and 200 pts split between fishing, cooking and other things.

Or you had a crafter: 100 Tailoring, 100 Blacksmithing, 100 Mining...


Later on an addition was made: You got a 50%+ failure chance for attack spells if you wore heavy armor like plate mail, to stop the so called "tank mages", heavily armored wizards with an halberd. :>

You trained your skills from 0 to 100 by: Fighting ever more difficult opponents with your sword for example. After a while you could not learn anyting from killing chipmunks, then you fought Skeleton Knights, and later on a Cyclops or Troll.

The beauty of the system was that your char could untrain skills - you locked your favorite skills at 100, and released others that you want to unlearn. Then you could start training Axe Mastery and Lumberjacking instead of Swordsmanship.


The older D&D adventures used a class system with levels, but you could set attribute points for strength and things like that manually. WoW took that away, they are distributed automatically to prevent people from investing into the "wrong" attribute.

2. EVE ONLINE
Then there is also EVE online, where skills are trained in real time, even when you are offline. You can always learn one skill at a time. At first it takes minutes, then hours, then days, then almost a month.

You can learn basic things very quickly, but then you have to specialize, which takes a lot of time.

So you can already be a better pilot or gunner than someone who started two years ago, but have no clue about asteroid mining.

EVE has become very popular nowadays. It is a also a Scifi MMORPG, rather than a typical fantasy one.



Interestingly, level based and grind heavy EverQuest derivates have become almost synonymous with the term MMORPG. People are just too fascinated by bigger numbers, higher levels and rare uber items. The problem of the level system is manifold, high level characters can usually totally forget about 90% of the world that is lower level so that it is no longer interesting and so on. It also requires constant expansions and higher levels, causing a lot of power creep and balancing for PvP is extremely difficult.

WoW PvP is a lot gear based and some classes have definite advantages one versus one. But at its core it is a PvE game based on the "Raid" philosophy, some of the lead designers are former Everquest cracks, so it does not matter so much as in GW (Where actually most are PvE players as well, and PvP gets a lot of love regarding balancing, but all content goes to PvE. I always wondered how GW managed to survive this discrepancy and do well).

Hacking monsters in a blah storyline before moving on to PvP or farming.

If GW was an RPG I would have killed polo joker, defeated the charr, livia would not be one of my heroes, and neither would what's his face charrboy.

Hmm. Guild Wars does have skill trees, however. They're just not laid out as trees in a graphical interface. There's no bridging needed between trees. I mean, look at it - each primary class has 3 "trees" and a class-specific tree. Tell me how that's not identical to anything else?

Because a skill tree demands you unlock one skill before you can access another..usually!.

In guild wars, you can....

1)buy the core skills pack and instantly buy ANY normal skill you wish from any trainer the minute you create your character.

2) Or be run to high end areas and buy more powerfull skills in later zones, provided you can get there!

...I dont quite understand how you think the skill system in GWs is skill tree-ish! Yes you have different branches for skills on each profession, like earth, fire, water and air but one isnt dependant on the other or how points you have in certain places.

You can use any normal skill at any level and at point.

So you dont consider it an RPG simply because you cant take the story as far as YOU lke?

And not everyone moves onto pvp after pve! I didnt until I just got really bored, but others dont.

See thats all far too complicated for me. I like a nice simple game I can pick up, play, get into and put down. I dont like spending hours or days or months getting a skill or spell sorted out.

QTF

GW isn't really an RPG, its more like a very simple card game (at its core)

Deck of skills, bring 8, etc etc. Rock paper scissor it out.