Skill Capping = 3|_!73?

Now, if you remember me at all (In which case, you know, sorry), then you'll probably recall that I was a pretty vocal opponent of the whole elite system if not a proponent for change in the way skills were acquired, period. That's because I was, at the time, a forum rat. And you could divide the boards on just about any topic. You'd get polarized factions as Jacobins and Girondists waging eternal verbal warfare over the most minute points. And the fighting was probably three times as vicious. Fun times.

Anyway, I'm on record as thinking elite skills are a bad idea. Still do, by the way. Just an unnecessarily limiting element that adds undesirable complexity to an already dense system while throwing around degenerative power levels (You ever wonder why it seems like people from a particular class only run one or two elites while ignoring vast amounts of others, well, there's your reason.). But at this point it's just a fact of life and I don't give it much thought. Obviously.

Still, thanks to a marathon weekend of elite hunting your probably expecting me to rant and rave about them, aren't you? Tell you how frustrated I am and how perilously close I came to throwing my monitor out the window? I mean, I hate the things so capturing a grand total of 36 in 72 hours has to leave me more than a bit cross, right? Well, sorry to disappoint but I'm not going to be ranting and raving today (No more than usual, anyway. Remember, you're dealing with a crazy person here.).

Because, you know, all things considered we've got it pretty good with the current elite capturing system. Not to get all old timey on you or anything but I remember when you'd have to trek three miles in the snow – uphill, mind – and drop an item in the snow just to cap an elite. Oh, and you didn't get any XP either. And it cost progressively more XP past level 20 to get each successive skill point (15k for the first, then 16k, then 17k, then 18k, and so on stretching further and further away as you burned through the easy XP from quests and the quick skill points from missions. If you ever wonder why I have so many PvE characters, that's why – it was easier to start a new one than to keep going with an older one.). You think we had green items back in the day? Think again.

Anyone who's recently started playing the game is probably scratching their head but the fact is the way characters have gained skills let alone their elite brethren has changed considerable since I've been following the game. Which, you know, has been a long time at this point. A few years at least. Which isn't really all that long but it sure does feel like it at times. And thinking over just how skill acquisition has changed is one of the things that makes me feel old. And, well, obsolete. So, I hope you don't mind but before I get to talking about the current system, I feel like outlining what's come before.

In the beginning there was the command line. Some time later, Guild Wars was developed and people started to testplay it. As I wasn't one of those lucky few, I'm not sure exactly how things worked – just that they were really different. It's been pretty well scrubbed from the pages of instant history but I'm sure that if you were to, say, search the recesses of the interweb you might just find some old screens of the way the game used to be. And perhaps others can tell you the tale of those times but I can't because I wasn't playing. No, I first played the game later during 2004 with the E34E event. When the developers threw open the doors to the closed alpha for the entire world and invited us all inside to take a peak at their work in progress.

At that time there were no elites skills. There were just skills. And the way people would get them was through skill gems. These would be dropped by bosses whenever they were killed. They came in threes meaning everyone in the group – which, during that demo, was mostly limited to four (We basically played the first few missions in Post-Searing Ascalon although they were dramatically different.) - and were almost completely random. A Ranger boss could drop a Warrior gem and two Elementalist gems, say, and that Ele boss could cough up three Ranger gems. In town there was a gem trader and just like the materials or dye traders today their stock was entirely player driven – if no one sold them a gem they didn't have it to sell. This meant that some gems were highly prized and, thus, some skills were very difficult to get. Because with a skill gem and a skill point you could head to a skill trainer (one for each profession) who'd let you permanently learn that skill for a small fee, of course. As for impermanently learning skills the game had a “9^th slot” on your skill bar that could be filled by any skill in the game. Period. All you needed to do was double click on a skill gem and whatever skill it was for would be yours for, say, five minutes or so. Warrior/Rangers could use Elementalist skills, Elementalist/Mesmers could carry around a Monk's Resurrection, cats could sleep with dogs, it was crazy. Using a skill gem to provide a 9^th skill would drain it of its “charge” and mean you couldn't use it that way again – although you could still permanently learn that skill at a trainer (provided you were a member of that profession, of course) – unless you happened to buy an item that would recharge a gem. They worked a lot like salvage or identification kits work now.

Obviously, that couldn't last very long. Although it allowed for a lot of interesting things it had a few problems. First, it gave a big edge to people who could carry around a store of gems in their inventories. You could discharge a gem at any time whether it was PvE or PvP or whatever so someone who spent a lot of time grinding out the gold to buy a lot of gems or to kill a lot of bosses for the drops would have an advantage. Especially because a lot of skills in the game were, at that point, essentially unlinked to any attribute – like Gale. It was only later on that attribute requirements became a part of skills without scalable variables so skills that could be used without attributes were the best gems to get. There were fixes for this, of course, (Such as not allowing gem items to be used in PvP the same way you can't use candy canes or sugar rush items today.) but there was no end of concern. The other problem was that it was way too random. You had no way of telling which skill you were getting. And certain skills could be extremely hard to find or expensive to get – if, of course, people bothered to sell it off in the first place. Like, say, a Superior Vigor Rune today, a good skill gem could command a lot of money so people wouldn't even bother to sell it to the merchant because they'd get more on the open market, so to speak. Even though there was no trading system in game at the time. So there was too much viability and scarcity in the system – if you wanted a certain skill you might be very well out of luck (Imagine what would happen if, say, Shadow Prison was the rarest skill gem in the game and your guild wanted you to play a character with that skill. Or if you didn't have a guild and you just wanted to play around with it.)

Fast forward a bit to the time when I was testing the game myself and the gem system had been replaced by a three fold system. The first part were skill trainers. Just like today there were NPCs in time who teach you a skill if you had a skill point and an amount of gold (Which was trivial. It was something like a gold piece for every skill you'd learned previously.). Although the selection of skills from each trainer was vastly smaller – you'd need to hunt out a skill trainer with the right skills if you wanted something specific.

The second part was skill charms. There were crafters in town who'd make a charm from any skill that you'd learned. Each profession had different crafting requirements – Necros needed bones, Warriors iron, Rangers wood, and so on. And elites, which had been introduced by this time, cost a little bit more than “normal” skills. These skill charms could be traded to merchants (Or from them. Again having an inventory based on what players sold to them.) and others players who could use a necklace item to learn that skill for a set period of time – which I believe was about 24 hours real time. Using a charm this way would use it up and it would be gone forever. If you didn't have the skill points and didn't mind the cost – which was pretty minimal all things considered – it was a good way to use those skills. If, of course, you had the connections to get a steady supply of charms. There was also an NPC called the Exotic Skill Charm Vendor who was basically a casino with a pretty face. You wagered a certain amount of gold (25g at the time, I believe) and she'd show you three charms. One of which you could buy for another 25g. So you rolled the dice and hoped that one of those charms – which were, of course, completely random – could be sold off for more than 50g. I know some people sunk a lot of money into trying to find a particularly rare charm.

The third part were skill rings. Rare (extremely rare) drops from bosses. They worked the same as skill necklaces – you'd double click them and then click on a charm. But unlike skill charms you'd learn the skill permanently. And, without having spent a skill point. Each profession had their own ring so, as you might imagine, these were extremely rare and highly valuable commodities. And figuring out ways to easily farm bosses for this rarest of drops (By way of comparison, I soloed something like 200 bosses and got three skill rings – only one of which was the right profession for my character. And I felt pretty lucky about it.) became something of a cottage industry in the test. Although the economy was a lot more, well, friendly – you'd hear people shouting that they'd found a ring and were giving it away to someone from the right profession, for example, because there wasn't any real need for money at that point.

That lasted for a little while and had some pretty good gold sinks but, again, there were some problems. The first was that someone with connections – in other words, someone in a big guild with active members – had a big advantage over someone who wasn't. That was a problem, of course, because at the time, anyway, there was a big emphasis on leveling the playing field between “casual” and “power” gamers. “Success in Guild Wars is a result of player skill not time spent”, that sort of thing. But to get skill rings you needed to grind a hell of a lot. And even without that the skills you had were equal to the skills you'd learned plus the charms you could get your friends to craft for you. And, to top it all off, skill rings let people gain skills without spending any skill points which meant that they'd have “more” than players who couldn't afford them.

Shortly afterwards the Signet of Capture was introduced. And it's this hybrid system that people who played the early BWEs probably remember. Eventually, the whole skill charm/ring idea was phased out but it hung around for a bit. Did you know that originally the idea was that skills were stored in rings which characters would wear (A signet's a type of ring, by the way.)? That was the lore's reason for why people could only use 8 skills at a time: one for each finger (And, no, the thumbs aren't fingers.). But, in any event, the SoC that first made it into the game was in a very different shape than the one which we have today.

First, capturing a skill didn't give you any XP. That came later on. Once upon a time gaining a new skill was considered reward enough, I guess.

The most noticeable difference was that you could only capture skills immediately after they'd been used. There was none of this “kill the boss, hit the sig, and browse through the selection”. No, you had to have quick reflexes and watch their skill bar like a hawk (And skill activation bars were different at the time, too, and much less user-friendly.) and camp that skill you wanted. If you started to catch the wrong skill you had to quickly slam the cancel action button or else waste a skill point and blow your chance until you could go back to town and buy another ring.

Oh, that's right. The SoC was, itself, an elite skill and you could only slot one of it at a time. So you unless you had good reflexes you got one chance to catch a skill before you had to reload.

It was, as you might imagine, a cumbersome, annoying process that lead to such oddities as people carrying around Heal Area for the sole purpose of keeping a boss alive long enough for it to cast the skill you wanted.

And that, itself, could be a problem because sometimes those skills weren't cast very easily. I'm not just talking about a skill that could quickly be spammed over with a quick spell like, say, a boss that cast Word of Healing and Orison in rapid order – requiring you to have blazingly quick fingers to activate that signet in time. Or stances which, at the time, didn't show up on the skill activation bar so you basically had to activate and cancel, activate and cancel, and hope you got lucky to catch one. No, I mean some of the bosses were bugged. I believe it was Battle Rage that required an exploit to get the boss to pop it off in the first place. You had to drop a item – any item really, from the character who had the bosses aggro and, presto, he'd activate the skill. If, of course, he was there.

Oh, that's right. I forgot to mention that in the original campaign boss spawns were somewhat random – there'd be points on every map where bosses could be. But that didn't mean that they would be there when you got to them. The boss with Battle Rage was good old Kroog Smush. Who, fortunately, only had two spawn points but you'd still have to crawl a ways outside of Droknar's and fight through a horde of enemies to find him – you probably thought I was joking about having to trek around in the snow to find elites, didn't you?

If you think I'm complaining you should have seen the community at the time. Up in arms and about to storm the Bastille captures the flavor of discourse pretty well, I'd think.

Skill trainers remained in the game, of course, but they were augmented by quests that would give out free skills as rewards. Those wouldn't cost you a skill point but if you missed one along the way you could head to a skill trainer in the next area and pick up all the skills that you could quest for. That was the idea, anyway, in theory people wouldn't spend their precious skill points on skills they could get for free. Because of the scaling XP requirements skill points were hard to get.

Anyhow, somewhere along the line it all changed. Shortly after release SoCs were altered to give out XP when elites were captured. They were made non-elite so you could slot multiple ones. And changed to their current form where you need a dead boss to target and can then pick out your skill at your leisure.

Faction was implemented giving players a whole new way of acquiring skills. Although they wouldn't actually gain the physical skill, they would unlock it for use with any PvP character (And, now, Heroes).

And the release of the first expansion, Factions, saw an overhaul of the skill trainers. Gone were the free skills from quests. Instead quests handed out skill points so you could reward yourself (If you could afford it. Around this time the cost of buying skills was changed, too, and would scale up dramatically until it hit a cap of 1k per skill.). But gone, too, were skill trainers off in some hidden outpost or glen who'd teach you some rare skills. Each area sold a progressively greater selection of skills.

With Nightfall it seems that the rate of gaining XP and skill points has been scaled back a bit. Not so much how much XP it takes, mind, but in how long it takes to gather that much through questing or completing missions. There's Hero Skill Points now but the basics haven't changed much from Factions.

So, if you'd ask me if I'm completely satisfied with the skill system at present, I'd have to say no. It's not perfect. And I won't be satisfied with anything else. Would I rather have the SoC be an inventory item (stackable, of course) that wouldn't require me to gut my skill bar when I'm heading out elite hunting? Or would I like a way of sampling skills, testing them, before I buy them? Sure.

But those would be pretty minor complaints. All things told, the way elites and skills, in general, are acquired is a lot easier than it used to be. The system makes sense and it works well enough that I don't let it bother me. I've seen it change in the past, though, and watched it evolve over the years so I know it can be altered. And, you know, it probably will be again.