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Although the guild wars skill mechanics were quite neat, I have to say I found the concept of 'equipping' a skill to be rather immersion breaking and frankly, weird. It completely destroyed all semblance of identity my character might have had.

Historically, skills were rings that you wore, which pseudomagically imbued you with the skill, or something. Thus, the eight skill limit (one for each finger, thumbs excluded). I agree the lack of justification within the context of the game world is a bit jarring, now, but I'd consider that a secondary concern or at least an issue orthogonal to that of balancing the game system.

Nowadays I tell myself that the skills are representative of how my character has prepared himself for his excursion (e.g., bringing trapping supplies, reagents for spells, and so on) in reasonable ways that are too micro-oriented for actual concrete representation in game play (I don't want to manage my arrows, or carry rocks to use to create meteor spells, whateever). So, I can only prepare myself for so much, and thus, the eight skill limit. But I digress.

Also note that I don't think you need to limit skills in the same was as GW does to also support arbitrary respec.

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So you are suggesting that instead of trying to stop a player from respecing purely to circumvent a challenge, I should balance the challenge differently and make the true challenge figuring out a good build to handle it? I like that.

Basically, yes.

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Of course that changes challenges from figuring out how to overcome inherent weaknesses to more of a logic puzzle as challenge via a weakness would simply be respeced to compensate for. IE, the fire mage facing a fire dragon is simply going to respect to be more effective, something I was avoiding.

One thing you can do is make creatures and encounters less one-dimensional. Yes, ice magic may work better on a fire demon, but how much better? Typical RPG cliche is do 1.5x or 2.0x damage. That's quite a lot. You could change that so you got a much smaller direct damage boost, so it's worth a players time to consider not bringing that ice spell -- finding a balance between giving the ice spell enough extra oomph to make it somewhat useful, but equally useful as (for example) spells to shut down the demon and prevent him from retaliating while you hit him with regular, non-damage-boosted spells.

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How do you create a challenge then where such respecing isnt as obvious or useful?

This is tricky, and something Guild Wars does poorly. It's usually impossible, on your first run, to know what kind of skills will be good for a certain area. You can extrapolate based on area similarity, usually, but that doesn't always work. Sometimes you just need to go in and get beat up a few times to see the kinds of encounters you'll be facing in an area, and then spec yourself to compensate. It's not what I'd call ideal.

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Original post by JasRonq So you are suggesting that instead of trying to stop a player from respecing purely to circumvent a challenge, I should balance the challenge differently and make the true challenge figuring out a good build to handle it? I like that. Of course that changes challenges from figuring out how to overcome inherent weaknesses to more of a logic puzzle as challenge via a weakness would simply be respeced to compensate for. IE, the fire mage facing a fire dragon is simply going to respec to be more effective, something I was avoiding. How do you create a challenge then where such respecing isnt as obvious or useful?

When you are designing monsters, you have to decide whether you want them to be of equal difficulty for all builds or not. If you want fire dragons to be impossibly difficult for fire mages but easy for warriors with big swords, is that fair? It's perfectly legitimate to design the monsters to be unfair to different builds if you allow players to (quickly easily and free) switch builds. But if you want to force players to work with whatever setup they've chosen, you can't really design monsters that will be too hard for any possible build.

That's why WoW has such boring generic monsters, because they wanted every monster to be of equal difficulty for all classes. And they still didn't succeed, there are lots of quests that are significantly easier or harder to solo based on your class, build, and even race because of the racial abilities. Compare to Dofus where each monster has 5 elemental resists, and most characters can only do 2 elements of damage. There were level-appropriate mobs which were impossible to solo with some classes. Now Dofus doesn't really have quests, so all monsters were optional except for the few aggressive ones. But if it had quests and mandatory boss fights as a single player game presumably would, there would have been some monsters that were impossibly difficult for every build.

Personally I would like to play a game where each build is treated as a battle strategy - the player can create and save as many builds as they want, and during combat if plan A isn't working they can switch to plan B instead. Then there wouldn't be the logical oddity Sandman points out, that the character could lose skills by unequipping them (or removing points spent to level them). Instead the character would have a permanent library of all skills they had acquired, and the build would just determine which ones they had at their fingertips (i.e. mapped to gamepad buttons and combos).

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Original post by Humble Hobo I have never been sure why it is necessary to limit your selection of skills to a specific 'build', especially if the game requires that you change builds in order to kill different bosses. Would it really detract from the game to allow a player to gain all the skills? There wouldn't be 'perfect' builds or flavor of the month builds on the forums. You wouldn't spend hours planning exactly what to sacrifice in order to get +1% additional chance of crit. You just play the game.

Spending hours planning exactly what to sacrifice in order to get +1% additional chance of crit is also just playing the game. It's part of the game.

That sounds disturbingly close to DnD mages plugging spells into their memory every night planning out what they expect for the next day. I dunno that I really like that. I always played the sorcerers because I hated doing that, and when I played a mage, I just kept a few all round useful spells memorized constantly rather than changing them.

I think your battle plan need to be reflected more in which skills/abilities/spells you use when, and not which you 'bring with you'
I think of the build as your library of what you can do, not as what you bring to the fight, which is more like the actual resources (potions, scrolls, etc.) you bring with you and the way you use them and your skills.

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Original post by Gnarf Quote: Original post by Humble Hobo You wouldn't spend hours planning exactly what to sacrifice in order to get +1% additional chance of crit. You just play the game. Spending hours planning exactly what to sacrifice in order to get +1% additional chance of crit is also just playing the game. It's part of the game.

Not to mention its the most fun part for plenty of players. That last 1% is a little micromanaging of the build for me, so I wouldn't have a system that came down to that kind of level of detail, but thinking about how you want to build the characters library of skills is definitely a major part of the game play.

After playing a lot of Hellgate London, where respeccing requires an item that is given out sometimes during patches (mainly to subscribers), I've been thinking along similar lines. I wondered how it might play out if respecs were unlimited, or limited only by a small amount of effort, but not completely required with some benefit for going the hard way.

Your fire mage is up against your fire dragon. What if he has the choice of going back and respeccing as an ice mage and killing the dragon quickly, or continuing to fight a long and gruesome battle and obtaining a reward of some kind. His fire skills could be improved for example, or he could just gain an extra amount of cash and/or experience.

Therefore the boss fight couldn't really be called bad level design, more of an optional hard route with a reason for going that way. It'd even give bragging rights to a player. I reckon that such a game would have to be somewhat player skill based rather than a pure stats RPG though.

If we allow easy respecing then why not just give the player all skills all the time? The only answer I can come up with is "because that's a different sort of game".

It's somewhat similar to the question of when and where a player can save their game.

Well, I never really meant 'easy' respecing. Just respecing. I figure that if its easy people will do it constantly, even feel the need to do it assuming there is a more optimal way to play a situation. I dont want them to feel compelled to constantly respec, or respec at all, and the game should be playable without respecing. Its jsut that respecing can be fun and having to restart because you want to respec is not fun, so there should be a better way to enjoy respecing and exploring different builds.

Need for respecing is a sign of a bad design. When skill increases could happen without increase in level, respecing is irrelevant. Yes for example "Two worlds" allowed reallocation of a... However it was incredibly game breaking.

Look for example at "Dungeon crawl". You wont start a new game just because you found incredible ax, and you specialized in bows. You simply learn axes at least mediocre, and keep the excellent skill with bows.

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Original post by JasRonq If you have access to every skill and are equally good with it as any other player, then there is no personalization to the character. This is suppose to be your avatar, your personal representation in the world, yet it has all the same abilities as everyone else's?

This isn't necessarily true - at least not any more than it is with specializations in the first place. Unless you go for a completely random, whacky build there are still going to be a lot of (and that's an understatement) players with identical builds around.

Secondly, possessing all skills doesn't mean using all of them simultaneously (that would be rather difficult). It just means they are available. If the actual skills are properly balanced, players would still need to play different roles in an encounter, and they would use the set of skills corresponding to that role.

In fact, with all of the skills being available, you're bound to get more unique combinations than you get by breaking them over several classes with a pretty much defined role and a smaller variety of skills available.

Moreover, the encounters could be made more dynamic, so that the player or group who can adapt to the scenario change quickly and properly gets rewarded, instead of just bashing the same keyboard combo over and over again.