Mar 14

Written by:
3/14/2012 9:21 PM 

 

Welcome to Guild Tech!

Sorry about the delay on posts everyone, it has been a hectic month for myself.

Today is all about skills.  Guild Wars has the most robust skill system out of any game I have played.  While you are only limited to 8 skills on your bar, you are able to combine any two classes together to create a seemingly infinite number of combinations.  Thus, skills can be very intimidating.

Skills come in 2 varieties, regular class skills and elite skills.  Regular class skills are acquired by purchasing them from skill trainers throughout the world.  As you progress through the campaign and advance in the story, more and more skills become unlocked and available for purchase but only if you are able to advance to that point of the story.  The purchase of skills are limited to currency and available skill points.  Skills start off cheap and grow is cost until they cap at 1,000 gold each.  In addition to that, each skill you purchase costs 1 skill point that you acquire each time you level up or reach a certain experience amount at level cap.  Skills are able to be purchased from a Priest of Balthazaar. In this case though they are unlocked for PvP characters, heroes and also for PvE characters through tomes.

Elite skills are acquired by accomplishing two things.  The first thing is that you need a class skill call Signet of Capture that you buy from a skill trainer.  Because you have to buy the signet of capture from a trainer, it costs money and a skill point.  After you have a Signet of Capture, you must slay a specific elite unit somewhere in the world and extract the skill from the corpse.  Some of the mobs are found in the world and others are found inside of missions and dungeons.  Like regular skills, elite skills can also be purchased from Priests of Balthazaar and suffer from the same restrictions.  


Elite skills are unique in that you can only have 1 on your bar at any given time with only one exception.  That exception is that if you just captured a brand new skill but they share the same cool down, however you lose this ability as soon as you enter an outpost.

Skills do have an achievement tied to them.  If you are able to collect each and every elite skill from a campaign, you will be able to have a dedicate-able title for each campaign towards your Hall of Monuments, plus an additional one if you collect all of them.  However, this costs a little: about 1,000 gold per Signet of Capture and there are 350 Elite skills between Tyria, Cantha and Elona towards the title track and you need to acquire 290 of them (no Eye of the North elite skills count towards this).  That means you need to have 290,000 gold (or 290 platinum) in order to get these titles.  

A way to cheapen the cost is to use gold Zaishen coins to purchase elite skill tomes, doing so also means you do not have to slay a monster to acquire the skill.  Doing so means you save 900g per elite skill, but you are limited to the number of gold Zaishen coins you can acquire each day.