Feedback:User/Guild Wars 3 perhaps/Skill building

I realize that the skill model for GW2 is already pretty much set in stone. This suggestion speaks instead to the future should there ever be a GW3 or some other-named spiritual successor.

My suggestion is to break with the traditional MMO RPG skills reward paradigm. Instead of skills being something you acquire as a 1-for-1 reward for having completed a specific quest or mission, I'm suggesting instead that skills acquisition reflect a more real-world experience.

Currently, skills are acquired by completing task A to receive skill B. It's linear, consistent, predictable...and boring. Once I've acquired a particular skill, I know how to duplicate those exact same steps in the future with another character of the same profession to acquire the same skill. Even worse, I don't even have to go through the trouble of figuring it out for myself. All I need do is open up a wiki page and it will tell me the exact steps I need to take to acquire the skill I'm looking for.

While I believe it isn't entirely out of the question to award a skill in exchange for having completed a task, I think a much more rewarding and interesting method of skill acquisition would be to acquire skills based on time, experience, effort, and even a measure of luck or chance.

To illustrate what I mean I'll use familiar skills from Guild Wars. Let's assume you're a Necromancer and you have Life Siphon equipped. Under the current paradigm you acquire Life Transfer by simply killing a boss who has that skill and then using a Signet of Capture. Under my proposed system, Life Transfer would be acquired instead by using a similar skill - Life Siphon - repeatedly over time until you finally "learned" or "advanced" to Life Transfer. This more accurately reflects how you would learn such a skill in the first place; using Life Siphon over-and-over again, you would - with time - learn how to apply it to a larger group rather than a single target. At which point - voila - you've learned Life Transfer.

The above is a simplified example. I also conceive of several limiters that would prevent too easy acquisition of more powerful skills through simply spamming weaker skills. For example, one concept is to make more powerful skill acquisition dependant on using multiple lower level skills. In the case of Life Transfer, it - like Life Siphon - is the application of a degen on an enemy to provide regen to yourself. However, it differs from Life Siphon in that the degen is potentially applied to several adjacent enemies all at once. Another skill that closely resembles that action is Suffering; a curse that applies degen to several enemies at once. Therefore, under this proposed system, to learn Life Transfer would require having used not only Life Siphon multiple times but also having used Suffering multiple times.

Other limiters could be:

1. No matter how many times you spam a lower level skill, you won't learn the next higher skill that is dependant on the lower one until you've reached a certain level. Thus, you could spam Life Siphon 10,000 times at level 1 and still never learn Life Transfer until you've advanced to the appropriate level.

2. PvP does not contribute to new skill acquisition. Thus no one could go into a PvP arena with a friend and simply spam a skill on each other all day just to acquire the next higher skill.

3. Using a lower level skill on an enemy too many levels lower than your character will not contribute to learning the next higher skill in the chain. This prevents a level 10 character from going around killing level 1 enemies just to up their skill.

Alternately, since any use of a skill would - theoretically - be contributing to your experience in the use of that skill you could still allow progression in the skill-learning track but with a limitation. For example, using a skill on an enemy the same level as you contributes 1-to-1 towards new skill acquisition. If you use the skill on an enemy of lower level, you receive a lesser percentage of the experience towards learning the new skill. It could be something like for every 1 level below your's, you get 10% less experience towards learning the next skill.

Conversely, fighting an enemy of a higher level will contribute a percent bonus towards your next skill acquisition (with a cap after X levels above your's).

4. Time could be used as a limiter as well. No matter how often you're using a skill within a given time period, you will not be able to advance to the next higher skill until that time period has elapsed. What that time period would be would depend on many factors; testing, game balancing, etc.

Alternately, this could be referred to as "fatigue" or "burnout". We've all experienced it; you try to learn something new but - if you overdo it too fast - you actually seem to start doing worse. It's not until you've taken a break and come back to it later that your previous efforts at learning something new pay off.

Likewise, in the game there could be a "fatigue" level after which no futher use of a low level skill will contribute towards learning a new higher level skill within a certain time period. For example, if you use Life Siphon 50 times in a 24 hour period, those 50 uses will contribute towards your learning Life Transfer. But from the 51st use of Life Siphon on, no futher progress will be made to learning Life Transfer for those 24 hours. It doesn't mean you can't use Life Siphon anymore that day; it just means you won't progress towards learning Life Transfer any futher for that day.

5. Environmental factors. There may be items, shrines, quests, NPC trainers, etc. which will help the character advance more quickly in learning a particular skill. This is not the same as the current skill trainers in GW in which you pay them gold and a skill point and - voila - you now have a new skill. No, these factors I'm listing would merely help you along your track a little faster rather then award you the skill outright.

6. Randomness. Instead of having all of the above devolve into yet another exercise in watching a skill bar fill up, do not use any form of measurement to show progress towards the next higher skill acquisition. Do not set a static number of uses for a lower level skill before the next higher skill is acquired. Otherwise, someone figures out that all you have to do is use Life Siphon 1,000 times before learning Life Transfer, the number is posted to a wiki, and it's back to number counting and/or skill bar watching rather than playing the game.

No. Instead do this: set a base line for the skill acquisition. Let's say it is 1,000 uses. But then use a random number generator to augment that 1,000 uses for each player. For one player this might result in them having to use Life Siphon 934 times before meeting the requirement for Life Transfer. For another player it might mean 1,021 uses.

7. Luck. If there are character attributes like "luck" or "fate" or something like that, such attributes would have positive or negative effects on how many uses of a skill they would need to advance to the next level. This would then augment the randomness factor I just listed above in #6.

8. The player's overall play style and skill use could impact how quickly they acquire a new skill. A Necromancer using primarily Blood magic is trying to learn Life Transfer; they will learn it faster than a Necromancer who has been focusing primarily on Death Magic, for example.

As mentioned earlier, all of this would be done in the background without a bunch of charts, graphs, or bars to keep track of. But that doesn't mean that the player is kept completely in the dark about how they're progressing towards learning a new skill. Little visual cues or messages in a chat window or some swirling aura above their head (whatever works) could pop-up at various points along their path to acquiring a new skill to give them the sense that they're getting closer and closer to their goal. Also, increasing proficiency in the lower level skill as it's used more and more (whether that be more damage, more healing, longer duration, etc.) will serve as an indicator that you're getting closer to the day when you'll learn the next higher skill.

All of this supports the philosophy of focusing on the game rather than focusing on spreadsheets about the game. Also, once a new skill is learned, it's a sense of true accomplishment and reward rather than the old method of "kill boss X to get skill Y" or "complete mission X to get skill Y" or "pay skill trainer X to get skill Y". The player will have truly earned the skill and it will be that much more valuable to them.

Also, if learning new skills are dependant on using more than one lower level skill, it will encourage players to try out other skills that they may not have otherwise considered using. The example I gave of having to use both Life Siphon and Suffering to learn Life Transfer illustrating this point.

Lastly, it opens up the possibility of skills that - though not unique - aren't identical from player to player, either. Much like the weapon crafting scheme in use in GW in which there is a base weapon that can then be modified with both a prefix and suffix and possibly an inscription, a similar process could be applied to skills.

Going back to my Necromancer example, let's say Necromancer X uses Life Siphon 1,000 times and Suffering 2,000 times while Necromancer Y uses Life Siphon 2,000 times and Suffering 1,000 times. Both learn Life Transfer. But Necromancer X learns a form of Life Transfer that affects more enemies but with less degen (consistent with his greater use of Suffering) while Necromancer Y learns a form of Life Transfer that causes a greater amount of degen to a lesser number of enemies (consistent with her emphasis on Life Siphon).

Now their skills are customized according to how they play the game rather than everyone learning the exact same skills and everyone knowing exactly how long those skills last, how much damage they do, how large an area of effect, etc. It introduces an element of the unknown so each encounter will be different because no two enemies will have identical skill sets even if the skills share the same name (this system could be applied to NPC enemies just as well as to human players). The skills will be similar enough to make educated guesses regarding strategy and tactics and to avoid frustration and confusion but different enough that the game doesn't devolve into rock, paper, scissors for each skill and its counter(s).

Thanks for reading.