User:-Alarielle-/Build analysis

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One quick note to myself and anyone afraid of the build system

So… That idea's been lurking around my mind for a while. Since you get half your bar fixed, won't the possibilities of build be considerably diminished in GW2 in comparison to GW1 ?

The answer is : depends on how you look at it, but it seems to be tending towards : actually there will be more possibilities. I'll post a full note on it some time later, but I did the work (using a Numbers (iworks equivalent of Excel) sheet to make the calculations). It's really math, simple from my point of view. The point is :

What happens in GW1

In Guild Wars, you get to choose 8 skills. Either 8 non-elites or 7 non-elite and 1 elite. To calculate how many builds results, you just use Binomials coefficients (read : you choose 8 from the, say, 60 available skills, counting the fact that you can't repeat any of them, and skills in different order count as the same build)

So, I did three calculations for each profession, first considering only the skills in Prophecies (a.k.a the release of the game, which is probably a better starting point for comparison) then the skills now.

In each case I calculated :

• The number of possible builds if you use skills only from your profession (which is actually superfluous, but it was to test my formulas),
• Then if you use a set primary/secondary profession combo, taking the secondary that would bring the most skills,
• Then (by multiplying the previous result by the amount of available secondary professions), the whole possibilities of build, considering any secondary profession. It's not an accurate value, it's actually a higher one (but not by far, considering the difference are very small).

Results ? In the case of Prophecies, the highest one is the Elementalist with 2 times 10^13. Yeah, that's 20 millions of millions. Good. In the case where you have all the campaigns, you get with Ele and Necro (couldn't make the difference) with 3.4 time 10^15. Like, 3,400 millions of millions. That last figure is actually, as I said, quite irrelevant, because there have been three additions (Factions, Nightfall, and GWEN) to the skill pools that GW2 won't benefit from in the first place.

What happens in GW2

In Guild Wars 2, you have 3 things affecting your build :

• Your choice of skills
• Your choice of trait
• The "profession mechanics"

I'll first go with the profession mechanics, because it's the easiest. The Ele has Attunements, the Warrior has Adrenaline, the Necro has Death Shroud, the Guardian his Virtues, the Thief his Steal ability and his Initiave. Although I love those concepts, they can't be changed in any way, so they actually don't alter the amount of builds that can be made. Yes, I consider that the Ele with his 20-something skill bar is only one build. The only particularity is the Ranger, who can have his pet equip 4 out of 8 skills. If I'm able to calculate properly (and I think I am), that makes 70 possibilities to build your pet. Yup.

Now, to the skills.

• The first five skills are, as we know, set by your weapon. Each profession page in here has the amount of different weapon sets that can be made, so once again it's just binomial coefficient (depending on how many sets the profession can equip).
• The next skill slot is the healing skill. For now, there are only 2 or 3 skills per profession, but whatever. Since there is only one slot, you just have to multiply by the amount of different skills. Good for us, it also works for the elite skill.
• Now there are the utility skills. Well, it's the same principle; except that I count, in addition to the skills already revealed (the highest amount is the Warrior), I counted 12 racial skills, since I read somewhere that there'll be roughly a dozen racial skills per race.

Only the traits left, whee!

• The trait lines all work the same way : I enter the amount of minor and major traits that have been revealed, and then, binomial coefficient to see how many arrangement of 1 major and 2 minor of them can be made.
• For the weapons, there's a particularity — while the 2-handed weapons work just like the others, if you dual wield, you may equip one major for the main hand, and a minor for the mai and the offhand. Since those come from different pools, I just have to multiply the amount of traits in each pool. Then, I compare how you can get the most combinations, and I use that figure for the weapon lines. For all profession that have two weapon sets, weapon lines are taken twice into accounts.

Then we multiply all the resulting building options.

Update from after PAX '11 — with the traits from Comic Con/PAX East since they were unavailable in the most recent demo. The necromancer went ahead with 2.06*10^13 — i.e. 25 trillion combinations. And keep in mind this will probably go up. Also, adding in the underwater build (where you may have completely different skills) typically multiplies the figure by tens of thousand.

Now, I think I can conclude. Yes, if you consider traits not to be a part of the build, you have much less options than in GW1. However, I am confident that Anet will handle it properly, since they made such a fuss about the traits, and I think they can safely be thought a part of the building concept. Note one last thing  : in the GW1 count, I took no account of metagame (of course) OR, more importantly, of the restrictions regarding attributes. Restrictions that, as far as we could tell so far, do not exist in GW2. So, happy now ? :D