Guild Wars: Eye of the North - interview

GR: Speaking of keeping the balance, we see that there will still be 150 new skills added. Was it challenging with there being so many skills already?

Miller: Well there's already a ton of skills and the people that we have balancing them are very, very, very adept at doing that. So certainly this time around, it's been a lot easier because actually only a hundred of those skills are PvP legal. The other fifty are… "PvE-only" skills. But they're more akin to what players have seen with the Sunspear and Lightbringer skills, where they're tied specifically to a group of NPCs in the world. So you get sort of a cool immersion factor out of them. They're a little bit different, and a little bit more dynamic, and a little bit cooler from a role-playing perspective than the PvP-legal skills are to some degree.

GR: Could you give us some examples of these PvE-only skills?

Miller: So the example that I've been publicly giving a lot is the skill we're calling The Light of Deldrimor. A dwarf teaches it to you via a quest… and then it kind of has two uses. It has an affect in battle and outside of battle. When you use it, it does a large blast of [Area of Effect] light energy, and it also helps you find secrets within the dungeon. And that's kind of a theme we've been trying to do with these PvE-only skills is to kind of break the rules a little bit on what we've previously done with skills because we don't necessarily have to worry about the player versus player balance. And that also means we can invest the time and energy to make them do cool things in and outside of battle.

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