Category talk:Skills

Category tree

I think it's time to begin this discussion, considering how we already have some skill articles and many skill categories. Right now, the skill categories are a bit of a mess - Water Trident, for example, is within the Water attunement category (which is a subcategory of Elementalist skills) and within the Elementalist skills category. Gash is within the Warrior skills category and within the Sword skills category, which is itself within the Warrior skills category (something I don't really understand, but anyway). I would suggest using the following skill categories:

• Warrior sword skills -> Warrior skills -> Skills by profession -> Skills
• Warrior sword skills -> Sword skills -> Skills by weapon -> Skills

The problem arrives with the elementalist skills. Phoenix is a wand or focus skill and a Fire Attunement skill. I think it should be within a Fire attunement category, which would be within the Elementalist category, but I don't know if it would be worth to categorize it within the Elementalist category as being both withint Fire attunement and within a wand category or a focus category. Erasculio 16:38, 14 July 2010 (UTC)

What about having the 2-way branching you described for warriors and a 3-way branching for elementalists?

• Elementalist fire-attuned wand skills -> Elementalist wand skills -> Wand skills -> Skills by weapon -> Skills
• Elementalist fire-attuned wand skills -> Elementalist wand skills -> Elementalist skills -> Skills by profession -> Skills
• Elementalist fire-attuned wand skills -> Fire attunement skills -> Elementalist skills -> Skills by profession -> Skills

Chriskang 22:42, 18 July 2010 (UTC)

Is there any particular reason you have the lower category, "<profName> <attunement> <weaponName> skills" and not just attach the "<profName> skills", "<weaponName> skills" and "<attunement> skills" directly to the article? A few of the articles (Obliterate, Devastating Hammer, for example) use this scheme and I prefer it because it seems to allow for simple category names and flexible categorisation. What are the reasons for having the extra levels of categories? -- Aspectacle  23:27, 18 July 2010 (UTC)

@Aspectable, I think that kind of scheme is a bit disorganized. We would end with, for example, a Sword skills category having dozens of skills with no specification to which profession they belong to, something less useful IMO than a tree mentioning which sword skills belong to each profession. Same with, say, Warrior skills - imagine the mess this would have been if it only listed warrior skills, with no division by attribute.

@Chriskang: it's a good idea, the only issue I see is with having the same skills twice within the same category; some elementalist skills would be within the Elementalist skills category under the attunement and under the weapon. I don't think there's a way to avoid that issue, though. Erasculio 00:38, 19 July 2010 (UTC)

Yea - but if you want to create an actual listing on a combination of the attributes it is straightforward to use dpl? If I'm looking for skills in GWW I look at the list pages which are generated, not at the actual category page. Other stuff; the single category names allow straight-forward autocategorisation from any skill infobox we would develop and these simple categories would also prevent the same skill appearing in the same category twice issue from your last sentence, right? -- Aspectacle  00:58, 19 July 2010 (UTC)

Some users like to browse categories to reach a certain skill (because they have a slow connection and don't want to load a big dpl page or simply because of their personal taste). Anyway, why restrict ourselves to just dpl when we can have dpl AND precisely defined categories? I'm sure we'll still be able to generate the categories automatically from the skill infobox template. It'll just be a little more complicated. Chriskang 22:55, 19 July 2010 (UTC)

I see three problems with your suggestion, Eras. The first is more relevant to the Elementalist categories, in that, if you categorize Phoenix under Fire Attunement and not Wand/Focus skills, you're removing the primary reason that categories exist: to link skills with some, but not necessarily all, common attributes together. And should you make a category for "Elementalist Fire Attunement Wand/Focus skills", etc, the names get clunky and you end up with far more pages to sift through.

The second potential problem involves the use of categories I see most often, which is generating lists. If you create such specific trees, then to pull a complete list of all sword skills, presumably you would have to pull from Warrior sword skills, Ranger sword skills, etc. whereas with the multi-categorized system you simply have to add "Sword skills". It's a matter of convenience, I admit.

Especially when we start categorizing by skill effects, range, etc. as we do on GWW, it seems your system will get far more messy than our current system, unless you plan to find some consensus on how far we should go into such a system. ("Mid-range ground targeted elementalist Fire Attunement wand/focus attack skills with self-heal"?) I prefer skills being categorized in multiple places. --Kyoshi (Talk) 21:28, 21 July 2010 (UTC)

Actually, the GWW system is a good example of why my suggestion would work. There, we don't have just a category for Monk skills; we have categories for each attribute, yet it's easy to create a list drawing from each category such as the one seen here. Therefore, just as it's easy to make a list of all Monk skills using categories made for each attribute, it would be easy to make a list of all Sword skills using categories made for each profession. Doing the other way around, though, would be more complex - it would be the same thing as if we had only a Monk skills category, and tried to make from that a Smiting Prayers skills list, which is the kind of thing that simply does not exist on GWW. So while making a Sword skills list from categories Warrior sword skills, Ranger sword skills and etc would be simple, making a Warrior sword skills list from a Sword skills category would not be so simple.

Likewise, on GWW we categorize skills by attribute and by type, not by both. It would be simple to do a similar system here categorizing skills per "profession & weapon" and type instead of being forced to do both; we don't need a "Mid-range ground targeted elementalist Fire Attunement wand/focus attack skills with self-heal" just like in GWW we don't need a "PvE core energy enchantment Protection Prayers skills that target self with earshot AoE offered by hero skill trainers" in order to categorize Aegis under a Protection Prayers skills category, instead of placing it just under a Monk skills category.

DPL lists may be good, but they do not help people to browse from a skill article. If someone is looking at the Aegis article on GWW and wants to know what are the other Protection Prayers skills, he doesn't need to search for a DPL list that isn't linked from that article; he can simply pick the category Protection Prayers skills. If all the page offered were a Monk skills category link, he would not find what he was looking for from that page. Likewise, if someone is looking at Gash and wants to learn what are the other warrior sword skills (which is something important, considering how those skills have to be used together), he should not have to choose between a list of all Sword skills (most of which would not be what he is looking for) or trying to find a DPL list that isn't even linked from the Gash article itself. Erasculio 23:40, 21 July 2010 (UTC)

The associated attribute skills to profession relationship in GW1 isn't the same as the weapon skill to profession relationship in GW2. An attribute line is completely tied to a single profession, a weapon on the other hand is shared between several professions. This difference makes it more like some of the other attributes associated with the skill, such as the type (trap, chain, healing, elite, etc). Some potentially interesting categories, such as offhand sword skills do not fit well into your suggested scheme. You said yourself that elementalist attunements do not fit well in your scheme (I think because the relationship between attunement skills and professions is actually like the gw1 attribute skills to profession.)

The simple categories provide us with a few things; they are simpler to apply to articles, they enable simpler dpl lists for any sort of skill attributes and profession combinations which you can think of, they don't make any assumptions about the specialised mechanics of professions we don't yet know about and a skill appears in each category only once. The only thing which clearly benefits from a complex lower level category is the improvement of a single category page based lookup. This is something I'd be willing to sacrifice for all of the other positives simple categories seem to give. -- Aspectacle  01:35, 22 July 2010 (UTC)

"The associated attribute skills to profession relationship in GW1 isn't the same as the weapon skill to profession relationship in GW2. An attribute line is completely tied to a single profession, a weapon on the other hand is shared between several professions. This difference makes it more like some of the other attributes associated with the skill, such as the type (trap, chain, healing, elite, etc)": however, while a skill in GW1 may fit within multiple types (just looking at your examples, Spike Trap is both a trap and elite, Healing Spring is both healing and a trap, etc), a skill in GW2 belongs to a single profession-weapon combination, just like a skill in GW1 belongs to a single attribute line. And just as in GW1 grouping skills by attribute is important (since we set attribute points based on attributes, so having skills of the same line is a good thing), grouping skills in GW2 by profession-weapon is important (since we have no option other than using those skills together). Therefore, the relation between attribute skill and profession in GW1 is pretty much the same as profession-weapon and profession in GW2.

"Some potentially interesting categories, such as offhand sword skills do not fit well into your suggested scheme": they could fit into Sword skills, or into Offhand sword skills if people would rather split them from the main hand sword skills. As it is, everything is just being grouped together.

"they are simpler to apply to articles": using a skill infobox, it would be the same thing to add both category systems to an article.

"they enable simpler dpl lists": they are also less flexible. Again, imagine how would you make a list of Smiting Prayers skills on GWW if we only had a Monk skills category. The DPL for that would actually be more complex than the one in my suggestion.

"they don't make any assumptions about the specialised mechanics of professions we don't yet know about": and we may adapt the combined categories if any of the professions has any different kind of mechanics.

"a skill appears in each category only once": which isn't an issue for warrior skills.

"The only thing which clearly benefits from a complex lower level category is the improvement of a single category page based lookup. This is something I'd be willing to sacrifice for all of the other positives simple categories seem to give": see, that's because, as you mentioned above, "if I'm looking for skills in GWW I look at the list pages which are generated, not at the actual category page". Which means, you do not use categories to navigate through the wiki, which is one of their intended functions; you only use them as sources for the DPL lists, yet it's simpler for common users to browse the wiki through categories (which are actually linked from each article) than through DPL lists that only link to, but are not linked from, articles.

That's the main advantage of a good categorization: it allows users to easily navigate through the wiki by using categories, instead of being forced to rely on DPL. Making a category system that simply groups all sword skills would be pretty much the same as only making a DPL list that lists sword skills without a way to sort it by profession, reducing considerably the utility of such feature.

The only real advantage of simpler categories is that they would be easier to implement. However, all the coding required to actually implement those categories is outside the scope of what a casual contributor or a reader would have to understand in order to learn about the skills; just like someone does not need to know how DPL works in order to read or add skills to the GWW skill lists, we wouldn't need every user to know how to make DPLs with multiple variables in order to add a skill to complex categories or to a DPL list.

Since the only real problem is giving us a bit more work, in exchange for a feature that would make categories more useful (and hopefully lead us to less people having to rely on DPL lists and instead being able of sorting effectively through skills by using categories), I would rather use the more complex category tree. Erasculio 02:11, 22 July 2010 (UTC)

I'm going to trim my answer right down to what I feel is your central argument for your above post.

You assert that common users use categories to navigate, but I would say the opposite is true using just a few of many possible gw1w examples; gw1:Air Magic (the air skill listing) 240k page views, gw1:Category:Air_Magic_skills 13k page views. gw1:List_of_elite_elementalist_skills 537k views, gw1:Category:Elite skills (all professions), 179k views. Pages with dpl in them are invariably more widely used than category listings. I think both maintaining dpl and surfing through categories are beyond the average wiki user.

I like the simple categories which we can combine to create anything we need, I don't think you could convince me otherwise. I concede, yes, I am influenced by the way I use the wiki, but I don't think you should over state the importance of how you like to use the wiki. Because dpl lists will be created and what categories there are won't affect the output of those, if you don't take grouped categories to the extreme as Kyoshi rightly shows as a possibility, I won't grumble much about it. -- Aspectacle  05:35, 22 July 2010 (UTC)

(Reset indent) Regardless of what kind of system we adopted (the one I suggested or the one Aspectable was defending), I think now is a good time to define which category trees we would like to use. Erasculio 14:03, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

Category tree, take 2

I'm not fond of articles with one thousand categories; I believe articles like this (scroll down to the category listing) are one of the reasons why so few people actually use categories for browsing the wiki at GW1W. Currently the skills here are categorized through many different and often intersecting trees without much organization or logic. I would like to propose the following category tree:

• Skills by type
  • Elite skills
  • Healing skills
  • Utility skills
  • Downed skills
  • Weapon skills
    • Axe skills
      • Main hand axe skills
      • Off hand axe skills
    • Dagger skills
      • Main hand dagger skills
      • Off hand dagger skills
    • Pistol skills
      • Main hand pistol skills
      • Off hand pistol skills
    • Sword skills
      • Main hand sword skills
      • Off hand sword skills
    • Mace skills
      • Main hand mace skills
      • Off hand mace skills
    • Scepter skills
    • Focus skills
    • Shield skills
    • Torch skills
    • Warhorn skills
    • Greatsword skills
    • Hammer skills
    • Staff skills
    • Longbow skills
    • Shortbow skills
    • Rifle skills
• Skills by profession
  • Warrior skills
    • Banner skills
    • Burst skills
    • Chain skills
    • Charge skills
    • Shout skills
    • Stance skills
  • Ranger skills
    • Chain skills
    • Preparation skills
    • Spirit skills
    • Trap skills
    • Pet abilities
  • Elementalist skills
    • Air Attunement skills
    • Earth Attunement skills
    • Fire Attunement skills
    • Water Attunement skills
    • Conjure skills
    • Glyph skills
    • Signet skills
  • Necromancer skills
    • Death Shroud skills
    • Mark skills
    • Minion skills
    • Well skills
• Skills by race
  • Asura skills
  • Charr skills
  • Human skills
  • Norn skills
  • Sylvari skills

All skills would then have only two categories: by profession (or race) and by type. We could also merge categories and lists, so each category would show a list of skills within itself, making it easier to browse through the skill articles. Erasculio 15:34, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

This looks ok, but isn't Elementalist skills missing Attunement skills? pling 15:39, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

True, I had forgotten about those (adding them now). Monster skills may also have their own category, but I think it's too soon to add those (we don't know if some monsters will share skills with players or not, if their skills will be grouped by creature, etc). Erasculio 19:50, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

I think "racial skills" would be better than "skills by race". The "skills by" cats organise normal skills in different ways, but racial skills are another sort of skill altogether. I'm not sure. pling 20:01, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

Looks good for now. With the information that we currently have at our disposal, this should suffice. Obviously we'll have to amend it as things start getting revealed. Also, I added main hand and off hand mace cats to your list. I thought about the scepter, but we don't have anyone using that in an off-hand (yet). Venom20 20:22, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

Also, what about pet skills. Should they be broken up into species

• Pet
  • Bear
  • Dog
  • Drake
  • Lizard
  • Snow leopard
  • Wolf
  • Armorfish
  • Jellyfish
  • Shark
  • Devourer
  • Moa
  • Spider

Venom20 00:06, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

I'm not really sure. If it's true that each subtype of pet has different skills (a black bear would have different skills from a brown bear), then I guess ArenaNet is just going to mix and match between different skills for each pet (a Fire Drake would have Elemental Shake Off, together with the Polar Bear and the Frozen Jellyfish, while the Savannah Lizard would have Stampede together with the Joe's Spawn Devourer and the Totemic Snow Leopard). If that were the case, then maybe it would be better to not split the skills by pet, since a given skill could belong to multiple pets. Otherwise, I think we could follow your idea. Erasculio 00:32, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

(Reset indent) Some issues:

• "Off-hand Mace skills": I have changed all those category names to "Off hand mace skills". I believe that capitalization makes more sense, and on the matter of "off-hand" versus "off hand" (and "Main-Hand" versus "main hand") I just went with what ArenaNet had done.
• Shadow Fiend and Haunt are both within "Death Shroud skills" and "Minion skills". I could find no way around that. Likewise, "End Death Shroud" is only within "Death Shroud skills"; I couldn't classify it by type since it apparently has no type (it's not utility, nor a weapon skill, nor does it heal...).
• Chain skills: since warriors have chain skills and rangers have chain skills, having a single "Chain skills" category as proposed above would not work, considering it would be within the "Skills by profession" category. I have replaced it by categories "Warrior chain skills" and "Ranger chain skills". Maybe not the ideal solution, but IMO it works.
• Charge skills: same problem as chain skills. What do you people think, "Warrior charge skills" too?

Erasculio 23:49, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

Don't have a problem with any of this (<3 for using lower-case). For the last two of your points, "Category:Warrior charge skills" et al should have a "Charge skills" sortkey, so it's listed under C for Charge instead W for Warrior in Category:Warrior skills. pling 02:18, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

done and done. Venom20 04:04, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

Unfortunately, Anet is not that consistent. Chriskang 10:05, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

Elementalists also have charge skills (Ice Shards has 4 stages, and can be held at the end like a Halo Plasma Pistol), and I suspect it's not the only one. You're also missing Signets for some professions. Your terminology 'Skills by type' will conflict with the skill types, eg Marks. Your 'Skills by type' is more like 'Skills by slot'. Your 'Utility skills' category will be bloated (and it will be the same with Healing and Elite, but to a lesser extent).Shaun|Nox 13:07, 1 September 2010 (UTC)

(Reset indent) The only thing I'm in doubt about is what to do with three articles: Chain, Charge skill and Signet. We have a "Skills by type" category, which as mentioned above has all skills based on their main type. I would like to avoid having a "Skill types" category in order to not create confusion, so I tried to empty the current "Skill types" category by merging it with professions, which was mostly possible due to how most specific skill types are linked to a single profession (minion skills, conjure skills, burst skills, etc). The only problem are the three skill types that are shared between more than one profession - chain skills, charge skills and signets.
I'm actually thinking about just adding those three articles to the main "Skill category", remove the "Skill types" category, and be done with it (since that's pretty much the last thing to settle here). Erasculio 04:50, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

So you have no problem with the Utility category containing all Utilities across all professions and races? A category like that is quite useless without sort/filter.Shaun|Nox 06:03, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

Thinking from a dpl perspective, a listing of utility skills by profession you would need to know that particular types of skill are a ranger specific type (ie traps). There are much better ways to do it. -- Aspectacle  06:19, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

Ok, so, a couple of questions: Would a "Main hand axe skill" also be under "Axe skills" or "Weapon skills"? Do we want the first two words of "___ Attunement skills" capitalized? And which categories will have "<prof> ______ skills" (e.g. "Warrior charge skills")? --JonTheMon 17:20, 2 September 2010 (UTC)