Template talk:Skill types nav

Archive

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• 2011

On every skill type mainpage?

I honestly don't think people are going to navigate between different skill types of different professions. Yes, the table is useful. It's also frikkin' huuuuge. Is there anything we can do to...tone it down a little? Take the spirit skill article for example, the table takes up over half the space that's in there. --120.145.10.110 17:03, 30 September 2011 (UTC)

Half the space of an incomplete article. In release, there will/should be tons of information on each one of those skill type pages. Mediggo 11:14, 6 November 2011 (UTC)

pssst, can I propose a change?

This table I propose has the same information but is longer instead of higher. Thus the amount of empty space should be slightly lessened. Note: it does look slightly silly on a 1920x1080 resolution, but then again most things do. This can be fixed by making the width a fixed size instead of a %. Venom20 14:46, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

FYI: To see a fixed-width variant, see here Venom20 14:48, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

How about setting min-width to the minimum size before it starts looking ugly instead of using fixed values? --zeeZ (talk) 14:56, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

It seems fairly heavy and blocky as is, especially with the profession icons in blue blocks. --JonTheMon 16:00, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

The main reason why I like the current design is that, thanks to the white backgrounds, the table doesn't look crammed but rather feels clean and roomy. Maybe just shift the current layout into 3 columns like this one below? 16:39, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

(Edit conflict) How about something more compact, but still in that style?

Like so? - Infinite - talk 16:51, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

I like the current version most because it's focused on small area of page. Easier to read and compare, and I think it's also more clear to understand. Also, is there really any need to sort professions by armor class here? I kinda dislike the "empty 3rd soldier profession cells" on all above tables, but that's probably just me. Mediggo 17:16, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

If you're trying to make it look better for high resolutions, then the result is currently the opposite of the intent. It's massive, bulky and about 1000 pixels long, which IMO, is about twice as big as it needs to be. It's visually distracting, somewhat hard to parse and not that aesthetically pleasing. There is something to be said for white space. As a side note, why is it necessary to break up professions into armor class? Armor class doesn't really have an effect on skill types, other than possibly that soldiers use shouts and some adventurers use traps... Aqua (T|C) 20:08, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

As it will be at the bottom of a page, criteria for bulkiness changes. If you want a 3 column-wide setup (for horizontal spacing issues) you're going to have a blank space anyway, so splitting by armor class is one way to go about it (unless you want the blank space to be on the bottom right). As for design, the first revision looks fine. If you wanted to replace the wide "profession specific" row with the three armor class rows, that would like fine as well. --JonTheMon 20:43, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

(Edit conflict)

What exactly was the main objection to these dimensions earlier this year? - Infinite - talk 20:52, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

My main objection with the current design is the useless and non-aesthetically pleasing white spaces located at the right and left of the nav itself due to it's vertical design. This is why I would propose (and prefer) a horizontal design.While I agree that a 3 column design does not suit the 8 professions, it looks much better than a 4 columned table and wastes less empty space than a 2 or 1 column table (again to the right/left). Venom20 21:07, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

split

Can we split skill types from profession mechanics?--Relyk 00:18, 8 December 2012 (UTC)

The problem is that there's an inconsistent overlap between mechanics and skill types. Guardian virtues, warrior bursts, and mesmer shatters are skill types, but the other mechanics are not (including attunements, even though we put that in their infoboxes here ~_~ ). So we'd be still be listing half of the mechanics, and someone might come along and say, "Why don't we have all the prof mechanics listed here?" —Dr Ishmael 00:54, 8 December 2012 (UTC)

Organization

I'm not entirely too sure about the placement of skill types, but unless there is a reason for things, I'd like to rearrange the table such that the list of types per profession appear alphabetically. For instance for the elementalist's row, Attunement•Overload•Arcane•Cantrip•Conjure•Glyph•Shout•Signet would become Arcane•Attunement•Cantrip•Conjure•Glyph•Overload•Shout•Signet. All other identifies remain, such as bold, italic, smaller font, etc.Venom20 15:58, 19 August 2015 (UTC)

I think we should get rid of profession mechanics that aren't actually skill types. This would include pet, attunement/overload, death/reaper shroud, steal, and tool belt. I don't know enough about revenant to say whether legend is a skill type or not, but Facet of Nature definitely isn't (it's a skill, not a type).

I also think that the current formatting is too complex. There doesn't seem to be much point to the small formatting for shared skill types. —Dr Ishmael 16:12, 19 August 2015 (UTC)

I agree, but sometimes it may be best to focus on aspect of the topic than most, but here are my several cents on the table. I do not the small font, I find it absolutely useless. The bold I can list with as it can help new players identify what is unique to a profession. I'm on the fence about the italic, but I see merit in keeping a distinction for types of skills that professions get with the new expansion. What I do disagree with is doing away with the profession mechanics. Tool belt skills are just that, tool belt skills. They type is indeed tool belt. While I agree that pet is, in itself, not a skill, the pets have skills. So there is, perhaps to me, a chain of logic there. For consistency purposes, I think that mechanics should remain. I also agree that facet of nature should be removed, but that facet stays. The revenant has 6 facet skills in total (one for each slot, plus nature). Also, if I may possibly rehash an older argument. I feel the table has grown too tall and doesn't efficiently use the spaces to the left and right. But this is a topic for another time. Venom20 16:23, 19 August 2015 (UTC)

Profession mechanics should have their own nav, how about that? —Dr Ishmael 17:26, 19 August 2015 (UTC)

So you're suggesting that this Skill nav reflect what the players can train using Hero points? If so, I completely agree with that. I'd hate to lose the mechanics, but this nav is getting too large and cluttered, and will fail completely once another specialization is given to the professions. Also agree that small is pointless. G R E E N E R 18:00, 19 August 2015 (UTC)

EDIT: I should recant some of the above, as I just realized some of the listed skill types such as Ward would be in limbo, and I'm undecided on how to handle that. G R E E N E R 18:08, 19 August 2015 (UTC)

"Profession mechanics should have their own nav" I could certainly get behind something like this. Venom20 18:04, 19 August 2015 (UTC)

@Greener: I didn't say anything about tying it to hero point training. My focus would be on the type/category names that appear in gold-ish font before the description on the in-game tooltips.

@Venom: Perhaps we should split off all mechanics, not just the profession-specific ones. —Dr Ishmael 19:27, 19 August 2015 (UTC)

I agree that the template is currently too long and some of the entries, namely Facet of Nature and Reaper's Shroud, are very questionable, and I also agree that splitting off the mechanics to a separate nav would definitely help; however, distinction between core and elite spec types should definitely stay.

Now, when it comes to the small font, I'm perfectly fine with removing it, but the question is how to handle shared types? If we leave them in each profession, the list will be rather long, but if we put them into a "shared" category like before, the distinction between professions will become less and less important as time goes on: we would already need to include the previously necro-specific wells, with thief and ranger physical and glyph skills will very likely become shared as well, and in the future this list will only grow. I was toying with the idea of hiding all other professions at first, not unlike Template:Jumping puzzle nav (but perhaps all hidden professions under one expandable section), but even I'm not convinced about that yet... 20:07, 19 August 2015 (UTC)

Yeah, I completely over-read into your words, sorry. For some reason I had it in my mind that Anet had mechanically combined all skills into the hero point categories, which is obviously not the case.

I currently see three different concepts trying to be carried by this nav, and I think they'd have to be split into at least two separate navs.

1. Profession Skill Nav which carries the list of skills which each profession can train into, based on the Hero point system.
   • Hero points are becoming a larger concept, and showing what can be gained via the elite specializations can clarify things (e.g. Giving links to the Warrior shouts, Ranger shouts, and Necro shouts)
2. Skill nav based on mechanics
   • Headlining the nav with profession specific mechanics (e.g. Steal and Tool Belt)
   • Following up with a catch-all for the different mechanic types. It may look ugly, but a list needs to be somewhere. This COULD be a third stand-alone nav, but then, how many navs do we want?

G R E E N E R 20:13, 19 August 2015 (UTC)

Perhaps a Profession mec nav like this? Though Guardians' new virtues has no type or name, and Facet of Nature and Continuum Split are an add to the existing mechanism or complementation of a stance.

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Profession mechanics

	Profession	Elite Mechanism	Core Mechanism
	Guardian	Physical Virtues?	Virtue
	Revenant	Facet of Nature	Legend
	Warrior	Primal Burst	Burst
	Engineer	Unknown	Tool belt
	Ranger	Unknown	Pet
	Thief	Unknown	Steal
	Elementalist	Overload	Attunement
	Mesmer	Continuum Split	Shatter
	Necromancer	Reaper's Shroud	Death Shroud

Keltz 21:31, 19 August 2015 (UTC)

That looks overly complicated. In any case, the core mechanics should be more prominent / sorted to the left, not the specialty mechanics. —Dr Ishmael 21:46, 19 August 2015 (UTC)

(Reset indent) The skill types nav should only have skill types. People don't need to look to all the skills available to all the professions, just the specific profession skill nav as Greener mentioned. People navigate between professions with the profession nav. The most we need to do is indicate specialization a skill type is unique to.--Relyk ~ talk < 02:22, 20 August 2015 (UTC)

Alright, my brain's taken me this far User:Greener/Sandbox2. Now it needs a break. G R E E N E R 02:46, 20 August 2015 (UTC)

Arcane/banner/cantrip (but not chain/channel/charge) are skill types (or categories) not skill mechanics. This is a very significant difference in terms of gameplay.

• A skill type/category is a designation assigned to it that allows traits to interact with it through said category, rather than having to name the skill explicitly. These can be identified by the gold text that prefixes a skill's description (as I've said multiple times).
• A skill mechanic refers usually to how the skill is activated, but generally to some mechanical aspect of the skill.

Sometimes these have close similarities, but they should not be confused. Example: Mantras are all channeled skills, but not all channeled skills are mantras. Thus mantra is the type and channel is the mechanic.

A skill mechanics nav should not list skill types, and vice versa. —Dr Ishmael 03:35, 20 August 2015 (UTC)

Ah, thanks for clarifying that. That's now cut down the usefulness of my Mechanics Nav as I've written it, as it will shrink it either way. Going back to the drawing board. G R E E N E R 04:07, 20 August 2015 (UTC)

@Dr ishmael Well, If you prefer a messing looking template instead of a split and simpler one that looks "bad", where you can recognize the diference between skill type and profession mechanics easier. Well then, unfurtunally I can't help. Keltz 19:29, 22 August 2015 (UTC)

I think what he was trying to say is that in attempting to fix one problem, I may have pulled on too many strings and got this template involved over at Template talk:Trait lists nav. It's not you, it's me. G R E E N E R 19:34, 22 August 2015 (UTC)

I decided to finally split the nav into skill types and {{Profession mechanics nav}}, as per Template talk:Specializations nav#Complete rework, to prevent the nav to growing into ridiculous sizes and to allow the inclusion of non-skill mechanics such as Life force or Adrenaline. I'm still not sure how to list the shared types without repeating them all over or removing the information about the professions altogether, but I kept them in each profession for the time being. 12:53, 25 August 2015 (UTC)

Collapse button placement

I think it'd be a lot nicer looking if the show/hide button was in the nav's header rather than at the top of the content. ~ Fishrock ^(talk) 17:17, 2 September 2017 (UTC)

Our CSS for navs doesn't really suit that and makes it quite difficult to do. (if you feel like fixing the nav CSS go ahead.. :/ )-Chieftain Alex 17:50, 2 September 2017 (UTC)

I was originally planning to do that, but I had trouble rewriting the nav into a table format while maintaining the same look and feel and I didn't feel like fixing all the CSS for it. Another thing I was trying to avoid was for the expansion link to be easily missed, which Greener showed to be a potential problem even with it sticking out like this. 18:01, 2 September 2017 (UTC)

Loving the new version

Just being able to look at Stance and then Shout, and seeing how the tables do show you the mix-n-match, taking into consideration the elite specs, is really nice. Thanks again for tackling this, Noxx. G R E E N E R 23:15, 3 September 2017 (UTC)

You're welcome. ^^ 05:44, 4 September 2017 (UTC)