MMOs: Abilities Overload

    Your abilities are the staple of your character and mmos. You level up, learn new abilities by trainer, on the field or by other means and learning to master each skill each time while at the same time it starts to add up. Now you're max level and you see u have 25-40 abilities and leave you w/ a ton of abilities wondering if you gonna need to use all these.

Look at all those abilities I use. 30 abilities I have to have on my bar. Not counting Buff,Stances,Hoverbike/Car, Heroic Moment (can't use w/o my companion present) and targeting marker. It was fun killing that Jedi tho =)

In Guild Wars 2 for example, your core weapon abilities are based on what weapon u have on your main hand (3 for 1-handed or 5 for 2-handed) and for off hand (2 regardless). You can learned all your classes weapon skill ability at level 10 by just using it. Their are more abilities but you will only have 3 to put in your utility skill (around 20) and 1 in the elite skill (3+ profession skills to choose from).

I was lvl 9 using a Sword (1,2, and 3) and Shield (4 and 5), 6 is a healing ability which everyone get. 7, 8, and 9 are the utility skill and 0 is the elite skills.

The question is why do we need this many abilities. Their's some that has to be used in certain situation like stun, your/enemy health %, rooted/bind, passive effect, and others that is only used 1-2 times in a 10 min fight. Why not give us up to 15 abilities that we'll use majority of the time then say those 25-40 that we'll use less often. By doing this, it can be less taxing on the player on learning and playing and less taxing for the devs to balancing skills and being able to focus on other aspects of the game. There are other games that don't have many and can still be fun and challenging like DCUO, Diablo 3 and the soon to be released Torchlight 2.

Do you think less is better or more is better?

Custom In-Game Music Option in Guild Wars 2

    Are you one of those people that boot up your iTunes or similar programs to have that epic boss battle music, chilling in the city, or exploring the sea floor? Well there's a not well known feature that will allow you to do such thing. You can have your own Music for the following, these names are Ambient, NighTime, Battle, BossBattle, Underwater, City, Crafting, and MainMenu.

For a quick how to, check out this How-To. (Might need to turn it up a tad)

You not limited to just one song on that playlist format so fell free to add how many you want. Just don't over do it w/ 100 songs.

Here's the benefit from this feature.

• Your Personal Music and not having to back out of the game to changed said music.
• More CPU due to not having Music Player open in background.
• The in-game music automatically formats the music to fit in with other game sound effects while additional programs simply play over it.
• ......
• PROFIT!

Now I know that people are like "The GW2 Music is Godlike, why would you changed it". The simple answer is, My Music, My Way!

Now you know so tell your friends & family!

 (Might put a few tunes I'll have playing for certain stuff in a new post so maybe you can copy get some ideals)

-- James Boer Talks GW2 Audio Design 
--- For more info Check out the Playing Custom Music Thread on GW2 Guru by clicking link <----
---- NEW! My In-Game Music List for GW2