Scribing skills still not saving in armory station. Great thing to include in the QoL patch?

TumlinTheJolly · January 11

As title implies, you still can't have several versions of scribing skills saved for use in different builds. You still have to spend ink and go to a scribing station EVERY TIME you want to swap between builds that use different versions of a skill, rather than simply using the armory station. Any updates on when this will be addressed? Seems like something they'd want to add to the QoL update.

Avran_Sylt · January 11

This is not a bug.

But it is an interesting feature request.

Soarora · January 11

It would be nice. Trials want me to have vibrant shroud and warding contingency, but I can't do both because I need one to be my immobilize for dungeons.

BasP · January 11

Yeah, that would definitely be a nice QoL feature! I hope it's implemented someday.

M0ntie · January 11

I'd call this a bug. You should not have to spend Ink to swap between the two and both combinations absolutely should save in the Armoury.

loosej · January 12

Agree that it doesn't really make sense not to save our scribed skills with our build. I assume the idea is to make us farm and spend ink, but for me personally it has the opposite effect.

All 20 of my chars have 2 builds, one for PvE and one for PvP. If I create a skill to use with one of them, I just don't slot/use that skill with the other build. I'm not going to the altar to change back and forth between two variants whenever I change builds. Meaning the only time I spend ink is when I first create a skill, or want to try something new. But if I try something new, it will always be for the same build, changing one or maybe two properties of the skill.

So realistically I interact with the system and spend ink at about half the rate I would if skills were being saved with our builds. For me this is the major letdown of the system. If you use it like me, it cuts the value of scribing in half. If you do use a single skill for multiple builds and change it every time, it reduces the value of extra armory slots a person could have bought.

I also find it puzzling from a technical point of view. The concept of skills and the armory existed when they created scribing, and I'd expect it to be designed in a way that skills or skill lines can be added to the game without the need to make them "armory compatible". When they added the arcanist or new guild skill lines, the existence of the new skills alone was likely enough for the armory to pick them up and start saving them. Which makes all this feel like it's not a matter of "we haven't added armory compatibility yet" but more like "we've made active efforts to make sure this doesn't work with the armory". I could be wrong on this of course, just providing feedback on how it looks.

NikoSquared · January 12

Absolutely, I only have a single character that plays multiple types of healer content (PvE Casual, PvE Trials, PvP Battlegrounds, PvP Cyrodiil). The scribes that they need are slightly different which means I have to remember which armory build gets which scribes, and manually apply them every single time I want to switch

virtus753 · January 13

M0ntie wrote: »

I'd call this a bug. You should not have to spend Ink to swap between the two and both combinations absolutely should save in the Armoury.

It's not a bug just because it's a pain point. The devs have confirmed that the current implementation of the Armory is not supposed to save different combinations of scribed skills. Implementing this would take them more work to add the functionality. They have made a comment about looking into adding this ability in the future, iirc, as they're aware of the requests to add it.

loosej wrote: »

I also find it puzzling from a technical point of view. The concept of skills and the armory existed when they created scribing, and I'd expect it to be designed in a way that skills or skill lines can be added to the game without the need to make them "armory compatible". When they added the arcanist or new guild skill lines, the existence of the new skills alone was likely enough for the armory to pick them up and start saving them. Which makes all this feel like it's not a matter of "we haven't added armory compatibility yet" but more like "we've made active efforts to make sure this doesn't work with the armory". I could be wrong on this of course, just providing feedback on how it looks.

If you play with different Scribing combinations while using CMX, you can see that CMX isn't able to distinguish the specific combinations properly in many cases. You can get "Chilling Explosion" to do Fire or Shock damage. (Not really - the skill has been rescribed from Chilling to Fiery or Shocking - but this is how the skill appears in CMX.) So something is quite different about the way that Scribed combinations are saved - it isn't just by skillID. Each non-Scribed skill has three skillIDs: one for the base form and one for each of the morphs. But Scribed combinations seem not to have that same 1:1 relationship between skillID and combination the same way that non-Scribed skills do.

"Chilling Explosion" does frost damage, as intended.

Rescribe to Fiery Explosion but CMX still says:

"Chilling Explosion" does fire damage.

Rescribe to Shocking Explosion but CMX still says:

"Chilling Explosion" does shock damage.

loosej · January 13

virtus753 wrote: »

If you play with different Scribing combinations while using CMX, you can see that CMX isn't able to distinguish the specific combinations properly in many cases. You can get "Chilling Explosion" to do Fire or Shock damage. (Not really - the skill has been rescribed from Chilling to Fiery or Shocking - but this is how the skill appears in CMX.) So something is quite different about the way that Scribed combinations are saved - it isn't just by skillID. Each non-Scribed skill has three skillIDs: one for the base form and one for each of the morphs. But Scribed combinations seem not to have that same 1:1 relationship between skillID and combination the same way that non-Scribed skills do.

"Chilling Explosion" does frost damage, as intended.

Rescribe to Fiery Explosion but CMX still says:

"Chilling Explosion" does fire damage.

Rescribe to Shocking Explosion but CMX still says:

"Chilling Explosion" does shock damage.

Thanks, that explains a lot! But I'm still left wondering why scribed skills don't get a unique id. I know the amount needed would be high (1 skill with 10 focus, signature and affix possibilities would need 1000 unique ids), but I'm also pretty sure they aren't using 8 or 16 bit integers to store them. Every coding decision being made always has some reason, but I also know it isn't always a good one, and at this point I'm just curious.

EF321 · January 13

loosej wrote: »

virtus753 wrote: »

If you play with different Scribing combinations while using CMX, you can see that CMX isn't able to distinguish the specific combinations properly in many cases. You can get "Chilling Explosion" to do Fire or Shock damage. (Not really - the skill has been rescribed from Chilling to Fiery or Shocking - but this is how the skill appears in CMX.) So something is quite different about the way that Scribed combinations are saved - it isn't just by skillID. Each non-Scribed skill has three skillIDs: one for the base form and one for each of the morphs. But Scribed combinations seem not to have that same 1:1 relationship between skillID and combination the same way that non-Scribed skills do.

"Chilling Explosion" does frost damage, as intended.

Rescribe to Fiery Explosion but CMX still says:

"Chilling Explosion" does fire damage.

Rescribe to Shocking Explosion but CMX still says:

"Chilling Explosion" does shock damage.

Thanks, that explains a lot! But I'm still left wondering why scribed skills don't get a unique id. I know the amount needed would be high (1 skill with 10 focus, signature and affix possibilities would need 1000 unique ids), but I'm also pretty sure they aren't using 8 or 16 bit integers to store them. Every coding decision being made always has some reason, but I also know it isn't always a good one, and at this point I'm just curious.

As far as I understand scribed skills are saved as base skill id + 3 currently active scripts. Everything scribing related uses all different functions, for example:
* GetCraftedAbilityLink(*integer* _craftedAbilityId_, *integer* _primaryScriptId_, *integer* _secondaryScriptId_, *integer* _tertiaryScriptId_, *[LinkStyle|#LinkStyle]* _linkStyle_)
** _Returns:_ *string* _link_

And regular one:
* GetAbilityLink(*integer* _abilityId_, *[LinkStyle|#LinkStyle]* _linkStyle_)
** _Returns:_ *string* _link_