GuildFans is happy to announce the winners of its 'Design a Skill' contest! Guild Wars 2 Game Designers Jon Peters and Isaiah Cartwright explain how they selected the five winning entries.

So the time has come for us to announce the winners of our epic 'Design a Skill' contest! Five lucky people will be receiving Guild Wars 2 wall graphics from LTLPrints, as modeled above by the legendary artist himself: Kekai Kotaki.

First of all, we'd like to thank ArenaNet for the participation in the contest. Particularly Game Designers Isaiah 'Izzy' Cartwright, Jon Peters, and the rest of the combat design team for screening all of the entries, and taking on the incredibly difficult task of picking out a handful of winners. Secondly, thanks to everyone who entered! We were blown away by the amount of creativity in the entries.

So, without further ado, let me introduce our lucky winners:

Grand Prize Winner:

• N3verendr - 'Stonewark'

The four runners up, in no particular order:

• CrazyExcel - 'Plasma Shackles'
• grabus - 'Soar'
• nurt - 'Wrought Iron Bear Trap'
• Vulturion - 'Infernal Damnation'

Congratulations to you five! We'll be in touch shortly. Read on further for more insight from Jon and Izzy on their selected skills...

Before I get into the individual analaysis of the winners, I'd like to introduce it with a message from Jon Peters, summarizing their approach to sifting through the entries, and the crtieria by which they judged:

"We each read every entry and instinctually tried to pick out our favorites. We each probably had around 20 at that point. Ones that overlapped went through to the final pile and then we made cases for the non-overlapping ones that we liked the most. This narrowed the list down to 8, at which point we rated then until we had our top five.

So how do we instinctually pick ones? Here is some stuff I look at.

1) How simple is it? I like simple elegant skill.
2) How unique is it?
3) How versatile is it?
4) Is it flavorful and fitting for the chosen profession?
5) When I read it is my first impression,"I want to use that skill right now!"?
6) Does it feel like a GW2 skill?

So basically those are my criteria. All five skills had elements of these questions that appealed to us. Ultimately, these last few all had a lot of cool things so I think when everything else is a wash you go with "How badly do you want to try out that skill?"

Overall there was a lot of great stuff and it was hard to decide. Every skill idea is honestly good in my opinion and it's how and where you take that idea that makes or breaks it."

Grand Prize Winner:

N3verendr - 'Stonewark'

Izzy - The reason why we liked this one is because it all fit really well together visually, design, and gameplay wise. It's also is really in line with the way GW2 skills are done; all the skills are fairly simple and there are not a lot of conditional statements. Everything is very visual and easy to understand just by seeing the skill in action.

Jon - This skill was nice because it takes the idea of a summon to a different level, using the skill slots in unique ways to mode switch while skill 1 remains the same.

Runners Up:

CrazyExcel - 'Plasma Shackles'

Izzy - This skill is really versatile, one of things we really strive for. You use it to keep a target near you, to keep a target away from you, to keep a target near someone else... There are a lot of interesting things you could do with this skill and the simplicity in the write up really drew us to it. Also the tid-bit at the bottom understanding that this idea could easily be a warrior or ranger skill by just changing it's mechanics was really in line with a typical ideas we come up with; find some neat idea and then a good thematic match for it. The critique I would say about this design would be targeting. It has elements of ally, ground targeting, and enemy targeting. That would be a really complicated problem to solve, doable but complicated.

Jon - Yeah this was the most elegant skill. It contained a ton of versatility in a small punch.

grabus - 'Soar'

Izzy - This skill just sounded fun to use and play around with. It did get a little complicated with the 'you take damage when the hawk takes damage', and it needs a little more function for PvE, but overall this skill fits really well in with the ranger thematic and was well thought out.
 
Jon - Yeah this one is really outside the box, but has a lot of potential. Some PvE potential too, but it wasn't explored in depth.

nurt - 'Wrought Iron Bear Trap'

Izzy - We really liked this one because it was a mental crowd control skill. Since we're always dealing with the balance of crowd control it was neat to see a skill where you put the choice on the enemy rather then on the balance of crowd control its self. The critique of this design is it's going to need some sort of UI or a complicated effect to explain the distance. There are a number of ideas to solve this but that was the first thing that came to mind when thinking how I would make this work.

Jon - Agreed this skill packs some interesting elements into a trap. I love making enemies choose how they want to deal with a skill.
 

Vulturion - 'Infernal Damnation'

Izzy - This skill seemed like a really fun way to summon a creature, allowing that creation to have a little higher balance than other summons, and it follows our minion mechanics very well overall. A very simple and straight forward skill with a lot of play. My critique would be in the thematics; fire isn't really in the normal necromancer bag of tricks, as we tend to aim at the colded end of things. Still, a very cool idea and one I really liked.

Jon - I always like malign intervention and this felt like the GW2 version of that skill. Also leaving a persistent area behind to take advantage of cross profession combos was a nice touch.

So there you have it! Thanks again to ArenaNet, and everyone who participated. Make sure to congratulate the winners over in the announcement thread, here!