Guild Wars Wiki talk:Formatting/Unique weapons

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Weapon stats

I looked at the list of unique items which look - to me - really messy. As we have some nice DPL lists around here, I thought about a method on DPLing unique items. The big difficulty there: The weapon stats.
So I decided to make a template for that, and did something nice. You can see some examples here. I also added a method for those Eye of the North special items with 5 attributes.
The big advantage of using a template is that we can get the information via DPL for nearly everything. In combination with an addition of a dropped by parameter to the {{Weapon infobox}} (not displayed, only for DPL), we could make nice DPL lists for unique items.
I would like to have all unique item stats replaced by this template. I (or Wikichu) would do all necessary replacements if accepted. Comments please :) poke | talk 22:08, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

If this means less messy unique item tables, I'm all for it. The template you made is easy enough to use, also. - anja 22:10, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

Looks good to me, if it means DPL works. I could see some concerns about making the template more complicated for new users but that can be said of any template. I think the usefullness here of creating the DPL lists would compensate of the extra complication. Not to mention I am fairly certain those unique weapon lists get looked at a lot, Unique Items is #9 on the most viewed pages. --Lemming 22:32, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

As someone who spent a fair bit of time trying to tidy some of those tables I resent being told they're really messy XP That said, I'd like to use DPL for this stuff if it's at all possible. Unfortunately, as far as I can see your template doesn't currently deal with the major problem we've had with this all along - what to do with weird unique items that can't be broken down properly. Here I'm talking of things like Tanzit's Defender, Thorgall's Shield, Ivor's Staff, The Shadestone etc etc, which have legal mods in an illegal combination (most often two inscriptions and no suffix). There has to be scope for that in the template otherwise it won't work - any ideas? I'd suggest a "bonus 2" switch, but that may make things complicated when it come to creating a quick reference list (as it'd mean adding another column which would be empty for most weapons).

Another problem is space. While the template works well on a weapon page, "[[Energy]] +5 (While [[Health]] is above 50%)" is simply too long for a quick reference table - it'd squash everything up making all the entries several lines deep. If we're going to use a template for this it's got to be smart enough that we can create compressed stats for lists. For example, in a list the above bonus should be "Energy +5 (HP > 50%)" - same info, much less space. The List of warrior unique items has been put together with compressed entries like this - any more text and the lines will break all over the place. I don't know if this would need to be implemented at the template or DPL stage.

I'd also add a compulsory "perfect" switch to the template, so we can easily sort the perfect items from the imperfect ones and create appropriate lists, and hopefully down the line combined "Perfect Weapon" lists when we finally get crafter and collector weapons sorted out. If you want to use the template for lists you'll need "Drops from" and "Location" switches as well. --NieA7 14:10, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

As for 'weird uniques' Poke mentioned this template on IRC when he was working on it and we have been talking about how to get Tanzit's Defender in line with the rest. AFAIK, the idea was to use "bonus = bonus desc1<br/>bonus desc2" (sortability will be a bit of a problem, but not too terrible):

== [[Tanzit's Defender]] ==
{{User:Poke/sandbox/sandbox|Shield
| attribute = Strength
| bonus = Reduces [[Blind]] duration on you by 20% (Stacking)<br />Received [[physical damage]] -2 (while in a [[Stance]])
| not replicable = y
}}

I do agree with the compressed version of the description for the quick ref lists. I'm not too sure how the usability would be best for that. And the "drops from" parameter is a good addition too, IMO. --  (CoRrRan / talk) 14:21, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

(edit conflict)

We had a discussion on IRC about those special weapons. For example Tanzit's Defender; As we cannot say which bonus is the "real" bonus (as a inscription) and which one should be treated as if there was an upgrade for that, we decided to put those together in the bonus section and leave the upgrade part empty. As you can see in my sandbox it displays correctly and there should not be that big problem to have those special items (marked btw. with not replicable = y) in the list. This is also explained in the parameter description of the template.

As for shortened names, it's difficult to do this, but if all really use the original ingame description, I think it would be possible to filter those out and replace them by a shortened name. It would be great if ANet would install a regexp extension as this would be rather easy than.

As I also said above, I would also request a dropped by parameter to the Weapon infobox; this would be enough to get the location as well. poke | talk 14:29, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

Missed it in the examples, sorry. Putting both in the bonus description is effectively done now, so the template would at least not be any worse (and to be honest I can't think of another viable way around it). We'd just need a guideline on what gets listed first in the case of a clash, just to ensure consistency.

Any particular reason you'd want dropped by in the infobox rather than the template?

I can't think of any weapons offhand that use a non-standard nomenclature for modifiers (except the Ogre Slaying Knife, but as that's non-perfect anyway I'm not too worried about it), so hopefully a global filter would work just fine. We should make sure that such a solution is possible before we start updating all the pages though.

With an eye to the future, what we do here should be compatible with whatever we do with collector and crafter weapons. Got any ideas how we can manage them? Template's no good unless we add every single weapon by every single crafter/collector individually, which doesn't sound like a fun idea. I'd really like to use DPL to pull together some perfect weapon quick references, if possible. --NieA7 14:46, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

The order of a doubled bonus would be the same as in-game seen by the user who adds it. And for the dropped by parameter, I think it's more suited to put it into the Weapon infobox as it is about the weapon and not about the weapon stats.. For the filter it definitely works as long as we use the same wording, so all bonuses should be worded the same as in-game.

For collectors and crafters I think it should definitely not been discussed here.. poke | talk 16:42, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

Fair enough about the order. It makes more sense to me to put dropped in the template because it's about the weapon, but largely that's a case of semantics I guess - end of the day it doesn't really matter where it goes. Rationalising the wording should be "easy" if we do everything in one go, so hopefully that wouldn't be a problem. As for collectors and crafters, I've never understood the wiki obsession with shattering a conversation into a million multi-hewed shards scattered randomly over a wide area, but so be it. With relation to the unique weapons, we'll be shooting ourselves in the foot if we don't give ourselves the flexibility to include other kinds of weapons in the same template system at a later date: better to think through it all now and get it right first time. --NieA7 20:34, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

How will this handle items such as Chimeric Prism and Gorrel's Staff? Backsword 06:54, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

Gorrel's Staff was easy; for the Chimeric Prism I added another special parameter. See my sandbox. poke | talk 08:09, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

Can energy be done with 'combined'? Or is something else needed? (For items like Hourglass Staff.) Backsword 18:05, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

(Reset indent) Discussion kind of stalled on this, I assume because poke got busy with other stuff. Is this still something we want installed? It looks good to me. - BeX 08:27, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

I was just waiting :P poke | talk 09:21, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

So we can start using it? ^_^ - BeX 10:31, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

If no one opposes, I'll start implementing it, so it can really replace the existing descriptions. Also we might have to discuss where we should add the dropped by parameter to (as we need it for the DPL lists) poke | talk 12:02, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Auto-categorization

Can we remove the part where it says "include the base categories into the article", since the weapon infobox auto-categorizes the items? --  (CoRrRan / talk) 18:08, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

Makes sense to me :) --Lemming 18:08, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

the example

the trivia for it is somewhat nonsense, and the Battle Axe crafted does not need a 15^50 inscription (it even couldn't accept it), as it already has a 15^50 inherent mod. —ZerphaThe Improver 14:39, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

stub

Shouldn't we change the weapon-stub template at the top for something like a unique-item stub? Otherwise, articles that are tagged as stub lead to the weapons formatting guideline, which doesn't make much sense since unique items have it's own formatting guideline.--Fighterdoken 22:19, 1 February 2008 (UTC)

Good catch. - BeX 01:52, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

should multiple appearances be documented?

Jennalee showed me that unique items have two diffrent appearances as "the dye update" changed - as we know - coloring of every item. (exaple from old wiki with Zarnas' Wrath) That means the unique item pictures are likely mixed up with old and new appearances, yet we should possibly try to get both versions for the articles as they are still existant in the game. —ZerphaThe Improver 12:33, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

Unique counterparts

This section has a couple grammatical and markup errors. In grammar, it reads "[[Example Unique]] has nearly identical stats of this item, however", when it should be "item; however," or something similar, like starting a new sentence. Yeah, I know, it's minor, but it's a bother. Also, if both identical and nearly identical counterparts are present, the wording doesn't copy-paste to seperate lines when reading. Should this be bulleted, or combined into one sentence, as the example does with two identical counterparts? Just some little things that I'd probably change if I didn't like consensus so huggy muggy much. --Chaiyo Kaldor talk contribs 21:37, 23 July 2008 (UTC)

Just work your preferred changes into a couple of articles and then link them from here for comments. If there's no objections, you can then update the guidelines and maybe organise a little project to help update all the affected articles. -- ab.er.rant 03:22, 25 July 2008 (UTC)

Cool. Looking back at GWW:GUIDE, it's apparent that I may have missed some parts of it... I'll keep this in mind going forward. Thanks, Ab. --Chaiyo Kaldor talk contribs 15:52, 25 July 2008 (UTC)

Categories

I previously posted a bunch of questions about the template and categories, but after the coffee kicked in I figured it out for myself. One thing remains, however. Unless I'm reading it wrong, the "Unique <weapon>" category is automatically generated by the "unique = yes" line of code at the top. If this is the case, then the line of code at the bottom can be removed.--Shana Something 18:17, 9 April 2009 (UTC)

Skin to notes

Any objections to changing the guidelines for unique weapons to match that of weapons in regards to skin being a note rather than its own section? -- Kirbman 04:40, 22 February 2012 (UTC)

Unique counterparts

Not that it really matters nowadays, but I think the part "Also list other unique weapons if they are of the same weapon type, with the same modifiers, but have different damage types and/or requirements." should be removed or reworked.

I'm fine with considering 2 wands as nearly identical, if e.g. they have different attributes and come with a "Seize the Day" Energy +10...15 Energy regeneration -1 inscription. You use it for weapon swapping when low at energy, so the damage req doesn't matter. Or if 2 wands/staves are identical except for the damage.

Foci with "Live for Today" Energy +10...15 Energy regeneration -1 OTOH are already a different matter. You need to meet the req in order to get all of the energy when swapping - so a different req focus would be inferior.

And Adept Staves of Mastery for staves with different requirements are utterly different imo (regardless whether those attributes belong to the same profession - what good is an Adept Healing Staff of Mastery when running Prot Prayers?). Same for Wands of Memory and Foci of Aptitude. The req changes what the item can be used for too much. Steve1 (talk) 17:55, 5 January 2021 (UTC)

Suggestion: Remove the "and/or requirements" part at the end. Steve1 (talk) 19:19, 7 January 2021 (UTC)

Replica

"Be sure to explicitly mention or note any difference between the replica and the unique weapon, such as slight visual differences or minor stat differences.

State "This item cannot be replicated", if the exact technical stats cannot be replicated."

The second sentence states that "if the exact technical stats cannot be replicated", then the item cannot be replicated and it should be stated as such. Yet one sentence prior, it says tells you to mention "minor stat differences". But minor stat differences mean that the exact technical stats cannot be replicated. Am I reading this wrong?

I assume that minor stat differences mean holy vs. fire damage on wands, or what is meant?

Shall we rephrase / clarify this section? Steve1 (talk) 19:36, 5 January 2021 (UTC)