Guild Wars 2

Hey all,

I was looking through the wiki for how to build my necro, guardian and warrior I am leveling

One thing that stood out was that some skills get a 20% cd flat and others get the 20% cd and a little extra on the side – be this a certain stat or range or what have you

If some of the traits associated with those skill cd’s were attached to make it cd+extra – this would both give a bit more potential to diverse builds as well as allow for the expansion of new traits into the trait line

That’s my .02

Thanks for reading

-Phyrak

And then there’s Path of Midnight, which is a 15% cooldown reduction and nothing else.

Yup.

Yes but do keep in mind that classes also have discrepancies.
In other words, having X on class A and X on class B isn’t necessarily balanced. It follows that having X on A and having Y on B isn’t necessarily imbalanced, even if X on A versus Y on A would be.

The problem here was when they early in the game started to normalize things then stop to look at the differences between profession. Followed by blanket nerfs to endurance recovery (that strangely missed the passive of signet of stamina)

The game has issues with the classes being too similar.
I don’t really thing more normalization is what we want. Even if we might loudly proclaim so due to having just died in a 1v1 fight because we didn’t know better and figured we should do that, players are terrible… actually, let me generalize:

Consumers are terrible at telling you what they want. See: New Coke.

This is actually a really really big problem in software development, and I can’t imagine it is any better (it seems far worse) in game development. We can’t just go with what consumers say. Not only do at best 10% of consumers bother to say something (so we have to guess that the other 90% won’t mind any change we do based on 10%), even if those 10% tell you uniformly that they want feature X, you implement it, 1% uses it, 5% never use it, 4% actively yell at you for implementing something which is bad.

It comes down to never listening to the customer directly. They tell you they want feature X, you spend some time to find out that what they actually want is that they have a problem B which takes ~30 seconds off their time every morning, but it’s highly frustrating because they’re just sitting there.
So all you needed to do was speed up something. Thing is, you patch that, you’ll still hear them yelling about not having feature X. That’s just how it goes, they do work happily again but they still complain.

/shrug

If I were a game dev, I’d probably block our own forums in my browsers. :P

He really is right, though. Most of the CD reduction traits are just utter poo. It has nothing to do with classes or making them more homogenous, but DOES affect build diversity.

Buffing up bad traits and traitlines (for instance when a traitline has terrible minor traits in it) will help classes have MORE builds and you will feel less homogeneity between classes.

Yes, though I think the other direction (remove the -CD entirely unless that is the point of the trait) makes more sense.

I’d rather have per-weapon traits – if they haaaaave to exist – be more creative than just “Hey here, have 20% less CD and 5% more damage, because we can’t be kitten d balancing the base weapon if you don’t want to spec for it”.

For example, the traits which make arrows pierce are interesting. They add something complex to the weapon, something to change how you utilize it. It’s not a simple damage add, it’s not a cooldown reduction, yet in the specific situation they’re meant for they both increase output and delivery frequency by virtue of hitting multiple targets.
And on top of that they make you able to hit the intended target even if they’re “hiding” behind other players.