At the moment about half our traits aren’t worth taking. The grandmasters almost all suck, and the Alchemy line is the only one that’s really solid.
Specifically, the bad traits are:
Acidic Elixirs: Why would I be throwing elixirs at the enemy instead of myself or my allies?
Exploit Weakness: Too situational and too easy to counter.
Accelerant-Packed Turrets: Turrets are meant to be kept up, not destroyed, and the blast radius is pathetic.
Autodefense Bomb Dispenser: This should be a Master trait. It’s about the power level of what a master trait should be.
Sharpshooter: A crit proc trait with low chance, low duration, and mediocre effect. Nothing that great about this. RNG is a bad thing. All crit procs should be guaranteed on-crits abilities.
Infused Precision: Another crit proc with bad chance and low duration, but it’s slightly better. 100% chance would be better. Warriors have Furious Speed.
Precise Sights: Another crit proc with bad chance and weak effect.
Target the Weak: This has potential, but it’s again too situational.
Coated Bullets: The effect only applies to two skills and is so situational it’s barely noticeable.
Target the Maimed: I don’t really get this trait. All our weapons that reliably apply bleeding don’t benefit from a direct damage increase.
Modified Ammunition: You need to have 6 conditions up on someone before taking this is better than just taking Rifle Mod, and pistols don’t benefit from direct damage increase.
Napalm Specialist: This looks kind of nice, but then you realize that our class can already easily achieve 100% burning uptime without it. A damage increase for burning would make this trait more worthwhile.
Metal Plating: Turrets are a bit weak to start, and this trait doesn’t help at all. Autotool Installation should be placed in this slot, and this trait removed.
Autotool Installation: See above. Also, this trait doesn’t heal anywhere near enough.
Power Shoes: +25% movement speed… IN COMBAT. Don’t even get me started on the bad movement speed cap in this game. The problem is that “in combat” effects are subject to the badly coded system that determines when you’re “in combat”. Too often I lose my speed advantage because the game decides I’m no longer fighting.
Performance Enhancement: I don’t even what? Why? This doesn’t have any synergy at all with this trait line.
Rifled Turret Barrels: This should be a Master trait. It’s not worthy of Grandmaster status.
Elixir-Infused Bombs: Does this really belong in Inventions? Sure, it’s a healing trait, but Backpack Regenerator is too, and it’s arguably more fitting for Inventions.
Acidic Coating: Grr…. RNG proccing.
Transmute: The worst trait. Ever. How about, instead of having a negligible chance of activating, Transmute has the effect of “Convert an incoming condition into a boon. 30 second cooldown”.
Backpack Regenerator: This probably belongs in Inventions.
Energy Conversion Matrix: Do I really need to say anything about this one?
Automated Response: It’s one of those traits that’s ALMOST good, but not quite. It doesn’t remove conditions you already have, and at 25% health, you’re basically already dead. This doesn’t seem very useful. I’ve seen some defend it, but they always get told to drop it.
Always Prepared: This is almost as bad as Transmute. NOBODY EVER uses it.
Speedy Gadgets: For some reason, this doesn’t apply to Gadget toolbelts. Glitch?
Kit Refinement: Ever since the nerfbat hit this trait, nothing has been the same. Nobody uses it anymore.
Deployable Turrets: All it does is add ground-targeting. That’s not very useful. This is probably the only trait that could actually be considered a liability to have, depending on your playstyle.
Inertial Converter: The “at 25% health” thing works when the ability aids you in surviving at that amount, but getting your toolbelts back is not the top priority if your health has reached 25%. 50 or 75% might be better.
Packaged Stimulants: I can’t really see this being that useful. Ground targeting is good when a skill has an actual radius, and medkit skills don’t.
Scope: It only actually helps with 1 and 3 on the Pistol, and 1 on the Rifle. All other skills can’t reach 600 units or are weakened when you use them at that distance. And even with those traits, it’s only 10% crit chance increase. Lame.
In general, we need to remove a lot of traits, change a lot of traits, and add a lot of traits.
-More toolbelt traits. It’s our class mechanic, after all.
-More gadget traits. It’s an entire set of skills, I think it deserves more traits.
-New grandmasters.