Guild Wars 2

Some trait lines make perfect sense, while, others make no sense at all. Some trait lines appear to give you a choice, but you really don’t have a choice at all. Every profession needs toughness. You need toughness no matter if you WvW, Spvp, or just do pve. I’m currently leveling a thief, which I’m about to delete due to trait lines that give no benefit and force me to play a style that I do not want to play.

Shadow Arts: +Toughness + Healing – I have to put points into this trait if I want to survive. The problem is the bonuses are based on stealth and melee. I dual wield pistols and weapon swap shortbow. I am at a disadvantage because I have to put 30 points in this trait for survival, but I am short 6 bonuses due to the fact they support melee and stealth and have nothing to due with my weapons of choice…Catch 22

I talked about this with my guildies and they said their fix was to equip accessories and upgrades to their equipment to supplement what they’re not putting in traits. Like, if they wanted toughness but no toughness skills, avoid the toughness line altogether and have +whatever toughness rings.

I thought vitality was a better stat but it might be different for other professions.

I agree. Perhaps you could choose a weapon specialization also so that all weapon boosting skills get changed to that particular weapon.

After studying the trait lines I have come to the final conclusion. Trait lines need to be broke down into a set of ten instead of five. Having a five set trait line really forces players to take stats they really don’t want. I like power, precision, critical damage, toughness, vitality, and healing. I could care less about condition damage, condition duration, or boons. But, I am forced to have stats that I have no desire for.

The current system has five trait lines that consist of two stats each to choose from with a maximum placement of 30 points and 6 bonuses. A better system would be 10 trait lines that consist of one stat each to choose from with a maximum of placement of 15 points and 3 bonuses. The new system would give a player more control over their play style and should have little to no effect on the current balance of the game.

I made a post about how I think the traits shouldnt include weapon specific ones like +5% sword damage because it makes things more limited I should be able to use what weapons i want regardless of trait lines

Yes I agree that adding weapon bonuses really limits the purpose of weapon swaping. It’s impossible to buff both weapons sets and you really feel nerfed while using the unbuffed weapon set.

Some of the selectable trait bonuses could use a redo, most of the ones on my ranger look like garbage, ooooo swiftness for a weapon swap…psssh

The attribute points for a class are not that critical. If you were to, say, get the +vit line instead of the +toughness line, you could get +toughness on your gear and still be good.

That said, often the traits and the attributes make no sense whatsoever. Take the Ranger Traps are all about conditions, but they are in the crit line rather than the condition damage line. The Thief condition duration line is largely about poison and venoms (good), but has Stealth and Healing traits in the Acrobatics line (they belong in the Stealth/Healing line). The Elementalist is just a complete mess and needs its traits redesigned from the ground-up.

The concept is good, but Traits need a lot of fine-tuning across the board.

aren’t the weapon buffs pretty negligible (at least for guardian)