I’m guessing these suggestions have been posted here before, but for some reason the forum search engine shows zero results no matter what search term I use. Anyway, here are a couple suggestions I wanted to propose for making trait retraining a bit easier to manage in PvE.
1. Trait Retraining
The current trait retraining system in PvE is okay, but has some room for improvement. In the current system you pay a small fee to have all your traits refunded and reset. Then you can add points back to the trait lines and select your major traits as needed. The downsides to this system are:
1. There’s no trait point subtract button so if you accidentally click the plus sign one time too often, you need to pay to refund/reset again.
2. Often a person didn’t necessarily want to reset everything, but just remove 5 or 10 points from one trait line and put them into a different line. With the current system, you need to take the time to rebuild all lines when that may have not been your intent.
Suggestion
My suggestion is that when you talk to a trainer, you pay the same small fee but rather than having all traits refunded/reset, the trainer places a temporary effect/buff on you that lasts for 10 minutes. While under the effects of this buff, your hero traits panel will have some new buttons: a “refund traits” button similar to how it looks in PvP, and also every trait line will have both a plus and minus sign to add/remove points incrementally.
The benefits to this include:
1. Players can experiment with a build idea for a few minutes and quickly see if they like the idea or not
2. Players won’t be penalized for accidentally clicking the plus sign too much since they can click the minus sign to go back down
3. Players can incrementally change a build without needing to always start from zero traits (full reset)
4. With the refund button available, players that do want to start with a full reset can do so
5. By having the build modification buttons available while under a time-limited effect/buff, it gives players greater flexibility to experiment while keeping some of the build committment ideals the game currently has by requiring talking to a trainer to reset traits.
2. Trait templates
As I’m sure many others have mentioned in this forum, I’d like to suggest the addition of trait (and skill) templates similar to what existed in GW1. The ability to save, load, and manage templates would be highly valuable to players, and it also would play well into the temporary retraining effect/buff mentioned in the first suggestion above.
If these two suggestions were implemented, the templates feature could become visible/active while under the effect of the time-limited retraining buff. While the effect was active, a player could manage templates and load one, and then use the plus/minus buttons mentioned above to tweak it or re-save it as desired.