Guild Wars 2

I really like the trait system of Guild Wars 2, but a ton of pickable traits seriously lack in terms of description: duration, # of stacks, actual damage numbers, etc. Some traits have also very vague wording.

Here are a examples of traits that are very well described, for the Mesmer class:

• Confounding Suggestions (Domination XII): 50% chance to cause a 1 second stun when you daze a target.

• Furious Inspiration (Dueling XII): Gain 4 seconds of Fury when you interrupt a foe.

Here are examples of traits that are not well described:

• Crippling Dissipation (Domination V): Clones cripple nearby foes when killed.
  Is the effect triggered when they’re shattered as well?
  How long does the cripple last?
  Define “Nearby” – 300 range? 400 range?

• Halting Strike (Domination II): Deal damage when interrupting a foe.
  How much damage? A base value would be helpful, a scaled value would be even more helpful in making a decision

• Protected Mantras (Dueling VI): Increase armor while channeling mantras.
  How much armor?

• Blinding Beffudlement (Illusions IX): Cause confusion when you blind a foe.
  How long is the confusion?

• Confusion Cry (Illusion II): Cry of frustrations grant retaliation.
  To myself I’m assuming?
  How long is the retaliation?
  Is the retaliation applied once per illusion shattered, or simply once on activation of the shatter?

TL;DR – A ton of tooltips for traits lack information that is required to make informed build-crafting decisions.

This has been complained about since BWE1, they did some minor wording changes at one point but they are still pretty much crap for a 2012 mmo

Sweet jesus this.
A thousand times this.

Trait tooltips are absolutely atrocious, half the time you’re left guessing as to how a trait actually works.

Please for the love of all that is holy go back and reword these traits, and give us some numbers, we need numbers.

I agree. It’s also that there is a huge disparity in the detail provided in the trait tooltips. For example, here are the Ranger’s Adept level skirmishing traits:

1. Pets do 30% more damage on critical hits. (Their hits, or mine, or both?)
2. Chance to cause bleeding on critical hits. (How much chance? How much bleeding?)
3. Creates a spike trap when reviving an ally. (Fine)
4. You gain 5s of vigor when struck by a critical hit. This can only trigger once every 15s. (REALLY good. They should all be like this!)
5. Critical hits grant might to your pet. (Their hits, or mine, or both? How much might?)
6. Pets move 30% faster. (Fine)

This is pretty indicative of most trait choices. You have lots of different options, but only really know precisely what half (or less) of them actually do. In order to figure out a build properly, you either have to test extensively in The Mists, or read from someone who has. Most people don’t want to do that, and should’ve have to.

The 4. trait above shows how well ANet can write their tooltips. Please, do this across the board so that there is consistency and players are well informed.

hopefully they will pay attention to this

You see…if we make the traits and tooltips actually tell you what the skills do, someone out there might take the game competitively.

But we don’t want that because then we’ll get an elitist playerbase that’ll run it for everyone.

We’re not going to let elitism destroy GW2 the way it destroyed GW1.

\Keep it casual 2012\

lol @ BlueCheez

But that’s exactly what they want to do with their e-Sport initiative right? make it more competitive? The problem is that they can’t without properly informing their player base about how things work.

I need to know what percentage of chance? is it actually worth it?
Buffs, 1 stack, 2, 25? How long does it last?
Conditions, 1 stack, 2, 25? How long does it last?
Damage, how much? what triggers it?
Cooldowns? how long, what triggers it?
Critical Hits, how much damage, what triggers it, and what percentage?
On revive/down state conditional skill (trap, well, etc.) how long does it last, how much damage (is it determined by my identical skills or is it special), area of affect (again, determined by my stats or special).

Necro has quite a few of those that are worthless for tooltips. That stupid little minion that raises when you kill something… The tooltip is worthless. No duration, doesn’t tell you it degens at a very high rate(it actually continues degen’ing after it’s left the area for about 10 seconds…), no damage, no conditional affects, etc.
It simply says "Summon a jagged horror whenever you kill a foe. 30 second cooldown. ", and yet it does so much more that makes you want to not touch it even though you have to take that one…

Skills are still missing information as well but that’s another thread.

this game isn’t esports material for a lot of reasons, one of those reasons is visibility.

There are a lot of things hidden/not obvious in this game and that does extend into trait lines and tooltips being basically not good in terms of informing the player

guildwars 2 esports is just marketing babble at this point.

Many skills that look promising on paper turn out to be very bad once you realise the numbers are just way to low. like the necro trait ‘vampiric’ that let’s your skills drain life. Once you realise it is only like 2 health per skill on low levels it looks pretty worthless.
I Think this lack of detailed information prevents really strategic build design. How should I be able to make decisions for skills, if I don’t even know how they scale with my stats ?! ‘altruistic healing’ on the guardian looks solid and one might think about building healing power on gear to make it better. What a shame it scales on a factor of 0.001 making healing power do basically nothing for this trait.
ANet has to revamp all the tooltips a give the players way more information if they want to get anywhere near the point of guildwars being taken serious as an esport.

The funny thing is, that they did a very good job in GW1, you know what skills exactly do. And in GW2 the skills have very poor destricption.

I Agree I did reset traits once because they were not what I did understood when read. Some explain us fine but others I now just ask arround map chat to see what they do. :P

Agreed with OP.

Totally agree. GW1 had great skill descriptions, I hoped for even better descriptions in GW2 – not worse. Introducing activation times was good but it’s not enough – keep improving it!

So much of the descriptive text in this game is messed up in one way or another, whether it’s traits that don’t tell players how they work or the countless consumables with tooltips that say nothing other than “Consumable.” Add all the typos, and a game that is mostly polished ends up presenting itself in a very unpolished way. I think they need a small team to go over all the trait/item text with a fine-tooth comb, hopefully sooner rather than later.

Seems to be a cultural problem. During beta they didn’t provide detailed tooltips because they said things were changing too often. With that view of tooltips being unimportant compared to pretty much everything else when launch approached and things hit crunch time they didn’t spare the time for tooltips since they didn’t consider it that important.

There was another problem that was ignored. Not providing detailed tooltips during beta meant that no one could know what traits were suppose to be doing and so couldn’t give feedback. This resulted in the huge list of trait bugs we saw at launch in each profession forum.

Lesson learned: Tooltips serve as documentation for your testers. Follow through with your changes and update tooltips everytime you update functionality. If Anet had done that during development there would be better tested abilities and traits as well as detailed tool tips already in place.

This is also probably one of the reasons it seems a lot of the builds aren’t viable in the game. There’s simply not enough information from traits, it’s quite sad.

Agreed 100%. As a shout warrior, I can’t even tell how much my shouts heal, I just know that “they heal”.

The other problem is that boons and conditions are very poorly labeled. Retaliation says “Reflect damage back to target” but it really isn’t a damage reflect, but a “thorns” aura. How much power does a stack of Might give? How much damage is my stack of 5 bleeds doing? Etc. etc.

Guild Wars wiki is a great site. It has a lot of useful information. Yes the tooltips need to be a lot better, but there is a source to find this information. I’m not saying wiki is the solution, just a resource.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Main_Page

FYI: type /wiki (what you want info for) will take you to an external link if you are ingame. ie: /wiki shouts

Xyvius.1679: Heals from warrior shouts: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Vigorous_Shouts

Gordunk.7289: A link on condition damage, and what bleed stack will do. http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Bleeding

Please ArenaNet Post to confirm you are working on it. As a Warrior, i cry tears of blood when reading my trait description.

This is highly ironic considering the very detailed and specific ability descriptions from GW1.

Tooltips in GW2 bring back fond memories…of EverQuest…the MMO that I played 14 years ago.

@Eclipses

Actually, the GW1 tool tips used to be equally as vague, and substantially wordier. It took them what… four to five years to give the option for concise tooltips?

Honestly, I prefer skill tooltips where it doesn’t tell me how much damage something will do, because that’s damage factored in before the armor level. I prefer to just find out how much damage I do when I do it.

Well, just look at the engineer’s “Equipping a kit creates an attack or spell.” Most of the attacks/spells are already part of that kit, so it’s not like they can’t just say “cast Super Elixir/grenade barrage/etc when you equip elixir gun/grenade kit”

I hear you. This is one of the things I wish would be fixed sooner than later.

Please fix tooltips! /signed

So /signed! It’s hard to make a sound decision on traits and skills when the descriptions are so vague. During the beta, I figured they were only vague because the skills hadn’t been balanced or fully fleshed out yet, but we’re almost 2 months into the live game now…

Ablation – for that #1, I think you are reading too much into it. Your pets Crit hits do 30% more damage, simply that.

Gotta agree, traits and even some skills in the game need way better tooltips. There are a lot of traits out there (I won’t go through a list) that I’ll never use because I don’t really understand how they work. It’s awesome that you can test these things out (to some extent) in The Heart of the Mists, but that shouldn’t even be necessary.

I agree with the OP, descriptions and combat information in this game are horrible. My mind has an idea why, since this game has a Korea company. I.E. looking at you NCsoft…

You guys ether got lazy and really don’t care about the accuracy of the tool tips. Maybe its work from your Korean office, Texas or California Offices. Maybe you gave them the game in Korean and said deal with it and they didn’t spent much time with translation. Doesn’t matter now what matters is:
Your character information over all is so vague that you don’t know what does what or how at times. How much to do of what of what. You don’t know if there is a bell curve or diminishing returns in place or what. Just that you got 3102 points of XYZ… Not to mention Magic Find isn’t even on the hero page.

I’ll state my most recent problem, ‘Adrenal Health’ with Warrior, toughness tree 15 point trait. Tool tip states “Regenerates health based on Adrenaline level” fairly straight forward. But when I got to level 1 do I get a Regen Boon Buff? no… Do I get a Blue Regen Buff to symbolize a trait buff is active? No… There is no way to know as the enemy hey this guy has an active regeneration buff going on at level 1, 2 or 3 stacks.

I literally have to go take damage from something and have my adrenaline up and go see each level and how much I regenerate to decide hey is this worth it or not. More information is needed, a lot more. You guys are super vague on almost everything in this game. There needs to be more informative combat information for both the player and the enemy they’re playing against to know what traits are active or skills being used.

Not to mention I found out last night even, that Volley, the skill, is not damage per hit. But a total of damage done threw out volley. Gee golly!(Since I can’t say even simple curse words that are normal in everyday life.), I had a friend tell me that, then had to make a damage log on damage to see if its for real and it is. Seriously… so much guess work in this game and people get things wrong and you want to make this an e sport out of all this confusion?

Are you for real?

-Sincerely Viridian

Agreed 100%, the description for the traits are terribly vague.

So how ‘efficient’ is it to have Churning Earth still stating it is a ‘hold and release’ ability? :P I’ve heard that may have been accurate in the press only beta.

Step 1) Fix the tooltips that say something that is plain wrong.

Step 2) Fix the tooltips that are worded in a misleading fashion.

Step 3) Add specifics/clarifications to tooltips that are vague.

Step 4) Be awesome.

Evan Lesh.3295:

I understand the frustrations that come with inaccurate descriptions. I’ve worked a lot on the skill “fact” system to bring it up to a good point, but I know there is more we can do. This includes making all buffs, upgrades, sigils, and traits affect skill tooltip numbers (some already do), adding additional skill facts based on traits, as well as adding the same or similar “fact” system to trait descriptions.

There are a couple reasons why trait/skill descriptions aren’t as accurate as they could be. They were constantly changing up until ship for balance and polish. This means some of the descriptions are just out of date. Also, each time a number is changed within the text, it needs to get localized again. This means it’s more efficient to make them a little more vague to lessen the localization cost and protect ourselves if that number needs to change again. That’s why skills have “facts” instead of baking the numbers into the descriptions. The last reason it’s difficult to keep skills and traits accurate is because of technical and time limitations. Our skills are complicated, and it takes designers a lot of time to make sure the numerous parts are correct. Sometimes we don’t even have the ability to make the facts accurate (summon’s damage was a tricky one).

I’m personally very passionate about skill descriptions. We know there are improvements that can be made and I’ll push to get time to revisit them because, well, I just like them

Much of the fact checking is being done by players. There are hosts of resources scattered throughout the interwebs with databases and whatnot. Many of us in the player base have this weird urge to understand game mechanics down to the most trivial detail (myself included).

A good place to begin the process of tooltip corrections would be the profession bug lists on these very forums, as I am sure that many of the “bugs” are actually skills/traits working as intended, but the tooltips are just inaccurate.

There really are a host of tooltips that are just plain outright wrong though, and those should be the first priority imo. Vague descriptions at least aren’t going to make people think the game is broken, it’ll make then curious and try it out themselves. Incorrect tooltips get people upset and diminish the quality of the game.

Glad to see a official response, but I totally agree with the op. You’d think the official wiki would be the place to get the information if it’s not in game but when you do you’ll find it’s all just copy pasted from the trait and skill descriptions directly and offers no additional help. If for technical reasons this can’t be fixed in game I’d suggest to at least update your wiki.

Evan Lesh.3295:

There are a couple reasons why trait/skill descriptions aren’t as accurate as they could be. They were constantly changing up until ship for balance and polish. This means some of the descriptions are just out of date. Also, each time a number is changed within the text, it needs to get localized again. This means it’s more efficient to make them a little more vague to lessen the localization cost and protect ourselves if that number needs to change again. That’s why skills have “facts” instead of baking the numbers into the descriptions. The last reason it’s difficult to keep skills and traits accurate is because of technical and time limitations. Our skills are complicated, and it takes designers a lot of time to make sure the numerous parts are correct. Sometimes we don’t even have the ability to make the facts accurate (summon’s damage was a tricky one).

I don’t understand how having numbers instead of a vague description would be more difficult to localize, my understanding is that numbers are for the most part universal when it comes to languages.

Yeah, redoing localization of a description because a number changes seems like a great use of people’s time….

I think community will probably test and post all these numbers anyway if the game is popular enough. But that is still no reason to leave out important information from tooltips. A hidden cooldown might make a difference between amazing trait and a useless one. Hopefully someday at least wiki or some fansite will have accurate information so we can plan our builds better.

Yep, I fully agree with everyone here. Skill descriptions are often vague and trait description are even more vague. Take the Guardian’s Inner Fire: ‘When you are set on fire, you gain fury’ and the Zealot’s Flame ability of the Torch offhand: ‘Set yourself alight, periodically burning up to three nearby foes’. One would think that these abilities synergize, but they don’t.

@Evan: I understand that its difficult to keep descriptions in sync with the ever changing balance, however, I believe the issue is in how your workflow is set up. If I am not mistaken, right now adding the description is a separate step (which results in ever present problem of code<→doc sync), but one should generate the description directly from the code in the first place.

I’ll add that we’re still lacking important infos in the hero sheet.

How much damage reduction does my character have in total?
How much bonus damage am I getting from power?
What’s my DPS?
How much is my life steal/life per hit?
What do my attacks have a chance to trigger? (i.e. 20% chance to get fury, 10% chance to get haste)

Etc etc.

I’d really love to have all info packed there like Diablo.

Personally, I think the time it takes to change a skill/trait/item’s tooltip description every time they are tweaked just needs to be chalked up as a necessary cost. I understand that the business model of this game necessitates a lower operating cost than the competition to some degree, but there are some things not worth skimping on. Of course, that’s easy for me to say as just another player and not an employee being pressured to spend my time a certain way, but that’s life.

Evan Lash
“Also, each time a number is changed within the text, it needs to get localized again. This means it’s more efficient to make them a little more vague to lessen the localization cost and protect ourselves if that number needs to change again.”

Localization. This is such a stupid thing to delay projects. I understand its done because of financial reasons to sell more games, but still, as long as you can’t localize it for every language on the Google translator at least, than why bother only with a selected few?
Why are those players more privileged then others and because of them, the rest of people are forced to wait longer for improvements and you guys have more unnecessary work to do? I am not an english native speaker and no games are in my language. We are forced to learn it in my country if we want to play. Why german,french, spanish are the privileged ones? If they dont want to lean it, its their problem. I bet it is thought in their schools too.
If its for marketing reasons, why don’t you localize it in simplified chinese? I bet in one week you will have so much sales in eastern Asia like all the sales you have had until now.
And yes, in GW1 skills were changing the numbers according to the attributes. It was really ok to see how your damage or heals are growing or lowering.

_They were constantly changing up until ship for balance and polish. This means some of the descriptions are just out of date. Also, each time a number is changed within the text, it needs to get localized again. This means it’s more efficient to make them a little more vague to lessen the localization cost and protect ourselves if that number needs to change again. _

So, for POLISHING purposes, these things were left vague and inconsistent?

And how much can it possibly cost to change a number on something over a bunch of languages? You make it sound like it saves tons and tons of money to simply NOT give trait details, simply because if that number changes, it’s gonna cost 1k per change of a number or something.

Basically, these arguments for why traits are inconsistent and devoid of information don’t make much sense at all.

@WeLoveKanjimari.6725

I will answer you.

Localization for different languages involves more work in the programming field than only the translation. Translation is fast and easy, sort to speak, but adding coded in the program that will recognize and associate them with the respective language is different. To put it simple, localization makes the developers create almost an entirely new game.

So I understand when they say its cheaper to keep it like this because its already coded

What I don’t understand is why not update the English client for those who use it and update it at a later date for those who prefer other languages.
Basically, you are prioritizing localization more than the updates. This is wrong.

Thank you Evan for replying! ^u^

Ronah.2869:

@WeLoveKanjimari.6725

I will answer you.

Localization for different languages involves more work in the programming field than only the translation. Translation is fast and easy, sort to speak, but adding coded in the program that will recognize and associate them with the respective language is different. To put it simple, localization makes the developers create almost an entirely new game.

Sorry, but I doubt that you were ever involved in creating a ‘real’ software project in a competent team. In general, in a competently designed software localization is as simple as adding new entries to the database. You don’t need to code anything at all . Translation (especially translation of small snippets) is an extremely complex process because you always have to translate in context.

I truly hope to see some improvement. At the moment, I cannot tell if I am doing something well or not until I actually try it. Then its like in the middle of a fight and I’m dying that “oh, that does not do what I thought it is supposed to do!” I’m dead!

Translation (especially translation of small snippets) is an extremely complex process because you always have to translate in context.

This. I have sympathy with wanting to avoid doing the localization too often as it is a lot of effort and needs a lot of checking. However it shouldn’t fall off the to-do list completely either.

Agree. Traits definately need more accurate descriptions. Some of them are quite good, others are woefully inadequate.

I can understand the dev post above about trying to reduce localization overhead and traits being frequently changed to the point where keeping up on specific values is hard, but it just needs to be done. It shouldn’t fall to the players to test everything to figure out stuff that could be clearly stated, especially since some of these things are extremely difficult to test without any of the internal data the devs have access to.

One of the ones that I really feel is particulary bad description-wise is the “Master’s Bond” trait in Ranger’s Beastmastery tree. “Your pet has a bond with you that increases its attributes each time you kill a foe. When it is defeated or deactivated, the bond is reset.”

Uh, yah. How much increase? Which attributes? Is there a cap, and if so what is it? Does it apply to enemies you get the killing blow on, enemies your pet gets the killing blow on, or any enemy you hit at least once before it dies?

The worst part is not only that the description of the trait itself is so bad, but then the bonuses are not listed anywhere else in the game either. The pet stat screen doesn’t reflect the boost. A buff icon does appear if you target your pet, but all it says is “boosted stats”, it doesn’t tell you how much. I’ve seen people say its 6 stat points per stack (and its capped at 25 stacks, that much at least is clear), I’ve seen people say 8, I’ve seen people say it doesn’t work at all. I have no idea where those numbers are getting pulled from because nowhere in the game does it say anything, and I don’t know whats true.

I couldn’t agree more! It’s very poor for engineers as well, with all of their “equips a _ kit”. You have no idea what the kit entails until you blow your skill points on it…

Evan Lesh.3295:

I understand the frustrations that come with inaccurate descriptions. I’ve worked a lot on the skill “fact” system to bring it up to a good point, but I know there is more we can do. This includes making all buffs, upgrades, sigils, and traits affect skill tooltip numbers (some already do), adding additional skill facts based on traits, as well as adding the same or similar “fact” system to trait descriptions.

There are a couple reasons why trait/skill descriptions aren’t as accurate as they could be. They were constantly changing up until ship for balance and polish. This means some of the descriptions are just out of date. Also, each time a number is changed within the text, it needs to get localized again. This means it’s more efficient to make them a little more vague to lessen the localization cost and protect ourselves if that number needs to change again. That’s why skills have “facts” instead of baking the numbers into the descriptions. The last reason it’s difficult to keep skills and traits accurate is because of technical and time limitations. Our skills are complicated, and it takes designers a lot of time to make sure the numerous parts are correct. Sometimes we don’t even have the ability to make the facts accurate (summon’s damage was a tricky one).

I’m personally very passionate about skill descriptions. We know there are improvements that can be made and I’ll push to get time to revisit them because, well, I just like them

Wait what? So your two reasons for the innacuracies are:
1. We didn’t bother to update the tooltips before shipping because…………
2. Localizing numbers is hard, a french 1, and an english 1 are completely different. Even if for some reason you weren’t using actual numbers(which would make no sense), it’s not like it takes any cognitive effort to retranslate numbers, there’s no context dependence.