My opinion:
First off, full disclosure, I found the Trait System Changes of April awful because you can no longer get core Traits by simply playing the game in whatever way you choose and buy Trait Books for a reasonable price as needed.
Now coupled with the September Skill Lock System Changes, we have a perfect storm of issues that serve to strip gameplay value away from the player experience and dole it out in a miserly fashion.
Curiously, if the Trait Changes had never occurred, I could almost like the new Skill Unlock System except for particular “features” of the new system:
- Disabled Skill Point Challenges
- Disabled Weapon Swap
- Down State Gating
- Profession Skill Gating
One of my two new alts was a Guardian. The game gives you a Mace as your starter weapon, I got to Divinity’s Reach as soon possible and purchased a vendor Greatsword, I found the whole idea of doing the first few Hearts in the starter area with only a Mace unpalatable. I also found the Greatsword to be very efficient, especially after I sigiled and runed my gear up.
My other alt was a Mesmer, I chose to go Greatsword early on as well, for the Sigil-boost.
GW2 was already somewhat Spartan-like when it came to progression.
After all, we only get a total 14 “buttons” to master. So it seemed strange to me that ANet would choose to slowly, incrementally ration out those buttons to the player over 40 levels.
Taking an already bareboned system and spreading it out over half the game makes one wonder why ANet didn’t just add to the game instead of taking away and redistributing things. The Trait System could have been left entirely intact and the April Patch could have added new Traits with goal oriented content…but alas, no.
And, now we have September’s changes:
Some Professions get whacked a bit more roughly with the changes, the Mesmer, the Ellie and reportedly, the Engie. Also, the Ranger is unable to access the already rudimentary Pet Commands…making the NPE for a Ranger somewhat off-putting to new players.
What I mostly like:
The leveling rewards are nice, I like them, some of the gear would be useful if I was truly a poor newb player who doesn’t have 20 gold in the bank.
Love the Trading Post, had to relearn it, but it’s growing on me…the filtering options were much much and a longtime needed.
Personal Story Changes…regimenting them could take away some of the pain that new players had with them, I suppose so this could be a positive change for the Truly New.
There’s a lot to appreciate about September’s Feature Pack; I think that some aspects of the leveling changes could help retain new players.
Veterans from other MMO’s may find the rationing out of “basic” abilities annoying, one might ask how likely is it that the new player to GW2 will be a true bonafide MMO virgin?
I am having great issue with the above noted Skill/Ability gating along the Trait Changes of April.
Together, the changes have made the Player Experience a lot drier and taken away the depth to what I’d argue was an already lean system.