Guild Wars 2

As a trait, it seems out of place. If we need it for a situation, we have to open the trait window and change a trait or switch out a trait line just to have this protection. Removing it from traits could give us another trait that would be more thematic instead of fall protection.

I think it can be made into a passive effect and added to existing utility skills. A few classes have signets that give extra toughness and making fall protection a passive effect to those signet seems natural. Another possibility is to add it to a healing skill as a passive effect.

I’m sure there is much to consider but finding a spot for it in utilities seems like a better fit.

So just now getting the watch the Ready Up from yesterday and I think the fall damage trait that have not been adjusted need to be looked at.

The Toxic Landing trait is probably the only one of its type to really have a place in the trait lines currently.

as far as i saw yesterday in the livestream the devs kept all the falling damage traits and i asked myself if anybody uses them?

and what i mean by using them is not just because for fun but because of a real, not niche, purpose. and please don’t argue with jumping puzzles^^

so i wanted to collect infos about their usefulness, because if they’re not, i feel like the devs should replace them with new and more useful traits.

please remain constructive

I agree with this one. There should be an effect which contributes to combat without yanking yourself of a cliff. That’s just too situational even though the new WvW map looks like it could come in handy.

They have their use in wvw, especially with the added knockback and blast finisher as warrior. If I would trait into strength, it would definately be an option for me.

I was thinking wvw as well. I don’t use them since I mostly pve these days and hardly ever fall. If I do it’s from a very great height and no amount of traiting would save me.

There are many places in PvE that you can only safely reach with fall damage traits. And in WvW, especially in the Borderlands, you’ll be mince meat if you don’t have them equipped when you get knocked off of that random cliff.

I use them on most of my roaming PvE characters (ie most of my characters). There’s usually a way to avoid fall damage, but not having to care gives you a lot more flexibility to be reckless and fast.

The new changes are AWFUL though, they moved Decent of Shadows into the middle of the Shadows tree, when it used to be in Acrobatics. They absolutely gutted Acrobatics, while at the same time forcing anyone who put a single point into into wasting six points on it.

The new WvW borderlands maps are specifically designed to make falling damage reduction traits a life or death decision.

so it seems everybody is taking falling damage traits because of well… falling damage, and not because of the secondary effects. so how about arenanet reduces the falling damage overall but removes these traits?

as i see nobody taking the traits for the effect, everybody should be happy.

The problem with that reason is the fact that they merge a skill type cd reduction trait onto the fall damage on necromancer so if you are interesting in running corruption you get the fall damage reduction as a added bonus not something they seem to do on (m)any of the other adept tier cd reduction traits.

so it seems everybody is taking falling damage traits because of well… falling damage, and not because of the secondary effects. so how about arenanet reduces the falling damage overall but removes these traits?

as i see nobody taking the traits for the effect, everybody should be happy.

I like the effect on Descent of Shadows, but yeah, most of them are underwhelming.

The simple rule that ANet would need to consider if they did a pass on fall damage traits is that the secondary effect needs to be something that benefits the player, not something that harms nearby enemies. The former would always be of some value, while the latter almost never is because this is not Mario and there are rarely enemies right under you that you intend to engage. Fall damage secondary traits should all be about increasing your ability to escape trouble or restore yourself to your ideal state faster.

that’s kinda true, most of the time when you take the risk of getting falling damage it’s because you want to chase or disengage.

it would be good if they changed the effects then to recharge skills instead of making watever where you land.

for example: if you take falling damage your movement skills get recharged. on ranger that would be hornet sting, swoosh etc, on guard it would be gs3 and sword 2.

on non mobile classes they have to do something else, thief can keep the stealth, mesmer could get a distortion, necro a portion of life force, ride the lightning for ele, jump shot and rocket boots, etc.

just some brainstorming but it’s interesting.

I really like the concept, and I’m relieved they weren’t removed. There are certainly ways they could be handled much better, though (eg, I’d love it if characters had a passive slot exclusively for a utility/movement/falling trait).

On my warrior, Death From Above can be a lot of fun. I’ve dropped down onto a small group (or zerg tail) in WvW before, with extremely entertaining results.

Jekkt.6045:

so it seems everybody is taking falling damage traits because of well… falling damage, and not because of the secondary effects. so how about arenanet reduces the falling damage overall but removes these traits?

as i see nobody taking the traits for the effect, everybody should be happy.

Thats not true. If you use the other effects right, there can be some nice buff combos, when several people in your party/zerg have them traited, as some create combo fields and some act as blast finishers. That can be very useful, for stacking stealth or swiftness, especially on the borderlands (even more on the new bl) and if you´re red in EB, as you can take falling damage 3 times, jumping down from overlook waypoint.

I wish the game had self-launching skills for triggering it as a combat tool. That would be sweet, and seemed like what the game having a Z-axis was originally going to be like.

As it is like 99% of the traits it really turns into something passive.

Well i use ’m for jumping puzzels and for fast running in wvw… It ’ll save some dmg making me drop 2 steep cliffs and run on instead of dying on the second or when I want to survive otehrwise having to spend way more time carefull jumping or just taking the long road.

Out of interest, why shouldn’t we argue jumping puzzles? I do them all the te :P

I trait into and out of falling damage on the fly when I roam PvE, but with HoT, I will try to work it into my build permanently, because I expect that I will do a lot of falling, especially during the first few weeks of exploring the new maps.

I run fall damage reduction because i like to not be restricted by things like gravity, and if areas were set up in a way where i could fling myself off of something in order to proc the fall damage trait from a fight to fight basis i absolutely would. However, that’s not the case and as such I’d like to see them make the fall damage traits more like how the thief and necros are instead of just giving us the shaft on the useability of the trait.

Necro have CD reductions tied to their fall down trait, and thieves have the MUCH better version where they have a method of triggering their fall damage trait without taking fall damage. If all the other professions got something added to the trait that allows it to be useable in combat as well, it’d be awesome.

EX: Rangers could get Hide in Plain Sight merged into Soften the Fall to make it useful in combat + as an added bonus reduce fall damage. It’d also prevent Hide in Plain Sight going away forever since they didn’t keep it around despite the fact that it’s significantly more useful than shared anguish.

I know I have my Thieves set to use them. Yes, they reduce to amount of damage taken by a fall but to be honest, I use mine on a Thief to, lol… game stealth as soon as I land. Makes those questionable jumps to save one’s life a very easy decision. Especially in the Silverwastes Labyrinth.

Do these traits trigger when you are knocked down in combat? Or merely when you fall off of a tree limb 197 minutes into that pesky jumping puzzle somewhere or another…

I’ve always assumed that being knocked down in combat did NOT trigger them, so saw them as wasted space – because if I fall off that tree limb 197 minutes into a jumping puzzle, the least of my worries is whether or not my character has just faceplanted…

I use them in PvE.

Because of the FoV slider, I can’t tell what height is extremely dangerous. I might fall into my doom because it looks like a 5 feet drop.

Indeed they are used

I only swap it in on my ranger for a fall a don’t think I will survive.

I use them on all my characters because I fall off of everything. That used to cost me a few points, dipping into the trait line. Now it takes an entire trait line, and it happens to be one that my main character doesn’t want. Of all the changes, this is the one that annoys me the most: I lose access to a trait that is HARDLY uber that I use to make up for sucking at jumping puzzles or falling off things all the time. Switching skills out constantly is boring and can’t possibly be what they want us to do.

Plus I fall off things all the time, which is why I have paid the price on all my chars.

I wish instead that falling for half damage (cooldown 30s or whatever) was baseline, and these ‘bonus on falling’ traits were just additional things that happen once every 30 seconds.

I use them for jumping puzzles I know have tricky areas. I also tend to have it on in wvw most of the time. Oh, and I use it during the Grenth priest fight in Cursed Shore, for when he teleports you to the ceiling.

They are really valuable for certain PvE content (map exploration, JPs, finding “lost coins”, etc). They are potential useful in WvW niche situations. I don’t see any value in PvP atm.

I wouldn’t mind if they were changed from being a trait to something you got when equipped with a toy, like a kite (how cool would it be if the kite reduced falling damage!) or the magic carpet. 3 months after such a change, I doubt that anyone would mind the new status quo: PvPers wouldn’t notice, WvWers would adapt, and there’d be no substantial pain for PvErs.

Fall damage traits should be a mastery or merged with revive trait.

I’d just say the Fall damage Traits opens up Area Mobility for WvW mostly and a few places in Pvp though currently Lacking enough High ground , though there was quite a few areas on strong hold where it could be handy if your on treb/gate defence for example dropping on the Npcs and releasing a poisonus cloud or Immobilising a group.

will defo be very useful in the new boarder lands , dropping down landing splat triggers the fall effect and if your at the Air temple you’ll take no fall damage if you hold the shrines , though it is situational.

the secondary effects seem worth it to me if you take future releases into account.

I like fallind damage traits but I would also like to own full luminescent armor. However it’s currently unatainable due to a bug that anet has known about for over a month and has yet to fix.

Thanks

I use the falling damage reduction traits in JPs but otherwise not. I think in all cases the falling damage trait needs to be in the adept tier not the master tier. Like now, I think its fine to have it only available through a certain trait line, but just not as a master level trait.

I use it on all my alts, even if I go no further in the line than is needed to get it. It’s the first trait I grab for all alts, so they can level via exploration more easily. I think I only have one alt (out of 14 80’s) that doesn’t have it permaset, and that’s because when I take her in a dungeon I swap out to make her Chains inflict vulnerability. This is why I was (I believe) the first person to ask in the AMA thread what the plans were for fall damage traits.

The stream answered that by showing the traits linked to other traits, and Thief getting it second tier instead of first, in one specific spec line. I’m sad. It’s super useful on Thief as others have noted above. I use it in the Labyrinth to get a little more wolf immunity, and also when jumping off the Labyrinth ledge down to help the Amber bull, it lets me zip past the devourers that might slow me down. I’ve used it in exploring the world (my Thief is one of my two gold star winners).

I really do think that now that it takes up so much more real estate in our traits, and requires commitment to a whole trait line if we want it, it should be baseline rather than a selected trait. I know the original reason it was put in traits at all was to foster the need to choose between it and other fun/useful/necessary traits, but that was when it didn’t mean giving up as much as it will now.

thanks for the posts and for the infos you players provide and one interesting thing i saw was one person suggesting to merge the falling traits with the res traits, this fits in my opinion very well while not removing them but still opening up one trait for other stuff

Jekkt.6045:

thanks for the posts and for the infos you players provide and one interesting thing i saw was one person suggesting to merge the falling traits with the res traits, this fits in my opinion very well while not removing them but still opening up one trait for other stuff

They’d have to look at every revive trait before making that call as many of the already have been part of mergers and rangers for some reason have two different ones one to place a trap and one with swiftness applied/increased revive speed.

The trouble is that they’re abilities with extremely limited combat use, taking up space in a system that determines your combat build, and soon has extremely little space to spare.

What seems like the obvious solution is the upcoming Masteries system. Fall damage reduction seems like it would be right at home in these gliding or mushroom-jumping or comparable exploration masteries. There’s no real “advantage” it would give anyone over newer players to make initially locking it behind that wall a problem. That way it can still be a “thing” for you to earn without it eating valuable trait space.

Fall damage traits are awesome. Wvw, defending a keep/tower. Jump off the top and land on the rams, great fun. The warriors has a knock back, so you can jump down and knock everyone off the ram then run back inside. Necro has a poison AoE, which can help reduce the healing as well as do some damage to those manning the rams. If ypu coordinate it, you can do some great damage to seige, as well as keep people off of it for a bit, which can be great while waiting for reinforcements.

If it is only paramount that it stay for WvW, then why not put it in a new WvW mastery track?

And if people really want one for PvE, they could add a mastery track for it just like gliding and shroom jumping.

yeah adding them to masteries doesn’t sound bad either.

Well, they are really useful both in WvW and PvE, and I never leave home without them, especially as a thief.

PvE for general use (explorations and jumping puzzles) and its also fun to use in WvW for ambushes (dropping down from a cliff), and to bait idiots who think I’ll be low on health when i jump down from a cliff, (they’ll get overeager for a kill and drop down to chase me, only get backstabed due to stealth on fall damage =3)

But i do switch them out when doing dungeons and fractals, and I never used them in PvP

I don’t have a problem with them costing a trait, but I think every trait line for the lowest tier should have an option of fall dmg only, no other buffs so we don’t get screwed into a trait line for fall damage. And necro fall damage should not couple to a skill that adds weakness self debuff on use...

Yeah, I do NOT want them as a Mastery, and do NOT want them as a WvW track unlock, but I also don’t want them to lock me into an entire trait line. If they aren’t going to let us mix and match traitlines anymore then they should just roll them into the default kit.

I also want them to stick around, but do not want them as 1/3 of a choice in an adept line, especially when the other two choices are also very niche. Make them minor traits.

I think they aren’t taken often because they are for very specific situations. My thought on how to fix this is to give players a way to double jump. The first jump is normal but the second can be triggered by pressing the spacebar when you’re already in the air. It would then trigger the stomp animation and on landing, trigger fall damage traits. To keep it fair, the second jump should use endurance to limit the amount of times players can use it and give endurance another use. It would also make the Superior Runes of Snowfall a lot more useful and that could lead more more fall-damage runes being created.

Hmm, that’s interesting, Crossplay. Though I think they could do the same thing with imposing a cooldown on the activation rather than eating endurance.

However, it would interfere with things in zones where you can glide. What if you want to just drop down a bit to a ledge, but your space bar makes you deploy a glider and you soar away into open space? How do we mesh the two effects so the player chooses which one activates?

I don’t think of a fall damage trait as situation specific, by the way. I think of it as something useful in maneuvering in all areas of the game except a few dungeons that don’t have places you can fall to your death.

Honestly, they should rework the falling dmg traits. Keep the fall dmg reduction, but make all the effects trigger on downed rather than when taking fall dmg.

We have a variety of traits to choose for different situations, I think maintaining the fall damage traits is a good thing – it opens space for their use in designing areas and content. Don’t close off a unique feature just because it isn’t used often.

Honestly, they should rework the falling dmg traits. Keep the fall dmg reduction, but make all the effects trigger on downed rather than when taking fall dmg.

There are already “on downed” traits. Now maybe they could combine the two, which wouldn’t seem unreasonable to me, but I like the “on fall” elements too, at least in some classed (on a class by class basis they might deserve a complete overhaul).

Donari.5237:

Hmm, that’s interesting, Crossplay. Though I think they could do the same thing with imposing a cooldown on the activation rather than eating endurance.

However, it would interfere with things in zones where you can glide. What if you want to just drop down a bit to a ledge, but your space bar makes you deploy a glider and you soar away into open space? How do we mesh the two effects so the player chooses which one activates?

I don’t think of a fall damage trait as situation specific, by the way. I think of it as something useful in maneuvering in all areas of the game except a few dungeons that don’t have places you can fall to your death.

I forgot all about the gliders. If my idea is to work, we will need a way of separating the two commands. I’m against more internal cooldowns though. I understand that some things have to have limits to their usage but I hate trying to keep track of all the cooldowns. I prefer to have something I can see and I can clearly see my endurance bar.

I think I was thinking of the fall effect, the one that fires a spell. The damage reduction is every time you fall, and I’d want to keep that. I can deal with not tracking a cd on when I’ll get stealth from falling, I just know “I just got it, so it won’t work on this jump.”

I’m in support of the idea of making fall damage resistance into a mastery.
It’s a trait that’s near vital when you’re exploring certain maps or doing jumping puzzles, and otherwise completely useless in most of the game. Flipping it on and off when you need it is an inconvenience at best, and totally build breaking on certain occasions at worst, even more so with the new specialization system if you DON’T want the line your fall damage trait is in. Really, it may as well be baseline as a quality of life feature, but it does seems kinda like a good thing to be an unlock for higher level characters, so once you finish your “falling mastery” it can always be on.

Either way, the thing that bothers me about falling traits is that you often still get knocked onto your butt on landing, which is immensely uncool. Especially if your fall trait is offensive like engineer. If you DO try to use it as an attack, sure you do a little explosive damage, but then your enemy has a free shot as you pick yourself off the ground. I think we should get class-specific landing animations to go with our falling skill, like engineers can slow themselves with rocket boots at the last second, mesmers can blink strait to the ground once they’re about 500 distance above it, warriors can slam fist first into the ground with a heavy impact, elementalists could dissipate into mist and reform as they land, etc.

Maybe make it so that our characters don’t start screaming and flailing until we hit a falling distance that would actually kill us. If we intentionally jump off stuff, it would be nice to see that reflected in our character animations.

Edit:
Ah, I just had another idea, what if it were a skill? Like a signet or something? Yeah, it takes up a valuable skill bar slot but it’s a LOT more convenient to swap the skill in and out when you need it instead of swapping traits or specializations, and then you can put it in any build. That way, if falling traits aren’t baseline because of balance reasons (For WvW and PvP) you’ll still have to give something up to use it, so if you jump off a keep wall to dive bomb an enemy, you’ll be down a combat skill on the ground until you manage to ooc.