Guild Wars 2

Bernie.8674:

Gulesave.5073:

The current system was touted as an improvement, yes, but they made the mistake of only looking at the perspective of a new player running their first character. Also, it came from CDI ideas about horizontal progression that the community never intended to be applied to pre-existing abilities.

I still don’t understand how the current system would be considered a good idea, even from that perspective. I played GW1 extensively from beta until 2009, but I was pretty late to the game for GW2 and didn’t come in until after the new traits were added. I still thought it was a mess. Here was my experience as a brand new player to GW2:

• I bought a trait book from a vendor for a couple of gold, only to discover that those trait books weren’t even useful for anything anymore. The game still let me buy and consume it, but imagine my surprise when I opened my trait panel only to find the next tier still locked.
• After looking on the wiki (because I could find nothing in-game explaining how traits work) I discovered that trait tiers automatically unlock.
• I couldn’t figure out how to unlock individual traits. I finally happened to glance at the tooltip dialog that popped up as my cursor was hovering past the telescope.
• Most of the level 30 traits involved areas that were nowhere near the places my story had taken me.
• I didn’t even know how to fulfill most of those unlock conditions. I had no clue as to where the ogre camp was until I joined a guild mate in WvW.
• I didn’t even need traits to level to 80. I have several level 80 characters now. Some of them got there with only 2-3 traits unlocked. My wife, who started playing a couple of months ago, levelled her character without any traits whatsoever.

For these reasons I seriously doubt they even considered the trait system from that perspective. Honestly, I have no idea how they came up with this. Historically ArenaNet’s systems have been well-designed and thoughtful. Every time they made a change in the pre-EotN days I could understand and agree with their reasoning. I don’t know what happened to change that. After hearing their ideas for the new mastery system and their intent to make traits consistent with it, I’m hopeful we’ll see this system fixed soon.

Yep, they really ruined their trait system, and the game story has been woefully unsupportive too – while the huge grind for mats is unplayable for anyone with a real life. The last straw for me has been destroying the capital city and not bothering to rebuild it before Christmas.

I absolutely will not pay for more poorly-executed, grindy, “shiny” content, while so many unadressed issues remain. I love the voice acting and other features in this game, but the altered mechanics, beginning with the dumbing-down called “New Player Experience”, and recently culminating in the absolutely medocrity-inducing change to the dailies, has been a huge bag of suck (the one improvement I do like is the “stacking” feature of the crafting recipies now that allows you to make components while on the same page, etc).

BentoDetective.6491:

As for the trait system, whatever changes Anet has concocted it’ll definitely *not be locked behind the xpac. Think logically, the trait system is a component of the core game. The xpac is meant to expand the game, not lock what the game currently has to offer.*

I’d be more concern about the change to the skill points/masteries issue. We no longer earn skill points at 80 but instead earn mastery points. Skill points would then be earned in more areas of the game.

This. CHILLAX PEEPS!
Although I´m confused how you´ve come to the conclusion post 80 skill point earning will be gone.
I´ve seen nothing alluding to this.

Makes no sense either unless they want to completely abolish XP earning after max level.
Surely that won´t happen, right?

HawkMeister.4758:

Although I´m confused how you´ve come to the conclusion post 80 skill point earning will be gone.
I´ve seen nothing alluding to this.

Makes no sense either unless they want to completely abolish XP earning after max level.
Surely that won´t happen, right?

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/reimagining-progression-the-mastery-system

“The ability to train Masteries is unlocked at level 80 for all players that own Heart of Thorns. When this ability is unlocked, your character’s experience bar will change to become a Mastery training bar while in PvE zones. This bar will track your progress on training the Mastery track you currently have selected, showing both the abilities you are training toward and those already earned from the track. To see all your Mastery tracks, spend Mastery points, and change which Mastery you are currently training, click the Mastery training bar to bring up the Mastery tray. Because the Mastery training bar completely replaces the experience bar, players who’ve reached level 80 will no longer gain levels but will instead train Masteries. This means characters that have reached level 80 will no longer gain skill points through leveling. Skill points will be added as rewards across high-level content to offset this change.”

There will still be some way to get skill points, but not via leveling.

Tachenon.5270:

HawkMeister.4758:

Although I´m confused how you´ve come to the conclusion post 80 skill point earning will be gone.
I´ve seen nothing alluding to this.

Makes no sense either unless they want to completely abolish XP earning after max level.
Surely that won´t happen, right?

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/reimagining-progression-the-mastery-system

“The ability to train Masteries is unlocked at level 80 for all players that own Heart of Thorns. When this ability is unlocked, your character’s experience bar will change to become a Mastery training bar while in PvE zones. This bar will track your progress on training the Mastery track you currently have selected, showing both the abilities you are training toward and those already earned from the track. To see all your Mastery tracks, spend Mastery points, and change which Mastery you are currently training, click the Mastery training bar to bring up the Mastery tray. Because the Mastery training bar completely replaces the experience bar, players who’ve reached level 80 will no longer gain levels but will instead train Masteries. This means characters that have reached level 80 will no longer gain skill points through leveling. Skill points will be added as rewards across high-level content to offset this change.”

There will still be some way to get skill points, but not via leveling.

Thanks for finding the quote, I’m too lazy to grab it .

Reading a post from a thread in the LS section, someone already said something similar to me. Long story short, they also purposed to have an interchangeable system to allow for acquisition of either skill points or mastery points.

If this option feature gets implemented, I’m sure it would please the crowd (on both sides). But, I don’t have much faith in Anet to change something they’ve already developed. I do hope Anet will add a significant increase to gaining skill points elsewhere.

I’m really glad to hear about a new system: I have 8 characters developed before the update and I can barely motivate myself to get all of the thirteenth traits for each character (I only have all five on one character – just imagine if I made my alts after the update :/). The timed event one (Karka Queen) is particularly annoying to me. I really feel the system hurt altaholics like me :P I am so thankful I made & developed chars before the update…

I will say, though, that I’d be OK if we only had to do everything once per account, which sounds like it’s the case with Masteries.

BentoDetective.6491:

Tachenon.5270:

HawkMeister.4758:

Although I´m confused how you´ve come to the conclusion post 80 skill point earning will be gone.
I´ve seen nothing alluding to this.

Makes no sense either unless they want to completely abolish XP earning after max level.
Surely that won´t happen, right?

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/reimagining-progression-the-mastery-system

“The ability to train Masteries is unlocked at level 80 for all players that own Heart of Thorns. When this ability is unlocked, your character’s experience bar will change to become a Mastery training bar while in PvE zones. This bar will track your progress on training the Mastery track you currently have selected, showing both the abilities you are training toward and those already earned from the track. To see all your Mastery tracks, spend Mastery points, and change which Mastery you are currently training, click the Mastery training bar to bring up the Mastery tray. Because the Mastery training bar completely replaces the experience bar, players who’ve reached level 80 will no longer gain levels but will instead train Masteries. This means characters that have reached level 80 will no longer gain skill points through leveling. Skill points will be added as rewards across high-level content to offset this change.”

There will still be some way to get skill points, but not via leveling.

Thanks for finding the quote, I’m too lazy to grab it .

Reading a post from a thread in the LS section, someone already said something similar to me. Long story short, they also purposed to have an interchangeable system to allow for acquisition of either skill points or mastery points.

If this option feature gets implemented, I’m sure it would please the crowd (on both sides). But, I don’t have much faith in Anet to change something they’ve already developed. I do hope Anet will add a significant increase to gaining skill points elsewhere.

Why should we have to choose between 2 different systems. The grind for skill points is bad enough since it makes traits and skills compete with each other. Making it also compete with the new mastery system also would just make things worse.