Guild Wars 2

The main obstacle I see right now to build diversity is the fact that most players are pigeon-holed into investing up to 40 trait points into specific places depending on what weapon they choose to use which leaves them with only 30 trait points to work with and that’s assuming they don’t also spec into their other weapon set. This also has the problem of making any weapon you aren’t specced into feel sub-optimal.

Examples:

A flamethrower engineer must spend 20 in Firearms for Juggernaut and 20 in Alchemy for Deadly Mixture.

A dual-axe warrior must spend 20 in strength for Axe Mastery and Dual Wielding and 20 in Discipline for Sharpened Axes. (this gets even worse if your MH and OF are different)

I believe the best solution would be to look at each trait individually and decide whether to work it into the weapon itself (and re-balance if necessary), rework it to affect all weapons (such as a Master trait that reduces all weapon skill recharges by X%), rework it to affect all weapons of a particular type (such as all ranged weapons or all defensive weapons), move it to adept tier, or eliminate it entirely on a case by case basis.

For PvE there are I think two main barriers
1. Support and control being way less important or effective than DPS
2. Having stats tied to armor and gear

Traits could be more general/less specific. Guardian has a trait “50% chance on crit to chill enemies”, only affects hammers, and another trait that causes great sword attacks to heal. Why make it weapon specific?

In certain cases, such as the hammer trait you mentioned, they need to be weapon specific; those are the ones that are good candidates for working into the weapon itself thereby increasing the weapon’s flavor without hampering build diversity.

The biggest problem for build diversity is that, currently, everything is being balanced around highly specialized builds. It is at the point now where skills require traits to be useful, and traits require other traits to be useful, and sometimes the necessary trait for a particular skill or other trait is dependent on yet another trait.

Any dependence on another skill or trait is a constraint to using that skill or trait. The more constraints you throw on, the less diversity you have. And no, nerfing popular builds doesn’t lead to diversity. It just leads to frustration and quitting.

Under ideal circumstances, I should be able to randomly pick out any skill from any class, and by itself that skill should be useful with no additional context or required supporting traits. The same should be said about independent traits. Then, when you have countless things that are useful by themselves, you will have build diversity. Likewise, anything that is not built this way is bad design.

For PVE, give monsters the GW1 mobs intelligence. Teach them how to rainbow spike, how to scatter from hundred blades, how to drop protection on front liners.
And ofc, revamp defiant.

I’m afraid the trait system’s effect on build diversity is intended.

The main problem with build diversity is that the gear that goes along with it has a very high cost. Make all soul-bound gear into account-bound, and Build Diversity becomes a 3s50c problem (the price to retrait).

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Any dependence on another skill or trait is a constraint to using that skill or trait. The more constraints you throw on, the less diversity you have. And no, nerfing popular builds doesn’t lead to diversity. It just leads to frustration and quitting.

This guy hit the nail on the head; thanks for putting this more eloquently than I.

Asia Skyly.7198:

The main problem with build diversity is that the gear that goes along with it has a very high cost. Make all soul-bound gear into account-bound, and Build Diversity becomes a 3s50c problem (the price to retrait).

I’m afraid it’s not as simple as gear. The trait system’s effect in also a factor. The gear issue may mean that my PvE character is always going to wear Berserker, and my bunker will wear Soldier’s or w/e. However, I still have limited choices regarding traits depending on my choices of utility and weapon(s).

I’m all for a build system that forces users to choose between useful options. I’m not so big on a system that forces my hand as much as this one does.

I don’t think there will ever been build diversity. Too many people (myself included) just seem to follow whatever the majority is doing. As the majority shifts, so do we.

What they need to do is implement an armor/trinket swap panel similar to the weapons so you could have multiple builds with traits and slot skills tied to each build, swappable with the click of a button. I could think of three right off the bat that people might want, a PvE build, a WvW build and a dungeon build. Wouldn’t it be nice to have 3 gear panels with traits and slot skills, even weapons (Though I see this as less of an issue) where you can say, “OK, I’m going in to WvW so I need this build…click”? This would go a long way in fixing gear diversity because you wouldn’t have to retrait every time and people will be much more likely to experiment with other builds without having to change their main and miss potentially profitable events/dungeon/fractal runs. Granted, buying multiple full sets of gear would not be cheap, but at least, this way, you could make the most of them. Yes, a retrait is only 3s50c, but it’s a neuscense to do because you have to travel to somewhere where there’s a trainer plus you have to carry all that extra gear and swap it manually.

Hell, just being able to retrait without having to go to the trainer would be a big improvement.

What they need to do is go back to the GW Attributes system, get rid of the set skills for a weapon and make armor have set stats per profession. If we were able to choose ALL our skills, even if it was 6-10 skills per weapon, it would up the build diversity. Going to the Attribute system from GW would remove a lot of the bad traits each profession has. Making armor stats set per profession would allow us to not worry about having armor sets for each build.

Afya.5842:

For PVE, give monsters the GW1 mobs intelligence. Teach them how to rainbow spike, how to scatter from hundred blades, how to drop protection on front liners.
And ofc, revamp defiant.

This happened in GW1?! If so why was this not implemented??? Seems like having mobs that actually react to the abilities you are using is a great way to break down the “Stack here and AOE down everything” mentality that is 90% of PVE.

Pandabro.8743:

Afya.5842:

For PVE, give monsters the GW1 mobs intelligence. Teach them how to rainbow spike, how to scatter from hundred blades, how to drop protection on front liners.
And ofc, revamp defiant.

This happened in GW1?! If so why was this not implemented??? Seems like having mobs that actually react to the abilities you are using is a great way to break down the “Stack here and AOE down everything” mentality that is 90% of PVE.

Would also promote grouping instead of “wait for champ then DPS him down like everyone else” mentality.