Guild Wars 2

It’s only a little thing I saw in the trait preview and I know that nothing in there is definite. But why does a system in which you can only go fully into a trait line need three minor traits? Wouldn’t it be better to just merge them into one and say for example:

“Your nature as an elementalist which is specialized on water magic allows you to heal allies around you with a [Sothing Mist] as well as healing allies as soon as you attune to water. You’re overall healing effectiveness towards allies is increased by 25%.”

It’s not a huge thing, but I think the new system wouldn’t look like it did in the preview if it wouldn’t be for the current system.

Another tiny advantage of only 3 traits towards 6 in a line is, that you could actually make connecting lines even if you’d choose to play without a grandmaster trait, but with two master, or two adept traits.

While leveling, you wont have enough trait points to fully go into a trait line, so at certain levels, you will only be able to trait into adept or master tier, for example. In that case, you would also only have hte benefit of 1 or 2 minor traits of a trait line, in your proposal, you would have all 3 minor traits, once you choose a certain line, disregarding how far you trait into it.

I agree, they’re out of place because they’re a remnant of the old design and a bad one for the new system.
When I look at the trait panel, I want to change my traits as fast and practically as possible. I can’t change those minors, they’re just clutter. They could just be explained in a tooltip over the specialization icon for all I care.

Wanze.8410:

While leveling, you wont have enough trait points to fully go into a trait line, so at certain levels, you will only be able to trait into adept or master tier, for example. In that case, you would also only have hte benefit of 1 or 2 minor traits of a trait line, in your proposal, you would have all 3 minor traits, once you choose a certain line, disregarding how far you trait into it.

Unless they drag obtaining traits into oblivion that argument will be valid for a few hours. Otherwise positioning of minor traits is completely devalued in new system since you will eventually unlock them all.

What bothers me more is the fact that adept minors for specializations are simply informing you that you are getting new abilities. They could have easily moved that information into some tooltip when you hover over entire spec trait line and made adept actually useful. So when your build includes specialization, you have one less adept trait than vanilla builds, as if we needed more trimming. It’s just lazy design.