Not too long ago, the traits were shifted from starting at level 11 to a later level. That made me mad. I felt I needed those traits to survive since GW2 characters are far too easy to defeat. It annoyed me that my chars were supposed to be significant enough to have a heroic story told of them, but any one of them (including “heavy armor” chars) could get their butts kicked by 1 or 2 basic enemies.
This was most noticeable with my human elementalist, Kiria Nal. I lost count of the times I had been slapped around like a noob past lvl 30. I erased her, remade her, erased her again, recreated her as a mesmer, erased her and recreated her as an ellie. (I really wanted to like elementalists, can you tell??) At any rate, I felt I needed her traits just to survived. I had my latest version built around glyphs & attunement buffs—I had near-permanent swiftness any time I wanted it, which made getting around much less annoying. Then the traits got nerfed, and I lost survivability. I quit playing the game for several months.
Well, I’m not going to lie. I did have some fun with GW2. So I eventually talked myself into giving it another try. (I had done this about 4 times prior to this, or maybe this was the 4th time I’d come back.) I played on, and recently got Kiria built back up to where she was before. I noticed, however, that the char I finally got to 80, my Sylvari thief, didn’t get her last two trait point until she actually reached 80. That puzzled me, because I’ve always wanted to have my traits done by 70, as originally done, so I could spend the last 10 levels honing my gameplay without worrying about anything else. I still felt I needed traits—esp. the ones that removed conditions—at lower levels. If those toxic snake-guys around the blooms were any indication, I wasn’t wrong.
The freely refundable traits got my attention. I really liked the idea, tho I still felt I wanted the traits earlier. (Nagging little pet peave there.) At any rate, I kept playing, even creating a couple of new chars. But after the last major update this past week, when I created my last char, a Sylvari engineer, I thought my game had glitched. Usually, I had all three of my starting-weapon attacks before I got out of the intro story, but this time I was limited to my #1 attack only until the shadow of the dragon was done and I got out and leveled. (It didn’t bother me that I didn’t have to look for some clothes afterward; I always thought that was unnecessary, tho it didn’t bother me too much because the chars were still covered.)
So now it takes until level 7 to get your #3 attack slot open. (Hope I got that right, I only did this one char on the current set-up.) Not only that, Black Lion was deleted from their previous locations so I couldn’t dump the stupid, useless starting weapons for a better crafted one immediately, as I usually did. And to top it all off, I couldn’t even start an off-hand weapon, and my first utility slot was shunted to lvl 13 and the second to 28 (or something a lot later than 13). I checked my other new char, the guardian I’d made just before these changes, and sure enough, I’d lost a lot of my abilities—I didn’t even have but one of my virtues!!
Now I’m completely confused, and mad enough to quit, AGAIN. I feel like I’m being punished for playing the game! Why would the devs keep taking stuff away from us?? I don’t understand.
I got back into playing the game (for the umpteenth time) because I thought it over and felt that maybe it wasn’t so bad, and I could adjust. However, I feel that the latest changes are just stupid. With a game that is already unnecessarily frustrating (that is, in my opinion, feel free to disagree), I just don’t think I can handle this. I wanted to like this game—why else would I buy it?—but every time I turn around, I’m losing something. Should I endure it again, only to have something else nerfed on top of my head next time? <sigh> This time, I don’t think so.