Guild Wars 2

Not so happy with the new traits and builds system, anyone else?

nvm, anyway, i’m not buying HoT, this game needs more fixes and less expansions.

crickets

tokate.5396:

Not so happy with the new traits and builds system, anyone else?

I’m not really happy with that either. I still need to test it more of course to be really sure but it really reminds me what happened to the specialization system of a famous mmo when they released an expansion with pandas…

I mean, now you have to spend every point in a specialization. To me, it is less diversity choices in the builds. Maybe it is intended to be for young kids or people not really smart :/

Also, I believe the new interfaces for the specialization system are confusing. Too much icons everywhere…

Where were you for the months-plural that this has been announced as being in the works?

It’s not like ArenaNet dropped this on people out of the blue on patch day. We’ve known this was coming since…what? March?

hahaha i knew this was coming, so i created a warrior. A-nets favorite class. You should have done it too. They basicly finnaly put down my previous main class. The ranger used to be half dead, but now they finnaly put it out of its misery. Its now a unplayable class with only 2 semi-viable builds and which will btw will eventualy be useless when HoT and new skills are added.

New main: Warrior
Future main: Revenant

My biggest misgiving about the new traits system was addressed by the rather easy recipe added to the Forge to allow us to restat our ascended gear. Up until now I had thought I was going to have to build new ascended gear, and that had me pretty upset.

I’ve lost a little bit of functionality here and there, but nothing too build-breaking.

Though I still dislike the placement of honed axes in the Beastmastery line. Either way I’ll survive just fine

ETA: I play A/T + A/WH condi/support ranger, so I can’t speak to those who are saying ranger is broken.

There’s nothing I like about the new update. I got bored of the game for some time now and don’t think I’m buying the HoT upgrade. I may be ignorant but to me it just looks like they just made it shinier and made the traits frustrating.

Individual traits range from significantly to stupendously more powerful than their previous iterations, with a number of useless/narrow/weak traits that nobody took either excised or rolled into other traits that can accurately be thought of as trait packages. You then, furthermore, get more of these newly ridiculous traits.

I can’t really see where all the hullabaloo is over this. Not only did we know it was coming for forever, but with a very small handful of exceptions ArenaNet just opened up the Build Power barrel and let everyone in the game take an extra double handful.

I mean hell, not only is my new Mesmer build actually playable, as opposed to the “I just can’t make this class work >_<” nonsense of pre-this-update, it’s awesome. The update’s opened up an entire new class for me, and I can’t imagine I’m the only one.

‘Course, I’ve been spending the weeks till now fiddling with Dulfy’s spec calc tool and getting a feel for how all the new bits work together. I figure that once people get over the interface shock and the “dude where’s my stuff?!” and get to digesting the new system, the complaints will taper off significantly.

Or not. I mean I am posting this on the official forums. Nobody here is ever happy with anything, so I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised at all the grousing. When will I learn?

Warden.8927:

LOL shut your filthy mouth. Go was it out with soap. You had to know this was coming for weeks dont be so ignorant.

Community is never pleased.

I read the posts when u log in every time they announced something new. Knew some changes were coming like sp to shards or w/e and also new traits, but a lot of this stuff i had no idea like wasting skill points to learn skills u already had learned again… what?!

I think many of the people unhappy main rangers, and rangers did lose some significant skills like the ability to throw traps, mobile spirits, and Offhand radius/range bonuses and some traits being placed in weird lines (axes for instance) to name a few. I can understand why some rangers feel somewhat slighted.

On the flipside, however, I think my ele is vastly improved thanks to the new traits!

Well my ele, guard and war got insane buffs. Can’t complain.

What I don’t understand is why everyone keeps saying “we all knew this was coming”. Yes, we did. So? What’s your point? You really think A’Net would have been dissuaded from pushing this change though if we had complained earlier? I have news for y’all: Santa Claus isn’t real.

And no, people are usually not happy with change. But then, why do it? Ever hear the phrase “never change a running system”? I mean I understand the need for changes per se; please do fix all the bugs and do keep providing new content. But IMHO this is a change of unprecedented (and unpredictable!) gravity. Don’t pretend to know how this will impact gameplay etc., because only time will tell. What I do know is that the original sentiment of “nice way to break half our builds” is true, except it’s more like “almost all of our builds”. Whether this is for better or for worse gameplay-wise, I think people have a right to be upset (I’m positively furious right now, as evidenced by the fact that I’m even on this forum); this whole thing is tantamount to yanking the ground out from underneath us. People don’t like change? Well, guess what, we just got a huge one.

I do suspect that the impact economy-wise will be Lovecraftean, and I also suspect that this is the actually intended effect. I have somewhere around 25 characters, am I to spend thousands of gold on new builds now? And oh hey! Along comes gem to gold conversion, ka-ching!

My issue is I’ve worked on emulators that released cleaner pushes than this. Who is beta testing? Are they not being given enough time to go through and test all the content?

How about almost changing the entire game? Not sure yet if bad or good. The bugs and undesired skill changed should be dealt with quite fast, but it could still be ok.

UncleSniper.4086:

What I don’t understand is why everyone keeps saying “we all knew this was coming”. Yes, we did. So? What’s your point? You really think A’Net would have been dissuaded from pushing this change though if we had complained earlier? I have news for y’all: Santa Claus isn’t real.

And no, people are usually not happy with change. But then, why do it? Ever hear the phrase “never change a running system”? I mean I understand the need for changes per se; please do fix all the bugs and do keep providing new content. But IMHO this is a change of unprecedented (and unpredictable!) gravity. Don’t pretend to know how this will impact gameplay etc., because only time will tell. What I do know is that the original sentiment of “nice way to break half our builds” is true, except it’s more like “almost all of our builds”. Whether this is for better or for worse gameplay-wise, I think people have a right to be upset (I’m positively furious right now, as evidenced by the fact that I’m even on this forum); this whole thing is tantamount to yanking the ground out from underneath us. People don’t like change? Well, guess what, we just got a huge one.

I do suspect that the impact economy-wise will be Lovecraftean, and I also suspect that this is the actually intended effect. I have somewhere around 25 characters, am I to spend thousands of gold on new builds now? And oh hey! Along comes gem to gold conversion, ka-ching!

Your preference would be for them to never make any sort of meaningful change, fix, or improvement to the game?

Because this was a fix as much as anything else. The existing trait system was bad. It was kludgy, unlocking things in it was either infuriating or expensive (and thus also infuriating), it was packed with bad traits nobody took, and worst of all it couldn’t be readily expanded, altered, or repaired. The Specialization system was conceived as part of a set of fixes for the base game that would allow ArenaNet to much more easily work with new traits, traitlines, or other similar buildy-bits in the future.

Yeah, there’s going to be some chaos while everything settles. There always is. Ride the wave and enjoy or take a break for a while, because there was never any hope of stopping this. I get the frustration, but trust me, man – this is a better system. There’s going to be things that don’t translate and that does indeed blow, but this is a better direction to be going in.

Play pirate ship condi meta and you will be fine….

TheRandomGuy.7246:

Well my ele, guard and war got insane buffs. Can’t complain.

besides guard is in process pf being optimized for that.. wil have LB and fire damage basicly kills anyone now.

I’ve been sexually aroused since the moment I logged my guard today. Gawd that juicy, sexy damage, defense and elite skills buffs. Yes, yeS YESSSS

DevilLordLaser.8619:

Where were you for the months-plural that this has been announced as being in the works?

It’s not like ArenaNet dropped this on people out of the blue on patch day. We’ve known this was coming since…what? March?

Probably doing what a lot of people were suggesting.

“Wait until the patch has released to complain about trait changes.”

Rangers and Necromancers each have a legitimate grievance, to some extent. A nasty chunk of Ranger utility was evicted from the character, and the devs smashed Consume Conditions with the mightiest of nerf bats without giving Necromancers any other actually viable heals, or without giving us a reason why Consume needed to be rekt.

Both of those are problems with specific execution of the system, rather than the system itself, and frankly getting them fixed should be easier now that the system as a whole has dropped. Whether they will be, who knows. But this entire notion that the whole of the Specialization system is unworkable garbage is just shock. It’s a big change, people are going to be bumping their heads on it for a little bit here, but I myself have eleven characters, and only one of them didn’t benefit from this switch-up (my Ranger, who didn’t really do anything before, either).

Every other character I have is either holding steady or has gained, usually a lot. Now I know that I’m just one me and this isn’t going to hold true for everyone, but a little creativity and experimentation should get most folks back to even footing pretty quick. And some folks are going to find entirely new options that beat the everlovin’ Gehenna out of what they were running before. Maybe that chance is worth banking on before we get a million threads angrily screaming “revert the patch!”?