Guild Wars 2

Hey Anet,

Been closely following all the great stuff coming up in HoT, excited to see core specs and dots & dashes changes as just announced.

I do have one concern that I thought I’d bring up, and that is a player’s identity. The choices they’ve made that makes them who they are, as reflected in stats. It has been up to this point that trait lines gave us our choices in stats changes. You built your character around them, and these stayed true no matter what gear you were wearing. After the changes only gear and level will determine stats. I haven’t been able to find any information on whether the stats assigned by levels will be the same for every prof, or flat across the board for everyone.

So I guess my question is, will there be a way for me to choose my own stats? I mean I know I can pick gear but that’s not ME, that’s just the stuff I am wearing. Or what if I can’t find or afford the perfect gear for what I wanted to play? As your leveling in particular you’re going to pick gear based on what is better than what you have, specific stats don’t become all that important until higher up or even max. I’d like to define my character with stats, not gear, so that I feel his accomplishments are his own, not some armor maker’s somewhere. I want his power to be his own strength, his toughness his own ability to endure. Making it ALL about gear with no variation between characters makes the game flat and boring.

An easy fix for this would be the option to choose stats to upgrade at the level intervals, instead of having them auto-assigned. This way my character’s own body, spirit and mind are growing along with him, based on the skills that he finds to be important. It doesn’t sound like much when you think about it in terms of mechanics or meta but in a game that claims to be so strongly into story, making character’s growth more static seems counter intuitive.

Maybe someone can help me out with this, maybe I missed something. It’s just what I am seeing right now.

That’s MMO’s for you. You trade the idea that your character is powerful in order to have stuff to chase that makes your character powerful. It kittens, but that’s the genre. I blame D&D.

Trait lines are more about the abilities they give you more than the stats, the stats were a complete pain.

Going into earth for stability on my ele but getting useless condition damage is something I’m happy I don’t have to worry about anymore.

The problem with that system is it becomes nearly impossible to balance.

The player who chooses to only increase defensive stats need more powerful attacks to compete with players who choose to increase offensive stats. But conversely, those players who choose only offensive stats need less powerful attacks.

And what about players who choose a combination of defensive and offensive traits?

We give up that level of character progression when we have a multiplayer game where players do compete against each other for the sake of balance.

The more permutations are possible, the harder it is to balance.

emikochan.8504:

Trait lines are more about the abilities they give you more than the stats, the stats were a complete pain.

Going into earth for stability on my ele but getting useless condition damage is something I’m happy I don’t have to worry about anymore.

I agree, it wasn’t the best way to do it. I was just saying it did make me feel I could choose what my character was good at. I still want to be able to choose my stats apart from gear, but I don’t want them to reattach them to traits, or specs, either.

Seera.5916:

The problem with that system is it becomes nearly impossible to balance.

The player who chooses to only increase defensive stats need more powerful attacks to compete with players who choose to increase offensive stats. But conversely, those players who choose only offensive stats need less powerful attacks.

And what about players who choose a combination of defensive and offensive traits?

We give up that level of character progression when we have a multiplayer game where players do compete against each other for the sake of balance.

The more permutations are possible, the harder it is to balance.

I guess you’re right about that. Sigh. It’s just sad, I’d honestly rather give up the competitive side in favor of more choice. But that’s never going to happen.