Yo, I mainly play pvp and some dungeons. I only have 1 lv 80 that still is only 60% map complete. It wasn’t until today that I found a trait I wanted to get but I wanted one Trait line 2.
I get lost a lot. Even in real life and with usually nothing to point me in the direction of a map portal it ended up taking me an hour just to get from the Straights of Devastation to Cursed shore. Running up and down the Straights twice and going in a circle. Ok fine, partly my fault.
Then I learn that it is from an event. One that requires many people, huh? It is my trait why do I need others? I had guessed it was like a skill point challenge. Ok, So I was forced to ask all 3 map chats when the event was and where the train was. Thus whole part took another 45 mins to spawn the boss.
Never having faced this boss I proceed to die along with everyone else and have to make 3 trips running (it was a long way) and our tactics in the end were just dps die run dps die run until it died. I died while it was at 1% and stayed dead to get the credit (being there). So I got it. I didn’t even bother going back for rewards or chest I just wanted out of the ruins of Orr. I’ll be purchasing the rest of the new traits from vendors.
It was not very fun. Which lead me to wonder why I didn’t like it.
One of my biggest selling points to telling my friends about GW2 was how easy to was to pick up and play, including how to easy it was to get into pvp. You just go to the mist, set up your play style, and play. Easy! Now parts of pvp are locked into either a decent grind of about 4 days of playing casually to get a trait from a vendor or for a new player getting a lv 80 then running to this end game maps that have tons of mobs and few way points only to wait on an event.
Having to get the traits just bugs me. We got them as a achievement for leveling. Proof of getting stronger. Proof that your character learn from your experiences. Badges of honor that directly effected our game play. Now they are glorified fetch quests that are determined by an arbitrary goal that have nothing to do with you. Go here, get unlock. It would have been more fun if they where just a drop that you could buy from the trading post, spending a couple of silver for a trait on the TP would have had just as much meaning to me as my experience above.
And now what am I going to do with my 7 alts that I pvp’d with that are lv 2. If I get my friends to try gw2 now they’d enter pvp with half a build, amulet-weapon-runes but no traits.
The simple answer would be to unlock all traits in the pvp version’s of the trait system. My answer will be going without the new traits for a long time.