Racial Traits
One new trait-line for each race! How cool would it be to have two of you favorite profession, and each of them were unique in look and playstyle?
It sounds fun, but also a bit forced. What kind of traits do you have in mind?
Propositions:
- Bonus x vitality/toughness for drunk Norns,
- 15-30 healing/health regen for Sylvari while standing in water,
- 20% lower falling damage for Charrs.
- 3% chance for Asuras to randomly avoid an attack, 5% under the effect of swiftness.
- 30% faster gathering for Humans.
My reasoning was mostly based on shapes and nature of these races. =P
Although it would be nice to see more differences between the races, I think adding particular benefits to each race is a bad idea.
It would be entirely possible for meta-builds to be only available for members of a particular race, which would be a shame for people to lose out if their main is the “wrong” race. You’d probably begin to see less diversity too.
Making things different and fair in this game is difficult, because niches often result in farms and unfair advantages.
Yoroio- although your propositions are nice and somewhat fit the lore, I can immediately see that asuran benefit the most from your ideas in terms of mechanics. Swiftness can be easily maintained so asura will basically end up having reduced incoming damage by 5%.
How would they appear as traits? Would you be able to access your particular race trait in any of the trait lines, or just the first one for every profession (e.g. Zeal, Fire).
Yeah they were pretty clear during development that they wanted race to only impact cosmetic and story based options. You’re not going to see any kind of racial traits because it would make certain races better suited for certain professions or certain situations. It’s the same reason we’re unlikely to see the addition of new racial skills either.
I like the racial skills, and actually use some of them, but it’s not a concept I necessarily want to see extended to traits. (Or more skills, for that matter.)
It doesn’t affect PvP balance (since they’re PvE-only,) but that’s a downside, too, because it seems like a waste to develop new traits that can’t be used in PvP. That doesn’t seem to have ever ended in favor of overpowered PvE skills, however, since I rarely see them used.
If racial traits are very useful, then you have the problem of someone wanting to change their character’s race, and having to grind another level 80 character. Character-race-matters elements of the game (skills, cultural armor, storylines) are interesting, and they flesh out the world, but they have a so many trade-offs and problems that I don’t see more coming anytime soon.
~The Storyteller – Elementalist – Jade Quarry~