Guild Wars 2

As my signature would lead people to believe, I have a lot of non-80 alts (Out of my 40 perma characters only 11 are 80s, which is fine because I enjoy taking my time to level and figure out the playstyle I want for each character).

My frustration with this is that I can’t unlock anything on them. At all. I’m not kidding. I logged in on every character to get the SP > spirit shards and every non-80 didn’t have a single Hero Point to spare. Not a one. They were already thrown into traits and skills that I didn’t want.

For instance the biggest thing for me pre-80 is getting that 25% signet boost on the 4 professions that do have it (necro, ele, thief, ranger), and getting the other professions their respective speed boosts (warrior 25% with a melee wep, engy swifty with a kit, guard shouts and mesmer swifty signet). I am completely unable to do this because Anet has decided to throw points into things that I don’t want and – most likely – will not use until I hit max level.

The other thing I like to do is get the portal for mesmers. With the new LA I have even more want to do this for Troll’s Revenge. But lo and behold on the non-80 mesmers that I had portal unlocked on, it was gone.

I know others have had the same grievances, so I’m putting this thread out there in the hopes that Anet will see it and realise they shouldn’t pick and choose for us. We’re gamers. We will figure it out. We don’t need to be hand held through everything.

yep, gw2 has gotten very play by numbers.

now all we need is ai to run our characters so we can just watch gw2 unfold.

New Feature: just start the game and watch!

I can only assume that after granting 80s enough points to unlock everything, they completely forgot that all low level characters would be getting locked into some grotesque failure of a build upon the release of this update.

There wasn’t even a way out: not having heard of the changes that would allow me to instantly unlock everything, I had refunded all traits across my lvl 80 characters in preparation and still found them automatically assigned after the update.

The thing that really gets me is that if I want to play the way I want to play I have to play on an already-80-unlocked-everything character, which isn’t what I want to play!

The UI is a little confusing at first and the trait symbols are too small imo, but those are things I can deal with. Being locked into specialisations and having skills that I don’t want are things that shouldn’t have happened in the first place.

My non-level 80’s all had heto points left after the change. What I think happened is that you had a great mix of skills on your bar and traits activated so that the game had to unlock a great variety of lines to keep the same skills and traits.

LadyRhonwyn.2501:

My non-level 80’s all had heto points left after the change. What I think happened is that you had a great mix of skills on your bar and traits activated so that the game had to unlock a great variety of lines to keep the same skills and traits.

I had exactly 0 traits activated on most of my non 80’s (and yes, like I said in the OP I checked them ALL). They all get the exact same skill and trait unlocks regardless of what I had on my bar or equipped in my traits.

I know a few people are upset about this and regardless of what happened it was wrong to have them automatically assigned. I am unhappy with the way it is and I still want a refund of HP’s on my non-80s.

I agree. When this patch rolled out ANET should have refunded all skill and trait points instead of giving us a premade build. Especially when changes are this sweeping it would be nice to give us the chance to play around and make the builds we want.

From what i’ve been told, it is possible that ANet uses moe points than we have, and i have a character who has zero (probably negative points actually) and for 6 levels i havent gain a single one and have to play with earth specialisation (ele) which would be the LAST I wanted to get, and now i cant even get hero points to make up for it and train other specs. I lost ALL of my conjure weapons and i bet that when i finally unlock another specialisation it will be by the time i unlock another specialisation slot, so i will have to put earth specialisation there again, when i dont want that specialisation… In other words, atm, i cant even make up for THEIR mistakes, not to mention i shouldnt have to

Rahkylus.8097:

In other words, atm, i cant even make up for THEIR mistakes, not to mention i shouldnt have to

It was a complete mistake to auto-assign them at all, no matter what they put them into.

Hell I wouldn’t even be against my 80’s getting refunded as well because at least I can buy everything back real easy on them.

Hero points got automatically allocated according to what skills/traitlines you had equiped when the patch hit.

-If you had Traitline X than you got all traits from Trailine X unlocked.
-The type of Utility/elite you had equiped had you unlock upto the point where you get those.

For example.
Slick Shoes is the last in the line of the Gadget-tree for Engineer. If you had Slick Shoes on your Engineer when the patch hit, you will have gotten the whole tree for Gadget unlocked, including all the utility skills that come before that.

If you had the Grenade kit equiped, and the bomb kit unlocked but not equiped, after the patch the Kit-tree is filled up to the point of the Grenadekit. Everything before that is unlocked but everything after is not. So you no longer have access to the Bombkit.

As a result people are stuck with a very odd mix of traits/utility skills. Now i could be wrong, but level an alt a bit it seemed i was not getting any hero points at all. Either i didnt get to a bulk point yet, or the game reserves the hero points you already sort of “borrowed” when it automatically unlocked the skill-trees for you.

Might end up getting stuck a pretty while without the particular skills or traits you want if that is the case.

Again, example. If you had the Supply Crate elite for Engineer you now end up with all turrets unlocked because the Supply Crate is the last in the Turret-line. So you end up paying a lot of hero points for that, that you’d rather have spend somewhere else while leveling.

Terrahero.9358:

Hero points got automatically allocated according to what skills/traitlines you had equiped when the patch hit.

-If you had Traitline X than you got all traits from Trailine X unlocked.
-The type of Utility/elite you had equiped had you unlock upto the point where you get those.

“I had exactly 0 traits activated on most of my non 80’s (and yes, like I said in the OP I checked them ALL). They all get the exact same skill and trait unlocks regardless of what I had on my bar or equipped in my traits.”

All of my non-80 characters got the same unlocks despite having different skills and no traits active.

Terrahero.9358:

-If you had Traitline X than you got all traits from Trailine X unlocked.

Then anet had no reason to put a ton of hero points on Earth Specialisation when i was at level 25 and had NO TRAITS at the time (they were only unlocked at level 30 before the patch), also i confirmed with other ppl most eles got their earth specialisation maxed anyway, also engis, most of them, got their inventions specialisation maxed, so i think that skills are based on your build, traits are the same for all which is even more ridiculous

This change was a disaster in my eye’s. There certainly wasn’t enough communication on exactly what was going to occur. I figured no more skill point scrolls would drop, no big deal. I already had a couple of thousand banked anyway. Now, I have my non 80’s that had everything unlocked with very little unlocked. I have thousands of these Spirit Shards with nothing to spend them on. Nor is there any way of converting them to hero points. What SHOULD happen is add a Spirit Shard to hero point purchase on Myani. Just add a 5th Bag on the left column below “Tomes of Knowledge” and labeled it Hero Points. Then we can simply take our characters there and exchange these BACK to something that unlocks utilities. As that is what I was storing scrolls for!

Ricky.4706:

yep, gw2 has gotten very play by numbers.

now all we need is ai to run our characters so we can just watch gw2 unfold.

New Feature: just start the game and watch!

You joke, buuuut…..

Yeah. There is an old tabletop gaming saying: Don’t give the GM ideas.

+1 on this. I have some alts which have unlocked skills and traits which are a completely bonkers mix (and 0 points to spare). My mesmer was worst. Ended up with toming it to 80 since I didn’t realize the hero points come with the level up rewards and not automatically upon level up.

Chobiko.9182:

I didn’t realize the hero points come with the level up rewards and not automatically upon level up.

I think this is what a lot of people were expecting. It wasn’t clear enough in regards to getting them all by leveling.

Bumping this. I feel like my lowbie toons have really been handicapped by this lack of choice. Would be nice to get some dev attention regarding this.

I think having none active may be what did you in. The program assigned points based on the most heavily invested trait lines. With all at 0, all were equal, so it had to randomly select rather than focusing on your preferred lines. I’m only guessing on that, but it would fit the pattern I’ve seen.

Donari.5237:

I think having none active may be what did you in. The program assigned points based on the most heavily invested trait lines. With all at 0, all were equal, so it had to randomly select rather than focusing on your preferred lines. I’m only guessing on that, but it would fit the pattern I’ve seen.

I know you’re trying to help but this thread is not about asking why this happened.

I don’t care why it happened. I don’t care about the formulas behind all this, or the thinking, planning and preparing.

I want my hero points back on my non-80s. I want to play them, but I want to play them the way I want to play them which isn’t supported by lack of choice and being locked into things I don’t want.

Heck, I’ve heard of people being “in debt” to the system for Hero Points, but that doesn’t show up on the counter at all either. I like the new system but the implementation is what riles me up.

Or you could just… progress on them.

That is what I am doing with my Engineer and Guardian. Am I being forced to use builds I may or may not have chosen? Yeah, in a way. But I am also getting to play with new ones and discovering parts I may not have dabbled in otherwise. It’s not so bad.

Soja.5918:

Or you could just… progress on them.

That is what I am doing with my Engineer and Guardian. Am I being forced to use builds I may or may not have chosen? Yeah, in a way. But I am also getting to play with new ones and discovering parts I may not have dabbled in otherwise. It’s not so bad.

The problem is – like I mentioned in the last comment – that people have been “in debt” of Hero Points thanks to the bad implementation. I don’t want to have to progress on them, do some mapping and think “oh great now I have xxx points” get to the hero panel and realise I still have none.

If a refund is given not only will I know exactly how many points I have, but I will also be able to play the way I want to play (which is half the point of playing a game in the first place).

If you don’t want to have to progress on them, maybe the point of character progression has been missed.

I don’t know. I just picked up and dealt with it. I guess not everyone is as resilient as me? Then again, I wouldn’t want to level 40+ characters either…

Soja.5918:

If you don’t want to have to progress on them, maybe the point of character progression has been missed.

I don’t know. I just picked up and dealt with it. I guess not everyone is as resilient as me? Then again, I wouldn’t want to level 40+ characters either…

I’m not against progressing on them, and that was never intentionally implied, nor stated.

I’m against:
a) not knowing whether the next hero point I earn I will actually obtain or whether it’ll be taken off the “debt”
b) having the exact same things unlocked on all my characters when I didn’t want those things to be unlocked on them with this new system in the first place.
c) being chosen for by a third party what should be unlocked for my characters when I had no say and I was uninformed in the way in which the skills/traitlines would be unlocked (and I still don’t care about the hows and whys behind it – I hate the outcome)
d) not being able to progress the character in my way at early levels

I never said I didn’t want to level 40+ characters, nor was that implied. You are putting words in my mouth and being passive aggressive. That’s a childish move.

You just need to move on, Anet has said that it would of been a lot of extra work, maybe scrap there whole system to help fringe cases like you. This is an MMO, sometimes things dont go your way in a change when you are in the extreme minority. Even more so during a pre expansion patch.

Signed, no MMO has ever done something like implement a new skill tree system and then auto customize a character rather then refund those points…

Yep, though this hasn’t really affected me at all I think this decision and approach by ANet was a very poor one.

It’s affected my gf quite a bit and though she’s not devasted or anything it’s pretty frustrating.

As a principle it’s pretty shoddy; it’s like a total stranger dipping into your personal savings account without permission to spend your hard earned money on things they think you might want.

Not cool.