Guild Wars 2

If you are like me, you build your characters stats based on the equipment and the stats you get from traits.

With the removal of stats from traits it will mean that up to 50% of my characters equipment will be incorrect for the build.

Also with the increase in stats on equipment it’ll mean equipment will be even more important. So I don’t see the complaints about berserker gear improving, get worse if anything. It’ll also mean a lot of gear that’s generally not desirable will be even less desirable than it is already.

What’s your thoughts on this ?

Moving the stats from traits to gear isn’t going to make the gear situation any worse* than it currently is.

*worse, depending on if you think it’s a problem at all.

I would like to see it in action before i can comment on it

Softspoken.2410:

Moving the stats from traits to gear isn’t going to make the gear situation any worse* than it currently is.

It will, actually.

Right now, stats on traits give us more possible combinations than gear does. Is there any gear with Power + Precision + Ferocity + Toughness? No, but you can invest in all those stats by using Berserker gear and investing in the trait line that gives Toughness. Same for any other attribute combination – gear gives only a small fraction of the combinations available by combining gear and traits.

Removing the only way we have to slot stats beyond gear will reduce build variety, since stats allocation on gear is extremelly limited.

Not to mention how it’s far easier to change traits than to change gear – or do you really see people around with multiple sets of full ascended armor? Locking stats to something we cannot easily respec will only lead players to change their builds even less often than they do today, which will make the game even more stagnant than it has been after three years of barely any new skill or trait.

ArenaNet should have done the opposite – removed stats from gear (beyond a basic damage for weapons and a basic defense for armor) and given players free control of their stats allocation, with respects available whenever out of combat. That would have given us true freedom to have a variety of builds whenever we wanted.

But, nope.

I hope ArenaNet at least allow us to change the stats of our equipment when this change hits. That’s really the bare minimum they should do.

Yup. 2 of my hybrid builds will be pretty broken after this patch.
I was able to gain allot of Condi damage without Condi damage armor. (Condi runes, Condi buffs, + Condi damage from trait stats) combined with extra Condi damage from the guardstacks(WvW).
But I accept the way the story goes. I see allot of new cool things I can do with this new big upcoming changes. I’m well prepared ^^

It will make me glad I’ve kept a full range of Ascended rings that I can now use for tweaking “off-main” stats.

I’m mostly interested in how/what they mean by re-allocating those 700 missing stats. This could be a really good things that all we purer/more specialized stat setup while still using the particular trait setup you need.

PS warrior comes to mind as a perfect example. The full zerker gets full potential of his stats while still running the supportive build.

I now have to swap out my gear on several characters to get back to the “sweet spot” of healing power, while gaining a tiny boost to unwanted stats on all of my characters. Yeah, I’m happy with having to replace my ascended stuff.

Honestly they’ve obfuscated the relationship between stats and their impact that I really don’t pay to much attention to it other than bigger = better.

Now before you all get up in my face about the wiki and formulas and spreadsheet analysis but I’m not playing EVE. And while the large stat values allow fine tuning that you wouldn’t get with small numbers but it isn’t obvious what +42 power does for my damage. Is it that I’m doing 42 points more damage?

So for me moving around where those numbers are coming from, not really all that important. As long as they are reasonably similar to what I currently have, no problem.

I’ll have to see how they play but at least a couple of my chars have beserker gear and healing/vitality traits, most specifically my Guardian which has an Altruistic Hammer build. That makes her kill fast and yet be very tanky. I might have to switch out gear on her.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

I’ll have to see how they play but at least a couple of my chars have beserker gear and healing/vitality traits, most specifically my Guardian which has an Altruistic Hammer build. That makes her kill fast and yet be very tanky. I might have to switch out gear on her.

Yep, the loss of healing power from traitline is going to hit my AH build as well. The same as loss of precision from Radiance (coupled with moving Retributive Armor from adept to grandmaster, and making it compete with AH for a slot).

I really like the new system better, that now I can freely choose the traits I really need, instead of forcing myself to pick a traitline because I need the stats from the traitline.

However I do concern about where 30% condition duration and boom duration trait will go. Do we lose it permanently?

Astralporing.1957:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

I’ll have to see how they play but at least a couple of my chars have beserker gear and healing/vitality traits, most specifically my Guardian which has an Altruistic Hammer build. That makes her kill fast and yet be very tanky. I might have to switch out gear on her.

Yep, the loss of healing power from traitline is going to hit my AH build as well. The same as loss of precision from Radiance (coupled with moving Retributive Armor from adept to grandmaster, and making it compete with AH for a slot).

AH scales terribly on Healing Power. Go check wiki for it please. You don’t lose anything. Most skills scale terribly at healing power. It’s better that you get more offensive power. The boon duration is a concern though.

I like being able to pick out the trait lines I like without consideration of the stats but when I read about it my first thought was, “thank god I never made ascended armor for any of my chars.”

This is one of the reasons why ascended gear should have selectable stats like the Legendary weapons have.

Toxsa.2701:

Astralporing.1957:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

I’ll have to see how they play but at least a couple of my chars have beserker gear and healing/vitality traits, most specifically my Guardian which has an Altruistic Hammer build. That makes her kill fast and yet be very tanky. I might have to switch out gear on her.

Yep, the loss of healing power from traitline is going to hit my AH build as well. The same as loss of precision from Radiance (coupled with moving Retributive Armor from adept to grandmaster, and making it compete with AH for a slot).

AH scales terribly on Healing Power. Go check wiki for it please.

I know that it scales terribly, but you have obviously never tried that in practice. It is a visible change. You might possibly be correct if we were considering only AH-based healing in AH build on its own, separate from all other healing sources, but even then it would add up. When we factor in regen, virtue of resolve passive/active and heal skill, those 200-300 points of HP suddently start to make a difference.

I dunno what some people complains about… I dunno, I am not good with numbers but this is how I see it.

For example (Not the real numbers)

Before Trait fix stats are for zerker:
Gear – Pow 100 Prec 80 Fer 80
Traits – Pow +10 Heal Pow +20 Vita +30

After changes:
gear – pow 120 prec 100 Fer 100
Or (This is important) you switch out one or two accesories and get
Gear – Pow 110 Prec 80 Fer 80 Heal pow 20 Vita 30

In the end, no change… Well exept that base stats gets a boost too.

So in my mind it does not seems to change a thing if you don’t want but it gives us more custumization as stats are not forced on us by wanting to invest in a specific traitline. Well and for those who want some xtra boon duration and stuff that may go away… Maby they will also go in gear now? We don’t know. So at the moment I look forward to this change but I do not dare to say that I know it’s gonna be good or bad. Let’s see what the future holds.

EdgarMTanaka.7291:

I dunno what some people complains about… I dunno, I am not good with numbers but this is how I see it.

For example (Not the real numbers)

Before Trait fix stats are for zerker:
Gear – Pow 100 Prec 80 Fer 80
Traits – Pow +10 Heal Pow +20 Vita +30

After changes:
gear – pow 120 prec 100 Fer 100
Or (This is important) you switch out one or two accesories and get
Gear – Pow 110 Prec 80 Fer 80 Heal pow 20 Vita 30

In the end, no change… Well exept that base stats gets a boost too.

So in my mind it does not seems to change a thing if you don’t want but it gives us more custumization as stats are not forced on us by wanting to invest in a specific traitline. Well and for those who want some xtra boon duration and stuff that may go away… Maby they will also go in gear now? We don’t know. So at the moment I look forward to this change but I do not dare to say that I know it’s gonna be good or bad. Let’s see what the future holds.

Not much although I really want to go back to rolling a sinister condi war in PvE. Only thing thats stopping me is how condi dura will be played out on gear (if it at all).

EdgarMTanaka.7291:

I dunno what some people complains about… I dunno, I am not good with numbers but this is how I see it.

For example (Not the real numbers)

Before Trait fix stats are for zerker:
Gear – Pow 100 Prec 80 Fer 80
Traits – Pow +10 Heal Pow +20 Vita +30

After changes:
gear – pow 120 prec 100 Fer 100
Or (This is important) you switch out one or two accesories and get
Gear – Pow 110 Prec 80 Fer 80 Heal pow 20 Vita 30

In the end, no change… Well exept that base stats gets a boost too.

So in my mind it does not seems to change a thing if you don’t want but it gives us more custumization as stats are not forced on us by wanting to invest in a specific traitline. Well and for those who want some xtra boon duration and stuff that may go away… Maby they will also go in gear now? We don’t know. So at the moment I look forward to this change but I do not dare to say that I know it’s gonna be good or bad. Let’s see what the future holds.

Good thing that my main and favourite class does not rely on boon duration, nor does it rely on condition damage. It’s actually a flat buff to the class That’s why I’m looking forward to the change

EdgarMTanaka.7291:

In the end, no change… Well exept that base stats gets a boost too.

You missed the part where they said, that increase to base stats, and to stat on gear, should cover most of the loss from traitlines.
It’s another hidden stat nerf.

Astralporing.1957:

EdgarMTanaka.7291:

In the end, no change… Well exept that base stats gets a boost too.

You missed the part where they said, that increase to base stats, and to stat on gear, should cover most of the loss from traitlines.
It’s another hidden stat nerf.

Hmm… I don’t read in to what they say so I missed that. That pretty much confirms that Boon+ and some extra stuff will be removed then. Still can be wrong.

I don’t see any point in trying to reconstruct my builds after the update. There might be better builds that are only possible because of the update. I’ll most likely spend a lot of time trying out stuff and min-maxing. It will be the same for me as if they’d just deleted all traits and introduced completely new ones.

If i had to guess, since we will have 3 full trait lines, there will be a total of 1800 missing stat point (accounting for 3 main attributes and 3 secondary attribute, excluding percentage based stats).

My prediction is these 1800 points will be distributed across all equipment, this means 6 armor pieces, a weapon, 5 trinkets, and a back item, which all offer varing numbers for the same stats.

The best approach would be to distribute these 1800 points to equipment pieces based on a percentage of the total stats offered by each piece, so let’s say the chest piece offers 7% of the total stats, then 1800 * 7% = 126, and assuming that gear piece offers the same amount of stats for all of its 3 stats (which it doesn’t), then each stat will increase by 126 * 33% = ~42.

So you see, you’re not gonna lose TOO much if anything at all, and if you do lose anything it’s very easily compensated cuz with less gear you can compensate for a higher amount of stats now.

Personally, I think this is one of the best moves Anet has done to date. By removing the stat choice from your traits you are now free to select your traits based on the benefit the traits offer alone.

Currently you have to choose your traits, not only one what the traits offer, but also on the stats you get. Which in many cases can reduce your trait options. Now we will have complete freedom to select the traits we want without worrying about losing power or ferocity or whatever.

If you need to compensate for lost stats, you will need to relook at your gear. If you have lost toughness for example and all your gear is berserker, you may need to change one or two pieces to provide that lost toughness. Stats on gear will be updated and increased, as well as your base stats. Therefore, I do not think this change will effect your stats to a great degree.

The most important thing to take from this change, is how it frees up your trait choices, which in turn should open the door for more build diversity.

A BIG +1 to Anet for this change. I think its great!

All my current builds are a collaboration between the stats I got from my trait lines and my equipment. When these changes go live I will be missing out on every stat that I augmented with traits/equipment thus making my current gear worthless to my builds.

Take the case of my necro, I have very little ferocity gear as I relied upon my soul reaping tree to provide most of what I got. Now, however, I will have to reinvest in new gear if I want the numbers to match what I had originally; can’t say I am happy about the change at all.

It really disappoints when a player makes a large investment like making ascended armor and then n Anet changes the game making that investment less valuable because they picked a build and relied on a stat combo that wont exist in the new system. I really hope they realize this and give ascended armor and weapons a one time stat change.

Either that or…

Coming soon to the gem store item stat changer.

I used to be really excited about specializations. Now I’m just worried how many of my builds get burned and how much time I wasted last year making ascended armor that isnt going to be of use anymore.

This is like the 3rd or 4th time we had trait change. When they going to decide they got it right?

If you think they change is good or not. It was implied that they didn’t want to make players current work to make a max level character and gear to be made obsolete by adding more levels and gear tiers in the expansion. They are making some players gear obsolete with this change without addressing the issue. Anet can we please get some consideration.

I will end up with yet more toughness. I really want a Power, Vitality, Healing Power set so I can trade some toughness for vitality while keeping my power and healing.

EdgarMTanaka.7291:

After changes:
gear – pow 120 prec 100 Fer 100
Or (This is important) you switch out one or two accesories and get
Gear – Pow 110 Prec 80 Fer 80 Heal pow 20 Vita 30

Which means, you will have to adjust your accessories if you want to go back to the build you have right now. And that’s assuming you are lucky enough to have a build that can actually be built with accessories, considering how limited stat distribution on items is, especially on ascended gear (which is even more limited than common gear).

What if, though, you feel like changing your build a bit? With traits, you could easily change some stat points from here to there, and change how you play. With stats coming exclusively from gear, in order to experiment you would need to change your accessories again, which isn’t so easy due to a multitude of issues (not only the limited stats on gear, but also the fact that getting so many ascended acessories isn’t easy, plus the lack of space where to keep everything, and etc).

In the end, the change punishes players who like to experiment and change their builds. I remember, in the original Guild Wars, when ArenaNet removed refund points and allowed players to change their attributes freely; it rejuvenated the game, and allowed for a lot more build diversity, build creativity and variety in play. Now… Now ArenaNet is going to kill all those things. And why? To make the game simpler for players to whom stat allocation would be “too confusing”. It’s the NPE all over again.

It won’t affect me at all, as I already have 4-5 sets of armor in different stat types. for all of you that never use anything but zerker, and only one set of armor in that stat, however… Sucks for all of you!

i will probably just change out a few rings. Im sure i have some that can help me get what i need. If i dont, then i will just use what i have already.

They will likely spin it and maybe NPE is the reasoning they’ll publicly state, but I’m almost positive this is done to make balancing a lot easier since they now will be using less resources for living story and updates and more on pumping out expansions. Many of these changes the expansion will bring will likely be in part due to Anet knowing that they won’t have as many people working on fixes and balance issues, so they’re going to try and make it easier for them.

I really don’t see how separating stats from traits, which is a great idea, would necessarily have to be done in such a limited and restrictive fashion unless its in part being done to decrease the number of things they’ll have to balance.

Yumiko Ishida.3769:

It won’t affect me at all, as I already have 4-5 sets of armor in different stat types. for all of you that never use anything but zerker, and only one set of armor in that stat, however… Sucks for all of you!

Why? Gear is presently the most significant factor in determining your stats by a wide margin. This change will not make zerker any less viable for any content.

Andred.1087:

Yumiko Ishida.3769:

It won’t affect me at all, as I already have 4-5 sets of armor in different stat types. for all of you that never use anything but zerker, and only one set of armor in that stat, however… Sucks for all of you!

Why? Gear is presently the most significant factor in determining your stats by a wide margin. This change will not make zerker any less viable for any content.

Yep. It will mostly hit the people that weren’t running zerkers.

Test.8734:

EdgarMTanaka.7291:

After changes:
gear – pow 120 prec 100 Fer 100
Or (This is important) you switch out one or two accesories and get
Gear – Pow 110 Prec 80 Fer 80 Heal pow 20 Vita 30

Which means, you will have to adjust your accessories if you want to go back to the build you have right now. And that’s assuming you are lucky enough to have a build that can actually be built with accessories, considering how limited stat distribution on items is, especially on ascended gear (which is even more limited than common gear).

What if, though, you feel like changing your build a bit? With traits, you could easily change some stat points from here to there, and change how you play. With stats coming exclusively from gear, in order to experiment you would need to change your accessories again, which isn’t so easy due to a multitude of issues (not only the limited stats on gear, but also the fact that getting so many ascended acessories isn’t easy, plus the lack of space where to keep everything, and etc).

In the end, the change punishes players who like to experiment and change their builds. I remember, in the original Guild Wars, when ArenaNet removed refund points and allowed players to change their attributes freely; it rejuvenated the game, and allowed for a lot more build diversity, build creativity and variety in play. Now… Now ArenaNet is going to kill all those things. And why? To make the game simpler for players to whom stat allocation would be “too confusing”. It’s the NPE all over again.

First of all, I don’t think many have even thought about the TraitLineStats as a major importance for a specific build. The traits, weapons sets, sigils, runes and stats on gear has been more focus to create a build.

I beleave that you have more freedom to Create a build now when you don’t have to sacrifice a specific Traitline just becouse it doesn’t give you the right stats. Now it is easier to just replace an Accessory.

I do experiment and change my Builds everyday(Okay not everyday but alot), I also play alot of different content that grants me alot of Ascended accesories and even gear sometimes and (You know what!?) they are account bound so I have saved them all. So when I come up with a new build I try different stat sets for them too! Hah, and that I do now, before the update.

The only thing that it may have a small impact on is PvP, but hopefully this is something anet have thought of.

The accessory solution is all fine and dandy as long as people were not already using them to grant other stats.

I like the idea that stats get seperated from traits. Still doesn’t change the fact that people are having the rug pulled out from under them. Stats are not the only problem. Some peoples build won’t even exist thus they might not have a use for the ascended gear they have at all. Making thier investment obsolete.

If Anet wants this change to be better received they need to give those players builds and stats they are eliminating some consideration. Nobody knew that the game was going to change this dramatically a year or more after they invested so much in armor.