Guild Wars 2

As of right now, the fall damage trait is taking up a spot in our specialization line. As they are quite useless while in battle, we are forced to choose the other 2 traits available.

I believe a solution to make these traits useful in battle is to allow us to do a ‘dive’ or ‘stomp’ while mid air, making us dive to the ground and take 1 damage to trigger the trait special effect. There are multiple ideas to allow us to do trigger this.

~Use the dodge button midair to trigger this ‘dive’.
~Our autoattack 1 will flip into the ‘dive’ for us to activate during midair
~Use jump button while in midair to trigger dive, tho this is probably not that great of an idea since we use jump to trigger gliding in HOT.

We can balance the skills out with the tweaks of damage, duration, cool down, and probably make it so that if we use this ‘dive’ skill, we use certain amount of energy. It makes more sense if we use dodge to do this ‘dive’.

I hope I made sense, I’m a bit drunk and tired while writing this, ask questions and I’ll try to explain more tomorrow morning!

Right now those traits are really nice and useful in WvW and open world. In some Pvp map one could imagine it is an advantage to jump from the clock tower with less damage.
Maybe it could be used as defensive tool when launch or knocked back… but then the ICD should be high enough to be comparable as defense against control traits.
But I’m not sure the change would not make it worth than now.

Ranael.6423:

Right now those traits are really nice and useful in WvW and open world. In some Pvp map one could imagine it is an advantage to jump from the clock tower with less damage.
Maybe it could be used as defensive tool when launch or knocked back… but then the ICD should be high enough to be comparable as defense against control traits.
But I’m not sure the change would not make it worth than now.

Sure, if you are doing JPs or specifically tying yourself to a style of WvW play that encourages others to chase you near cliffs, then falling damage is very helpful. However that doesn’t apply to the vast majority of gameplay. Thus, they aren’t “nice” or “useful” in WvW or PvE; they have an extremely niche use in both and yet require taking up a specific trait line just to get that occasional value.

I don’t think ANet should add a new mechanic to try to artificially create a need that reduced-falling-damage would address. Instead, I’d like to see it removed as a trait and replaced by something else: tied to armor (maybe toughness) or upgrades (like snowfall runes), or just reduce the baseline falling damage for everyone.

Just reduce falling damage across the board and reuse those traits for something that is actually useful.

To get a picture of how useless they are, consider all existing runes that can be used to free a trait. Movement speed runes are currently selling for 4g74s91c each (the useful Rune of the Traveler), for a total cost of 28g49s46c or 1g59s91c each (the fairly useless other than the speed boost Rune of Speed), for a total of 6g39s64c. Fall reduction runes (Rune of Snowfall) are fairly useless other than for the trait-replacing feature, and currently sell for 24c each, for a total of 1s44c.

Comparing the Rune of Speed to the Rune of Snowfall shows that movement speed is considered to be at least 444 TIMES more valuable to the players than falling reduction.

mtpelion.4562:

Just reduce falling damage across the board and reuse those traits for something that is actually useful.

To get a picture of how useless they are, consider all existing runes that can be used to free a trait. Movement speed runes are currently selling for 4g74s91c each (the useful Rune of the Traveler), for a total cost of 28g49s46c or 1g59s91c each (the fairly useless other than the speed boost Rune of Speed), for a total of 6g39s64c. Fall reduction runes (Rune of Snowfall) are fairly useless other than for the trait-replacing feature, and currently sell for 24c each, for a total of 1s44c.

Comparing the Rune of Speed to the Rune of Snowfall shows that movement speed is considered to be at least 444 TIMES more valuable to the players than falling reduction.

Well gw2spidy says here is 228 times more runes of snowfall than traveler in supply… so when rescaled, fall reduction only 2 times less valuable than speed

Ah but that sweet sweet moment when someone follows you over a cliff! (way better than the alternative traits)

Also so useful when doing map exploration/completion, speed increase on completing some maps is easily equal to 50% swiftness uptime.

Also traveler is more useful for its other stats, I have a set of 5 on my celest ele with a divinity as the 6th rune

Rune of speed is used for swiftness uptime, so its not a trait substitution. 25% hard movespeed is mostly wasted for lots of classes due to how prolific swiftness is

I’ll say I found them far more useful in the beta-with the handglider it was very easy to set a… dynamic entry, shall we say?

I feel like the -50% reduction should be baseline, just while out o combat.

Then the “trigger on fall damage” could be rolled into those traits that trigger an effect when you get hit below a certain health threshold.

Loki.4871:

I’ll say I found them far more useful in the beta-with the handglider it was very easy to set a… dynamic entry, shall we say?

This. I can see this being most used when “falling with style” in HoT

I dont use it in PvP but its a must for myself and most of my friends to have falling traits in WvW and sometimes PvE

I wish they also stopped your character from splatting on the ground