Guild Wars 2

… would be to let us SAVE trait sets to recall later. This to me is even more valuable than not having to visit a vendor. I have a wvw trait set, and a pve trait set. They largely remain unchanged, as with most people who switch traits for these activities.

The part that sucks about it, and often has me saying “screw it” and going into wvw with my pve traits instead of bothering to switch, isn’t the cost, and isn’t the NPC visit. It’s having to manually rebuild the trait set point by point each time. Being able to save a set to recall when resetting traits would alleviate this problem 100%

The odd thing is, GW1 had this. It was a simple but very useful feature that allowed you to save your builds to local text files. This made it easy to work with builds or even give them to other players or post them online. As a former GW1 player, I was surprised GW2 didn’t release with a feature like that. Hopefully the no-cost re-traiting is a step in that direction. You’re right, that would be by far the best trait system improvement.

I wouldn’t go as far to say that the reason i didn’t reset my traits that much isn’t because of the fact I had to go to a trait vendor. It definitely was the main reason and I’ll be changing my traits all the time now. But trait templates would be really great as well and a further improvement.

The changing traits thing barely makes sense, anyways. I like it better in DAoC before players were allowed to reskill. The whole point of reskilling was to make all content more accessible to players that restricted play to one character. So, these games intentionally make skill/trait choices to differentiate finished characters of the same class or race, then smash that principle to remove barriers to players with a narrow character focus. What remains is something that is unprincipled, so it is confused essentially.

I want barriers to be removed for players, but some restrictions are part of the interest in the game. Look how less interesting these type of games became with this free-reign kind of thinking. Mobs are less likely to have damage type specific strengths/weaknesses. Mobs are less likely to move around. Mobs are less likely to use complex AI. Mobs are spaced and grouped equitable for every race and class combination. Players now run through a path of industrialized hack & slash while playing roles that use weapons to indicate their role, rather than very distinct effects.