Guild Wars 2

As of the moment I think the implementation is a bit off. While yes it adds more play but to have to use the new trait line to be able to use the new weapon and utilities I feel is off. I think once you train in to it you should be able to swap between them like secondary classes in GW1, tie the new class mechanic and/or weapon to that and always allow the use of the new utlilities. It was a big surprise when I went to try rebound out on my normal Ele build to watch it go poof as I swapped out of the tempest traitline and find that method faulty by design for something new like this. This also allows for more use of the trait-line and more versatility of it this way instead of it having to be focused at the new weapons and abilities and giving limited use for anything else.

umm in GW1 lets say you’re on a necro who doesn’t normally use bows and you have ranger who does use bows as your secondary profession, then you switch ranger out for ritualist, all of a sudden your bow is useless since you have no bow skills.

The GW2 way of “swapping your secondary profession” is by swapping out your elite trait line. It’s basically the same thing.

You cannot use bow skills on a GW1 necro unless you have ranger as your secondary profession. You cannot use tempest skills/weapons on a GW2 ele unless you have tempest as your elite spec trait line.

No, weapons do not work that way in guild wars 1.

Skills and attributes yes.

While attributes may not buff the bow, you can still use it. (All of my GW1 characters had bows on a secondary set for pulling, profession or secondary not withstanding.)

Nate, the ideas of weapons is far from the truth in GW1, by far the casters tended to gravitate towards martial weapons due to the better bonuses you could get from the inscriptions and still being able to get the 20% enchants when needed instead of having a slot that is doing mostly nothing. Very few builds ran otherwise and it was generally only seen in certain builds for PvE. So while yes they were dmg capped, you still had the ability to use them for the better options on the weapons. As well in PvE everyone carried a longbow, thus nearly all my characters on my account had a Candy Cane Bow for pulling as was mentioned. There was no need to ever trait in to any to use them, you just suffered dmg reduction only, so as long as you have stuff that helps your class out it didn’t matter the weapon. Heck if you PvPed you would see most caster classes running a spear/sword/axe and shields and only popping off of them if they needed to mana-ramp to cast something really quick barring very specific builds for certain reasons.

Now on the locking of skills, I view tempest as a secondary profession type idea, if they want to keep adding them they are going to have to find a better way to do so otherwise they are going to hamper people in to having to sacrifice utilities and elites just to move from one to another and I find that is wrong, leave the mechanic changes associated and add say unlocking the choice to use the profession and then the choice to equip the weapon to the hero tree for leveling. I find that would make much more sense with that new training system then gimping a whole change to a trait line that may not even be the best choice for the new weapons and utilities to make use of. If they want to add more customization with this new trait and training system then it shouldn’t be gimping us worse then the old system would have with and added trait tree and as of the moment it seems more like a half complete idea then something I would look at as a way stay.

So I don’t like the current system for Specializations as it fills incomplete when looking back to their previous game as well as comparing to any other game, it seems like it was only half-way finished on the design board and tossed at us to try in a beta with hopes that we would like it. Honestly I want to see more options not more options with a catch 22 when looking at my skill bar with utilities and weapons and elites. Otherwise they could come around and start linking more and closing out future options of combos if they choose to make specializations a single use at a time as they add more potentially in to the future. As it is now, it is not as bad as what it could become, sacrifice this just so I can use this or this or that becuase I can only use axe with this specializtion, this one gives me the best mechanics and this one the best utilities oh I forgot that that one gave a great elite but the traits are kitten. That right there is what I don’t want to see happening with a system that is good basic idea but currently is sitting on a bad implementation.