Guild Wars 2

So as i understand it now, leveling a character to 80 will net you 400 Hero Points and to unlock all the Core Specializations you will need 465. Ok 65 skill challenges is not that bad, but kitten why should i have to go back on ALL my alts and make sure they all have 65 skill challenges complete?

I have one of EACH class, not all of them 80, but i have hope of getting them all to 80, and if i want to be able to experiment with builds that means each of them will eventually need to get 65 hero challenges. Mind you all but 3 of my characters were created before the new trait unlocking system, as such i never had to unlock all the traits on them, but now if anet decides to undo unlocking all the traits on ALL my characters only my Main (who has map completion) and 2 of my alts have completed even CLOSE to enough skill challenges to get every core unlock.

I even have one fresh 80 with literally 3 skill challenges, that means if i want to get everything i will need to do 62 more on them, not to mention the OTHER 4 characters.

But Anet i have a compromise for you, instead of taking away everyone’s skills and traits and giving them nothing in return, hows about you convert all of the leveling Skill points AND 65 other character bound skill points into hero points for each character.

This means that characters who DO have all their traits, skills, and all that unlocked (who may have WASTED GOLD AND SKILL POINTS TO DO IT!) will still get their unlocks without feeling like they have been cheated by this the trait system TWICE!

tl;dr – resetting everyone’s traits and not giving us credit for it sucks, instead ANET should give people up to 65 extra hero points for skills/traits they already spend tones of SP and Gold on otherwise its totally unfair for alt-holics!

+1 I totally agree.
when they announced the expansion they said “they dont want to invalidate players work” snd thets why they dont add new gears. But how about ot skills?
We have bought all our skills, normal and elites, to most of our alts if not all our alts.
Now we ahve to go and do the skill chalanges again just to get our skills back?

This is really INVALIDATING our work.

I dont care about the materials you offer us for the crafing in exghange of the skill points and skill scrolls we have. I dont give a kitten about crafting. I totally ingnore it. So I dont need your materials. I want ALL MY SKILLS I have worked for whitout any other suplimentary work for it. So you are not invalidating us with new gears but with another grind for hero points which is not even alt freindly

This is bullkitten but hey, who gives a kitten? There are still many players who will buy the expansion and give them millions of dollars. There will always be gulibles and noobies who are unawareof the trickery A-net is using to hit on their players every 6-8 months

commnagrom.8637:

So as i understand it now, leveling a character to 80 will net you 400 Hero Points and to unlock all the Core Specializations you will need 465. Ok 65 skill challenges is not that bad, but kitten why should i have to go back on ALL my alts and make sure they all have 65 skill challenges complete?

I have one of EACH class, not all of them 80, but i have hope of getting them all to 80, and if i want to be able to experiment with builds that means each of them will eventually need to get 65 hero challenges. Mind you all but 3 of my characters were created before the new trait unlocking system, as such i never had to unlock all the traits on them, but now if anet decides to undo unlocking all the traits on ALL my characters only my Main (who has map completion) and 2 of my alts have completed even CLOSE to enough skill challenges to get every core unlock.

I even have one fresh 80 with literally 3 skill challenges, that means if i want to get everything i will need to do 62 more on them, not to mention the OTHER 4 characters.

But Anet i have a compromise for you, instead of taking away everyone’s skills and traits and giving them nothing in return, hows about you convert all of the leveling Skill points AND 65 other character bound skill points into hero points for each character.

This means that characters who DO have all their traits, skills, and all that unlocked (who may have WASTED GOLD AND SKILL POINTS TO DO IT!) will still get their unlocks without feeling like they have been cheated by this the trait system TWICE!

tl;dr – resetting everyone’s traits and not giving us credit for it sucks, instead ANET should give people up to 65 extra hero points for skills/traits they already spend tones of SP and Gold on otherwise its totally unfair for alt-holics!

this would favor people who saved skill points, not people who spent them on skills/traits.

Not if there is a Hero point cap of 400 + # skill challenges.
That way excess skill challenges could just start to refund spend skillpoints.

Of course, everything that was unlocked should stay unlocked, otherwise people might spend the extra points in the new elite specialisation track. It should be easily calculated how many hero points each unlocked trait would cost in the new system.

Why rant over something you don’t even know as yet how it will play out.

My guess they won’t make anyone that already has traits open make a repeat payment, so likely many players will end up with 400 hero points and all skills (only spending hero points on what they don’t already have).

Which means you’re likely going to end up with a huge pool of hero points that you can trade in for sellable items.

WIN-WIN (besides from tempory market crash).

Delgan.8619:

Why rant over something you don’t even know as yet how it will play out.

My guess they won’t make anyone that already has traits open make a repeat payment, so likely many players will end up with 400 hero points and all skills (only spending hero points on what they don’t already have).

Which means you’re likely going to end up with a huge pool of hero points that you can trade in for sellable items.

WIN-WIN (besides from tempory market crash).

People don’t trust ArenaNet to do it right. And ArenaNet hasn’t said anything to confirm either way, which makes people antsy. I think it’s very logical.

Of course there are solutions to these problems, and it’s very possible it’s all good. But otherwise, there’s not alot to go on, and alot of people feel cheated in advance.

They are changing the basic foundation of the game again, and it already feels like they don’t seem to regard the players that have been playing for years. The NPE was exactly the same feeling. Older players usually seem to get screwed over to implement new systems.

Delgan.8619:

Why rant over something you don’t even know as yet how it will play out.

My guess they won’t make anyone that already has traits open make a repeat payment, so likely many players will end up with 400 hero points and all skills (only spending hero points on what they don’t already have).

Which means you’re likely going to end up with a huge pool of hero points that you can trade in for sellable items.

WIN-WIN (besides from tempory market crash).

hero points will not be used for anything except skill progression.
the monetary things you can get with skill points will instead use a different currency, that you will get similarly to how you get skill points now.

this is according to what anet said.

based on what they have said, they cant use that type of structure.

Disagree, suck it up and do the skill challenges.

CrimsonDX.4821:

Disagree, suck it up and do the skill challenges.

Its not all about having to do the skill challenges, I have all these characters that i’ve spent a lot of Skill Points AND GOLD unlocking all my skills and traits, like i said i have three characters (my guardian, necro, and ele) that won’t be effected by this at all as they have more than enough skill challenges complete, but i also have a mesmer and ranger at 80 that only have about 5% world completion but are level 80, because i level them almost exclusively in wvw, its not fair to me that i’m now going to lose all the time, gold, and effort i put into unlocking their traits just because arenanet decided to change the base functionality of traits.

Why can’t my current characters be grandfathered in some how exactly like they did with the old system? If you only need 65 hero challenges to unlock all core specs why not make it so up to 65SP worth of skills/traits/w.e become Hero Points and all Hero Challenges you do in excess of 65 award the currency?

Also this is a dangerous precedent for ANet to be setting and people to just be going along with it. What if they change something even more crucial and everyone has to get set back to level 1? Would everyone just “suck it up” and relevel their character? Hell no, they’d get angry and flood the forum with posts about how its not ok! Well to many of us this is EXACTLY what arenanet is doing, setting our character back and making us do EVEN MORE work just to unlock everything. That’s why people like me are angry and taking to the forums, so Anet KNOWS that they need to do something about it or their are going to alienate their player base!

tl;dr – go read my whole post scrub

~Shrug~

My work won’t be invalidated by their system. I got tired of buying traits after the first two so on subsequent characters I went out and earned them instead. (Only did this for two and I have two more with no map completion or traits).

I’m one of those weird people who enjoy repeating content and am at 70% done on my 15th map completion. No one is saying you have to do 100% map to unlock all of your core specalizations, Only 65 skill points.

If you only play PvP this doesn’t affect you. If you PvE at all then you’ll be going places that have skill points. You do dungeons? Grab the skill points near the dungeons or on the way to them. Go get all of them in the starter cities, get the ones in WvW while you’re there. It isn’t hard, just a little time consuming.

I don’t see the problem. Would you rather be tied to bugged event chains or events that may or may not be available due to someone else finishing it before you got there? This gives folks a very easy way to get points that are in static locations and they cannot be contested or completed before you get there. It’s win win.

khani.4786:

This gives folks a very easy way to get points that are in static locations and they cannot be contested or completed before you get there. It’s win win.

except the ones in Orr…

The current trait system forces people to waste 20-30 hours to get all traits or a ton of skill points and gold to buy everything.
How can anyone say the upcoming system will be worse? 95% of level 80 characters will probably have been leveled in the open world and will probably have close to enough “hero” points to unlock everything instantly.
In the current system you have to bear with unlocking each trait on EACH character. I have totally stopped leveling characters since it was introduced. The new system will be very altist friendly.
And if you’re one of the 5% of “Duh, I level my character in EoTM only by running in a circle for hundreds of hours.” characters, is it really that bad to spend perhaps two hours to get those hero points and never have to bother with them again?
What would interest me the most though is when you get to unlock traits/lines. The move from 10→30, 40→60, 60→80 in trait tiers was one of the worst changes of last year in my opinion.

MLinni.6109:

The current trait system forces people to waste 20-30 hours to get all traits or a ton of skill points and gold to buy everything.
How can anyone say the upcoming system will be worse? 95% of level 80 characters will probably have been leveled in the open world and will probably have close to enough “hero” points to unlock everything instantly.

except i have 5 80’s 1 with world completions, 1 with 60 Skill challenges (that i leveling in the open world and EotM), 1 with 30 skill challenges (also leveled in the open world) and 2 with less than 10 (one leveled in the open world the other in EotM) so thats hmmm lets see 2/5=40%? yeah 40% of MY level 80s are readyish for this change, even though i have spend MY OWN SP AND GOLD AND TIME unlocking all the traits and skills, kinds of a waste now huh?

MLinni.6109:

In the current system you have to bear with unlocking each trait on EACH character. I have totally stopped leveling characters since it was introduced. The new system will be very altist friendly.

what? this new system would STILL see you unlocking each trait AND skill on EACH character, its no different other than the fact that they have standardized the unlocking rules, so instead of doing xyz event to get xyz trait you do xyz skill challenge and get a hero point to use to unlock and skill/trait

MLinni.6109:

And if you’re one of the 5% of “Duh, I level my character in EoTM only by running in a circle for hundreds of hours.” characters, is it really that bad to spend perhaps two hours to get those hero points and never have to bother with them again?
What would interest me the most though is when you get to unlock traits/lines. The move from 10->30, 40->60, 60->80 in trait tiers was one of the worst changes of last year in my opinion.

I’m sorry that i wanted to make more characters and level them in my own way, in a game where i can level my characters however the kitten i want! If i want to level a character to 80 by mining i can do it! if i wanna craft to 80 (while its more difficult now) i can DO IT!

in a game thats all about “level how YOU want to level” its a bit backassward to make everyone HAVE to go into PvE and grab an arbitrary number of Skill Challenges just to fill out their build diversity!

commnagrom.8637:

khani.4786:

This gives folks a very easy way to get points that are in static locations and they cannot be contested or completed before you get there. It’s win win.

except the ones in Orr…

Yeah those aren’t always easy, but I’ve still managed to get even Balthazaar’s skill point when it was contested (again, not easy, but doable).

The devs didn’t recognize map completion when the current system went in. They had no problem throwing all my work away. I still don’t have the elites on my main even though he has full map completion.

Don’t trust the devs.

Surely you dont use every skill and every traitline (I’m not implying this all at once-that’s impossible). There are likely some skills and even some traitlines that you just don’t use. If for example, you never use traps on your ranger, then dont invest points into traps until you get the HP that you need. If skills arent integrated into the same lines as traits, then you will be able to pick what skills you need (with some limit- it seems that skills/traits will require whatever is before it in line to get it) and the traitlines that you want to use. 400/465 (roughly 86%) will be the baseline for all level 80s. My best guess (we’re all guessing at this point) is that you can unlock 3 full traitlines and most/all of your skills with that.

Gobble D Goop.4081:

Surely you dont use every skill and every traitline (I’m not implying this all at once-that’s impossible). There are likely some skills and even some traitlines that you just don’t use. If for example, you never use traps on your ranger, then dont invest points into traps until you get the HP that you need. If skills arent integrated into the same lines as traits, then you will be able to pick what skills you need (with some limit- it seems that skills/traits will require whatever is before it in line to get it) and the traitlines that you want to use. 400/465 (roughly 86%) will be the baseline for all level 80s. My best guess (we’re all guessing at this point) is that you can unlock 3 full traitlines and most/all of your skills with that.

The problem is that you can’t skip over skills in the new system, the skills unlock in tracks now instead of just picking and choosing which you want, jut like they are doing with traits…

commnagrom.8637:

Gobble D Goop.4081:

Surely you dont use every skill and every traitline (I’m not implying this all at once-that’s impossible). There are likely some skills and even some traitlines that you just don’t use. If for example, you never use traps on your ranger, then dont invest points into traps until you get the HP that you need. If skills arent integrated into the same lines as traits, then you will be able to pick what skills you need (with some limit- it seems that skills/traits will require whatever is before it in line to get it) and the traitlines that you want to use. 400/465 (roughly 86%) will be the baseline for all level 80s. My best guess (we’re all guessing at this point) is that you can unlock 3 full traitlines and most/all of your skills with that.

The problem is that you can’t skip over skills in the new system, the skills unlock in tracks now instead of just picking and choosing which you want, jut like they are doing with traits…

the tracks are similar themed things.

so likely traps would be grouped together

also each specialization is grouped seperately, so if you never used say the vitality line, thats your 60 points right there

phys.7689:

commnagrom.8637:

Gobble D Goop.4081:

Surely you dont use every skill and every traitline (I’m not implying this all at once-that’s impossible). There are likely some skills and even some traitlines that you just don’t use. If for example, you never use traps on your ranger, then dont invest points into traps until you get the HP that you need. If skills arent integrated into the same lines as traits, then you will be able to pick what skills you need (with some limit- it seems that skills/traits will require whatever is before it in line to get it) and the traitlines that you want to use. 400/465 (roughly 86%) will be the baseline for all level 80s. My best guess (we’re all guessing at this point) is that you can unlock 3 full traitlines and most/all of your skills with that.

The problem is that you can’t skip over skills in the new system, the skills unlock in tracks now instead of just picking and choosing which you want, jut like they are doing with traits…

the tracks are similar themed things.

so likely traps would be grouped together

also each specialization is grouped seperately, so if you never used say the vitality line, thats your 60 points right there

But it becomes harder to try out builds in the open world if you don’t have access to everything, and it tends to be one of the types of skills that aren’t that great (yeah signets are grouped together but what about that kittenty signet?)

TBH, I think a lot of this worry is about nothing, as most of us don’t actually like every single trait and every single skill, and therefore wont be really missing them if we don’t have them unlocked.

But just for the hell of it, let’s break it down with a bit of guesstimation.

From the image we can see 5 hero point lines for traits and 5 lines for skills. We know that each trait line will have 3 minors and 9 majors for a total of 12 traits, and we know that there are 4 heals, 3 elites and 20 utilities for each profession, totalling 27 skills. This is missing out the racial and additional skills like the anti-toxin spray or mistfire wolf, because we can’t tell from the image how they fit in.

Obviously we don’t how how expensive traits and skills will be, but we do know that it’ll take 465 to unlock them all, and can therefore make some guestimates based on averaged costs for traits and skills.

trait = 3 points average each = 180 points for all or 36 per set
skill = 10.5 points average each = 285 points for all or 57 per set

trait = 4 points average each = 240 points for all or 48 per set
skill = 8.3 points average each = 225 points for all or 45 per set

trait = 5 points average each = 300 points for all or 60 per set
skill = 6.1 points average each = 165 points for all or 33 per set

trait = 6 points average each = 360 points for all or 72 per set
skill = 3.8 points average each = 105 points for all or 21 per set

trait = 7 points average each = 420 points for all or 84 per set
skill = 1.1 points average each = 45 points for all or 9 per set

At a guess, the middle option would appear to be the most logical, but to be perfectly honest, using any of those averages, for the majority of us, missing out on 65 points isn’t going to be the end of the world.

commnagrom.8637:

Also this is a dangerous precedent for ANet to be setting and people to just be going along with it. What if they change something even more crucial and everyone has to get set back to level 1? Would everyone just “suck it up” and relevel their character? Hell no, they’d get angry and flood the forum with posts about how its not ok! Well to many of us this is EXACTLY what arenanet is doing, setting our character back and making us do EVEN MORE work just to unlock everything. That’s why people like me are angry and taking to the forums, so Anet KNOWS that they need to do something about it or their are going to alienate their player base!

Yes.

Resetting progression violates an important trust that players extend to developers in a game like this. When that trust breaks down, people eventually stop playing.

Players will not spend time progressing their characters if they are anxious about the possibility that they will be set back.

I feel sorry for those who spend large amounts of gold or time unlocking traits under the current system. Most of my characters were created before the current travesty of skill acquisition.

That’s probably where some of the disconnect is here. When people say, “Yeah, but it’s better than the current system”, I can only think that they didn’t know the system we had at launch. So they replaced a working system with one utterly broken, so it’s okay to fix that by putting in something just a little broken?

And all of this points to ArenaNet not really understanding an important lesson. Introduce new systems for new content.

When players asked for a system similar to elite skill hunting in GW1, they weren’t thinking that ArenaNet was going to go and make them get a trait they already had access to by doing zone completion. If ArenaNet had instead added a half dozen new grandmaster traits to the game and required a zone complete or a specific dynamic event to acquire them, it wouldn’t have been nearly as bad as what we got.

Same with trait acquisition 3.0. They could have made sure every level 80 would have the core skills and traits with 400 Hero Points, and then required us to go do Hero Challenges for the new Elite Specializations. Strict WvWers would still be annoyed, but it’d make a lot sense to be making the argument “Hey, you only need to do a handful zones of skill challenges to unlock your ES” than it is to be saying, “It’s only nine to ten zones of skill challenges to get back to the unlocks you already earned.”

Kaz.5430:

TBH, I think a lot of this worry is about nothing, as most of us don’t actually like every single trait and every single skill, and therefore wont be really missing them if we don’t have them unlocked.

Except for the linear nature of reward tracks.

I’m confident that each trait track will unlock all three adept traits before master, and all three master for grandmaster. I’m also confident that the more useful and used skills will be higher in the tracks. Most likely, the elite skills will be at the end of a reward track, which means we’ll be unlocking all skills of a particular type to get to an elite.

We’ll all be unlocking traits and skills we never intend to use to get to the ones we do.

Gibson.4036:

Kaz.5430:

TBH, I think a lot of this worry is about nothing, as most of us don’t actually like every single trait and every single skill, and therefore wont be really missing them if we don’t have them unlocked.

Except for the linear nature of reward tracks.

I’m confident that each trait track will unlock all three adept traits before master, and all three master for grandmaster. I’m also confident that the more useful and used skills will be higher in the tracks. Most likely, the elite skills will be at the end of a reward track, which means we’ll be unlocking all skills of a particular type to get to an elite.

We’ll all be unlocking traits and skills we never intend to use to get to the ones we do.

Based on those guestimates (which admittedly are all guesses, but so is anything else at this point), worst case scenario is still likely to allow you to unlock every single elite skill, and three entire trait lines, with points to spare.

Obviously even I would prefer to have my skills and traits grandfathered in, but I don’t think that it’ll be the end of the world as we know it, if they don’t.

Gibson.4036:

commnagrom.8637:

Also this is a dangerous precedent for ANet to be setting and people to just be going along with it. What if they change something even more crucial and everyone has to get set back to level 1? Would everyone just “suck it up” and relevel their character? Hell no, they’d get angry and flood the forum with posts about how its not ok! Well to many of us this is EXACTLY what arenanet is doing, setting our character back and making us do EVEN MORE work just to unlock everything. That’s why people like me are angry and taking to the forums, so Anet KNOWS that they need to do something about it or their are going to alienate their player base!

Yes.

Resetting progression violates an important trust that players extend to developers in a game like this. When that trust breaks down, people eventually stop playing.

Players will not spend time progressing their characters if they are anxious about the possibility that they will be set back.

I feel sorry for those who spend large amounts of gold or time unlocking traits under the current system. Most of my characters were created before the current travesty of skill acquisition.

That’s probably where some of the disconnect is here. When people say, “Yeah, but it’s better than the current system”, I can only think that they didn’t know the system we had at launch. So they replaced a working system with one utterly broken, so it’s okay to fix that by putting in something just a little broken?

And all of this points to ArenaNet not really understanding an important lesson. Introduce new systems for new content.

When players asked for a system similar to elite skill hunting in GW1, they weren’t thinking that ArenaNet was going to go and make them get a trait they already had access to by doing zone completion. If ArenaNet had instead added a half dozen new grandmaster traits to the game and required a zone complete or a specific dynamic event to acquire them, it wouldn’t have been nearly as bad as what we got.

Same with trait acquisition 3.0. They could have made sure every level 80 would have the core skills and traits with 400 Hero Points, and then required us to go do Hero Challenges for the new Elite Specializations. Strict WvWers would still be annoyed, but it’d make a lot sense to be making the argument “Hey, you only need to do a handful zones of skill challenges to unlock your ES” than it is to be saying, “It’s only nine to ten zones of skill challenges to get back to the unlocks you already earned.”

this is not the first time, they set the predecent with fractals, and many players were silent about it.

anyhow they may have a plan.

Kaz.5430:

Obviously even I would prefer to have my skills and traits grandfathered in, but I don’t think that it’ll be the end of the world as we know it, if they don’t.

Being locked into three trait lines is too restrictive for switching between roaming and zerg WvW, solo PvE and zerg PvE. Not to mention changing up weapon use from time to time to keep game play fresh.

But I don’t think it’s the end of the world either.

I do, however, expect ArenaNet not to remove character progression and require we earn it all over again.

If they let us keep all the skills we’ve unlocked i think players would be ok with needing to unlock all their traits again with the 400+ points they will be getting