Guild Wars 2

It’s because of the single track to unlock them.

That’s right, the developers apparently wanted Elite specs to be a long term progression goal, something you’d enjoy spending time unlocking, but players revolted because they had been playing their core classes for three years already, and wanted to get in and start having fun immediately. If you don’t have a lot of world completion on a character, this means running him with an empty trait tree, no new utilities, and in some cases missing core functions (like the Thieves’ special dodges).

The reason for this is because with the previous “New Player Experience” upgrade, they locked all abilities between single track systems, so that if you want the ability that is 5th in a track, you need to also unlock abilities 1-4 first. This means that if you want to start playing as a Daredevil, and have to unlock the weapon first, then the dodge buff, and then a series of other traits and utilities in a specific order, whether you actually care about any of those abilities or not.

What would have worked better is, have a more free form unlocking system like the game launched with (as with many features in modern GW22, the launch version was the best version). That way, if you just want a specific combination of three major traits and two Utilities, then you could unlock those with what points you have, and leave the rest to unlock slowly, once you have the basic build you wanted. The basic principle is “rush to competency, crawl to mastery.” You get what you need to not have an empty traitline right away, but can slowly earn the rest.

I mean, in my personal case, I had World Mastery on my DD, which allowed me to get about half the tree right out of the gate. However, this just gave me a couple utilities that I didn’t intend to use, and a handful of random low-tier traits. If instead I’d had the three minors, then Lotus Training, then Weakening Strikes, Staff Master, and Incapcitating Daggers, then I would have the same build I have now, only with way less points spent, and the back half could be a collection activity, rather than working towards a need.

This is a good point, and I for one would have been more satisfied with the unlocking if I could choose the traits that I unlocked so I could play with a functioning build. I would wager to guess that Elite Specs were the number one most anticipated feature of HoT, and not being able to access them until roughly midway through the game was a little disappointing.

If future elite specs allow you to build your spec as you go rather than pigeonhole you into rather useless-until-complete choices, I think it will be received much better as well.

Truth. A good solution would have been to have the training unlock utility skills first, then traits. That would have fixed Herald’s issue as well.

The 400 point elite track would have been fine if it was 250 points to unlock the skills and traits, then 50 points to unlock the weapon, 50 points to unlock the weapon and 50 points to unlock the armor..

We all would have loved that.