Guild Wars 2

Ok so its been a number of months and my friend decided to start playing again, and basically, we don’t understand the new way of how you are supposed to unlock your traits etc etc.

Back when I first started, things were very simple, you had a book at level 10, a book at level 40 and a book at level 60. that was it. you unlocked all your traits up to those levels and everything was easy and made sense.

Now, my friend is trying to get traits for his character, the training manuals no longer work and looking at the profession trainer, its going to cost 260 skill points and 28g just to unlock all the traits as they all are now sold individually (260 skill points for a new player to get their traits is ridiculous and 28g is just as ridiculous, not including the new grandmasters)

Am I missing something here? all my characters have been 80 for over a year so I don’t really have any recent experience with the way its supposed to work now, however, that seems excessively stupid and not very well thought out if that’s how its supposed to be…..

If you hover the mouse over a trait, it will say what quest you will have to do to unlock it for free. Remember you don’t get trait points until level 30.

The old trait books no longer work. Trait tiers now unlock automatically (and for free) at level 30, level 60 and level 80.

The first tier is no longer available at level 11!

Also, the individual traits now require unlocking as well. This can be done in one of two ways:
1. Buy the trait book. This is rather expensive, because players are encouraged to use the other method.
2. Perform some task with your character. Next to every unlocked trait, you see a telescope symbol. Hovering the mouse over it, you will see the task that needs to be done to unlock that trait.

The idea is that you will unlock traits by doing these “quests”, and if there are ones that you don’t like doing (or that have tried and failed too many times), you can just buy the book.

All characters created BEFORE April 15th 2014 will not need to unlock any traits, except the 5 new grandmaster traits that were also added on that date.
All characters created AFTER April 15th 2014 will need to unlock all their traits separately.

Sadly, unless more things have been fixed than I think they have, some of the trait quests are basically impossible at the levels that you want the trait at.

Which means buying them. Crafting materials are selling pretty well, so making money isn’t completely terrible at least. Conserve your money when leveling; upgrade armor only when it’s 10 or more levels behind (or buy it from karma vendors) and weapons when they’re 5 or more.

Skill points can be an issue — so try to take only the most useful skills rather than situational ones, if you can. And finish every skill challenge you can find (many of them are a lot easier when someone else joins in).

And don’t worry about it too much if you can’t pick up a trait. Generally speaking, the first couple of traits don’t give you as much as the overall synergy once you have access to 4 or 5 of them. There are exceptions though.

Foosnark.1784:

Sadly, unless more things have been fixed than I think they have, some of the trait quests are basically impossible at the levels that you want the trait at.

A number of the harder-to-complete trait quests has been changed at the start of the Festival of the Four Winds. For example, completing level 60 areas has been reduced to merely beating a specific event boss in a lower level area.

You’re probably past the level where this matters, but when I started, I saw Traits and thought, “Ooh, I need those!” and bought a few. Then I realized that I couldn’t use them until 40, 60, and 80. >_<

I’m trying to hold off on buying any more and pushing myself to earn them through quests. But it seems like a lot of quests!