Guild Wars 2

Does the HoT looks like a cost reduction from ANet?

From my point of view it just screams for it.

I left this game several times because after some point of time, it was boring but then after 2-3 months when I am walking in the street, I got an idea about a build and comeback to the game to try it.

Biggest attraction of GW2 for me was always the build diversity and it seems everything done for HoT is just to reduce the build diversity.

3 trait lines instead of 5, not more stat customization over traits, unified stat budgets over the gear(you can get 10 different stats over the traits, boon duration, crit chance, crit damage, power, cond dur, etc.. but only 3 from most gear and 5 from celestial) .

It seems to me ANet does not want invest that much to balancing teams by reducing the number of variables in the equation for balancing. Now we will get classes, trait lines designed to be played in an one way, the way the ANet want us those to be played instead of dealing of player creativity and balance the game.

Yes I know it is hard to balance this game, you need really big balancing team and actually react to things much quickly then 6 month cycles but this game deserve this.

I find this really pity because build diversity was always the strong point of this game which brought times and times again with the all the other MMOs I get bored after 6 months and never return to them, it seems GW2 will have much less appeal with HoT also.

One concern is something similar to what happened to Guild Wars 1.

The almost every other day patches…..
There were patches for patches for the patches for the up coming patch to fix the patch that happened two patches ago that was meant for the patch to fix the patch for today.

Yeah im ok with the amount of updates. In GW1 when i’d take breaks it would be annoying to catch up on all the updates. Build diversity looks like its going to improve. At least I see a few different builds for necros.

To be honest, half the traits in every trait line for every class don’t do anything that matters. Grandmaster trait for +1k Healing Power when interrupting a foe? Uh, ok? Stealing recharges all skills of one type by a small chance? Uh, ok? Pet’s deal extra condition damage — how about every pet attribute increase trait?

Even in PvE it’s the same, some stuff just doesn’t matter and they are there for no reason. To me it just seems like the new system is just taking out all of those useless traits and putting all the useful traits in a smaller line. I don’t really see it being any different, I mean you’re still going to be using the most ideal traits even if there is a smaller selection.