Guild Wars 2

Seriously, I don’t understand why the devs didn’t collaborate on the forums with players and through chat about nice trait ideas. Some of these traits are absurdly bad, uncreative, or in the completely wrong trait line to ever be useful.

Top players from each profession could have had some really awesome ideas for new grandmaster traits, but it feels like they just came up with some really wacky stuff completely on their own.

Even though most of the new healing skills are not viable, I feel like the quality/effort put into them was decent. For these traits it seems like they were just scrounging around until they came up with a total of 40 and didn’t think about traitline placement or overall power level at all.

Most of the new traits are to expand the versatility of the profession. You’ll most likely see the effectiveness of these new traits once the patch is live. If you honestly can’t think of how these traits are useful, you’re only superficially familiar with your profession. Every profession has a few traits that are incredibly interesting on paper. How they pan out in the gameplay may be a different story.

An good example for good feedback:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/balance/Engineer-The-ideal-April-changes/first#post3818220

Any bets that the devs response to this thread?

Traits are for PvE too and not just PvP…

Rezz.8019:

Traits are for PvE too and not just PvP…

what?

I cannot speak for all professions, but the placement of the traits have certainly some thought behind.
I think most placements where because they wanted to make certain traits exclusive (e.g. dhuumfire and parasitic contagion).

I agree however that some of those traits may need a buff and some are lack luster.

Muchacho.2390:

I agree however that some of those traits may need a buff and some are lack luster.

Honestly… Even the “lack luster” traits are suitable for an expanded range of play style. These new GM traits give Mesmer and Ele a feasible support healing build, Guardians a more self-preservation style of solo play, a permanent increase to attack speed for Warriors as well as giving Warrior’s the ability to become an AoE Might factory (Mace/Shield with Might Defenses and Phalanx Strength), etc… You just have to think outside the box and not pass one of the traits over because it doesn’t directly relate to a build you run.

Some of the traits are good and interesting…

However, some are in the wrong place/line and your never going to pick it because of another ‘must have’ trait.

Some should not be Grandmaster traits at all but Master and 1 or 2 Adept. There’s even 1 Grandmaster trait that should have been a bug fix…

So yeah, failing to involve the players as resulted in a lot of useless Grandmaster traits.

I agree that there are traits that aren’t worth the grandmaster slot, even some of the most interesting ones.

It feels like Anet wanted to add many interesting trait ideas in a single sweep, but forgot that they were restricted to the highest tier only. :P

This game is more AIONesque than Guild Wars. Devs should have involved players to design the new traits.

i definitely see some of the traits being more useful than the healing skills.
signet of vampirism is utterly useless.
Parasitic Contagion could be incredible.

guardians with 33% more burning damage could open the doors for some interesting builds, and my crit immune conjure ele should be fun!
also powerblock mesmers?!

though yeah, some of the traits just suck, 1 second stability for thieves lol XD

Liewec.2896:

i definitely see some of the traits being more useful than the healing skills.
signet of vampirism is utterly useless.
Parasitic Contagion could be incredible.

guardians with 33% more burning damage could open the doors for some interesting builds, and my crit immune conjure ele should be fun!
also powerblock mesmers?!

though yeah, some of the traits just suck, 1 second stability for thieves lol XD

Parasitic contagion is probably the most useless trait possible. 5% of condition damage back as health. Even if you sustain an average of 5 stacks of bleed on a target for the whole fight (which you won’t do) then this is doing 500 damage a second. So you heal for 5% of this which is 25 a second. A grandmaster trait which conditionally heals for at most around 50 a second (even less than regen) is really bad. Like really really really bad.

Even if you spike someone for 2 seconds with fear and about 7/8 bleeds that will probably only do a total of around 4k/5k damage. 5k damage you heal for 250. That again isn’t even good.

The grandmaster trait is so so bad. I don’t understand why, if they want this mechanic, they don’t give it a useful percentage. If they are so worried about it being used and OP then just don’t implement it and think of something else.

The other GM trait (regen in deathshroud) is equally horrendous.

In a nutshell the problems are such:
1, They implement traits and skills at a very very bad level in general because they are afraid of them being OP.
2, Then they plan to bring things up if they are not good enough

This is their plan. This plan is making people quit because:
1, They take too long to bring up bad stuff and nerf good stuff
2, It shows they don’t trust their testing team because otehrwise they would release better and more confident balance patches

Lordrosicky.5813:

Parasitic contagion is probably the most useless trait possible. 5% of condition damage back as health. Even if you sustain an average of 5 stacks of bleed on a target for the whole fight (which you won’t do) then this is doing 500 damage a second. So you heal for 5% of this which is 25 a second. A grandmaster trait which conditionally heals for at most around 50 a second (even less than regen) is really bad. Like really really really bad.

Look at the thief trait. They have to crit to actually get 5% of the damage back as health, that’s even worse.

Slim.3024:

Lordrosicky.5813:

Parasitic contagion is probably the most useless trait possible. 5% of condition damage back as health. Even if you sustain an average of 5 stacks of bleed on a target for the whole fight (which you won’t do) then this is doing 500 damage a second. So you heal for 5% of this which is 25 a second. A grandmaster trait which conditionally heals for at most around 50 a second (even less than regen) is really bad. Like really really really bad.

Look at the thief trait. They have to crit to actually get 5% of the damage back as health, that’s even worse.

Because they are afraid of both becoming OP. So they implement these “holder” traits which in their mind they can then slowly buff until they become viable. The problem is they only balance every 4/5 months.

Edit: In fact this patch doesn’t really have any balance in it. SO in truth they only really balance tiny amounts every 4/5 months. They patch in huge temporary content every 2 weeks for living world story but to just change some numbers on skills like healing signet we have to wait for months and months.

This is why nobody should be playing this game seriously anymore. Those at the top have proved nothing as the game takes no skill and there are about 15 players (in EU) who actually put effort in. It is not worth moaning about stuff because anet has shown they aren’t serious about pvp