Guild Wars 2

Take ele as an example, attunement swap cooldown , ele rely on it so heavily in spvp to be viable becuz attunement swap is a class defining ability. It greatly boost a class performance in a competitive environment where player are trying to exploit the strength to the best. That what make most ele run x/x/x/x/30 on most viable spec.

So lets take a look at mesmer defining trait, a caster that summon illusion to do most of thier bidding. That what define the class, most crucial skill have illusion tied to them. Illusion celerity a cooldown reduction to all illusion is a trait that benefit the whole class which heavily rely on illusion, moving it up the trait line just kill diversity as it reduces the potency of other spec other than shatter as most other spec don’t benefit much from going so deep into illusion tree. This will end up forcing mesmer to be like ele and also go into the last tree to be viable in tpvp for a class defining trait.

A-net what your view on this, especially seen this effect on ele , what gives the idea to replicate the same effect onto another class when the goal is to expand diversity?

Although i can’t give a good prediction now, but from history , mesmer have high chances of being like eles, time will tell, what do you think will happen.

Well, in GW1 it was nearly the same. Most builds were forced to specc on its classes primary attribute to get the most out of it.
Sure you can’t compare the games with each other. It’s in general the traits that are sooo bad designed. 80% of them are useless. That’s why build diversity fails. At least A-Net is heading in the right direction by buffing uselss traits instead of nerfing the good ones.

Shifting trait to hard to reach places also cause major impact on build diversity, and they just did what 1 that could be learn from eles to mesmer.

in some cases i have to agree. But if we look at the fire-traitline of the ele, this is definitely not the problem.

Traits that build diversity should be something like “Fear does damage” not “hurr durr 20% skill recharge”. There are too many unimaginative/terrible traits.

kaplis.7195:

Traits that build diversity should be something like “Fear does damage” not “hurr durr 20% skill recharge”. There are too many unimaginative/terrible traits.

That wrong too, then every class will have to many hidden mechanic that make it harder to balance, traits should give a variety of hidden mechanic and buff to existing abilities. I did some detailed explanation in this thread https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/RIP-Phantasm-Mesmers/page/2#post2278975 you can read on how i present a solution to an easier balancing effort.