Guild Wars 2

I mean really, I think most of the older players in the game would agree that the June 23rd patch was when things started to go south. I can’t think of any reason to not bring it back (other than some confusion on the user side of things, and a bit of work on the dev side), but…..

1) It would increase build diversity, because we wouldn’t be locked into 3 trait lines

2) We can have the old version in pvp, and the new one in pve / wvw (possibly older version for wvw). This will also help split the game modes and allow the balance team to do better in the long run.

I am not entirely sure how the whole “stat distribution” problem would work, but I think that we could potentially leave this part out.

What do you guys think? Would there be any real drawback to using the other system?

AirSickMouse.7294:

I mean really, I think most of the older players in the game would agree that the June 23rd patch was when things started to go south.

I would disagree. The pre-hot game, after Elementalist burn application was tuned down, was very fun.

I can agree that the period pre-HoT was fun, but there were many more fun metas with the older system than there were with the current one, I think.

it’s not even about fun. june 23rd patch lowered the skill floor to such an extent that you don’t need any skill at all to achieve mediocre-good results.

i bet, if season 3 had no elite specs, and balance would be pre june 23rd (WTS2) with a couple of small buffs to:

more than half of the players who got to legendary in season 2 would not make it that far anymore.

Agreed. See also https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/pvp/Discussion-the-trait-system/first#post6134657

I disagree. The game back then was better but not because of the old trait point allocation system. The 3 trait line lock didn’t really kill diversity, since most builds went 20/20/30 or 30/30/10 i.e. using only 3 trait lines. Builds got stronger, which made them harder to balance, sure, but there were some good games and some good competition between then and HoT release.

What actually killed the old builds we had with that older system was the trait changes and moves that came with that patch. So yeah, allowing allocation into more trait lines would increase diversity, but only because the traits that people would want to take were moved to different lines, and because, evidently, some trait lines still have entire trait tiers with nothing desirable.

Disagree.

First, it’s not going to happen. The trait system will remain because is needs to support the elite specialization system.

Second, the old trait system actually had less room for diversity. The lack of diversity you’re seeing now is because elite specializations are so much better than everything else.

The old system had many problems:

• Hard to make traits mutually exclusive. The only way to stop two traits from being used together was to put them both in the same grandmaster slot.
• Always pick the “low hanging fruit”. Traits which were lower in the lines but more powerful were always chosen. This was especially true for adept slot.
• Too many throw-away traits. You had a lot of traits in all slot levels which would never be realistically used ever. The traits also didn’t feel like they were adding anything to your character.
• Some lines had good traits, but stats which weren’t useful, which hurt your character relative to other professions. Further, blanket boon and condi duration increases was a balance problem.

The new trait system should have fixed all that in theory, but ANet did a poor job implementing it.

• In the old system, similar traits were spread out into different lines. They should have been condensed into the same line, but were not.
• Each specialization should have had themes or roles in mind and the traits moved around and adjusted in order to reflect that. In most cases, traits were left where they had been previously
• Increased mutual exclusion wasn’t well exercised. Defensive traits weren’t put into the same slot, nor were straight damage increases. The result is that you could still have both, defeating the point of the new system. And they even caved to whining from elementalists when two powerful traits were mutually exclusive in the preview.
• It’s clear they ran out of time when re-doing the system and haven’t re-visited it. Some old traits are still around and still terrible or still too powerful relative to any other choice.

If you wanted to improve upon the current trait system, there’s still a lot of room:

• Make the core specializations more focused and coherent.
• Increase mutual exclusion on powerful offensive or defensive boosts.
• Consider reducing the number of major or minor traits per line. If you have a really powerful trait choice at one level, maybe remove the minor trait. Or make a very powerful minor and no major trait at that level.

Impact.2780:

So yeah, allowing allocation into more trait lines would increase diversity, but only because the traits that people would want to take were moved to different lines, and because, evidently, some trait lines still have entire trait tiers with nothing desirable.

So basically thats an argument in favor of the old trait system. With the old system you didn’t neccesarily have to commit fully into a traitline if this traitline had one bad trait tier. For example the Reaper traitline: you want Augury of Death, Chilling Victory, and then…. nothing, cuz the GM traits suck. They also could make all traits evenly viable, but that won’t really happen, so the old trait system solves this problem (not fully, but still).

This is going to depend on your profession.
For instances ask a thief, he would probably prefer the 4 trait system (pretty near every thief was running 4 lines)
Other profession would like 3 trait lines instead.

The June patch removed build diversity for thieves, I don’t think anyone would argue that point.

Any new specialization will always replace in terms of power the previous ones due the power creep: if Anet releases a new build that doesn’t outperform the older ones then the player will have very low interest in to buy the new content.

I don’t think that several viable builds will exist to every class in PvP; probably the main source of variety for every class is the fact that different builds will be optimal for different content (raids, fractals, meta events, WvW raid, WvW roaming, PvP…). But asking for 3-4 builds equally competitive for PvP for each class is albeit desiderable, a naive wish. Just doesn’t match the Anet track record.

Buran.3796:

Any new specialization will always replace in terms of power the previous ones due the power creep: if Anet releases a new build that doesn’t outperform the older ones then the player will have very low interest in to buy the new content.

That’s a false statement. People will play new elite specs as long as they’re interesting, coherent, and work well mechanically. For example, Reaper was really popular even before the first beta weekend. It has a vision and its tools reflected that. And even though it was nerfed over the course of the BWE’s, it was still played a lot (even before Deathly Chill was made OP). But elite specs which didn’t flow well at all (Dragonhunter) or had poorly implemented mechanics (Tempest overloads, Daredevil dodge frame klunkiness) were panned.

June 23rd wasn’t when things started to go south. June 23rd was pretty good. The problem is, players always complain too late. As an engineer, I complained early on about some trait lines being atrocious but no one listens to a lone voice in the room. Good news was that enough people complained about Guardian and got some things fixed/changed for it, same with Elementalists. But no one really had foresight when it came to engis.

As I suggested in the other trait thread:

“You could keep the current system and have it such that a character can pick any 9 traits from any of the 1 – 3 trait lines they select. For instance a person could run only Death magic in the case of necros or he could run just Soul Reaping by selecting all 9 traits from that specialization. Or a person could do what they are doing now and go with all 3 and select one from each. Sounds more interesting to me than going back to the overly complicated and not so eye-candy trait system.
Also, if you think some traits are that bad, you could suggest traits you think would be better suited for those slots.”

It would be like a shot in the arm to build diversity. But even if we had the above suggestion, some traits will still be really bad and will never be taken.

100% Agree with everything OP has said. World of Warcraft went through a similar thing and it killed their population base. From what i hear, they completely removed trait lines so people could no longer rally theory craft and personalise traits, depending on their play style. Instead the dumbed it down so people has easier choices, effectively telling people what and how to play.

I feel, since last Junes patch, every trait line is just too flipping obvious in terms of what trait to pick. I miss theory crafting, coming up with builds, mixing and matching rune stats etc. Add that to an indispensable elite spec on every class, bingo, diversity is out the window.

Old trait system sucked massive dong in general and favoured couple builds and professions.
Specialization system is better, concept-wise, but just imbalanced, clogged with bad/uninteresting trait design and lack of common direction or idea when it comes to some particular cases.

I think a lot of people need to take off the rose tinted glasses.

Did the old trait system have more builds and higher diversity? Sure, you’d be a fool to say otherwise, however did it have more viable builds and higher useful diversity? Nope, I’d say it was about the same to be honest.

A lot of people like to think that the old builds going 5 points into a different line, choosing a minor instead of a major, as being different builds but they aren’t. They’re the same build more or less, sure subtle differences but it’s like saying a Mcvities hob nob is different to a supermarket own brand hob nob. Sure they may be a little difference but it’s still a friggin hob nob.

I do think the current trait system still needs work, some classes more than others but the old trait system was filled with a lot more false choices and useless traits. Diversity is dead because of HoT and poor balancing not the system.

I actually miss the old trait system, most fellow veterans would agree on this.

After the June 2015 update, everything became super casual friendly and the traits were dumbed down to the point that only 1 to 1 and 1/2 viable builds are attained, even without the HoT specialization before, people are running 2 to 3 viable builds, 1 to 2 fun builds and 2 to 3 experimental builds.

The added stats is a plus side to the guardian as well, thats why the class is very outdated because part of the problem of guards is we lost the added stats of the traits (aside from the outdated utilities and mixed up traits of guardians) I’m pretty sure some class suffered a lil bit with the stat lost of the old trait system as well.