Guild Wars 2

Hey!
A lot of the “passive trait procs” are very annoying to use, for both, the user and the opponent. I’d like to suggest a buff/debuff for every passive trait with a cooldown.
Whether to show it to both, yourself and the enemy or just yourself is subject to discussion. I’d suggest showing it to both.
You could place it above from where the boons/conditions are shown.
Clustering the bar to much isn’t a problem imo, most speccs dont have more than 1 or 2 of those traits.
Pro’s:
- Strong passive procs lose viability and weak procs gain viability!
Unviable ones right now are too unpredictable to be used, e.g. shatter recharge at 50%, maybe “hard to catch” and similiar stuff. This change would make it more predictable.
The strong ones right now usually don’t need to be played around by the user, e.g. Incendiary Powder. which leads me to:
- More counterplay:
Giving players, who face players with these “use and forget traits”, the ability to see when they could proc, allows for more thoughtful play and thus, ever so slightly, weakens those traits.
(On a sidenote) For Incendiary Powder and similiar traits on other professions I’d suggest introducing the ability to miss it, giving yourself an icon when you proc it, like with the flamethrower toolkit ability. They might need other buffs to compensate, but for the sake of counterplay, I think it is worth to consider.
Con’s:
- One could argue it decreases skillcap as currently you could count the cd in your head once it proccs
- GW2 vision of its combat was to do as much as possible with animations and as little as possible with icons, this would slightly move away from that idea

I might have missed examples of traits/Pro’s and Con’s that don’t apply to my argumentation, if you come up with anything like that, I would appreciate if you added that to the discussion, since I didn’t take a lot of time with this post.

I’ve always been in favor of making rng items (sigils procs, burning on crit etc) behave like thief venoms. Both sides can see the icon on the target and if the player misses the attack the chance for it to activate goes away until the cool down is up. Gives some counterplay to the rng factor.

When trait rng stuff is active, it should show like the other trait buffs (Strength in Numbers, etc.) like “XII” in the buff bar.