Guild Wars 2

As long as Anet keeps “game changing” traits in “mandatory” trait lines. By this, I mean specific traits are mandatory to be able to survive. I don’t like to use metabattle as a reference but take a peek at it and you’ll see every class for every “meta-viable” build has a mandatory trait line.

Ele – Water
Mesmer – Inspiration
Guardian – Valor
Engineer – Alchemy
Necro – Soul Reaping
Ranger – Nature Magic
Warrior – Defense
Thief – Deadly Arts/Trickery

These Trait lines have become mandatory to at least survive. Eles shouldn’t think that Water is for healing and for cleanse. Same for Defense for Warriors. Anet needs to add more sustain and cleanse traits on other trait lines and fix the core mechanics of these classes. Of course, there will be nerfs to these current meta traits to balance it out.

For something more detailed, I won’t be listing all classes as it has already become a long wall of text but here’s some examples:

• Ele – Lowest base HP and Armor? Oh well let’s give them a lot of healing and access to defensive boons. Well, too bad for you they’re only in Water, Earth, and Arcana. Oh, Tempest doesn’t take advantage of attunement swapping? Well there’s still Earth and Water.

• Warrior – So… your defensive utilities have long CD? Go get Defense for sustain and cleanse for a start so you have something while they’re on cooldown.

• Necro – So you have 2 HP bars. What, that’s not enough? Well, there’s Soul Reaping to boost your core mechanic.

Now imagine if this was the case.

• Ele – Elemental Attunement and Healing Ripple are now core mechanics. Elemental attunement and Healing Ripple will only affect the caster and HR heal is reduced by 50%. Traiting to water will increase Healing Ripple by 50% and now heals allies. Traiting to Arcana will now share Elemental Attunement’s boons. New sustain and cleanse traits with different mechanics are added to offensive Trait lines. Some water traits are changed to more offensive ones.

• Warrior – Adrenal Health and Cleansing Ire are now core mechanics. Nerf Adrenal Health healing by 50%. Cleansing Ire does not increase adrenaline when hit. Traiting Defense will increase Adrenal Health’s healing by 50% and Cleansing Ire increases adrenaline when hit. New sustain, cleanse, and adrenaline related traits with different mechanics are added to offensive Trait lines. Some Defense traits are changed into offensive ones with an active mechanic.

On the other hand, they can just add similar traits on offensive lines with different mechanics. Powercreep should be nerfed though.

There are a lot of other changes they can do besides what I suggested but this will not be enough if they don’t balance other skills and utilities. If these are added to the core mechanics, Elementalists will now look at Fire to increase their burn damage and Air for direct damage. Warriors can now boost the potential of other weapons. With this kind of changes, people will start looking at other traits and will finally create build diversity.

TL;DR – Give offensive traits better sustain and cleanse and/or rework class mechanics. It’s been 3 years and these mandatory trait lines have almost never changed.

Kyon.9735:

As long as Anet keeps “game changing” traits in “mandatory” trait lines. By this, I mean specific traits are mandatory to be able to survive. I don’t like to use metabattle as a reference but take a peek at it and you’ll see every class for every “meta-viable” build has a mandatory trait line.

Ele – Water
Mesmer – Inspiration
Guardian – Valor
Engineer – Alchemy
Necro – Soul Reaping
Ranger – Nature Magic
Warrior – Defense
Thief – Deadly Arts/Trickery

These Trait lines have become mandatory to at least survive. Eles shouldn’t think that Water is for healing and for cleanse. Same for Defense for Warriors. Anet needs to add more sustain and cleanse traits on other trait lines and fix the core mechanics of these classes. Of course, there will be nerfs to these current meta traits to balance it out.

Then instead of needing 1 trait line to survive, you’d need three or two? It’s hard for me to say whether this will work or not but it may become a case where there are too many similar traits and instead of increasing diversity, you end up reducing it.

This is not to say your idea isn’t intriguing. I’ve actually thought of this solution myself but I ultimately concluded that it won’t truly solve the issue because of what I mentioned above… but that’s just my opinion.

I agree mandatory lines need to be taken down and some effects made baseline, I do not agree with some of the lines you listed as mandatory:
Elementalist- I think you pretty much nailed it
Mesmer- Yes this is good too
Guardian- I don’t think many guards use valor, you may be thinking virtues which is definitely mandatory on any build
Engineer- yep
Necro- pretty much
Ranger- Yeah
Warrior- Defense and discipline are both mandatory atm. Just thought it’d be better for you to mention that.
Thief- Trickery yes, deadly arts no. There are plenty of working builds that don’t use DA. It’s just in pvp there aren’t enough stats for CS to work to it’s full potential so DA’s mods end up out damaging CS. In wvw and pve, it’s a completely different story.

As for proposed changes:
Elementalist: I have no idea how I feel about this one, it sounds like a good choice except you want to be careful you don’t make lines useless through these changes.

Warrior- Absolutely not. With these changes warrior would be god. They could still take defense for rousing resilience and have more sustain than they do now. Without making them choose between cleansing ire and the other GM traits you make warrior a bigger problem than it is now because they won’t have to sacrifice sustain/immunities for condition removal. Adrenal health just needs a few nerfs so it isn’t the game changer and it’ll fall off the list of mandatory things.

Regarding Warrior being OP, I did say that some traits will need to be nerfed to balance it out and my suggestions are mere suggestions. I’m pretty sure you and a lot of others have a better idea than the one I gave

When creating builds, I realized that we think too much about defense in general which is why we are limiting ourselves with our builds. With better baseline defense and core mechanics, we can actually start thinking about offense and as we all know, having bunkers hit bunkers isn’t fun. But what can we do? Without these bunker setups we can be easily killed even by bunkers.

Anet will need to stop the discrepancy between “offensive” and “defensive” trait lines. Eles need to think that Fire is for burn and fire based damage, Air for Lightning and direct damage, and Water is for Chill and Water based damage. This is what we have originally been promised for HoT. “I am a Tempest specializing in Earth and Water” should’ve meant specializing in those element based DPS, not a standard norm for “I am a Tempest who doesn’t die in the first 5 seconds”. This goes for all classes.

I know this will be a long term investment as a lot of changes need to be done and traits to be added but hey, it’s better than thinking that we’ll be using the same traits for the next few years until this game totally dies because of lack of build diversity.

P.S – Sorry for using Tempest as an example a lot. Obviously, I main one so it’s easier to give general examples.

The issue is when base defenses become too powerful. Using mesmer as an example, the amount of defense their builds have is insane but they aren’t sacrificing much to gain those. That is the unfortunate line you tread on when making more baseline defenses.

That being said, if the effect those defenses had (healing, regen, block uptime, etc.) all had much smaller baselines but would have much better scaling ability then yes build would be much more diverse. The tanks would have to actually build for being tanky and the dps would have to build for it but because of their baselines defenses they could actually land damage every once in a while.

Also would help if passives were removed. Part of the issue is so much of the defenses and such in this game are fully passive s nobody has any control of it and it causes balance to be unattainable because you can’t account for random procs. After all passives get removed then it becomes easier to add things as baseline and work on promoting active gameplay.

I agree with your traitline orientation statement. Traits should provide you with new ways to play and different types of advantages. Take thief for instance, obviously crit strikes would mean you excel at criticals and gain more benefits from them while shadow arts is a more stealth based line that gives you a new way to play. The sad thing is a ton of traitlines are made with the mindset of “this is the condi clear line, this is the damage line, this is the defense line, this is the utility line, etc.”

P.S- It’s okay to use a profession you main as an example because you communicate better when it’s something you’re comfortable with.

P.P.S- It’d probably also help to have the old trait system back (not with the stats but just the way selection worked) then you could have more control over what you took.

Personally I really dislike the idea of making these effects baseline. Child-proofing build strategy is not how you make build diversity; it’s how you make building irrelevant.

Yes, making these core traits baseline as they are now would make them OP which is why I recommend nerfing them while distributing he sustain and cleanse on every trait line.

They can also put similar traits with different mechanics on every traitline if they won’t nerf them and make them baseline. It will still be up to the player if they would want to take those or be more offensive with their trait choices. Bottomline is that we should be given other options for survivability.

I agree that in a sense, the old trait system (minus the bonus stats) are good because it lets people use whatever they want. I still like Anet’s vision of specialization, they just need to implement it better.

@Sarrs
I don’t really see it as child-proofing but rather opening up more options.

My edit doesn’t seem to get saved so I’m posting a new one.

For example.

What if Eles had a Fire trait that heals them when they apply burn and attack burning foes? What if there was a trait that removed X condi every Y seconds while inside a fire field? Of course, water will need to be nerfed and some traits must be changed into more offensive ones.

There are a lot of different mechanics that can be added for each line for every class. I believe these kind of mechanics will make things more interesting and reduce reliancy on specific lines.

Just wanna bump this little gem right here.

I have been mentioning this but as long as those traitlines are superior/required over other ones, kiss diversity good bye.