Guild Wars 2

Looking around, build diversity isn’t very high. One of the reasons for this may be some extremely specific weapon traits. For rangers, something like Light on Your Feet. These weapon traits only apply to 1 specific weapon. Some traits for instance, only affect 1 or 2 conditions, which in turn kind of dictates your rune choice and skill selection. I would suggest a more thematic design that is less specific. Maybe dividing ranger weapons into subcategories like ranged offensive/melee offensive/melee defensive then having 1 trait that greatly improves every weapon that fits into each of these categories. For instance, a trait that increases sword, axe OH, and GS auto-attack (+ whirling defense for OH axe) speed by x%. Another trait that makes sword 2 evade during the whole cast, makes GS 4’s block last longer and dagger 4’s evade go further and last longer. Maybe make some of these traits mutually exclusive to each other.

Although you will force classes to play in a few number of specific ways, it will be easier to balance playstyles and make more meta builds viable.

Paprikaspice.8462:

Looking around, build diversity isn’t very high. One of the reasons for this may be some extremely specific weapon traits. For rangers, something like Light on Your Feet. These weapon traits only apply to 1 specific weapon. Some traits for instance, only affect 1 or 2 conditions, which in turn kind of dictates your rune choice and skill selection. I would suggest a more thematic design that is less specific. Maybe dividing ranger weapons into subcategories like ranged offensive/melee offensive/melee defensive then having 1 trait that greatly improves every weapon that fits into each of these categories. For instance, a trait that increases sword, axe OH, and GS auto-attack (+ whirling defense for OH axe) speed by x%. Another trait that makes sword 2 evade during the whole cast, makes GS 4’s block last longer and dagger 4’s evade go further and last longer. Maybe make some of these traits mutually exclusive to each other.

Although you will force classes to play in a few number of specific ways, it will be easier to balance playstyles and make more meta builds viable.

there are traits for different builds right now i have two builds a con sword tourch/staff and a gs/staff cliric build there is a trait to make my torch con better and one to make great sword stronger

The issue with that is that specializations already encourage themes of play. The fact that the gs trait is somewhere while the sword trait is somewhere else though they both fit the same theme, it really limits your specialization and weapon choices. If the gs trait also boosted the sword, I think that would greatly boost build diversity.

creating 2 traits to improve some weapons, perhaps making them mutually exclusive, and relying less on generic cd reductions for weapon improvement traits would also increase build diversity.