Guild Wars 2

Every class has them, useless traits that nobody really ever uses. I have a replacement that could prove interesting.

Trait: All Utility (including elite) cooldowns are reduced by 10%. Does not stack with any other trait.

Instead of traits that force you to use a single type of utility, ie Shouts, Tricks or Elixers, this trait lets you choose whichever skills you deem more effective. So instead of loading up 3 cantrips, I can use a cantrip, sigil and glyph at the same time and get a decent cooldown reduction.

It’s balanced in that, the specialty traits give a greater cooldown reduction of 20%, but lock you into one type of utility. This would even affect skills that don’t have a specialty cooldown trait as well. If this trait and a specialty trait are both chosen, the highest reduction gets priority. For example if I choose this and a shout trait, my consecrations are reduced by 10% and my shouts would be reduced 20%.

No.

You end up with 30% cooldown reduction if you combine a speciality trait with this particular trait, which is way too much (imho). I can kind of see this becoming viable in PvE because I personally have experienced times when I wish certain skills had slightly shorter cooldowns, but on the PvP side of things I don’t think it’s going to work personally.

we already have that. Many Classes can setup traits to cooldown all of their Utilities by 20% or more. All classes can reduce the Cool down of one or 2 types of Utlities already.

So this is redundant and a waste of a trait choice.

Yobculture.5786:

No.

You end up with 30% cooldown reduction if you combine a speciality trait with this particular trait, which is way too much (imho). I can kind of see this becoming viable in PvE because I personally have experienced times when I wish certain skills had slightly shorter cooldowns, but on the PvP side of things I don’t think it’s going to work personally.

Perhaps you failed to read the part where it said that it does not stack with any other traits. Also, if this and a specialty trait are chosen, the highest reduction prevails, also in the OP.

sirsquishy.8531:

we already have that. Many Classes can setup traits to cooldown all of their Utilities by 20% or more. All classes can reduce the Cool down of one or 2 types of Utlities already.

So this is redundant and a waste of a trait choice.

This is only if you choose one class for all your utility slots OR if you choose more than one specialty trait. Instead of wasting 2 trait choices for specialty traits, you could pick one trait to cover all your choices. It has both pros and cons obviously, otherwise it would be over/underpowered. If you chose to use only shouts, then yes the specialty trait would be better. If you chose 2 different types of utilities, then you have the choice of 2 specialty traits so that all your slots are cooled down 20%, or you could choose this one trait that would give you 10% cooldown no matter what you chose.

This is better in the cases where there are no specialty traits for the type of utility you choose. All racial utilities would be affected for example. I believe there are no cooldown traits for turrets, etc…