Guild Wars 2

Hey there, I run an Elementalist main, and haven’t been playing from the start, but I have been playing since January, and I like the game, but I do feel that there are several aspects of it that could certainly use tweaking. I have hopes that the community feedback is important to ANet, so I figured I’d toss up my suggestions for a big point of character customisation, the traits.

Traits are very useful since they give loads of new abilities to the player, and they can pick and choose exactly what they want to get out of the system. However, there’s several traits that are pitifully useless, at least from what I’ve seen, so here are my suggestions to fix and/or replace them. I will be addressing any issues I have with the minor traits first, then the major ones. Please note that any precise numbers in suggestions are just suggestions, and those probably need tweaking. The general idea of the suggestions is the main thing that should be considered.

This is an EXCEEDINGLY long post, so what I’m going to do is just link to a pastebin page, so that it doesn’t need to be spread among loads of posts.

Here you go!

Well, looking at your suggestions, I see a lot of unnecessary buffing.

Your Fire trait suggestions involved a lot of buffs and I see that it would result in a lot more Might on an Elementalist. Considering that they already get very high amounts of Might, I don’t really see it as a good idea.

Your Earth trait suggestions involved a lot of buffs to Protection and Stability uptime, which I don’t think is a good idea, considering that those are the top two boons in the game.

Your Water trait suggestions included boosting Healing by 10-20%, which I think is way overpowered. It could very well result in a Water-based Ele being capable of full-time healing, which isn’t something that should happen. You also suggested a change where a trait could make it so that providing Regeneration would act as a stunbreaker. That’s definitely over the top, considering that you can trait to get regeneration when attuning to Water. That would be the shortest cooldown on a stunbreaker in the whole game.

Your Arcana suggestions included increasing Arcane Fury to 5-6 seconds. You have to realize that this means permanent Fury if you rotate your attunements properly.

Eles already have high uptime of a ton of boons, even if they pay a price for that. You do not need to make it any easier. The result will just be eles paying less of a price for the same and thus putting it somewhere else, like their damage.

Fair enough. I realise that a lot of them are probably a bit OP. Main thing I had focused on was a theme for each trait line. Damage/Might for Fire, Protection for Earth, Healing for Water, etc. The Arcana fury one is prob a bit much if you rotate through your attunements only getting off 2-3 attacks per element, I’ll admit I assumed that the player would at least get all of their attacks off before swapping attunements, at which point like I said, you’re still only getting an attack or two of effect from the effect of the Fury.

I made some mistakes in these, no doubt. I’m mainly hoping that there’s at least one good idea in there that might be balanced and still useful. Thanks for your time, and the comments!