Guild Wars 2

Can someone explain the need for a 15s base cooldown on attunement swap? Also, why is the cooldown reduction part of a specific trait line? We’re talking about a class that is required to swap attunements, therefore required to take that trait line.

Those are two basic questions that seem to remain unanswered. If anyone can link me to something that explains why this is necessary I’d appreciate it.

If it just comes down to “that’s the way it was designed”, then maybe a dev could explain further?

We have all been asking this question, every day, ever since the game was released.

Not like it really matters the Cd on most attunement specific abilities are 15-50 seconds. Which also is ridiculous considering every attunement offers 1-2 reliably good abilities.

I really like having 15s cooldowns on attunement swaps, it makes me have to strategically think ahead and plan the way I am going to use them.

I agree that everyone has been asking. It just seems like the lack of justification leads to much zanier suggestions to compensate for the limitations imposed by this kind of mechanic.

Having skills within an element that are over 15s cooldown doesn’t mean that the player is always going to use that skill before leaving the element. That’s the whole problem. So many of our skills work best (or in Staff’s case work at all) only when specific circumstances are present.

Take lava font, untraited this skill has a 6s cooldown with an additional 15s cooldown if you aren’t playing “fire mage” which everyone knows doesn’t work. 21s cooldown on a skill like lava font is insane because lava font is worse in DPS and targeting than some auto attacks.

Not to mention, our combat has to be totally linear every time because we can never switch back to an element in time once we leave it. There’s no reason why an Elementalist shouldn’t be able to spec into the fire and air lines for damage-oriented play without being kept out of his damage dealing elements when trying to combine other attunements with his attack.

We can’t be reactive in a PvP environment without 20+ in Arcana, period. That’s a problem that needs solved before looking at how we can change this trait and that trait or what have you.

Weapon swap would just be nice… I would like to run melee/range
And also be able to just stay in fire if that what I want without gimping myself soo much.

So far my elementalist is on hold, would really like to play on him, but the attunement dance is not my cup of tea…

But if they give use GS then maybe I will just for the look xD

Also why nerf RL!? It just needed a fix (1500ft was a bug)…

this is a poor choice of words
“attunement swapping is a bad class mechanic”
Attunement swapping = good
Arcana reducing it = good
the problem isn’t with Arcana being so “required” for an elementalist,the problem is that the other trait lines don’t offer anything MORE reliable to make us WANT to stay in an attunement,picking traits for that attunement,making Arcana just more convenient,and desirable,while the others just look like a poor choice because of the actual “poor choices” we get for traits
a few stacks of might in fire doesn’t equal a cleanse + regen + burst heal from water under 15,and a dodge roll in water healing and cleansing AGAIN
and it DEFINITLY cannot even come CLOSE to being worth “10% toughness becomes condition damage”
so we’re forced into wanting to be able to swap quickly for the most effectiveness
attunement swapping is good,the other trait lines just need more work

but as with the 30 earth trait,it’s no surprise to me
i’ll just leave this here and let people soak this in for a bit when they think GW2 has some poor choices of skills that don’t get fixed
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Smiter%27s_Boon_

Alpha.1308:

this is a poor choice of words
“attunement swapping is a bad class mechanic”
Attunement swapping = good
Arcana reducing it = good
the problem isn’t with Arcana being so “required” for an elementalist,the problem is that the other trait lines don’t offer anything MORE reliable to make us WANT to stay in an attunement,picking traits for that attunement,making Arcana just more convenient,and desirable,while the others just look like a poor choice because of the actual “poor choices” we get for traits
a few stacks of might in fire doesn’t equal a cleanse + regen + burst heal from water under 15,and a dodge roll in water healing and cleansing AGAIN
and it DEFINITLY cannot even come CLOSE to being worth “10% toughness becomes condition damage”
so we’re forced into wanting to be able to swap quickly for the most effectiveness
attunement swapping is good,the other trait lines just need more work

but as with the 30 earth trait,it’s no surprise to me
i’ll just leave this here and let people soak this in for a bit when they think GW2 has some poor choices of skills that don’t get fixed
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Smiter%27s_Boon_

Organizing your skills based on attunement makes attunement swapping (in its current state) bad.

As a staff player, the following draws on experiences with the nature of staff skills:

When is the right time to engage an enemy with 100% offensive DPS skills with no CC or sustain (Fire)? When is the right time (since GW2 has no trinity) to support your group, or yourself, with healing and very little to no DPS (Water)? When is the right time to drop CC and boost your mobility, apart from trying to run away from the fight you just lost (Air)? When is the right time to have a mediocre amalgamation of the qualities from the previous three attunements (Earth)?

Okay so staff might be a bad weapon comparatively, but the point remains the same. You can’t synchronize your skills and be said to have access to all 4 attunements and their 20 skills when attunement swap limitations give you:

5 | 5 | 5 | 5

Edit: The interesting part is, reduce the swap cooldown and suddenly those attunement based skills I discussed above become infinitely useful and rather adequate because now you have more depth of strategy.

Edit 2: As a side note, Fresh Air is actually a diluted attempt at eliminating swap cooldowns by allowing us back in to an attunement when we crit. So far it seems like many players love it and it’s even brought about further variety of builds.

If we did not have attunement swap cooldowns, we would be able to put together skill sequences and combo fields and finishers that we cannot now. The result would fundementally change the way the class is played and its balance. The class would have to be totally reworked.

We don’t have to have to take arcana for attunement swapping reduction. Many players do not.

Essentially you are asking why we have cooldowns at all. heck, lets make every button available at any time. There is no diff if its a attunement or weapon swap or skill or trait or sigil cooldown. They are all cooldowns. Pick your favorite. Start a thread on that. Oh, I guess you have.

15 seconds of attunement cooldowns, even 20 seconds, would be ok if there was a possibility to specialize, to specc in a specific direction, to fulfill a role. And that is actually the way I would like the elementalist to be. To have at least 5 different ways to build up:

1. Speccing into Fire and having some points in the other trait lines, building for raw AoE burst dmg and burn. Downsides: Squishy, low healing, low hp. To make this possible the fire trait lines would need some traits to reduce the cooldown of the fire attunement (either generally for 20% or something similar to Fresh Air) AND it needs to be senseful to go for raw dmg as an elementalist. Elementalist aren’t supposed to deal the dmg of a warrior or a mesmer, but currently they are way too far behind, even behind guardians with comparable builds.

2. Speccing into Air, to gain high mobility, high single target dmg and some good disabling speels. There would need to be traitlines to make this possible, like a grand master trait that allows you to use your lightning flash 3 times or something like that. Downsides would be: Low AoE dmg, squishy, low healing.

3. Speccing into Earth, to become very tanky, having strong AoE ccs and bleed dmg, but low direct dmg, low mobility and low burstdmg.

4. Speccing into Water, to become a supporter, using soft ccs, heals and buffs/boons, but dealing low dmg (to make this senseful, the content in PvE would have to be altered – I don’t want to have the holy trinity back, neither I want to make supportes mandatory for every group, but they should be useful at least).

5. Speccing into Everything, being nowhere superior and nowhere inferior. Unfortunatly, ArenaNet only wants to make this build viable as the only one.

That’s actually the way I see the way how the Elementalist was supposed to be designed originally. There need to be changes to make points in water less mandatory and to push the arcane trait more towards an utility tree, that can be combined with everything, but doesn’t have to be – like being specialized on boons, being specialized on cc, being specialized on more mobility etc.

One of the main problems I do see is that without having at least 10-15 points in the tree, the elements/attunements don’t really do what they are supposed to do. Water doesn’t rly heal, Earth doesn’t give you protections. Once in Beta that was differen’t and I think the best way would be to bring this back. All the minor 15 point traits except for Lingering elements need to be given permanently passively when swapping into the attunement, ofc a bit weakened (like Healing ripple nerfed for 50%, but can be made stronger with a trait in water).

This way Elementalists wouldn’t be forced anymore to have either 30 points in Arcana or 15 in water, because they can’t really heal themselves up otherwise – and healing is their only defense. In exchange the dmg would need to be generally lowered ofc, that you need to specc into dmg to gain dmg – how it is supposed to be. Like changing the minor 5 point arcana passive (Gaining 2 seconds of fury when swapping attunements) with the 15 points arcane passive (Lingering elements, including ofc fixing its bugs). Without fury the basic dmg of the elementalist would be nerfed already a lot.

That’s just the way I do actually believe how the Elementalist was supposed to be once and some little suggestions to bring him back on this path.

Baladir.2736:

If we did not have attunement swap cooldowns, we would be able to put together skill sequences and combo fields and finishers that we cannot now. The result would fundementally change the way the class is played and its balance. The class would have to be totally reworked.

Yes, it would have an impact on skill combos. Would a reduction upset the balance so much that the class would need to be reworked? I don’t think so, our DPS is still average and our best skills do in fact have cooldowns already.

Baladir.2736:

We don’t have to have to take arcana for attunement swapping reduction. Many players do not.

In PvP? 60% swap reduction, 30% boon duration and the best traits we have are located in this line. Build variety outside of Arcana is pretty sparse imo, especially before Air XII.

Baladir.2736:

Essentially you are asking why we have cooldowns at all. heck, lets make every button available at any time. There is no diff if its a attunement or weapon swap or skill or trait or sigil cooldown. They are all cooldowns. Pick your favorite. Start a thread on that. Oh, I guess you have.

Not exactly. A swap reduction wouldn’t change the fact that we have to wait X amount of time to use a skill after triggering it. On-swap internal cooldowns are already present in the game so obviously they are necessary to prevent limitless stacking of whatever your sigil provides. Trying to equate attunement swap cooldowns to every other cooldown in the game is over-generalization.

We don’t have a single attunement that can stand on its own regardless of weapon set. The skills aren’t set up that way. Some players have suggested changes that would allow us to specialize in one element. I personally enjoy ANet’s concept of using every attunement available to us. It isn’t like a swap cooldown reduction is going to allow us to blow through 20 burst skills instantly. We don’t have 20 burst skills.

Neko.9021:

We have all been asking this question, every day, ever since the game was released.

1000x this.

The other question we ask every day is why we all have to spec 20-30 points into arcane just to make the class playable.

• base attunement change CD should be 12sec, 30 points arcane makes it 9sec.
• remove the CD on how soon you can change to another attunement after changing attunement, it serves no purpose except except to punish players with high latency.
• each of the elemental 25pt traits could decrease that element’s attunement CD by a further 2sec. consolidate the existing 25pt traits into the 15’s or 5’s on a case-by-case basis. It seems fundamentally broken to me that speccing 30 points into an element line doesn’t make that line somehow more accessible. Without some kind of mechanic like this, arcane is always going to be required.

mjharrison.3209:

Neko.9021:

We have all been asking this question, every day, ever since the game was released.

The other question we ask every day is why we all have to spec 20-30 points into arcane just to make the class playable.

To make the class playable? Ive got 1400 hours played on my ele on my 2000 hour account. I almost never run arcana anymore unless i need to, such as staff trait or bunker. This isnt a case of it being unplayable at all, its a case of the players not wanting to try other things and get used to not having arcana. Believe me, it is the players not wanting to change, and resisting it. Adapt to the game, and you will find out you CAN play the ele without arcana. I honestly feel like arcana traitline is training wheels for a noob ele player. (unless, like ive said, you NEED to run it for staff or bunker). L2P.

The Game Slayer.7632:

mjharrison.3209:

Neko.9021:

We have all been asking this question, every day, ever since the game was released.

The other question we ask every day is why we all have to spec 20-30 points into arcane just to make the class playable.

To make the class playable? Ive got 1400 hours played on my ele on my 2000 hour account. I almost never run arcana anymore unless i need to, such as staff trait or bunker. This isnt a case of it being unplayable at all, its a case of the players not wanting to try other things and get used to not having arcana. Believe me, it is the players not wanting to change, and resisting it. Adapt to the game, and you will find out you CAN play the ele without arcana. I honestly feel like arcana traitline is training wheels for a noob ele player. (unless, like ive said, you NEED to run it for staff or bunker). L2P.

I second this ^. Never been a fond of investing more than 10 points in the arcane tree. As a burst focused ele , more than 5 points in it is not necessary and it is most certainly playable.

Some of us do like the 30 point investment into Arcana for the 30% boon duration, the nice boons you get by swapping attunements, permavigor, and Evasive Arcana. Even on my Fresh Air build…I still like to run it. I also don’t run full Zerker because I find it dull and boring.

Well i see it like this: imma burst ele so i wont need boons alot therefore i can put less points in arcana. If i died cos my boons run out of juice means i didnt burst enough. For bigger encounters its just beware of surroundings and gtfo when zergs or bigger groups want to play moshpit

xbaunx.6438:

Take lava font, untraited this skill has a 6s cooldown with an additional 15s cooldown if you aren’t playing “fire mage” which everyone knows doesn’t work. 21s cooldown .

21 second cooldown? Did you even think that through? You DO understand that skills keep on recharging even if a player is not inside that attunement, right?

The Game Slayer.7632:

xbaunx.6438:

Take lava font, untraited this skill has a 6s cooldown with an additional 15s cooldown if you aren’t playing “fire mage” which everyone knows doesn’t work. 21s cooldown .

21 second cooldown? Did you even think that through? You DO understand that skills keep on recharging even if a player is not inside that attunement, right?

He must (edit) )have stayed (/edit) in fire for 5 seconds after using lava font which would make it a 20 sec cd lol

The Game Slayer.7632:

21 second cooldown? Did you even think that through? You DO understand that skills keep on recharging even if a player is not inside that attunement, right?

You missed the point. Try to think staff in 1v1. You can’t play as reactive without adding X amount of seconds to low-cd skills or skills that are coming to the end of their respective cds. Waiting around for X skill to come off cd so you can blow it before leaving X attunement is bad. A ~21 second fire 2 was just a more extreme example. A reduction in base swap cd would mitigate this problem. If staff is just bad in those situations then maybe a weapon swap would solve it all.

/thread

Hmmm, what if instead of tying the Attunement Recharge solely to Arcana it was such that putting points in one of the others would reduce the Attunement recharge of that specific element. For example, stacking 30 points in fire could drop the Attunement recharge from 15s to 5s (make it -.33s every skill point). This would allow people to focus down the elements they want and still make Attunement Swapping viable without having to devote a lot of points to Arcana, but at the same time they would be limited to switching back to their focused elements. I’m just not sure what to do with Arcana otherwise (keep the Attunement Recharge but have the Recharge cap at 5s?). There’s probably some huge gaping hole I’m missing in this though as I’m just a noob using hammers to level.

TGSlasher.1458:

The Game Slayer.7632:

xbaunx.6438:

Take lava font, untraited this skill has a 6s cooldown with an additional 15s cooldown if you aren’t playing “fire mage” which everyone knows doesn’t work. 21s cooldown .

21 second cooldown? Did you even think that through? You DO understand that skills keep on recharging even if a player is not inside that attunement, right?

He must stay in fire for 5 seconds after using lava font which would make it a 20 sec cd lol

Oh, he HAS to? Why? Explain.

xbaunx.6438:

The Game Slayer.7632:

21 second cooldown? Did you even think that through? You DO understand that skills keep on recharging even if a player is not inside that attunement, right?

You missed the point. Try to think staff in 1v1. You can’t play as reactive without adding X amount of seconds to low-cd skills or skills that are coming to the end of their respective cds. Waiting around for X skill to come off cd so you can blow it before leaving X attunement is bad. A ~21 second fire 2 was just a more extreme example. A reduction in base swap cd would mitigate this problem. If staff is just bad in those situations then maybe a weapon swap would solve it all.

/thread

Im very sure I did not miss the point. Im almost sure youre so called “example” is clearly flawed, as a fire #2 skill will never ever have a 21 second cooldown. It will only ever be 15 seconds, due to attunement swapping. You must understand that we have double the skills, and a regular weapon swap on any other class is 10 seconds. This is the price we pay for having double the skills of every other profession, and might I tell you, 5 seconds is really not that bad. It couldve been 20 seconds (wait, they already put it down to 15 from 20.) and THAT was understandable. But we need SOME sort of limitation to our vast array of skills. And if you want to play with absolutely no limitations (compared to other classes), THEN you put 30 or 20 into arcana.

The Game Slayer.7632:

TGSlasher.1458:

The Game Slayer.7632:

xbaunx.6438:

Take lava font, untraited this skill has a 6s cooldown with an additional 15s cooldown if you aren’t playing “fire mage” which everyone knows doesn’t work. 21s cooldown .

21 second cooldown? Did you even think that through? You DO understand that skills keep on recharging even if a player is not inside that attunement, right?

He must stay in fire for 5 seconds after using lava font which would make it a 20 sec cd lol

Oh, he HAS to? Why? Explain.

Sorry, missed a have in there … He must have stayed in fire for 5 seconds …

Since its not possible to swap weapons with an elementalist, i do think attunement swaping cooldowns are a huge pain to the class. There are just to many cooldowns you have to keep your eyes on at any give time… It also hurts class diversity, since its easy to know what kind of attacks are coming next…

Oh. he switched to fire, so he is probably going to run to me and then area blast. Oh, he switched to water and then out. I have around 12~15 seconds to kill him before he can do any big healing again. And so on. It would be a lot more interesting if he could swap at any give time into water, use 1 healing skill and then just swap to to dps, and then to air to get some distance.

I rerolled into a thief. I cant say how much i love not having to care anymore for CDs. Its just that awesome.

LightningBlaze.4913:

The Game Slayer.7632:

mjharrison.3209:

Neko.9021:

We have all been asking this question, every day, ever since the game was released.

The other question we ask every day is why we all have to spec 20-30 points into arcane just to make the class playable.

To make the class playable? Ive got 1400 hours played on my ele on my 2000 hour account. I almost never run arcana anymore unless i need to, such as staff trait or bunker. This isnt a case of it being unplayable at all, its a case of the players not wanting to try other things and get used to not having arcana. Believe me, it is the players not wanting to change, and resisting it. Adapt to the game, and you will find out you CAN play the ele without arcana. I honestly feel like arcana traitline is training wheels for a noob ele player. (unless, like ive said, you NEED to run it for staff or bunker). L2P.

I second this ^. Never been a fond of investing more than 10 points in the arcane tree. As a burst focused ele , more than 5 points in it is not necessary and it is most certainly playable.

These two comments I whole heartedly disagree with. As an ele besides a Lightning Hammer build, optimal efficiency comes from having access to any one of your skills at any given time. Our skills are gated twice, once by the skill recharge and a second time by the attunement cooldown.

The attunement cooldown has one sole purpose, to not allow the elementalist to use whatever skills they want that are on cooldown. Why create something with that purpose? Because you haven’t spent the time to balance the way the skills interact with each other.

I see Fresh Air as an attempt by ANet to slowly work towards reducing or getting rid of the Attunement cooldown, because it gives Elementalists access to Air attunement whenever they want to use it. That’s 1/4 attunements that they are potentially reviewing for reducing/eliminating the cooldown.

We all want the attunement cooldown gone, the only thing standing in the way is balance. Once ANet figures out how to balance it, we should see the cooldown on attunement recharge reduced.

teonimesic.1403:

Oh. he switched to fire, so he is probably going to run to me and then area blast. Oh, he switched to water and then out. I have around 12~15 seconds to kill him before he can do any big healing again. And so on. It would be a lot more interesting if he could swap at any give time into water, use 1 healing skill and then just swap to to dps, and then to air to get some distance.

This.

Shockwave.1230:

These two comments I whole heartedly disagree with. As an ele besides a Lightning Hammer build, optimal efficiency comes from having access to any one of your skills at any given time. Our skills are gated twice, once by the skill recharge and a second time by the attunement cooldown.

The attunement cooldown has one sole purpose, to not allow the elementalist to use whatever skills they want that are on cooldown. Why create something with that purpose? Because you haven’t spent the time to balance the way the skills interact with each other.

I see Fresh Air as an attempt by ANet to slowly work towards reducing or getting rid of the Attunement cooldown, because it gives Elementalists access to Air attunement whenever they want to use it. That’s 1/4 attunements that they are potentially reviewing for reducing/eliminating the cooldown.

We all want the attunement cooldown gone, the only thing standing in the way is balance. Once ANet figures out how to balance it, we should see the cooldown on attunement recharge reduced.

And this. It’s good to see some thoughtful responses since some of the above forumers are only interested in arguing semantics.

xbaunx.6438:

Shockwave.1230:

These two comments I whole heartedly disagree with. As an ele besides a Lightning Hammer build, optimal efficiency comes from having access to any one of your skills at any given time. Our skills are gated twice, once by the skill recharge and a second time by the attunement cooldown.

The attunement cooldown has one sole purpose, to not allow the elementalist to use whatever skills they want that are on cooldown. Why create something with that purpose? Because you haven’t spent the time to balance the way the skills interact with each other.

I see Fresh Air as an attempt by ANet to slowly work towards reducing or getting rid of the Attunement cooldown, because it gives Elementalists access to Air attunement whenever they want to use it. That’s 1/4 attunements that they are potentially reviewing for reducing/eliminating the cooldown.

We all want the attunement cooldown gone, the only thing standing in the way is balance. Once ANet figures out how to balance it, we should see the cooldown on attunement recharge reduced.

And this. It’s good to see some thoughtful responses since some of the above forumers are only interested in arguing semantics.

That’s funny to hear you say that. Above you responded to me saying:

“Yes, it would have an impact on skill combos. Would a reduction upset the balance so much that the class would need to be reworked? I don’t think so, our DPS is still average and our best skills do in fact have cooldowns already.”

I would add. Seriously? You can’t think of new skill combos that would fundementally change the use of skills as we know them and the balance of the class?

Shockwave.1230:

LightningBlaze.4913:

The Game Slayer.7632:

mjharrison.3209:

Neko.9021:

We have all been asking this question, every day, ever since the game was released.

The other question we ask every day is why we all have to spec 20-30 points into arcane just to make the class playable.

To make the class playable? Ive got 1400 hours played on my ele on my 2000 hour account. I almost never run arcana anymore unless i need to, such as staff trait or bunker. This isnt a case of it being unplayable at all, its a case of the players not wanting to try other things and get used to not having arcana. Believe me, it is the players not wanting to change, and resisting it. Adapt to the game, and you will find out you CAN play the ele without arcana. I honestly feel like arcana traitline is training wheels for a noob ele player. (unless, like ive said, you NEED to run it for staff or bunker). L2P.

I second this ^. Never been a fond of investing more than 10 points in the arcane tree. As a burst focused ele , more than 5 points in it is not necessary and it is most certainly playable.

These two comments I whole heartedly disagree with. As an ele besides a Lightning Hammer build, optimal efficiency comes from having access to any one of your skills at any given time. Our skills are gated twice, once by the skill recharge and a second time by the attunement cooldown.

The attunement cooldown has one sole purpose, to not allow the elementalist to use whatever skills they want that are on cooldown. Why create something with that purpose? Because you haven’t spent the time to balance the way the skills interact with each other.

I see Fresh Air as an attempt by ANet to slowly work towards reducing or getting rid of the Attunement cooldown, because it gives Elementalists access to Air attunement whenever they want to use it. That’s 1/4 attunements that they are potentially reviewing for reducing/eliminating the cooldown.

We all want the attunement cooldown gone, the only thing standing in the way is balance. Once ANet figures out how to balance it, we should see the cooldown on attunement recharge reduced.

Time will tell of course, but I think it was instead a move to make investing points into Air more rewarding. A build has to give up quite a few abilities to get that 30 points into air. Many builds only had 10 there before. I gave it a shot and found I lost too much healing and condition removal. And for what? The added dps of Electric Discharge is the big draw.

For burst dps glassy Eles, it gives an option, at a penalty.

Not coincidently we only have one combo field in Air, with staff, and no combo finishers.

imo this change to enhance the Air trait line is a far cry from a move to eliminate attunement swapping. If it was, and this is as far as they have progressed in a year, I think there is going to be a real long wait. If so, I can’t wait to see what they are going to do to keep the arcane trait line viable.

Baladir.2736:

That’s funny to hear you say that. Above you responded to me saying:

“Yes, it would have an impact on skill combos. Would a reduction upset the balance so much that the class would need to be reworked? I don’t think so, our DPS is still average and our best skills do in fact have cooldowns already.”

I would add. Seriously? You can’t think of new skill combos that would fundementally change the use of skills as we know them and the balance of the class?

Right, I was saying that the new accessibility to skills via a reduced swap cooldown wouldn’t cause so much imbalance that the class would need to be reworked.

Baladir.2736:

imo this change to enhance the Air trait line is a far cry from a move to eliminate attunement swapping. If it was, and this is as far as they have progressed in a year, I think there is going to be a real long wait. If so, I can’t wait to see what they are going to do to keep the arcane trait line viable.

I don’t think anyone wants to eliminate attunement swapping itself, just reduce the base swap cooldown. A 60% reduction in swap cooldown is only part of the attraction of Arcana. Some would argue that +30% boon duration and the exceptional traits are more important.