Guild Wars 2

Anyone agrees? Most of them are boring, mathematical +5%/ +10% damage traits, or highly conditional tiny-effect-when-you-’re-in-this-attunement-only effects.

I mean, if I want to make a condition duration build, I specc into the fire traitline for the stat that increases condition duration. Do I really need filler like “burn/ bleed lasts even longer”? It feels redudant. Isn’t that the point of the stat boosts in each trait in the first place? Although this is an issue with most professions, elementalists’ seem to be some of the worst offenders.

I personally love traits that are visceral (with visual representation), creative (create unexpected effects that might be fun to try out) and/ or contribute to skill diversity (that change skills or profession mechanics in meaningful ways).

Elementalists do have interesting options, for example:
- Persisting Flames, Blasting Staff (the extra sense of power is visually represented with longer or larger animations);
- Written in Stone, Vigorous Scepter (changes the strategy behind signet/ scepter usage; in the last case, it’s visually represented with more dodging animations);
- Evasive Arcana (it’s visually represented, it’s a creative take on dodging and adds an extra layer of strategy to dodging); <—- One of the best examples.

Sometimes, even mathematical traits can be interesting when they’re numbers are meaningful enough, and can challenge you to build around them:
- Bolt to the Heart ;

But the elementalist is filled with really boring, really general traits like “you deal 5% more damage if you’re stuck applying this condition or stuck in this attunement!” traits, or effects that are redudant when taken into account the stat boosts of traitlines, or even traits that are way too conditional generally.

It also seems that traits from other professions have been getting fused into more interesting versions. Many +20% recharge traits now also do something else for other professions. But worse of this, is that +20% recharge traits are inherently stronger for other professions, because it usually affects half of their weapon skills, than for the elementalist, which usually only affects 1/4th of their skills.

Opinions?

Given the astounding amount of awful traits, I much prefer the mathematic +% ones. That way, they affect all the my skills instead of applying some abysmally weak boon to some small subset of slotted skills that I never slot in. I do agree you otherwise though, I would love to see more traits that actually make a difference in gameplay and strategy (and make the traits worth taking).