Guild Wars 2

I’m surprised I couldn’t find a thread about this trait. It’s useless. A lot of traits are, that’s not my issue with it. My issue is that it could be amazing (whereas a lot of useless traits simply couldn’t be amazing no matter what you do).

On paper, it sounds a lot like the Elementalist trait that casts a spell whenever you dodge (or even the one that casts a buff whenever you switch attunements). But the whole 20 second global cooldown destroys its usefulness. For instance, the Elixir Gun spell that leaves a trail of glue would be great as an escape tool except you would never be able to time it right without simply never using a kit until you need one of these spells. In that case, though, your kits stop being kits and start simply being the single spells that this trait causes them to cast. If you have more than one kit, this becomes doubly useless because now, to make use of the trait, you have multiple utility slots that can’t be used for their kit purposes because of they share a cooldown. We don’t even have to get into the fact that so many Engineers use Speedy Kits and would have to choose between swiftness and making use of one spell every 20 seconds.

Why not remove the cooldown? Or make the cooldown significantly shorter? Or give each kit its own (also shorter) cooldown? Could this really be overpowered? Maybe the Magnetic Bomb or the 2 auras would be a bit overpowered with no cooldown at all, but there must be a happy medium, because a 20 second global cooldown completely breaks this trait.

We made plenty of threads when the change was first implemented. They destroyed the synergy that kit refinement’s spells had with their kits. For me, I was always switching between kit refinement and swift kits for my elixir gun. It gave me an extra super elixir for switching to it on a 10 sec cooldown. I think they changed it because a lot of people were using it to spam grenades or something.

Ah, then the search for these forums is just terrible because not a single thread came up for “refinement.”

I didn’t realize this worked differently before. How did it used to work?

Here’s the old wiki page for the old kit refinement.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/index.php?title=Kit_Refinement&direction=prev&oldid=524947

Each kit had their own kit refinement cooldown so if you were carrying more than one kit, you could switch to several and get each of their effects. Then they added a global cooldown so you couldn’t spam the effects with several kits and then they finally just outright changed most of the effects to what it is now along with a global cooldown.

EG/TK are completely useless now. The least they could do is make the glue spots acid spots so whatever is chasing us will harm the enemies behind us and make them as large as our pistol glue gun shots.

TK needs a shield of it’s own or at the very least the protection boon when equipped since it’s melee.

I’m hoping medkit’s bubble gets boosted to 5 seconds of shield time.

The forum search is broken, which is why you couldn’t find threads on Kit Refinement.

We used to have a decent KR trait.

Over two patches Anet implemented first an incomplete global cooldown (Feb 26 patch – the GCD was deliberate; the incomplete implementation was widely thought to be a bug) then replaced the original trait with the one we have now (March 26). Throughout this process there was strong opposition on these forums to the changes, and in particular to the GCD. ANet did not heed these protests and the GCD is a core feature of the KR trait we have now.

Here’s the
old KR trait

some threads from the last four months that feature KR (this is incomplete but gives you more info than you’re likely to need) – in no particular order:
Kit Refinement restricts swapping
Kit Refinement effects post patch
So Kit refinement dead
Kit refinement nerf tested + explained
Kit refinement skill….revised and tested
They broke Kit Refinement :-(
Your 3 favourite traits?
Med Kit Refinement = BOOM!?
4 kit build advice
Your Kit Refinement build?
RIP Kit Refinement

and finishing off with some light relief:
KR was just holding me back!