Guild Wars 2

Attached is a layout of each profession’s trait line and the stats associated within each line.

For primary stats: Toughness and vitality lines are defensive, while precision and power are offensive. The last trait line at the bottom is reserved for profession specific stats.

Secondary stats: Healing power and boon duration are defensive, while condition damage and crit damage are offensive.

The remaining stat is condition duration which is unanimously found in the power trait line for all professions.

My question is for players that are experienced in other classes besides guardians.

To go offensive or defensive, how do you mix your trait lines for different professions and do they match up with the trait lines?

For example, for primary stats guardians would want toughness and vitality to maximize defense. On the other hand secondary stats would suggest that healing power and boon duration are defensive stats.

Problem now is that those 4 stats are in 3 different trees. Both combinations of the bottom 3 trees have proven to work well for defensive healing as seen in the Healaway build and the AH/crit hammer build.

Would a defensive elemental pick the Earth and Water trait lines or the Water and Arcane trait lines? Or neither of those things?

One interesting side note is that the guardian class is the only one that has toughness combined with crit damage. Possible transposition mistake or intentional placement of that stat? Condition damage or boon duration seems like it would follow the trend of game play mechanics better.

Why is Power always linked to Condition Duration? I’ll never understand. Boon Duration and Virtues makes sense if you look at the tree as a whole. Critical Damage doesn’t make that much sense with Toughness, but what makes even less sense is Healing Power with Vitality. Generally, Healing Power is to support a high Toughness build. If you raise Vitality, you raise your maximum health pool. This means your healing abilities don’t heal for the same percentage of health and instead heal for less. If you raise Healing Power instead of Vitality, you increase the percentage of health you heal with abilities. The two often contradict each other.

In fact, I don’t even know why Pure of Voice is a grandmaster trait in the Vitality tree. Condition removal also supports Toughness over Vitality. There’s somewhat of a combat “square” element to this game. Power (and other damage boosting stats) beats high Vitality. Condition Damage beats high Toughness. Likewise, high Vitality beats Condition Damage and Toughness beats Power. Healing Power and Condition Removal offer great benefits to a Toughness build over a Vitality build under most circumstances. While Guardians have access to a much wider variety of Condition Removal effects than most classes, it’s usually available to counter the lower heath pool the Guardian has. Other classes often are as good if not better at creating bunker builds, but that’s for a different thread.

I’m all in favor of a trait rework for the Guardian. It feels like an organization issue over a distinct lack of good traits. I find myself constantly switching out the Honor traits between an Empowering Might build for Greatsword and boosting Symbols for Hammer to adjust my Altruistic Healing input. I don’t find a large need to switch around the Valor traits nor invest into another category. Altruistic Healing is amazing, but most of its prior traits are lacking. The Honor tree has 9/12 traits that I use on a regular basis when necessary. I should feel a similar need to do the same in other trees.

I feel the trait lines were created with a very specific design in mind.

I think there are a few lines that have “obvious” internal synergy with stats, like Virtues for Guardian, or any line with Toughness and Healing power. The virtues line are all about boons (shouts excluded). It reduces cooldown on virtues, and increases boon duration, and with the way trait points can be allocated, make it a perfect pair with something more offensive minded. For the other trait lines, I think its more of a case of getting some defense with your offense, or, getting different kinds or offense/defense together, so that you build more… I don’t want to say hybrid, but its kind of like that.

Honor for example, is Vitality and Healing Power. So if you build high Vit, although you gain more percentile benefit from Toughness, your healing will be a bit better to account for that Vit. If you build Healing Power, your healing will have more room to be “felt”.

For Valor, Toughness and Crit Damage. Great for glass cannons, as Crit damage is what they need, and you’ll get some toughness along with it. For a bunker build, you get some extra damage so you aren’t as worthless in fighting back.

Traits aside, I think the lines were made with multiple lines in mind (though that’s a fairly obvious statement). What I mean, is that you’d be pairing lines together, or getting multiple benifits, and so the trait lines themselves give multiple benifits, allowing you to really flesh out a build, instead of allocating points into one job so completely narrow, you won’t be as effective dealing with ad-hoc situations as otherwise, which is a design focus Anet has gone for with this game. I feel this game is much more hybrid friendly than others for the exact reason that you get “extra” stats with the ones you want. Similar to how Clerics gear gives power, or Valkerie gear has Vit. You become more of a Glass Cannon, than a paper BFG, and more of a bunker, than the Maginot Line.

Traits are a whole ’nother story.

Do you then feel that certain professions have been guided towards utilizing certain trait lines as they have better mixture of “wanted” stats and traits that better integrate with professions stats and mechanics? (i.e. there is no build diversity, we all need to do what was intended)

I think that currently, there are some lackluster traits that kind of, “prevent” certain builds from forming. Otherwise, stats alone, we can build whatever we desired purely based on mechanics, armor, and trait stats.

I think game mechanics are also involved here (over class mechanics), as like with a condition build for guardian per se. Game mechanics only allow burning to be so useful, and our traits don’t necessarily help us too much in that regard. Radiance is the kicker for a condition damage build. Some of those traits would need to support additional conditions, and conditions on crit.

A problem for me, is that there aren’t many ways I can make other conditions “feel guardian”, and so that just leaves us with sigils, which aren’t enough to hold their own weight. Vulnerability and blind are good. They fit well with Zeal as they feel like power conditions, and benefit solely from condition duration. Radiance 5 (and 15) are good inter-trait line support traits, but they don’t necessarily benefit from their own line. Radiance 15 and Virtues 5 mesh well, but the condition damage from might isn’t utilized well enough for a condition build to take the spot of a power build (who benefits from both damage types, all that passive burning and whatnot).

So as far as your post, our trait synergy, and that of other professions, is there. We either get the traits we want, or we get an “added bonus” from stats we might not be building directly for. In order to make every type of build available and equally competative, we’d have to take into account actual traits and weapon skills. I think those are going to be a lot of the changes we’ll see across all professions in the future.