Guild Wars 2

The annoying thing about the Inspiration line is it is our go to line for condition removal, but even more annoying is is the bad grouping in the Master trait line.

Master traits:

Warden’s Feedback (WF) – minus 20% cd for focus weapon + reflects projectiles.

Restorative Illusions (RI) – condition removal on shatter.

Protected Phantasms (PP) – phant distortion with protection (-33% damage on creation).

The thing is if you take inspiration, it is likely you wanted it specifically for power cleanse and Restorative Illusions. Taking Restorative Illusions competes with two of the other best traits in Inspiration (WF and PP). The placement of these three traits at master’s level isn’t necessary and annoying as hell.

I suggest swapping RI with the master minor Inspiring disortion (this is logical as the other two minors are also healing traits – and it is primarily a healing line).

Then swap Persisting Images (adept trait) with PP, or swap Illusionary Inspiration (grandmaster trait) with WF.

The ultimate aim being splitting the 3 best inspiration traits up so you can at least take 2 of these together, so which traits are actually swapped is flexible.

no no no. Inspiring distortion wins fights on it’s own. It syncs extremely well with all the ways we can get distortion. Where I really could care less about WF or PP. They may be the best 3 traits for YOUR build but not for everyone.

If you don’t care about WF, why would you be concerned that he’s moving Inspiring Distortion to compete with it? You’ll still get Inspiring Distortion.
Are you worried that you would have to pick between Persisting Images and ID? Do you ever take PI anyway?

Well as I said the trait swaps are flexible. I just gave the above as an example. The point is to disperse the master traits a bit. The reason for the line is condition removal/healing, so putting RI in competition with other good traits is daft imo. I mean why should someone have to chose between removing a condition on shatter, focus cool down or phant defense. All three of those traits are very good in PvP and WvW. A few of the other traits in the line are pretty much not used that much or are junk, so why create the unnecessary competition.

You mean to say that there are choices within a given tier that are causing us, as players, to make hard decisions about what traits to choose? How dare Anet bestow such decisions upon us?!?

In all seriousness, the trait line’s focuses are Phantasms and Glamours with Healing Power being its original associated attribute. Warden’s Feedback is locked into the master line (based on other identical weapons traits being Master grade).

I can’t say I agree with the arguments as a lot of them seems geared to PvP. From a PvE perspective, Distortion alone can save a team rather than trying to recover from an attack that could have been avoided to begin with. RI doesn’t get as much mileage unless you know you’re going into a condi heavy fight (in which case, Well of Eternity should be enough), and PP is rather meh after the damage changes to player minions.

The idea of trait lines is that you should make compromises. All traits should be good and you should often hesitate because of competing traits. So if your argument is that “we should put RI in competition with junk traits instead of the good WF and PP” I would argue instead “let’s change those junk traits and make them good”.

Now personally, I think WF and PP are near-useless in PvP, so I never hesitated one second to choose RI. Also, RI and WF/PP are pretty much exclusive since one focus on shatters and the other on phantasms (although I could accept that PP is actually a shatter trait). So I really don’t think there is a problem here.