Question in title.
I suppose ArenaNet may be the only one with a definitive answer, but I’m genuinely curious as to what happened to them.
For those of you who didn’t play GW1, Preparations were a skill that added an effect to attacks for a period of time. For example, Ignite Arrows made arrows explode, Read the Wind made arrows move faster and do more damage, etc.
When the Ranger was first revealed back in 2010, there was a developer "question and answer" where one of the devs stated Preparations would be coming back as utility skills. They were then unseen for a while before Sharpening Stone popped up. For the longest time, Sharpening Stone was listed as a preparation on the wiki, but was later changed to Survival. After that, preparations seemed all but gone, aside from a faint rumor they would be returning as traits (akin to how camouflage became a trait).
However, the betas rolled out and preparations were still MIA, and no word from the devs ever emerged.
Some of them were reworked into other skills (Choking Gas is a Thief skill, while Ignite/Kindle Arrows was worked into the Warrior longbow, Rapid Fire is a Longbow skill). Apply Poison was the only preparation to actually make it into GW2 as a Thief utility, but is now called Spider Venom. Aside from the lowly Sharpening Stone, though, the Ranger’s signature skill is all but gone.
There’s a couple reasons why they would not be included
One explanation is they could be overlapping with Thief venoms, but considering Thieves and Rangers can manage to share Traps and 1 "preparation" without feeling similar, I’m sure Preparations could be worked out.
The only other real explanation would be lack of a purpose. The majority of GW1 preparations were +damage of some sort, and that is really hard to translate into the simplified boon system in GW2. Likewise, there’s very little for them to cover with Signets/Survival skills covering the bonus damage.
The last, but not real effective, explanation is the inclusion of melee to the Ranger makes "*adjective* Arrows" preps unavailable, but considering Sharpening Stone is essentially Barbed Arrows, that doesn’t seem like a reason to not include the,.
Still, I would love to see some of the old favorites like Ignite Arrows and Read the Wind worked into GW2 in some way. It would also help to make the Ranger’s currently dull attack animations more exciting. They could also be a good set of utilities for Marksmanship, and move the Signets to Beastmastery where they are more appropriate. It would also be cool to see some new GW2-inspired preps, like Lighting Arrows or Healing Arrows, as well as some of the old Ritualist Weapons spells *cough* Splinter Weapon *cough* return as preparations.
So, does anyone, dev or otherwise, definitively know what happened to Preparations?