Guild Wars 2

We have currently 4 traits that activate when a certain threshold of health is hit.

Pain response: useful in theory, in practice most of the times it just goes on CD giving only the regen buff and maybe removing one of the 3 conditions.
Hard to Catch: random teleport at random moments, bad since day one.
Last Refuge: we all know about this too.
Instinctual Response: no one has ever used it I think, and for good reasons.

Now, why can’t we have the activation of these traits decided by the player? It’d be a lot better, it’d promote more active gameplay (not just relying on passive abilities which procs nmw), and there’d be not a lot of work to do.

3 of them can just be binded on a specific key (let’s call them F2-F4), and their effects remain the same as they’re now: as soon as the trigger is hit, the skill is usable by the player, and, if used, it goes on cooldown (the duration is the one of the trait). If the skill is not used, and the health goes again over the threshold for any reason, the skill isn’t available anymore (but doesn’t go on CD).

The other trait which maybe should allow us for some more control is Hard to Catch obviously: just make it a ground target, instead of being ported in a random place.

We could maybe have another restriction, in order not to “save” the trait skills for too long, i.e. a window of use of 4-5 seconds, after which the skill is disabled, it doesn’t go on CD but it’s not usable until the trigger is activated again (so we need to go up over the threshold and then down again to have it usable).

I think this modification would make those 4 traits much more useful than they’re now, and mostly less a liability than anything else (Last Refuge, I’m looking at you!).

I agree. We should be given an option to trigger these skills.

+1