Guild Wars 2

EDIT: My post was originally posted in the WARRIOR forum, and moved into HoT by a mod. Could a mod please move it BACK to where it belongs? This was a discussion about useless WARRIOR traits, not all classes.

Related thread: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/hot/The-Design-of-Revenant-Traits

In light of some of the trait previews, I must say I am incredibly jealous of the new Rev class already. Most of the traits seem highly appealing even on their own, but with some synergy, they look truly useful.

For example: Gain stability or retaliation (2 different traits) after dodging, and gain bonus endurance when struck with a fairly short cd. Seems like you could keep a fairly high uptime on two powerful boons that are typically in short supply and have very little counterplay, meanwhile dodging far more often.

REV: Cruel Repercussion (Adept): 50% more damage on your next hit, after an opponent negates your attack?! I assume negate means block or interrupt, but it could even mean dodge.

Either way, compare that to:

WAR: Short temper (Adept): Gain 1 might and 1 adrenaline when blocked.

I’m not saying ALL Warrior traits are bad, we’ve actually got a handful of decent ones, but they’re mixed in with unplayable ones, and often played in trees that make no sense whatsoever.

Here is my list of Useless Warrior Traits below.
Reckless Dodge: Damage is insignificant, tiny radius, worthless all around. How about something cool like gaining Regen, or Might, like how the Rev class gains Stability or Retal?

Powerful Banners: Damage is insignificant, tiny radius, banner builds typically have low power anyway, and who summons banners into a crowd of enemies?!

Berserkers Might: Gaining 2 adrenaline every 3 seconds, as a Grandmaster trait?! That’s insanely weak and even more useless with the recent adrenaline change.

Thick Skin: Gain 100 toughness when over 90% health. This just plain irks me. In general, extra toughness is not the same as damage reduction, because of the way it scales, becoming increasingly unhelpful the more of it you have. In other words, the more into the defense tree you go, the more useless this already crappy trait becomes.

Shieldmaster and Missile Deflection need to be combined. Nuff said.

Vigorous Return: A trait that only helps you slightly after you get knocked down, and then get back up again. Given that War downed state may be the 2nd worst out there, once a Warrior goes down, odd’s are he isn’t getting back up.

Rousing Resilience: +1000 toughness after breaking a stun? Again, largely useless for the fact that it uses toughness, and not a flat damage reduction, or a boon like protection. This could easily be fixed, by changing it to Protection.

Determined Revival: +400 toughness while reviving. Again, useless for the fact that it uses toughness, and not a flat damage reduction, or a boon like protection. This could easily be fixed, by changing it to Protection.

Revivers Might: Seems just a bit weak. I know it’s a minor, but its so easy to spam AOE might, this is just unhelpful.

Stronger Bowstrings: This just needs to be baseline for the longbow. The autoattack is already 1200 (yeah, it still says 1000 in the tooltip after 2 years)

Burning Arrows: What does this have to do with the tactics tree, which is all about shouting, buffing, reviving, banners, and boons? This belongs in the Arms tree, or basically anywhere else.

Thrill of the Kill: Most times, if you just killed someone, you’re about to lose all your adrenaline over the next 5 seconds anyway. Mildly useful in WvW zergs, but in such a target rich environment, there’s no shortage of ways to build up adrenaline.

Sweet Revenge: This trait REALLY needs to be baseline. If you kill someone while in vengeance, you totally deserve your free rally. See, the problem is warriors almost NEVER even get to use their vengeance state due to how bad warriors are when downed, MUCH LESS actually KILL anyone in it (outside of PvE, but why are you downed in PvE to begin with?!?). When I’m fighting against an enemy war, if I dont have stability up AND im far away or I get CC’d just when they go down, every so often, they’ll actually manage to use vengeance. This occurs maybe 1/10 times, in an already highly unlikely scenario. But then to actually KILL another player after all that? It’s almost impossible. And certainly not worth a trait.

If it were to happen they would tell us I believe, all that’s changing seem to be the mechanic not actual traits. They should be busy right now,wait like 2-3 months after HoT if it doesn’t happen there ,it’s simply not going to happen. I struggle to believe how you cannot improve inferior traits and skills, it should be obvious if not time should have made it by now. Forum specialist may be the last step to proper in class balancing.

Hopefully this thread gets heard “properly”.

Sagat.3285:

Forum specialist may be the last step to proper in class balancing.

Hopefully this thread gets heard “properly”.

We’re waiting on all professions to get represented for specialists.

My hope is that the specializations are really streamlined from the get go(wishful thinking) and that they polish the base classes to match that so they are still viable. I’d hate to see the specializations make some base class builds useless. We shall see. What’s the point of specializations if they neuter variety in builds?

i just want last refuge to not exist.

i’d rather the first point in shadow arts not give me anything than give last refuge.

I’ve literally just a couple of hours ago made my first warrior so I don’t know a lot about them. But with other professions I know that seemingly useless traits can become useful if you match them with particular other traits and stats.

Eg. you want all the toughness boosts replaced with protection. Well toughness stacks in strength and protection only in duration so if you already have protection from another source they’d become useless. Plus it’s possible these traits are intended for players with low toughness (who would benefit most) like the 99.9% of the population who wears full berserker.

My point is traits might not be any use to you with your particular play style and gear but could still be useful to others.

What we don’t know – but would be interesting – are the statistics which ArenaNet would have. They’d record what traits players have equipped and would know which ones see little to no use.

Hopefully they do a look over & rework of allot of the existing traits.

Looking at my guardian he has a good 25-30 weapon skills/traits/utilityskills that range between so niche they never get used, next to useless in any situation, on so long a CD its not worth using, to just plain sad.

My necromancer isn’t far behind either & I’m sure there are plenty of other traits, weapon skills & utilities in game on other classes that qualify in one of these areas.

Hoping they get rid of the useless fall damage traits please. Make that baseline or something tied into another trait.

yessir, thank you for the thread. fixing useless traits AND utilities should be one of their priorities. dare i say, even some weapons need to be redesigned. id just like to point out a few examples:

ranger:
- useless (or near-useless aka not competitive aka does not bring enough to the table) shouts, spirits and traps; that’s 12 skills
- OH axe, warhorn
- BM and skirmishing lines
- 70% of pets do not have a use, period.

ele:
- sigils, conjured weapons

necro:
- MH dagger, warhorn
- questionable minions

thief
- MH pistol, s/p pistol

warrior:
- rifle, OH sword, banners

ALL the new healing skills they attempted to introduce! none are being used to this day! most of the new GM’s…still not being used.

probably a few dozen other useless traits, and so on…I hope they’ve been using their metrics to see what is and isn’t being used in pvp and wvw.

TLDR: im also very concerned about the Revenant and new specializations completely overshadowing old stuff that isn’t being used. build variety is as paltry as it’s ever been, and roughly half of the profession content is not usable to any decent effect. the xpac is the perfect opportunity to refresh each profession, and I don’t mean just by introducing new specs, as excited as I am about them.

I too would like to see some traits tweaked to keep up with the changes to all the profession and game improvement/balancing. some traits are weirdly unuseful and maybe they should be scrapped. But a lot of them are not used because you really would have to sacrifice too much to get that situational trait.

My dream would be to have traits swap with weapons. I think you could get a lot more variety or builds and see a lot more of the situational traits finding their way into a setup. this idea has been shot down but I like the idea of being able to maximize each weapon set for offense or cc or defense and really mix up teams.

mistsim.2748:

necro:
- MH dagger, warhorn
- questionable minions

Don’t you dare touch either dagger or warhorn. Those are our best designed weapons!

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

mistsim.2748:

necro:
- MH dagger, warhorn
- questionable minions

Don’t you dare touch either dagger or warhorn. Those are our best designed weapons!

dont wanna start a thing here, but they don’t get any use in “higher ranks” or competitive pvp. maybe they were designed well, and maybe they can be improved with traits. but my point was if it’s only being used by a minority or not at all, it needs work.

mistsim.2748:

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

mistsim.2748:

necro:
- MH dagger, warhorn
- questionable minions

Don’t you dare touch either dagger or warhorn. Those are our best designed weapons!

dont wanna start a thing here, but they don’t get any use in “higher ranks” or competitive pvp. maybe they were designed well, and maybe they can be improved with traits. but my point was if it’s only being used by a minority or not at all, it needs work.

Actually, for those, the work needs to go in the other half of the skill bar. The weapons are perfectly viable, but the utility support for that style isn’t quite there. Dagger/Warhorn is the Necro’s highest damage and highest sustain weapon set.

I am expecting a lot of tooltip changes, and little else. The Anet way.

Agree with most of the traits, but the Reckless dodge and sweet revenge. You can’t tell me using a 100 cd skill (from mesmer Illusion of life) on yourself is going to be fair when other classes got nothing else but some stupid basic skills.

mistsim.2748:

…

dont wanna start a thing here, but they don’t get any use in “higher ranks” or competitive pvp. …

If you are speaking about pvp, you should write it down. Traps for ranger are really strong in wvw and good in pve too. OH axe and warhorn are good in pve too.
But i agree with shouts, nature rituals and beastmaster traits.

Aleksander Suburb.4287:

mistsim.2748:

…

dont wanna start a thing here, but they don’t get any use in “higher ranks” or competitive pvp. …

If you are speaking about pvp, you should write it down. Traps for ranger are really strong in wvw and good in pve too. OH axe and warhorn are good in pve too.
But i agree with shouts, nature rituals and beastmaster traits.

hmmm interesting. I have about 1000 hours logged in my ranger in wvw alone since the open beta, and I never found traps to be of any use against competent players, in skirmishes or zerg busting. the problem with traps is you can only slot one stunbreak at most, and you have no other defensive utilities. trappers are instagibbed usually for that reason. in fact I haven’t seen a trap ranger in wvw in over 18 months. but I guess with the huge diaspora of vets in the last year or so, new players are coming in and trying silly things.

for traps to be viable, they need to be the way they are now when traited, but without any trait investment, in addition to giving you additional benefits like a stunbreak and a boon on use. condi rangers in wvw apply conditions much faster through sigils and weapons compared to throwing traps, and have a tone more survivability by using the utility slots for signets and LR.

I agree that OH axe is good in PVE, but I guess im only coming from a pvp perspective.

I always liked the sheer simplistic uselessness of Retaliatory Subconscious.

If it also granted protection and a massive buff to retaliation damage for that duration as well it would be useful (in part due to the fact that 3 of the other 5 adept virtue traits are skill specific), but it just gives you a tiny duration retal every 30 seconds.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/guardian/The-bad-trait-skill-list/first

Guardian’s already have a pretty decently compiled list

mistsim.2748:

ranger:
- useless (or near-useless aka not competitive aka does not bring enough to the table) shouts, spirits and traps; that’s 12 skills
- OH axe, warhorn
- BM and skirmishing lines
- 70% of pets do not have a use, period.

ele:
- sigils, conjured weapons

necro:
- MH dagger, warhorn
- questionable minions

thief
- MH pistol, s/p pistol

warrior:
- rifle, OH sword, banners

ALL the new healing skills they attempted to introduce! none are being used to this day! most of the new GM’s…still not being used.

probably a few dozen other useless traits, and so on…I hope they’ve been using their metrics to see what is and isn’t being used in pvp and wvw.

TLDR: im also very concerned about the Revenant and new specializations completely overshadowing old stuff that isn’t being used. build variety is as paltry as it’s ever been, and roughly half of the profession content is not usable to any decent effect. the xpac is the perfect opportunity to refresh each profession, and I don’t mean just by introducing new specs, as excited as I am about them.

Since skills work the same way in PVP and PVE I don’t think certain abilities need buffing if they are completely overused in one aspect.

Elementalist Conjures are used everywhere in PVE and are some of the most powerful skills in PVE, although lacking in PVP that doesn’t mean they can buff those skills without causing serious problems in PVE.

Frost Spirit is a welcome addition to any PVE group. Spirit Rangers in general play well in PVP, OH Axe is almost meta in PVE dungeon running.

As for the new Healing Skills, Arcane Brilliance (Elementalist skill) is used extensively in PVE, Invigorating Precision (new Thief GM trait) is great for Thieves (use S/P and Pistol Whip anything) etc

I’d rather they first update and buff skills, weapons and traits that are COMPLETELY useless in ALL game types. Then they can tweak skills that are useless in one part of the game but not in others.

Well the new boons and other changes means that there should be some changes to existing traits, hopefully they take that oppurtunity for changing other things as well,

mistsim.2748:

Aleksander Suburb.4287:

mistsim.2748:

…

dont wanna start a thing here, but they don’t get any use in “higher ranks” or competitive pvp. …

If you are speaking about pvp, you should write it down. Traps for ranger are really strong in wvw and good in pve too. OH axe and warhorn are good in pve too.
But i agree with shouts, nature rituals and beastmaster traits.

hmmm interesting. I have about 1000 hours logged in my ranger in wvw alone since the open beta, and I never found traps to be of any use against competent players, in skirmishes or zerg busting. the problem with traps is you can only slot one stunbreak at most, and you have no other defensive utilities. trappers are instagibbed usually for that reason. in fact I haven’t seen a trap ranger in wvw in over 18 months. but I guess with the huge diaspora of vets in the last year or so, new players are coming in and trying silly things.

for traps to be viable, they need to be the way they are now when traited, but without any trait investment, in addition to giving you additional benefits like a stunbreak and a boon on use. condi rangers in wvw apply conditions much faster through sigils and weapons compared to throwing traps, and have a tone more survivability by using the utility slots for signets and LR.

I agree that OH axe is good in PVE, but I guess im only coming from a pvp perspective.

I don’t use any stun breaker. Just three traps. And if they stun me, so they should come for me and try to kill me while i’m standing in my own traps. With a trapping build you can fight easily 5 NPCs and kill them in no time. Fights against two other player are more safer and easy compared to a longbow/berserker build especially with the trapper-runes.

More dissapointing are the useless traits for many classes. For rangers it is the faster reviving and get swiftness -.- while you’re rooted to the ally
Or the position of the trap traits in a tree for precision and Ferocity.

So apparently my post was moved by a mod to the HoT subform.

This was meant to be a Warrior thread, really, which is why I posted in the *WARRIOR *subforum.

Could the mod who moved it, please return it to its rightful location??

I completely agree. Most traits in each tree line are outplayed by one trait in each tier, making everyone other trait obsolete in some manner.

mistsim.2748:

yessir, thank you for the thread. fixing useless traits AND utilities should be one of their priorities. dare i say, even some weapons need to be redesigned. id just like to point out a few examples:

ranger:
- useless (or near-useless aka not competitive aka does not bring enough to the table) shouts, spirits and traps; that’s 12 skills
- OH axe, warhorn
- BM and skirmishing lines
- 70% of pets do not have a use, period.

ele:
- sigils, conjured weapons

necro:
- MH dagger, warhorn
- questionable minions

thief
- MH pistol, s/p pistol

warrior:
- rifle, OH sword, banners

ALL the new healing skills they attempted to introduce! none are being used to this day! most of the new GM’s…still not being used.

probably a few dozen other useless traits, and so on…I hope they’ve been using their metrics to see what is and isn’t being used in pvp and wvw.

Oh god… Who are you? You must not play the same game… Absolutely impossible. This or you are trolling…

Rangers : I recon that shout need some work but there are viable build with them. Other than that… Let’s say that you don’t know how to play a ranger.

Ele :
Sigil → extremly strong if you properly build around them
Conjure → Should I say that it’s heavily used in PvE?

Necro :
D/WH → Best dps weapon set, thank you
Minion → perfectly fine if you build around them. Active skill are mostly badly designed.

Thief :
MH pistol is fine especially for condition builds.
S/P allow you to almost permastun stuff, it’s fine.

Warrior :
Banner → One of the greatest strengh of warrior. With just this they are desirable in PvE.
Off hand sword → a block and a pretty strong torment and damaging skill? what more could you want from 2 skills?

I agree that every classes are plagued with bad traits and revenant traits are all sexy but honnestly try to consider everything before saying “This is bad”. Rangers is the pet class of this game. BM and skirmishing grant awesome traits to support your pet which should be the way you use a pet classe.

Dand.8231:

So apparently my post was moved by a mod to the HoT subform.

This was meant to be a Warrior thread, really, which is why I posted in the *WARRIOR *subforum.

Could the mod who moved it, please return it to its rightful location??

You should look at the replies of your post. It is not a majority of warriors.

And if you’re looking to get it fixed with the expansion this is the place for it.

And honestly if you want your topic to get the exposure it needs there is literally no no better place then this one.

You seriously called reckless dodge bad. I don’t know what to say.

It cleanses blinds and still hits hard as a DPS spec.

I do agree that Thick skin is bad and versatile power is bad however. Precise strikes isn’t looking so hot either.

Warrior’s Sprint: Why only works when you wear a melee weapon? pls anet make it work with ranged weapons too!

• Reckless dodge is fine- it can hit hard.
• Powerful Banners is 96/120 s cd to hit for 1k – it doesnt get more useless than that. Make banner pulse combofield avery 5s would be nice (but probably op).
• Shieldmaster and Missile Deflection combined? But you have block on mace #2 and offhand sword #5.
• Revivers Might- make it grant 3might + fury for you and revived ally.
• Thrill of the Kill- this trait had little value before adrenalin “nerf”. Now its useless.
• Rousing Resilience- yes make it protection or 15s duration.
  Also
• Cleansing Ire- make it remove conditions when you use burst skill, even if you miss, are blocked or attack foe evede- as it is now most warrior builds use longbow becasue its burst always “hits”. Why wasnt it made that way after adrenaline nerf is beyond me.
• Phisical Training- making if affect Rampage skills would be nice but op
• Rendering Strike- 33% chance to increase damage by 1% on critical hit- make it 50% or make it 3 stack of vulnerability.

Tbh, and I know you shouldn’t compare, but I can’t sympathize with any classes “poor” traits, compared to the necromancer. The necro flat out has the most worst traits, both major and minor. I play every single class cept thief, and I can say this in all honesty.

To clarify, this isn’t to say that there aren’t traits (major and minor) that should be fixed across the board, there deffo is. But I can’t sympathize at all since the necro has so many bad traits it’s almost embarrassing.

I only skimmed the non-warrior related posts, but to comment on the OP.

I agree with most things, but maybe not everything about Thick Skin, Rousing Resilience, Determined Revival. I don’t think giving warriors easy access to protection is a great idea.

While I know I’m not the norm, I run a Knight/Rabid, sword/shield& longbow build. I assume most people (at least in PvE) run full zerk, so for a different perspective. I’m sitting at ~52% DR compared to a zerker (exotic) ele.

I do agree that Thick Skin is neigh useless, but it is an Adapt lvl minor trait. Maybe make it a passive DR ~3-5% or so (it’ll still really only work on the first hit anyways), or increase the HP threshold so we do see use with it. At least from the WvW & PvP perspective.

Other times, when I switch my build around for giggles, I can regain about 1k hp per second (banners & apoc armor) and don’t really ever lose any hp. A nearby ele in water can also usually keep me easily above 90%. So there are situational times when this trait does get used to it’s full effect, but they are far from the norm. And you’re right with over 3.5k armor the extra 0.1 doesn’t make that much of a difference, especially if only for the first attack.

Determined Revival, again I don’t like the idea of giving warriors protection. If it did, it’d require you having to balance two different things. Warriors just starting a revive then stopping to get a medium length protection while still being able to attack vs. letting the boon be able to be stolen/removed. If it had to give protection, make it a 1s pulse on a 1s CD, thus you’re only rewarded for rezing someone.

Rousing Resilience I agree with you, but for different reasons. I find the trait to be way too situational to be of much use. I haven’t tried it since they up’ed the duration from 4→8s, but I don’t see myself replacing Defy Pain with it. For my build it would increase my DR from ~52% —> ~62%, a whole 10% for 8 seconds after very specific trigger conditions….yay…. Heck even just changing my armor from knights to zerker my DR goes from 43% —> 56%, ever so marginally better, but still kinda meh.

The only enemy who has long enough stuns for me to break would be a hammer war, which I’d rather just blind/immob/stun/kite/dodge/pop balanced stance instead of purposefully getting hit and then using a stun breaker. Or, Claw of Jormag’s fear for days, which this trait would do absolutely nothing.

All that aside, I’d also throw in my two cents for traits that should get a bump.

I’m still angry that Furious was stealth nerfed (like ~1-1.5 years ago…may have been a June update), from +2 adrenaline to +1, and was never really addressed.

Also Blademaster should get some kind of bump. It is the only weapon trait I can think of that doesn’t reduce the recharge on weapon skills. The trait is just in an odd place. The sword is either a condi or a hybrid weapon (or mobility in which case the trait doesn’t matter). If you’re a condi, you most likely already have a high precision to make use of Precise Strikes, plus we have good access to Fury and a signet and banner that increase precision. You could use this with some effect as a hybrid, but there is only 1 heavy hitter on sword main hand. I know the sword skills already have a short CD, but this trait needs a bit something extra to make it more useful. Maybe something tied to adrenaline gain, conditions, or boons if not a weapon CD.