Everyone’s said it better than me before. My guild is full of a bunch of longtime friends, and we’ve returned to the April update, but all the good stuff is soured by the trait unlock system. I’m the only one currently running a fresh alt and it is excruciating, others have said that unless things changed their alts will be the old grandfathered ones they already had, because they’re just not willing to deal with the trait unlock system.
I also convinced a friend to pick up the game before I realize how bad it was and she is having much less fun with it because she cant freely experiment with her build. Sure, she would’ve had to pay respec costs before, but how often did you need to actually reassign your points, really?
= What I’m doing to circumvent the cost =
Instead of paying attention to your neat content I’m waypoint hopping while it’s still cheap, clearing out skill challenges on all maps. The 200 skill points I can get this way should get me through most of the skill point cost, which is the worst of it for a veteran player running alts. If you’re a new player even if you’re doing the skill challenges you’ll never have the gold. It’ll still wipe out my bank balance and make sure I’ll never be able to afford all that nifty cultural and order armor you guys put so much effort into.
Additionally I’ve looked up guides to determine what build I want and I’m focussing only on getting the traits I need for that unlocked. This isn’t what you wanted with multiple viable builds, now people are going even more flavor of the month because of the huge cost associated with getting even a single build up and running.
Is this how you want us to play the game? O_o
= The problems =
- Trait unlock quests are the same for every class. 100% Lornar’s Pass? Well I already did world completion on my main, but okay. I’ll do it again. And again. And again. And OH GOD KILL ME PLEASE. I did it today, never again. It took me all day to 100% Lornar’s Pass. I don’t even wanna think about some of the other zones. And you want me to do this for every alt I roll? Doing the same story dungeon over and over? I can’t even get my guildmates to do explorable token runs.
- Speaking of explorables, those paths tend to be merciless. Without proper traits, they’ve become that much harder for new players to get in on. Imagine pugging; “Oh, you’re a new player? Sorry dude. /kick”.
- Purchase price is ridiculous, at 360 skillpoints and almost 50 gold. This is impossible for new players who will be stuck with bad traits, feeling bored and stuck with the same gameplay until they reach either 60 and they can start grinding out skill scrolls in WvW to unlock traits, or 80 if they’re into PvE. Even giving the benefit of the doubt that 50% of the unlocks aren’t ridiculous tasks, that’s still 180 skillpoints and 24 gold to buy the rest. It’s just not feasible for anyone but the most dedicated, veteran of players. I’ve played for well over a year and I can’t afford to do it.
- Trait unlocks require WvW/don’t allow WvW. Some people like leveling exclusively in WvW, some people hate PvP and want nothing of it. When you’re forcing people to do Obsidian Sanctum for their falling damage mitigation trait, you’re forcing them to deal with PvP they might not be interested in. Without the falling damage mitigation trait, doing jumping puzzles is unwise at best, cutting off people from a huge chunk of PvE content unless they spend the cost again. Vice versa, those with no taste for PvE can’t unlock the vast majority of traits.
- Uplevels are now a liability in WvW. Whereas before an uplevel could tweak their build as needed as they progressed through levels to offer maximum efficiency to their server, now they’re bland, untraited, generic and just not very good. And I’m saying this as someone who runs uplevels through WvW. I’m not just there for free exp, I want to be useful and that’s basically impossible now.
- A lot of the content is impossible to solo. This makes it even more of a drag to unlock traits.
= Possible solutions =
What should be done at minimum is to make the unlocks account-based and not character based, because making me 100% Lornar’s Pass over and freaking over is just ridiculous. I know someone is very proud of the work they did on that zone, but I hate that zone and after the 2nd time 100%ing it I am well and truly sick of it.
What you should really do is tone down the money cost (its like 20 times as expensive as it used to be), remove the skill point cost entirely, make the activities required to unlock traits soloable activities, or at least activities you can do with a small group of 2-3 people, and have a WvW and a PvE unlock activity for every trait. And even then, if you can’t be bothered making the activities unique for every class, then make them account bound. If you get to be lazy, so do we.
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