I can’t stand the trait unlocking. My favorite part about the game was that I could really do whatever I wanted and still progress. Now whenever you want to try a new build, you have to either stop what you’re doing to fulfill requirements that usually take way too long to do, or pay so much money and skill points that it isn’t feasible to do long term.
A lot of the requirements are things I don’t even want to do, like dungeons or WwW. I and the one person I play with can’t do those by the two of us and I don’t enjoy grouping up with strangers.
Even the ones that can be soloed tend to be terribly unreliable to get. For a group event boss, I’d need to get to the area the event takes place in, idle for an unknown amount of time until the event starts, then hope there are enough people around to do it and that they’re skilled enough to beat it.
Is this really the developer’s idea of fun? Sure isn’t mine, I enjoyed being able to explore the world constantly and not stop and wait just so I can get back to playing the game the way I want to.
This is especially bad because I like experimenting with builds. Now, I’d have to do so much work to unlock everything with my two alts that I’d have to dedicate all my free time to playing GW 2 to do it without it taking ages. I’m not going to waste that much time doing things I don’t enjoy, so I’m just going to play them almost entirely traitless up until level 48 so I can experience the other order storylines. I don’t like the story past that point but that’s a different topic. After that, I’ll only play as my main.
The new trait system prevents me from doing what I was planning to do, getting them to 80 then experimenting with different builds on them. I really wish I’d made alts before this happened, but too late for that. Please revert the system back, or at least make it a lot quicker to unlock everything so I can enjoy playing as my alts.
I’d prefer returning to the old system, but if you must keep the unlocking system, here’s some suggestions on how it could be improved:
- Allow buying traits with karma. This would make the currency actually useful. Since you gain it from doing right about anything, it would also allow unlocking traits the way I like to play the game, just by doing whatever I feel like doing.
- Reduce the costs significantly. Make the amount of currencies required for unlocking everything around as much as a lvl 80 character would likely have gained while reaching that point. Around 100-150 skill points and 20-30 gold seems like a good amount.
- Make the unlocking requirements less time consuming. Having to do 100% in an area with multiple characters takes way too much time to be worth it for unlocking a single trait. They could be closer to what the achievement requirements are. Something like exploring 100 Krytan areas, completing 50 hearts or doing 200 events. Those don’t require you to go out of your way to do anything, shouldn’t be something anyone doesn’t want to do in the game and don’t depend on luck at all.