Guild Wars 2

We need to talk. Like, serious discussion (puns unintended) about traits. Because you can’t deny how much traits make or break things. Hopefully, all of you will join on your thoughts and what not and with (LOTS) of luck we might get a red response.

Ok to me there are things you just don’t make for traits-
1)Steroids. Never. I don’t mean “gain 20% damage when target is below 50%” or something. I mean “give nearby allies 150 precision”. I want to slam my head into a wall when I read that. Why would I waste a trait for that? Also, “convert 10% of toughness into condi dmg”. No. That’s not only a steroid, its a BIG one. I don’t want to choose between overbearing or weak stat traits. I want something meaningful.
2) Cooldown reduction. Please stop. If I want to play a weaponset, I don’t want to search through my traits to see the “and if you buy now, we’ll throw in a second one free” ad. Either lower the cooldowns or don’t, but just remove these. They waste slots.
3) Redundant traits. “Hammer damage is increased by 25% to stunned targets. Oh and if you pick this trait in a completely unrelated line, you also gain 50% stun chance!!!!”….. “Now, you came to your thief. Good. Here- this trait lowers steals cd. But so does that one.” …. Stop. Just… stop please. Makes it look like no one cared when they read it, and makes us wonder if anyone did in fact read them.
4) Improper reward traits- 50% crit chance in deathshroud, 20% damage to targets below 50% hp…its like “oh you want big damage, here take these”. Then people are crying over a bursty meta… I wonder why. Not to say gaining damage is bad, but when the numbers are so high…
5) Mandatory traits. Anyone who plays Thief or Elementalist extensively will tell you that at least one line is mandatory. Not because of the benefits, or how strong it is, but because it contains so much that NEEDS TO BE BASELINE. Why do I have a trait that raises my base initiative? While you also nerfed the costs to be way too high on my skills? (cnd is 6, total without trickery line is 12, easy math folks) Elemental Attunement is pretty big.
6)RNG traits. Nuff said? Just in case not, I don’t want to pick a slot that “has a chance to” do something. That’s pointless. Either it does or it doesn’t, I don’t need random numbers. Neither do you when you balance. I don’t know anyone who enjoys gambling while trying to outplay someone.
7) Conflicting traits. One needs look no further than Rangers at this point. You have a trait that gives you 10% damage for keeping your endurance full, but on another line that you’d highly consider taking for damage you have a trait that gives you 10% damage for dodge rolling successfully.

Examples of good traits are everywhere however, because they (anet) do a good job very often- Panic Strike for Thieves is just beautiful. For doing your job as a thief, your trait rewards you. Meaningfully. Also, when you have a number of conditions on you, send them to your enemy (necro) and that synergizes with the signet trait that converts 2 boons to conditions when hitting someone with a signet. To me good traits are ones that reward you for playing. You don’t have to go “here’s a stat bar, eat it”. You get good traits like striking a foe while over 90% hp removes these conditions, burns apply blinds, blinds apply confusion. Things that, just by playing, you get an effect from. You don’t have to contemplate staying in one weapon set. You play how it makes you feel good, and you get something from it. Not to say everything will always be effective in that sort of scenario, but I don’t want to pick a trait that says I need a certain weapon to gain the effect (while wielding a sword, successfully evading an attack reduces steals cooldown).

Not saying Anet didn’t do a great job in some (a lot) of zones, but I wish they would take a quick second look. If you are set on releasing a new xpac, you need to be OPEN to suggestions and very willing to explain your reasoning. A one way door is one that people walk out of.

Before I talk about specific Traits lemme say (I’m going to make a bigger post on Thief and what I would do) I do think Anet needs to take time to read through each forum zone. Obviously you should have the manpower, your game is doing well. But then we look into the Thief and WvW forums and your last response to anything can be dated back to 2014. Anywho, Thief trait talk. Gotta find my file.

Hope you all read this, hope we get a red response, and I hope you share your thoughts and opinions with the rest of us. The threads purpose is for you to say what you see on traits and what your stance is on them- are they good, should we change some, are there specific traits that shouldn’t exist or that exist in a state too good too pass? I want to know what you guys think about these.

Anet is trying to get large guilds to do parties in Lion’s Arch on the day of the design reveal, know why? cause they’re going to slaughter us all again with karka swarms. If you did not see this coming then you completely missed all of the clues.
1. Anet pimps new changes to LA and says rebuild is almost done! yay!
2. Notice the Consortium is building LA – why? Gnashblade owns the Black Lion Trading Post, if the Consortium was truly a powerhouse we’d also have the Consortium Trading Post with which to do our trading.
3. Anet asks guilds to publicly announce party plans for the unveiling (suspicious!!)
4. Players discover karkas hiding in the platforms coming from Southsun Cove.
5. We can safely assume there will be fireworks and all kinds of noisy raucus activities with which to get our /dance on.

We’re all going to die and have to fight and rebuild again… Anet is why we can’t have nice things!!!!

I love mini pets, both my own and other peoples, but I’d support this option.

But I’m not sure if it would be possible to hide objects for you without hiding them for everyone else too.

mulch.2586:

there is a suggestions forum

why suggest something to take away player choice?

did you realize the engineer doesn’t exactly have a melee set?

This argument gets brought up over and over again, and it’s a bit of a fallacy.

Melee weapons cannot be used at range. All ranged weapons can be used in melee range.

That’s why the argument that “Engineers don’t have melee weapons, so professions that lack ranged options shouldn’t whine” misses the point. The OP’s point is that weapon swaps limit your weapon choice because one of your weapon choices should be a ranged weapon.

This is not true in every case, but it is true that the ability to be at range and stay at range is often an advantage, and if one of your two swaps is not a ranged weapon, you potentially put yourself at a disadvantage.

I’m surprised noone has jumped on you about learning to play yet.

GW2 is melee unfriendly. You can melee and it’s powerful but it’s not something you do generally. The game was design as kite and kill.

You can do it but at a large disadvantage relative to range. Even on a guardian, the wimpy sceptre is a more effective playstyle than going into melee; particularly vs bosses/champs.

I read one of the short stories that Anet released recently and made impossible to find. Anyway its from the perspective from another character taking place in the most recent update when we take back LA. Whoever writes these stories does a really good job, and in the literature, there is an atmosphere cast that is very dark and rightly so since LA is torn to pieces and is basically a warzone.

However in game, because of the structure of the content, you don’t really feel any trauma in the environment. You may see things torn to rubble and NPC dialogue that is rather dim, but from the players perspective, you feel no threat whatsoever. Looking back at the last LS, where we take back LA. It was kind of a joke in some situations because there are loads of people farming their hearts out at this event, while the devs tried to convey this war-torn atmosphere of LA that didn’t completely get across.

I think this has been a pretty consistent trend with the LS. Its not that the story is bad or the writers are bad, I think its that there is trouble in taking that story and portraying it in every aspect to its fullest extent. With the LA events, I think players could have felt more threatened by being in the zone with all these villains of Scarlet. She has champions lurking around, along with other mobs, but they never really feel that dangerous. One reason is that you can pretty much skip all of them(this is an enormous problem with PVE content in this game that subtracts from the threat players feel from dungeons/fractals/pve content). You can pretty much put auto-walk on and stroll through the zone if you please. The only times i’ve really tread carefully in zones, are in Southsun Cove, and the Older version of Orr where there was a stupid amount of mobs around, with a high respawn rate.

I think for LS season 2, the devs need to work more on creating the atmosphere that the writers are doing when they write this story.