Guild Wars 2

Dastion.3106:

From a mechanical perspective IP makes the most sense. It enhances the action you’re performing rather than adding an alternate effect. There may be situations where you want to play the build without summoning an illusion when you dodge an attack, but if you’re hitting a shatter then with IP all you’re doing is enhancing the wanted effect rather than creating an alternate effect that could cause issues.

I think getting DE as an innate trait would feel best from the perspective of low-level Mesmers, but this argument in favour of getting IP as an innate trait does make a lot of sense. IP is always beneficial, DE sometimes overwrites phantasms. Unless clones stop overwriting phantasms, that makes IP the trait that would be a no-brainer in every build, while DE is actually a little bit situational. (Even if that “situation” is most of the game outside of dungeons.)

Menaka.5092:

Josh Davis announced for tomorrow a long AMA on Twitch with a first look at the current state of traits in ANet test servers.

All aboard the hype train!

Notably, it’s covering every (non-Elite?) trait in their current forms. So we’ll find out what the consolidated traits look like sooner than we thought!

Chaos Archangel.5071:

They specifically said we’ll be able to grab 3 Grandmasters. So instead of putting trait points, we choose the traitline we want. Since most mesmer builds only jump into 3 traitlines anyway, this is a potentially a pretty major buff to build variety. (sorry Phantasm builds. =[ )

That was my reaction as well. I know some other classes liked to do 6/4/2/2 or 4/4/2/2/2 or whatever, but I haven’t seen any popular Mesmer builds that do that. (Mainly because we have some pretty build-defining Grandmaster traits.) So I think getting the equivalent of 4 extra trait points in exchange for being locked to only three trait lines is a big win for us.

@Swish: Anything that went 644 or 662 is now going to be a full 666. It isn’t very likely that they’ll remove working, effective traits rather than merge ineffective ones so it’s likely we’ll be in better shape than before.

I don’t know Ele too well, but I got the impression from reading Reddit comments that they seem pretty satisfied with what they saw of their trait changes. So that makes me cautiously optimistic for the Mesmer changes, too.

Xaylin.1860:

We also don’t have a heal which would properly benefit from Glamour traits so I don’t see this happening either.

Chronomancer could have a Glamour heal. A healing field that we drop on the ground would make a lot of sense if it’s a defensive/supporty spec, which seems likely.

Xaylin.1860:

skcamow.3527:

Sweeps.3059:

Well looks like we may be getting a F5 on our shatter skills.

Confirmed here

…

Wouldn’t be sure about gaining a fifth shatter. They could easily just change how the existing ones work when picking the new elite specialization.

F5 Shatter is a pretty safe bet (I’m like 90% certain this is what it actually means), but “new way to shatter your illusions” actually does leave some room for other interpretations.

Menaka.5092:

From the UI examples and from the description, looks like you can only have one trait in each tier. They might merge the +damage trait to the base mind wrack skill, or move halting strike somewhere else (or scrap it alltogether). We don’t really know.

I do suspect that most traits which only affect a single skill or weapon type will be going away. Though Mind Wrack is sort of an edge case, since it’s technically a class mechanic.

Still, +X% Damage to Skill Y is kind of a boring trait, so keeping it seems to be at odds with their goals for the new trait system.

Curunen.8729:

Pink
Butterflies

It’s like 90% about the pink butterflies.

The clone/phantasm mechanic is also pretty unique. It’s a cool niche between traditional “pet” classes and Final Fantasy-style summon magic.

IGN: Amberley Avalen
Playstyle: mostly open world PvE, some PvP/WvW
Server: Sea of Sorrows
Role: Scholar