What a mess.

Permanence is the least of the problems I see here. One can always respec but for a fee to a trainer, so it's not so bad. Unlike Arena.Net I don't see the importance of ball and chaining players when they want to respec to try a different strategy against a difficult encounter while in a dungeon for example. But hey, wiki should be completed within 3 weeks of release so you can check what works and what doesn't work before entering a difficult instance lololol.

On the other hand, all the profession specific attributes that decrease recharge time seem lame when compared to the prof. specific attributes that improve life force (health), damage etc.

Good gracious look at how lame the guardian's attribute is. It either provides virtue spamming (lol dynamic comabt) or it reduces all recharge by 5-10 seconds which is just bland for the Virtues of Justice and Courage since they only trigger once. Why not let it provide longer durations on the boons that are triggered when they activate their virtues.

I like it lets you define your toon to your play style and gives you a bonus for it and yeah you might loose a little from it but it allows you as a player to make your choices on how you play and still be effective in a group. It does not say that anywhere in the link that you would gimp yourself or your group but it allows you to define what you like to play and how is all nothing like a talent tree more like the old skill point system except to change it you have to see a trainer first. So like any game there I think it might work out will have to see I just don't want to play a game where I am the same as the next what ever no matter what.

So now there are 10 attributes per character? That's quite an amount.

Oh, and, what do the 4 base attributes do now (power, precision, toughness, and vitality)?

I'm actually really happy with this. I like having a sense of permanency to my character. Your decisions when building your character carry significant meaning now. They just need to work out something so you don't teleport back to town from a dungeon, respec, teleport back, and fight the boss with this specific boss-killing build. Honestly, had I designed it, I would have restricted you from changing builds at all in a dungeon.

I'm not thrilled about weapon- or skill-specific traits, but I'll wait to see how the balance works out before I complain. The traits look very unbalanced right now.

The only change I would ask for is removing the points you receive in your primary four attributes when you level up. They might as well make it so you gain attributes exclusively from gear and trait points. If you don't put points into vitality when you level, your health doesn't increase. I don't know if they'd even need level scaling at all if they did that.

Guru freaks out because they're terrified of change. More at 11.

Hmm, sounds alright, and you should get enough points make a diverse enough character to handle a number of situations. My main concerns are:

1. Is there much / any point to spending points not in groups of 5? For example: why go 26, 26, 18, when 25, 25, 20 gets you an extra major trait slot at the cost of only 1 point in 2 attributes.

2. Is everything going to become too 'busy'? With traits like "gain the Might boon when swapping weapons", and "drops a field of caltrops every time she dodges" in addition to regular skills, aren't there just going to be special effects going off like it's constantly 00:00 on new years eve.

3. The profession specific attributes seem kind of... hidden away / wasted, I mean there is only one trait line that increases them, so if you don't take that line it's like you're wasting the uniqueness of that class.

This is all speculation of course, and as someone who has tried their hand a creating an RPG system I know it's far from easy, but this just doesn't strike me as a perticularly great system. Also, they redesigned Boons / Conditions so they weren't as 'mathy', yet this system has 'mathy' written all over it :/

I guess iteration can go both ways, , this is what they wrote about traits in an older blog ( http://www.guildwars2.com/en/the-game/combat/traits-overview/ ) :

'We want experimentation with traits to be fun and engaging, so we've made the rules for changing traits extremely flexible. With no in-game cost, you can respec at will, outside of combat. This means you are open to experiment with what works and what doesn't work on the fly, without having to go back to town or worry about if you have enough gold. '

I see current changes as a step back. They now want to tax experimentation, it makes no sense according to their own design philosophy. The whole point was that professions are supposed to be flexible. Put the goldsink on something else please and let us save PVE templates too.

Originally posted by someforumguy

I guess iteration can go both ways, , this is what they wrote about traits in an older blog ( http://www.guildwars2.com/en/the-game/combat/traits-overview/ ) :

'We want experimentation with traits to be fun and engaging, so we've made the rules for changing traits extremely flexible. With no in-game cost, you can respec at will, outside of combat. This means you are open to experiment with what works and what doesn't work on the fly, without having to go back to town or worry about if you have enough gold. '

I see current changes as a step back. They now want to tax experimentation, it makes no sense according to their own design philosophy. The whole point was that professions are supposed to be flexible. Put the goldsink on something else please and let us save PVE templates too.

this

I'll repeat what I said in GW2 guru thread for those who think holy trinity is back again and wat not.

"To all those who complain, you are forgetting one major thing. This game is VERY action based where personal skill is just so much more important and will overshadow any of these traits/attributes mechanics that the game will have.

Ya there might be initially things like "LF Support Guardian" or wat not. Yet if that Support Guardian doesn't make good use of dodge, or doesn't use environment to his/her advantage or doesn't position him/herself well or doesn't activate skills at the right time, that player will be terrible and will letdown the whole team just because of the lack of personal playing skills.

When people start realizing just how much player skill itself is important to being successful, then all these "LF this LF that" garbage will be thrown out of the window.

I personally love the attribute and traits systems just because I know I'll invest tons amount of time personalizing my character to my play-style."

Originally posted by someforumguy

I guess iteration can go both ways, , this is what they wrote about traits in an older blog ( http://www.guildwars2.com/en/the-game/combat/traits-overview/ ) :

'We want experimentation with traits to be fun and engaging, so we've made the rules for changing traits extremely flexible. With no in-game cost, you can respec at will, outside of combat. This means you are open to experiment with what works and what doesn't work on the fly, without having to go back to town or worry about if you have enough gold. '

I see current changes as a step back. They now want to tax experimentation, it makes no sense according to their own design philosophy. The whole point was that professions are supposed to be flexible. Put the goldsink on something else please and let us save PVE templates too.

I agree. Seems like they caved to the theorycrafters who often insist that more "permanence" is some how required for specs to establish your character's "identity".

I'm glad you can still change them for a small fee and a visit to a trainer, but I would much rather that not be necassary. Barriers to easy and free spec changes just encourages people to stick with Flavor of the Month builds to the detriment of more free form experimentation. (This also really flies in the face of the game's design philosophy, which has eschewed game mechanics that force you to stop having fun enjoying content for a forced return to a trainer).

As a compromise, I would ask for the ability to have two or more specs you can freely switch between in the field, with a visit to a trainer only needed to reset those specs.

Originally posted by Vaultar

I'll repeat what I said in GW2 guru thread for those who think holy trinity is back again and wat not.

"To all those who complain, you are forgetting one major thing. This game is VERY action based where personal skill is just so much more important and will overshadow any of these traits/attributes mechanics that the game will have.

Ya there might be initially things like "LF Support Guardian" or wat not. Yet if that Support Guardian doesn't make good use of dodge, or doesn't use environment to his/her advantage or doesn't position him/herself well or doesn't activate skills at the right time, that player will be terrible and will letdown the whole team just because of the lack of personal playing skills.

When people start realizing just how much player skill itself is important to being successful, then all these "LF this LF that" garbage will be thrown out of the window.

I personally love the attribute and traits systems just because I know I'll invest tons amount of time personalizing my character to my play-style."

 

You can't say that the more support guardian, for example, won't be taken over the more dpsy one, if their player skill are somewhat the same. Ofcourse it's not that the trinity is back, but it still might make people have to have a certain spec to be taken in a dungeon, considering players of somewhat equal skill. Have to see more details on how it works out tho.

Originally posted by cali59

I really really dislike this change for two reasons.

 

First:

We realized that an important part of building a character is some sense of permanence. With this new system, you are flexible enough to change if you really want to, but you should still feel like the choices you made matter while you are out adventuring or slogging your way through a dungeon. In competitive PvP, you have a separately saved trait build and can respec free of charge.

 

I don't get this, it doesn't seem like it fits at all.  Combat is supposed to be fluid with people able to build towards different roles based on the encounter.  In some other game yeah I can kind of see the idea of having a tankish build of skills and then locking in traits to support that, but what if in GW2 you need to be controlling for one encounter and support for the next?  You can totally change your skills but now you have traits that don't support this change at all.

And in a game full of instant teleportation (and one person can leave a dungeon as long as they all don't) then what is the point of making people go back to town to pay a fee and make everyone wait?

The only way this makes sense to me is if traits are so complicated compared to skills that you want to actively discourage their respecing so people don't have to wait for people to keep allocating points before every boss battle.

 

And if that wasn't bad enough, we have this.

Major Traits (For each of the three unlocked slots, the warrior may choose any of these):

• Gain adrenaline whenever killing an enemy.
• Reduced signet-recharge time.
• Movement skills break out of the Immobilize condition.
• Reduced burst-skill recharge time.
• Gain adrenaline when inflicting a critical hit with an axe skill.
• Increased movement speed while wielding a melee weapon.
• Reduced burst-skill adrenaline cost.
• Chance to rally whenever killing an enemy while under the effects of Vengeance.
• Improved critical chance for each full level of adrenaline.

Traits that depend on specific things I think are particularly bad, but not so much when you can freely change them and your skills.  You just have to make a judgement call whether it's worth taking the trait when you have X number of Signets or certain weapons.  Now, if you switch your weapons/skills due to a different boss, you're now going to have 100% worthless major traits if you took these.

 

I really hope guildwars2guru is going ballistic over this.

 

edit: someone on GW2Guru is saying you need to go to a trainer to respec the points, but you can freely swap the major traits.  That's better but still not awesome to me.  Also I don't know if that's confirmed.

 

It was me Cali. I lurk here in these forums for quite a while now! xD 

But as I said before to you and another guy there, and to everyone here read it:

You can change the Major Traits like you could earlier and you have all of them available to you, and this is something a lot of people didn't understood yet. So, the old system of Traits change is still in the game. What you can't change without spending a small fee are the Minor Traits and the new Trait Attributes, because those are stuck in the Trait Lines you spend points in. The only way to change Trait Lines is re-spec the points in them.
So yeah, it's a middle ground of can/can't change Traits, but you will know what Minor Traits you wont use so, in my point of view, it's really about beeing a Jack-of-all-trades-but-master-of-none-Warrior or beeing, for example, a Master-of-2(+1)-trades-Warrior (giving the Build of Jon Peters in this last example). If you could change everything, the number of playstyles in each profession would have to be less because of balance in Traits. If you couldn't change anything, we would have another traditional MMORPG.

Just think. Respec is only if you want to change the points you have in the Trait Lines. 
As you see in the article, each Trait Line has pre-defined Minor Traits like in Warrior Discipline below (all of them related to swaping weapons), so you know you can't change those. But the Major Traits are only slots that you unlock, so you will still have the ability to chose which Trait you want in that slot.
If you only respec to change the points you have in the Trait Lines, that means you wont need to respec to change the Traits you have in those slots.

This are my conclusions about it, so it was easier to copy-paste from there.

My only question is in another problem. How will they manage to keep this current system away from "LF (class) with X,Y Trait Lines" in Dungeons/PVP/Squads/Guilds? Only time will tell! But I guess players will forget about that problem in a game it's easier to play socially with others.

Originally posted by AvatarBlade

Originally posted by Vaultar

I'll repeat what I said in GW2 guru thread for those who think holy trinity is back again and wat not.

"To all those who complain, you are forgetting one major thing. This game is VERY action based where personal skill is just so much more important and will overshadow any of these traits/attributes mechanics that the game will have.

Ya there might be initially things like "LF Support Guardian" or wat not. Yet if that Support Guardian doesn't make good use of dodge, or doesn't use environment to his/her advantage or doesn't position him/herself well or doesn't activate skills at the right time, that player will be terrible and will letdown the whole team just because of the lack of personal playing skills.

When people start realizing just how much player skill itself is important to being successful, then all these "LF this LF that" garbage will be thrown out of the window.

I personally love the attribute and traits systems just because I know I'll invest tons amount of time personalizing my character to my play-style."

 

You can't say that the more support guardian, for example, won't be taken over the more dpsy one, if their player skill are somewhat the same. Ofcourse it's not that the trinity is back, but it still might make people have to have a certain spec to be taken in a dungeon, considering players of somewhat equal skill. Have to see more details on how it works out tho.

Also, 2 guardians (dps + support) can't switch roles during combat anymore, because both are too specialized.

Without specific roles, the front guardian would have to retreat when low on health and leave the fighting to the other guardian while supporting him. With specific roles, everyone has to stick to their role until the group either wins or wipes... Doesn't sound like flexible or dynamic combat to me. Well, I hope it's not really going to be that way, but still... causiously panicking.

Originally posted by Morcotulcon

Originally posted by cali59

I really really dislike this change for two reasons.

 

First:

We realized that an important part of building a character is some sense of permanence. With this new system, you are flexible enough to change if you really want to, but you should still feel like the choices you made matter while you are out adventuring or slogging your way through a dungeon. In competitive PvP, you have a separately saved trait build and can respec free of charge.

 

I don't get this, it doesn't seem like it fits at all.  Combat is supposed to be fluid with people able to build towards different roles based on the encounter.  In some other game yeah I can kind of see the idea of having a tankish build of skills and then locking in traits to support that, but what if in GW2 you need to be controlling for one encounter and support for the next?  You can totally change your skills but now you have traits that don't support this change at all.

And in a game full of instant teleportation (and one person can leave a dungeon as long as they all don't) then what is the point of making people go back to town to pay a fee and make everyone wait?

The only way this makes sense to me is if traits are so complicated compared to skills that you want to actively discourage their respecing so people don't have to wait for people to keep allocating points before every boss battle.

 

And if that wasn't bad enough, we have this.

Major Traits (For each of the three unlocked slots, the warrior may choose any of these):

• Gain adrenaline whenever killing an enemy.
• Reduced signet-recharge time.
• Movement skills break out of the Immobilize condition.
• Reduced burst-skill recharge time.
• Gain adrenaline when inflicting a critical hit with an axe skill.
• Increased movement speed while wielding a melee weapon.
• Reduced burst-skill adrenaline cost.
• Chance to rally whenever killing an enemy while under the effects of Vengeance.
• Improved critical chance for each full level of adrenaline.

Traits that depend on specific things I think are particularly bad, but not so much when you can freely change them and your skills.  You just have to make a judgement call whether it's worth taking the trait when you have X number of Signets or certain weapons.  Now, if you switch your weapons/skills due to a different boss, you're now going to have 100% worthless major traits if you took these.

 

I really hope guildwars2guru is going ballistic over this.

 

edit: someone on GW2Guru is saying you need to go to a trainer to respec the points, but you can freely swap the major traits.  That's better but still not awesome to me.  Also I don't know if that's confirmed.

 

It was me Cali. I lurk here in these forums for quite a while now! xD 

But as I said before to you and another guy there, and to everyone here read it:

You can change the Major Traits like you could earlier and you have all of them available to you, and this is something a lot of people didn't understood yet. So, the old system of Traits change is still in the game. What you can't change without spending a small fee are the Minor Traits and the new Trait Attributes, because those are stuck in the Trait Lines you spend points in. The only way to change Trait Lines is re-spec the points in them.
So yeah, it's a middle ground of can/can't change Traits, but you will know what Minor Traits you wont use so, in my point of view, it's really about beeing a Jack-of-all-trades-but-master-of-none-Warrior or beeing, for example, a Master-of-2(+1)-trades-Warrior (giving the Build of Jon Peters in this last example). If you could change everything, the number of playstyles in each profession would have to be less because of balance in Traits. If you couldn't change anything, we would have another traditional MMORPG.

 

Just think. Respec is only if you want to change the points you have in the Trait Lines. 
As you see in the article, each Trait Line has pre-defined Minor Traits like in Warrior Discipline below (all of them related to swaping weapons), so you know you can't change those. But the Major Traits are only slots that you unlock, so you will still have the ability to chose which Trait you want in that slot.
If you only respec to change the points you have in the Trait Lines, that means you wont need to respec to change the Traits you have in those slots.

 

This are my conclusions about it, so it was easier to copy-paste from there.

My only question is in another problem. How will they manage to keep this current system away from "LF (class) with X,Y Trait Lines" in Dungeons/PVP/Squads/Guilds? Only time will tell! But I guess players will forget about that problem in a game it's easier to play socially with others.

thank you for that, I am fine with it this way.. honestly this is how I thought it already was. I was just worried about those majors with the ranger because of the species training ones.

Originally posted by doragon86

I care very little about the money sink. However, I don't like the idea of having to go to town to respec. I'd rather they allow you to respec for PvE on the fly and just integrate the fee into that, i.e. no respec NPC.

This is my main reservation as well. I could care less about any money, it's just the inconvience of it all. I'm not sure what their goal is here. Anyway, with how  many times they have changed it all up I'm sure we'll see them change it again.

Originally posted by Morcotulcon

It was me Cali. I lurk here in these forums for quite a while now! xD 

But as I said before to you and another guy there, and to everyone here read it:

You can change the Major Traits like you could earlier and you have all of them available to you, and this is something a lot of people didn't understood yet. So, the old system of Traits change is still in the game. What you can't change without spending a small fee are the Minor Traits and the new Trait Attributes, because those are stuck in the Trait Lines you spend points in. The only way to change Trait Lines is re-spec the points in them.
So yeah, it's a middle ground of can/can't change Traits, but you will know what Minor Traits you wont use so, in my point of view, it's really about beeing a Jack-of-all-trades-but-master-of-none-Warrior or beeing, for example, a Master-of-2(+1)-trades-Warrior (giving the Build of Jon Peters in this last example). If you could change everything, the number of playstyles in each profession would have to be less because of balance in Traits. If you couldn't change anything, we would have another traditional MMORPG.

 

Just think. Respec is only if you want to change the points you have in the Trait Lines. 
As you see in the article, each Trait Line has pre-defined Minor Traits like in Warrior Discipline below (all of them related to swaping weapons), so you know you can't change those. But the Major Traits are only slots that you unlock, so you will still have the ability to chose which Trait you want in that slot.
If you only respec to change the points you have in the Trait Lines, that means you wont need to respec to change the Traits you have in those slots.

 

This are my conclusions about it, so it was easier to copy-paste from there.

My only question is in another problem. How will they manage to keep this current system away from "LF (class) with X,Y Trait Lines" in Dungeons/PVP/Squads/Guilds? Only time will tell! But I guess players will forget about that problem in a game it's easier to play socially with others.

I saw your reply but then I had to step out so I didn't respond to it yet.  I'll probably end up copying something like this over there as well.

I did see that your Major Traits can still be reslotted and that's something at least.  I know that even if we trait a certain way our other skills won't become useless, but I am concerned about people being gimped for particular encounters.

For example, suppose you have a warrior with 30 points in Defense.  (I know this is a work in progress, but here's the trait list and what's available and how it presumably gives 300 Toughness and 300 Compassion)  http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/List_of_warrior_traits

Now suppose you reach a spider boss that 1-shots everyone in melee range like the one described here.  http://www.guildwars2guru.com/forum/showpost.php?p=805995&postcount=42

If this warrior has to switch to a Longbow or Rifle, they'll still be able to contribute, but I'd think pretty poorly compared to a guy who could respec his traits.  He can presumably find 3 Majors which aren't totally useless (Adrenal Health, Cull the Weak, and Sure Footed for instance) but compared to what you'd come up with if a person could respec traits, it seems like a significant hit.  Even if they did have points in Tactics which they could switch to Longbow (they might, since it boosts Vitality), they'd still be missing out on all kinds of potential Strength and Arms points and traits, including possibly 200 or 300 points of Power.  Someone said you have base 916 to your 4 base stats at level cap (though also boosted by gear)?  Obviously we don't know how much attributes affect things or if these are even the final numbers or how much gear will play a role, but it seems like an awful lot to give up.

To everyone else here, I don't think this is the end of the world, but this what I had to say over at GW2Guru about this change.

Oshit

Brawn (warrior) — Improves the damage of warrior burst skills.

if warrior burst skill damage remains as high as it is right now... oh god

I am none too thrilled about this new systems. For one who has been following GW2 since the beginning this comes as a shock to me. It is a total reversal on what Anet has stated before.

This does in fact make it more like the usual MMOs that I wanted to get away from. I wanted the freedom to be able to switch between builds while I am just messin around out killing things or to fit the situation at hand. That is no longer the case.

I have defended Anet plently of times about their decisions, but this time I can not. I would tell people about how flexible the trait system was and how you can switch out your build at any time outside of combat. That was one of the reasons I want to play GW2.

This saddens me and I am truely disappointed in Anet.

As I wrote on guru, my only concern would be if the small fee escalated per time to eventually become a large fee.  It doesn't sound like they're going that way, but I've had that experience before and it really restricts repeatedly changing how your character plays.  I'd be slightly miffed had they said that.  Other than that I don't have any issues with it, including the need to visit trainers.

Everybody needs to remember that how they have it today doesn't mean that it will stay that way forever.  Restrictions to reassign attribute points in GW made it about five months after release before they decided it was much more fun to be able to flip 'em around freely without penalty.

Originally posted by DJJazzy

Originally posted by doragon86

I care very little about the money sink. However, I don't like the idea of having to go to town to respec. I'd rather they allow you to respec for PvE on the fly and just integrate the fee into that, i.e. no respec NPC.

This is my main reservation as well. I could care less about any money, it's just the inconvience of it all. I'm not sure what their goal is here. Anyway, with how  many times they have changed it all up I'm sure we'll see them change it again.

Yeah, if they got rid off the going back to town to respec aspect of it all then it would be a lot more palatable.

Originally posted by AvatarBlade

Originally posted by Vaultar

I'll repeat what I said in GW2 guru thread for those who think holy trinity is back again and wat not.

"To all those who complain, you are forgetting one major thing. This game is VERY action based where personal skill is just so much more important and will overshadow any of these traits/attributes mechanics that the game will have.

Ya there might be initially things like "LF Support Guardian" or wat not. Yet if that Support Guardian doesn't make good use of dodge, or doesn't use environment to his/her advantage or doesn't position him/herself well or doesn't activate skills at the right time, that player will be terrible and will letdown the whole team just because of the lack of personal playing skills.

When people start realizing just how much player skill itself is important to being successful, then all these "LF this LF that" garbage will be thrown out of the window.

I personally love the attribute and traits systems just because I know I'll invest tons amount of time personalizing my character to my play-style."

 

You can't say that the more support guardian, for example, won't be taken over the more dpsy one, if their player skill are somewhat the same. Ofcourse it's not that the trinity is back, but it still might make people have to have a certain spec to be taken in a dungeon, considering players of somewhat equal skill. Have to see more details on how it works out tho.

Well, we know that we will be able to avoid getting hit (thus avoiding ALL of that incoming damage if you timed ur dodges well) and each class will get its own self-heal meaning that if u are playing great, u won't need to be dependent on others like in so many previous mmos. All classes were designed from the start to be survivable in their own way and that is BEFORE taking into account the trait system. Think carefully about the part in bold. What this means is that regardless of the trait system, all classes can play with each other as long as each player controlling their own class is highly skilled when playing that class and the trait system is there to give that extra customisation for your character to truly standout when it comes to the fighting styles.

That is exactly where "independent skill really matters here more so than in most other mmorpgs" comes in which the devs have been repeating over and over and over again these past months.

Bottom line: as long as u play well and as long as u know that each member of ur team plays well, the team will do fine in the dungeons.

I can still recall how the devs were talking about their dungeon experience many months ago when they were undermanned or on purpose went in with them all being of the same class and how thru playing smartly they managed to overcome the odds against them. That was back when traits were still under development and were most likely not used in these examples.