Are you satisfied with the specialization paths?

I have been trying out new classes and experimenting with different things and in the process an epiphany struck me.One of the things I find the least satisfying about this game are the specialization paths.One of the reasons I think a lot of people are just... just terrible at the game... is that the talent choices in the specialization tree are vague, confusing and seemingly inconsequential.The majority of the talents you choose give you so very little in the way of performance boost or change your game play in such a trivial way they don't feel rewarding at all to unlock.

Let's look at some skills as examples...

Warrior - Thick Skin: You have +150 toughness while above 75% health...In most fights that's what, the first two hits? The first three if you're lucky?

Warrior - Dogged March: Reduce the duration of movement-impeding conditions and gain regeneration when you are affected by one of these conditions.Regen (6s): 780 Heal when you get Immobilized, Crippled or Chilled.

OMG! That's like almost a 1% damage reduction for 6 seconds every 10 seconds.You might avoid like, a whole auto-attack worth of damage by the time you go from full life to dead!

A lot of abilities are like this. They seem great until you actually think about them, then they are just worthless.I think that's one of the reasons people lose interest in this game.

There is an underlying cheapness to everything. The devs couldn't be bothered to put in the time to come up with original ideas so they just threw in tiny micro-adjustments that are, or at least seem practically meaningless.

If you go to the web pages and follow all the latest builds, get everything just right in your rotation you might end up doing 5%-10% more damage than if you just stood there and did auto-attack. It doesn't feel epic or important or like your progress means anything when you unlock new traits because they are so incremental as to seem barely worth the effort.

Each of your three skill trees might have one or two selections that work in synergy together (If you're lucky) and the rest just feels like meaningless filler.If you as a player are honest with yourself, I'll bet you can count the number of times you got excited about unlocking a trait or ability on your fingers, can't you?That's a problem. When progress is meaningless you lose player engagement.

Signets and abilities:Warrior - Healing signet: It gives you a tiny, tiny regen, and every 20 seconds you can hit the button for 2320 health and a reduction in condition damage for 6 seconds.That's like.. one auto-attack by a player. If the spell has a cast time you actually end up losing damage while you cast it. Why even have that button?What's the point? There is almost zero impact when you cast that spell and in the time it takes to hit that button, you could be doing damage to your enemy.

Most of the healing spells in the game for all classes are like this. They offer so little unless you are geared specifically for healing, you might as well not even use them.

Warrior - Endure Pain: Every 60 seconds you get 6 seconds of immunity from direct damage but not CC or condition damage. This sounds great on paper, but in practice it's not worth the time to push because almost everyone does condition damage and you can't go 3 seconds against most classes without some kind of CC.

I'm not saying these are bad ideas. I'm saying that when you use them they FEEL worthless.The player experience, to me, feels like half the time these abilities aren't worth worrying about because they do so little.

There are some skills and abilities that are game changing and they feel worth using, like making your auto-attack set people on fire, it feels fun. However many of them just feel like filler that you take because "You might as well to take something, right?"

I wonder how much impact the traits have to have before they negatively affect PvP and trivialize PvE even more than it is. Wouldn’t too many too good traits make the game about traits and not about skill?

Hard to vote for me because I have two different ways to go:

• In WvW, fractals and Raids, I use existing classes. No need to think. It's given.
• Aside of those activities, I want full freedom and no big thinking. My priorities are then: 1) To take the weapons I enjoy the most. 2) To set the elite I enjoy the most. 3) To adjust very roughly stats and attributes around this combo (that is rarely optimal :3 ), based on main type of damages. I don't calculate anything in details. I have for example, for PvE explorable stuff, an engineer equipped 2 x pistols with elite scrapper (I do love the gyros): It works nicely enough for what I am doing, with a max of fun but it is certainly very far from any optimal powerful set up!

So, all in all, fact is that in both cases, I avoid the "hassle". It's not that I see it as a hassle, but it is true that it needs a bit of efforts, and I am by far too lazy for that. I therefore vote for last one.

Side note: I believe that avoiding the "hassle" does not necessarily imply not to be competitive. :)

You're looking at Adept traits, they aren't supposed to be big or game-changing, they're supposed to be minor bonuses that give you minor benefits. GM traits are the ones which are supposed to alter your gameplay.

Not everything is meant for pve. Wvw and pvp benefit from trsits as well. Dogged March, for instance, in a zerk warr in wvw, is huge.

I felt sure I had voted before; yet, here is the option to do so, again.

I'm not really much of a theory-crafter/build-concerned player.

The system is fine. some traits and trait lines could be better tho (death magic)

Apparently, you're missing a lot of crucial synergies and the PvP perspective if you feel you might as well take "something".For example, a lot of people are still moaning about warrior's endless sustain in general, and healing signet has been a solid choice for as long as I remember.

You make many wrong examples, I am not sure you are grabbing the big pictureThick skin - agree, unimportantDogged march - partial agree, the regen is low, but coupled with the condi duration reduction is not totally uselessHealing signet - disagree, the regen is far from tiny, it's actually pretty good when coupled with Adrenaline Health trait. To compensate, the active healing is low, which is fairEndure pain - totally disagree, 6 seconds of damage immunity is HUGE. Used well, in PVP it's one of those abilities that make the warrior look unkillable even when equipped with Berserker amuletGood rotation making +5%/10% more damage than just AA - totally disagree, it's like 2x / 3x in extreme cases

On the other hand, I partially agree to your statementThere are many totally luckluster traits or abilities that would need a revampI advocate that the game would be better with a strong reduction of choice, having less traits, less utilities, less signets and sigils, etc, but each should be much more meaningfulHaving less allowed combinations would make balancing them easier for Anet

I'm satisfied with your spelling of satisfied.

@Chilli.2976 said:I'm satisfied with your spelling of satisfied.

Don't forget impact, fulfilling and competitive. ;)

To the OP. Admittedly the original system in vanilla was even worse to understand what's going on but I still feel like I can't be bothered to figure it all out.

It's not just this part but in the combination of gearing (stats), this skill trees or whatever they're called and the skill bar, it creates a situation where I can't be bothered really and I've just given up on things like raids and fractals completely as well as PvP. For the rest of the game it doesn't really matter what you pick and that underlines how bad the system really is in my view.

I see a great disconnected between lots of things that last for a second or maybe three and skills that you have to wait 90 seconds for to use again or even 30 seconds. On the one hand it's about small, quick increments and on the other it's about large increments and the mix just doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

Add to that that the fixed skills from weapon choice also makes that you have a number of skills that don't quite fit your build. I find that hugely annoying and although I understand the concept of having certain skills linked to certain weapons, I feel the game would've been much better served with each weapon having a skill pool to choose from. This way you keep the link with the weapons but you gain flexibility in skill choice within each weapon pool.

I also find it annoying that the trait system has weapon bonuses in them but it can be a tree maybe I don't want for my build but then I miss out on the weapon bonuses. In essence I don't like to be forced in certain directions but I'm more or less in that position. This is also a direct result I feel of how skills are linked to weapons and there is no flexibility within that and I don't like how some skill slots are then basically filler slots when we already have only 10 slots to begin with.

And yes, all these small numbers and percentages just don't feel like they make much difference. I mean what is 1% reduction when you get you get hit by a boss? So that brings me to the next consideration and that is pve vs pvp. I guess that some of the traits are far more significant in pvp than pve. To have the same system for both therefore always is a disadvantage to one of the sides. It's either good for pvp but meh for pve or the other way around.

So I have stats sets that outperform all others, making the others useless or at least less effective no matter the class in most content of this game. I have dud skill slots and skill combinations that are fixed but don't always make sense and then a trait system that is still not clear and exciting except if you're a min-maxer that loves that sort of thing. I mean I see this game have durations of half or quarter seconds. That makes me go wtf...

All in all, to quote a movie, I find this system vague and unconvincing.

@"DotDotWin.4357" said:I have been trying out new classes and experimenting with different things and in the process an epiphany struck me.One of the things I find the least satisfying about this game are the specialization paths.One of the reasons I think a lot of people are just... just terrible at the game... is that the talent choices in the specialization tree are vague, confusing and seemingly inconsequential.The majority of the talents you choose give you so very little in the way of performance boost or change your game play in such a trivial way they don't feel rewarding at all to unlock.

Let's look at some skills as examples...

Warrior - Thick Skin: You have +150 toughness while above 75% health...In most fights that's what, the first two hits? The first three if you're lucky?

Warrior - Dogged March: Reduce the duration of movement-impeding conditions and gain regeneration when you are affected by one of these conditions.Regen (6s): 780 Heal when you get Immobilized, Crippled or Chilled.

OMG! That's like almost a 1% damage reduction for 6 seconds every 10 seconds.You might avoid like, a whole auto-attack worth of damage by the time you go from full life to dead!

A lot of abilities are like this. They seem great until you actually think about them, then they are just worthless.I think that's one of the reasons people lose interest in this game.

There is an underlying cheapness to everything. The devs couldn't be bothered to put in the time to come up with original ideas so they just threw in tiny micro-adjustments that are, or at least seem practically meaningless.

If you go to the web pages and follow all the latest builds, get everything just right in your rotation you might end up doing 5%-10% more damage than if you just stood there and did auto-attack. It doesn't feel epic or important or like your progress means anything when you unlock new traits because they are so incremental as to seem barely worth the effort.

Each of your three skill trees might have one or two selections that work in synergy together (If you're lucky) and the rest just feels like meaningless filler.If you as a player are honest with yourself, I'll bet you can count the number of times you got excited about unlocking a trait or ability on your fingers, can't you?That's a problem. When progress is meaningless you lose player engagement.

Signets and abilities:Warrior - Healing signet: It gives you a tiny, tiny regen, and every 20 seconds you can hit the button for 2320 health and a reduction in condition damage for 6 seconds.That's like.. one auto-attack by a player. If the spell has a cast time you actually end up losing damage while you cast it. Why even have that button?What's the point? There is almost zero impact when you cast that spell and in the time it takes to hit that button, you could be doing damage to your enemy.

Most of the healing spells in the game for all classes are like this. They offer so little unless you are geared specifically for healing, you might as well not even use them.

Warrior - Endure Pain: Every 60 seconds you get 6 seconds of immunity from direct damage but not CC or condition damage. This sounds great on paper, but in practice it's not worth the time to push because almost everyone does condition damage and you can't go 3 seconds against most classes without some kind of CC.

I'm not saying these are bad ideas. I'm saying that when you use them they FEEL worthless.The player experience, to me, feels like half the time these abilities aren't worth worrying about because they do so little.

There are some skills and abilities that are game changing and they feel worth using, like making your auto-attack set people on fire, it feels fun. However many of them just feel like filler that you take because "You might as well to take something, right?"

False , healing signet is at the top of the highest healing for a warrior and can't be interrupted, here's from my post on the old forum + spb healing:HealingComparisons between our heals to show how much hp/min you heal with them:Healing Signet – 344 hp every 1 sec 60 = 20640 hp/min + active healing×2=(6960hp)= 27600hp/minMending – 6520hp every 15sec 4 = 26,080 hp/minTo the limit– 9100 hp every 30 sec (with full adrenaline) = 18,200 hp/minDefiant Stance – varies too much(1853 base)To the limit has little use now due to the fact that adrenaline is lost quickly when not in combat. ]HOT healing: Blood reckoning 3230hp/20 sec*3= 9260hp/minPOF healing: Natural healing11670/25sec×2= 23340hp/min

Edit: also healing signet and or endure pain is meta in pvp/wvw

I think there can be quit a difference between builds, but for those differences to be substantial you need to go all out: Skills, Traits, Armor stats, Weapons, Runes, Glyphs all need to be working towards that goal (like AoE , tanky, survival, single Boss ) etcetera. I am not saying these builds are the only way to go when you have a certain goal in mind, it's just if you want to see some real difference you will not be getting it by just changing around a few traits.

I can see why Anet has gone the way of "small increments" though: it does avoid the trap of there being just a couple of "Must Use" skills and traits per Profession. You can tweak a lot, mix and match for small gains, and even end up with something quit different if you go all out as I decribe above.

I guess the days are over when your Wizard became a god in Everquest once you hit level 50 and gained access to Ice Comet. :)

NB: I voted "could be better". I do not see why something like the Dismount attack skills on our mounts only take off like 3% of the hitpoints of a simple regular mob. That is just anemic. At least the other effects make it slightly more useful.

the TL;DR version is the OP doesn't understand the concept of synergy. On the one hand this isn't surprising, since most gamers aren't trained to think beyond direct number comparisons. But at the same time thats very depressing, since Buildcraft is one of this game's biggest strengths in terms of features.

If you think auto attacking vs actual rotation is only a 5 to 10% increase, you may want to unequip your longbow, brown bear, and soldiers stats. If the traits are truly so unimpactful try doing any raiding, wvw or pve without them. Im sure you'll be fine.

I would say that most people dont get excited because veterans leveling an alt already know what theyre going for. All of the other traits dont matter. Newbies leveling a character dont bother reading tooltips or sometimes dont even realize they unlocked something because theyre too engrossed in exploration. The open world experience is also forgiving enough that you can get by without using any traits.

I voted "could be better" since there is always room for improvement.

I wonder if the OP is still leveling characters or if this is based upon end-game, full gear observations? Plus the mix of "let's talk about traits" but delving into skills was off-setting. As someone already pointed out, the full package must be considered - weapon choices, skills, traits, gear -- heck, even food and utility could be taken into account.

I have created builds where I have two solid choices of trait lines, but the last was rather bland for what I wanted to do. Not that the choices weren't beneficial, but if there was a more offensive choice I may have been happier.

At the pace I play, I am excited to unlock the next tier of an elite specialization. The leveling up (1-80), not so much since it's old and familiar.

@Gehenna.3625 said:it creates a situation where I can't be bothered really and I've just given up on things like raids and fractals completely as well as PvP.

See, that's what I'm afraid of. A lot of players are going to be turned off to a third of the game's content just because the system is so obtuse. Like why can't you have a two handed weapon tree, a one handed weapon tree, a defensive tree, a condi tree, and a power tree or something. I know it would take some of the mystery out of the system but I don't think a lot of people purchase the game to try to figure out the occult machinations of talent trees. They purchased the game to play the content.

(Disclaimer: I'm sure a few of you purchased it just for the fun of playing with the mechanics but ya'll are freaky, internet-wizards so you don't count.)

@DeanBB.4268 said:I wonder if the OP is still leveling characters or if this is based upon end-game, full gear observations?

I leveled a necro to ~48, a Mage to ~45, a engineer to ~48, then picked up a warrior and PVPed till 40 then boosted the rest of the way with the ToK piling up in my bank.I have the yellow gear mostly, mostly from PVP reward tracks, a few off the AH, and an ascended accessory from the laurel vendor so I'm still geared like a noob.

Part of my problem is I can't afford the expansions so I only have the base game with some unlocks from buying it waaay back at release. No Masteries, no mount, no elite specs. I can't pay to win so I have to make due with the basic game.

OP chose best traits and skills warrior has and called them bad. Looks like he/she knows a lot about the game ;)

@Dumat.1479 said:OP chose best traits and skills warrior has and called them bad. Looks like he/she knows a lot about the game ;)

It's less that I'm saying they are bad and more that I'm saying they are meaningless, boring and dry. Every time I see something that is like 30% chance of doing damage on a critical strike I roll my eyes because those kind of perks only seem useful if you can't do basic math. You might as well buy a lottery ticket. You'd win just as often.

I think you just don't understand the game very well, honestly. First, the traits you use as examples are the lowest tier, and thus are designed to be weaker than higher tier traits. But more importantly, you can't evaluate them independent of the other skills available in the kit. What you call inconsequential actually add up to a class that has excellent passive and active damage reduction as well as pretty insane regen.

@DotDotWin.4357 said:A lot of players are going to be turned off to a third of the game's content just because the system is so obtuse. Like why can't you have a two handed weapon tree, a one handed weapon tree, a defensive tree, a condi tree, and a power tree or something.

I think it is more of a profession-specific thing. Some professions, like warrior, ranger, engineer, elementalist, offer somewhat straightforward specialization lines while other require more attention and/or knowledge.In my opinion, it all counts as your game knowledge and your personal skill in using a particular profession.

If you go to the web pages and follow all the latest builds, get everything just right in your rotation you might end up doing 5%-10% more damage than if you just stood there and did auto-attack

I have a feeling you didn't actually try this because if you did you'd know that the difference between a good rotation and auto-attacking is rather large. Let's do a very simple test of your theory:Test 1: Warrior auto attacking with Greatsword (note: I'm not using a meta build nor all buffs on my Warrior)From my very simple test I did 2.9k DPS on an average golemTest 2: Warrior using Auto-attacks, Hundred Blades and Arcing Slice (Adrenaline skill)From my very simple test I did 3.8k DPS on the same golem. That's a lot more than 5-10 difference. It's nothing optimized either, if I did the proper rotation with full buffs then the difference would be even greater.

On other classes the discrepancy between pure mindless AA spam and a real, well crafted and executed rotation is even bigger. I'm nowhere near being a god-tier FB but I get an average DPS increase of about 20k+ when switching from 1-1-1 to my actual rotation.

@AliamRationem.5172 said:What you call inconsequential actually add up to a class that has excellent passive and active damage reduction as well as pretty insane regen.

That may be true, but if players never learn the magic combination of abilities that synergize well together among all the detritus they will never see it.Your enjoyment of a game should never, ever, be dependent on trying to figure out the secret combo that the developers hid in the game to make your class viable.

You have failed as a designer if your players can't pick up the game and feel heroic. That is what you are selling as an MMO. You are selling the fantasy of power and or heroism.

Example: Look at your shield:One ability shield slams your enemy stunning them for a whole 2 seconds every 20 seconds, doing a pitiful amount of damage (Huzzah?)Your other ability lets you cower behind your shield for 3 seconds every 20 seconds blocking incoming attacks. (So heroic?)

Why aren't you always blocking attacks with your shield? Isn't that the point of having a shield?It's like saying a cops riot shield only blocks thrown rocks every 20 seconds.Does that make any sense at all?Shields should have a passive block value all the time, for every attack and maybe they do, maybe they block lots of attacks but if they do, I certainly can't tell. It feels like I might as well be carrying a paperweight instead of a shield. It not only dosen't feel heroic, it doesn't even feel logical.