Fancy Features Update - Traits

So season 1 of living story is done. Scarlet is dead (woot!). This past patch is mostly the celebration of a successful conclusion (and if you haven't gotten the rewards yet, do so quickly. There's no achievements or anything, just go to the party and get some fancy things at the end).



Since living story is on cooldown, Guild Wars 2 is releasing it's first feature-only patch, and it's a doozy. They're releasing balance enhancements, feature improvements, brand-new systems, and other things. They'll be disclosing information everyday leading up to the patch. Today they announced a lot of stuff about traits.
For instance, to prevent idiots from putting 11 traits on one branch and 14 on another, each trait will now be worth 5 old traits. This will condense the 70 trait points down to 14. As a result, you won't start earning traits until level 30, and will only get a trait point once every few levels.

Also, profession books are no longer a thing. Instead of buying a profession book to unlock the next tier of traits, they're all free, and so are trait refunds! You may now change your build instantly anywhere, like you could for PvP. To celebrate, they're adding 40 new traits in total! However, there's a catch. In Guild Wars 1 and other various RPGs, you would have to explore and progress to find new vendors who would sell you new and unique equipment/skills. The same is true for major traits.

On a single branch, the trait line alternates between minor and major traits. Minor traits are a fixed perk, major traits are swappable depending on the tier and generally have an extra little something special. So you now find the guides who distribute the major traits by participating in WvW, personal story, exploring, story/mini dungeons, etc. If you're too lazy for this, then the recently unemployed profession trainers have been re-employed to sell you the traits... for a price that has yet to be disclosed.

To conclude, this all comes bundled with a complete redesign of the traits page, and yes, it does tell you where and how to unlock the specific traits you want.



Oh, and in case you're wondering, there is a new trait that would further make my necromancer harder to kill, but luckily for everyone in PvP, it's aligned towards a Death Shroud build, which I am not very interested in using regularly. That's all for now, if you want to keep up to date as they announce stuff, check out their blog: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/the-game/releases/feature-packs/

Posted in: GuildWars 2,Living Story,patch,update