This week the Scrying Pool looks back at last week's Specializations announcement.

Moving on to the trait overhaul itself, I won’t go into many specific traits other than saying there are some cool new mechanics they are bringing in. Some of these include the Mesmer getting cooldown reduction by accomplishing specific things and the change from simply Dodging traits to traits that require the player to actually evade an attack.

When we first saw the Revenant a couple of months ago, it was lacking a lot in the trait department. The demo for the Revenant only featured three trait lines and those only had nine traits in each line. At the time a lot of comments had gone down the line of thought that the Revenant was even further behind than people had thought, that it was so unfinished it didn’t even have the full 13 traits in any of its lines.

My thought, however, was what if this was the direction that ArenaNet was taking traits? What if we were going to get a truncation, a simplification of the traits? Unfortunately I didn’t write a Scrying Pool about this theory and last week confirmed that the traits for all professions are being simplified down to nine traits per line.

I really like this change. I have seen a lot of comments the past week of players concerned with build diversity, as fewer traits mean fewer total options. However, the 13 traits per line was full of junk. There were many traits that no one would ever take while others were almost so good or required that there was no diversity as everyone would take them. My first impression is that it seems like there is going to be a larger pool of viable builds in the game. Because of this, I am excited to see what happens to the meta when this new specialization system goes into play, and that is not even considering what the Elite Specializations are going to bring to the table.

The only concern I have with this new system is actually more like a minor speed bump than an actual concern. With this overhaul there is going to be a lot of confusion. What was announced as Specializations is actually Elite Specializations, whereas Specializations is the name for the trait line overhaul. Even with the name change from trait lines to specializations, the individual options are still called minor and major traits. Then we get into skill points being renamed to hero points with another change to how many are acquired during leveling. Existing skill points are not vanishing entirely, but are being converted into an item that is still not entirely clear if it’s an account-bound crafting material or a non-tradeable currency that fits into the wallet. This too will pass as players get acclimated to the new system and the confusion lessens, and at least the overhaul is coming in the first expansion and not the fourth.

What do you think about the new Specialization system? Are there any other concerns you have with the new system and how it works? Which profession are you most looking forward to learning more about its Elite Specialization?

Matt "Mattsta" Adams will one day be a Time Wizard!

Work on unlocking the dungeon skins came to a screeching halt this week with the pursuit to gain a HoT Beta Portal. I really like this method of obtaining a beta portal, it just kind of sucks for me since I have already gained all of the rewards that Dry Top and the Silverwastes have to offer. I am now just running Silverwastes to get keys to one day endlessly do chest farming with. This did however allow me to complete one of my longer term goals of acquiring all of the Karma obtained skins in the game. What are you working on while we wait for Heart of Thorns?

If you have a question for me or a topic you would like to see talked about here, leave a comment below. You can also tweet your question and topics to me on twitter @MattstaNinja. Also, check out my site Mattsta.Ninja that focuses on guides and more for Guild Wars 2.