This week saw the release of more enticing information for Guild Wars 2 in the form of Ben Miller, a game designer for GW2, talking about traits and their role in the upcoming sequel to ArenaNet’s hit MMO, Guild Wars. “What are traits?” you might ask. Well, according to Ben, “At a basic level, traits make you better at what you choose to do. You slot traits in order to modify skills and attributes. Once you have mastered a handful of traits they become a key component in creating your overall build.”

Now, I hate to compare, but this sounds similar to World of Warcraft’s glyph system, except more elaborate because that’s just what Anet does.

According to Ben, there will be 100 or so traits for each profession to master, which as you may guess, leaves a lot of room open for different trait-builds, and each profession will focus on different activities to learn such traits, so, for example, a warrior would train physically while an elementalist would study ancient arcane tomes. This will help to make each profession feel even more unique, which sounds fantastic to me.

Combine the trait system with the new skill system in Guild Wars 2, and I’m starting to see how players will be rewarded more for experimenting or even running unorthodox builds, which I’m already accustomed to. Ask anyone in my alliance about the guy who runs crazy builds that don’t work half of the time.

You can read the full article on the main Guild Wars 2 website and I suggest you do as I barely cover the article and it’ll help you get more excited for the release of GW2!

P.S. Guild Wars 2 will be at PAX Prime