After the MMORPG.com panel on Saturday, Sardu from Guildwars2hub.com got a chance to talk to Jon Peters on traits and builds. Make sure you read the full article for all the details. Here’s a little snippet:

Sardu: Between the press closed beta (CBT2) and the more recent closed beta event (CBT3) I noted there were a lot of changes to traits. The overall system mechanics remained largely the same, but could you talk a bit about some of the specific changes to the traits themselves?

Jon Peters: In the first of those events we had enough placeholder traits to show the process of how you would click on certain slots and there would be choices. That’s basically what those were for. So for the second one (CBT3) it was more like this is how many choices you’re going to have and most of these are real, so all of those were actually built in that three week span in between tests.

Source: Traits and Builds Interview with Jon Peters

MMORPG.com has partnered with the Guild Wars 2 team for an exclusive Live Stream Q&A with Jon Peters at 10:00 a.m. PST (1:00 p.m. EST) about professions and traits in Guild Wars 2. We’ve compiled your questions to ask during the interview.

** UPDATE #2** The interview has been posted to youtube and added to this post.

PVP class balance:

• They believe utility is spread around evenly to all the classes, and the majority of current balancing is just playing the numbers game. AE’s he expects will be ineffective in pvp vs good players.
• To counter the healing all classes have, poison is a healing debuff. Through combos every class can get poison attached to their attacks. Necro and Thief have posion as base skills.

Today, Jon Peters, Game Designer for Arenanet, published a new dev blog titled, “Play Your Way – Jon Peters on Traits and Attributes“. This fantastic blog details all the stats in the game and most importantly the Trait System. The trait system in Guild Wars 2 is exactly what the talent system is in WOW, Rift or TOR.

Elementalist

• Fire Magic: Power and Expertise.
• Air Magic: Precision and Prowess.
• Earth Magic: Toughness and Malice.
• Water Magic: Vitality and Compassion.
• Arcane Power: Concentration and Intelligence.

Each class gets five trait lines that augment a certain segment of a class’s abilities. For example, the elementalist is broken down into, if you can guess, Elements (as seen above). Water has healing capabilities while Fire does more damage. Each trait line has 30 points, it consists of 3 minor traits and 3 major traits. These do all sorts of different things that augment your character. If you want to dive deep into the Warrior Discipline tree, check out the dev blog.

Speccing out your character can determine your play style from offense to defense or support.