The new traits highlighted a philosophy of progression which I think could be extended to weapon skills. I’m sure many other people have had this idea, it may even have come up in the CDI’s, but here is my breakdown. (Parts covered by spoilers are asides).
Basic premise (tl:dr): New skills in weapon skill slots (excluding autoattack) which can be switched in, similar in mechanics to utility slots.
Limitations:
- Each weapon with skills unique to its type (i.e. sword has a set and axe has a separate set, or pistol has a set and off-hand pistol has a separate set).
- Similar to the way “core traits” and “new traits” work, all the weapon skills we currently have will belong to the set of “core weapon skills.” New weapon skills will have to be unlocked at level 80 (or some other level). Why? From what I understand, the original reason for binding skills to weapons was to reduce confusion for new players and to prevent them from playing in an ineffective way (c.f. GW1: firestorm on warrior). This maintains the original system whilst giving experienced players more options.
Benefits:
- Build diversity.
- (Slightly) More content after level 80.
Problems:
- PvP unlocks: People dislike having PvE unlocks for PvP. I think this is really a separate issue and whatever solution there is for traits, that would make people happy, can also be implemented here.
- Balance: Adding more skills may mean more issues with balance. Some people may even strongly believe that it’s more important to balance current skills before adding new ones. That’s okay; the purpose of this topic is also to gauge people’s opinions of priorities. But there was a time during GW1 where ArenaNet released balance updates for skills once every half month, so I trust in their capabilities. Due to the workload, this may be one of the reasons why they didn’t want to make so many skills again, so I understand if it’s unfeasible in GW2. But could more skills even make it easier to balance? Currently the a small pool of skills are being balanced against each other, a fraction of skills will be seen as “balanced” or “in a good place” so the remaining ones will be compared against those. However, this is like trying to determine a trend from a small number of data points. A larger sample may give a better indication of what “balanced” is.
- Thief profession mechanic: This would probably make their dual wield mechanic redundant. As an alternative, I suggest maybe changing it so their third skill is instead: a weapon attack chain (sets of two skills which are bound to each other, i.e. one would not be able to choose which two skills are chained) like autoattack?
- Elementalist: A lot more or a lot less choice? It might seem like they get the a lot more choice for each weapon. However I don’t think it’s too different from the current system, elementalists have access to more skills already per weapon set, but they have less choice of weapons. I’m not sure how people will feel about this, it would be interesting to know.
- Engineer(?): They have weapon kits which belong to utility skills so there shouldn’t be the option of changing skills within weapon kits. Would engineer players feel they’re benefiting less from more weapon skills than other professions?
(edited by Kevnikov.6458)