Guild Wars 2

I would love to see each weapon receive two more weapon skills. They would take much longer than the current 5 take. I believe that learning the 4th to 5th skill takes 25 kills? Correct me if I am wrong, I have not leveled a new char in a while. I would want the new skills to take much longer like 100 kills or maybe require special conditions for you to unlock them like 50 kills while poisoned or 50 kills with 10 or more stacks of bleeding on the target.

The skills could then replace other skills on your bar. This would encourage different playstyles and for players to try out different weapon skills together.

My main example is the Warriors GS which has 2 melee attacks, 1 ranged attack and 2 gap closer attacks. You can chain these skills together in interesting ways but what if you are fighting a boss? All you want to do is hit the boss, that leaves you 2 main skills. You can use they other skills but they are not as effective. If you had 1 more melee skill to choose from you could replace your ranged skill with this and have an extra skill to use in this scenario.

This also works in PvP, say you are still running a GS warrior but your main concern is catching up to an enemy, staying alive and keeping them occupied until your team arrives. If there was a skill that was blocking with the GS that could add more survivability to your build. This blocking could return damage to the opponent for hitting your sword and also cause you damage but less than what you would have taken from a direct hit.

I think adding 2 more skills per weapon is not unreasonable to ask for. I understand it would take work to test and balance so many more skills but I think it would help the game get back to its roots of GW1 while still maintaining all the greatness of GW2

I would love to have customizable weapon skills. The reason I doubt it will ever happen is that ANet designed each weapon to fill a certain play-style. Weapons might be designed to excel at direct damage, condition damage, defense, crowd control, or group support. And as such, the weapons (more or less) do a good enough job of this.

So adding skills to a weapon that fall outside of a weapon’s designed purpose probably isn’t going to happen. And adding skills that fall within a weapon’s designed purpose would be redundant and/or present balancing issues (i.e. why take that great sword skill when this one is clearly better).

But as a man hoping to one day have an actual blocking skill on my guardian’s shield, I hope I’m wrong.

Engineer weapons, and kits, are the only ones in the game that aren’t specialized properly like every other class’s weapons.

I don’t even main an engineer and this problem is obvious for them.

Adding 2 more weapon skills per weapon would be incredibly difficult to balance and I don’t think anything like that should be on their to do list until they have fixed the many things wrong with the ranger class (and possibly others but I main ranger so I don’t know)

You currently have 10 keys to choose from and two weapons sets equaling 20 keys of skills, wanting more is ridiculous I don’t need 40 keys on my hot-bar where half are useless like other MMO’s.

Folk.2093:

You currently have 10 keys to choose from and two weapons sets equaling 20 keys of skills, wanting more is ridiculous I don’t need 40 keys on my hot-bar where half are useless like other MMO’s.

What are you talking about? if you switch weapons that replaces 5 skills in your hotbar. It does not add to them. The two new skills would be interchangeable like the utility skills are now. There would still only be 10 skills to use ever.

Goatjugsoup.8637:

Adding 2 more weapon skills per weapon would be incredibly difficult to balance and I don’t think anything like that should be on their to do list until they have fixed the many things wrong with the ranger class (and possibly others but I main ranger so I don’t know)

They balanced them before. In GW1 they had a ridiculous number of skills you could use and continually balanced them and added more for every expansion. I don’t expect this to be their top priority, it is just something I would like to see.

Imagine if you chose to get rid of barrage on your ranger for a single target skill that had slightly lower damage than barrage and now single target. You would now be a single target ranger and there could be another ranger that replaces Point Blank Shot with a low damage AoE that causes bleeding? You would now be more of an AoE Ranger than the other ranger but would still be using the same weapon. Now expand this further to your second weapon and you are a completely different ranger than another ranger.

darkace.8925:

I would love to have customizable weapon skills. The reason I doubt it will ever happen is that ANet designed each weapon to fill a certain play-style. Weapons might be designed to excel at direct damage, condition damage, defense, crowd control, or group support. And as such, the weapons (more or less) do a good enough job of this.

So adding skills to a weapon that fall outside of a weapon’s designed purpose probably isn’t going to happen. And adding skills that fall within a weapon’s designed purpose would be redundant and/or present balancing issues (i.e. why take that great sword skill when this one is clearly better).

But as a man hoping to one day have an actual blocking skill on my guardian’s shield, I hope I’m wrong.

I believe that the ANet team would be able to develop two more skills for each weapon that still fit the weapon’s designed purpose. The purpose of the Warrior’s Sword is to apply bleeding and do condition damage. You could have a skill that does straight damage rather than bleeding or cause poison damage. These would not change the designed purpose of the weapon which would still be condition damage. Changing a bleeding skill would allow for a little bit more direct damage or allow you to do condition damage in a different manner.

I in no way think that this would be an easy task. Coming up with 2 new skills that still fit the general feel of the weapon and remain balanced without becoming redundant is difficult. I do however think that if they did add these 2 new skills per weapon it would change everything dramatically.

Chrispytoast.3698:

Goatjugsoup.8637:

Adding 2 more weapon skills per weapon would be incredibly difficult to balance and I don’t think anything like that should be on their to do list until they have fixed the many things wrong with the ranger class (and possibly others but I main ranger so I don’t know)

They balanced them before. In GW1 they had a ridiculous number of skills you could use and continually balanced them and added more for every expansion. I don’t expect this to be their top priority, it is just something I would like to see.

Imagine if you chose to get rid of barrage on your ranger for a single target skill that had slightly lower damage than barrage and now single target. You would now be a single target ranger and there could be another ranger that replaces Point Blank Shot with a low damage AoE that causes bleeding? You would now be more of an AoE Ranger than the other ranger but would still be using the same weapon. Now expand this further to your second weapon and you are a completely different ranger than another ranger.

If you think GW1 skills were balanced you are living in a pipe dream, there is a reason so many builds were complete trash in GW1…

I think 2 more skills would be awesome, however not soo freely. By that I mean different basic attacks.

SB on thief breaks stealth often and/or grabs too much aggro.

Sword on ranger is difficult to not get yourself into a bad spot with it and often can get you killed. From being kitten, I understand but having to manage a basic melee attack chain that closely? nty.

Same with axes on ranger

Hammer on guardian

I’m sure there are others.

There should be more basic attacks, that don’t go from ranger to melee or vice versa but atleast allow different uses for those who don’t want said chain. If ranger had a 1h melee weapon that was more stationary and defensive I would be in soo much joy I would give away 10g to the random guy who messages me because I can efficiently end them in pvp now without leaping at them a million times….

Runiir.6425:

If you think GW1 skills were balanced you are living in a pipe dream, there is a reason so many builds were complete trash in GW1…

Yes you could make a build that was absolutely horrible or one that worked well. The point is you got to try things out. For free. You didn’t have to pay to have your traits re-speced so you could try out a straight damage build, a condition damage build, a 55 monk.

Most skills didn’t get used. But ANet tried very hard to make it so that at least in PvP builds were balanced. Utility skills take over some of your skills so you do not have all attack skills. Most utility skills don’t get used though.

Chrispytoast.3698:

Runiir.6425:

If you think GW1 skills were balanced you are living in a pipe dream, there is a reason so many builds were complete trash in GW1…

Yes you could make a build that was absolutely horrible or one that worked well. The point is you got to try things out. For free. You didn’t have to pay to have your traits re-speced so you could try out a straight damage build, a condition damage build, a 55 monk.

Most skills didn’t get used. But ANet tried very hard to make it so that at least in PvP builds were balanced. Utility skills take over some of your skills so you do not have all attack skills. Most utility skills don’t get used though.

I use my utility skills very often.

But still, I agree more freedom was enjoyable. But with how many skills there are atm that are already useless, some utility/healing/elite skills should imo be redone. Weapon skills are meh, the idea is a skill kit you use for X situation. The only thing that sounds intriguing is the option of different chains for melee weapons.

NinjaEd.3946:

Chrispytoast.3698:

Runiir.6425:

If you think GW1 skills were balanced you are living in a pipe dream, there is a reason so many builds were complete trash in GW1…

Yes you could make a build that was absolutely horrible or one that worked well. The point is you got to try things out. For free. You didn’t have to pay to have your traits re-speced so you could try out a straight damage build, a condition damage build, a 55 monk.

Most skills didn’t get used. But ANet tried very hard to make it so that at least in PvP builds were balanced. Utility skills take over some of your skills so you do not have all attack skills. Most utility skills don’t get used though.

I use my utility skills very often.

But still, I agree more freedom was enjoyable. But with how many skills there are atm that are already useless, some utility/healing/elite skills should imo be redone. Weapon skills are meh, the idea is a skill kit you use for X situation. The only thing that sounds intriguing is the option of different chains for melee weapons.

I use my Utility skills all the time. What I was saying is that after you put enough skill points into your Utility skills you can easily point out Utility skills that will never be used.

Folk.2093:

You currently have 10 keys to choose from and two weapons sets equaling 20 keys of skills, wanting more is ridiculous I don’t need 40 keys on my hot-bar where half are useless like other MMO’s.

You must be playing a different game than I am because when I switch weapons only 5 skills change on me. 3 if I have the same off-hand.

I agree with the OP. This is actually something GW1 was better at than GW2 imo. Some builds just become boring after some time. Even with the great amount of different traits, you’re still using the same skill rotations, over and over, especially with a class like the ele, that uses virtually nothing else than D/D with cantrips.