Guild Wars 2

The current armor and weapon design is of course good but we need more variety, especially in low level weapons and armor.

Armor and weapon design can also be combined with upgrading. Like upgrading your weapon with a stone so it becomes +10 which means more base dammage and a light that appears. A glowing weapon… nice isn’t it?!

Some upgrading systems:
*upgrade armor and weapons with stones to make it +10 giving stat bonuses and base damage bonus. The weapon glows more when you upgrade it more and it could also reveal an extra slot to use sigils.

*elemental upgrade for armor and weapons which gives us the opportunity to let us armor and weapon burn or freeze or wathever. This could do some more damage to mobs and players in GW2 or just used for looks.

*Weapon combining: combine a weapon with another one or with an object to get a speciall extra skill to be used with F5 (an example) or just a weapon skill which will trigger every x skill uses or x% chance…

Imagine we combine a sword with torch to get flaming sword and a skill or combine sword with ink to blind enemies or poison to give your weapon a green color and poison your foes.

Those are some of my ideas, but at the end it may not make a person overpowered but give more advantages, give him a balanced buff and cool looks.

I made a suggestion about having a workstation that allows you to create your own custom armour and weapon skins from a pool of different parts (with unlock-able stuff in the cash shop) Skin Generator Idea

As for your other parts of the suggestion:

1) We already got upgrades that provide extra stats (Armour Runes + Sigil of Force / Accuracy).

Also, the problem with extra Sigil slots is how would you balance it? Dual-wielding player would get 4 (3 is you limited it to main-hand only) slots, whilst two-handers would get 2 slots.

2) We already got upgrades that can apply conditions (Sigil of Doom applies Poison on next attack after Weapon Swap, Sigil of Ice has x% chance on crit to apply Chill), as well as increase the durations of conditions.

Although it would be cool if these applied some sort of small particle effect. The only reason I could think of for them not is because of the potential to clash with other particle effects.

3) We had elemental damage in GW, but they removed it in this game (possibly because of their aim of not having required builds / play your way).

I can see where youre coming from on most of those but I disagree with the glowing and particle effects aspect of it.

While this seems like a good idea on paper, Im pretty sure any mats required to make these glowy weapons would skyrocket in price, Putting them beyond reach of the majority of players and causing complaints to come piling in. Dont get me wrong, after coming from Perfect World I do miss the awesome weapon particle effects and stuff, but I feel like this is the wrong way to handle it. I play dual daggers and I am really disappointed about the lack of good looking skins (in my opinion) in comparison to greatswords and other weapons but I do hope and believe that Anet will release new skins often with future patches/expansions.