Guild Wars 2

I think a lot of people take issue with back items and how they interact with equipped weapons, armor, etc. This is especially true in the Engineer profession (at least according to the threads in that forum). Then I thought “what if you could add an extra slot for back items and a swap symbol to the hero panel?” That way, when you swap your weapon, you swap your back item. I feel this would open up some awesome strategy and customization for all professions. So say if you’re a Ranger, you can add a nice quiver with higher accuracy to go with your short bow. If your secondary weapon was a Greatsword, you could add a matching back piece with higher crit damage.

Now, if you worked extra hard for a rare back piece with nice stats, I know no one would want that to be unequipped on weapon swap so hopefully this idea could be implemented in such a way that your stats and armor appearance will only change if there’s another back item in the second slot.

As an aside, It’d be cool if the engineer profession got 3 extra back slots. It sounds greedy at first glance, but please hear me out. 3 extra back slots would solve the issue prevalent in the Engineer thread (“hobosacks” if you’re looking for a search term) about how the equipped back item is frequently hidden by equipping Weapon Kits, one of the Engineer profession’s unique abilities. The usefulness of the way it currently works is that it’s clear to you and whoever you’re fighting what Weapon Kit the engineer currently has. The downside of course are all the issues people have with unique back pieces being covered up by the Weapon Kit.

With extra slots, Engineers can customize the look of each Weapon Kit, and even modify stats slightly for each equipped kit. If something like this would be too prolific for the engineer profession, maybe we could have simply a checkbox added to disable back items for the weapon kits altogether.

I dunno how realistic either of these requests would be to implement, but I hope I’d at least be helping everyone enjoy this great game even more.