Guild Wars 2

The topic says it mostly. Make each weapon trait only apply to one weapon. Right now traits like rangers Martial Mastery cause a player to feel bottle necked into using a set of weapons, instead of simply improving a specific weapon that they tend to favor. I realize it may be set up this way for balance, but having traits only apply to one weapon would honestly go a long ways towards expanding what people can and cant do with their characters.

Edit: This could also be remedied by making a trait for darn near every weapon combo, but that seems silly and complicated

I’d make almost the opposite recommendation, for the same reason: I think traits probably shouldn’t be limited by weapon-type at all, unless there’s something special about the trait effect that would make that impractical. For example, there’s a Mesmer trait that causes focus skills to reflect projectiles; fair enough, I can see how that wouldn’t be appropriate for lots of skills on other weapon types. But all the +10% damage, -20% cooldowns, +X <stat> while wielding Y weapon type traits strike me as filler that needlessly pigeonholes builds.

I realize that even specialists probably aren’t getting 100% use out of those traits because of weapon swapping, dual wielding, aquatic weapons, etc., so you probably can’t just do a straight replacement with universal traits, but I still think there’s a lot of room for improvement there.