Guild Wars 2

This is just something that popped into my head recently after reading somewhere that ANet are considering making Legendary weapons account-bound so we only have to craft each once per account. Not sure if I can find the source on that right now and it may be false, but whatever.

The suggestion is this: Make some sort of system that lets us account-bind weapon skins, and swap between them at will on any char (similar to dying armor – a purely cosmetic option from the list of skins we have available)

Possible restrictions on the system:
1) Only allow players to get skins from weapons they have crafted/obtained personally (I have no idea if there’s a tag for original owner on equipment, so not sure how feasible that is, but the point is you only get to account-bind a legendary weapon skin if you crafted it)
2) Obtaining a skin from an item destroys the item
3) Characters you want to use the skin on need to be able to equip the original item (so need to be level 80 to use legendary skins from another character)
4) It could require an item from the gem store; some sort of Superior Transmutation Stone or something, to cover the loss from players no longer needing other Transmutation Stones for that skin. Perhaps this shouldn’t apply to legendary weapons out of respect for the effort it takes to make one already.

Benefits from this include:
1) Legendary weapon skins can become account-bound; possibly other skins as well.
2) Legendary weapons remain “best-in-slot” on the basis that you can wear the actual current best-in-slot underneath the skin. Though this still means if you destroy your legendary to have the skin, you need to obtain the best-in-slot weapon to replace the stats.
3) It also helps for all those exotic weapon from the mystic forge that require days or months of daily/monthly achievements to collect coins for. (those are the only way to get Mystic Coins, right?)
4) It gives motivation to try to collect every legendary (or even just one legendary), so the player can change weapon set-ups on a character and still have legendary skins (this can already be done by crafting multiple legendaries on a single character, but…)
5) This likely won’t particularly hurt much of the game, except for potentially reducing the perceived value of legendaries on the TP.

Anyways, that’s the idea. Craft a legendary -> Convert to Skin item -> Unlocks ability to display that skin on any character without needing the weapon, as long as you could actually equip the legendary on that character.

Thoughts?

Why stop at weapons? Couldn’t this be applied to armor as well?