As a long time Guild Wars 1 player getting in terms with the Guild Wars 2 combat system was an interesting one at first I must say. But after a few weeks of playing it became apparent that the way skills and combat worked in this game was very “streamlined” (read: restricting) and I can’t really see any good reason why it couldn’t be much more versatile without going through a thorough balancing process. So here are three suggestions to improve the combat and skill system in a major way:
1. Remove the feature that you get certain attribute points by investing in a certain traitline. Instead give a 700 attribute point pool (for lvl 80).
Why is this so important? Because it removes the restrictions of being able to roll only a couple decent different builds. You could go for 700 condition damage while traiting to heal traits for support. It would not break the balance because you would still be as powerful when it comes to pure stats, but it makes you feel a little more unique and as you had a certain role. This type of point allocation system was in GW1 and it worked excellently, giving you literally hundreds of different options to choose from.
2. Give flavour to the weapon skills.
This is actually even huger of a complaint I have with the current system. Why would anyone use a sword (I play as a mesmer) which has healing power and vitality on it when the sword is clearly meant for dealing heavy melee damage. Everyone is only buying sword with power, precision and critical damage making all other options unviable. I have a solution. Instead of making whole new skills with unique animations (which would require huge amount of work considering the number of classes atm) there should be different effects for atleast to the main hand weapon. I play the mesmer class so I give an example of a GS mesmer. number 2 skill Mirror Blade at the moment does this : throw an illusionary greatsword that bounces between targets, damaging foes and giving might to allies. It creates a clone at its first target. If you play with heal support build you would want to change it for example: give 5s regeneration to allies. If you play with full condition damage you should pick up one that deals less power based damage but inflict for example 8s of poison to all foes it hits. Skill 5 (Illusionary Wave) could, instead of pushing back foes, heal allies it hits or set them on fire. I have a ton of more examples, but I think I made my point. This would not make weapon types all feel the same because each weapon would still have a distinct WAY of doing the job you want it to do. This allows you to first pick a favourite weapon and after that iterate it to your playstyle whether it’s supportive, defensive, offensive or utility-based.
3. Rethink the traits to work with the new skill system, make resets free, armor stat replacing to mitigate gear grind
There are some good traits right now, but the major traits need to have more active role in combat. Right now it looks to be the other way around. Minors are the ones that define mostly your playstyle and majors are just added passive power. This is very limiting and poor design. Making resets free just makes the game so much more fun when you don’t need to think about wasting a resource as some kind of punishment for changing your current role. There should probably be limits to when it comes to instances and what-not, but atleast in the open world money sink in this regard just isn’t enough of a reason to keep the cost in place. Finally a major part that made GW1 combat fun was that you didn’t need different sets of gear to play different role. You just placed runes and insignias which were very cheap because they were only stats. Sure there are runes and sigils, but all weapons and armor come with fixed stats that are unchangeable. You can’t change them unless you have another piece of gear or weapon and (use a transmutation stone to have the same looks) . This is making the game extremely grindy if you don’t want to play as dd all the time. It could work like this: once the item is soulbound, its stat could be changed to whatever of your liking (and in line with the rarity and level of the item of course).
Those are my 3 suggestions thanks for reading and let me hear what you think of these suggestions. 