Guild Wars 2

How do people feel about the addition of balanced ‘glyphs’ for weapon skills to help diversify how they are used and make them able to fit a variety of builds and situations? Glyphs for all weapon skills at once might be too much, but what about just button 1 to begin with?

Example A: Single-step autoattack

Ranger, Shortbow.

Crossfire : Fire an arrow. Bleed your target if you hit them from behind or from the side.

Option A1: Flanking attacks now inflict increased white damage, instead of bleeding.
Option A2: Flanking attacks now inflict X condition for Y seconds.
Option A3: Flanking attacks heal allies near your target.
Option A4: Flanking attacks have an X% chance to inflict Y control effect.

The idea being to allow someone who has built a particular way to still be able to use a differently focused weapon without requiring a new set of gear or something. Kinda like it is in Diablo III. The essence of the ability is the same, but it is morphed in some way.

Some downsides might need to be added to the options above to ‘balance’ but maybe you get the general idea, for all weapons, in all classes to have some flavour added to them. These can still be lore-friendly, as why wouldn’t a ranger use blinding, burning or crippling bolts all the time if they wanted/needed to?

Example B: Multi-Step Autoattack

Necromancer, Dagger

Necrotic Slash: Slash your foe twice.
Necrotic Stab: Strike your foe again, gaining 2% life force.
Necrotic Bite: Strike your foe, gaining 4% life force.

Option B1: The range of autoattacks is increased from 130 to X, but you now gain Y lifeforce.
Option B2: Autoattacks have an X change to trigger Lifesiphon.
Option B3: Autoattacks now inflict X condition, but you now gain Y lifeforce.

etc.

Maybe it wouldn’t be balanced, maybe it’d produce some really overpowered builds and require a trait tree overhaul .. but honestly many classes already would love a trait tree overhaul, and introducing something like this first, instead of later would probably be better. Hope this was interesting for people to read and mull over. And sorry if I’m like the 50000th person to suggest this. Also this might be a nice currency sink, as this could be something to spend gold, karma, skill points or whatever on at 80, I feel it might be challenging to add this system to the leveling.