Guild Wars 2

So…..any chance of this happening?

Has much fun as your favourite (and actually viable) weapon is, it gets a bit old using the same skills over and over, which really doesn’t help on the replayability and thus longevity side of things for the game.

Any chance for this happening?

Also, on this topic, a whole back the developers said that they aim to make every weapon usable on every class, we’ve still yet to see 1 weapon restriction removed since launch, how’s this going?

I was thinking of this just a few hours ago. Weapon skills that is. It would be nice to choose from a few skills for number slot.

Anet’s design to have fixed weapon skills was to get around the problem they had in GW1. There were over a thousand skills, many duplicated because of the expansions, and only 2% of them would get regular use.

Perhaps what is needed is alternative modes on the same weapon. For instance, an offensive mode where most of the skills are attack based or defensive mode where the auto attack is still offensive but the rest are more like parries, blocks or deflects.

Also, more weapons would be welcome!

Azrael.4960:

Perhaps what is needed is alternative modes on the same weapon. For instance, an offensive mode where most of the skills are attack based or defensive mode where the auto attack is still offensive but the rest are more like parries, blocks or deflects.

This is pretty much what I was thinking about. Or having an option for each slot to change between an offensive or defensive skill.

And people say the game is imbalanced now, what do you think would happen then?

I don’t think a solution to that problem is to have 10 times less skills to choose from, because isn’t that just causing the problem which having over a thousand skills was trying to solve in the first place and going back to square 0?

Dean Calaway.9718:

And people say the game is imbalanced now, what do you think would happen then?

They’d probably still say the game is imbalanced and then go on to blame the gem shop.

People around here talk a lot of kitten and I don’t pay too much attention to it. This weapon skill thing is just idle speculation.

Xae Isareth.1364:

Also, on this topic, a whole back the developers said that they aim to make every weapon usable on every class, we’ve still yet to see 1 weapon restriction removed since launch, how’s this going?

Well, that would be nice. I’d like to see a warrior with staff, fighting like some kind of a monk. Also elementalist with bow, shooting magic arrows, or a staff or scepter ranger (druid). That would be really awesome!

If you want different skills, pick a different weapon? That’s why weapon switching exists?
But anyway, I do feel some of the OP’s pain on this one, especially during boss encounters.

You know why people complain about “casuals sitting there pressing 1111111 all the time”? Because the auto-attack skill is the primary damage dealing method for that weapon. Most of the others, if not better damage on long cooldowns, are conditionally useful, either as defense or control.
Even on skills that have damage abilities, it’s still taking up the same time that 11111 would take up, so it’s just a slightly higher damage bump, with nothing of actual interest, and if it did have something interesting, it would get negated by a boss or considered annoyingly overpowered in PvP.

Not that I have a solution for this one. In looking other games, there’s even less choice (6 total slots in Diablo 3; maybe 8 total in WildStar), but those choices tend to be more customizable, have more impact, and occasionally have shorter cooldowns.
I have to bring up warrior-hammer as my personal needling pain in relation to this, just that a slack 2-second knockdown on a 30ish second cooldown is kinda crappy.

This was one of many suggestions in the suggestions forums a couple of months after launch. It’s part of the large body of ideas that early GW2 fans had before the suggestions folder was dumped and ultimately completely ignored.

It would have certainly helped with diversity issues in combat or the requirement of some classes to press 2-3 times the buttons in order to achieve the same results as others who just have to press 1.

This suggestion could result in massive issues for the developer.

Where do these skills come from? They’d either have to free weapon skills from being bound to specific weapons or create more skills for each weapon. Either way, animations would have to be generated for each new skill, or for each skill on the different weapons.

Balance: Depending on circumstances, players would cherry pick weapon skills based on what they plan to fight. Imagine a warrior with one weapon set which has 4 CC and the other with 4 heavy-hitting attacks.

I certainly like the idea of more diversity, but believe customization of weapon bars is an idea whose time will never come. The game was designed for skill balance to occur on the weapon choice level. This idea would move that balance to the level of individual skills. This would result in massively imbalanced options and/or a glut of skills that do essentially the same things as existing skills. Look at the new healing skills added last year and tell me they added a lot of diversity to the game.

If they didn’t add diversity, at least they added a bit of variety. It isn’t just a problem of diversity, it’s simply an age old truth that doing the same thing over and over again gets boring no matter how cool that thing might be.

Where do skills come from? Well, they need to design them. That’s what MMOs are, games in constant progression. You could ask where do new combat mechanics in TSW came from, where new skills in GW1 came from, where do new raids in WoW came from: the developers designed them.

Balance? First of all, you can never perfectly balance a game. Even MOBAs have balance problems. If you want perfect balance in a MMO, then you got a dead game that never gets updates, because adding anything screws the balance up in some way.

In fact, I tend to think the only way to actually create perfect balance is through chaos. If you look at TSW, that game has a skeletal dev crew, but it’s probably more balanced than most MMOs I’ve played in PvP. Why? Because the combat system has so much choice that you get a whole load of ‘overpowered’ builds that they end up balancing things out and achieving diversity at the same time.

I don’t really see how moving balance down to a skill choice level changes anything anyways. The devs are already tweaking balance on a skill by skill level.

I agree with suggestion of more weapon skills. The current amount of skills for each weapon is pretty abysmal, and not all the skills are great. I’m new to Guild Wars completely. Never played the first one as I was hooked onto World of Warcraft at the time. The combat in Guild Wars 2 is amazing and very fresh for the mmo genre. However, the lack of weapon skills for each weapon and weapon types ( no two handed axes). Really limits this awesome combat system.

I’ve read a lot of posts saying Arena Net keeps the system limited like this for balance issues. If this is the real reason than that’s just sad. You can never balance an mmo and limiting certain systems of the game, such as combat. It only hurts the game even more then balancing issues do. Guild Wars 2 is great and I’m having a blast playing my warrior. The weapon skill limitations are putting a big damp on my play style though. It always the same 5 skills… it gets boring after the first twenty levels.

The issue with GW1 was the very large numbers of skills that were just sub par. Balancing them was a monumental job.

The issue really boils down to really poor mob AI. Even if they gave us a split of offensive and defensive skills, the mob AI and limited skillset is such that there would be no point in switching to defensive skill.

In GW1, every mob fell into a certain class reflective of the available character classes. So minotaurs used Warrior skills, while undead used necro skills and various types of Riders used mesmer skills. Some breeds of spiders used ranger skills while others used necro skills. In one elite dungeon, the mobs were dual profession so you could have warrior/monks who would rush into melee with you but have access to healing skills to make them really tough but were backed up by monk/elementalists who could heal but offset the mana expenditure with elementalist skills.
The most stand out feature was that the mobs were mixed, meaning you couldn’t just go with a vanilla or cookie cutter build in your party and expect to beat them consistently. You might need to take knock down mitigation, condition cleanses, projectile reflection or blocking, etc etc. And the AI used their skills smartly so that you couldn’t just spam a rotation.

What GW2 needs is an invigoration of AI that gives mobs much smarter mechanics and how they rotate skills, not to mention a larger array of skills that they’d use. About the closest to a GW1 mob you can get in GW2 are dredge. This is what makes them so difficult to fight. They have greater depth of skills than any other mobs in the game and they use them in combinations better than other mobs. Inquest and Flame Legion come close and this is what the game needs more of, especially in boss fights.

The game needs to give the players a reason to take certain skills. And if Anet decided that weapons should come with an offensive and a defensive option, then the mobs need to be reworked so that there is a reason to use those skills

The core and basic idea of the entire combat system is built and balanced on specific weapons having specific skills…..I seriously doubt this is going to happen.

Entirely new weapons for each class? I’m pretty sure that WILL happen (and I’m guessing sooner than later), but being able to change a weapons skillset….not likely.

It seems that some here do not understand that just because something may be technically possible does not mean it SHOULD be done. The same goes for a player “wish list”. This request goes against the main premise of the combat system and how Anet balances it. While it may be “kewl” for you to be able to mix-n-match weapon skills, trying to make the game balanced and playable would become a technical nightmare if this were possible.

That’s the thing though. You shouldn’t sacrifice gameplay to create more balance. It just hurts the game even more. I can’t count how many times warlocks in WoW were hugely unbalanced and would kitten of a lot of people, but people also enjoyed it to. It’s hard to balance an mmo and if you’re trying to created one with balance as the focus point then you’re not going to have a good game.

I’m just really tired of swinging the same 5 skills. Everything about this game is great and amazing, but the limitation on weapons skills and types makes the combat not much better than WoW’s

Sherpder.1834:

I’m just really tired of swinging the same 5 skills. Everything about this game is great and amazing, but the limitation on weapons skills and types makes the combat not much better than WoW’s

There’s.. other weapons? And skills? And traits?

One of the “problems” is that the business end of a weapon is usually the #1 skill for damage. A few weapon skills do better damage, but have cooldowns. More likely, most of the skills have some control or support component.

And compared to WoW, the skills in GW2 tend to be more dense in utility. WoW has skill rotations, but that’s just an illusion of depth, forcing players to tote a wealth of only-occasionally useful side skills while they bang out their 2-to-4 damage button combos. That rotation has been more-or-less replaced with autoattack.

And that’s fine. There’s only but so much a person can do at once, anyway.

I’d be in favour of some interchangeable weapon skills. They could impliment it so that particular skills are restricted to a particular 1-5 slot to minimise its effects on balance. It could open up loads of different builds.

Rauderi.8706:

Sherpder.1834:

I’m just really tired of swinging the same 5 skills. Everything about this game is great and amazing, but the limitation on weapons skills and types makes the combat not much better than WoW’s

There’s.. other weapons? And skills? And traits?

One of the “problems” is that the business end of a weapon is usually the #1 skill for damage. A few weapon skills do better damage, but have cooldowns. More likely, most of the skills have some control or support component.

And compared to WoW, the skills in GW2 tend to be more dense in utility. WoW has skill rotations, but that’s just an illusion of depth, forcing players to tote a wealth of only-occasionally useful side skills while they bang out their 2-to-4 damage button combos. That rotation has been more-or-less replaced with autoattack.

And that’s fine. There’s only but so much a person can do at once, anyway.

Well, often the problem is that in PvE traits is mostly a spreadsheet game. You got a few traits like Guardian AH which might change gameplay up a bit, but its mostly a statistical exercise, so it’s really rather unexciting.

This is one feature that I think the game really needs. Most builds are defined by their trait distribution (I agree with Xae, it’s quite unexciting). It’s such a common thing to see on these forums that someone posts a build and someone else comments later saying “oh, that’s just the Mind Crush build” or whatever. Well, they may have both come up with the builds independently, in fact often I’ve run the same build myself without ever having seen their posts before. Clearly there’s limited room for originality. Also, as a result, there is very little sense of the undiscovered. In GW1 I always thought “I wonder if anyone has tried using these skills together,” whereas now, I’m sure most viable permutations of traits/weapons have been tried, even if it isn’t necessarily the meta.

I admit that the problem of having so many skills will create some ridiculous combinations and balance becomes an issue. But balancing is part of the fun, as is discovery of these that are unbalanced. In GW1 there were regular skill balances, it was fun simply reading what the changes were and what else would become viable due to the changes. Yes, it might be hard work but what would we lose if more developer time was dedicated to this? Some living story content, a few less minis or a gem store skin? The source of fun in the game should not be focused entirely onto one thing. A lot of people will have a great time simply playing/testing different builds. Besides, if hypothetically speaking, everything was perfectly balanced, would everyone be happy if they never changed anything again or added new skills just to preserve this state of balance?

I’m not sure how game breaking it would be to have the option of switching: e.g. Scepter 3 on Mesmer (Confusing Images: channeled skill that does damage and confusion) into either a phantasm summoning skill or grants you and allies retaliation. (I’ve just chosen some random possible skills). The phantasm skill demonstrates that now it is possible to have two phantasm summoning skills on a single weapon set. Now people may say “clearly the game was balanced so you can only have one phantasm on a weapon set,” but they’re the developers, they can do what they want. If they want to maintain that then they can chose not to make such a skill. The retaliation skill demonstrates one that doesn’t conform to the current “flavour” of the scepter, whatever that may be (shooting bolts?). If people really care about that then have a bolt which bounces from your enemy to allies doing damage and granting retaliation. My point is, the current state of weapon skills is bears no restriction on what can be done.

It’s not like it will be a free for all anyway, skills will still have to be tied to weapons. I feel like it’s still a lot easier than the task in GW1 (which I think they were doing a great job at balancing anyway.

tl;dr: New weapon skills = good, benefits outweigh problems. No new weapon skills = lose potential fun.

Dean Calaway.9718:

And people say the game is imbalanced now, what do you think would happen then?

It would continue to be imbalanced because this game is already too complex to balance perfectly.

I also think it would be a better game.

Azrael.4960:

Anet’s design to have fixed weapon skills was to get around the problem they had in GW1. There were over a thousand skills, many duplicated because of the expansions, and only 2% of them would get regular use.

Perhaps what is needed is alternative modes on the same weapon. For instance, an offensive mode where most of the skills are attack based or defensive mode where the auto attack is still offensive but the rest are more like parries, blocks or deflects.

Also, more weapons would be welcome!

Remember PvX Builds? For each profession?
2%? Wrong.

Azrael.4960:

you couldn’t just go with a vanilla or cookie cutter build in your party and expect to beat them consistently.

Wait wat?

Don’t forget your cookie cutter.

What’s the moral of these builds though? Oh, “CC” (GW1 called it shutdown) and heals were the backbone of the metagame, not a sideline spectator.

Nick.6972:

Azrael.4960:

Anet’s design to have fixed weapon skills was to get around the problem they had in GW1. There were over a thousand skills, many duplicated because of the expansions, and only 2% of them would get regular use.

Perhaps what is needed is alternative modes on the same weapon. For instance, an offensive mode where most of the skills are attack based or defensive mode where the auto attack is still offensive but the rest are more like parries, blocks or deflects.

Also, more weapons would be welcome!

Remember PvX Builds? For each profession?
2%? Wrong.

Eh…2% or 10%…it was a stupidly low number There were 300+ elite skills alone and maybe on average only 30 were ever really used in the metagame.

I can’t really think of any good reason, including balance concerns, for them to not have more weapon skills. You gain them all very quickly and it gets boring, and balance will always be adequate and will never be perfect, so waiting around for that is a waste of time. Plus, most weapons have overly specific applications because they’re hogtied to what they have and there’s no room for customization. I knew this would pose a problem even before launch and it does – it gets stale very fast.

For example, I’d love to be able to customize my water attunement staff to be more damage oriented.

hannah mee.7925:

Azrael.4960:

you couldn’t just go with a vanilla or cookie cutter build in your party and expect to beat them consistently.

Wait wat?

Don’t forget your cookie cutter.

What’s the moral of these builds though? Oh, “CC” (GW1 called it shutdown) and heals were the backbone of the metagame, not a sideline spectator.

Nick.6972:

Azrael.4960:

Anet’s design to have fixed weapon skills was to get around the problem they had in GW1. There were over a thousand skills, many duplicated because of the expansions, and only 2% of them would get regular use.

Perhaps what is needed is alternative modes on the same weapon. For instance, an offensive mode where most of the skills are attack based or defensive mode where the auto attack is still offensive but the rest are more like parries, blocks or deflects.

Also, more weapons would be welcome!

Remember PvX Builds? For each profession?
2%? Wrong.

Eh…2% or 10%…it was a stupidly low number There were 300+ elite skills alone and maybe on average only 30 were ever really used in the metagame.

Well, PvE-wise, this game isn’t doing much better.

Look at warrior for example, our entire class mechanic is just borked in PvE.

Also, if I wanted to go play a perfectly balanced game, I’d go play chess.

I absolutely love the idea about weapon skill expansion. Having a little “tweak” for each skill would even be enough to further define one’s role in GW2.
It actually fits every request that has been made in the various CDIs as well.
________________________________________
Another example would be Staff#2 Necro:
Mark of Blood
0 – Normal functionality, 3 stacks of bleeding, self regen
1 – 5 stacks of Torment, no regen
2 – No bleeding, higher base damage, pulses 3 times
3 – No bleeding, 2 sec protection, 5 sec regen to 5 allies in range

More weapon skills please! Thank you.