Guild Wars 2

I personally prefer new weapons.
I like the Elite Specs but still for me new weapon adds hipe and anticipation rather then the same old thing that we now used in different way. Plus for me it feels very limiting (design wise).
Also I think it can be balanced because the game has already have a large weapon pull and it is balanced and with the new Elite spec it’s like adding new weapons and the game is balanced (Sort of).
What do you think?

Elites every time. They add more depth and variety and a goal to work towards than adding in new weapons. Weapons dont always act like they logically would in the gw universe, so even if they added say a Great Axe, it doesnt necs mean it would like you were fighting with one, so or me its less exciting to think of any being added.

New elite profession and an existing weapon for it is my choice.

One problem with getting a brand new (to the game) weapon is that there will be at most a handful of skins. If you look at the number of choices for each weapon and think about the time to design an equivalent set of skins, to make crafting them, to make mystic forging them, to make a drop table for them, it’s a lot and that’s just one weapon. Will all professions get that brand new weapon or just a lucky few and the rest have to sit and wait their turn?

So most likely 2, maybe 3 professions will get a new weapon and it will have maybe a handful of skins if you go the brand new weapon route versus everyone getting to use one of the old weapons and have a full wardrobe to select a skin from.

Bruno.3812:

New elite profession and an existing weapon for it is my choice.

One problem with getting a brand new (to the game) weapon is that there will be at most a handful of skins. If you look at the number of choices for each weapon and think about the time to design an equivalent set of skins, to make crafting them, to make mystic forging them, to make a drop table for them, it’s a lot and that’s just one weapon. Will all professions get that brand new weapon or just a lucky few and the rest have to sit and wait their turn?

So most likely 2, maybe 3 professions will get a new weapon and it will have maybe a handful of skins if you go the brand new weapon route versus everyone getting to use one of the old weapons and have a full wardrobe to select a skin from.

I personally think they should add 3 weapons and each profession get 1 of the 3.
If I get it right you think it’s gonna be alot of work for Anet to make new skins for those weapons and it’s not really gonna happen. But think of that way at game lunch there were alot of weapons with alot of weapon skins (way more then 3) so adding new weapons skin wise is possible if they really want to. If you cutting Anet some slack then you giving the excuse not to make new design and innovation for the game because it “to hard” (Not tring to be a di_ck, just tring to be realistic IMO).

New spec by far.

Kingsdavid.3598:

Bruno.3812:

New elite profession and an existing weapon for it is my choice.

One problem with getting a brand new (to the game) weapon is that there will be at most a handful of skins. If you look at the number of choices for each weapon and think about the time to design an equivalent set of skins, to make crafting them, to make mystic forging them, to make a drop table for them, it’s a lot and that’s just one weapon. Will all professions get that brand new weapon or just a lucky few and the rest have to sit and wait their turn?

So most likely 2, maybe 3 professions will get a new weapon and it will have maybe a
handful of skins if you go the brand new weapon route versus everyone getting to use one of the old weapons and have a full wardrobe to select a skin from.

I personally think they should add 3 weapons and each profession get 1 of the 3.
If I get it right you think it’s gonna be alot of work for Anet to make new skins for
those weapons and it’s not really gonna happen. But think of that way at game lunch there were alot of weapons with alot of weapon skins (way more then 3) so adding new weapons skin wise is possible if they really want to. If you cutting Anet some slack
then you giving the excuse not to make new design and innovation for the game because it “to hard” (Not tring to be a di_ck, just tring to be realistic IMO).

Yes, one should be realistic

After they are added then what? How many times can the game put in new weapons? After a few months they’ll be old skins and there will only be a handful of them. People will be asking for more than the few skins they got and asking for more new weapons.

It’s a feature that needs a lot more work than an elite spec and weapon and doesn’t add anything more than a new skin and an animation when you get right down to it. The elite specs add both new animations and new skins for substantially less cost.

New weapons or an elite spec is the same thing. If they were going to add a new weapon type, it’s going to a part of an elite spec, which are easier to balance due to their limitation and only available to 80s. That was kind of the point of elite specs, to make it easier to add new abilities. The trick with elite specs though is that they can reuse the same weapons over and over, including overwriting the core weapons. Because of that, and since new weapons means more work when creating sets, there may never be new weapon types. They did however want weapons to identify the profession, which greatly limits their options.

Yeah, new weapons will probably never happen, and I don’t really care about them, tbh. The one feasible addition could be giving some of the underwater weapons a use on land, since they already have a lot of skins for them. It’s been discussed on the forums to death as well, but it’s still unlikely.

I prefer a new elite specialization.

I’d choose new weapons if they’re unarmed/brawling weapons….

…I will forever want to punch dragons to death.

~EW

Considering I play Thief, which barely has anything, I would love some new weapons beyond limiting them to just Elite Specs. -.- I just use my Daggers forever for condi and a Medeocre bow that keeps getting nerfed.
Same with Revenant which doesn’t really have much build diversity.

I’m not seeing how it has to be a binary choice of one or the other. They could easily accomplish both without too drastically increasing the amount of time needed for the overall process.

Elite Specs already add an additional weapon to each profession. Which already entails new skills, balancing those skills, new animations. Which is exactly what adding a brand new weapon type would entail as well. The only part of the workload which would be increased in adding a completely new weapon vs an existing one is additional work on art assets, specifically weapon models.

But everything else, the programming and balance side, remains consistent. An Elite Spec adding a new weapon type is mechanically identical to one adding an existing weapon.

The workload increase would be solely on the artwork team. But in terms of elite specs anyway, the art team is probably done with their work on any given E-Spec long before all the programming, bug fixes, and balancing is done. So the overall development time would stay similar I’d estimate, it would just mean the art team would be involved to a greater extent.

Keeping the art team working longer on new weapons for E-Specs would have an effect on OTHER parts of the game. Like the environment, skins, and such for the new region. More time spent on models for new weapons means less time spent on all those other aspects. And that’s a completely different debate. But purely in talking about the elite specs themselves, I don’t see why it should be a choice of one or the other.

Land spears. The fact that we can’t use the coolest weapon ever invented baffles me. Guardian, Warrior, Ranger, and Necromancer should all be able to use this by default.

New weapons would be nice, mostly because I want to see terrestrial sets for spears and tridents. Or merge the two into a pole arm class.

Guardian next elite spec … Paragon.

Drops mic!

Electro.4173:

I’m not seeing how it has to be a binary choice of one or the other. They could easily accomplish both without too drastically increasing the amount of time needed for the overall process.

This is how I see it. As far as mechanical work goes, it’s plausible that you could distribute a new weapon to multiple core classes for the same level of effort as a single elite spec, while every elite spec that you add it to is no additional work. The only mechanical change required outside of the weapon skills when adding it to core would be replacing a trait with the new weapon’s trait. This isn’t really a big issue since every class has so many useless traits that there would be plenty of candidates for replacement. This means you could likely add a new weapon to the game at the same time as new elite specs for only a moderate increase in design workload.

The real difficulty would be in creating the visual effects, since you’d probably need at least 50 skins to launch with.

thief with dual katana, greatsword….more cool move..no ninja turtle slamming ground move

Greatswords for elem, dont care if just cosmetic and have same skills as staff, but different skill launch animations