Guild Wars 2

First understand how the system currently works.

1.) You choose a weapon ->
2.) You gain skills that are exclusive to that weapon only

For item #1 (choose a weapon) you have an element of choice.

For item #2 (gain skills exclusive to that weapon choice) you do NOT have an element of choice.

You should be able to pick for example a greatsword, and then have choices for skills that are exclusive to the greatsword.

Currently you only have the choice of choosing a weapon but not the exclusive skills for the weapon.

An important note to the designers to consider that I must stress is about selling points. To properly make a point it is important to consider successful competitor products as well as prior products of your own.

As a former player and critic of Guild Wars 1 and World Of Warcraft I would state that Guild Wars 1 had the superior selling point in terms of skill choice.

World of Warcraft has many skills like Guild Wars 1 did, however many of them are atrociously imbalanced and another good handful of them are diluted unto the fact of how useful or necessary they are.

The design brilliance behind the skills of Guild Wars 1 in my opinion still outshines every other MMO out there.

This is because the designers strongly achieved 3 basic goals in concern to skills:

1.) Give a multitude of choice. Truly there was a multitude of skills.

2.) Ensure every skill has a viable purpose. Every skill was usually viable in both PvE and PvP. Between the volume of skills and ensuring the viability of each I literally could spend hours upon hours theorycrafting builds.

3.) Ensure every skill is balanced. On this point I personally believe Guild Wars 1 absolutely destroys World Of Warcraft. I have never seen a game with so many skill choices of which out of hundreds and hundreds of skills the amount of skills that would appear imbalanced could probably be counted on one hand.

In concern to Guild Wars 2 and specifically to Weapon Skills:

Elements #2 and #3 are satisfied in my opinion while element #1 is minimally satisfied.

-You have the choice to choose different weapons -> This starts to satisfy element #1 but alone is not enough.

-Once you choose your weapon your stuck with those skills and there is zero room for customization.

In terms of skill choice I think the one place Guild Wars 2 is currently lacking is with weapon skills. I believe if the designers add more choice in this area the game will become exponentially more interesting just as Guild Wars 1 was with how many potential builds you could come up with.