Guild Wars 2

I always liked games where you had to hang onto different weapons or change skills based on a mobs weaknesses or resistances. For instance you wouldn’t want to attack a fire imp with fire based spells or weapons, they would do less dmg and ice/water based weapons or spells would do more dmg.

It adds an extra layer of tactics besides just, do I use aoe’s or single target this mob. It would also create a higher demand for weapons. Players would want to acquire several legendaries, one of each dmg type. This would extend the endgame goal for players that go after gear completion as their endgame.

No.

All this does is make combat more annoying. If I want to cover my own weakness, I would have to buy more weapons and take up space in my inventory.

If you want to target a mob’s weakness. Get Mob slaying sigils.

You wouldn’t have to. You would still do standard dmg to mobs with a regular weapon. It would just add a layer of immersion and strategy to people that wanted more depth. I’m sure you’re not annoyed by Slaying sigils and don’t have an inv full of slaying equipped weapons. Just like you would be able to ignore the feature I’m asking for if you wanted. What are you killing that’s filling up your inv anyway. It’s been months since my inv’s been half full.

Slaying sigils don’t do what I’m asking for. They add nothing to immersion and there are too many of them to reasonably carry one of each type and they take the place of regular sigils reducing that layer of strategy.

I’m not challenged to figure out what a mob’s weakness is because the sigils tell you a centaur’s weakness is centaur sigils. I also willing to bet that if the devs checked they’d find that nobody is using slaying sigils over other sigils because they reduce a layer of depth to a build.

I would suggest five or six diff types of dmg. Nothing as extensive as the ammount of sigils we have with a negligible amount of xtra dmg.

Corruption from corrupted weapons that deal +2% dmg to average mobs.
Fire – xtra dmg to ice/water/plant related mobs
Water – xtra dmg to fire/mechanical/electric related mobs
Charged – xtra dmg to water/aquatic/earth/mobs with lots of metal armor

They could also add skills that cause mobs to become weakened to a certain type of dmg. So players could try out debuff builds centered around diff types of weapon dmg. Or dungeon groups could coordinate debuffs and weapon dmg types against boss mobs.

Game mechanics could also cause boss mobs to become weakened to certain types of dmg. Like flooding a dungeon room or pulling a boss into water before using charged weapons against it. Or pooring oil on a boss making it vulnerable to fire dmg.

You could just grab your weapon from the bank before heading to a battle where you knew you would need that dmg type. It wouldn’t be so imbalancing that you’d have to have them all on you all the time and you wouldn’t come across regular mobs that you couldn’t kill without the right dmg type. It would just be a little bit better if you did and add an extra layer for those that wanted more depth.

I agree encounters can be more engaging, but a simple weakness/resistance mechanic can become stagnant in and of itself and it adds another layer of difficulty in balancing mobs. What ANet should do is add interesting effects like “takes extra damage when knocked down” or “lose health when boons are stripped” to encourage different styles of play and to exploit existing mechanics.

Olfinbedwere.5049:

They add nothing to immersion

Damage types generally don’t add immersion if you think about them at all. Lets take GW1 as an example:
– What exactly is earth damage ?
– Elementalists had access to the 4 classic elements, so you may think they had a choice. They didn’t. Each element was different in how it did damage and those differences were more important than damage types. Which is why they went AOE for fire damage in almost all PvE zones. Against enemies with enough fire resistance that this didn’t happen, they didn’t change to another element. Instead they insisted on a ranger with winter to make all elemental damage into cold damage, which the enemies were weak to.
– Physical damage classes could mod their weapons to deal elemental damage. For them, each element behaved identically. So, if it was worth taking the elemental mod over other mods, it meant taking 4 weapons, one with each mod.
– Enemy resistances often made no sense. For example maguuma centaurs have higher cold resistance for some reason. Their rangers have less earth resistance, which is very odd for the class known for elemental resistances.

Frankly, damage types didn’t add any depth to GW1. Just complexity. All it adds are bonuses to killing enemies that are much harder to figure out than foe slaying sigils. So you have to wiki the resistances.

Ah, true and true. Combat depth isn’t easy I guess. Twobit’s knockdown/boon stripping idea is nice. It’s basically adding more combos, I think, which is good. More combos = more strategy.