Guild Wars 2

Unlocking New Weapon Skills

An alternative to gear progression, players would be able to unlock new weapon and utility skills:

Skill Capturing – Blasting from the past straight from GW1, players would use a skill point to purchase a Signet of Capture, which would then be equipped in the appropriate slot:

• If you want to capture a weapon skill, you place it into the 5th weapon skill slot.
• If you want to capture a utility skill, you place it into a utility skill slot.
• Rarest of all, if you want to capture a Elite skill, you need to equip it into the Elite slot.

Only one Signet of Capture may be equipped at any one time.

Skills can then be ‘captured’ in a variety of ways:

• Hidden skill challenges, defeating a [weapon] / [utility i.e. Cantrap] Grandmaster.
• Killing a Named / Champion mob.
• Performing a feat / achievement (i.e. each tier of Greatsword Master would unlock a Greatsword skill [or Burst skill for the Warrior], which is basically a flashy skill in comparison to the others).
• Reading a rare training manual, hidden in libraries / temples ect.

This system could be implemented as opposed to ANet automatically just giving us the skills when they introduce them

Weapon Skill Load-outs

As an example, lets say you got 2 axes: one that has the Berserker prefix (Power, Precision + Crit), and one with the Valkyrie prefix (Power, Condition Damage + Vitality).

Right-clicking the weapon while equipped would give you a ‘Skill Load-out’ option. The UI would then display 2 (off-hand) / 3 (main-hand) / 5 (two-hand) boxes, in which you can select from a pool of skills (organised appropriately by cooldown, therefore reflecting how powerful that skill is).

Going back to the axes, for your main-hand Berserker axe, you’d pick high damage abilities, while for the off-hand you’d pick skills focusing on conditions. These skills would then be attached to the weapon, as opposed to your skill bar.

Skills attached to your weapons would be displayed in the weapon tool-tip.

Skill Capturing would be awesome.
But creatures would need to be given alot of player skills – wich currently isn’t very common.
Most enemies have NPC skills that are unavailable to players. This would need to change.

I loved how in GW1, creatures used skills that made sense considering their physiology.
A mantis would use axe/sword/dagger/scythe skills, for example.

I may have read wrong, but your Weapon Skill Load-out suggestion looks like some kind of Template for Weapon Skills (assuming more Weapon Skills are introduced).
Meaning you’d define that a specific Weapon will always load a specific set of skills.

I love that idea. Nicely done.