Guild Wars 2

I think that weapons, and items in general are a little disappointing. Seeing the reality of the end game farm, along with the fact that your reward is pretty much interchangeable weapon skins that have no noteworthy stats or qualities beyond visuals, was a bit discerning. The material farm, the dust farm/price, lodestones, precursors.. All this stuff is fine, but I’m sure I can speak for us all when I say we really want something more than a skin out of it in the end.

So this brings me to my first idea..

Aging

The first step to bringing us closer to our items. I played quite a few games with different versions of this system, and every time I really enjoyed it.

In GW2, a weapon could start off on the first stage, with no benefits. You would age a weapon by using skills, and if your skill has an effect on another person/npc (damage done, healed, utility used) the age bonus is multiplied, given you’re using the weapon in action.

With time, your weapon would advance through stages, gaining certain bonuses (a side idea: you could use items made from crafting professions to influence or ‘reinforce’ the bonus with each layer of aging.) These stages can also give visual effects, varying from the basic tarnish and wear on a low sword, to a mystic glow on a staff showing the wielders affinity to the weapon. Each stage could also give the weapon a new prefix:

Scuffed -> Aged -> Ancient Greatsword, as an example.

Another idea, which would also work on armor, would be for aging to come with use of the stats on a piece of gear. So if you crit, any gear with +crit would age. If you heal someone/yourself, your +healing gear would age, and so on.

This could bring different ‘stages’ to certain rare items, giving more of a sense of progression. It may also help deal with PRECURSORS, as a well aged weapon would be worth more to Zommoros. Or take the dependence on the Forge out completely, leave the low chance to get a precursor, but one could also be obtained by aging/reinforcing a weapon properly.

Marginal stats/effects/visuals from aging levels are great, but the real fun would come from aging them fully, which brings me to my next point:

Special Procs/Effects

When a piece of gear is fully aged, it should come with a bonus specific to that item, such as a proc or a stat that really defines it. As an example, Final Rest, where the demon on the end would grow as the staff ages, and when fully aged, the demon would attack your target after a skill (more of a damage boost and a visual, as opposed to a pet).

The same could be applied to armor, where a fully aged mesmer helm may give you a 2% chance on being hit to teleport your enemy back 5 seconds (just throwing out ideas, just something more dynamic than the usual +5 to this, +10 to that). A fully aged molten shield could have a chance to erupt depending on the noise of the skills cast around it (gunfire/explosions/yells have more of a chance to set off).

A 5-piece fully aged set could give you a dynamic aura related to the gear, for example a rare necromancer set that has a cloud of death, decaying the strength of healing (more random ideas). A mesmer set could have the visual of illusions trailing behind you as you run, like an echo. To add dynamic to it, any enemy that touches an echo would get a stack of refraction, which would begin to slowly bend and distort their screen as stacks build.

That’s not to say sigils should be removed, I think they should stay right where they are.. There just needs to be something more.

These are all just ideas and in no way am I saying the skills themselves would be completely viable or balanced, it’s more just to give you an idea of the whole system :P

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Thanks to all for reading this huge post, looking forward to hearing all responses/ideas, and I’ll definitely post more as I think it over, but I think whether they take my route, or another, this game has SO much unused potential in the item system. When comparing it to all the other things GW2 does so well, I think it’s only a matter of time ?

I like the spirit of the idea, but not the implementation. This assumes specific weapons have specific and unique upgrade paths/abilities. This is bad and shoehorns people in to needeing specific pieces of gear which screws up the freedom of form not being tied to function, which is a fantastic part of GW2’s design.

In stead, what about using what we already have avaliable?

Weapons you use are soulbound to you. You have a class. You will gain skill points from now in to eternity.

What if, in stead, you could invest your skillpoints in to sidegrading stats in your items, moving points from one stat to another slowly over time, and at specific benchmarks you could trade base stats for a class-specific effect from a large selection of effects. For example a necromancer might have a selection that includes life force bonuses, fear procs, and life steal effects. A warrior may have adrenaline, passive damage reduction, or ally buffs. A Thief may have blind, weakness, and shadowstep effects.

Basically, you earn the ability to customize in to class specific (and thus easier to balance) effects by sacrificing core stats over time, or simply have the ability to move stat points from one to the other to really tweak your gear in to something that’s unique for you.

I like it, if anything that could be the aging system, just with a GW2 twist.

I mean most of the effects would be visual, but in the end there should always be some form of uniqueness to certain really amazing items, a sense of accomplishment. But this way, you could invest skill points into aging the weapon, and slowly changing the stats towards your taste. Throughout the process, it would get minor visual effects, with a bigger effect at the end of the aging process, along with the whole prefix thing.

I agree going too far with it would throw off the balance that they’ve achieved so far, but it would make things more interesting. With enough fine tuning, it doesn’t necessarily have to be class specific. If the effects are specific to the item, at least to a certain degree, it will do a lot to make each item feel unique. Even if the effects are very marginal.

Let’s say for example, the lodestone weapons when fully aged, have a small chance on hit (2-5%) to shoot a bolt of that element at the target, not causing any effect, but doing a bit of damage, maybe doing slightly more damage if the target is afflicted by the condition related to the weapon (frozen for corrupted weapons, burning for destroyer, etc)

The way the combat system works, I can’t say you’d really notice too much anyways with the lack of info in the combat log/debuff stacking. And that’s not to say only rare/expensive weapons can be aged. A lower level player can spend some time making themselves a nice aged common sword. Over time it gets battleworn and rusty, and eventually has a small bleed effect unique to it, or something along those lines.

I just figure it also solves the problem of precursors, by not only giving more value to all other gear, but possibly introducing new methods of obtaining them/legendaries with aging, that crafting reinforcement thing I spoke about earlier, and the forge.

Just throwing off ideas, but this could add some more connectivity between players if, let’s say a piece of gear gains ‘aging’ when it’s stats are put into effect like I was saying earlier. At certain tiers, you can upgrade a piece of gear’s age level, with the appropriate crafting skill in 400. If you don’t have the skill, you can party with someone who does, and they’ll gain exp for performing the task. Each time you do this, you can infuse skill points, and certain items from crafting professions to tune the stats towards your liking.

It would be against ANet’s policy to not give people playing for a longer time an advantage in player vs player combat (although that’s questionable considering the existence of ascended items), so this would have to be disabled in WvW at least.