Guild Wars 2

With such a strong focus on customizing the appearance of your weapons and with the epic Legendary weapons, it is a MAMMOTH oversight that ANet did not include any way to customize kits.

I’ve brought this up before, and so have others, but it needs to be addressed.

How much work would it take to get kits on par with weapons in terms of appearance choices? TONS. But they’re the ones who decided to use this system, why should we be penalized for it?

A few options of slightly less bulky backpacks would be nice…
It doesn’t have to be as many options as the weapons themselves.

Another idea: make about 3 or so different versions, and link each of them to a group of weapon models.
So if you use this or this pistol, or that rifle model, you get backpack 1. On other weapon models: backpack 2, and so on.

Backpack and the ‘weapon’ itself of course, I assume both are modeled as one unit each time.

An option to change if your backback is visable or not would be nice.

I understand that since engineers are the only ones who can use the kits, they are not as much of a focus for ANet. All other weapons can be used by at least 2 professions:

Axe: 3
Dagger: 4
Mace: 2
Pistol: 3
Scepter: 4
Sword: 5
Focus: 4
Shield: 3
Torch: 3
Warhorn: 3
Greatsword: 4
Hammer: 2
Longbow: 2
Rifle: 2
Shortbow: 2
Staff: 4

Engineers can still get good looking pistols and rifles, but the kits are supposed to compensate for the engineer’s lack of weapon choices. The lack of appearance choices should be compensated as well. Since engineers are the only ones who will use these kits, I can absolutely understand not putting as much focus on alternate skins. However: I believe no fewer than 5 options should be available for each. Give us SOMETHING. Besides, these kits are just BEGGING to be re-skinned.. you could do some really awesome things with the models that wouldn’t make any sense on normal weapons, but would fir perfectly with the engineer’s style.

Considering to ‘fix’ this it would take a new UI element not in place, I can understand why it’s not in. I don’t consider this an ‘oversight’ so much as a ‘design decision’.

That being said, the option of having the backpack simply not show would be a decent addition (and in fact it already bugs out to not be visible now and then randomly in game).

Ronin.5038:

An option to change if your backback is visable or not would be nice.

Yes, as simple as this…
Can’t be overly difficult.

I consider their ‘design decision’ to be an ‘oversight’ .. :-P .

If I didn’t have to wear a mammoth backpack while throwing grenades or dropping bombs, that would be a great step forward.

However, it only MILDLY resolves the issue of “Two engineers with the same kit will have identical weapons”. This can only be said about other professions if they just happen to have the same weapon model. Kinda not fair.

If they need to implement another interface to accommodate this, I think we’re owed that much.

Yeah I would like a less bulky appearing kit.

I feel like I Egon Spengler with a proton pack on my back every time I use the elixir gun.

And if you do not get the reference, Just ask your parents.

I had a suggestion for this i thought would be easy.

First. Make elixer gun/flame thrower equip the appropriate backpack but continue to keep out your weopon. Rifles look close enough to flame throwers we can assume you modded it. And pistols already can shoot glue and flame blasts…so no big change there.

Second. Every other kit (tool,bomb,med,nade) No backpack…let us continue to see our weopon either holstered to our back or sidearm. That way we’re never NOT able to see the weopon that “might be legendary” we worked so hard to get.

(why i chose this over other solutions)
It ensures we always can see a legendary weapon we earned…alternate kit looks would still hide your legendary and thus take away from the prestige of earning it.

(what i would like to see)
Alternate themed attacks. If i’m asura i might want more futuristic looking bombs or rays/lasers to shoot from my gun instead of bullets. It feels awkward to get decked out in asura racial gear only to be planting bombs in a keg with a fuse..and still shooting bullets out of your asura laser gun. This is a personal thing…if they offered a skin change that cost additional money at this point i’d pay it.

That almost seemed like a decent idea, until it became clear you assume everyone uses rifles. I son’t see it looking right with P/S for example.

I actually like the look of the flamethrower, so I’d like any option listed to be just that – an option.

@Zinwrath: I absolutely love the idea of having kits “attach” to our currently equipped weapon. Not only would it allow us to see our legendary rifle/pistol/shield, but it would be more incentive to have weapon stats affect kits.

This still puts us slightly below par with other classes as it caps us at 3 unique weapon appearances (aside from the kit usage), but if this was in place, I probably wouldn’t feel the need to make a post complaining about it.

Also as the OP put it it is a huge problem. This game is entirely cosmetic based where your only reward is new cosmetics the biggest one being weapon cosmetic acheivements. We are pretty shafted in this department however because to utilize our kits we are forced to hide the weopon we earned. Ontop of the fact we have very few options in the first place. 3 to be exact which is amazingly less than any other profession. We also cant swap weapons because i assume tool belt is better than death shroud, gaurdian f1-f3 abilitys etc.. which is an arguement you could make.
Honestly there is no clear reasoning…it cant be because of weapon kits because that would suggest every engineer is FORCED to use atleast 1 weapon kit to be balanced and not being punished.

I dont know the entire design philophy “or lack of one” that caused this issue to exist but i hope a fix is being considered.

Mongo.2490:

@Zinwrath: I absolutely love the idea of having kits “attach” to our currently equipped weapon. Not only would it allow us to see our legendary rifle/pistol/shield, but it would be more incentive to have weapon stats affect kits.

This still puts us slightly below par with other classes as it caps us at 3 unique weapon appearances (aside from the kit usage), but if this was in place, I probably wouldn’t feel the need to make a post complaining about it.

oh haha, thanks i’m glad you like the idea too. It doesnt solve every problem “as i continued to rant in my above post” but it does atleast address the bigger issue (atleast bigger to me) that our weapons are being hidden as punishment for wanting to dive into kits. Honestly i’m surprised this option wasnt considered before the game ever got this far, but i dont work in the game industry so…who knows.

Aye, it’s too bad they never thought of custom kit or even turret looks, and kind of surprising since as mentioned the game is so focused on cosmetics.

I love my engineer most of all the classes I’ve played, but I find myself sometimes more into my warrior simply because I have the added fun of finding different looking weapons.

I think the flamethrower looks great and all, but by level 80 it loses a lot of the wow-factor it had when I first pulled it out so it would be nice to change the look.

Sadly, considering I’ve yet to see even the briefest mention of this by anyone at Anet I bet it’s way way down if even it’s on their list.

@Bluebizzer. yea it doesnt look promicing. I expected them to be on par with other mmo’s…maybe even go so far as each race to have their own custom looking turrets etc. But im’ guessing the man power and money to do it by launch wasnt worth it. I’ve read several game articles and critics over the internet, many often consider the engineer to be a slap together of last minute ideas without any thought of how they would work together. I love the theme and the way the class works no doubt…but i can clearly see that it wasnt given near the polish time say..the warrior or gaurdian has. Both very rewarding no matter what route you take and plenty of cool cosmetic options.

I think the engineer is going to be a fixer upper now that the game is out. I dont feel the class is under powered by any means as i do just fine in spvp. We have a lot of bugs but i’ve played em all and i can say the necro has far more. Seeing as most our problems are in the design….it may take longer to get around to solving unlike a bug fix or a number adjustment for balance. I can say if they do half of what the community is asking for the engineer has the potential to be one of the most AMAZING professions cross any mmo….time will tell if arenanet listens to its community the way they boast. Other than Riot or "within last few years’ sony online i’ve yet to see too many companys take thier customers seriously untill their game is on its death bed. If i was a betting man though, i’d say arenanet is about to blow us all away really soon though. I truley think they will.

I would like to just know that it’s on the list at all. If it takes a while – fine. But let us know if this was even considered…

So far the developers arent as vocal as they are with the companys i mentioned earlier. Im hoping this is just due to the game just being released and perhaps things arent at the point they can openly discuss issues yet. Its that or they’re using an old philosophy of not communicating with your community and keeping a certain distance to them. This style is going out the door with small companys exploding over night like riot who openly discuss ALL changes openly with their customers and allow 1on1 talks with the devs as well as quick responce on to why something the community wants they cant do. I’ve seen sony online and other companys start to adopt this, i would imagine arenanet will or intends to…but ya its a drag they are not being more vocal yet.

Zinwrath.2049:

So far the developers arent as vocal as they are with the companys i mentioned earlier.

I have to solidly disagree. They have been extremely vocal here. There are hundreds of post by Anet folks every day. Just go look at the dev tracker. Simply because they are not posting on the threads you want them to does not mean they are not vocal.

They simply have a list of bugs to get to, long before they can get to the profession specific issues.

i’m aware of all their responces to bug lists etc. You realize you can scan by dev post? I’ve read their posts they are not even remotely the same as the companys i’ve mentioned. Even the responce to the dungeon bug went on forever with only (user error) responces followed by a day later with “oh wait we found a bug thanks to all your comments about it”. I’m glad you feel they are talking a lot…but its not the same as what i’m talking about. Please look at the League of Legends website (and the many videos breaking down each patch they implement) or sony online’s repeated videos of “what direction we’re taking the game and why we are making these changes”. As well as frequent responces on the forums, its not odd to get 10-20 responces within 30 minutes on one thread sharing ideas with players. As it stands right now if you read most posts they are “oh wow good find on that bug, we’ll get to it hopefully in a week” Which might be more than…some game does, but not even remotely close to the examples i showed.

Anet floated the idea of making kits more customizeable.

But then again, this was at the same time as they promised sigils on kits, and auto attack by launch so… I would take it they probably mean decades into the future. Maybe centuries.

Well they also recently released that post about how their live team is split into various specified teams. Which i found kinda funny because it doesnt really mean anything to a common person as we dont know how many are staffed in each team…nor would we know how thats any different than any other mmo (other than gw1 perhaps). This information was not given so i read the post and it left me kinda blankly staring at the screen not sure what to think….hoping this means we’re gonna be seeing a lot more fixes and information soon.

I’m angry about promices that shouldnt have been made too, but i’ll wait and see how things pan out over this next month before i become an irrate customer, still having fun in spvp so far despite the many bugs and lack of ranked play :P

Hope this doesn’t hit a taboo topic..but why not just code it in?
I know GW isn’t a AAA-A budget game like WoW, but that game had completely redid its UI 3 times now?

Maybe they can make the appearance option a micro-transaction thing. I wouldn’t mind that. But if they do go that route, I hope that there would be MANY options to choose from.
I want my TF2 medic looks, and my 00 Riser look as well. Yum.