I play with about 14k hp on my ele; 3k from 30 trait points in water, and the last 1k from a magi-statted staff (will change that to cleric’s eventually…)
Anyways, things to note here on healing power:
1) For eles especially, it’s as much of a defensive stat as toughness and vitality
2) Vitality doesn’t improve the value of healing itself, it just moves the buffer zone before you actually need to heal
3) Toughness, on the other hand, DOES improve the value of healing. If we get a 25% damage reduction from additional toughness, that’s effectively buffing healing we receive by 33%
4) (FotM only, but…) Agony deals damage based on max HP – this means high vitality builds take more damage from Agony in fractals, whilst -also- reducing the efficiency of healing vs. agony
5) Elementalists get a crapton of condition removal, so we don’t really need Vit as protection from condition damage
As such, I actually consider Vit less important than healing power or toughness on eles. We get enough from traiting into water, and healing power simultaneously helps our party survive as well; and for our own purposes, toughness is also more valuable.
On Power/Prec/Crit Damage (considering base power as the point for all damage increases):
I’m no maths expert here, but it seems like going with power as a main stat can get you up to a 200% increase in effective power alone, while having precision as the only main damage stat can’t get much above an 80% effective power increase, and crit damage only exists on gear that has power in some form. Obviously ‘zerkers is best for raw damage, but after that soldier’s seems most efficient, and also comes with two defensive stats (Valkyrie’s would have slightly better damage, but at the cost of an entire defensive stat). Cleric’s doesn’t have power as a main stat, so it can’t really hit the same damage level as soldier’s, but it’s still somewhat viable (as an aside, I’d be all over a gear set that has Power as main, Healing/Toughness as secondary instead of Healing as main, Power/Toughness as secondary).
Knight’s gear is pretty much a trap – full Knight’s gives less damage mitigation than Soldier’s, and less effective power (leaving the only advantage being on-crit effects and crit%, which knight’s doesn’t grant and you’d have to sacrifice dense to get…)
Magi’s (or any gear without power) is more or less worthless unless you want to go full support or full condition, but min-maxing healing power doesn’t have particularly great returns and destroys combat effectiveness. (you can get around 60 extra healing power by picking the Air V trait which converts 5% of precision into healing, and stacking Magi gear… not worth it because of power loss)
Precision by itself is pretty worthless for us. Elementalists don’t get decent on-critical effects via traits (Fire 10 gives a 30% chance of 1 second burning on crit, Air 25 gives a single 5 second stack of Vuln at a 60% chance) Edit: Forgot Arcane 6, which can be useful, but not sure it’s worth stacking precision just for it when doing so generally loses survivability in other areas.
On condition damage:
If elementalists want to spec for conditions, they’re pretty much pigeonholing themselves into earth and fire attunements – any time spent in other attunements is time our bleed/burn stacks disappear and waste the condition damage we’ve statted into.
Unfortunately, that makes condition elementalists pretty subpar because they lose out on two attunements, or an entire stat slot becomes worthless, at any given time.
Ergh. This post kind of went all over the place.
(edited by Dingle.2743)
While a support role is very easily possible as elementalist, it’s important to know what support you actually have, and that there are times when killing things works better.
As for what’s available with staff (what I’m most familiar with):
Fire: Best damage output when other support isn’t necessary + Lava Font fire field (Area might on blast finisher)
Water: Every skill here supports in some way
- 1 : AoE heal around the target
- 2 : 6 stacks of vuln every 3 seconds or so
- 3 : AoE heal ground-targeted, + water field (AoE heal on blast finisher, AoE regen to melee combatants on projectile finisher)
- 4 : Chill slows down mob attack delay/move rate, frost field for more chill + frost armor (which now adds a defensive buff)
- 5 : 4 stacks of regen over 10 seconds, water field
Air
- 2 : Targeted blind with a small AoE around the target, short CD
- 3 : Knockback/Interrupt/Defiant Stack Remover
- 4 : AoE swiftness (kinda meh, but still support)
- 5 : Lightning field + dazes for lots of interrupts/defiant stack removals over a short period
Earth
- 1 : Weakness with nearly 100% uptime if you have condition duration, though that requires sticking in earth…
- 2 : Blast finisher for all those nice fields staff has
- 3 : Group projectile reflection if you trait for powerful auras
- 4 : Cripple, but this is hard to use and doesn’t matter if your group’s got decent melee fighters
- 5 : Immobilize, but see 4
That’s just the weapon skills for staff, and a lot of those aren’t dependent on stacking healing power or traiting for support. As for actual trait support…
Boons on attunement (Water Regen and Earth Protection are the most valuable for support, but you need to be close enough to allies to spread it to them)
You can get a 20% CD reduction for water if you want to focus more on the healing skills
Water AoE heal on attunement
Evasive Arcana is awesome; AoE heal + condition removal in water, or AoE cripple + blast finisher in earth, or AoE blind for 6 seconds on air
You can also trait for an AoE condition removal when attuning to water, and condition removal whenever you grant anybody regen. With both that’s 2 condition removals when attuning to water, but also 4 condition removals over 10 seconds when you use healing rain if you’re using staff (and one self-removal when using Glyph of Elemental Harmony in water)
There’s a bunch of other traits that I’m sure are useful as well, but I’ve only really described the ones I’m familiar with.
This isn’t starting to consider utility skills. What’s important to remember is that support is not just healing, especially when you pay attention to how much more eles can do than simply healing.
I’m sure the other ele weapons have plenty of support available as well, but I’m not used to them, so I won’t talk about that.
How high do tiers go? Is it 100 dynamic events?
100 events, 100 veterans, craft 40 masterwork (green) or higher items, 5 dailies.
Once you’ve finished your daily and can see the Monthly list in the UI, you can mouse-over each element there to see the real totals, without anything hidden by the whole tiers thing.
^ That
As a heads up, while weapon swap sigils are triggered by switching attunements, they have a 9 second internal cooldown (this is to prevent shenanigans with eles being able to trigger the sigils 4 times every 9 seconds with 30 in Arcane, or with warriors with Discipline 15 being able to weapon swap every 5 seconds)
All of our most useful skills can’t be used again before the attunement recharge is finished anyways, so reducing it further isn’t really necessary (unless you want to abuse boons on attunement swapping…)
So I did some thinking on this overnight, and I figure the problem as described may have possible solution, though whether these will work are dependent on it being possible to change the implementation.
First issue: Bleed stacks would theoretically take up huge amounts of server bandwidth if they were allowed to go infinite
a) Bleeds only need to tick once per second. Change their duration to a simple count of ticks, which only needs to update once per second. Have all bleeds tick at the same time, so the server only needs to notify clients once per second.
b) Player clients only need a few pieces of information about the entire stack – the total count of bleeds (number on condition), the duration of the longest bleed (timer bar on condition), and the total damage output of their own bleeds.
c) The total damage of a player’s own bleeds can be simulated on the client from the player’s stats, as well as the number and duration of those same bleeds. If the server can calculate them, it shouldn’t need to communicate that data back.
d) This could reduce the entire upload bandwidth from the server for bleeds to a grand total of… once per second, a flag to say “this is the total bleed stack” and two numbers. Possibly just a single byte each. For the entire stack, up to 255 bleeds. 2 bytes on one of those if we want to go nuts and have 65535 bleeds. Obviously the server already handles being notified of 123684 new bleed stacks every second in group events (by discarding older bleeds for newer ones…), so client upload isn’t an issue.
So bleeds as a bandwidth issue… can probably be solved, though it may need a re-code of how the condition works. You might argue that it would eat into server processing, but then we could have every single player at one of these events stacking 25 bleeds on separate mobs and that works fine, so I doubt it.
With bleeds out of the way, that leaves:
Confusion – Confusion will rarely reach 25 stacks even in a dungeon party as far as I’m aware, so I’m not sure it’s even necessary to solve this one. Maybe huge events would need more.
Poison and Burning – Doesn’t stack, but if we’ve freed up 24 “slots” from getting rid of the bleed overhead, we could easily give poison/burning 5-10 of those each for individual players (to have one burn/poison per player). 5 would be the minimum for dungeons and pvp, though large events would want more.
So, uh, if that solution would work ANet – do it, condition builds will love you.
No.
Everything that could feasibly be implemented via a level cap increase could be done without breaking the promise for no gear grind.
New traits and/or trait points? Tie them to achievement tracks in expansions, or have extremely hard skill challenges called “trait challenges” which do the obvious.
Gating content based on progression? Open world: tie zone unlocks to some sort of counter based on renown hearts, dynamic event completion in the previous map, etc.
New skills, weapon sets? No reason to tie those to level progression, just like what we already have.
If they can find a way to increase the level cap without voiding everybody’s gear, I wouldn’t complain as such, but it’s not particularly necessary to evolve the game in any way.
Norn – Female – Warrior
Asura – Female – Elementalist
Asura – Female – Necromancer
3 other mostly unplayed characters from the remaining races.
My brother doesn’t read the forums, but he plays:
Charr – Male – Mesmer
As a possibility – for the Elementalist, have them work like the Engineer’s kits (infinite carry time/uses), but keep the additional summoned weapon limited – this would need to act like a chain skill. First use activates the “summon a weapon from the sky” version of the skill, then it reverts to a simple kit swap for [cooldown time] seconds.
At the very least, make the autoattacks not use charges. We’re stuck between “do nothing while waiting on skill cooldowns” and “do something very weak while waiting on skill cooldowns, but also reduce the amount of times you can use them”.
1) Dailies (20-30 mins)
2) Lion’s Arch Jumping Puzzles (15 mins tops)
3) If my dungeon group is online, run a dungeon with them. We’re not farming any dungeons in particular right now
4) World Completion with a certain friend if they’re online
5) If none of my friends are online, work on levelling an alt, or park a level 80 character on Maw if I’m not paying 100% attention to the game.
I’m not really into solo grinding anymore, which is why I only work on world completion if I’ve got a friend willing to do the maps with me these days. (Having a buddy along really helps with commune skill challenges as well, though there are few so hard that I wouldn’t be able to get to them alone…)
If the majority of my friends start to quit, I have no idea how long I’ll play for after that.
On days when I’m farming Maw, I might be logged in for 8 hours continuously, but I’m only playing for the 10 minutes or so that the Maw events run for in a solid chunk – I’m spending as much as 60% of my time away from the game entirely.
Staff:
Air 4, Air 5 + Arcane Wave (Area swiftness blast finisher), Glyph of Elemental Harmony. If you have at least 10 points in Arcane (and that trait which gives boons on attuning), switch to another attunement, switch back to air when the swiftness is running out and everything else should be off CD by then, plus you’ll get the swiftness from attuning to air.
If you’re in combat and have evasive arcana, you could also attune to earth and dodge into the static field for an additional blast finisher, but unless you’re actually trying to run away, there’s probably better uses for the blast finisher, and that one only works in combat.
Not sure how much boon duration is needed to make that rotation perma-swiftness, but I have 50% boon duration personally and have 20-30 seconds left on swiftness when I can reattune to air, so that’s probably a lot more than I need for perma swiftness alone.
(edited by Dingle.2743)
Kodan
Tengu
Elder Dra- I mean dwarves.
Then again, around 100 players playing as Elder Dragons in a new starter zone would be hilarious.
^ Title (edit: Should be “Unused skins” not “Both skins”)
One of the major issues I have with transmuting is the destruction of the unused stats and appearance. That I have to choose to destroy the look of one item completely when transmuting.
Basically, the problem as I see it is that there’s the potential to have to grind to reacquire either the looks or the stats of an item if we ever decide we want a new look… but don’t want to lose our old one. This is especially apparent if we want the looks of multiple dungeon sets – we either need to work hard on getting the same stats we already have (to have both looks), or we have to grind dungeons for an entire set we’ve already obtained once if we want to go back to an old look.
What I’m asking for is some way to retain at the very least the skin of the item we don’t keep (as a consumable that works like a transmute interface, returning the unused skin of that combination and so on), if not having the transmutation process return two items – LookA+StatsB+(Optional)UpgradeA/B, and LookB+StatsA+(Optional)UpgradeB/A
Or alternately a new transmutation stone that creates a “Skin” item which is permanently saved to either the character or the account and can be accessed from something like the PvP locker, except in PvE – so this super stone gives a skin item which is consumed like a dye, and then lets us take an infinite number of skins from the PvE locker of that type (the same way dyes are forever once used). Of course the skins would account-bind any item they’re used on so this can’t be used for profit.
There could be minor costs to using these skins like paying a few gems to withdraw them from the locker, but ultimately what’s important is the skin isn’t permanently destroyed – we shouldn’t have to grind out a set for appearance more than once.
(edited by Dingle.2743)
No, unless we’re given the option after the fact to upscale our level 80 Exotic/Ascended gear once we hit 90. The gear grind in GW2 is supposed to cosmetic once you reach BiS gear, and ANet would generate a large quantity of aggro from the players if they forced us to have to grind for new BiS gear with a level cap update.
We know the rest of the Ascended gear is coming; I’m sure most of us would rather we don’t have to replace it in the future.
I don’t mind a level cap increase if we don’t have to grind for gear stats again, as it’s pretty much a certainty that there’ll be plenty of new content to cater to the new level range if an expansion increases the cap, but I don’t want to be told “go grind for another month per character so you can get gear good enough that the elitists in dungeons will actually accept you again”
Maybe a bunch of new level 80 zones that reward trait points for map completion could be an interesting way to add progression. Just 5 or so for one more minor trait.
With GW2 not being subscription base, players who could amass enough gold for the gems to be able to purchase the expansion would essentially be getting the game for free.
Time and resources go into creating games and their expansions and while Anet is probably doing well with their Gem business on top of the inital game purchases, I’m sure their employees would like to be appreciated with raises and/or bonuses which giving away free games would effectively curtail.
The idea here is that somebody spent enough money to buy those gems, then another player trades them gold for those gems and buys the expansion.
The upside could be that this gives gem seller a reason to buy more gems to sell, and the downside could be things such as the gem market already essentially being full and none of the gems being used are from new spending, or alternatively the gems are being fed into the economy via credit card fraud on some level and the money spent on them may not stay in ANet’s pockets. Also, in the case of gems bought via fraud, what do they do to the person who bought those gems (from the seller)?
I’m for the expansions not being available for gems, as I feel supporting the developers of an expansion should be a personal thing and not bought with the hours of time you’ve spent… already playing their game, on their servers, costing them money for the upkeep of your entertainment. But if they can deal with fraud, then there’s no real loss to making it a gem store item for them.
Maybe they could hit a compromise (with my ethics…) and release the update in the gem store 1-2 months after the retail release (to get the people that aren’t willing to spend their own money), but they’d have to announce this as something that would happen at least before preorders are available, or they’d have some very angry customers.
Ultimately it’s down to ANet. They’ll get more people coming back if they put it on the gem store (the epansion’s technically free if you can unlock it via playing the game, right?) but they might not want to deal with potential issues from that.
The new dailies, so far:
Underwater Kills – Takes less than 5 minutes to get 10 kills; just about every zone has an underwater area you can quickly rack up these kills in.
Dodges – Similar to the above, this doesn’t take much time at all.
Combo Finishers – If this wasn’t bugged, it wouldn’t be very hard to do either. Certain NPC’s will generate combo fields, or use combo finishers, so it’s possible to do this by attending certain events if you’re that opposed to being around other people. (I actually ran into somebody who partied with me for this achievement, and we found that fire field + whirl finisher was consistent – and cleared the achievement within 5 minutes for both of us)
All of the above were likely made for the same purpose – to push players towards understanding/reinforcing those skills. Underwater combat is often different in terms of skills to land combat, and not everybody has mastered it; dodging practice in general is worthwhile for everyone; Combo Finishers are an integral part of the game in higher level play, so reinforcing those in achievements helps everybody eventually.
Crafting – Why complain? You’ve been required to gather materials daily for the last 4 months. Even refining materials counted, e.g. Ore into Ingots – it took me less than one minute to walk to a crafting station and make some bronze ingots from the materials I’ve been harvesting every day since I started playing the game.
Revives – NPC’s count, NPC’s die in droves during a large number of dynamic events, reviving NPC’s gives exp, counts towards a longterm achievement and is something people generally do when they can. Take a trip to somewhere like Thaumanova Reactor, where the default state of NPC’s is pretty much “dead”, and again, this takes only a few minutes.
Really, there’s nothing terrible about the new achievements, and they have a clear purpose, which is pushing players towards reinforcing their skills in certain areas.
The update doesn’t seem to have caused any major changes to elementalists, so I’m going to see about learning to play my Ele in the way you suggested.
As for the mail, it wasn’t anything related to goldselling, as far as I could tell – in short, a guy that saw this thread was asking if I’d like a direct in-game lesson on playing my ele. Not sure why he’d be banned so suddenly, seemed like he was more a roleplayer than anything else – suitable name for his race, referenced the lore in the way he wrote the mail, etc. Simply put, not the kind of account/character somebody would waste on goldselling/botting. If he’s banned, he’s probably banned from the forum as well, which may be why I haven’t heard from him at all.
That aside, I’ve played with your builds a little today, though I specced 10 points into water instead of air – a little survivability seems to go a long way in PvE and story quests especially; I got invited into an AC run and managed to help out, which is more than I expected at level 35.
Everybody thinking this breaks Magic Find:
1) You kill mobs
2) RNG determines loot, using MF
3) If the loot contains an item at a certain rarity level, spawn a chest and put the loot in the chest
4) Else, leave it on the corpse as normal
Now, unless we have to do the whole chest-opening animation to get the loot, all this really means is “There is now a visual indicator that a mob is worth looting”
Though I don’t recall it ever being treated as such in-game, I’d imagine amongst Asura, being a manual labourer is a ridiculed position in their society.
Asura have custom-designed golems for most forms of manual labour, and for the tasks they haven’t built a suitable golem for, they can surely outsource to the other, less intelligent races. With the profits the Asuran race like get from the waypoint system and Asura gates, as well a selling (likely vastly overpriced) technological products to other races, it’s more or less certain that labour is incredibly cheap from their perspective.
So an Asuran manual labourer? He must be so worthless, he’s the equivalent of a golem… or a Norn…
@Inkubus: Thanks for all the advice. I’ll see if I can put it to good use, though I might not fully commit to learning the rotation until I see what changes, if any, the update will have for Elementalists.
To whoever sent me a particularly eloquent mail in-game: For whatever reason, when I try to reply, I get an error message stating that the mail system is “Unable to find recipient.” PM me, perhaps?
The circle needs to be the negative color of the ground for the best contrast.
^This. The other option is to give the rings two contrasting layers of colour, e.g. white/dark red for hostile rings, and black/light blue for friendly rings. Having separate colours for hostile and friendly would go a long way to ensuring players aren’t wasting dodges on friendly attacks in particularly zergy zones (WvWvW, obviously)
Also, colourblind here – I can’t see the red circles against darker surfaces, especially brown/black ones. Plus side, almost no issues in the open areas of the Shiverpeaks.
This is just speculation, but:
Given the nature of the changes to Daily achievements, I’m going to assume that ANet are aiming to release the update at midnight GMT, when the Daily achievements get reset.
There haven’t been any announcements along the lines of “the update will be released in an hour” or anything like that, so I’m doubting it’ll be half an hour from now, i.e. the next daily achievement reset, so probably it’ll be 24 and a half hours from now. If you’re in GMT or any further east, that may as well be the 29th, but it’d be around 4PM PST, and as has been noted, ANet function in PST, so they’d still be meeting their announcement of an update on the 28th.
…Kinda hoping I’m wrong and it releases earlier, because my logic has just told me to stop looking forward to an update tonight. We’ll see.
I’ve been playing since christmas (got the game as a xmas present), have a level 80 warrior, level 30 elementalist, level 8 mesmer.
I’ve had a total of around 12-15 dye drops in that time. I wasn’t aware that people were used to them being more common than that.
If you pay more attention to what the traits actually do, you’ll notice that it’s fully viable to select major traits which don’t care about your current attunement, and of the minor traits, only the 5 point traits in each element tree care about being in that element – the master minor traits are themed on switching elements, which you wouldn’t be doing if you stuck to one element forever, and the grandmaster minor traits give global benefits for all attunements.
Then there’s the arcane trait line, which is very heavily themed around changing attunements regularly (and because it’s so beneficial to do so, most people spec into Arcane)
I may only just be getting the hang of playing an elementalist myself, but it’s pretty clear that the best way to play is switching attunements regularly. Remember that each individual skill in each attunement has a seperate CD to the same slot in another element, so regularly switching would let you use powerful skills more often. With that in mind, sticking to a single element seems to be a bad way to play the class.
^ Title.
I recently started an Asura Elementalist. Gotten to level 23, learned every weapon skill, crafting my gear as I go along to level my crafting skills.
However, it’s a lot harder to play than my previous character (Warrior, levelled using a S/S + Rifle bleed build) and I’m not sure how to trait it during the levelling process. It also feels like a lot of my weapon options just aren’t as useful at low-level PvE – I feel like I’m being forced into Staff, as a large number of dynamic events have large mobs and S/D and D/D don’t fare as well in AoE skills.
So I’m looking for advice on things like effective trait builds at low levels, what gear stats I should aim at, and which healing/utility/elite skills to pick. There are plenty of guides for how I can set up my character at level 80, I’m just looking for help on the way there.
Thanks in advance, everyone.
At least two problems with this. Certain mobs are just completely out of the way. In CM some seem to be behind closed doors. Many paths do not have a chest at the end, for all those there is never a reason to go for 100%.
If you’re looking for a reason to go 100%, DDO did it perfectly.
Number of kills, objects destroyed, and ‘side-quest’ objectives completed were a few of the many ways dungeons racked up their own set of points to be tacked on to the final run-end reward.
That encouraged people to kill, break, find, help, and essentially ‘complete’ as much as they could to get that top-end reward.
Perhaps a system like that could be worked out for dungeon tokens on the ‘first run’ daily bonus.
Logged in to say something along these lines.
If you don’t want to give players an incentive to kill the early monsters on the basis that they’ll clear the early content of the dungeon and then leave to respawn the enemies, hence never clearing the dungeon – instead give the players a reward at the end of the dungeon based on the amount of content they cleared.
For example, rewarding dungeon tokens based on total kills rewarded after clearing (perhaps 1 per regular enemy, 2 per veteran and 3 per champion), or have mobs drop keys which are needed to open chests that spawn at the end of the dungeon – incentives that make players want to kill mobs, but also want to clear the dungeon.
There’s another potential issue for leather/cloth that was mentioned in a review I read recently:
Because most rewards are upscaled to your current level, it becomes increasingly difficult to acquire low-end materials the longer you play for on a single character. While a player could roll a new character or buy from the TP, I don’t think a player should at any point feel forced to do either of those in order to acquire low-tier crafting items simply to level the craft; however, if they didn’t realise salvaging was the only way to get cloth/leather when they were still at the level range to get low-tier
crafting mats, they’ll be forced to buy or make a new character.
That could especially become a problem when a player decides to make a legendary which requires max level cloth/leather crafting to produce materials for the weapon’s gifts, though again the player could simply buy the refined materials.
It just bugs me that there’s no consistent method for gathering leather/cloth that doesn’t scale up to the player’s level – let us harvest leather from animal-type monsters based on their level (instead of our character’s) and add cloth harvesting nodes somehow (even if that means inventing wool-producing plants)
One way to reduce overhead on this system would be something like this:
- Each mob, or group of mobs, is assigned a volume in the game world. Could be a specific area around those mobs, or simply the same volumes that are already used to determine if a player is in-range of a PoI/waypoint/revealing a map section
- Whenever a player enters this volume, trigger an event telling the mobs tied to it that a player has entered the region
- Whenever a player leaves the volume, do the same for a player leaving the region
Those combined would reduce the server overhead by only needing to check when a player takes a certain action; it’s unlikely that it would be a massive overhead. You could also take it a step further, and have the enter/leave events simply add/remove seconds from the respawn timer, which would have the nifty effect of a player entering an area directly causing the mobs to respawn.
This would only make a large overhead if an area has a large number of active players repeatedly crossing boundary lines for these invisible respawn volumes, so maybe deactivate it for WvWvW (the only place I can see that causing an issue)
This is just something that popped into my head recently after reading somewhere that ANet are considering making Legendary weapons account-bound so we only have to craft each once per account. Not sure if I can find the source on that right now and it may be false, but whatever.
The suggestion is this: Make some sort of system that lets us account-bind weapon skins, and swap between them at will on any char (similar to dying armor – a purely cosmetic option from the list of skins we have available)
Possible restrictions on the system:
1) Only allow players to get skins from weapons they have crafted/obtained personally (I have no idea if there’s a tag for original owner on equipment, so not sure how feasible that is, but the point is you only get to account-bind a legendary weapon skin if you crafted it)
2) Obtaining a skin from an item destroys the item
3) Characters you want to use the skin on need to be able to equip the original item (so need to be level 80 to use legendary skins from another character)
4) It could require an item from the gem store; some sort of Superior Transmutation Stone or something, to cover the loss from players no longer needing other Transmutation Stones for that skin. Perhaps this shouldn’t apply to legendary weapons out of respect for the effort it takes to make one already.
Benefits from this include:
1) Legendary weapon skins can become account-bound; possibly other skins as well.
2) Legendary weapons remain “best-in-slot” on the basis that you can wear the actual current best-in-slot underneath the skin. Though this still means if you destroy your legendary to have the skin, you need to obtain the best-in-slot weapon to replace the stats.
3) It also helps for all those exotic weapon from the mystic forge that require days or months of daily/monthly achievements to collect coins for. (those are the only way to get Mystic Coins, right?)
4) It gives motivation to try to collect every legendary (or even just one legendary), so the player can change weapon set-ups on a character and still have legendary skins (this can already be done by crafting multiple legendaries on a single character, but…)
5) This likely won’t particularly hurt much of the game, except for potentially reducing the perceived value of legendaries on the TP.
Anyways, that’s the idea. Craft a legendary -> Convert to Skin item -> Unlocks ability to display that skin on any character without needing the weapon, as long as you could actually equip the legendary on that character.
Thoughts?