Big Ideas to shake things up: An expansion to the weapons system

[Shiboito.4253]

Hi systems team, first of all wanted to say that I've been encouraged by what I've seen so far, especially knowing now that the recent profession reworks and QoL improvements to wvw (repeatable reward tracks, grandmaster marks) was the doing of the systems team only compounds that encouragement. You all are doing some great work and I think this team can go great places.

 

With that said, I wanted to offer some thoughts that have been rolling around in my head for a while that I keep coming back to. Apologies if this isn't the perfect venue for this.

 

Guild Wars 2, especially in the competitive sphere, is extremely rich in terms of room for theorycrafting and optimization amongst the player base. Nowhere else have I seen as much room for discourse surrounding class builds and comp builds with quite as many options as GW2 (Seriously, you should have seen our guild forums for 4 months post PoF launch -- SO much fun discussion!), and so it is in the interest of fostering that particular strength of the game that I offer something which I feel will expand that foundation for yet more theory and buildcraft from the community. This suggestion is the decoupling of weapons from elite specializations, and perhaps adding more weapons to certain professions on the core level, rather than introducing them with further elite specializations pending further expansions or major updates (hey, you can release a mount with living world, why not weapons for a profession?)

 

The desire for this unfettered access to weapon types to core professions comes from a multitude of builds where I could say "you know, i'd really like it if I could use *some_elite*'s weapon in this build and having to settle for some other option", but I think the most potent example of these is the Firebrand's Axe and the Dragonhunter's Longbow. Core guardian is still a viable build type, but suffers from lackluster ranged options and a reliance on the sword as its only viable main hand damage, with limited control options among those and few good options for condi builds. All that could change by unlocking those two weapons to the main class.

 

Similarly, opening up scourge torch to reaper and core could open up a plethora of new builds which could make good use of its options.

 

Ultimately, this is just one player's fun fantasy, but I guess part of the point of this post is just to say that I would encourage the team to challenge the assumptions of systems that have been put in place, and to question whether their presence makes the game better, or if modifying or removing them would improve the game yet more.

 

Thanks! Keep up the great work :)

[derd.6413]

suggested before, got shot down back then and will be shot down again