Weapon Skills: What to change, which ones, and how?

Naturally, the coming Balance Patch will definitely be focused on the new Elite Specializations (And probably a few old ones) in order to hammer those out first, but after that I believe that we need a Weapons Pass with the next Balance Patch. Weapon Skills typically make up the bread-and-butter of any build, with a few exceptions being based around utility skills.

Each profession basically have one or several Weapons that are drastically underperforming, lacking in purity of purpose or simply cannot seem to carve out their niche effectively. Among some of the most glaring examples are Guardian Staff, Engineer Shield and Necromancer Focus, but just about every profession needs a bump in one area or another.

So let's get some discussion going, looking to answer the following questions:

• What Weapon(s) (for which profession) are you finding lackluster, underperforming, clunky or otherwise not living up to its potential?
• Are there any particular skills in question that you find grating, unintuitive or just plain unfun? Or is it that you feel the weapon as a whole just doesn't feel right?
• Do you have any suggested changes to these weapons and/or their skills? Are these changes radically different from the current iteration, or more close to number tweaks?
  • If Yes, what's your angle with your suggested changes? What are you looking to fix, and how do you envision your suggested changes to do that?
• Are you more concerned with Weapon Skills being effective in a Vacuum, or are you alright with Niche skills designed primarily to synergize with other weapon skills and/or Specialization traits?
• And lastly, are you typing this from primarily Open World-, PvE-, PvP- or WvW-focused perspective? Do you prefer Weapon Skills to have a more narrow but clear-cut purpose that might make it more desirable in a specific game mode, or would you rather see Weapon Skills designed to carve out a niche in every game mode even if that might cause it to suffer in terms of Purity of Purpose?

I love the GS on mesmer. But when cornered you will have to play piano with your utility skills. The 5, Illusionary Wave is supposed to create some distance but it only works while facing the target which is a problem when you are running away or have a thief or warrior that runs through you back and forth spamming dagger autoattacks. My suggestion would be to decrease the range of illusionary wave while giving it's effect get a 360 degree radius.

I'll give feedback on guardian (primarily wvw and pvp perspective):

• Staff takes the cake when it comes to lackluster. There are certain skills on other weapons that are still stuck in the 2012 era (torch 5, mace 1 and 2, and hammer 5) but I'll focus on staff for now.
• Pretty much every single skill on guardian staff either sucks, and/or is boring:-Staff 1 is a complete joke now. It does extremely subpar damage, has absolutely no support and is effectively melee range.-Staff 2 is still very poor. The projectile is far too slow, difficult to aim, the healing is mediocre (considering its cooldown) and it does next to no damage. Staff 2 is essentially single-target staff 1 with a tiny bit of healing and no further functionality attached.-Staff 3 is a decent skill. Synergizes with traits, adds a bit of damage and can be worked into either condi or power builds.-Staff 4 should be mobile. This skill is far too niche requiring not only specific gearing but specific traiting to make it even moderately effective. Upping might stacks to 15 wouldn't hurt either.-Staff 5 is pretty much ele earth staff 4 except objectively worse. When they do a weapons pass, they should change the functionality of this skill rather than make boring numerical tweaks. Adding some sort of ally support or damage to this skill would be pretty neat if you ask me.
• Some suggested changes for staff: It really needs to regain its title as a support weapon. It doesn't do too great of a job of that right now. I would advocate massive reworks of the skills on staff. Each skill would conceptually remain the same but would work slightly differently: Add healing to staff 1 and increase the radius (450 is fine). Staff 2 should be ground-targeted. Once it reaches its destination, it would pulse something (maybe healing to allies or blind to foes) and would have a detonate (same as it is now). It would also have a solid cooldown (7 or 8s) and no cd reduction mechanic. Staff 3 is fine as is. Staff 4 I would make mobile, and slightly decrease might duration. Alternatively, it could remain as is but grant 15 stacks of might and have a 16s cooldown. Staff 5 could call down a beam of light from above that deals decent damage before spreading out into a ward as it is now.
• It's fine to have niche skills that work optimally using a particular build, however there should never be a case where an entire weapon is niche skills or works only with a specific build. This is exactly what staff is. It has very poor performance to begin with and it must be specifically built for just to achieve par.
• I originally intended to approach staff from a pvp and wvw perspective but honestly it could be said for pretty much any activity in all three game modes. Staff is a highly underperforming weapon on guardian that is still stuck in vanilla-game balance.

As an engineer main shield is perfectly fine in every way except the cooldowns. All it needs is to be on par with the other Shields in the game with 20/25 second cooldown on it's skills.

If anything I'd rather rifle be reworked into an effective ranged weapon, or mortar kit be reworked into an effective ranged kit. Engineer used to be good at ranged with the old long ranged nades but those were nerfed to welcome mortar kit and mortar kit lacked in every way compared to nades.

Lots of people disagree with a rifle rework but if that's what it takes for Engineer to get a viable ranged option then I'd take it. Rifle is effectively a melee weapon that focuses on locking down and bursting them, and the last 2 elite specs have both added a melee weapon, something that we needed the first time but not the second IMO.

Mortar kit could be the ranged option we need but it's an elite skill and not a weapon, so balancing it like a weapon would be weird I think.

As a guardian I would suggest changing the torch 5. It looks great but is neglected by most players since the scepter 1 has higher DPS in MOST cases. A flat DPS increase on skill 5 would be boring, I suggest making it apply more burn stacks to increase it's viability on a condi perspective and increasing the flat damage at least to surpass the scepter AA.

I feel like warrior longbow needs something more to the skill 4 blind. Cripple? I don't know, but all the others seem fine.

Renegade Shortbow. I don't think it's as terrible as everyone makes it out to be. It has potential on condi builds, but it definitely has some issues. Mainly with how difficult it can be to land the attacks properly. Edit: Sorry I didn't mention the weapon skills specifically. Bloodbane Path - The projectiles really should track the target. Enemies can avoid it completely by simply moving. Sevenshot - Well, everyone says this skill needs a rework and I agree. Way too difficult to hit stuff with this. Spiritcrush - It's actually a really nice ability, but tends to be unnecessarily restrictive with the casting angles. Scorchrazor - Also a nice skill, but we don't get enough control over the direction it's cast and lands up going completely off target sometimes. I probably still need to get used to the weapon, but does still feel like it needs polishing.