On Spears and weapon masteries for the future.

[GeraldBC.4927]

I understand the idea behind the land spear addition. On one hand it's a convenient way to expand the game's weapon skills by 5 new skills per class(except ele who gets 20) without having to add new models, at least that's the premise. On top of that, warriors have been begging for land spears back in the hype for HoT. 

However, when I first heard that this is the addition I personally felt it was short-sighted. Yes, reintroducing parts of the game that already exist in a new way does make for an easy main feature, but there's only limited room to do that. What's next? Land tridents? Land Harpoon guns? You'll run out of weapons at that rate. Not only is it short-sighted but the aspect of convenience from a development/modelling perspective isn't even there, because spears have gone ignored as a weapon for so long. There isn't much of backlog of spear skins to fall back on here. You had to add a lot of the skins with JW. Which brings me to my thoughts on spear and new weapons. If land spears should teach you anything, it's that the work load of introducing a weapon type is not as overwhelming on the side of models as it first seems. There's no Awakened Spear or Jade Punk Spear skin, and I highly doubt there will ever be one. It's okay to introduce a weapon and not retroactively add a version of it for every single skin collection in the game. It's simple pragmatism. 

If you're going to have to make new weapon models anyway, why not just fully commit to doing that? You know what addition would leave upwards room and create a foundation to build upon?

Imagine if you will, a mini-expansion like SotO and JW but instead of reintroducing an under water weapon for all classes, adding 5 brand new skills per class, it instead adds 3 entirely new weapons with 5 skills, but only 3 classes can wield each. That way on top of having a new flagship feature like spears, you have created something to build upon for a future expansion. I'll give you a concrete example on what this could look like. 

Imagine for an expansion, 3 new weapon types: 

Greataxe - It's just a large two-handed axe

• Warrior
• Revenant
• Mesmer

Kama(s) - two small, one-handed scythes, can be wielded separately from each other

• Guardian
• Necromancer
• Thief

Crossbow -Large, two-handed ranged weapon, Name is self-explanatory and no, if robots and laser cannons don't break the setting then neither do crossbows. 

• Elementalist
• Ranger
• Engineer

It's the same amount of new skills and animations, but for each class there's now 2 new weapons they don't have access to yet. Which also means there's 2 more weapons' worth of room for a SotO style expanded weapon mastery later down the line. 

[Dean Calaway.9718]

38 minutes ago, GeraldBC.4927 said:

because spears have gone ignored as a weapon for so long. There isn't much of backlog of spear skins to fall back on here

I love it that it was the players that pushed for that and now there isn't any glitter spears for them to use 😂

38 minutes ago, GeraldBC.4927 said:

What's next? Land tridents? Land Harpoon guns?

You might very well get that, let's see what pattern emerges from the next expansion, if they'll go 1 new weapon for everyone again or different professions get different weapons.