Guild Wars: If I Entered the Design-a-Weapon Contest

Sadly, didn't get a chance to what with everything going on and all. I can barely scratch out a few hours to play each night, setting aside several more to draft a weapon design was beyond me. And I believe the deadline for submissions has passed. I doubt anything I would have come up with would have made it in game – I tend to prefer an austere simplicity over the sparkling gewgaws and garish ornamentation that people seem to like. But I'd at least have liked to have some fun with it.

For example, I think I would have sent this in for my first submission:

With the following note:

Wooden Sword (Call it a Waster, a Bokken, a Suburito, or even a Dussak, I don't care.). To make it all you'd have to do is reskin the standard Short Sword with a wooden pattern. But the important thing is that it has to have the following maximum stat line: 15~22 blunt damage.

Just to see what happens. My second submission would, of course, be this:

And you can guess what the damage type would be.

There've been some attempts made along these lines with piercing Battlepick Axes and Daggers which go either slashing or piercing – there's even already a sword that does blunt damage, the Jitte, if I'm not mistaken – but they haven't been very successful. I'd really want to push it to the limit and see what breaks.

I'd just want to see what would happen if you could introduce weapons with different damage types than normal, I guess. It's probably pointless because, like Block/Evade, while it's an old mechanic that's been in the game for a while it's never really been made of much use. Beyond dividing damage into physical, elemental, and armor ignoring, there's really not much point to subdividing further except to create more shield swaps, I guess. As with Block/Evade, it's not much use because while there are a few skills – like Shields Up or Bladeturn Refrain – that deal with specific damage subtypes they're not particularly....what's the word? Ah, yeah – good. Not when there are skills that are just as effective which apply universal armor bonuses or just straight damage mitigation. These specific skills need to be extremely strong to make up for being so narrow but they're really not. It has the potential to enrich the game by providing a mechanic for players to try and outguess each other and mix and match damage types to the best effect. But as long as there are ways of bypassing that matching game, it's pointless.

Ah well. If I could slip a way of exploring that design space past the gatekeepers, my next step would be something like a mace. Think about it, a one-handed blunt weapon that you could use with hammer skills while still lugging a shield. It'd require some serious tweaking of existing skills but I think, I'd start by putting it at 11~22 damage with a 1.33 swing rate. Then I'd say that when you use a mace as opposed to a hammer you'd just outright half any knockdown times. Normal KD times would then be a second while Backbreaker would be the hammer-normal 2. Add Stonefists and you'd add that additional second. You'd have to look at the extra damage from skills, then, and maybe screwing with condition durations for the one-handed version as well. Then there's two-handed axes and swords to think about....