Hear me out before losing your minds!
Many games start out baking weapons with utility. It has always been a near disaster because balancing around having it and not having it is impossible.
Wow is a great example in MMO history where they baked too much utility into certain classes that they couldn’t buff their damage/healing…which meant that class suffered outside group content.
In the case of new world, they didn’t punish weapons with utility…but now because certain weapons “have it all,” there isn’t reason to bring ones that don’t (speaking in PVE). At the same time, many weapons need reworked to have more engaging and meaningful abilities. As effective as hatchet is, the abilities are quite terrible from a user experience perspective. When I speak of meaningful abilities, I’m thinking great ax gravity well as an example.
Idea:
remove rend, weaken, aoe stuns (single target is fine), empower, healing reduction, etc from weapons
INSTEAD
Add a new feature called a “utility belt” where
- everyone can choose a mechanism to apply a debuff/buff
- the buffs/debuffs have to be carefully used because there should be some cooldown or charge up time to use them
The goal would be to allow people to play the weapons they want but still be able to bring utility to a group environment, while also adding more strategy to the game
The alternative is:
- make these buffs/debuffs be a choice and a strategy to use. Many weapons passively apply these affixes. No thought, just spam abilities.
- don’t allow them to stack