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I love that Ashes of Creation will have a weapon talent system. I think that it creates a massive opportunity for players to really distinguish their own unique playstyle and drive so many different build paths. The synergies that will exist between weapons and your abilities as well as weapons and other player's abilities is a great idea. I truly believe that this will enable an extremely high level of dynamic game play for both PvE and PvP. (burning blade from the fighter/great sword preview as an example)
The weapon talent systems are in a decent place as of right now but I do think there is opportunity to make improvements here. I'd also love if the team could do a deep dive of the weapon talent progression because I'm not fully clear on how you make your way through the weapon talents and what sort of limitation will be in place so you can't just get every weapon talent within a specific weapon talent tree.
The good:
The team has done a good job navigating the tough balance that exists by making all weapons usable by all archetypes. I can see how the different passives and procs can be applicable to various archetypes and how they can change how an player approaches their play style across the board (as well as in specific situations).
The weapon talent system seems to be doing a great job and trying to drive decision making in combat. Deciding when to finish a weapon combo, when to focus on pushing a weapon specific buff (like essence harvest), and when to weave in basic attacks vs. focusing on your ability rotation.
The not so good:
I personally think that many of the weapon talents lack depth. A lot of the upgrades you get when you progress a specific modifier (e.g. elemental attunement 1 to elemental attunement 2) feels lackluster because it keeps adding the same flat percentage bonus as you upgrade.
Along that same line of thinking, I wish the modifiers lead to another keystone talent. Something that incentivizes you to finish out a modifier portion of the weapon talent tree. If not that, maybe the leveled (wand hit extra damage 1, 2, 3) talents could unlock some sort of deeper/more special modifier when you reach the 3rd level of the talent.
I hope that the final weapon talent system drives a significant amount of weight in your decision making when speccing your weapon. What I mean by that is having limitations on your total talent points as well as forcing us as players to have to really pick and choose how we spec our weapons. I like when our choices matter and carry a lot of weight because it forces us to be intentional about our choices and enables us to have a multitude of play styles. Similarly, I hope that they make updates to the system to make the talents more interesting than static damage or static proc chance etc. Maybe more proc types or more modifiers connected to ability attack types - I'm not totally sure but I know they could do more here.
I'm also a new content creator and am focusing largely on Ashes of Creation because it's the only game I'm actually looking forward to. If you want to see all of my thoughts on the weapon talent system and a more in-depth overview, I made a video on it here:
https://youtu.be/UfBRihBtWGI