Guild Wars 2

Single-handed weapons should offer a full set of skills when an off-hand item is not equipped

I’m irked by how the game seems to suggest that fighting without an off-hand weapon definitively limits your ability to fight.

In literature, there are characters depicted as only wielding a single one-handed weapon and come up with unique offbeat benefits that compensate for the lack of weapon in the other hand.

Guild Wars 2 should allow players to enjoy the style of wielding only one 1-handed weapon as well.

For example, when a Thief is only wielding a Pistol, Dagger, or Sword without an offhand:

Here are some possible 4 and 5 skills, to show how this could work:

Pistol:

• Pistol Block: Guard against melee attacks for a brief moment. If a melee attack is blocked, shadowstep behind your attacker and daze them for a few seconds.
• Reload Assault: Fire Vital-Shots twice as fast (1 initiative each) until you are out of initiative. Channel for 1 second and regain a portion of the initiative you used.

Comments: Using a pistol barrel to block an attack just seems cool.
And if you have a hand free, that makes reloading a pistol much easier, so based on how initiative works, logically that means you should have a way to recover initiative.

Dagger:

• Hilt Smash: Strike your target’s head, confusing them for a few seconds.
• Five Finger Discount: Shadow-step behind and pickpocket your target, curing a condition. If you are not afflicted with a condition, you gain a random boon. (Shorter range then Steal, fyi)

Comments: Having a hand free could mean being able to steal more often.

Sword:

• Single Arm Stance: Gain quickness and dodge all melee attacks for several seconds.
• Arm Gamble: Apply X stacks of vulnerability to yourself. Immobilize yourself and your attacker the next time you take damage for several seconds. Once immobilized, the damage of your next few attacks are heavily increased.

Comments:
Zoro, Princess Bridge, and dozens of other characters you’ve probably never heard of that are just more skilled with one sword and look cooler doing so.

And, of course, the “make yourself vulnerable to make the enemy vulnerable” trick had to be put in somewhere. A bit like Necros with their conditions, except much more physical and normal as opposed to magic/curses.

Some are a matter of elegance of having only one weapon to focus on, while others have a high-risk high-reward thing going on.
Both are great, and I feeling GW2 is missing out with the way things are set up right now.

Thief may very well be the worst example as skill 3 is different when you have a bare hand as an off hand than when you have another weapon .

As for your suggestion if ANET did this many people would never feel the need to get an off hand making them invalid .

I’ll admit that the way that GW2 handles weapons has, to my mind, been a disappointment.

I agree that having a single, 1-H weapon equipped shouldn’t limit you to just 3 skills. There are scores of examples – real-life and fantasy – of skilled proponents of combat equipped with just a sword or dagger. Yet GW2 punishes us for trying to emulate them instead of recognising that maybe, just maybe, someone equipped with a single dagger has “trained” to be excellent with it.

Another thing I miss is having a pool of weapon skills (as per GW). It makes everything feel too cookie-cutter and mass-produced. I’d like to be able to swap in situational skills as… erm… the situation demanded. I’d like to be able to swap out one skill for another so that my hammer-welding Nord wasn’t exactly the same as every other hammer-wielding Nord.

This, I think, is one of ANet’s biggest failings: the desire to have a level playing field has drastically reduced the ability of the players to customise their character’s skill-set.

There are other – what I consider to be – failings with weapons too.

The lack of weapon-swapping for Engineers and Elementalists. Okay, maybe giving them the ability to swap from close-up combat to distance control mid-combat does make them OP. So? Make the ability only available outside of combat. It seems ridiculous to me that these two classes should lose 2 inventory slots just so that they can carry the minimum weapon-sets that they’ll need.

However, my biggest moan is reserved for the traditional “if it’s a staff then only a wizard can use it” mentality. ANet said they were moving away from traditional MMO combat and, to give them credit, they have pretty much proved that the “Holy Trinity” of other games isn’t necessary. However, they’re still stuck with the old D&D mindset: daggers are for thieves and staffs are for wizards.

I’ve said this in previous posts but it is just bizarre that my warrior can figure out how to use a 1-H or 2-H sword yet a dagger is completely and utterly beyond his comprehension. Same with a staff – I’m not expecting warriors to be able to channel the “arcane powers of the universe” and blow stuff up but I would expect a warrior to figure out how to use a staff to seriously inconvenience people. Hello – quarterstaff anyone?

tldr:

1. I agree with the Op that a single weapon should have 5 skills.
2. I’d like to see a pool of skills like in the original GW
3. Weapon-swapping out of combat for Engineers and Elementalists.
4. All weapons useable by all classes.

When you re-invent the wheel, you keep enough things the same so as to not culture shock people.

We lost the pick up/turn in of quests.
We lost the holy trinity.
We gained dynamic events.
We gained an easier method of balancing classes (fixed skills on weapons makes balance easier).

Amung others… keeping a staff arcane-like helps to make things feel not-so-different for many new players.

That said, I totally agree. A ranger using a quarterstaff style of fighting would be glorious. I also find it odd my warrior canf igure out how to use a spear underwater but seems to be baffled at how to use it on the land (spears were created and designed before bows or even swords for crying out loud!). I was fully expecting spears to be a melee weapon for the soldier classes.

tldr:
I agree with the Op that a single weapon should have 5 skills.
I’d like to see a pool of skills like in the original GW
Weapon-swapping out of combat for Engineers and Elementalists.
All weapons useable by all classes.

1: YES
2:YES
3:NO elementalists would be way overpowerd
4:YES

I totally agree…also, it´s not mandatory to have “bare hand skills” for every weapon…maybe just two skills for bare hand for any weapon (so nothing in off-hand equals an off hand weapon)
Daggers for warriors (or guardians even, why not?) would be awesome, as well as spear or quarterstaff on land…it´s all good but we can´t have everything right now, can we? I just think that ANet will give us some of these things in expansions (new weapons, new weapon combinations etc)…After all, we don´t even have a 2h axe, so it have to be comming at some point.Plus, I thing ANet said they don´t want to add new classes, for balance sake, so new weapons (or old weapons that are new for some classes) is a logical course of direction here…
Please ANet…Bare-hand skills and new weapons in expansions/updates

As for weapon swapping off-combat…I don´t play neither engineer or elementalist, but I think it´d be convinience for him…As far as I know, they carry at least 1 other weapon which they swap out-of combat in inventory – which is basically the same thing, but not that easy like clicking one button

Not that I disagree with your suggestion, but how would you address that 1H weapons have less stats than 2H weapons (to make up for the dual-wielding part)?

BlakThornArrow.
tldr:
I agree with the Op that a single weapon should have 5 skills.
I’d like to see a pool of skills like in the original GW
Weapon-swapping out of combat for Engineers and Elementalists.
All weapons useable by all classes.

1: YES
2:YES
3:NO elementalists would be way overpowerd
4:YES

You see, this is what puzzles me: people keep saying Engineers, or Elementalists, would be way over-powered if given weapon-swapping – even out of combat. I don’t see how that’s the case (or even possible).

Sure, I’ll agree that giving them weapon-swapping in combat would make them over-powered. But when they’re not in combat?

At the moment, either class has to keep bag-space open for at least 2 other weapons unlike all the other classess who have a slot for a second weapon-set. While bag-space isn’t exactly at a premium, it’s a real pain to have to open up the inventory, swap weapons, and then go into combat. In cluster-kittens like big dynamic events, the big bad can be down (or almost down) before either of these classes has made a situational weapons-swap.

If they had a second weapon-slot – which they could only use out of combat – they’d save 2 bag-spaces and be prepped and ready to join in much quicker (simply pressing ` instead of i, swapping weapons, i again). So, how does that make them OP?

I suspect that people only think it would make them over-powered because it’s an on-going myth that it would. Someone, somewhere, looked at the 4 elemental sets available (or the kits available) and said “allowing these 2 classes to swap weapons mid-combat would make them devastating”. And, somewhere along the line that got translated into “ever letting these 2 classes have weapons swapping under any conditions whatsoever would make them over-powered”. And now everyone parrots it because, heaven knows, ANet never make a mistake do they?

tldr;
I disagree that giving weapons swapping out of combat to engineers and elementalists would make them over-powered. I don’t understand why do so many people say this?

Adine.2184:

As for your suggestion if ANET did this many people would never feel the need to get an off hand making them invalid .

Your criticism assumes that the new skills would completely overshadow the use of an off-hand.

The point is finding a balance so that both are at least moderately appealing to different player-demographics.

TheDaiBish.9735:

Not that I disagree with your suggestion, but how would you address that 1H weapons have less stats than 2H weapons (to make up for the dual-wielding part)?

A very good question.

If you can’t tell already, the 4 and 5 skills suggested tend to favor utility over damage.
I’d like to think that having a bare-hand offers unique utilities, while dual-wielding would lean more towards damage or the theme of the off-hand.

Although, I could also see the adding of additional chain-combos (similar to many slot-1 weapon skills) to the 4 or 5 skill slots.

• Example: Dagger’s 1-skill deals bleeds and poison. So, we could have the 4-skill be a chain combo that deals vulnerability and cripple.

And naturally, there could be sigils and traits added in to reinforce whatever features ANet runs with.

PFoster.3648:

Sure, I’ll agree that giving them weapon-swapping in combat would make them over-powered. But when they’re not in combat?

tldr;
I disagree that giving weapons swapping out of combat to engineers and elementalists would make them over-powered. I don’t understand why do so many people say this?

I’m curious about this as well.

I’ve heard sPvP players already try to keep their bag open in the corner with certain weapons places in the exposed corner.
That way, while out of combat, they can use boon-granting skills and immediately switch out. And they can repeat this whenever out of combat.

Example: Warrior’s Warhorn skills.

There’s nothing stopping an Engineer or Elementalist from doing this between fights. Not unless the enemy can maintain a constant assault and prevent them from even dropping combat-status, which is ludicrous.

From a purely subjective opinion, I think Engineers and Elementalists would not be overpowered with weapon swapping. However, I do think it would give them an unfair advantage, seeing as they are balanced without it. They would be able to switch more efficiently and still have the aforementioned switch-while-out-of-combat trick.

Well, I agree it would be awesome to have the “fencer” style in GW2.
However, out of respect to all the builds that spend money on 2handed or Dual Wielding, you should need to hold something in your offhand, even if it’s some kind of gauntlet or armlet – anything that would cost you to obtain, to make it fair for everyone.
Something that would still count as if you had an empty off-hand.

Nurvus.2891:

Well, I agree it would be awesome to have the “fencer” style in GW2.
However, out of respect to all the builds that spend money on 2handed or Dual Wielding, you should need to hold something in your offhand, even if it’s some kind of gauntlet or armlet – anything that would cost you to obtain, to make it fair for everyone.
Something that would still count as if you had an empty off-hand.

Please explain how this disrespects 2Handed builds or Dual-wielding builds?

Last I checked, 2Handed users actually enjoy the benefits that you are concerned with. They don’t need to buy 2 weapons, they don’t need to make 2 legendaries to match, etc..

This would simply put 1Handed main-hand weapons on an even playing ground.

For wielding two weapons, people still using dual-wielding get the benefits of:
1. An extra weapon sigil
2. Bonus stats on PvE gear

Adding a gauntlet or arm-guard type item like you suggest would actually cause the problem you’re worried about.

The only real thing you would loose over 2 one handed is the extra stats and extra upgrade, as damage is based on the average of the 2 one handers anyway (though it will be more damage than weildng a shield, horn or torch in the off hand, as they have lower damage than weapons bringing the average down).

As two handers are typically about double +1 on stats (the +1 being on the primary stat typically) but more damage.

Simply it could just double the stat bonuses of the primary weapon when having an empty off hand. It would, all in all still be weaker as you have less damage than a two hander, while loosing out an upgrade from 2 one handers.