Guild Wars 2

SMALL SPOILERS. **** So I’m about to fight the Mouth of Zhaitan, and I’ve got my hammer and greatsword equipped, and the NPCs tell me to use my ranged weapons on the hovering specter swords. Fat chance: I’m already in combat and I can’t switch to my rifle or longbow — and that fight is rough in melee, if not impossible. Only my dying allowed me to switch, back at the waypoint.

Or I’ve got the projectile shield skill slotted up, but I just ran into four trolls who are freezing me to death and boy, it would be nice to swap to that condition-curing skill, but no, I’m in combat, so I’m stuck with a skill that is useless against the troll (but had been enormously useful ten feet back when I was fighting dredge).

The game should allow some tactical, in-combat re-assignment of one’s equipment and skills. I’m NOT saying to go so far as a pause-game feature — that couldn’t be done in an MMO! — but seriously: different enemies, different skills. Let me choose what I need while I’m fighting, especially if I realize I’ve got inappropriate tools equipped.

It’ll never happen. It would allow you to “cycle” your weapons too much. Blow all your cooldowns on Greatsword, then switch to Hammer. Blow all cooldowns, switch to Longbow. Blow all cooldowns, switch to Rifle. Ect, ect.

2 weapon slots is a balance thing, and they’re locked during combat so that you can’t abuse it.

Even switching utilities in-combat would be somewhat abuseable. While you can’t actually switch utilities while they’re on cooldown, you’d still technically have access to all utilities at all times, which defeats the purpose of having limited utility slots to a degree.

If they were going to do this, they may as well just allow you to equip every weapon and give you access to every skill, save the hassle of swapping skills out.

The whole point of the builds thing is to limit what you got access to so you make balanced choices. Otherwise, since we have no geneal resouce system (i.e. Energy), it’ll be a case everyone can just blow thier cooldowns.