Guild Wars 2

Something that would add more to player choices would be to have main hand weapons have 2 more skills if you don’t have an offhand equipped, since for thief, the only way to get some skills is to not have an offhand. Would love to just use a sword on my guardian, since It can be somewhat viable with the blinds I get from Flashing Blade and Virtue of Justice.

The problem is that one-handed weapons are balanced to have less stats than two-handed weapons. Either they’d be encouraging players to gimp themselves in terms of stats (which would be basically just a trap that no one who knew better would use anyway) or they’d have to somehow double the stats for a mainhand only when an offhand wasn’t equipped.

The latter might not even be possible without reprogramming the entire system.

You could just trait it. Add it to one of the sword traits or something like that. I don’t think it would be that hard to make it viable. They could figure out some way to make it work if they wanted to. Or have it scale the weapon with no offhand equipped. They do things like that already with the scaling.

If they did something along the lines of check offhand on equip/weapon swap, and if no offhand is equipped, scale the weapon to 2h stats and add the 2 bonus skills, and if there is an offhand, it remains at 1h stats and only has the 3 skills.

Then its just a matter of figuring out what kind of skills to add, and all that jazz. For Guardian, the sword could use either a parry or some kind of defensive buff type of skill, and then maybe an attack that adds burning or something, to go with the theme.

Urthona.3198:

The problem is that one-handed weapons are balanced to have less stats than two-handed weapons. Either they’d be encouraging players to gimp themselves in terms of stats (which would be basically just a trap that no one who knew better would use anyway) or they’d have to somehow double the stats for a mainhand only when an offhand wasn’t equipped.

The latter might not even be possible without reprogramming the entire system.

This is not true.. there are “offhand light” abilities as thief, for example if I’m using a dagger in my main hand and nothing in my offhand, I get “offhand light” abilities (of course meaning nothing equipped in offhand) to compensate. Now they could easily do this with any class, it’s not a programming impossibility like you’re saying because it has already been done. And before you say that it’s just for dagger it’s not.. It works for every weapon for thief.

Brewergamer.8357:

Urthona.3198:

The problem is that one-handed weapons are balanced to have less stats than two-handed weapons. Either they’d be encouraging players to gimp themselves in terms of stats (which would be basically just a trap that no one who knew better would use anyway) or they’d have to somehow double the stats for a mainhand only when an offhand wasn’t equipped.

The latter might not even be possible without reprogramming the entire system.

This is not true.. there are “offhand light” abilities as thief, for example if I’m using a dagger in my main hand and nothing in my offhand, I get “offhand light” abilities (of course meaning nothing equipped in offhand) to compensate. Now they could easily do this with any class, it’s not a programming impossibility like you’re saying because it has already been done. And before you say that it’s just for dagger it’s not.. It works for every weapon for thief.

Exactly. All they would have to do is come up with some additional skills and increase the stats a bit, and it would be feasible. It would give more options to the player, and since it wouldn’t be all that difficult to do, why not? Since when is more a bad thing.

I never understood why there were “no off hand” options to begin with. The leveling pace is so fast that it seems like wasted coding effort. Same for the mountains of redundant equipment and vendors everywhere.

It’s almost like the developers were working on a quantity quota rather than quality.

This would be really cool. I’m imagining being able to punch someone in the face while wielding one sword main hand on warrior, and maybe something like Throw Dirt for the ranger with just a sword (although I do really like sword/dagger). So many possibilities ! XD

I remember reading a thread with a similar goal which suggested an offhand “glove” weapon to provide the second weapon’s stats, and indicate a free offhand.

I would really like to see this. It would offer a nice customization option, particularly if the “empty offhand” skills were animated in a finesse-focused way – a warrior, for example, with a free offhand would intuitively be more agile with his single weapon.

The only major barrier to this being implemented is that each class would require two additional skills be thought up, balanced against existing skillsets, programmed, and animated per one-handed weapon per profession. While that would have been comparative cake in development, most MMO developers hire a bulk initial staff rich with programmers and content-creators which gets drastically cut at launch. This is no exception, so the manpower to hammer this out might simply not be there.

Sadly it probably would be quite a bit of work, maybe it’s something we could hope to see in a future content update.

as for the no offhand skills for thieves those have been stated by the dev directly that they were quickly thrown together and never intended to be used outside the tutorial area (the no oddhand for pistol is a very clear exmaple of why this seems right… the repeater skill there is jsut a plain weker version of the p/p’s unload really, and the swords “Stab” to me feel more like a skill fit for a #1 rather than a #3 skill, and even twisting fang porbably being the best of the 3 empty offhand skills(my geuss is becasue you as thief start with a dagger in the tutorial, so they put a litte more into it maybe, the the other 2), is kinda meh

I don’t like the idea of turning every one hander into a two hander.
If this system were in place, it would, logically, make sense for people to be running around with only an offhand equipped yet have a full skill bar. Which would also technically enable completely unarmed builds. While you haven’t entirely suggested that, I’m pretty sure that’s where it would end up.
While the idea is interesting enough, I just don’t think it makes a whole lot of sense for somebody with say, only a shield equipped to be on equal footing as somebody with a sword and shield. You may say, “Silly Silver, their skills wouldn’t be as good!”, to which I would say, “You mean like, perhaps not having as many available, like it is now?”
Also stats-wise, it would be a mess. It would essentially be people deliberately making themselves worse off.

I think a more elegant yet somewhat unrelated option that would be nicer would simply be a selection of skills per weapon. So for instance, each weapon has two possible skills per slot but only available to that slot as to (most likely) encourage weapon balance.
Eg: Having two auto attack skills available for slot 1 but can only choose them AS slot 1. Then having two (or more, whatever) available for only slot 2 etc. That way, people couldn’t just choose all the spike damage skills per weapon.

I digress, I think the current system of having less stats and less skills for only using one weapon when you could easily be using two is a reasonable penalty.

Brewergamer.8357:

Urthona.3198:

The problem is that one-handed weapons are balanced to have less stats than two-handed weapons. Either they’d be encouraging players to gimp themselves in terms of stats (which would be basically just a trap that no one who knew better would use anyway) or they’d have to somehow double the stats for a mainhand only when an offhand wasn’t equipped.

The latter might not even be possible without reprogramming the entire system.

This is not true.. there are “offhand light” abilities as thief, for example if I’m using a dagger in my main hand and nothing in my offhand, I get “offhand light” abilities (of course meaning nothing equipped in offhand) to compensate. Now they could easily do this with any class, it’s not a programming impossibility like you’re saying because it has already been done. And before you say that it’s just for dagger it’s not.. It works for every weapon for thief.

For a thief, the “Offhand light” skill fills slot 3 – it’s only there to balance a thief with no offhand vs any other class with no offhand. The skills are there purely to tide you over till you get another weapon, not to be actually viable past then.
Bear in mind the Thief’s slot 3 skill already changes based on the offhand. Having that apply to skills 4 and 5 still may not be possible.

I’m not sure I see the benefit in this. Would take a lot of work introducing and balancing the new skills (Around 46 by my estimate), a big change to make mainhand weapon stats alter based on if you’ve got an offhand (Imagine the confusion when comparing). And to what end? So you can have an empty hand on your guardian?

How could you equip just a shield when it would only apply to main hand weapons, not off-hand.

People complain about there not being enough skill variety, or having to use the same skills all the time, and no new weapons and so on. This would help solve one of those problems without actually having to add in an entirely new set of weapons with skills and traits to balance them, which would probably take quite a bit more work.

The offhand glove type for the stats and skills would work as well, making it less confusing on the stat comparisons.

They wouldn’t have to change the main hand weapon stats at all, they would simply balance the “off-hand light” skills to make up for the difference.

The glove weapon idea isn’t bad, it’d make it easier for some people to understand (judging from the number of people who ask what off-hand light means).

Even if the off-hand light skills originated from the devs wanting the thief’s mainhand to give 2 skills and the offhand to give 3, but knowing the lack of a 3rd skill would confuse and irritate numbers of people so threw together whatever just to fill the slot; it’s originated a really interesting idea. Adding a glove weapon or off-hand light mechanic would be really cool, and pretty unique (I’ve always wished for but never seen a glove style weapon in an MMO.

I so want my ranger to have Throw Dirt (a blind), and maybe Sucker Punch (a brief daze/confuse). (that might be OP but it’d be really nice to have a blind).