Hi,
With Heart of Thorns release just around the corner I and a lot of Guildies have been in discussion about what builds we’ll be running as things get under way. As the discussions develop one topic has continued to come up:
Active vs. Bagged Weapons
There are a lot of reasons a person might have to use a Staff in one part of the game, dagger/daggers in another, and still scepter/focus, etc somewhere else. What this leads to is a lot junk sitting around in our bags we don’t use save very situationally.
Frequently in dungeons a person running Elementalist will cast the combo-fields to build up 25 might, then switch back to staff for more maximized damage. As Elementalist can only access a single weapon this gets rather cumbersome. People put up with it because they have had to and because Anet’s really mum about most anything.
With Heart of Thorns making more weapons available to more classes wouldn’t it be more practical to simply make some secondary weapons and armor storage areas into the Hero menu? How many veteran players really want to throw away their legendaries they’ve worked so kitten entirely so they can use the new Master Level weapons?
I really started to sympathize with this concern as I played my Thief. It’s full ascended with a legendary. More than that it has a lot of skins for shortbow, pistols, swords, and what all that I really will be waving goodbye to when staff comes out. This isn’t so much because they aren’t useful the ‘open hero menu then swap out weapons’ is really quite clunky. The only reason you’re holding on to this system right now is either laziness or some conservation to an idealism you yourselves are undermining as you advance the game.
This sort of thing is really not a huge problem if you’re playing a class that’s only going to be swapping out a single item for one one-handed item. Where it becomes a real burden is when you’ve got to put two items on. For instance, if you swap staff with mace/shield on Guardian you’re suddenly going to have to stop and find the bag one of these items just dumped into. It won’t be one of your invisible bags. It will be one of your regular bags (and by now a veteran will have lots of these and pretty deep). Meanwhile the group’s wanting to move on. Further, it gets in the way of the constant effort to salvage the gratuitous amount of loot we get. So long as you just leave a few bags full of the various sorts of loot you’ll find the loot pile clutter can be somewhat avoided for a few hours, but it solves nothing of getting rid of the hunt: ’where’d my shield / focus go?’ .
Just make it so we can swap out our equipment without the game dumping our gear into the same bags as our loot clutter. This is very easy to do, any gear we were just wearing that gets auto-removed if we equip a different gear immediately goes into an invisible bag slot if we have one equipped. Simple, easy to do.
Thanks
In Guild Wars 1 there are three possible weapons we can have equipped.