Guild Wars 2

Hello,
Lately I’ve been thinking. Anet seems unable or simply unwilling to put out new armor sets, because of the extreme amount of development time these take. So why not make the most of the skins we already have?

What I hint at is to remove the weight restrictions from armor skins. Every class being able to use skins from the light, medium and heavy armors. This also means many more mix and match possibilities.

The main reason I can think of to oppose this is that it “makes no sense”, warriors walking around in light armor. However the existence of outfits make this argument null and void.

Thoughts?

Edit: Apparently mix and matching different armor weights causes incompatibility issues that Anet can’t (or won’t) solve.

A compromise could be:
Letting any character be able to toggle one armor weight at a time, locking the other skins. There could be a template for each armor weight that you can switch between free of charge (like outfits), so you don’t have to waste 6 transmutation charges every time.

Even that argument is fairly crap. Given the mess of dyes, combinations, and the spam of particle effects in fights, I can’t tell what anyone is even wearing in the first place. I have never, not once, identified a class or even class type by their armour.

I think they prefer to make outfits to put in the gem store so they can profit

Black Iris Flowers.3418:

I think they prefer to make outfits to put in the gem store so they can profit

Profit? People actually buy outfits? :s I bought ONE, everything else is either too fancy or has clipping issues.

Btw, I agree about removing weight restrictions. Let’s mix-n-match skins freely!

Mea.5491:

Black Iris Flowers.3418:

I think they prefer to make outfits to put in the gem store so they can profit

Profit? People actually buy outfits? :s I bought ONE, everything else is either too fancy or has clipping issues.

Btw, I agree about removing weight restrictions. Let’s mix-n-match skins freely!

i want my battlemage reaper thank you. +1
also a side note, lets maybe be more creative with armor designs in general. maybe some proper mage robes, or something.

Mea.5491:

Black Iris Flowers.3418:

I think they prefer to make outfits to put in the gem store so they can profit

Profit? People actually buy outfits? :s I bought ONE, everything else is either too fancy or has clipping issues.

Btw, I agree about removing weight restrictions. Let’s mix-n-match skins freely!

No one cannot deny that facts the Balthaziar Outfit is a great outfit. While you cannot change the flame color for most that wanted that, Atleast it looks cool.

Looks great on my Charr Berserker.

But I do not mind Armor Weight removal.

I want a GS in elem using the staff skills too

I mind armor weight removal because all other development would come to a grinding halt while they remake every piece of armor from scratch to fit on new rigging armatures. The current ones will cause graphic nightmares if mixed. Not clipping, not difficulty in deciphering a profession, but actual horrible things like lines across your screen, textures getting jigsaw puzzled on the armor and the character skin, undyeable red areas, etc.

People have been asking for this from very early on, and the devs have explained that it is impossible with the technology they have.

So maybe years from now if there is ever a GW3 they will have learned to have universal armor pieces but in the current game we are stuck with the three weights not talking to each other.

We used to be able to mix and match armor weights in the preview window. It generates some bad color maps sometimes, but re-previewing the piece immediately fixed them, so I find it hard to believe that making this available in live play is really that unsolvable of a problem…

Donari.5237:

I mind armor weight removal because all other development would come to a grinding halt while they remake every piece of armor from scratch to fit on new rigging armatures. The current ones will cause graphic nightmares if mixed. Not clipping, not difficulty in deciphering a profession, but actual horrible things like lines across your screen, textures getting jigsaw puzzled on the armor and the character skin, undyeable red areas, etc.

People have been asking for this from very early on, and the devs have explained that it is impossible with the technology they have.

So maybe years from now if there is ever a GW3 they will have learned to have universal armor pieces but in the current game we are stuck with the three weights not talking to each other.

Is there any evidence to support this claim? Because I haven’t seen any.

Each armor piece is already built to work on all character models (well at least all non asura and char models). Whether you role a light, medium, or heavy armor class, your character model will be the same so the armor pieces will still fit. Same thing with dye channels, these are independent per piece. Putting on heavy legs and light coat won’t kitten up the dye job on the legs.

Undyeable red area is made up.

Only problem would be most combinations just wouldn’t look good. But I think that is responsibility best left up to the player to come up with a good looking combination. Anet shouldn’t have to worry about that, so just remove the weight restrictions when transposing armor.

They’ve specifically said that the different armor weights are incompatible.

Source
Curtis Johnson
(snip) When we started looking at bringing more of the clothing back into armor with mix and match styles there are some fundamental incompatible things between weight classes. (part of how we set up every armor to allow many dye channels and styles per piece). There really is no way at this point over six years since we started development to make absolutely everything work together. (snip)

So while it would be great if they could it appears they cannot without re-working the whole armor system. If it’s going to be that much work I’d rather they not do it but continue with making more playable content.

How about making skins and auras out of in game content that’s already there.

Take this Atmospheric Cloud for example, would be fantastic as an Aura item and not just a heart mission.

Oh this again.

ANet will not do it because the armors where not meant to be mixed past there type. They have different joins for different types. To put it simple. Some combinations’ would not work. You could end up having gaps and clipping issues. This has been explained in great length many times before, and much better than I have here.

Expanding on BrotherBelial’s post- you can see the issue if you just look at how medium armor is “split” compared to light and heavy. Light armor and heavy armor chest pieces rarely go below the waist- any kind of “skirt” is contained in the leg pieces. Medium armor, as we all know, is the opposite. The tops are long, to better trench coat, and the legs are mostly skin-tight leggings with a few straight skirts for variety. There would only be a handful of medium chests that would work as is, and it would be pretty much impossible to convert any of the trenchy options in a way that would make sense (half a trench coat really doesn’t work).

OriOri.8724:

Undyeable red area is made up.

Actually it’s not.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Order-of-Whispers-armor-color/first

Granted that wasn’t a mixed-armor issue as far as we know, but it was a definite graphic armor glitch for a while and it came to mind for me as an example of the sorts of things that would make players not want to wear an armor piece.

JemL.3501:

I want a GS in elem using the staff skills too

out of context.
try again.

There is absolutely no evidence to point to that being related to mixing armor weights, and a great deal of evidence that points to it being something else (namely, the fact that no one was mixing armor weights when it happened, and it almost exclusively affected male human players wearing Whispers armor).

@BrotherBelial – Again though, I don’t think that is Anets problem. If someone wants to go for that look let them. Likewise, if someone wants to mix medium and light armor then it should be on them to make it look good, not on ANet.

OriOri.8724:

@BrotherBelial – Again though, I don’t think that is Anets problem. If someone wants to go for that look let them. Likewise, if someone wants to mix medium and light armor then it should be on them to make it look good, not on ANet.

The problem is there would be too few who understand that the different armor weights have different meshes and would likely clip when mixed together. And would expect ANet to have it so that the armor weights of all existing armor would be able to mix and match with minimal clipping.

I mean a simple warning that pops up in the window when you are about to transpose items and end up mixing armor weights would solve that problem.

“You are trying to show 2 skins from different armor weights in your outfit. This is known to have caused clipping issues, so be forewarned that it may not look good.”

Its really all on the individual players the way I see it. Maybe I’m just more mature than people who play videogames though

Y’all keep talking about clipping but you don’t ever talk about this part we set up every armor to allow many dye channels.

Even if the armor pieces have the same number of dye channels that doesn’t mean that they dye the same places between different weights. How could they? If you have a heavy armor char the dye channels on the chest only go to the waist. How can the dye channels for a heavy armor UI handle a medium armor chest piece where the dye channels extend to the ankles or they simply dye completely different sections than a heavy armor. This is part of where they’re talking about fundamental incompatibility.

Y’all see where they said fundamental incompatibility. But what I’m seeing is people who see it and decide that it means, ‘it may clip some.’ That’s not what the words fundamental and incompatible mean. Fundamental incompatible is square peg/round hole. Not ‘it will work but might look bad’.

The problem isn’t only clipping. Armor textures are all mapped differently for each weight.
If you were to wear a heavy piece at the same time of a light or medium piece, the texture would be all wrong on either or both pieces. You could have stuff like the texture from the top of one armor on the pants the other or pieces textured like skin or even invisible if there’s transparency on one of them.
If they were all mapped the same way or if each individual armor pieces had their own texture file, it wouldn’t be a problem. But the way they are made now it is impossible unless they remade 2/3 of them.

You can keep repeating “it doesn’t work” until the end of time — the fact remains it DOES work and we were able to see it work inside this very engine. Yes, it twitched occasionally, but fixing the twitch was trivially easy.

Nike.2631:

You can keep repeating “it doesn’t work” until the end of time — the fact remains it DOES work and we were able to see it work inside this very engine. Yes, it twitched occasionally, but fixing the twitch was trivially easy.

Preview panels are not UI panels tied to a specific armor weight and they have a standardized dye setup that doesn’t correspond to the different armor weighs UI dye channels. Since they are not weight specific and because they have their own separate, standardized dye set up they can mash things together and ignore problems. That does not mean that the problems with UI panels tied to armor weights and with dye channels specific to that armor weight don’t exist or are easily overcome.

Though I am not wholly convinced on the incompatibility arguments, if this is Anet’s stance then that’s that.

I did think of a compromise:

In the wardrobe panel, make a subtab in which you toggle your current desired armor weight. Lock the skins of the two armor weights not chosen.
It’d be annoying to have to use six transmutation charges every time you swap weights, so it could work (if Anet is feeling generous) like outfits do now: having a different template saved to each armor weight.

E.g.: An elementalist is tired of wearing light armor, so he toggles light armor off and medium armor on. He now chooses 6 medium armor skins to use and uses 6 transmutation charges. However he gets tired of the trenchcoat and toggles light armor back on, and has his old light armor set restored free of charge.

Salocin.2783:

Though I am not wholly convinced on the incompatibility arguments, if this is Anet’s stance then that’s that.

I did think of a compromise:

In the wardrobe panel, make a subtab in which you toggle your current desired armor weight. Lock the skins of the two armor weights not chosen.
It’d be annoying to have to use six transmutation charges every time you swap weights, so it could work (if Anet is feeling generous) like outfits do now: having a different template saved to each armor weight.

E.g.: An elementalist is tired of wearing light armor, so he toggles light armor off and medium armor on. He now chooses 6 medium armor skins to use and uses 6 transmutation charges. However he gets tired of the trenchcoat and toggles light armor back on, and has his old light armor set restored free of charge.

This is a good solution.

Open wardrobe -> select overall armour weight category.

=> 3 tabs, one each for light, medium and heavy.

Armour types are kept entirely separate, but you have the option to switch totally to another type for free – templates for each category (type) are saved and can be toggled between (similar to toggling outfits).

Individual skin changes within a category still cost transmutation charges as usual.

So every class can have a light template, medium template and heavy template in the wardrobe, with the option to toggle between them as they prefer.

I have no idea how difficult/possible this is to implement, however from my layman’s viewpoint surely it should be possible in this scenario given it would be impossible to mix weight categories.

Edit: So slightly modifying the title of this thread to “keep armour weight categories separate but allow all classes access to each category”.

They just seem to be very unwilling to do much with armour whilst cramming outfits down our throat.

Hell if they want to make money from it, make it a gemstore upgrade to unlock a new weight category tab in your wardrobe.

I’m sure many players would buy that no question.

Curunen.8729:

So slightly modifying the title of this thread to “keep armour weight categories separate but allow all classes access to each category”.

I tried a few iterations, but capturing the essence of the thread with a 45 character limit isn’t that easy. ^^

Salocin.2783:

Curunen.8729:

So slightly modifying the title of this thread to “keep armour weight categories separate but allow all classes access to each category”.

I tried a few iterations, but capturing the essence of the thread with a 45 character limit isn’t that easy. ^^

:D

Yeah the realisation hit me after typing that sentence! Tough to put it in a more concise form.

Maybe “Allow all armour weights accessible separately”?

Though I think that is 46 characters…