Guild Wars 2

With the introduction of the new mining pick that gives a chance to pop a sprocket from an ore node a couple thoughts ran through my cranium… first, odds are we could see more tools like this (a chance to pop a quartz crystal for example) and second, dual wielding these mining tools would look awesome. So here’s the idea, dual wielding mining picks. If you equip an “off hand” mining pick you’d have a new animation showing you mining with alternating strokes, main hand first, and you could mine at a 50% or so faster rate than when only one tool is equipped. In addition, the proc chance (if available) for your picks would be dependent on the stroke – main hand, off hand, main hand for your normal three stroke node. Your main hand would get used, on average, 2/3 of the time while your off hand would be used 1/3 of the time. This has an interesting effect for those about to scream “Pay to win!” (without having a clue as to what pay to win actually means)… it dramatically slows down the return on investment for each individual pick while allowing you to progress the ROI on both.

Please, save the arguments about whether or not picks with procs should exist for the other thread already discussing that. This is assuming they exist, assuming more will, and therefore expanding on that the idea of dual wielding mining picks (although it still works conceptually without picks with procs).