Guild Wars 2

I played a warrior to level 42 utilizing the weapon swapping in group, story, and pvp play. I also used this on my thief and loved it there as well! Recently I forgot to check about other professions using it until I was level 16 with my elementalist. I found two decent daggers and was thinking “cool! I’ll set it up to switch out of my staff with the weapon swap button.”..then I finally realized it wasn’t there.

I personally thought it be nice to have the ability to free up those two inventory slots, and also using daggers is not full ranged like my staff. The ability to switch out of mid-melee to ranged would be nice instead of always having to wait till out of combat to switch my weapons.

I asked around map chat if elementalists were the only ones and I read that engineers were in the same boat. Are all ranged professions like this? Is this because we have F1 to F4 attunement skill abilities? Would this make these types of professions overpowered in PVP?

Ya it would. With weapon swap elementalist would get like 40 skills when a profession with weapon swap like warriors just have 10. Without swap elementalist got 20 already, just with attunements.
Eng have their kits with lot of different weapons.

Are elementalist so strong compared to others Wraith?

I’m a starting elementalist. And I find it hard to play with daggers all the time, to me it’s a situational setup just like the sword for a ranger.

You have to keep in mind Elementalists effectively get 20 skills when they equip a weapon. Albeit it’s limited by an attunement cooldown, but that’s in place to encourage strategy.

Similar story for Engineers. Kits are basically a weapon swap (but far more interesting imo) and are not restricted by any cooldowns.

Any other class with weapon swap has access to only 10 skills on the fly, but the upside being that you can create your own strategic combination of weapon skills.

I think if you understand this, you can see Anet’s logic in how they disabled weapon swapping for those classes, because weapon swapping is intrinsically built into the class.

Esquilax.3491:

You have to keep in mind Elementalists effectively get 20 skills when they equip a weapon. Albeit it’s limited by an attunement cooldown, but that’s in place to encourage strategy.

Similar story for Engineers. Kits are basically a weapon swap (but far more interesting imo) and are not restricted by any cooldowns.

Any other class with weapon swap has access to only 10 skills on the fly, but the upside being that you can create your own strategic combination of weapon skills.

I think if you understand this, you can see Anet’s logic in how they disabled weapon swapping for those classes, because weapon swapping is intrinsically built into the class.

The 20 skills are not really unique, a large amount of the skills have somewhat the same purpose. But I figured out this would be the reason why Elementalists don’t have weapon swapping.
Right now we can switch between certain “roles” but we can’t switch between ranges.
I guess it’s a choice that has been made when they designed the profession.
Because they could have distributed some of the weapon skills to attunements instead of weapons if they wanted to.

Please do not misinform people: Engineers are the ONLY ones without a weapon swap. Engineers only have 1 weapon in their build ever. Elementalists have 4 technically. Each attunement counts as a weapon swap, as evidenced by them working with ‘on swap’ sigils and with sigils in general.

Kits however, as people mistakenly point out, are not weapons for a number of reasons:

Kits make you lose stats. Any mainhand weapon you have, you don’t get the stats when you swap kits. If it has vitality you see a drop in HP.

Kits do not count towards ‘on swap’ sigils. If you have a sigil on your mainhand weapon that says “on swap”, then engineers cannot access it. Engineers are the only class that does this.

Kits do not have a persistent auto attack. Whenever you toggle off a kit, any auto attack you enabled is disabled. And it is disabled by default, so literally every time you equip a kit, you need to toggle it on. Its hell on the fingers.

Kits do not benefit from sigils. If I have a sigil of 5% crit, or lightning strike on crit, you will never see a kit do this.

You cannot drop a kit, when in the air.

See, the reason for this is because kits are not weapons, but bundles. Bundles are what you find around the world as environmental weapons. So, a boulder, an oakheart branch and so on… are all examples of bundles. And they all share the same characteristics of the engineers kits.

Bundles, are not weapons. Different mechanics govern them.

Pics related. Note the stat drop from equipping a kit.

So, in answer to OP. Only one profession has no access to weapon swapping, and thats akittenshame.

Gimano.7381:

Are elementalist so strong compared to others Wraith?

I’m a starting elementalist. And I find it hard to play with daggers all the time, to me it’s a situational setup just like the sword for a ranger.

No, they are just ok. The classes it self (at least in pvp) have lot of balance. With a warrior I have cut lot of ele like paper, but lot of them have made me burn like paper too. lol
Depends on your build, different builds are better for different situations, that’s all. Anyway you will not see a big difference in pve until higher levels because of the lack of traits.

Lyuben.2613:

Please do not misinform people: Engineers are the ONLY ones without a weapon swap. …

Ya, but your ONE “weapon/kit” utility skill can be used as 5 new skills.
With my warrior my bull’s charge just do that, charge against the foe, cooldown and charge.

Wraith.4103:

Lyuben.2613:

Please do not misinform people: Engineers are the ONLY ones without a weapon swap. …

Ya, but your ONE “weapon” utility skill can be used as 5 new skills.
With my warrior my bull’s charge just do that, charge against the foe, cooldown and charge.

It is 5 weapon skills in your weapon skill bar.

But its not a weapon.

If it was a weapon, it wouldn’t have the plethora of stupid problems I listed.

Skills from weapons aren’t the only thing that goes in the weapon skill bar.

Transformation skills and bundles go there as well. And bundles ain’t weapons.

Lyuben, Im not saying you are wrong.
I’m just saying kits looks better than just one utility skill. Eng got more diversity, I can be wrong but its what looks like.

Wraith.4103:

Lyuben, Im not saying you are wrong.
I’m just saying kits looks better than just one utility skill. Eng got more diversity, I can be wrong but its what looks like.

That may be the case, but the topic is weapon swapping, and not utility power discussions.

And kits may be seen as powerful utilities, they cannot be seen as a weapon swap.

thanks for the constructive replies!