There was a thread speculating on what happens to the Elite spec weapon when you swap to the core specs. I tested with my Reaper:
With GS in first weapon set, staff in second, I changed from Reaper spec to a core spec. The GS went into my backpack (another poster said when the inventory is full it goes into one of those “your bags are full, grab this later” popups). All my Reaper utilities vanished, leaving empty boxes.
I assigned some utilities. My memory is a little hazy on what I did weapon wise. I do recall that somewhere in this process, the UI decided my second weapon set was my main one.
Then I went back to the Reaper spec. My utilities remained the core ones I’d just assigned. My traits had to be selected again. I had anticipated the latter and had memorized my 313 pattern for that, since we don’t have templates. If I hadn’t done so, I’d have had to mouse over the traits to remember what did what and choose them again. I had to move the GS back into the weapon slot.
This all is a) clumsy and time consuming and b) risks losing a valuable weapon if one has full bags and logs out without collecting the excess item(s) from the popup.
The early comments on Elite specs said that we would be able to change from Elite to Core any time out of combat as easily as we retrait now. This is not the case with the current design.
I have seen a few suggestions on how to handle the loss of the ability to use the Elite weapon. The easiest seeming one, coding wise, is to grey out the weapon in its slot and blank the weapon 1-5 skills until we manually swap something else in. That at least avoids inventory management issues. Another is to add a third weapon pair slot to the Hero Panel (maybe down and to the right?) in which we store the Elite weapon when not in the correct spec.
I’m not sure how well that will work as more weapons get added with future Elites, though. But if we can stick whatever weapon we want in there (perhaps limited to Elite weapons only), then it would be up to us to choose what gets cycled when we swap.
As to the utilities, the game already knows how to swap them out when we go between land and swimming. Could a similar trigger be put in place for Elite/Core swaps? Bonus, do this for underwater as well, so the game checks “On land and in Elite, this set; on land and in Core, this; in water and Elite, this other set; in water and Core, this final one.”
If these QoL issues aren’t addressed, people will need a few minutes to swap out to meet different situations, minutes they won’t always have if there’s a go-go-go event chain or dungeon run or a zerg is bearing down on them in WvW. Sometimes you want to get out of combat just long enough to swap a thing or two then run back in to help your friends. That’s just not feasible with the complete utility redo and the weapon getting jammed in the first open space in your bags, if you have any open.