Guild Wars 2

I realise this topic has been brought up before but after the announcement of Revenants’ staff as a healing/support weapon I got to thinking about how this would play out in-game, well to put it bluntly, it wont, the only scenario staff would support is melee stacking. Hence there will be a huge amount of situations where staff will be redundant, this is a major downfall of not being able to weapon swap and I feel it will significantly hurt Revenant in the long run.

Imagine you’re playing Guardian, you have access to 2 sets of utilities, but only one weapon, would you ever use staff support in a dungeon or boss scenario? Since you cant switch in combat, if you don’t, you’ll miss out on that lovely might stacking, but if you don’t run another weapon, you wont be contributing as much damage and of course you have 2 sets of utilities, you wouldn’t use staff. Now imagine your staff was melee only. What do you do when you need to come out of melee range?

So this is what I see as a huge draw back. Not being able to swap will lead to weapon redundancy in situations where you’re stuck in combat, or even choices made for you in fights where range is a necessity. I understand Anets decision not to have swapping as a way to simplify the class and not grant it too much utility, which it already has in bundles, but it will definitely hurt in the long run. Now I’d like to run a few points:-

-Engineer & Elementalist. They don’t have weapon swap, yes, but both classes are mainstay ranged and even with the inclusion of hammer for Engineer they can easily swap to a ranged damage kit and be just as effective. They’re flexible, elementalist has all the utility of Revenants 6-9 skills within its 4 attunement swaps and can easily switch between dealing damage safely or supporting allies.

-Ranged versus Melee. This is one of the biggest drawbacks, and will play out in PvP also. There are a lot of situations where using melee isn’t optimal or atleast the option of range is required, and not being able to go OoC means your choices are made for you. Example, Claw of Jormag, Breach Thresher, FotM Jade Maw (its really not optimal to melee tentacles), Dredge Powersuit, & Elemental, Mai Trin, Thaumanova Anomaly. Those are just ones I can think of.

-PvP. I know we haven’t seen Revenant in PvP yet, but this is probably the big one for some people, in PvP there is no OoC weapon swap, if you go melee, you’re stuck as melee. This literally makes you a sitting duck against power rangers and makes you obscenely predictable as a player. This is really going to hurt build viability in the meta-game.

Anyway, basicly I don’t feel like being able to swap utilities can replace swapping your basic combat skills. I’m sure I could go on and list more downfalls to this system, but I’d like to start a discussion and see what people think, how will it play out? How would you change it? Is it even an issue? If anything, I’d suggest allowing Revenant weapon swap in combat, but using different mechanics. Maybe a channelled weapon swap ability, or even make swapping weapons reduce your energy to 0%.

“tl:dr – No in combat weapon swapping might hurt weapon viability and force Revenant into a niche role. Swapping utilities cant replace swapping basic combat skills, it will suck in PvP.”

I do share some of your concern here, but I want to make a point about elementalists. While they have 20 weapons skills per weapon, each of their weapon sets also strictly limits them to a set range (melee-ish for D/x, mid-range for S/x, and long-range for staff). I do not main an Ele, but perhaps someone else can evaluate how limited Eles are with this restriction? So far it seems, atleast in general terms, similar to what Rev will be facing.

I’m not an experienced engineer player so I can’t say much more on the matter, I only recently obtained the Razer Naga mandatory for playing the profession after all.

Elementalist on the other hand lacks weapon swapping so as to enforce a meaningful weakness other than “hi I have low base HP and light armour”. The elementalist swaps between four roles instead of swapping between 2 weapons. If you pick staff, you’re forced into a long range AoE combat style that suffers against mobile targets. If you pick Daggers, you are locked into close quarters fighting. This weakness is overcame by correct attunement management, but it is the Elementalist’s primary weakness.

Revenant lacking the ability to swap weapons allows focus to be placed on their legend skills, it also means they can make those abilities more powerful to compensate, especially when the lack of weapon swapping gives Revenants the lowest number of skills of every profession. It’s both good for advertisement of the profession (as splashier skills appeal more than lots of meh skills) and the learning curve of the profession. The lack of skills to learn means players have to spend their time learning the correct application of their powerful skills, rather than their location on the skill bar. In a way, it’s like Dive Kick, it seems simple but has its depth focused in the areas the players most invested in the game care about.

D/D Ele is at its most effective in and around melee range, yeah. Being melee by itself is not something that’ll completely shut a class out of PvP. Also, how a class does against Power Ranger isn’t exactly, or rather isn’t at all an indicator of how good it is (if it’s even bad against Power Ranger- it does have the destroy-projectile tablet)

Hellrain.3142:

-PvP. I know we haven’t seen Revenant in PvP yet, but this is probably the big one for some people, in PvP there is no OoC weapon swap, if you go melee, you’re stuck as melee. This literally makes you a sitting duck against power rangers and makes you obscenely predictable as a player.

Tell that d/p thieves. I dont think they are any troubles walking over a power ranger with melee set. You also forgetting recently show ventari ability to destroy projectiles which will turn any ranger/engi and everything else projectile based into a sad joke that get facerolled on a sigh.

Also melee on it own is viable in pve, in case if you know that you need ranged weapon, simply swap to hammer before the fight starts. In general meta in pve are double melee sets as range in general is weaker, so its not really all that much different from other classes. Lets also take a look at ele that doesnt have troubles swapping between dagger and staff.

engi is ranged? Who told you that? You can buy the game on the site of this forum btw, when you buy it make one engi an try it, then come back.

Bless you!

A lot of good points.

It does seem like Ele is the closest comparison when it comes to a lack of weapon swapping, they obviously are viable (even meta) in most setups, though I cant say I’ve seen D/D ele’s in PvE much lately. PvE wise, atleast from my experience they resign themselves to a ranged damage & group buffing role.

Saying that, having played both D/D & S/F (my preference) Ele in PVP a fair bit, they are strong, but mostly due to the sustain and mobility they have, and they have a great advantage that most classes don’t, which is weapon swap runes activating on attunement swap. Most staff Ele’s I’ve seen outside of a pre-made group tend to die extremely fast. But you must remember, even as D/D Ele always has the option to fight at mid-range.

skowcia.8257:

Tell that d/p thieves. I dont think they are any troubles walking over a power ranger with melee set. You also forgetting recently show ventari ability to destroy projectiles which will turn any ranger/engi and everything else projectile based into a sad joke that get facerolled on a sigh.

Also melee on it own is viable in pve, in case if you know that you need ranged weapon, simply swap to hammer before the fight starts. In general meta in pve are double melee sets as range in general is weaker, so its not really all that much different from other classes. Lets also take a look at ele that doesnt have troubles swapping between dagger and staff.

True with thieves, but they have stealth, blink and have extremely fast, bursty damage skills. From what I’ve seen & played so far of Revenant they’re fairly slow, they did have 2 mobility skills in the Axe offhand & Mallyx Legend though.

Basicly we have to hope that the amount of utility they have in Legends outweighs their overall lack of flexibility, we haven’t seen the Shiro Legend yet so who knows, that may help, and I have a feeling Glint may have some ranged options. But I can say, there a ton of PvP scenarios where I wouldn’t want to be stuck with just melee on a slow moving class, not unless I’m going to be running a tanky build and a blink skill isn’t going to help much without other mobility or cc.

It’ll be interesting to see how it turns out when they release the rest of the class, but I do worry that Anet are going to pull the worst crime of all and make the class get boring or frustrating too fast.

Hellrain.3142:

True with thieves, but they have stealth, blink and have extremely fast, bursty damage skills. From what I’ve seen & played so far of Revenant they’re fairly slow, they did have 2 mobility skills in the Axe offhand & Mallyx Legend though.

Basicly we have to hope that the amount of utility they have in Legends outweighs their overall lack of flexibility, we haven’t seen the Shiro Legend yet so who knows, that may help, and I have a feeling Glint may have some ranged options. But I can say, there a ton of PvP scenarios where I wouldn’t want to be stuck with just melee on a slow moving class, not unless I’m going to be running a tanky build and a blink skill isn’t going to help much without other mobility or cc.

It’ll be interesting to see how it turns out when they release the rest of the class, but I do worry that Anet are going to pull the worst crime of all and make the class get boring or frustrating too fast.

Keep in mind that in that we havent seen everything yet and i doubt that sword attacks, Shiro (labbeled as assasin) and possibly Glint will be slow. Check even Mallyx on it own is actually fast paced with medium range boonstrip (+dat confusion) and we havent seen ventari yet.

The datamined sword attacks are also quite fast with 1/2 casttimes, exception being middle aa attack with 3/4 for some weird reason (which also has 450 range and 450 radius – shadowstep?). Also as noticed elite skill from Glint is indeed some medium or long ranged attack, possibly a high burst move given it huge casttime in trailer/beta vid.

And then theres also this old article
http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/473/feature/9418/page/2

“Roy noted that the mobility of the Revenant in combat is a lot like the Thief’s out of combat… but he’s definitely not as mobile as the Thief when not in a fight drawing upon the Mists”

Which leads me to think that outside of combat they wont have any moblity like necros, but in combat they will match easily or even outperform a mesmer, thief. Downside is that they probably wont be able to escape from fight unless Shiro has stealth ability (and should have in my opinion).

Nobody even thought that Ventari can bring a unique playstyle with some weird tablet. So in fact all we can do is speculate. Howered given the fact that revenant is mostly a melee oriented class im sure he will have more than enough tools to deal with kiting, ranged abilities and staying alive in toe to toe with melee oriented classes like war, guard. Mallyx alone can ruin a day of any melee focused class without high stab uptime just by putting anguish under yourself.

Not being able to switch weapon is ok to me. However, what I fear most is the useless utilities: having played the beta, I never ever used Jalis’ Vengeful Hammers, it’s just not my kind of utilities. Seems like, in the end, I won’t be able to replace it with anything (except a more useless racial skill), that’s the only regret I have regarding the Revenant.

Howevere, technically, each profession has 4 utilities of the same kind, and 5 kinds of utilities. So maybe we gain 2 elites and thus lose 5 utilities, or we get utilities just like every profession, but they are just unreleased because the Revenant isn’t done yet.

Keep in mind people. That last legend or even the Elite Spec legend could be ranged combat focused.

Meaning it deals with ranged magic attacks that allow the Revenants to fight from afar while still having a melee weapon equipped. Basically making the Revenant immune to kiting in a sense.

From what I played in the Beta, I would also like weapon swap on Revs. But I’m used to warrior and so many weapons as is..