Revenant, weapon swap & class effectiveness.
in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Posted by: Hellrain.3142
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.”