Guild Wars 2

Lately I’ve been noticing a lot how weapon swap cool downs affect the flow of the game, and have often found myself wondering what really is the point of weapon swapping cool downs.

I think the cool down on weapon swaps really destroys the flow of the game too much, and most importantly, it destroys the fun and interesting ways you could play your character.
The way weapon skill usage is designed in this game, I suppose, the important thing should be using the right skill at the right time, so why hinder players with such a mechanic in the first place. Skills have their own internal cool down anyway… So why an additional one on swaps?

The combat in this game is fast, you want to use the tools that are at your disposal at a twitch, fast, and swap back to whatever you find appropriate after, not be hindered by the weapon swap cool downs additionally…

I guess some of this comes from me being a long time Quake player, where I got used to being able to swap between weapons really fast based on the situation. But I think that’s the whole point, and it would do good for GW2 too.

And anyway, you can play Engineer that way, and that’s why I find that class the most fun. You can play like: “Oh ok I need a knocback real fast now” – Swap to flamethrower, “Now some immobilize would be nice” – Swap to bombs, drop some more bombs etc…, swap back to shield+pistol, do whatever. It makes playing that class really dynamic and fun, just trying to find the right way on the fly, not being stuck on 1 weapon set for 9 seconds, after you’ve switched for that one single skill that you really needed…

Thoughts? And keep the topic civil please.

I love and miss the Quake/UT era of gaming.

So, so much.

IMO: it was the best time in competitive gaming.

I completely agree with you, ALOT of weapon sets become useless after you used 1 or 2 skills from it, but you’re still stuck with it for 10 seconds, it’s a fast paced game, and it dosn’t make sense to have the cooldown.
Main hand mace for warrior would get more usefull, as you can swap to it, use the interupt, or the block depending on the situation, but being stuck with it for 10(or even 5 seconds) is such a waste.

A lot more builds would be viable, opens up alot more skill combos instead of being limited by a swap cooldown.

Engineer is easly the most fun class to play, mostly because i can swap freely between my kits and weapon set, i can swap to whatever i want depending on the situation as you said.

I hope more people reply in this thread, because i think this small change would make the combat a lot more fun.

I imagine p/d and d/p thief pushing 3 swap 3 swap 3 swap 3 swap… imposible to hit, perma gap closer/maker with blinds ok no cooldowns on swaps.

I say lower the cooldown to Oh I don’t know…. 5 seconds? It’s 5 seconds too long in my opinion.

what is your suggestion for eles about this issue? and weapon swap for ele would be nice but then eles could do everything, so much options and that would be slightly over balance

I was just about to ask the same question. Whats the point of weapon swap cool-downs? While I can understand skill cool-downs I can’t honestly think of a good reason why I would be denied the right to swap between my warrior’s longbow and greatsword without having to wait for the cool-down to expire. This “feature” was greatly responsible for the majority of my deaths caused by the fact that after an accidental swap I was unable to switch back to the more appropriate weapon (i.e. greatsword during melee fight).

My suggestion – remove weapons swaps cool-downs completely and if required adjust skill cool-down times appropriately. That way you would remove this completely artificial gameplay element and still retain control of potential balance issues through adjustment of skill cool-downs. This would also allow players to have more diversity during fights because it would be easier to quickly combine unused skills from both weapon sets.

weapon swap CD is pointless as far as i can see…

remove CD for atunement for eles also, but keep the 5sec unable to use atunement you just switched from?

It’s not a great idea in that they’d have to take out sigils that activate on weapon swaps and they’d have to redo the warriors’ discipline traits.
Other than that i can’t argue though.

yeah, i play warrior and discipline is not the best tree in my opinion to go for anyway. sometimes i feel bad because i think my class is the reason this CD even exists… like some1 is gonna go for discipline to get lower CD!?

GeoPro.7530:

It’s not a great idea in that they’d have to take out sigils that activate on weapon swaps and they’d have to redo the warriors’ discipline traits.
Other than that i can’t argue though.

sry, but idea can not be not great because u need to do something for it to work…

Of course a few other changes would need to be done, and it’s not like it’s any big changes, skills would get balanced around it, put a 10 second cooldown on the sigils that activate on swap, remove the cooldown from ele attunements. And ofc redo the discipline traits.

PetricaKerempuh.7958:

weapon swap CD is pointless as far as i can see…

remove CD for atunement for eles also, but keep the 5sec unable to use atunement you just switched from?

you contradict with yourself

About eles: I admit I don’t know that much about elementalists, since it’s the class I played by far the least, because those types of classes really don’t attract me. But I’m sure someone could come up with a good idea about it.

About thiefs: I think initiative itself and thief’s ability to spam any attack over and over again is kinda weird, so I don’t think that should be an excuse for not removing the weapon-swap cooldown. Instead they should just look into initiative too.

Sigils that do whatever they do when you weapon swap are the least of problem, just give them an internal cooldown of 9 or 10 seconds just like many other stuff has it right now already.

Ofcourse I’m not saying that the game would work perfectly right away if they removed the weapon swap cooldown, but I think it’s not such a big thing that it would not be possible, and I think it would improve the gameplay and also the skill involved by quite alot. I just can’t see a rational reason why they force us to get stuck in a weapon set for 9 seconds just because we used 1 skill. It doesn’t even go along with the philosophy around which they built the way weapons and skills are used in this game. And as mentioned before. Skills have their own cool down, so there really shouldn’t be too many imba stuff possible.

Anyway, thanks for the inputs, keep coming up with ideas that could either confirm my thesis or refute it. I’d like to see as many thoughts on it as possible. A Dev input on it would also be nice

P.S.:I’d also like to give another example of why I hate getting stuck in a weapon set:

Necromancer, staff. Jesus Christ I just want to lay down a mark or two, to let myself escape or whatever, but after that sitting on staff is REALLY annoying. Additionally most builds we use are usually traited for one weapon set only…

Ok.

well i guess as a ranger i have a different view pint on things i use all of my weapon abilites all the time, and without fail most of my DPS comes from my auto attack with both Sword and shortbow. there are alot of things that would need to be adjusted.

from personal experience rangers can get swiftness and fury on weapon swap in combat. so if i equip 2 shortbows i could possibly use 111 ~111~111~111~ to get unlimited fury unlimited swiftness and really take advantage of the system you propose.

my research on thieves also i believe they get initiative back on weapon swap again with this system all you have to do is spam your highest damaging attack swap spam attack again, i mean the game is completely built around swapping weapons/ atunements. i would be willing to bet that every single profession has one or multiple traits that would be used to manipulate the system.

i personally enjoy weapon swapping cooldown because it allows cooldowns to reset on my other weapon while maintaining a current flow of abilities.

of course i use all of my abilities on all of my weapons. so for me by the time i have used all of my abilities on a weapon set my swap is usually up.

i do not think that what you are really asking for is to remove a cooldown on weapon swap, what you really want is an improvement of certain weapons. as a ranger, and with my playstyle i choose weapons that compliment my play style and i use all of the abilities.

granted some abilities can be improved and buffed for more effectiveness, but if you are only ever swapping to a weapon for one ability than maybe its the weapon that needs changed not the cooldown.

what people should be asking for is please make these weapons more appealing so i dont use them for 1 ability and be mad about how bad the rest of the abilities are for 8 more seconds.

the cool down is there because if it was not there the game would be severely changed in regards to balance, playstyle of classes, and all around changes to different weapons.

while i agree that on my warrior some weapons arent appealing to me outside of one ability this doenst mean that Anet should change the cool down on weapon swap, this means that they should change the weapons abilities.

In regards to the point on wanting that interrupt available i believe careful use of interrupts should be something to learn, so you dont use it on just anything. it makes you want to save it for big attacks or stomps so you can rez a player. its a calculated choice instead of random spamming.

Tilki.8520:

PetricaKerempuh.7958:

weapon swap CD is pointless as far as i can see…

remove CD for atunement for eles also, but keep the 5sec unable to use atunement you just switched from?

you contradict with yourself

what do you mean? this is in worst case a paradox, nowhere near contradiction.

oh and regards to elementalists, removing the cd on attunement swapping would enable them to jsut use the swap as there main attack if traitied in to arcana deep enough they would also be able to give themselves perma might, regen, protection, and swiftness all the time. they may not even need to equip a weapon

Psychrome.9281:

oh and regards to elementalists, removing the cd on attunement swapping would enable them to jsut use the swap as there main attack if traitied in to arcana deep enough they would also be able to give themselves perma might, regen, protection, and swiftness all the time. they may not even need to equip a weapon

CD on abilities/traits… i dnt see the unsolvable problem here

As far as elementalists are concerned I would also completely remove cool-downs for their attunement switches and introduce potential cool-downs AFTER the switch has been performed. I.e. +1 second cool down on all skills which means unused skilles for the new attunement would also become unavailable for 1 sec but players would be absolutely sure that they switched to the new attunement.

In case I wasn’t clear enough until now my main issue with the way how cool-downs currently works is that it introduces too much uncertainty into gameplay regarding the availability of the requested weapon set / attunement. In my opinion weapon swaps should ALWAYS be available and all cool-down restrictions should be applied AFTER the switch has been performed, i.e. through skills cool-down adjustments. There should be no need to baby sit two different groups of cool-down timers of which one artificially blocks the other one.

Sure there might be some balance problems at the beginning of which I might not be aware of currently but considering that I’ve played almost all professions until now (except Thief which already looks kind of what I am after) I think at least it might be worth a try.

Psychrome.9281:

well i guess as a ranger i have a different view pint on things i use all of my weapon abilites all the time, and without fail most of my DPS comes from my auto attack with both Sword and shortbow. there are alot of things that would need to be adjusted.

from personal experience rangers can get swiftness and fury on weapon swap in combat. so if i equip 2 shortbows i could possibly use 111 ~111~111~111~ to get unlimited fury unlimited swiftness and really take advantage of the system you propose.

my research on thieves also i believe they get initiative back on weapon swap again with this system all you have to do is spam your highest damaging attack swap spam attack again, i mean the game is completely built around swapping weapons/ atunements. i would be willing to bet that every single profession has one or multiple traits that would be used to manipulate the system.

i personally enjoy weapon swapping cooldown because it allows cooldowns to reset on my other weapon while maintaining a current flow of abilities.

of course i use all of my abilities on all of my weapons. so for me by the time i have used all of my abilities on a weapon set my swap is usually up.

i do not think that what you are really asking for is to remove a cooldown on weapon swap, what you really want is an improvement of certain weapons. as a ranger, and with my playstyle i choose weapons that compliment my play style and i use all of the abilities.

granted some abilities can be improved and buffed for more effectiveness, but if you are only ever swapping to a weapon for one ability than maybe its the weapon that needs changed not the cooldown.

what people should be asking for is please make these weapons more appealing so i dont use them for 1 ability and be mad about how bad the rest of the abilities are for 8 more seconds.

the cool down is there because if it was not there the game would be severely changed in regards to balance, playstyle of classes, and all around changes to different weapons.

while i agree that on my warrior some weapons arent appealing to me outside of one ability this doenst mean that Anet should change the cool down on weapon swap, this means that they should change the weapons abilities.

In regards to the point on wanting that interrupt available i believe careful use of interrupts should be something to learn, so you dont use it on just anything. it makes you want to save it for big attacks or stomps so you can rez a player. its a calculated choice instead of random spamming.

problem about getting boons with weapon swap can be easliy solved by using a cd on that trait

you guys arent really seeing the big picture are you…what you want to do is completely change every class just so you can spam abilities… you would have to absolutely rewrite every class especially thieves, the initiatve system would be the most overpowered system …far more than it already is…removing the cooldown on weapon swap is ridiculous and i hope to god it never happens

I think having cooldowns swapping to weapons to use skills with cooldowns feels odd. I think if you removed or lowered the cooldown on weapon swapped you would cause other issues, but easily fixed…except those gosh darn thieves lol. They would be even more ridiculous.

Gaining benefits from swapping weapons or attunements in combat could easily be fixed by applying an internal cooldown to their benefits. Initiative on the other hand…good luck getting around that one.

Weapon swapping encourages skilled play through opportunity cost. If you’re carrying around a weapon set for just 1 or 2 abilities and not how it complements your play/ build you take the risk of locking yourself out of important abilities. People need to get out of the old habit of hitting stuff on cool-down, and instead use abilities when you need to use something.

One should consider just what your other weapon set adds to your play, the options it gives, and how to fight effectively with it.

As for elementalist, I feel the cool-down of attunement swapping should be lowered a bit so people don’t feel so pressured to dump a lot of points in arcane.

I like the cooldown in general. The only issue I have is that necro staff auto can’t hit anything at all, so if you need to use a mark it’s often most effective to just dump all 4 marks (in 2 3 4 5 2 order no less), then death shroud so you can avoid wasting time on the auto. I’m sure a few other classes have supposed utility sticks that result in similarly simplistic play on swap.

Numot.3965:

Weapon swapping encourages skilled play through opportunity cost. If you’re carrying around a weapon set for just 1 or 2 abilities and not how it complements your play/ build you take the risk of locking yourself out of important abilities. People need to get out of the old habit of hitting stuff on cool-down, and instead use abilities when you need to use something.

One should consider just what your other weapon set adds to your play, the options it gives, and how to fight effectively with it.

As for elementalist, I feel the cool-down of attunement swapping should be lowered a bit so people don’t feel so pressured to dump a lot of points in arcane.

This is exactly what i am talking about, i am glad others out there prefer skill to random spamming