Guild Wars 2

tOss.9024:

If you don’t think it causes imbalance, then you shouldn’t have to switch unless you want to. Implying people have to switch to perform well also implies imbalance. If a team runs a group of balanced builds, then they can counter a team switching between two extremes.
Build swapping can be viable, but not necessary, and once the meta game shifts I think more will realize this.
As with any competitive game, there will be trends of “Must dos.” This is just another trend if the moment imo.
I wouldn’t doubt you will see non-switching, fast moving, teams that take advantage of the down time needed to run a switch game At some time should switching become extremely common.

The fastest team is going to be the one that abuses the most out of weapon swaps. For example: hammer guardian giving himself swiftness with staff and swapping to greatsword to do a leap, swapping to sword and teleporting towards enemy and swapping back to his hammer. Its only going to get worse once players start understanding the game better.

Yukishiro.8792:

Swapping to another weapon to use swiftness doesn’t take that long. It’s just clunky and awful to do but you feel like you have to to remain competitive.

I am not that upset about swap at the spawn zone. Swap outside the spawn zone shouldn’t be allowed.

I was talking about build swapping on the time restraint.

DrInfy.9047:

tOss.9024:

If you don’t think it causes imbalance, then you shouldn’t have to switch unless you want to. Implying people have to switch to perform well also implies imbalance. If a team runs a group of balanced builds, then they can counter a team switching between two extremes.
Build swapping can be viable, but not necessary, and once the meta game shifts I think more will realize this.
As with any competitive game, there will be trends of “Must dos.” This is just another trend if the moment imo.
I wouldn’t doubt you will see non-switching, fast moving, teams that take advantage of the down time needed to run a switch game At some time should switching become extremely common.

The fastest team is going to be the one that abuses the most out of weapon swaps. For example: hammer guardian giving himself swiftness with staff and swapping to greatsword to do a leap, swapping to sword and teleporting towards enemy and swapping back to his hammer. Its only going to get worse once players start understanding the game better.

Have you ever played backbreaker hammer dagger warrior in gw1? I haven’t but I gave props to those who played it coz it was difficult to pull it through.

If you did then what you described was kinda like the BB dagger warrior

But what you described was more deep.

Well if it doesnt get changed, can we get a UI slot for weapons, armor, amulets, characters, and consumables. Or should i just go ahead and make macros to do it for me?

I would predict a.net adding a swap equips ui with limited amulet slots and limited runes to bring so these swaps will be limited and only if the need to swap arise. Also I expect that observer mode will have a /inspect for them spectators to know their equips and traits and their subsequent changes and hp so we know if people are doing magic to get their hp to 32k or something

Hsulf.9370:

A rational thread regarding the changing on weapons during a tpvp game.

I.e, you open up your backpack, equip new set, use appropriate skills, after battle open backback and swap sets etc.

Now I play ele, I have a build which accomodates s/d, s/f and staff so thats like 60 skills I can utilitse, numerous hastes, fields w/e. And it’s obviously great as I love the flexibility.

However from an e-sports perspective, do spectators really want to see people opening their backpacks every 3 seconds and swapping out? Surely tactical gameplay should be around what you enter the tournament with, not what you can swap out to.

Will be interesting to see the responses. I’d be quite happy with a block on weapon set changing, but then again I do like the current flexibility.

I’m sure your ele would like to enter a full ranged enemy party (not likely but an example) and be like well kiten, I only have 2 daggers and RTL is bugged, what do now, get kited to hell and back. I think it would be fair if we had weapon swap out of combat perhaps, so for those, its a ranged team, get out my scepter or staff and not get face crunched into the ground.

I personally like changing gear in sPvP and tPvP, I run my ele with cleric’s amulet for the 14k health, if a backstab thief gets the advantage of me then I know to switch to knights for the extra defense. Your traits are already locked to the tree your in, so you cant switch from full offensive to full defensive (but you could change around those offensive traits you’ve used). Rangers are bad for it, they use both warhorn moves out of combat then run at you with 2 diff weapon sets.

Perhaps a CD on skills when getting a weapon out of you inventory, so your auto attack is fine but the rest go on their cd. So for ele you couldn’t just whip out a dagger then rtl off into the distance replacing you staff again. And a CD on changing a second time, so you can only swap weapons once every 1 min

TL;DR

• This would screw elems who are dagger dagger and all enemies are ranged (untill gap closers are fixed)
• If your running a low hp amulet your stuck with it (painfull vs 1 or 2 shot thieves)
• IDEA: Put all skills on newly changed weapon on CD
• IDEA: Put weapon changed on CD so you can only fiddle with your gear every minute or so

I just had similar discussion on our Community forum and while it was really hot topic (12 pages within 5 hours) we came with the conclusion that most players will be fine with system like this:

1) Teams can join the map only when all team members press the “im ready button” which is now available in heart of the mist. Whole team will be transfered to the map all at once (avoidind any spy informations)

2) From the moment you have joined the map with your team noone can relog / change class. If you disconnected then you have to came back with same class.

3) You can still change utility skills + elite skill based – everytime out of combat (CD is applied so you its still fine)

4) Inventory weapon swap its not possible or it will give you CD – that way it can´t be used as it is now.

5) Change in sigils / amulets or other parts of gear is disabled completely.

6) Traits can be changed only in your lines. Meaning no full respec but only small adjustment while still keeping your stats same. This change could anyway be done only at respawn area.

And thats it..

@TG – sounds very much like hotjoin as full ranged party doesn’t happen that much is tvp.

However, the point is if you’re d/d ele you should really be roaming, i.e pushing points or help spiking targets, I don’t want to teach you to suck eggs as I’m sure you know what you’re doing with your class, but this is where the skill in building the correct team comes from.

If you’re D/d, you’re either a roamer, a dps or both, and the rest of your team should accomodate your weaknesses either by support, being tanky, drawing attention, w/e it may be.

The notion that “I’m d/d, I should swap out if my enemy has ranged” is kind of a negative attitude as you should have a balanced enough team setup that even if they are 5x ranged your team can do something about it (anti projecticles anyone?).

The more I think about it, the more I think they have three options, either:

A) Lock everything out as soon as you enter the spvp game.
B) Partially lock weapons/traits/utilities after leaving spawn point
C) Make a seperate UI so that swapping doesn’t look so clumsy on streams.

Mainly drawing the 3 options around C, no one in their right mind wants to watch people swapping weapons, utilities, traits whilst streaming. It looks fugly and clumsy.

I think it adds more skill to the build if you actually setup your weapons/traits etc pre-match not during.

And macros are going to be an issue. This is my biggest point. But hey, if anet want a load of their players using macros, my hat goes off to them. I’ll go set mine up now.

The most important point

Honestly I think this is just a design error as anet hadn’t thought this far ahead, and that people in spvp and tpvp are just trying out builds still so there’s no point locking it. Come major tourny time, I see them doing something drastic about it.