Guild Wars 2

Does anyone else feel this way?

Weapon swapping. I’m sure by now its been dragged through the mud enough times that this thread is superfluous. However, getting back into GW2 after a long hiatus has given me a chance to step back and think about what really was annoying me about this game when I left.

Elementalists can’t weapon swap in combat. And they never should be allowed to. The power such an ability would give to a character that basically has FOUR weapon swaps would make the class so imbalanced that play would be unfair, or skill nerfs would have to be extreme.

Outside of combat, however, is a different matter entirely. The ability to swap from Dagger/Dagger to Staff should not be relegated to the Hero Panel for only one reason. IT’S ANNOYING. You have to stop playing, breaking your emersion in game, and ask your team to hold up, to respec a weapon that they can just hit ` and be done.

The argument that I came up against weapon swapping out of combat is speedbuffing. An ele could swap weapons drop a massive ammount of buffs outside combat, and then the team steamrolls another, or an NPC. To prevent this i would like to propose a compromise to the system.

1: Eles can weapon swap, but only once per minute and thirty seconds
2: Eles cannot weapon swap for more than 1 minute and thirty after casting any spell.

The game already allows for simular mechincs as part 1. Part 2 should be a simple binding in the code to force the weapon swap cooldown on any ele skillbar. By adding these restrictions, it removes the combat benefits an ele might have for weapon swapping but still allows the class to become more dynamic and play it its strengths depending on the situation without opening the hero panel to stop play while they respec.

I want to stress that its not a game breaker. But it is an annoying mechanic that I feel was never fleshed out. I would hope that Anet will revisit this topic and adopt a similar solution.

Thank you for reading my little rant :P

Mel

It’s hardly the only thing.

I would not like eles to have a cooldown on swapping weapons. What if you swapped to the wrong weapon? Now you have to wait 1 minute and a half just to swap back, and I think that would alot more annoying. The problem of yours doesn’t annoy me, so it might just be a pet peeve of yours.

Who even cares how many skills we have? It’s not like it’s better than having ten. Worse, really, when you factor in how attunement cooldowns limit the skills we have access to at any given time.
I’d advocate swapping weapon sets in combat, but then we’d get absurd amounts of CC due to the design of our weapons, so at this point I say make conjures like Engi kits and remove attunement cooldowns (adding internal cooldowns for on-swap effects, of course).

Also, I can easily maintain perma-Swiftness with a staff and scepter/dagger out of combat as it is, but that only matters when I’m alone. Organized groups can already stack obscene amounts of Swiftness by blasting Static Fields, so that’s a non-issue.

We´ve been asking for out of combat weapon swap since the first beta, thus far they haven´t delivered.

I think the last excuse was that they want to make a full template system (gear, skills, traits etc.)

Melody Cross.8465:

Does anyone else feel this way?

Yes, but they’re mostly misinformed.

Strang.8170:

We´ve been asking for out of combat weapon swap since the first beta, thus far they haven´t delivered.

I think the last excuse was that they want to make a full template system (gear, skills, traits etc.)

There have been many posts by the community explaining why in-combat weapon swap is neither viable nor desirable. The last one involved insane dagger/scepter blast finisher stacking in staff fields.

The only way to implement weapon swap for eles in a non-broken way is to introduce all kinds of crazy restrictions, which nobody’s gonna be happy with.

The ele wouldn’t be overpowered even if they gave the ele a weapon swap with a cooldown like that of the guardian.

It’s one of these things people would just adapt to.

However it might make the ele “too much fun” to play and it does go against the current “lets-make-the-ele-less-fun” dev attitude.

Xillllix.3485:

The ele wouldn’t be overpowered even if they gave the ele a weapon swap with a cooldown like that of the guardian.

Sure, because an auramacer that has acces to both Shocking, Frost and Magnatic aura isn’t overpowered one bit.

Or an ele with twice the number of knockdowns/interrupts.

Or perma chills.

Or so many blast finishers in a water field that they heal themselves more than their healing skills do.

Or all of the above combined into every build…

ThiBash.5634:

Sure, because an auramacer that has acces to both Shocking, Frost and Magnatic aura isn’t overpowered one bit.

Or an ele with twice the number of knockdowns/interrupts.

Or perma chills.

Or so many blast finishers in a water field that they heal themselves more than their healing skills do.

Or all of the above combined into every build…

None of which matters when you’re out of combat.

ThiBash.5634:

Xillllix.3485:

The ele wouldn’t be overpowered even if they gave the ele a weapon swap with a cooldown like that of the guardian.

Sure, because an auramacer that has acces to both Shocking, Frost and Magnatic aura isn’t overpowered one bit.

Or an ele with twice the number of knockdowns/interrupts.

Or perma chills.

Or so many blast finishers in a water field that they heal themselves more than their healing skills do.

Or all of the above combined into every build…

On any class when you switch during battle you have something like a 8 second cooldown before you can switch again.

My apologies, I’ve been responding to the wrong person. I’ve seen so many people demanding in-combat swaps that I tend to jump on any that even mention the word swap.

Out of combat swap would be ok to me, but if so I’d like to see the weapon specific traits removed too so we don’t have to still go into our inventory and change those.

The only place I can really see a weapon swap being needed is Arah exp, but this might just be personally. I use d/d for both a damage/crit build and a support build and don’t have too many problems with just swapping between the elements to keep dealing damage. There is also the conjured weapons given to the ele class if you’re not built about the swapping elements. Dropping another weapon (Frost bow, fiery great sword, the axe, and lightening hammer) in turn could act as a weapon swap.

The only times I even use another weapon are Arah exp for the Lupicus fight and for Tequatl. Even then it’s easy to just be running with the group in the dungeon while switching skills and weapon for the fight, most of the time people pause before the Lupicus fight as it is (at least they have every time I have run it).

Weapon swapping for the ele class just plain isn’t needed. Even if you’re a full on fire build and need to stay in fight you can still conjure a weapon and still get your stacks of might for staying in fire while using a conjured weapon. You’ll also see that the engineer is the same for the fact they can use explosive packs.

Thank you for the replies and reading my OP. I will not cite any specific comments at this time. I get the feeling that doing so would be jumping on a merry-go-round that I have little wish to ride. I’m not going to complain about skill nerfs, etc. But Izzy? You still can’t smite

However, in the interest of keeping the discussion on track I decided to return and post an example of how I find this play mechanic annoying, more annoying than most mechanics in the game I might dislike at this time.

Last night in WvW I was soling with D/D spec. Eventually I rolled in with a small group and we started capping towers. The D/D spec did fine for most of the work required of me until we started needing water on the gates. I threw on my staff for greater effect. And a quick respec for greater area of effect and water skill spam.

It became obvious from teamspeak that the commander’s goals eventually shifted (though I will highlight one point because I feel a need to. If anyone from Anvil Rock is reading this, I apologize but…stun breaks. 9v30+ and we were wiping you that many times that close to your WP? Stun breaks. Really). As is my way, and attention span, I decided to return to solo play. So I had to STOP playing. Open the hero panel, find my daggers amongst the loot I had acquired, equip them, reset those two traits and NOW I can continue (again, sorry for the derail. Those two thieves in AR borderlands. Stun breaks. REALLY). Admittedly, re-equipping my daggers did not take terrible time. But it took a lot longer than hitting ` would have. Long enough that I decided it was prudent to waypoint to a safe location to do so. Long enough that I lost that sense of urgency. That feeling of “go go go”. It felt like a task. A chore.

I don’t want to do chores in a video game. If I want to do chores, I’ll mop my bathroom floor. Actually, I should do that today…ew.

This is not relegated to WvW. Feel simularly in certain PvE situations. But, i’ll leave it at the one example for brevity.

Moral of the story: I feel that Anet was correct in preventing eles from weapon swapping in combat. I believe that most prudent players would agree that giving eles 45 skills at their disposal in combat as opposed to other characters 15 (20 for necros if you wish to count deathshroud) would be imbalanced to hellangone. However, this makes us the only class that is prevented from swapping from midrange/frontrange playstyles to backline without stopping play completly. Perhaps I err’d on the side of caution with my timer suggestions as the longest cooldown of any of our weapon skills is 60 seconds and the longest buff I can think of is 30 from a guardian blast finishing through a field combo. Such a question would be best answered by an Anet employee or group thereof when deciding how to properly balance the introduction of this mechanic to what is still a relativly fun class.

But. Every other class has this dynamic (and that’s the operative word for my “rant”. Dynamic. The ability to change to meet the circumstance presented to you or that you find yourself running toward). It was even a selling point in some of the reviews I watched during the beta. I think it should be revisited. I think it should be revisited sooner rather than later, and I don’t think such a simple mechanic as a timer addon is unacceptable for the sake of balance.

Darn. That wasn’t very brief at all…

Thank you again for reading. I look forward to more discussion and constructive critique.

Mel

As the game stand now, Elementalists have out-of-combat weapon swap. It just takes an extra 3-4 seconds to open the H panel and manually switch them.

Being able to do it by pressing the ` key would be slightly more convenient, but there’s a multitude of other problems with the class that I’d rather see them address.