Guild Wars 2

I was trying to brainstorm ways to make Weaver operate a bit more simply. I, like apparently many people (but not all, of course), find the Weaver spec interesting, but very complicated, and requiring really dancing on a wire to play well.

I was thinking, perhaps instead of having your first click change the main element, then your second push that element to second and a new one into first, and so on, what if you could manually just swap “mainhand” and “offhand” elements at will, so you could go from fire/air to fire/earth or water/air, in whichever order you prefer.

But how to do the controls for this, we only have four f-keys, not counting the f5 this doesn’t use. Well why not the weapon swap that Eles can’t use anyway?

So that’s my UI suggestion. Have the standard row of four elements, bound to f1-4. Then, above that, have a smaller row of elements, also bound to f4. If you start jamming on f-keys, then all that will change is the 1-3 attacks, they’ll keep swapping around to whatever element you pick. If you hit “~” or “Weapon Swap,” then the larger bottom row and the smaller top row flip places, and then jamming on the f-keys will only change the 3-5 attacks (since the 3rd is a dual skill).

In terms of overall balance, it’s not that different than the current design, you can still reach the same targets, just maybe in a couple less cycles of the keys, but I think it would make the class much easier to operate.

Just as an example, if you were in fire/fire, and wanted to switch to air/earth, you would see the big row on the bottom and the small row on the top. You would hit f3 to swap main to air, and therefore be in air/fire, then after the CD you’d hit ~ and then f4 to swap to air/earth.

Since the ~ key doesn’t actually change anything it wouldn’t need a cooldown like Weapon Swap does. If they have difficulty implementing it that way since Weapon Swap isn’t meant to work that way, they could do the same thing using the unused f5 key, but personally I think ~ would be more intuitive.

So what do you think, better than the current? Worse in some way I’m not seeing?

I was thinking separate cooldowns for the off hand attunement instead of the 4s global cooldown on attunement swap. That way you can just double tap Air to fully attune or Air/Earth without any delay. The off hand still has the 4s cooldown so you just can’t go off hand Earth again. Or what if the off hand attunement could be switched only when the main attunement is on cooldown? That way we can better control which main and off hand attunement is in place.

There are other problems with this such as displaying the cooldown on the icon, then it just becomes another hidden cooldown that we have to manage. Could maybe keep the main attunement at 8 or 9 seconds this way… Hmm…