Guild Wars 2

Out of combat weapon swap should be added imo as a great quality of life change.

In combat would be sickeningly powerful. They’d end up having to nerf so many things you’d have to piano 40 buttons to get your damage out.

Something that might work is coding it so you can swap once while in combat, but then you are locked out of swapping until you go out of combat again. That way you could swap once to make a choice on what range you want to take on that fight at, but wouldn’t get the OP (imo) advantage of being able to swap back and forth.

@kubetz:

it’s not like I consider weapons swap mandatory: I consider mandatory to have the ability (that any other class has) to deal with targets at any given distance anytime should that be required.

DiogoSilva.7089:

This has been repeating many times, and apparently it’s never ending.

The problems with range can and should be fixed with Conjure Weapons. Yes, conjures kinda suck at the moment, but that’s the source of the problem, not the lack of weapon swapping.

I`ve tried using conjured weapons on & off since the betas.
to say they suck is putting it politely

Tried again last night, they last for 30 seconds, so if I`m running D/D & some ranger is hitting me in WvWs, he can out heal what they do, assuming anything even hits them.

900 range? Meh! If we`re being hit by range, frostbow will be of next to zero use.

I make this suggestion with NO regard to having to rebalance things. I get that you could basically get the best of all worlds regarding your builds…but…awesome?

What if you could assign a weapon to your element so that when you attunement swapped to that element, it would weapon swap to the set of your choice too.

Example:

Assign water to dagger/dagger
Assign air to scepter/focus
Assign earth to scepter/dagger
Assign fire to staff

I’d use focus more for earth and some air, but it’s so bad in fire and water.
I like some water staff stuff, but air staff is terrible.

The major complaint seems to be that weapon sets lock you into a specific range/role (too much aoe, not enough single-target, too melee-oriented, blah blah, etc).

My suggestion allows you to:

- spec all close, mixed, or ranged as you see fit (much like other professions).
- have more freedom over the kind of build you’re trying to put together

Don’t like that?

Other suggestion: swap some of the skills around to different weapons or just out-right change them so that the ele has options. Put lava front on dagger and drakes breath on staff for example. I’m too tired to give a better example, but I hope you catch my drift. Or, make staff air 1 more like scepter 1, but does bigger dmg all at once (single target, big dmg).

As with any change, balance will be an issue. Biggest for us would be building around all knockdown/stuns, etc. in a PvP environment.

BTW: I feel that on my primary build, D/D, I’m good to go in 95% of situations and don’t really feel like I’m lacking. I do feel a bit naked 1v1 on staff, but I don’t use staff that much. I’m not a huge fan of PvE scepter either, but I think that’s more personal style. I’m not calling for my suggestion to be implemented, just throwing it out there for analysis. I’d love to get some more use out of that darn focus!

TL;DR:

Allow us to assign weapons to different attunements OR

Move some skills around to give different ranges on any weapon set OR

Outright change some skills on each weapon to provide that range and target diversity.

Not complaining, I like where my ele is at, just an idea.

No, weapon swapping wouldn’t make Elementalists OP… it would make us Gods.

If I can take pretty much any profession in any situation with any weapon (with even odds, of course), doubling my control/lock potential would make them sit and cry while I deal damage from far?

The only profession that is annoying are Thieves with all their teleports and gap closers, but they’re generally dumb and teleport right into the enemy zerg if you led them to.

But it would be nice to play a stupidly insane OP profession for a change… imagine dealing monstrous AoE damage in WvW with the Staff… then someone comes out of the door and you multi lock him with Static Field, Gust, Shockwave, switch to S/D and combo him for Knockdown, Blowout and another couple Immobilizes.

Though Guardians would probably survive since they have on demand Stability… nerf Guardians then?

I think that weapons swap should be added to the ele in pve only, with a higher cooldown than the other classes (e.g. 1-2 min).
This is why ele weapon skills are highly focused on something: the staff is, for example, the only viable weapon for event farming (and if you don’t agree, you have never been to orr, where mobs die 2 secs from their spawn..dragon tooth? lol). Staff have the lowest dps in the game against single target and, imo, it’s a kinda boring weapon. I love S/D but it’s still a solo/smallgroup weapon combo imo, it’s mainly fire damage skills takes forever to land.

So i see weapon swapping on the ele a pve-only long time solution for swapping between roles instead of swapping from cooldown sets.
I think we can agree that this wouldn’t make ele more op but just a little more fun to play^^

I want to put my voice behind out of combat swapping.
Lock the swap any time we are in combat. It doesn’t grant any extra power in combat. All it would do is stop the entering our inventory to get to the weapon ( or using h).

Please, Please Anet think about this. We aren’t asking to be stronger in this, we just want the convenience that every other class has.

Side note:
While I don’t actively play one, engineers should probably have this mechanic too (ooc swapping).

Whichever way you look at it, elementalists already get twice as many weapon skills as anyone else. And that ranges from pure damage to self/team support, crowd control, and self-defense. I’ve only recently started playing elementalist, but already I’m pretty impressed with what all I can pull off with rapid swapping to an appropriate element.

Giving them twice as many options would mean they’d have four times the weapon sets as everyone else, a great variety in damage, self-defense, and crowd control abilities, and basically all cooldown times would be irrelevant.

Elementalists don’t need weapon swap — they can already swap to four different sets!

Elementalists can change between attunments, which is kind of like a weapon swap, but they alone of the classes cannot change between something appropriate for a ranged fight and something appropriate for a melee fight.

Warriors can go from axe or sword to rifle.
Thief can go from d/d to shortbow.
Ranger can go from bow to melee weapons.
Engineers can swap between grenades and bombs or many other choices.
etc.

Weapon-swapping elementalists would have 40 skills available but many of them would be redundant — 8 would be auto-attack.

And I think a lot of people are missing the point that an elementalist who swapped from a staff to d/d when the enemy closed would become stronger but an elementalist who swapped from d/d to staff would become weaker. Yeah sure swapping to staff mid fight would give you access to a bit more heals or cc but your damage would really suffer and you would be at a disadvantage in the fight until to swap timer was up and you could go back to d/d.

There are elementalist that run in WvW with daggers equipped even tho they are not the right weapon for most of what happens in WvW but how many elementalists use a staff in pvp?

I understand the argument that eles have 20 skills and 40 with swapping would ‘maybe’ be wrong. This is why out of combat swapping is the way to go (i think). We’d still only have 20 skills, but be able to conveniently swap weapons – which we ALL already do with the inv or h while out of combat. Its not asking to be able to use those extra 20 skills, its asking to not have to go through those extra steps when we want to switch weapons.

LOL at people thinking knockdown-dragonstooth-phoenix is actually a good combo. Against noobs maybe, good players will simply dodge everything after the knockdown because it doesn’t last long enough to guarantee the tooth to hit.

The problem is not the number of skills you get from weapon swap but the possible chains. Imagine s/d swapping to d/f or s/f? You can dish out conditions, good damage, some cc and heals then swap for more and finish with protection skills + blinds+invulnerability..all in one… way too OP.

+1 for out of combat swap though, it is very annoying to open inv screen that often.

I tend to agree with most of the people posting that elementalist with weapon swap would be rather OP. If you could swap between D/D and staff you basically wouldnt be able to die.

I do think that not having the ability to swap is a bad thing though. I think what they should do is something along the lines of allowing you to choose the option to swap but if you choose to be able to swap you can only spec into say 2 or 3 attunements.

Still might be a bit OP though but currently the class does need help somehwere.

The people pulling the ‘versatility’ card seem to be overlooking the fact that the ele’s cooldowns are so high that they actually aren’t very versatile at all.

To compare: an engineer can switch kits to be versatile and has a regular set of cooldowns on each kit; a common build switches back and forth between flamethrower (mid-range AOE damage) and elixir gun (support and healing) as needed and each of those are ALWAYS available when needed.

Ele’s, however, have such steep cooldowns that they cannot reliably fall back on the role they need if they’ve used it any time recently. It doesn’t help that each of our skills are also substantially weaker than a single skill of another profession too. Eles do not have 20 skills, they have 20 half-skills that require combos to be even moderately effective. eg. Healing Rain is pretty mediocre on its own compared to the AOE healing skills of other professions, its only value comes from the blast combo which means it requires 2 skill uses to actually be useful. In terms of relative power they are the equivalent of 10 skills on another profession.

Why do people always overlook this key difference?

The ONLY reason eles won’t get weapon swaps is because of the combos it would give them access to. It has nothing to do with the (false) ‘versatility’ the profession is purported to possess.

Any in combat weapon swap would be OP. I am not going to lie I lol’d hard at some of these responses. Its like you guys don’t realize that in combat swap to a good ele might as well be an I win button in WvW PvE and sPvP. Too many buttons my kitten With a single key bind this would open me up to 40 skills and no cool down because the rotation I would rock would be only limited by how fast I could attune.

In-fact I change my mind I second this. I already zerg raids an survive for the fun of it give me staff healing and aoe on top of that. I am serious here. Show me that much power and I will show you 10 eles who are as good or better than me who will break the game. Worst I will do is leave it with heavy bruises.

All kidding aside bad idea get used to your range and be a king or queen with it as is.

I realized another reason it would be overpowered: take a look at our weapon choices and note which ones can make Fields and which ones can do Finishers. Note, for example, that the staff can make a boatload of Fields, but has only a single Finisher. While other weapons can make few (or no) Fields but have several Finishers — some on fairly low cool downs.

I only want a second weapon set for fast switching out of combat. It’s just a quality of life issue, but it would be very convenient.

i would agree for out-of-combat swapping. hell, when i played the first public BWE, i thought elementalists and engineers could out-of-combat swap anyway.

then i found out it was false and i was sad.

in-combat? oh god no. i think other people have said why that would be absolutely ridiculous.

They just need to let us swap out of combat. Keeping your bags open is so smacktarded.