Guild Wars 2

All I see on the forums is ‘Engineers don’t get Weapon Swap because lol kits’

Why is that a good reason? That’s a terrible reason.

That would be like saying ‘Warriors shouldn’t have Weapon Swap because Banners’ or ‘Rangers shouldn’t get Weapon Swap because Pets’.

Well, using the ‘swap weapon’ key as an animation cancel is nice ‘cause it’s required for a lot of skills (otherwise they suck even more than they already do.. eg. Rocket Boots, Jump Shot), though apparently this can be done with a separate key binding.

Also, the combination of Hammer’s defensive cooldowns with .. well, most other weapons would be too much. They’d just nerf everything else to compensate.

Last patch they tried to fix shield, but cut down the block duration on toolkit to balance things. Result: People still don’t use shield, people who use toolkit are sad.. massive failure.

The banner skills are literally worthless, and pets are the profession mechanic of rangers so that’s not a great example either.

Engis don’t get weapon swap for the same reason elementalists don’t – they can have access to way more than 2 skillbars at any time to begin with.
If Engis could weapon swap they could have access to 7 skillbars aka 35 skills, without mentioning 5 more from the utility belt for a total of 40.

Compare it to the 15-20 of other classes like Thief and Warrior and you can clearly see why it wouldn’t be fair. They would need to be balanced in a way that makes them half as powerful compared to the other classes’ skills.

Kits aren’t engineers main profession mechanic though. Toolbelt is. So bad logic there.
I do think Engineers should get weapon swap if no kits are currently equip though. Kits spam is what put me off playing Engineer. That and grenades not having a proper auto attack that auto casts at the foe.