Guild Wars 2

I was actually on the ‘weapon swap nay sayer’ boat before it was added and I saw what it looked like and realized what it meant. I thought there could have been so many other ways they could have added diversity to the revenant and solved its issues without breaking the symmetry. Now I’m quite happy with the change and I’ll tell you why it should be kept as well as how well it works with the class and how it solves a few of the issues it resolves.

Adding it did not necessarily flat-out buff the profession. As it was said in the live stream, a second set of skills opens up more windows for you to screw yourself over with energy costs. It comes with its pros and cons and makes the energy mechanic a bit harder to master. It’s an improvement on the capability of the Revenant more than anything.

The Revenant will be the only profession that’ll be able to swap skills on both sides of the health globe. This offers more mix and match opportunities when it comes to how your weapon couples with your utilities and visa versa. For instance, if I were to take Hammer and Staff I would have two sets of skills that work well with Ventari skills. One offers further support through healing while the other allows for more control-based support and allows me to manage the tablet from a safe distance. That’s the norm for every profession, but the Rev will have to think about how both of their weapons will synergize with a second set of utilities. If I also had Shiro equipped I would be also be able to be a mobile front liner that can pump out healing orbs thanks to impossible odds and keep on people’s tails with staff 5 and Phase Traversal. With Hammer I could use Impossible Odds to negate the long cast times and Riposting Shadows to stay at range. You have to put in more thought with what legends you take and how they can compliment both weapons’ play styles.

Weapon swap opens up the option to spec fully into two roles where before you could only have one. If I have mace/axe equipped it’s pretty obvious I would be channeling Mallyx, but my second legend would go unfulfilled. Now I can take the weapons that work with both legends so that I can feel as if I can fill both roles better. Being able to swap between weapons just opens up more adaptability in terms of your playstyle and your role, and that’s what the Revenant’s about!

It’s just nice to be able to swap between weapons as well. I like the staff, but I also like the swords. Now I can have both! Weapon swap also allows you to have hammer plus a melee weapon so you can have a mix of range when you need it. So that’s one issue solved.

In conclusion, adding weapon swap to the Revenant fixes a lot of its problems and should make it feel more diverse, entertaining, and complete. Sometimes the easiest way is the best way I guess. Who cares about symmetry anyways? We’re not all death the kid; be happy about this!

Actually the problem was Legends and Traits only supporting a single weapon in focus. This made the choice of the second legend extremely awkward, as half its abilities only made sense with a particular weapon setup, and half the traits in a given line has the weapon in mind.

This wouldn’t have been a problem if the Weapons were independent from Legends, all the Trait lines incorporated something for at least 3 different weapons, there was a weapon oriented trait line, or the Legends didn’t rely on a particular weapon setup to enable their traits.

There was a fifth option that we were all originally hoping for, where the Legends interacted with the Weapon’s skills (giving effects to the weapon, rather then the weapon effects procing Legendary traits). But since that didn’t happen, we ran into a problem where the tight pairing of equipment, weapon, traits and utilities meant we could only run one Legend with any competency.

Adding the weapon swap didn’t fix the problem….. it just worked around it. Even with this change, Revanents still remain the rigid class out of the 9.

starlinvf.1358:

Actually the problem was Legends and Traits only supporting a single weapon in focus.

I like weaponswap too, however this sentence is not true

starlinvf.1358:

Actually the problem was Legends and Traits only supporting a single weapon in focus. This made the choice of the second legend extremely awkward, as half its abilities only made sense with a particular weapon setup, and half the traits in a given line has the weapon in mind.

This wouldn’t have been a problem if the Weapons were independent from Legends, all the Trait lines incorporated something for at least 3 different weapons, there was a weapon oriented trait line, or the Legends didn’t rely on a particular weapon setup to enable their traits.

There was a fifth option that we were all originally hoping for, where the Legends interacted with the Weapon’s skills (giving effects to the weapon, rather then the weapon effects procing Legendary traits). But since that didn’t happen, we ran into a problem where the tight pairing of equipment, weapon, traits and utilities meant we could only run one Legend with any competency.

Adding the weapon swap didn’t fix the problem….. it just worked around it. Even with this change, Revanents still remain the rigid class out of the 9.

Yup. Revenant weapon swap helps with the synergy problem, but it doesn’t really help the overall experience.

I would have much preferred that each legend gave a bonus to weapon skills; Jalis for range/protect, Shiro for damage, Mallyx for conditions, and Ventari for heal/regen. The main argument of “need weapon swap for range” would be handled by having Jalis, but it would come with added synergy with other weapons (closer-range defense for sword, for example).

Buuut, lazy option is fine too. :P

Linking weaponskill to legend is a bad idea as said multiple times. Legendswap has to compensate for the unchangable utility skills. Also you are supposed to legendswap pretty often and to get energy. I don’t want to be forced to go ranged just because I wanted 50 energy back after an upkeep.

Lazy option sometimes is the best option. Eager is almost never a better policy.

Kidel.2057:

Also you are supposed to legendswap pretty often and to get energy.

I know this is probably just a matter of opinion, but I’m not sure I quite agree with this. I feel like the idea is to only swap Legends when needed, or wanted. If it was supposed to swap often, don’t you think it’d be more like elementalist attunement?

I mean, I understand wanting to swap for energy gain, but the traits don’t really encourage frequent legend swapping, with the exception of the stun break, but even that’s situational when you get stunned.

I would agree with you except for the fact that to max up the output of upkeep skills you need to use them til your enery is over and then rapidly swap to another legend to gain energy and keep using weaponskills (that’s actually the main reason, you can’t use ws if you have low energy). That’s the difference with elementalist.
Ele just uses up most of its cooldowns, while with revenant is more a matter of flow.

At least that’s how I use it. Of course it’s not the only way.
You can use legendswap more defensively mainly for stuns/condis. Of course there are more ways to see it.
The most offensive way however is to get energy back.

And I think it’s intended, otherwise swapping to a new legend would have started at 0.

Or you could do like every Thief ever and.. wait? The energy on swap is nifty, and I wouldn’t exactly call it an exploit, but.. it’s kind of exploiting the current system for more ability spam. But, I also assume it’s actually a design decision that the devs are going to look into, so that will stay until they find it’s getting misused.
/shrug
I’m ambivalent about that.

Weapon swap is.. okay, it just doesn’t synergize well with the current legend design. While one could use any weapon with any legend, and the devs will encourage that for robust gameplay, traits will mean the difference between ‘usable’ and ‘optimized’ for each legend.

Also, it’d be much more in theme for the legends to influence weapon attacks, rather than requiring weapon swap.

Thief has no cd on weaponskill, so the wait time is a drawback from the initial burst.

Revenant can’t burst. And thief doesn’t need initiative for 6-0 skills.

Energy gain on swap is a design choice that was made clear in the first blog post about Revenant and energy.

It’s currently the only good way to use upkeep skills and it’s working as intended. People are even asking for 100 energy on swap instead of 50, where have you been?

People ask for a lot of things. Often rudely.

That doesn’t make them right. Or polite.

When I was poking at Revenant, I never had energy problems. I had cooldown issues. And people have been asking for those to lower as well.
…Which, come to think of it, is a solid reason to grant weapon swap. With weapon skills on cooldown, a weapon switch would give a Revenant more to do while in between cooldowns. I’m iffy on how much of a game changer that really is, but it’s a solid perk, and the OP details many other good reasons for it.

The only thing it doesn’t quite resolve is what starlinvf brought up about the trait/weapon/legend dependency, but we’ll see how tangled it is this weekend.

I don’t really see thid trait dependency.
I’m going to use swords+hammer and shiro+jalis, but only devastation related to them. Other trait lines are going to be invocation and salvation/corruption