Guild Wars 2

Just out of curiosity. Why does weapon swap not refill initiative?
I know with 30 points into acrobatics you can get a trait that refills 3 whole initiative on swap, but it seems like it should be innate.

If I am playing my ranger, say, axe/warhorn and shortbow I can…
pop my fury/might/swiftness buff,
stack on some bleed and chill with my #2 and 3,
call down some birds with my #4,
and then swap to my bow and poison/cripple them. Still have my daze for when it’s needed and still have my retreating shot available.

On my theif, if I’m say shortbow and d/d, I can…
Drop choking gas,
Fire off a couple clusters for damage and area weakness,
Swap to d/d and…. auto?

Seems like when you swap you should have some initiative to work with. Maybe not all of it, sure. But something would be good.
My original though was it would be nice if the primary weapon combo and secondary could have separate initiative pools that regen independantly?

If other classes can have their secondary weapon’s skills coming off cooldown while it’s not active, I don’t see why our initiative(which is suppose to be an alternative to cooldowns) has to not experience the same benefit other classes get.

What do you guys think?

Works as intended, I’d say.
Would be waaay too imba, unless the max initiative was cut by 40% or something. You could spam like there was no tomorrow. If you’d really want to spam, you could even equip the same kinds of items twice for teh lulz.
With such a change, it would now REALLY be impossible to escape from a thief without at least 15 seconds of invis and the thief running in the wrong direction…

He’s not suggesting that Thieves instantly gain all their initiative back every time they swap weapons, that’d be insane.
I think that having separate pools for each set would create nearly the same issue, but gaining only 3-4 initiative on swap for one extra attack would be perfectly reasonable.
When I play my thief, I rarely even swap weapons because there’s so little reason to, whereas on my ranger I’m swapping practically on cooldown every time for the extra attacks.

Personally, I’d probably prefer it if they instead drastically dropped the recharge on swap for thieves to only a second or two, so you can swap back and forth as needed purely for the utility of it. Without separate recharges like other classes have, it just doesn’t make sense for the weapon swap to have a recharge and it greatly hinders your ability to use a particular set for particular circumstances, since you become locked into that weapon for a while.

Grimwolf.7163:

He’s not suggesting that Thieves instantly gain all their initiative back every time they swap weapons, that’d be insane.
I think that having separate pools for each set would create nearly the same issue, but gaining only 3-4 initiative on swap for one extra attack would be perfectly reasonable.
When I play my thief, I rarely even swap weapons because there’s so little reason to, whereas on my ranger I’m swapping practically on cooldown every time for the extra attacks.

This is how I read the OP’s intent as well and actually agree that a little initiative after the weapon swap, enough for extra attack as you stated, would not make a thief overpowered and would match many of the other classes who -do- gain something when they swap.

Yah, you two knew exactly what I was thinking.
Just some initiative to spice up the gameplay and add incentive to actually use the swap mechanic.
Right now it’s practically a useless mechanic. Once in a long while I will swap in combat to my bow for a quick shadowstep, but that’s really it. And most of the time I don’t even do that since when I need the escape I don’t normally have 6 initiative to spare.

Sure there could be people that just use 2 sets of daggers, and abuse it a little(even that could be eliminated by something like you only get the initiative if it’s a different weapon your swaping to), but if it’s only “some” initiative then it’s really not that bad.