BloatedGuppy said:
Not only practical but outright necessary for some classes, like Elementalist attunement swapping. Weapon swapping is built right into many trait lines. I have no idea how you came to this conclusion, but it's way off base. I would go so far as to say never weapon swapping will cripple you.
As an example back to my necro who i want to play as a dot build, means i take curses as my main tree and sceptre as my main weapon the bonus's the tree gives me are
+crit
+condition damage
critical hits cause bleeding
20% increased bleed duration
fury on using death shroud (the one universal buff )
well skills use ground targeting
2%increased damage per condition
conditions from sceptre skills last 33% longer
now if i swap to axe or dagger the majority of these benefits including half the trees stat point allocation drop off to being useless. staff does a little better but as it doesn't cause bleeds its still massively gimped.
Of course the counter argument is to not use the specialist skill and take the crap generic option but thats like cutting off your right foot so the sprained left ankle doesn't slow you down.
so really the only weapon swap available is to take the staff to use marks as ae tag spam in public quests its not a viable choice for performance , which is your argument to the rest of my points oddly enough
BloatedGuppy said:
Ah, the illusion of "choice". First, in reality, 99% of the 80 billion possible specs are not going to be remotely viable in anything resembling a competitive environment. Second, 95% of players generally adhere to a tiny handful of communally recognized optimal specs in the end anyway, and those who don't struggle. This is a problem currently faced by TSW. It's all well and good to give people a million choices, but if you've not balanced all million choices with one another and accounted for all possible issues, then all you really have at the end is a tiny handful of good choices and a whole fucking ream of terrible ones. Sometimes a simple, clean and BALANCED system can allow for great tactical depth. Look at chess. That said...
ah the illusion of "justification", 20 years ago i played quake 2 on a pro level internationally, i haven't cared about pro level since because i dont play there nor do 99.99% of people, second just because a lot of people bottom feed there build/spec doesnt mean some of us dont. i was ranking up server firsts including Illidan in wow as a an avoidance tank when your common wisdom said EH or gtfo, my build was rated lower than anything and most guilds wouldnt of taken me, the same guilds that asked me how i managed it after oddly enough.
there is nothing wrong with gimped specs, this is meant to be a game , games are meant to have failure states, if you cant make a wrong choice you cant make a right one either. i havent looked up a single GW build nor will i . its one of the most fun aspects of the game to me and its been heavily gimped in GW2 which makes me sad!
Balance is an aim a goal , its never been achieved in an MMO , take a game with two skills if they are different they will be unbalanced in some way. people cling to it but its an illusion. what actually matters is can you get the job done with the tools at hand. and the margin of error is HUGE not the tiny strip of land where balanced lives. sure taking the perfect op build has bigger margins, but none are big enough to let you stand in the fire all raid long.
BloatedGuppy said:
Yeah I'd like to see this too. They need to balance what they've got first, but down the road I would very much like to see this. Again though, enough with the level 6 nonsense. You can make an argument for level 30, and realistically it's closer to level 40-50 when you'll have the full breadth of your abilities available, if not your talents. But at level 6 you've barely scratched the surface. I have a hard time even unlocking all my different weapon skills by level 6.
well every time you go to a one of the ae spam fest public quests just swap to a new weapon combo its easy to max one per event. and we shall just have to disagree on the rest here, i view the combat skills as the meat and by level 15 i have unlocked nearly all the utility skills which are minor use anyway and i just have the elite to go (and ill have the points for it at level ) which for my classes seems to just be a dps timer button. and the traits all seem to offer my classes percentage modifiers and passive or on hit affects not new skills or methods just improved returns on what i do already.
