Love the leggy focus, but it is unfinished clipping product again

So I just want to highlight the clipping issues of this legendary The Binding of Ipos, which in my mind is the most clipping legendary currently in game. I like the design of the weapon, but again similarly as with legendary armor it is clipping as bad as possible. whielded version has the weapon inside the leg for norn and asura races and stowed version is so uneededly oversized that it clips with 99% of legs and with your arm on most races... I propose reducing the size of the book significantly when stowed and fix the bugging when whielding. Don't make this amazing weapon into another clown fiesta. Thank you.

I have a better idea.Why is it on the side and not on your back? Put it on your back.

ANet Chelsea

One of the problems I had to tackle

was how to give you a different hand. Spoilers: I didn't. I covered yours up, hence the large size of the claw - it has to fully encompass your hand. It's not your hand anyway, it's a magic demon hand. Also, don't let the preview window fool you, it's not actually accurate size in there (though it sounds like you crafted it).

Believe me, it bothers me too; even more so since it's my creation and I want it to be perfect! This was yet another problem I had to deal with and it ended up being something I could not solve. Since I can't move the arm I'm limited to moving the book around and messing with the size.

The book actually does scale down and it squishes flatter while on your hip to help a little, but no amount of scaling or squishing would remove the clipping on some races unless you want a book for ants. Scaling it down also presents its own set of issues so the final result you see was the best solution.

I tried everything.

These are problems I deal with every time I make hip stowed weapons and there are quite a few others that share this issue. Making weapons is a game of compromises and it's an art to even get things to look as good as you end up seeing them in game. Game development in a nutshell.

So that's why firebrand didn't get real tomes.

ANet Chelsea

It was not. I came up with the idea for and made the focus, and I work independently from the skills and balance team. The focus was not designed with tomes in mind, and guardian tomes were not unused because of the legendary. The weapon went through several iterations and eventually landed on a book, and when it came time to figure out how the character would hold it I didn't want to have to resort to having the character just holding a strap on the binding like other book focuses. I wanted something unique and awesome, remembered guardian tomes, and continued from there. It took a lot of problem solving to get it to work at all (weapons work differently from spells like the guardian tomes, not to mention all the other animation and art work that had to be done for it) but eventually /u/anet_mattp and I figured it out! It has a lot of crazy stuff going on behind the scenes that we hadn't ever done for weapons before.

That said, it was a nice bonus for me to get my tome back in a roundabout way and I hoped you guys would be happy with it too! :)