I'm tired of swapping

Honestly, I am just tired of everything in the game being balanced around swapping, and people who don't constantly swap running ineffective (either damage or defense wise) rotations. I'm tired of swapping weapons, i'm tired of swapping attunements, i'm tired of swapping legends, I'm tired of swapping kits.

At game launch, it was manageable, because you weren't forced into it, maybe if you had energy sigil, or sigil of battle, or if sometimes you needed to CC someone as an Ele, or drop a few bombs as an Engi, but in the last few years everything became about swapping, and if you don't swap you suck.

I want to be able to make a fire-themed Ele, and sit in Fire, and do fire damage.I want to be able to make a Ventari-themed Revenant, and camp a tablet and you know, actually heal people.I want to make an Engi who is just a grenadier, and for that to be good enough.I want to make a Final-Fantasy-themed GS Warrior, and actually attack with it most of the time.

Where did this trend to having to swap for the majority of effects in the game (buffing yourself/others, cleanses, restoring health and energy), etc. come from ? Who thought it was a good idea to force players into playing styles where they have to break immersion to play effectively ?

I'm just tired of it. Just because a class can do everything, doesn't mean they should have to do everything.

No one is forcing you, play what you want, unless ofc you go raids but this is a different story

Last season i played engie -grenadier in spvp, boy, those who know looked surprised, those that don't, didn't know what to think and how to deal with me. I was having so much fun

i too would like to be the top of efficiency without using all my tools

You don't have to do any of that. If you want to do the optimal thing you should do all of it. Nothing stops you from not doing it. Even Ele you can play mostly just switching between Fire and Air.

Whenever I am in open world on my ele I never switch from Fire unless it is to give myself swiftnessAs a warrior you CAN play GS only and it wouldn't be that bad. I use Sword + Axe in my other weapon set just to get the additonal damage and mobility, but you don't have to do it either.

My tendons will swell regularly, because I have special fun disease. On bad days it makes me lament that GW2 endgame is being designed under the premise that DPS rotations should be hard to do. So much so that I won't even try the max DPS rotations for some classes. I'd rather just camp mace/axe on renegade than deal with the mess that is the shortbow rotation. I won't even touch condi engi or condi weaver.

I can sympathize.

All my characters, except my Elementalist, run a melee set/ranged set combo. I only swap weapon sets if I feel like it, or one set proves useless. I still do well enough in T4 fractals to never have been kicked, and I've yet to have any problems with OW or Story content.

Tired of swapping? Then don't do it.

If you don't want to swap, don't swap. I think it's one of the things that makes the game fun. I feel that you're letting a roleplaying preference interfere with your opportunities for interesting gameplay and other types of roleplay. But it's your game; you play how you like to play.

You will find some content more challenging than others might find it, but isn't that always the way when we set limitations on what we're willing to do?

A lot of players are in the game for efficiency, rather than immersion. Those players were going to plumb any build system in the game to find what works best. It's what they do. Because cooldowns are per-weapon (or attunement), swapping is one of a very few ways to get markedly better results. Thus, it's meta to do so. This is a result of designing a build system which lacks depth. Players turn to complexity because there are only a very few meaningful choices.

There are ways to make camping one weapon/attunement/legend/kit competitive in effectiveness. Buffing so that weapon X (etc.) is the best option is an obvious way. What happens then, though, is people complain that X is "too good" and that it is trivializing encounters. People who prefer weapon Y or Z complain because they're the ones left out. Another way would be to buff X so that it's almost as good. If ANet does that, though, then the min-maxers will just modify their switching rotation to make best use of it, which is likely to result in even more power creep. A third (very radical) way would be to remove switching entirely. The problem with that one is that you've sacrificed complexity, leaving players with neither depth nor complexity -- and that's not going to be well-received.

My guess is that -- given the existing build system -- the best that can be hoped for is that players who want to make an immersion choice (My warrior is a sword-and-board fighter), the best they can hope for is viability. While most choices are indeed viable in most of PvE, that is more due to the relative lack of difficulty in most of PvE than it is to any semblance of balance between options.

In short, this situation is so baked into the game's build system that the only way to fix it would be to start over -- and we both know that is not going to happen.

I have no idea what you're talking about. All my characters have one set of gear, no swapping. I've never had any issues.

I think your argument is entirely based on optimal DPS more than playing effectively..

I've been playing the same Zerker LB Ranger build since before Heart of Thorns dropped.. I don't care about optimal DPS through precise skill rotation and weapon swapping.. I care about doing a continuous source of damage and keeping myself alive thus not being a burden on others who have to revive me every few seconds.

Every player that goes down is DPS loss.. every player that revives them is DPS loss.. and i've seen countless cases of players diving into certain death just because their skill rotation demands they swap into melee and smash the enemy.

Earlier today I fought a bounty boss which has a reflect phase.. did people stop attacking during this phase?.. No they kept swinging and shooting and within seconds my screen was full of downed players lolBest part is even when I revived some of them they just jumped straight back into the fight and killed themselves again XD

Playing effectively and optimal DPS are not the same thingin most cases.. specially when it comes to PvEThere's so many different ways you can play and play very well without giving a monkeys about hitting your absolute highest DPS.You can pretty much play any way you like in PvE.. the only real limitation is you as the player.

Personally, I think they should retain the swapping. But they should make us able to rearrange our weapon skills, so that we can swap between our two sets of 5 skills, without having to graphically switch weapon.

Prior to PoF I used to run a Scrapper build designed around camping Flamethrower. I just equiped it and never exited, continual 12 Might and a stack of Stability with no work whatsoever. It was fine for open world and most Story. Did Caudecus in LS3.4 with it, but wouldn't bring it to the various Balthazar fights.

If swapping didnt exist, there would be little need to have other skills, especs etc. The depth would be gone. Im quite happy rarely swapping outside of melee to ranged and in open world or story hat is just fine. But it would be impossible to design challenging or interesting instances without it (hence why u see the need more now despite it always being a thing to do)

I really dislike swapping weapons too, but for another reason. I play at 300 ping, and GW2's lag compensation does a good enough job when i queue all my skills my rotations would be perfect... until I need to swap weapons/attunement/legend/kit, the game doesn't let you queue skills from another weapon set for some reason (weapon swap effect, coding limit maybe).

Which results in an awkward pause of doing nothing while waiting for your toon to pull out the next weapon set. This especially sucks when you're in pvp, when i play warrior shield bash > weapon swap I just stand there like a retard, by the time my 100b is cast the stun is already over.

Maybe one day there will be SEA servers, but i'll probably be dead by then

@Hannelore.8153 said:Who thought it was a good idea to force players into playing styles where they have to break immersion to play effectively ?

Other players. Those are the people trying to put demands on how you play.

You can play however you want.

@"Hannelore.8153" said:Who thought it was a good idea to force players into playing styles where they have to break immersion to play effectively ?There you go.

@Cifrer.6013 said:

@"Hannelore.8153" said:Who thought it was a good idea to force players into playing styles where they have to break immersion to play effectively ?

it is a rather unique mechanic in mmorpg and I very much welcome this. It should stay as it is.

Remember the bad ol' days of GW1 and groups "requiring" you to have a certain weapon/armor/build or you'd get kicked?

I think that was fixed in GW2 where everyone can do a little of everything, but noone has to specialize in one thing.

I'm feeling ya on this one, I also find it annoying that some weapon sets have almost no use...

When I read the title I thought it was going to be about the need to swap -characters- for specific encounters, like Raid bosses or simpler things like jumping puzzles, story achievements, fights like Queen's Gauntlet and so on, that are much easier on one character, but a lot harder on another one. I'd agree with that.But not the need to swap weapons/kits/attunements/legends, that's part of the gameplay and honestly you don't have to do any of that in the vast majority of the game's content. Asking to make a character perfect without using swaps is essentially asking to dumb down the game, if you want that play a Thief (Daredevil or Deadeye) that in PVE rarely (if ever) needs to swap weapons.

I olay berzerker warrior and camp longbow for open world pve. I love the animations, aoe fire fields. I have a build that is just for this, it is maximized for what the build is. It's super fun and deadly.

I agree with the O for the most part. For most classes, weapon swapping is really annoying especially with the addition of elite specs and a new weapon. I want to play that weapon, not swap back to a weapon I played with for years.

But something like Rev, legend swapping keeps it interesting.

In addition to my last post, I would say that weapon swapping is rather unique in the MMORPG genre. However, I would rather a weapon swap be encouraged if you need to step back a bit and heal up, provide CC, etc. I mostly dislike swapping when it has to do with going through a dps rotation. It becomes too spammy, and less intelligent.

The rotation turns into something like this,Rotation: Pop a utility or two, press 2,4,5 swap to secondary, press 3 and 5. Rinse repeat.

Id rather have a setup like this,Rotation: Pop a utility or two, press 2,4,5, autoattack...I see incoming damage, press 4. Oops I missed, im low on health, swap to my secondary, pop 3 (stability) pop 4(aoe heal).

Its intelligent and reactive gameplay.

Games like Phantasy Star Online (both one and two) and the Borderlands series pretty much nailed it for me in regards to weapon swapping. In these games I always have multiple weapon sets equipped but they never feel like a burden to me. It could have been the same for GW2 if it weren't for A-Net screwing up the weapon designs, take deadeye for examle. Just looking at the ranged options you could have had dual pistol for drawn out fights in direct engagements, rifle for burst damage from range and short bow for AoE but instead rifle does everything dual pistol does but better, you get punished for sniping because mobs are just teleporting to you (or get insanely high regen if they can't reach you) and short bow is just a dumpster fire outside of skill 5. If A-Net is bad at one thing then it's incentivising the player to change up their gameplay (they're good at forcing it tho).