weapon swap confuses me

So I come from multiple MMO's and am trying to give guild wars more of a chance, but I keep getting thrown off by the whole weapon swap in builds. I'm competitive and enjoy doing high proficiency with any of the class's I main. But on all the builds it seems you have to have a rotation with swapping to your off set of weapons. Am I reading this correct, or is it possible to do Perfectly fine without weapon swapping on every class? I want my ranger to be a ranger, not a melee. I want my warrior to use 2h or double 1h's. not swap between them all and drive me insane. Does anyone have advice or anything of the sort they could lend me to this? Do I really need to swap weapons for a rotation or am I reading too deeply into it?

you are fine not to swap but you won’t get the best out of it...

you can always swap between long bow and short bow for ranger

for warrior, great sword and hammer... or two axes and short-dagger..

in chrono, we keep one weapon constant.. say the sword on main hand.. we swap offhand between shield and another sword

you can play the engineer and elementalist.. no weapon swapping but there are other mechanics

Depends on the content you play. In open world, it really is play whatever is comfortable for you. I generally mix things up between what looks cool and what feels right to my style. Bugger the rotations.

I couldn't get away with that in high end fractals or raids though. Rotations will become important by then

Think of weapon swapping as giving you extra options. For example my main (Warr) uses Mace/Shield and only uses his second weapon set (rifle) when ranged is required.

My ranger uses shortbow/longbow simply because I don't I enjoy the non bow options for him. Primarily I use the shortbow and just switch to the longbow for certain situations (knockbacks, cripple aoe, stealth)

My Daredvil is a mix of Staff and pistol/psitl and switches depending on range. My Reaper is Greatsword (melee) + focus/axe (ranged)

That's a classic way of looking at it. It wont be "meta" or "optimal" at times, but it will help you break in the idea at least. You don't have to constantly swap, you can make it as simple as melee/ranged or pick a primary weapon and use the secondary set as something emergency. There is no hard and fast rule for the majority of the game.

Basically, unless you start to struggle, play it how you feel comfortable as long as you aren't trying to do the challenging instanced content. At that point, knowing rotations and what every weap skill can do and in diff combos is useful knowledge to have.

Weapon swapping is cool. Like bow ties.

But seriously, consider Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark. He fights a bunch of adds sword-to-sword. Then a champ pops up and Indy weapon swaps to his pistol and one-shots him. How cool is that? Would you really expect Indy to go sword-to-sword with some hp-sponge champ and take longer, just to avoid weapon swap?!?You would not.

Or consider a more classic example: the ninja. Recall any ninja movies you've seen. The protagonist ninja fights a bunch of dudes with his sword, then he leaps backwards, bounced off a wall and finishes them off with a rain of shurikens. That ninja was using weapon swap.Consider what would have happened if he couldn't (or refused to) weapon swap: he would be pointlessly bouncing from wall to wall to table to ceiling to chandelier while his sword was on cool-down, until some minor baddie downs him with a thrown spear - because baddies aren't afraid of weapon swap.

So don't diss the swap. Embrace it. Become one with it. Weapon swap is love. Weapon swap is life.

Think of builds and rotations a bit like playing music. You can play a piano or a flute, a guitar or a stand-up bass. Each have their strengths and weaknesses, each can be played by virtuosos and, to an extent, most can be played by amateurs.

There's quite a lot of decent music that can be played by a guitarist that knows only a dozen chords. A virtuoso is going to make those chords do things that the amateur couldn't, regardless of that accidental/artificial limitation of 12. If you're just having fun, without any particular goal, it's absolutely overkill to worry about all the chords. It's especially not important to learn alternative tuning for the instrument. Whereas if you plan to play in a band, a dozen chords is barely a good start. And if you plan to play in concert halls...

So no, the OP doesn't have to weapon swap. You can succeed at solo play in most of the game without it (especially if choosing builds carefully with this in mind). All the same, recognize that it limits your abilities. You can't master the profession without, you know, mastering all its aspects.

Swapping between two of the same weapon is also a thing for ranger builds because of quickdraw but that still uses the weapon swap mechanic. Not swapping is probably fine for PvE.

To keep it simple, in oter MMOs you had ONE weapon with 10-20 skills, here you haveTWO set of weapons with 10 skills, game gives you room on your screen and several ways of taking advantages on weapon combination & swaps.

P.S. you don't want to your ranger have ranged weapon only and warrior be locked in melee, you just don't know it yet :)

@Nibletz.9576 said:I'm competitive and enjoy doing high proficiency with any of the class's I main.

From this I'm guessing we're not merely talking about open world PvE, but rather Raids or T4-Fractals. In GW2 each weapon set comes with 10 skills. There are high dps and low dps skills in this set. By switching between two weapon sets you have access to double the amount of high dps skills. Therefore switching weapons is necessary for maximum efficiency.

Notable exceptions are: Elementalist and Engineer who switch their weapon skills around without switching weapon sets, Thief who has no cooldown on his weapon skills and has to deal with an energy resource instead and Revenant who also is limited by an energy resource.

Because Thief and Revenant don't switch their weapon set as part of their rotation, they have the option to pick a utility set as their second weapon set. They only switch to this set when the situation asks for it.

Ranger in this game...doesn't mean ranged.

Builds for high end pve (raids/fractals) are mostly melee based or one range option to swap to.

I'm not really understanding why swapping is a problem. But for high end pve it is expected.

@Illconceived Was Na.9781 said:Think of builds and rotations a bit like playing music. You can play a piano or a flute, a guitar or a stand-up bass. Each have their strengths and weaknesses, each can be played by virtuosos and, to an extent, most can be played by amateurs.

There's quite a lot of decent music that can be played by a guitarist that knows only a dozen chords. A virtuoso is going to make those chords do things that the amateur couldn't, regardless of that accidental/artificial limitation of 12. If you're just having fun, without any particular goal, it's absolutely overkill to worry about all the chords. It's especially not important to learn alternative tuning for the instrument. Whereas if you plan to play in a band, a dozen chords is barely a good start. And if you plan to play in concert halls...

So no, the OP doesn't have to weapon swap. You can succeed at solo play in most of the game without it (especially if choosing builds carefully with this in mind). All the same, recognize that it limits your abilities. You can't master the profession without, you know, mastering all its aspects.

I play alot of guitar and other instruments so this really spoke to me.

I figured it out running a different build of power, but for Condi I feel like going from sb to dagger / tortch you go from ranged to melee and would lose dps on going and coming from different distances

@Nibletz.9576 said:I figured it out running a different build of power, but for Condi I feel like going from sb to dagger / tortch you go from ranged to melee and would lose dps on going and coming from different distances

A lot of high-DPS strategies involve staying close, even with ranged weapons (especially shortbow for soulbeast). Another tactic is to start closing on the target as you swap, so by the time you swing (e.g. the dagger), you're within striking distance. It is definitely a huge adjustment if you're used to e.g. camping long bow and staying as far from targets as possible.

If you really are interested in optimal play, then you need to weapon swap.

A warrior, for example, will need to be able to CC for breakbars and the best weapons for that aren't high DPS weapons. Besides that it also allows you to leverage sigils to boost your output or surviabilty, depending on the class of course.

If you dont want to weapon swap play Engi or Ele. But you'll need to swap kits and elements.

You really have to choose class fantasy or optimal play. It's really a fun mechanic using the different weapon skills to combo fields to synergize your play. Depending on content of course core open world for the most part one can do whatever, once you reach HoT you'll need to use all your skills available, you probably can slog through it with one weapon but I'd personally find the play slower and rather boring. If you intend to sPvP or WvW or Fractals or Raids and you want to be welcomed and successfully either find a class that limits the swapping or get use to it.

Or maybe this game isnt for you, that's ok too.

@phs.6089 said:To keep it simple, in oter MMOs you had ONE weapon with 10-20 skills, here you haveTWO set of weapons with 10 skills, game gives you room on your screen and several ways of taking advantages on weapon combination & swaps.

P.S. you don't want to your ranger have ranged weapon only and warrior be locked in melee, you just don't know it yet :)

This reminds me. It doesn't matter what weapons or what your weapons ranges are. In group content basically everyone sticks to melee or close to melee range unless you want to be the jerk that screws things up.

Swapping weapons is really just cycling to a different set of skills (and benefiting from any 'on swap' activated bonuses). Look at elementalists. They don't swap weapons but do swap aspects. The effect is the same - a new set of basic skills. The idea is that you have a variety of options, but can't just execute ANY skill at any time. I think this is a good thing. I used to play WoW, for instance, and had something like 8 task bars to show all my possible skills on the UI. This is much simpler without limiting you to JUST one taskbar's worth of options.

@Biff.5312 said:Swapping weapons is really just cycling to a different set of skills (and benefiting from any 'on swap' activated bonuses). Look at elementalists. They don't swap weapons but do swap aspects. The effect is the same - a new set of basic skills. The idea is that you have a variety of options, but can't just execute ANY skill at any time. I think this is a good thing. I used to play WoW, for instance, and had something like 8 task bars to show all my possible skills on the UI. This is much simpler without limiting you to JUST one taskbar's worth of options.

On the other hand engi kits are functionally equivalent and with a 1s CD it is effectively allowing the use of any skill at any time ... but engi also feels like twice the work for half the result as a consequence of that.

there are pve builds for ranger/soulbeast that use shortbow/shortbow viper's gearset. you swap between shortbows in order to proc the sigil that adds more condi to the enemy and the rotation for it is really simple.

thief builds like power daredevil staff and power deadeye daggers don't require weapon swaps at all.

not all builds require you to swap weapons for optimal dps (yeah there's a few out there), though most that don't require weapon swaps are mostly for open world only a few stuff like certain thief builds are ones that you can bring to high end pve

@Nibletz.9576 said:I want my ranger to be a ranger, not a melee.

i do too, and play with condition SB/SB on most instanced content and berserker longbow on openworld and story

@Khisanth.2948 said:

@Biff.5312 said:Swapping weapons is really just cycling to a different set of skills (and benefiting from any 'on swap' activated bonuses). Look at elementalists. They don't swap weapons but do swap aspects. The effect is the same - a new set of basic skills. The idea is that you have a variety of options, but can't just execute ANY skill at any time. I think this is a good thing. I used to play WoW, for instance, and had something like 8 task bars to show all my possible skills on the UI. This is much simpler without limiting you to JUST one taskbar's worth of options.

I don't know - I enjoy engineer and kit swapping. It requires/allows a more active involvement during combat, but also offers a lot of options. Besides which, you don't HAVE to do it. But they do operate in place of weapon-swap, for sure.