Armor weight restriction removal? Thoughts?

[Marikus.1875]

Greetings, citizens of Tyria (and soon Cantha, I guess?)

What do you all think about the devs removing armor restrictions from classes so that we can mog whatever we want on our characters regardless of class? I have been a big proponent against WoW's mog restrictions and removing them but to no avail. There's a bunch of support for it there, I wonder what the sentiment is here? 

As an Ele, it would be awesome if I could wear/mog heavy armor to create a proper battlemage.

Do you like the restrictions? Do you agree that you rather have more freedom in how you build your character? 

Edited September 14, 2021 by Marikus.1875

[Gibson.4036]

The standard answer I've heard on this topic is that the silhouette is important for recognizing classes in PvP.

To which I'd say, seems possible to restrict it in PvP, then.

You can turn yourself into a Kodan or Watchknight in WvW, so no need to restrict it there.

The other big response I've seen was agonizing over potential clipping when mixing various pieces from various weights. Overall, I don't see this as a problem, except for one particular area. Light and medium armor treat long coat or robe pieces differently. One has the long part attached to the torso piece, the other includes it in the leggings. If you mixed the two you could end up with something really odd where two butt-capes merge with each other.

In general, the more options to customize, the better. I'd love for some of my heavy armor characters to wear medium stuff so they don't look so overly bulky.

Edited September 14, 2021 by Gibson.4036

[Marikus.1875]

6 minutes ago, Gibson.4036 said:

The standard answer I've heard on this topic is that the silhouette is important for recognizing classes in PvP.

 

Wait, they actually use this same silly excuse here in GW2? LOL. This was the main reason the developers used in WoW to justify the restrictions. Then when that was eroded because the obvious class breaking cosmetics they released (onesies/covenant gear etc.) it became "cus class lore". 

No offense, but GW2 isn't the most readable game with all of the flashy effects and just the general direction of the art and graphics. Don't get me wrong, I love the art style of this game...but silhouette reading in PvP is downright impossible. 

Edited September 14, 2021 by Marikus.1875

[Blocki.4931]

It's not possible. Each armor type is heavily baked into the class, it cannot be switched.

[Randulf.7614]

I’m not wholly against it, but you wouldn’t be able to mix weights due to rigging issues which might be a drawback for many.

I guess it comes down whether the devs think messing around with old, legacy code is worth the work and time - I don’t imagine it to be a trivial change

[Gibson.4036]

1 minute ago, Marikus.1875 said:

Wait, they actually use this same silly excuse here in GW2? LOL. This was the main reason the developers used in WoW to justify the restrictions. Then when that was eroded because the obvious class breaking cosmetics they released (onesies/covenant gear etc.) it became "cus class lore". 

No offense, but GW2 isn't the most readable game with all of the flashy effects and just the general direction of the art and graphics. Don't get me wrong, I love the art style of this game...but silhouette reading in PvP is downright impossible. 

I'm with you there, but then I don't seriously PvP, either. The game already separates out PvP gear as it's own thing, so it seems like it would be easy enough to let PvE and WvW use whatever.

[ugrakarma.9416]

i dont believe that will have clipping issues with cross-professions armors, theres obviously with races.

These restrictions dont make much sense at all, even the animation, the profession-tied animation stuff is weapons.

Edited September 14, 2021 by ugrakarma.9416

[Dante.1763]

As cool as it would be theres a more practical issue they have said is the reason its not possible(without overhauling ALOT of stuff and anet has said as much.)

Each armor weight is set to be on a particular skeleton for that race. Ele, Necros And Mesmers on Charr(as an example) have entirely different rigging points for their armor. When someone pulled a heavy armor character out of the game and threw light armor on it it actually broke the model.

 Previewing those heavier(or lighter) armors actually forces the game to load that races skeleton of the appropriate weight in the window, which is why you load nakked.

Outfits also have a unique skeleton per race, but not per armor weight, which is why they cannot set them up as individual armors.

 

Would it be cool? Yes. Are they aware of this as something players want? Yes.

[Marikus.1875]

3 minutes ago, Dante.1763 said:

Would it be cool? Yes. Are they aware of this as something players want? Yes.

This gives me hope for the future then that may they can find some spare time and work towards a solution.

I prefer greater player agency in a game rather than the game telling me how to play it. GW2 already does a great job in that sense with many of its systems and open world IMO, the class armor restrictions is where I find myself artificially limited.

[Gehenna.3625]

35 minutes ago, Marikus.1875 said:

Greetings, citizens of Tyria (and soon Cantha, I guess?)

What do you all think about the devs removing armor restrictions from classes so that we can mog whatever we want on our characters regardless of class? I have been a big proponent against WoW's mog restrictions and removing them but to no avail. There's a bunch of support for it there, I wonder what the sentiment is here? 

As an Ele, it would be awesome if I could wear/mog heavy armor to create a proper battlemage.

Do you like the restrictions? Do you agree that you rather have more freedom in how you build your character? 

So what would you suggest for the people who have legendary armor sets of each kind (light, medium, heavy)?

[ChronoPinoyX.7923]

I'm all in for being able to mix and match different pieces of armour for Fashion Wars 2. If they can't remove armour weights because of how heavily coded it is, then I'd be happy for them to do a duplicate of each armour design in the game for all 3 weights.

They already do duplicate designs for all three weights on certain pieces of armour, they should be able to do it with all other designs. The only real issue would be the fact that all 3 duplicates would have the exact same names on them, and that could cause problems for people to some extent. 

[Marikus.1875]

4 minutes ago, Gehenna.3625 said:

So what would you suggest for the people who have legendary armor sets of each kind (light, medium, heavy)?

 

Leave those how they are??

[b k.1648]

This isn't a "spare time" fix. It requires re-rigging two of the character weight classes to match the third, and then doing the same for all the affected armour pieces. With the number in the game now, this could require tens of thousands of rigging hours to change.

[Doggie.3184]

Outfits destroyed any argument that could be used against this long ago. Their original class "silhouette mentality" and visual looks they wanted for each class is looooong dead.

It all comes down to how much Anet cares to make the change. It's either too much work and/or they're scared of medium buttcapes clipping with pants-attached-buttcapes of heavy/light but so many items still work together. I'd say let people make their own choices, most people wont pick the items that clip.

Literally for me personally I just want the heavy gladiator tops on my medium, they're 100% incapable of clipping and don't even look like heavy armor. It's such a waste for so many of these skins to be locked to one armor weight.

Another simple solution though is to stop making buttcapes from here on but they wont. Still praying for all the buttcapeless GW1 Assassin armor to return with Cantha but they already made one into an outfit instead of skins so I have little hope. Elona didn't even bring back Paragon armor beyond an outfit so it looks like Assassin will probably have the same fate with Cantha.

Edited September 14, 2021 by Doggie.3184

[Marikus.1875]

1 minute ago, Ben K.6238 said:

This isn't a "spare time" fix. It requires re-rigging two of the character weight classes to match the third, and then doing the same for all the affected armour pieces. With the number in the game now, this could require tens of thousands of rigging hours to change.

However long it takes, I'm okay with them dedicating the resources to it. GW2 is already known for having an endgame centric to fashion hence why outside of this community its known as "Fashionwars 2". Makes no sense to have such an artificial restriction in place when what you wear is literally part of endgame playstyle.

[ChronoPinoyX.7923]

4 minutes ago, Ben K.6238 said:

This isn't a "spare time" fix. It requires re-rigging two of the character weight classes to match the third, and then doing the same for all the affected armour pieces. With the number in the game now, this could require tens of thousands of rigging hours to change.

If we take into consideration the fact that we have pieces of armour that is shared throughout all three weights but maintaining the same exact design, seems like ANet already worked out that issue to some degree quite a while ago. 

I don't think it's much of a rigging issue but rather a design issue since ANet designed so many things in this game to clip with one another, even if it's in the same weight class

Edited September 14, 2021 by ChronoPinoyX.7923

[b k.1648]

1 minute ago, ChronoPinoyX.7923 said:

If we take into consideration the fact that we have pieces of armour that is shared throughout all three weights but maintaining the same exact design, seems like ANet already worked out that issue to some degree quite a while ago. 

I don't think it's much of a rigging issue but rather a design issue since ANet designed so many things in this game to clip with one another, even if it's in the same weight class

 

For the shared pieces, that's because they rigged it three times. That only helps for those armour pieces.

  

4 minutes ago, Marikus.1875 said:

However long it takes, I'm okay with them dedicating the resources to it. GW2 is already known for having an endgame centric to fashion hence why outside of this community its known as "Fashionwars 2". Makes no sense to have such an artificial restriction in place when what you wear is literally part of endgame playstyle.

 

You might be okay with that, but unless ANet can justify tying up a few riggers for years at the cost of several million dollars, it's not realistic for them.

[Marikus.1875]

7 minutes ago, Ben K.6238 said:

 

You might be okay with that, but unless ANet can justify tying up a few riggers for years at the cost of several million dollars, it's not realistic for them.

Plenty of assumptions made but: 

1) We don't know what Anet's budget is and unless you're part of the organization and working directly in finance, neither do you.

2) Hiring a team of five dedicated personnel with total comp (both sides) at ~150k/yr would still come in under a million dollar investment not "several millions". 

3) I am okay with them making this change, you're right. 

Having this restriction in place just goes against the spirit of freedom that this game exemplifies. It's rooted in old and outdated design and seeing as they're showing they are more than willing to take a second look at things in the backend such as how WvW is going to play and even infrastructure changes like DX11... I'm okay with them taking a second look at this too.

Edited September 14, 2021 by Marikus.1875

[ChronoPinoyX.7923]

Just now, Ben K.6238 said:

For the shared pieces, that's because they rigged it three times. That only helps for those armour pieces.

If they could rig these things three times without issue, that means the same rig could be incorporated into other weights. That's copy pastaing a rig to different weight skeletons, which are all exactly the same just coded separately, and it works from what we can see. If they can copy pasta rigs between different professions (like Reaper GS to Rev GS), then this shouldn't be an issue at all. 

[Doggie.3184]

16 minutes ago, ChronoPinoyX.7923 said:

If we take into consideration the fact that we have pieces of armour that is shared throughout all three weights but maintaining the same exact design, seems like ANet already worked out that issue to some degree quite a while ago. 

I don't think it's much of a rigging issue but rather a design issue since ANet designed so many things in this game to clip with one another, even if it's in the same weight class

The rigging already worked as far as I know from the old preview windows long ago. They're just scared of buttcapes clipping. A long time ago the preview menu had a feature bug that allowed you to preview anything together regardless of armor weight and people loved it and kept asking why we couldn't do it in-game for realzies and I recall no answer provided, they just eventually patched it out.

Edited September 14, 2021 by Doggie.3184

[Xanadrine.4352]

I mean we already have outfits that are obviously plate armor being worn by cloth classes, and cloth outfits being worn by plate classes. not to mention in game armor sometimes you cant tell whats heavy or light/medium in some sets. I dont think it would be as big an issue as people are making it out to be. It would just be a skin from the wardrobe anyway we already apply these kinds of things such as big armor being skinned into a catsuit , dresses skinned into pants. Also I think people forget that everyrace is already rigged for every weight of armor

Edited September 14, 2021 by Zuldari.3940

[Zephire.8049]

While it would be nice, it would be a heck of a lot of work and there are other QoL issues that I, personally, think they should focus the time and resources on first. That's just a lot of time spent re-rigging thousands of pieces of armour across 10 models (plus the sub-groups of weight/bulk/muscles) and modifying pieces to not clip. If something needs modifying, it needs its model adjusted and a new texture map. Which brings up the issue of whether models that need to be modified should be split into two models or have the new, non-clipping version be the only one and wreck the outfits of those who were using the old version.

 

Given that Anet's been putting out more and more armour that is the same across the three weights they clearly want to go in that direction but it's more likely to be another case of old backpacks not being dyable but everything after the patch that introduced it will be. It's not that they don't know players want it (they do) or that they don't want to go back and update old skins, it's just far too resource-intensive to do that. And if that's their stance for backpacks, I can't see them doing something similar to armour which has over 7 times as many skins and each one would require as much or more work.

[genjonah.1253]

Outfits exist, I see no need to do the massive undertaking of programming to add more confusion to everyone’s builds

[ChronoPinoyX.7923]

1 hour ago, Zephire.8049 said:

While it would be nice, it would be a heck of a lot of work and there are other QoL issues that I, personally, think they should focus the time and resources on first. That's just a lot of time spent re-rigging thousands of pieces of armour across 10 models (plus the sub-groups of weight/bulk/muscles) and modifying pieces to not clip. If something needs modifying, it needs its model adjusted and a new texture map. Which brings up the issue of whether models that need to be modified should be split into two models or have the new, non-clipping version be the only one and wreck the outfits of those who were using the old version.

 

Given that Anet's been putting out more and more armour that is the same across the three weights they clearly want to go in that direction but it's more likely to be another case of old backpacks not being dyable but everything after the patch that introduced it will be. It's not that they don't know players want it (they do) or that they don't want to go back and update old skins, it's just far too resource-intensive to do that. And if that's their stance for backpacks, I can't see them doing something similar to armour which has over 7 times as many skins and each one would require as much or more work.

People are making it sound more laborious than it needs to be. Believe it or not, all three weights share the exact same rigs between all the races, they're merely separated by the game's programming which restricts the mixture of each weight pieces. If the case was that they had actual differences in rigs to begin with, ANet wouldn't be able to make pieces of equipment that corresponds to all three weights whilst being exactly the same in design.

There's a good number of equipment in this game right now that are nearly full sets of armour, with only two or three pieces missing that's shared between every weight class. The Holographic Dragon equipment alone is halfway through being a full set, and that is shared between every single equipment weight, the Etherbound Set is another that is only missing three pieces to become a full armour that's shared between every equipment weight. 

ANet already showcased how copy pasting rigs and animation isn't that hard since they've already done it with the E-Specs. The biggest issue they'll run into, which I agree with, is clipping since that's a flaw this game has even with same weight equipment. That part is an unfortunate side effect of ANets design choices for the armours they made since most of them have clipping issues with one another, regardless of weight class. 

[Ultramex.1506]

Just do like what ESO did by transmuting your armor to any skin you want regardless of weight. I don't agree with removing enitrely because of defense bonus depend on weight, its small but its there.

 

 

 

 

Or Spend gems to get heavy outfit for your mage 😛