What if the Vindicator utilities worked like charge skills?

[Lanz.7312]

I'm mostly good with a lot of what Vindicator does, but the most common critique I see aside from the dodge is how awkward the utilities are. I've seen some compare it to needing to constantly swap elements on an ele, but even ele at least has their elements bound to specific keys and can know what they're switching to without having to check their bar constantly. Because Vindicator utilities swap automatically, the player needs to either be constantly referencing their own utility bar in a fight, or needs to mentally be keeping track of every utility that swaps. 

 

So what if, instead of the utilities just switching and staying switched, it used a charge/ammo system and prioritized one set over the other with the F2 swapping the priority? So, for example:
Instead of Alliance Tactics just swapping whatever skills you currently have, it swaps them all to red, or all to blue, cycling like the utilities currently do, and that color becomes your 'primary' set (so if your primary set is red, it swaps it to blue, and vice-versa).

And then for the utilities themselves, they essentially function like skills that have 2 charges, except that when you use the skill it swaps it to its counterpart and uses a charge, and when the skill is fully-recharged, it returns to whatever your primary color is.

So, taking Nomad's Advance and Battle Dance, for example:
If you've used Alliance Tactics to make Archemorus your primary (red skills), then your utility would be Nomad's Advance by default. If fully cooled-down it has 2 charges. When you use it the first time, it starts the 10 sec recharge and swaps it to Battle Dance. If you use it again while it is Battle Dance, it will add the second recharge like any charge skill would, and swaps it back to Nomad's Advance (cooldowns may need adjusting). The key here would be that if you used Nomad's Advance, and DIDN'T use Battle Dance, and the the skill recharged back up to two charges, this would ALSO swap it back to Nomad's Advance, because in this example the red skills are your default. This way, you know that regardless of what you do, your skills are always going to eventually default back to your 'primary' color, and at any time if you need to control that, you can use the F2 to manually cycle them between all-red or all-blue. This would essentially allow you to prioritize the offensive skills or the defensive skills without having to just mix them up constantly. 

This would also make the F2 like a sort of mini legend swap, giving you back a bit of energy and 'swapping' Archemorus and Viktor. 

[Jthug.9506]

This is actually the best solution I have seen suggested. Still think we need hard cc somewhere, also urn lame and spear weak.

[Lanz.7312]

2 hours ago, Jthug.9506 said:

This is actually the best solution I have seen suggested. Still think we need hard cc somewhere, also urn lame and spear weak.

Yeah, Vindicator has other problems for sure, but I'm also not really expecting the spec to be perfect out of release. Most of the elite specs need tweaks over the years anyways. I feel like the flip mechanic is probably the biggest problem vindicator has right now, and it feels like mostly a design problem, rather than an engineering problem.