[Request] Weapon swap during combat [Merged]

[NotABandwagoner.9654]

5 hours ago, revolucion.7518 said:

I fully agree with OP, it is long past time that this change is made. Engineer does not have parity with the other classes as things stand.

Are you referring to Engi being the only profession who needs to give something up (A utility slot) in order to interact with a core game mechanic (Weapon swap sigils)?

If so, I have said as much previously and agree.

[Silinsar.6298]

I think the beauty of engi is that you have the freedom to build it as a one-weapon spec, as a 5 (or even more, if you consider the kits that don't really have weapon-like loadouts weapons) weapon spec. Or anything in-between.

If you play it as 1-weapon, you indeed get only one weapon, but more utilities to make up for that. The more kits you play, the more options / "weapons" you have, but it becomes more difficult to make full use of them and you might like some utilities that have more impact "condensed" in a single skill use.

This is what kept engi interesting for me since GW2's release. I like that it breaks the usual convention of two weapons somehow, similar to Elementalist, but in a more flexible way (there are the summoned weapons but they have a high CD). Having little (if you count holo forge) or no CD on weapon swaps also is a unique advantage of Engi, you can react more quickly and frequent when a fight's dynamics change. It's just a blast to play.

 

tl;dr: Engi's amazing as it is.

[Stalima.5490]

23 hours ago, Stalima.5490 said:

I do not want this, because I do not like weapon swap at all, 1 weapon and a large array of abilities, that is why I play my engineer.

 

If they did anything close to that I would rather they just replaced the toolbelt altogether with the ability to use your secondary weapon without requiring swaps via the toolbelt buttons.

I'm just thinking, my Idea here would have actually worked quite well for mechanist, with the mech using your secondary weapon (the auto wouldn't need to be bound so you still get healing toolbelt like medkit)

 

The level of customisation that would offer would be quite interesting I think as well as been fairly unique.

[Puck.3697]

I request very much no, this will increase the complexity of the class as a whole, I think elementalist is a good example of what happens when you keep layering more and more.

many chose these weapons to avoid weapon swap, and there’s enough choice for both to exist. Engineer doesn’t need weapon swap. 

[haineslake.8691]

I second the request to not add weapon swap during combat to engineer. If you want to swap weapons, there are plenty of other professions to choose from.

Edited March 10 by haineslake.8691

[draxynnic.3719]

Another one of these threads? *marks off space on this month's bingo card*

The reasons why it shouldn't happen have been outlined several times. The true underlying problem is that kits have not kept up with the state of the game.

[Yaki.9563]

By the logic of some posting here, Firebrand should not be able to weapon swap. Yet it does, and it gets those 3 kits built in so they don't require the use of a utility slot. Similarly, Untamed should not get to weapon swap since they get to modify their weapon's attacks depending on Unleash status.

[NotABandwagoner.9654]

23 hours ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

The reasons why it shouldn't happen have been outlined several times.

"I don't want it, wah wah wah!" is not a reason.

[draxynnic.3719]

10 minutes ago, NotABandwagoner.9654 said:

"I don't want it, wah wah wah!" is not a reason.

The last thread on this topic is still on the front page of this subforum, albeit towards the bottom. Go read that for the reasons. Heck, I'm seriously considering reporting this thread to the moderators and requesting a merge.

[foxtrot.6902]

No thanks.

Bring kits up to speed instead. 

[Jski.6180]

I get the feeling most ppl would just use 2 of the same wepon most of the time but with stacking sigils. A lot of the classes who do have wepon swap tend to do this just to reduces complexity of there builds. The want for wepon swap is more on the lines of waiting the ability to switch from melee to ranged as needed or just to have an panic def wepon swap set up. Eng dose have kits to account for this but its better to let all classes have the chose of an wepon swap in combat (ele needs the ability to switch from melee to ranged badly for all game types not the need for more skill cd as they already have enofe skills to have something to use all of the time.)

I kind of think all core classes should get an wepon set swap on an 20-30 sec cd. So more then just an wepon swap for most classes where they can have 2 new weapons when they use the effect but ele and eng only gets 1 new wepon.

[Mell.4873]

I know we have had a thread or threads already but honestly Engineer is falling behind most other classes benchmarks due its reliance on outdated Kits.

Ground targeted kits while sacrificing a utility slot tends to be a bad mix. If mechanist proves anything it is damage stacking that wins out in the DPS race. This is exactly why Ranger is top DPS at the moment.

[Sobx.1758]

On 3/12/2024 at 4:04 AM, Yaki.9563 said:

By the logic of some posting here, Firebrand should not be able to weapon swap.

It's almost as if people DID write that exact thing on this forum. And it's almost as if -finally- the espec got the pages system introduced too.

 

On 3/12/2024 at 4:31 AM, NotABandwagoner.9654 said:

"I don't want it, wah wah wah!" is not a reason.

True -and that's not what anyone says nor what the poster you just quoted meant. Your "I want it wah wah wah!" isn't a reason either. 🙄

Edited March 13 by Sobx.1758

[Jerus.4350]

Engi is about to join the broken dps specs with the upcoming ECSU changes which will also boost kitless holo Engi and that might even be better than the version with grenade kit.  
 

Not having a weapon swap isn’t holding us back and introducing it to Engi would likely require rebalancing the entire profession to deal with that major change.  
 

My vote would be to never make this change.  Engi has been designed and balanced around kits and a single weapon and I don’t think that should change 10+ years into the game.

[Puck.3697]

I don’t want weapon swap added lots of people went Engi / ele because they didn’t want weapon swap, removing another option culls the options for those players. 
 

also I rly don’t think it’s holding engi back. Rangers top dps because Anet balanced their abilities to do so, it’s nothing to do with design, the same spec that’s top today has also had times where it’s been mid pack. rangers raised in dps, just like the other options who got dps focused new stuff,

it happens everytime, power creep comes with every wave of introductions, so ones who got dps additions raised. 
 

also yeah, holos getting buffed, Anet are addressing this 
 

 

Edited March 14 by Puck.3697

[Artemis.8034]

On 3/13/2024 at 4:09 PM, Jerus.4350 said:

Engi is about to join the broken dps specs with the upcoming ECSU changes which will also boost kitless holo Engi and that might even be better than the version with grenade kit.  
 

Not having a weapon swap isn’t holding us back and introducing it to Engi would likely require rebalancing the entire profession to deal with that major change.  
 

My vote would be to never make this change.  Engi has been designed and balanced around kits and a single weapon and I don’t think that should change 10+ years into the game.

Meanwhile pmech is in the gutter

[wolfyrik.2017]

On 3/3/2024 at 5:05 PM, Ravenwulfe.5360 said:

I was on the fence about weapon swap but the more I tinker with it, the more it comes to mind that the shortbow, in ANet's great wisdom, was intended as a weapon swap weapon and they forgot that engineers cannot weapon swap. Do I think that engies need to give up kit utility to weapon swap? Not really, especially not in the way the meta keeps changing, and the shortbow still needs buffs before it can be considered decently support solo viable. But the shortbow definitely brings the case, since we do lack a steady aegis effect, that weapon swap should be more and more apart of our kit.

I don't think it was "intended" for weapon-swap per se. I strongly suspect given Anets history with engineer, that they just haven't actually considered that there is no weapon swap.

[draxynnic.3719]

15 hours ago, wolfyrik.2017 said:

I don't think it was "intended" for weapon-swap per se. I strongly suspect given Anets history with engineer, that they just haven't actually considered that there is no weapon swap.

More likely that they consider kits to be weapon swaps, but didn't consider whether engineer weapons should have different design rules than kits (since kits always present the possibility to swap back, but a weaponset has the potential to be the only weapon they have).

Mind you, this does all raise a question: would people be happy if at some point engineer received a new kit at a time that other professions were receiving new weapons?

[SnowMochi.7602]

1 hour ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

Mind you, this does all raise a question: would people be happy if at some point engineer received a new kit at a time that other professions were receiving new weapons?

Speaking for myself, I would emphatically say no. 

Our new weapon (short bow) already sucks. Our current kits suck, and given the track record our class has had with dubious previous updates, the last thing we need is yet another kit which (surprise!) will also suck.

And if by some chance the stars align or someone on the dev team is asleep at the wheel that day, and we actually DO get something that's effective and FUN to use, have no doubt that once word reaches the devs that players are effective AND having fun with it, that they'll make it their priority to change it so it DOES suck.

For a split-second last year, it looked as though whoever was "taking care" of the engineer class finally - finally! - did right by us.  They finally tweaked our rifle to where it was actually effective and FUN to play! Alas, someone must have whined and bawled and howled, because as quickly as the fun began for us, it was quickly taken away again. 

I'm just sick of this brand of "balance." If for only that, I'd rather have the option of being able to swap between the few weapons we have access to that actually work - sometimes. Not that it matters, because even if they do somehow give us weapon swap, they're sure to contrive a way to make it unrewarding. Based on all they've done to repeatedly stymie this class, it would seem that they have an extreme dislike of engineers. I don't know which is worse anymore: their enmity or indifference.

 

[draxynnic.3719]

1 hour ago, SnowMochi.7602 said:

For a split-second last year, it looked as though whoever was "taking care" of the engineer class finally - finally! - did right by us.  They finally tweaked our rifle to where it was actually effective and FUN to play! Alas, someone must have whined and bawled and howled, because as quickly as the fun began for us, it was quickly taken away again. 

I'm just sick of this brand of "balance." If for only that, I'd rather have the option of being able to swap between the few weapons we have access to that actually work - sometimes. Not that it matters, because even if they do somehow give us weapon swap, they're sure to contrive a way to make it unrewarding. Based on all they've done to repeatedly stymie this class, it would seem that they have an extreme dislike of engineers. I don't know which is worse anymore: their enmity or indifference.

The guy who turned rifle into a burst-fire assault rifle with grenade launcher was the same guy who was caught out expressing complete indifference towards bringing kits up to date because he didn't like them himself. He was only interested in buffing his own mechanist build, not engineer as a whole.

Myself, I'm still waiting for pistol to get an explosion on the auto. There's obviously nothing broken about getting the explosion tag on an autoattack.

[Puck.3697]

On 3/12/2024 at 3:31 AM, NotABandwagoner.9654 said:

I don't want it, wah wah wah!" is not a reason

Lol. Because “I want it wah wah wah” is a reason? . It’d cause nerfs to engi, a ton of them while at it, go play a class with weapon swap if you want weapon swap lol

[Panda.1967]

Engineers are long overdue for weapon swap. They never should have been without it in the first place. I said it during Alpha, Beta, and every expansion, and I’ll say it again now. If Kits are the reason that Engineers can’t have weapon swap then they should have been the profession mechanic instead of, or in addition to, the toolbelt.

They’ve added weapon swap to a profession that was originally designed to not have it before. In all honesty kits do not supplement the lack of a weapon swap in the first place, many of them are really no better than an extra set of utility skills anyways. Medkit is just 5 healing utility skills, bomb kit is just a bunch of CC utlity with some damage, elixir gun is just support utility, tool kit is literally just all utility skills and an auto attack… that leaves Grenade Kit, Flame Thrower, and Mortar Kit as actually functioning like weapons… Grenade & Mortar are virtually identical to eachother and a little awkward to use with them being entirely ground target. Flamethrower being a midrange weapon makes it a bit of an awkward weapon swap too… it’s got half the range of Rifle, Shortbow, & Pistol, and it gains barely any range over melee weapons. Also should note, Mortar kit is a waste of an elite skill if taken on any elite spec… Mortar kit is only really a good elite skill for its toolbelt skill, which you don't even get with elite specs, without its toolbelt skill it is not woth being an elite skill.

People keep claiming it will cause balance issues… the same claims were made about revenant when the community demanded it get weapon swap. Adding weapon swap to Revenant hardly caused any balance issues if any. Stop making baseless speculation about how something that NONE OF US CAN EVEN TEST IN THE FIRST PLACE is going to affect balance. You DO NOT KNOW if it will cause balance issues, stop acting like you do. If you think it will, then state so as your personal opinion, stop claiming it as fact. It is your opinion, it is not a fact. It is my opinion that it won’t cause a ton of balance problems. The only “balance issues” I can see it causing would be that some engineer builds may have slightly greater access to CCs in PvP… ooo so scary… it would fix far more problems than it would create.

Edited March 23 by Panda.1967

[draxynnic.3719]

2 hours ago, Panda.1967 said:

Engineers are long overdue for weapon swap. They never should have been without it in the first place. I said it during Alpha, Beta, and every expansion, and I’ll say it again now. If Kits are the reason that Engineers can’t have weapon swap then they should have been the profession mechanic instead of, or in addition to, the toolbelt.

They’ve added weapon swap to a profession that was originally designed to not have it before. In all honesty kits do not supplement the lack of a weapon swap in the first place, many of them are really no better than an extra set of utility skills anyways. Medkit is just 5 healing utility skills, bomb kit is just a bunch of CC utlity with some damage, elixir gun is just support utility, tool kit is literally just all utility skills and an auto attack… that leaves Grenade Kit, Flame Thrower, and Mortar Kit as actually functioning like weapons… Grenade & Mortar are virtually identical to eachother and a little awkward to use with them being entirely ground target. Flamethrower being a midrange weapon makes it a bit of an awkward weapon swap too… it’s got half the range of Rifle, Shortbow, & Pistol, and it gains barely any range over melee weapons. Also should note, Mortar kit is a waste of an elite skill if taken on any elite spec… Mortar kit is only really a good elite skill for its toolbelt skill, which you don't even get with elite specs, without its toolbelt skill it is not woth being an elite skill.

People keep claiming it will cause balance issues… the same claims were made about revenant when the community demanded it get weapon swap. Adding weapon swap to Revenant hardly caused any balance issues if any. Stop making baseless speculation about how something that NONE OF US CAN EVEN TEST IN THE FIRST PLACE is going to affect balance. You DO NOT KNOW if it will cause balance issues, stop acting like you do. If you think it will, then state so as your personal opinion, stop claiming it as fact. It is your opinion, it is not a fact. It is my opinion that it won’t cause a ton of balance problems. The only “balance issues” I can see it causing would be that some engineer builds may have slightly greater access to CCs in PvP… ooo so scary… it would fix far more problems than it would create.

Two problems with your argument here.

First, it's very much an apples to oranges comparison. Revenant had a fundamental issue in that they had the bright idea of a profession without any form of changing their weapon skills... and then made most of the weapons to be highly specialised in one function and not worthwhile anywhere else. During the revenant beta, hammer's power budget was very dependent on the enemy being at near-maximum range making you pretty much helpless at close range, swords were melee, staff was also melee and pretty much purely defensive/support so you couldn't really hurt anyone, the only weaponset that actually felt good to play without weaponswap was mace/axe. It wasn't actually designed to not have weaponswap - it had no substitute for weaponswap like elementalist and engineer, and the weapons weren't designed to be functional without weaponswapping - they just chose not to have it out of a sense of symmetry and I guess they thought being able to swap utilities compensated? By the time it was pointed out how terribly this felt to actually play, it was too late for them to do anything other than put a weapon swap on and deal with the balance consequences later.

Engineer is... basically the complete opposite of that. The core weapons were designed so that you could just use one weaponset and it would work: both had reasonable ranged capability while also rewarding getting closer to your opponent so you were competitive in close as well. Furthermore, if it weren't from kits having been largely abandoned for years, engineer would arguably have the best weaponswapping in the game. There's no cooldown to switching kits, although swapping sigils and the effect-on-kit-use trait have cooldowns just to keep them sane. You can, if you're willing to sacrifice your utility slots, run with six different sets of weapon skills (seven if you're a holosmith...), and if you're not a mechanist, you still have your toolbelt, which depending on your choices might give you some of the functionality other professions would get from utility slots anyway (Bandage Self for a heal, the elixir gun toolbelt skill for a stunbreak, etc). I'm not saying that's optimal, but you can do it! Counting the kits, release engineer competed with warrior for the number of autoattack-capable weapons (pistol, rifle, five kits - medkit didn't count on release since IIRC skill 1 was throwing a bandage on a cooldown then, and mortar wasn't a kit), pulled ahead before Heart of Thorns, and has only opened the lead since. Not having weaponswap has also been compensated for by having some of the most valuable utility slots in the game - after all, any utility slot could be another weapon, so any other utility skill has to be good enough to compete with that. This is why the mechanist signets that every non-mechanist player that doesn't understand engineer design complains about are so overloaded: because they have to be good enough to compete with taking a kit, and they have to achieve that in a single skill rather than the main skill+toolbelt combo other engineer utilities rely on. If you're not playing mechanist, every non-kit utility skill is still a two-for-one deal.

Engineer was designed from the ground up not to need weaponswap, because it had something that, apart from having to be paid for with utility slots, was better. Revenant had no weaponswap but had none of the tools to make that actually work.

Second, you claim that revenant being given a weaponswap didn't cause balance issues...

...you just failed your Heart of Thorns history test.

Revenant had the ever-loving Shiro nerfed out of it during the first year or so, and a lot of it was pretty much taking into account that revenant now had more skills available, so those it DID have had to be paired back. Basically the elementalist problem: you've got twice as many skills, they have to be half as good to compensate. Most of this was in the form of increasing the cooldown of defensive and crowd control skills, because being able to use one such skill, weaponswap, and then follow up with another was just too strong with the original cooldowns, but the damage skills were also pared back a fair amount as well, as well as at least some of the legend stance skills (note that on release, I'm pretty sure the only legend stance skills to have cooldowns at all were the healing skills - I'm not sure that nerfing those was entirely due to having a weaponswap, but I suspect it was a contributing factor).

If anything, you'd have worse if engineer was given a weaponswap, because as stated above, revenant was never properly designed as a no-weaponswap profession, so paring it back was mostly a matter of adjusting cooldowns and coefficients. Engineer, however, was given every tool it needed to be better than a conventional weaponswap profession. Some of those tools have deteriorated since, but that's a problem with balance team neglect (mostly from only-cared-about-mechanist-firebrand-and-staffmirage guy), not the underlying profession design. And it's not like engineer is at the bottom of the pack. Mechanist was getting close to firebrand-level domination before it got slapped down and it's still pretty good, holosmith is generally not allowed to fall too far in the DPS tallies for long (can't see the current benchmark, but I think that's because Snowcrows hasn't got around to updating holo since the patch) and while I don't think scrapper has ever been in the top spot, it's always been a solid choice since quickness scrapper was introduced.

Which means that if engineer was ever given a weaponswap on top of everything else it already has, you can expect ramifications. Like revenant, it's likely to have all the basic weapons nerfed - cooldown increases at the very least - to account for having two of them. Again, like revenant, you'd be likely to see nerfs to utility skills, because the "strong utility skills to account for lack of weaponswap" interaction would no longer be justified. And given that kits are supposed to be the main substitute to weaponswapping, I think it'd be a safe bet that engineer would lose the ability to freely switch between kits without a cooldown if they were to have kits on top of conventional weaponswap.

And for what? So it'd become possible to have eight different sets of weapon skills instead of only seven? (Granted, I don't think anyone would actually make a holo with a full set of kits, including medkit, other than purely for the memes. But it demonstrates the absurdity of it all. Engineers running three kits isn't all that uncommon.)

[SoulGuardian.6203]

2 hours ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

Two problems with your argument here.

First, it's very much an apples to oranges comparison. Revenant had a fundamental issue in that they had the bright idea of a profession without any form of changing their weapon skills... and then made most of the weapons to be highly specialised in one function and not worthwhile anywhere else. During the revenant beta, hammer's power budget was very dependent on the enemy being at near-maximum range making you pretty much helpless at close range, swords were melee, staff was also melee and pretty much purely defensive/support so you couldn't really hurt anyone, the only weaponset that actually felt good to play without weaponswap was mace/axe. It wasn't actually designed to not have weaponswap - it had no substitute for weaponswap like elementalist and engineer, and the weapons weren't designed to be functional without weaponswapping - they just chose not to have it out of a sense of symmetry and I guess they thought being able to swap utilities compensated? By the time it was pointed out how terribly this felt to actually play, it was too late for them to do anything other than put a weapon swap on and deal with the balance consequences later.

Engineer is... basically the complete opposite of that. The core weapons were designed so that you could just use one weaponset and it would work: both had reasonable ranged capability while also rewarding getting closer to your opponent so you were competitive in close as well. Furthermore, if it weren't from kits having been largely abandoned for years, engineer would arguably have the best weaponswapping in the game. There's no cooldown to switching kits, although swapping sigils and the effect-on-kit-use trait have cooldowns just to keep them sane. You can, if you're willing to sacrifice your utility slots, run with six different sets of weapon skills (seven if you're a holosmith...), and if you're not a mechanist, you still have your toolbelt, which depending on your choices might give you some of the functionality other professions would get from utility slots anyway (Bandage Self for a heal, the elixir gun toolbelt skill for a stunbreak, etc). I'm not saying that's optimal, but you can do it! Counting the kits, release engineer competed with warrior for the number of autoattack-capable weapons (pistol, rifle, five kits - medkit didn't count on release since IIRC skill 1 was throwing a bandage on a cooldown then, and mortar wasn't a kit), pulled ahead before Heart of Thorns, and has only opened the lead since. Not having weaponswap has also been compensated for by having some of the most valuable utility slots in the game - after all, any utility slot could be another weapon, so any other utility skill has to be good enough to compete with that. This is why the mechanist signets that every non-mechanist player that doesn't understand engineer design complains about are so overloaded: because they have to be good enough to compete with taking a kit, and they have to achieve that in a single skill rather than the main skill+toolbelt combo other engineer utilities rely on. If you're not playing mechanist, every non-kit utility skill is still a two-for-one deal.

Engineer was designed from the ground up not to need weaponswap, because it had something that, apart from having to be paid for with utility slots, was better. Revenant had no weaponswap but had none of the tools to make that actually work.

Second, you claim that revenant being given a weaponswap didn't cause balance issues...

...you just failed your Heart of Thorns history test.

Revenant had the ever-loving Shiro nerfed out of it during the first year or so, and a lot of it was pretty much taking into account that revenant now had more skills available, so those it DID have had to be paired back. Basically the elementalist problem: you've got twice as many skills, they have to be half as good to compensate. Most of this was in the form of increasing the cooldown of defensive and crowd control skills, because being able to use one such skill, weaponswap, and then follow up with another was just too strong with the original cooldowns, but the damage skills were also pared back a fair amount as well, as well as at least some of the legend stance skills (note that on release, I'm pretty sure the only legend stance skills to have cooldowns at all were the healing skills - I'm not sure that nerfing those was entirely due to having a weaponswap, but I suspect it was a contributing factor).

If anything, you'd have worse if engineer was given a weaponswap, because as stated above, revenant was never properly designed as a no-weaponswap profession, so paring it back was mostly a matter of adjusting cooldowns and coefficients. Engineer, however, was given every tool it needed to be better than a conventional weaponswap profession. Some of those tools have deteriorated since, but that's a problem with balance team neglect (mostly from only-cared-about-mechanist-firebrand-and-staffmirage guy), not the underlying profession design. And it's not like engineer is at the bottom of the pack. Mechanist was getting close to firebrand-level domination before it got slapped down and it's still pretty good, holosmith is generally not allowed to fall too far in the DPS tallies for long (can't see the current benchmark, but I think that's because Snowcrows hasn't got around to updating holo since the patch) and while I don't think scrapper has ever been in the top spot, it's always been a solid choice since quickness scrapper was introduced.

Which means that if engineer was ever given a weaponswap on top of everything else it already has, you can expect ramifications. Like revenant, it's likely to have all the basic weapons nerfed - cooldown increases at the very least - to account for having two of them. Again, like revenant, you'd be likely to see nerfs to utility skills, because the "strong utility skills to account for lack of weaponswap" interaction would no longer be justified. And given that kits are supposed to be the main substitute to weaponswapping, I think it'd be a safe bet that engineer would lose the ability to freely switch between kits without a cooldown if they were to have kits on top of conventional weaponswap.

And for what? So it'd become possible to have eight different sets of weapon skills instead of only seven? (Granted, I don't think anyone would actually make a holo with a full set of kits, including medkit, other than purely for the memes. But it demonstrates the absurdity of it all. Engineers running three kits isn't all that uncommon.)

Thanks for this marvellous long essay, when we already established from page one, that weapon swap would be for core engineers only, and restrictions to one weapon kit only.

That way, it would max at 4 weapons, counting sword/pistol and pistol/shield, bow or rifle, and 1 weapon kit.

5 if you use sword and pistol twice, but you'd have skill cd to consider.

So, after all that long essay, what exactly is the advantage here, or all that panic over possible nerfs?

And let's get one thing clear here once and for all.

"Nothing is set on stone."

ESPECIALLY, not with Arena Net, as we have had the experience countless times throughout the years.

It doesn't matter if this is my OP.

Could have been someone else's... I would still state the same thing.

But it seems it's all or nothing for some people.

No middle ground, no happy medium.

There is always a middle ground.

The suggestions people made so far to apply weapon swap to core only, and restrict weapon kits seems logical and reasonable enough. 

Furthermore, they have been said that the option would be there, but they don't have to use it.

The contradictions seem more like dictatorships to me, rather than trying to reach a solution through democracy.

The lengths people go to, in order to reinforce their own preference is amusing.

Edited March 23 by SoulGuardian.6203

[Panda.1967]

2 hours ago, Yasai.3549 said:

Toolbelt was made because Kits were Engi's weapon swap and the Toolbelt supplemented the use of Kits taking up a utility slot. 

That is NOT why toolbelt skills were made. Toolbelt skills were made because every profession has a class mechanic to interact with. Warriors have Adrenaline and Bursts, Mesmers have Shatters, Necromancers have Death Shroud, Rangers have Pets, Guardians have Virtues, Elementalists have Attunements… Engineers were given Toolbelt as their class mechanic way back before the first alpha test. It was stated by myself and many others back then even that the class felt incomplete with its very limited weapon selection (Pistols, Shield, & Rifle) and having to give up a utility to weapon swap. It would have been better if, and even seemed as if it was originally meant to be, that Kits were to be the Engineers class mechanic. A lot of early toolbelt skills were very poorly designed, and kits felt like they were meant to give engineer builds their identity.

Med Kit originally had 4 copies of the exact same skill, Drop Med Pack, and one “stonger” version Drop Med Packs on skill 5 that dropped 5 packs at once. It was a rush job to give engineers a healing weapon kit.

Mortar as others have mentioned didn’t exist at launch.

Tool Kit was designed to be used with Turrets… and still is… it is quite clear in its design that it wasn’t meant to be a utility skill hut rather a class mechanic originally.

the devs have even stated before in the past that Engineer had some major changes before the first alpha. Kits most likely were the original class mechanic and honestly probably should have remained that way.