No Skill Bar Swap With Weapon Swap Is Extremely Frustrating

This is actually such a no-brainer. The whole idea to have different skill sets and weapons is so awesome but is implemented so poorly. It's a shame.

Actually this is something I've thought about myself. Why swap weapons when my current gear is optimized for what I am currently using? GGG has done a great job in introducing this system, but they only went halfway and it will not see any use in its current state. If, on the other hand, you swapped skills with the weapon swap, you could build around that, perhaps developing a build better for bosses than pack clearing which would make the system incredibly useful and, perhaps more importantly, add enormously to player's agency and strategic decision making in considering their builds (not to mention it would give us something to do with all our excess gems which right now just sit in our stash).

If that feels overpowered, then limit the swap to outside of combat, forcing us to commit, before a boss for example.

I have good news and bad news:

Good news:

Yes, you can have the skills to change according to the Weapon Set.
Press G (Skills Menu) and click in the DPS square in the right side of your skill. In the window that opened, at the bottom right, there is 2 checkboxes where you can decide if that skill appears in both Weapon Sets or only one of them.
Its not perfect but kinda works.

Bad news:
That only works for Skills, base weapon attacks and Raise Shield does not have that option (don't know if they just forgot or if there's a reason).
So if you want to use a 2H Weapon and a Mace and Shield, forget it.

Sorry if someone already gave you that answer :)

"

Bad news:
That only works for Skills, base weapon attacks and Raise Shield does not have that option (don't know if they just forgot or if there's a reason).
So if you want to use a 2H Weapon and a Mace and Shield, forget it.

The exact reason why the 'good' news is not good at all.

tldr: jump to SOLUTION below for a way to do this, without requiring the game to be changed

So, there's two use cases for weapon sets:

1. Secondary set has auxiliary abilities
This is the case with Sorcerors, which mostly use 2nd weapon for casting Sigil amd curses / area spells, but their main attack is on weapon set 1.


2. Secondary set has alternate abilities
This implies there would be a recognizable reason to change weapons, typically based on the kind of enemy, such as:
a. elemental resistences
b. boss / clear

In practice, changing based on resistences is unlikely - instead you setup penetration/exposure, so most likely we're talking about clearing vs bossess particularly because you can't repeat support gems (which is a bit odd how we get separate weapon sets, but cannot assign support skill gems to different set).

In the case of bossing, it's reasonable to expect you to have a different keybiding for your bossing skill. Above someone suggested using Shift+RMB - it's a small price to pay for the simplicity.

SOLUTION

If you *really* want to toggle skills (and focusing on solving your issue rather than changing the game), there's a few options using 3rd party software, while still staying clear of macro policy.

One option is a software called "X-Mouse Button Control" (XMBC), which is at version 2.20 something.

We'll set it up so the mouse wheel changes your main attack, like FPS games :)


- In game, setup Right Button for main skill, Middle Button for your other main skill
- In XMBC, create 2 layers.

On layer 1, select:
Wheel Up: Layer Previous
Wheel Down: Layer Next

On Layer 2, select
Right Button: Middle Button
Middle Button: Right Button
Wheel Up: Layer Previous
Wheel Down: Layer Next


This way, whenever you use the wheel to change layer, it swaps middle and right button.