What the heck is the logic behind weapon swapping?

Playing a sorc and saw some people having a shield in their off hand for blocking. Tried the idea and found some success. Would weapon swap to shield when blocking and swap back to my staff for casting automatically.

Got a unique shield that recoups mana on block so I swapped that in. Now my weapon swap is effed. If I shield block it swaps to the shield but it wont switch back to my staff to cast.

WHY NOT?

Skills default to using whatever weapon set is currently used, unless there are weapon restrictions. Gotta go into the skill menu and assign skills to their weapon sets.

I'm a Warrior that Dual Wields 2 hand weapons using the Giants Blood passive notable.

For my second set I have a shield in hand, and nothing else. I use that shield to Shield Charge almost exclusively.


1) To answer your question: The logic behind weapon swapping is to allow you to use a variety of skills despite them depending on varying items. They come with a small downside of having to load a new set of items into your hands as a tiny inconvenience penalty.

2) The weapons will swap automatically when you choose the appropriate skill to use.

3) There are currently bugs for item swapping, debuffs, skill usage and otherwise. -- Please see the Early Access Bug Reports channel for more information; I myself have posted these issues there --

The best way to overcome this issue of not being able to swap back, for me, was to close the application and reload it.

If this doesn't solve your issue, please report the problem to Early access Bug Reports by posting a topic in that channel.

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mrfox123#7595 wrote:

Skills default to using whatever weapon set is currently used, unless there are weapon restrictions. Gotta go into the skill menu and assign skills to their weapon sets.

Yup, just this one.


Each Skill can be set to be used exclusively with specific Weapon Set. This helps a lot on Warrior, for example, when u have both 1h+Shield and 2H equipped - so you use, for example, your 1H for most things, but for the most hard-hitting Skills you use 2H to deal maximum damage during stun phases, or something.


Another good use case for that is with Sorc - imagine you have very good Staff with + to Skill levels and such, and you want your major abilities to hit hard all the time so that you use Staff for that. But you also found a Wand with Mana Drain just for those rare annoying situations when you are out of Flask charges and you need some quick mana recovery. So you just do the automatic swapping on per-Skill basis without having to press the Weapon Swap button.


Or, another very good use case for that - is to effectively have a Dual Spec on your character. Because you can allocate all your Passives to specific Weapon Set. So you can effectively play with 2 Builds at same time- one build for clearning trash with high aoe damage and reasonably low defences, and the other build specifically for bosses, where you invest heavily into single-target damage and survivability.


Or, imagine you play a build that uses 2 or more different Elements. And you also found two really good weapons, but each of those weapons is only good for your Frost skills, for example, while the other weapon is really good for your Physical skills or something. So, instead of just sticking to one weapon and compromising - you have a great option to just have the best of both worlds and you use your Frost weapon for Cold skills exclusively, and the other weapon for anything else.


Like, the possibilities are just limitless here - you can get super creative with this system and how good it works. But I personally just use it for effective Double Spec - I play through the campaign going for maximum damage on my characters, I take exclusively only damage nodes and everything, I dont care if I die here and there, I just want fast clearing - but I also want to have a "just in case" more defensive and conservative build easily available to me when I get stuck somewhere - so I can just open my inventory before the boss room, move my weapons between Weapon Sets and now I am suddenly more tanky during the boss fight.


Just use it to your advantage. Use it for having a double spec. It is extremely useful and good.


This reminds me a lot of weapon swapping system in Guild Wars 2 - there you have unique Skills assigned to each weapon type, but it was so annoying to constantly spam weapon swap button to switch between skill sets - and here it is just no-brain, super-easy, very player-friendly automated process.