Swap this!
In perusing the official SWTOR forums today, I noticed a long debate about swapping weapons and gear mid-combat. The original post by Melios read:
I’ve been wondering something, are we going to be expected to swap gear during battle like in FFXI to maximize performance? Like swapping into one robe to maximize Force Lightning damage and then swapping into another for when you need to heal a teammate?
To clarify for those who never played FFXI, you’re pretty much expected to include /equip commands in your macros to swap in gear that boosts whatever spell or weapon skill you’re about. This had an unfortunate side effect of requiring you carry around a lot of gear in inventory (and inventory space is a serious premium in that game). I’m wondering TOR has this function or if swapping gear is restricted to out-of-combat.
I'm way to exhasted, (and cute) to pick a weapon right now. Just leave me here.
I’ve never played Final Fantasy XI, even though I was a big fan of the franchise back in the day. Honestly, I have no desire to swap weapons and armor during combat in TOR. I can only imagine, entering combat, blaster fire buzzing around my head, and my awesome Sith Inquistor Assassin standing there looking into his hands trying to pick an appropriate lightsaber for the occasion. All kidding asided here’s what the devs had to say:
On Saturday, Damion Schubert responded:
Right now, we do not allow players to change gear or weaponry in combat. We just didn’t think that kind of gear juggling added a lot to the combat.
It’s pretty much impossible to not have a weapon equipped. You’d have to work for that. Sure, you can unequip a weapon and not equip a new one, but there’s no compelling reason to do so .. even less outside in the wilderness where you’re likely to get jumped.If you find a new weapon, you can just swap it out, never leaving you at a point where you don’t have a weapon.
Switching weapons to maximize stats is not the kind of gameplay we want to encourage. It’s tedious and not fun for the overwhelming majority of players, and since some players would feel compelled to engage in the behavior if it offered a benefit, regardless how tedious and unfun it was, we just disallow it, period.
What side are you on? The mid-combat gear swapping side, or the why would I not have my gear equipped already side? Personally, I want to focus on raining destruction down on my enemies, not asking them to politely miss while I change my cloak from black to brownish black.
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I was one of the posters… I talked about how weapon swapping is important for ranged classes. If a ranged class is attacked by a melee class, it seems like there are only a few abilities to deal with them (BH: flamethrower, trooper: stock strike or recent vibroblade slash, smuggler: dirty kick, IA: not sure) that can deal with melee. Wouldn’t that get really boring really fast? Someone mentioned 2 weapon slots like in KOToR 2, that would be genius. Just an easy swap between melee and ranged.
Personally, I could see switching out weapons depending on the situation. There is no real one size fits all weapon, you do it in real life. My main issue is with switching armor during combat, to me it just wouldn’t make sense.
The idea here is to imply that you use your class abilities to put some range between you and your melee counterparts. Since there is no auto attack in the game nor do say BH have any abilities that require the use of a melee weapon, i do not see the advantage of swapping out a ranged weapon for a melee one. In fact doing so would more than likely lock you out of almost all your abilities.
Even weapon-swapping can get abusive. I spent a good bit of time playing WoW arenas with a retribution paladin (before they made them useful) and managed to come out in the top 5% for a season in part due to some heavy weapons swapping. I’d trade my greatsword for a +healing hammer and shields with a macro, toss a heal and in the same macro re-equip the sword. In other words, I’d gain the healing bonuses without actually using the gear. If weapons in TOR have a stat other than damage on them, they could be used that way as well, and I’d rather not see that again.
Meh. I guess I don’t care much either way, but I did a weapon-swapping Barbarian in Age of Conan (two-hander for crowd control, dual-wield for damage), and it could be pretty tedious. Ultimately, I always preferred classes that simply used a single weapon.
“I talked about how weapon swapping is important for ranged classes.”
I don’t agree with this. In lots of games, mages aren’t hitting you with a melee weapon when you get up in their grill. They’re still casting on you, and I never really heard the complaint that it becomes tedious. If a Jedi Force leaps on your Imperial Agent, you can shotgun him in the face, just as you would if you were at mid-range. You don’t have to repeatedly use your shank ability, though you could if you really liked it, I suppose…