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How many viable weapon sets can you have at one time?
GWFandaddy
Member Posts: 180
in Guild Wars 2
With so many threads arguing, "It's Great vs It Sucks", I thought maybe we could talk a little about something else. I haven't delved deeply into this, so I thought maybe I could get some info. Without changing traits, how many effective weapon sets can you have available to your build at one time, and how profession dependant will that be, if at all. I notice you have to be like an attorney around here, and make sure you have all your qualifiers and modifiers included, or you get beat up 
Comments
You have 2 weaponsets available, that you can switch between in combat. (except Elementalist and engineer, they cant switch during combat)
On top all classes can switch between their weapons as much as they want out of combat. The warrior has most weapon combos, they have 17 different combos of 5 different skills each.
All weapon sets are effective, but they have different uses.
Best MMO experiences : EQ(PvE), DAoC(PvP), WoW(total package) LOTRO (worldfeel) GW2 (Artstyle and animations and worlddesign) SWTOR (Story immersion) TSW (story) ESO (character advancement)
I understand your beat up concern here! lol Anyway, I didn't quite understand the question, but I think if you use this tool http://gw2.luna-atra.fr/skills_tool/ you can get an idea of weapon/skill sets. It's in french but you can change the language on the right hand side. I hope this is what you were asking.....
Death is nothing to us, since when we are, Death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.
I would also like to know how many EFFECTIVE weapon sets there are for a profession (ie. Are rangers as effective with a big 2hander as they are with a bow? How many weapon sets are as effective as their bow?)
Traits favor certain weapons, certain skills, so, lets say you're a warrior and you've used traits that favor Rifle and 2 handed Sword then it would seem to reason, that other weapon sets won't be as effective. Are you saying that any set can be effective, regardless how you've slotted traits? For instance, in GW, if you were going to concentrate on using a pet, you'd want to put some attrib points in beast mastery, if you wanted your pet to be as effective as possible. Am I missing something?
Without a doubt there will be a lot of balancing after launch, but the bottomline is: every profession can be effective with every weapon they can use, and that is not dependant on the traits they equip.
You can specialize on one specific style by choosing specific traits, but so far it looks like specializing isn't much of an advantage, since you always need to play as a hybrid, no matter what weapon/traits you use.
Yeah, you could put all of your traits towards a single weapon set and then realize in certain situations that weapon set is not really that effective.
Focus on two, be ready to hot-swap in combat tacticaly, and you'll probably do allright.
That being said, especially as something like a Elementalist/Engineer you'll probably still switch into one of your "other" attunements/kits for certain situations.
The way the stats work, it looks like all the professions will get some good use out of all the possible stats.
Really all about play style!
From what I can see, most of the trait lines have boons or conditions that are weapon specific. So that, if you have 2 weapon sets you plan on using the most, you can slot your traits to be more effective while using those 2 sets. So, what I'm gathering, is that if you want to be as effective with any set, you need to slot your traits in a non-weapon specific way? And that's fine, I'm just asking.
Yes they are. They are meant to use every weapon they can equip with equal success (although not at the same thing).
Great news. Thank you.
I'm not sure that the OP knows that the classes have restrictions on the weapons they can use.
For instance, an Engineer can only use a Rifle, dual wield Pistols or go pistol/shield.
That is the most restrictive class when it comes to weapon choice at this point. I'd mess around with the tool located here to get an idea of what to expect from the various weapon combinations for the various classes.
You can swap your major traits outside of combat, out in the field, so if you take 3 rifle traits, and decide you'd rather use pistols you can swap those major traits out for other ones.
Traits will help a bit, but they're not going to render one weapon vastly superior and the rest useless... they will give a minor bonus which will help, but intelligent use of your skills, control, and dodge abilities will outweigh any static trait bonus a given weapon might have.
Holy wow! I guess I missed a few qualifers modifiers, and who knows what all. Am I speaking a foriegn language here? May ah moo dogface to the banana patch?
Yes, you can either focus on non-specific traits or swap out the traits between fights. You can always swap the major traits, 'respeccing' is only required to redistribute the trait points, e.g if you want to focus on a different trait line.
All twohanded non-projectile martial weapons are extremely powerful for every class that can use them. Where as longbow would be better for situations when you're not getting focused, where shortbow can be used lock down enemy.
Let's say you choose to use Greatsword/Shortbow, you would have access to Leap, Block, Knockback, 2 Cripples, a nine stack Bleed from three skills, 2 Dazes or 2 Stuns, Poison, 2 Evades, and Swiftness. Those are just the skills you would get from your weapon choice, this does not include your utilities, elite, or pet skills.
Basicly a mesmer have 6 weapon combinations for primary and secondary 2hand/main hand, not counting the off hand The offhand rarely have impackt enough on a build to qualify for a really different weapon combo with awhole new trait setup.
The combos are the 6 ways to combine MH sword, MH scepter, 2H staf and 2h greatsword.
To make a traitsetup that can support all these, i would advocate for a balance build with 2 traitlines at 20 and 3 at 10 points.
i don't think it going to hamper you alot no matter what you go with as the 20, but domination would be ok as it both increase power aswell as condition duration wich actual covers all 4 main weapons. And you should be able to pick traits that should support any combination then.
Good luck
Bear with me here a sec.
GW2 isn't about focusing entirely on damage or support like other games. I remember this http://www.guildwars2guru.com/articles/the-sky-is-falling-traits-are-here/ where between gear and traits he specced for damage so completely that he became so fragile he died in 3 hits, and specced for support so completely he couldn't kill anybody without help.
I find it helpful to think about traits like the baseline is 10 points in every tree (with 20 in two you like or whatever). That's balanced. You want to be able to DPS but also take a hit, or be able to support someone else if you have to, all to some degree. GW2 is giving you the flexibility to skew your build a certain way, but you'll probably be worse off. Putting 30 points into one tree is really saying that you want to be focused on a particular aspect to the point of not being able to do something else.
That's the difficulty I had wrapping my brain around the new system. Like a warrior's Defense tree has hammer traits because that's a control tree and a hammer is a control weapon. Arms is a DPS tree and it's got rifle traits because a rifle is a dps weapon. If you've got your points in defense but you have to use a rifle, then you shouldn't look at like you're gimped because you don't have the rifle traits. You should look at it like you had previously made the decision to be a control warrior and now you're still a control warrior, but with a rifle (having swapped your major traits away from the hammer ones to generic ones).
It's hard because we're so trained to min max, so the tendency is to look at it like your rifle is gimped because in WoW your damage was all you cared about. You don't need 30 points in Arms to use the rifle effectively. Having those points in defense makes you more survivable which will be way more valuable than in other games where all you had to do was quickly run out of the fire.
"Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true you know it, and they know it." -Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, 2007
You underestimate the offhand... in many cases it also changes the 3rd abbility of the mainhand weapon, mesmers use offhand pistols and their build changes in an AoE build.
On top of that, people still dont know how traits work, between fights you can also switch master trades, so you could switch your sword master trait for a pistol master trait, as long as thats available with your points spend. All weapons combinations will allways be effective in the right situation with the right build, and builds can be changed.
Get it out of your heads to play with one build, be prepared to switch between several builds on the fly between fights.. switch based on situation and your required role. Sticking with a single build will make you less effective.
Best MMO experiences : EQ(PvE), DAoC(PvP), WoW(total package) LOTRO (worldfeel) GW2 (Artstyle and animations and worlddesign) SWTOR (Story immersion) TSW (story) ESO (character advancement)
I thought that was only the case with thieves?
it is.
What I'm going to do as a warrior is make dual wielding swords cause longer term bleeding, crit more often, and cause vunerability when I crit. That way I can pull out my gun for an additional bleed effect, which is also effected by the bleed trait, as my bleeds from the swords are doing their job if I need to back away from the target. My bullets would also deal extra damage from the vulnerability and can apply additional vulnerability while I'm away from the target. In other words, one weapon type I carry can help out the other weapon for a short period of time in certain conditions. What I would try to do if I were you is use atleast one weapon for utility that works well with the utility that the other weapon estabilishes.
Remember that your utility skill selection should reflect your weapons and traits. Some utility skills will make certain traits and weapon skills redundant. Some will help you obtain the level of utility that you would have had if you were using a different weapon combination. As an example, the rifle cannot be used to stop an enemy target on the warrior. As a utility skill I will use "Throw Bolas" to immobilize a target that I need to catch up with to re-apply bleeds. I could use a bow to immobilize a target, but I want the rifle for my own preferences.
Same goes for engineers and elementalists, but instead with toolkits and magic instead of a secondary weapon.
Didn't they just use thief as an example of how they wanted to change things even further?
Best MMO experiences : EQ(PvE), DAoC(PvP), WoW(total package) LOTRO (worldfeel) GW2 (Artstyle and animations and worlddesign) SWTOR (Story immersion) TSW (story) ESO (character advancement)
I just found this: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Dual_wield_skill
I should have wrote " with a whole new trait point setup, because that was what i meant. You will offcause change build in between fights, and with that change sellected traits. But off hand rarely (as i see it) in the case of mesmer gives the need for a whole new trait point setup , that needs more comes from the playstyle following the main hand weapon.