Hey guys, here’s a great idea!
Why don’t we have a weapon swap in Last Epoch?
We can switch weapons at any time from the inventory, and swap skills at any time.
So, why not have weapon swap proper, which also swaps the active skill bar?
That would be really great and would allow for more flexibility and cool stuff going on. :))
If we have that mid-1.1, that would be STONKS!!
From memory they don’t want it to be the optimal way to play. I believe the example Mike brought up was Shout Barbs from D2? Use set A to get a temporary buff then swap back to set B to do damage until the buff runs out then switch back to set A, etc.
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The same reason as to why gear-swap isn’t a thing as well as friction-less respec mechanics.
To alleviate the issue of creating 2 distinctive ways to play with a singular character, hence making the respective ‘character identity’ more shallow.
Not to speak that there’s no current incentive to make that in the game and no planned content which would need the extra variety… even if it is something which can (can, not must) be overall positive.
Which ultimately would boil down to an increase in character power that would be too significant and easily accessible to pass up, causing regularly swapping weapons around to be common enough that the game would need to be balanced around it, leaving everyone who doesn’t know/want to do it worse off.
No thanks. If anyone wants to play sweatlord games by diddling their weapons around all the time, they can learn AHK.
My first thought echoed the idea that it’d be too good and thus bad for the health of the game. But… PoE has weapon swapping and no on really uses it. Different systems, for sure. But 99/100 times, weapon swapping is just not necessary/doesn’t give any active benefit to a build in PoE. It’s used in incredibly jank builds to do some whacky things that almost always aren’t worth doing for any more than being funny. So maybe it wouldn’t be bad here?
That being said. What would weapon swapping do for a build in Last Epoch? Same reasoning for the thought. It does so little if anything for builds in PoE, what would the inclusion here actually do for the average or majority of builds? Arguably I know less about this game and it’s uniques and interactions with skills than a lot of others, but I can’t come up with something screams at me like “This is why you would weapon swap!”
In PoE it has another benefit, of giving you another set of links for skills. In LE, your skills are not bound to your gear, and therefore not bound to your weapon, at all. So you are swapping to another weapon for what?
If there are things that would be super busted good (And I’m sure there are at least a couple) then you need to worry about it being too good that everyone wants to do it and it becomes a wide-spread META. If not much, then why add a new thing into the game that does basically nothing for the vast majority of players?
Edit: And another thing: To implement and rebalance the game around weapon swapping would be a lot of dev hours for a feature that I just don’t believe they as a game studio want to put into their game. So. That’s the biggest “why not.”
I’m sure they’d be thankful if you donated your time and knowledge to building that system for them for the game though!
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Weapon swapping could work if they did what TQ did for enemy resistances - aka it was mandatory to do avoid immunities on damage on some enemies/ bosses. Undead where immune to life steal, soul magic entirely, poison, and a few things as an easy example from my memory. So the weapon changed your element so that you could damage them.
In the cases of some constructs, you had to use either magic or piercing, so you had to have a secondary weapon for some mechanics.
can this be feasible in LE?
No, as enemy density is increasing removing skill and importance of positioning and timing for builds that can tank anything. Second, LE lacks any meaningful resistancs building, and builds that allow for ways to bypass these, as running 2 weapons would be mandatory.
Until i can build a spec, around 100% retaliation damage to counter act the bs that would happen from mandatory nature of such a thing, going to say hard no.
First of all… weapon swap is used by some builds in PoE. given that very very few builds can actually profit from it since a vast amount of power comes from the passive tree and separate skills often necessitate very different builds it just isn’t done a lot.
One example where it happens is especially with archers and having a barrage setup in the second setup, which leads to what EHG specifically wants to avoid in LE, namely that you use separate setups for AoE and single-target.
This would be very very easy in comparison in LE given the variety of uniques as well as switching between area affixes and single target affixes.
For a specific example even:
I have a Jhelkor’s Blast knife build. I could put 2 legendary crafted ones which each have area on them for monoliths and then weapon swap to 2 legendary crafted ones with crit multiplier instead, surprisingly easily and swiftly changing my focus.
Single-target versus AoE affixes without downtime.
Currently you theoretically could carry a secondary set with you focused on another playstyle, not only does it reduce your inventory space though but also can’t be used reliably in the middle of a monolith to - for example - burst down the monolith mini-boss substantially faster.
Exactly, and in combination with it not being allowed to be super good for any reason - as it leads to the aforementioned issues - it would be a bad choice to do it in the first place in any situation, at least with LEs setup.
Which they’re actively trying to avoid so as to not necessitate weapon swapping or similar mechanics in the first place.
Yes, it can.
No, they won’t do it.
Yes their reasoning for it is a good one, namely enforcing heavier character identity and reducing the hassle of ‘optimized gameplay’ to a degree.
Yes, it’s not for everyone, that is a design-decision which is personal flavor. And Flavor cmes with both upsides and downsides related to it, which is why it’s a flavor and not a ‘general good decision’ or ‘general bad decision’. Which is the distinction.
The only reason LE lacks that is the way monoliths are implemented with randomized enemy types and no way to foresee which foes you’ll face in a guaranteed manner.
Given different timelines you can though actively forfeit some resistance types entirely since they just won’t happen or are solely tied to fairly weak mechanics to the possible mob-pool able to spawn.
To be fair, the possibility of a 100% retaliation build would be fairly fun. Doesn’t need to be overly strong… the one in Grim Dawn isn’t either, it’s decent… but it’s a damn fun mechanic to tinker with.
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In PoE, the only purpose of weapon swap is for you to level gems without having to sacrifice anything in your build. That’s it. It’s pretty much the only reason it came to be.
The fact that some builds actually manage to properly use it in their build is just a monument to player ingenuity.
Even if you manage to handle the jankyness of that, changing weapons doesn’t change your skillbar, which was in the OP suggestion.
So I think this is fine as is. You can do everything manually, in a super janky way, which prevents cheesing tactics.
There was this one. I used it in 0.9.2. It was really slow. It took me 30 minutes to kill a 100c boss. But it was almost immortal. And it was fun (for me).
I think I had around 150% minion retaliation.
Then 1.0 increased rebuke cooldown and the build was dead.
If you’ve ever seen Jousis’s series of “Forbidden” builds for PoE, he uses the weapon swap in most of those builds to excessive levels of jank, but pulls off some absolutely incredible and wild builds. Big recommend the watches.
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He’s awesome, he’s my hero… I tried his CWDT Firestorm build once. Oh, the lag…
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The servers were not made powerful enough for our lord and savior’s builds.
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