Consider reworking switching weapon penalties

the dual tree is one of the biggest highlight feature of POE2.

it is marred and underused simply by the fact that there is a slight "weapon switching" delay.

in the ENTIRE tree theres only 1 location where "weapon swap" nodes are located.

one can argue that "oh you can just anoint" or get the mod via jewels.

to me if you put a PENALTY for using it, i simply will NOT use it.

how many passive points do you want us to sacrifice in order to make using weapon swaps feel good?

i would argue that even 1 point is already too much.

when i first started playing poe2 i liked using mace paired with palm skills.

dash in slap. then bonk my enemies with a hammer. then for bosses i would finish them with a culling slap.

but as i played the game more i realized that there was a delay. then i realized the importance of weapon swapping skills.

then i realized. why do i even want to bother? using low level skills feel bad, and increasing the attributes to gain them eats up a lot of your passives.

might as well just specialize into maces and forget about it.

on the flipside, other builds WOULD have been able to utilize more interesting combos if theres no weapon swap delay. players would be encouraged to actually use a different weapon or different secondary effect.

also for certain "non damaging" skills, the attribute requirements are simply too high to "feel good".

want to shout loud as a sorceror? nah, you're like only going to have a bit of str enough to yelp. want to curse at your opponents and make them cry as a titan? you can curse at them but it will be puny as you're too dumb to make any curse too meaningful.

damaging skills make a lot of sense to keep the requirements very high. but for more supportive skills, its simply too high of a cost.

my initial ideas that i had when i saw this feature being teased way back then was to make very unique builds where i could do funky stuff like a archer/melee combo where i m fighting a boss. boss telegraphs an attack. i skillfully use a backflip bow attack to disengage, then use a shield rush attack to quickly get back into melee range. or build up and cause 1 elemental ailment, setting it up for a 2nd elemental attack to consume it and cause a different elemental effect instead.

all this would be epic if we could quickly switch weapons without delay.

as is. i ll stick to using my stick with a rock attached and not use anything else.

Probably not what you want, but if you do stack a few jewels it makes a difference.

Think I'm using around 3 jewels with ~70% total and it felt much better afterwards. Still not completely smooth of course but it made the delay bearable.

If you stack more than that maybe it will be even better idk :)

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smichal52#3310 wrote:

Probably not what you want, but if you do stack a few jewels it makes a difference.

Think I'm using around 3 jewels with ~70% total and it felt much better afterwards. Still not completely smooth of course but it made the delay bearable.

If you stack more than that maybe it will be even better idk :)

i am pretty sure that doing that would make it feel much better, just that, if i needed to put in effort to "fix" the mechanic, then i might as well just use a build focused on a single weapon slot.

it reminds me of poe1 where strike skills required players to fix it by slapping on "strikes target an additional target" and "increased melee weapon range".

theres a difference between spending points to fix a skill rather than spending points to improve a skill. in the example given, so much effort is needed just to make melee strikes "feel" better. while aoe skills usually are decent from the get go and increasing their aoe simply improves the experience more from a decent starting point.