So I’ve been looking into creating builds that use the weapon switch mechanic, and am exploring ways to make it useful and interesting. Has anyone else tried this sort of thing? I’m seeing some really powerful uses for it, but have only just started looking into them.
There are some things that I’ve noticed:
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DoT damage continues after you switch weapons. This means that if you had a set of weapons with dot damage, and a different set of weapons with different dot procs, then all of them would stack if your dot duration is high enough.
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Devasatation continues after you dis-equip your offhand. This means we could have devastation casting builds that switch to a 2he weapon or something.
Edit:
- If you have an item equipped that gives modifiers to a buff skill (like Defender of the Three, the shield that gives +6% phys res to Blood of Dreeg) and you cast the skill, you get the benefits of the equipped item for the rest of the duration of that particular cast. So if you equip the shield, cast blood of dreeg, remove the shield - you still get that added 6% benefit to your build for the duration of that cast. This means that you could minmax a character by stacking modifiers on a skill on your weapons, so when you rebuff, you switch weapons, get all the benefits of that, switch back to your main fighting weapons and continue. This is terribly exciting news.
The sorts of situations I think that weapon switching would be helpful are things like
- A gunner class that could have dual-wield weapons that boost grenado, and a 2he ranged weapon for Primal Strike or something.
- A melee set that provides tankiness and a ranged set for damage/maneuvrability
- A caster that has a 2he weapon with a powerful skill on it, so you could have your whatever+offhand to cast certain abilities (like Devastation) before swapping out to the 2he weapon for more weapon damage and different skills etc.
- Swapping to a shield for certain defensive procs, vs dual wield / 2he for damage procs.
Of course there need to be other considerations that go into building in this way. If your build relies on toggle buffs on weapon components, then switching weapons mid fight will be precarious, risky and will disrupt the flow of gameplay (especially in with lag). So the build would have to be built with weapon-switch-flow in mind.
An example (very draft, haven’t tested, still working on it etc) is this one - Chaos damage with Dual Wield pistols setup for big weapon damage, ranged brimstone, higher attack speed, more attack procs, more chaos RR, then switch to sword ‘n’ shield for +23% physical resistance, more attack damage converted to health, more weapon damage on doom bolt etc.:
https://www.grimtools.com/calc/mN4PDP5N
Both sets of weapons (Dagger+Shield or Pistol+Pistol) use the same augments and components. Curse of Frailty is only useful when pistols are in use, so I’ve assigned it to right mouse so it only shows up when you switch to pistols etc.
Who’s up for exploring weapon-switch builds with me?
Side note to everything: Christmas Devastation (I came across this mechanic while exploring options )