Deck swapping time

Ya honostly I have played very little in the last couple releases due to work. If you were not changing armor and just weapons it should be a short time swap.

 

At the moment you can if you do it through the deck changing interface. Just strip your character, link that equipment to a deck, enter combat and swap decks (took my character almost 9 seconds to strip/dress up). Swapping weapons takes about 2 seconds.

Assuming the system is treating "remove item" as the same as "substitute item", i think the time for changing armor should be increased or eliminate that possiblity at all. Changing decks where you change your weapon should be a bit less, and Quick swapping should reduce swapping time, not focus, and maybe the second point allows you to do it while you're moving (same as quick draw feat in D&D).

What i'd really like to see is gear totally disassociated from the deck, with an additional interface that allow us to swap weapons. This could be easily implemented if we had a different bar for consumables/objects, which keeps making sense in my head.

 

I did a little bit of testing and measuring.

First some dry-run results, it appears that just changing the weapon from bow to something else takes about 2.5 seconds using a deck switch, after that I can move but can not really do anything else for an additional almost two seconds. So for a total of a bit over 4 seconds I appear to be unable to fight (but I can move after 2.5 seconds).

Next I went to do some fieldwork, experimenting with some guinea p...wolves. They are nice "training associates" in the sense that they are fast and plentiful. With all the innate bow skills maxed, and using my long bow with stacked range bonuses, I started from the maximum distance possible, staying put (at least until switching decks). I Here are some observations:

• I can shoot away for 6-8 seconds before the pack is on me
  • I can typically land 5 shots during this time, before the first bite
    
  • but only 2-3 if I want to have an alternate melee weapon ready (for 3 shots definitely need to back away a bit right after switch)

Also tested it briefly with thugs during a random encounter. They are much slower - I typically have over 10 seconds instead of 6-8. So if I wish, I can kill thugs relatively easily without them even ever reaching me, with just bow skills (i.e. without rooting or other slow down spells) -- I think Aimed Shot is a bit overpowered ATM, especially when stacked...

So using ranged and switching to melee is actually very helpful, but one needs to handle the switch with care, and it is very useful -- may be necessary to be useful - to have the ranged skill innate bonuses maxed out and have some range and/or attack speed bonus in the bow itself.

This does not take away the fact that the current weapon switch delay is a major immersion breaking annoyance. The delay should be no more than the time it takes to put away a weapon and taking a weapon out. Which is currently about 2.5 seconds - almost exactly the time to switch the decks, but then there is that glyph delay on top of that, even if the glyphs were exactly the same.

 

ok slight update.. it apparently thought I was changing armor since my armor had changed and I hadn't re-linked what I was using. So it was trying to change into armor I didn't have. Go figure.