Balance is what I want. Treating melee and ranged characters evenly. I don't want a free swap. I want X amount of equipped quick slots you can swap once per turn before attack. Same as now, but locked after attacking. And I really don't want those slots to be randomly forced to be bow-only as that makes absolutely no sense. It just seems like a complete oversight of Larian devs not understanding why anyone would equip two melee weapons even though their game has different damage types.
Shields should cost an action no matter what. Anything else will allow cheese where you end your turn with a Shield and +2 AC even if you attacked with a two handed weapon. That's a blatant exploit and they should fix it.
Well, I’ve been trying to argue that the current approach does treat melee and ranged characters evenly, other than the AC from shield even when using a ranged weapon (which Larian have said they will fix) and the fact that a character can swap back to melee and shield after making an attack with a ranged weapon (which we agree shouldn’t be permitted). In my view, allowing a free swap between different melee weapon sets before attacking each turn would tip the balance too far towards melee characters, when added to the benefit they already share with all characters from being able to adjust the range of their attack when they need to.
But I suspect repeating myself on this point isn’t going to bring our preferences together, so I’ll stop doing it
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I think we do agree, though, that swapping between different melee weapon configurations should be made more convenient for players, even if I think it should always cost an action (or two if both hands are changed) and you don’t. I just think that Larian fixing the generic custom slots would achieve that well enough for my purposes, without requiring additional slots specifically for weapon sets. But can understand why folk might want something a bit more tailored.
