Weapon and Armor skill division mechanic is bad

[lol kirby 1]

Dividing the skills arbitrarily between weapons and armor is one of the worst gimmicks in the whole series.
It makes absolutely no sense how its currently designed,not that it will ever be a good gimmick.
Why is weakness exploit an armor skill,yet crit boost,crit eye,and attack boost are weapon skills?
Its already bad enough how badly gutted those skills are,but also this gimmick on top of it??

Why is focus a weapon only skill,its mandatory for multiple weapons to even function,but now you have to give up half your slots to even get it or give up something else.
Gunlance gets screwed over the hardest because,guard,guard up,offensive guard,artillery,load shells are all weapon only skills,you can't get them all. This also isn't even mentioning that handicraft,sharpness,master's touch are all weapon only skills. So no sharpness or attack increasing skills for you gunlancers,sucks to use the weapon you like I guess.

Meanwhile longsword has either 1 or 0 mandatory skills so guess you get special treatment just for using that weapon. Well except the fact you can't get more than 1 attack/crit eye/crit boost skill maxed out,and forget about getting any sharpness management skills too.

Why is this skill system designed the way it is? It can't be for balancing reasons since,well,its not lol.
Can't be for encouraging more set variety,since everyone just uses burst/gore magala exclusively. It can't be for aiding the other new gimmick of weapon swapping,since there is no weapon combo that has 100% overlap with all the skills on a set,unless you use 2 of the same weapon but at that point just stick to 1 weapon (even then,the 2 of the same weapon type won't necessarily be fully compatible with the same armor/decoration setup)

TLDR:this gimmick sucks and is poorly designed,its not fun,limits set building,doesn't synergize with other mechanics,and punishes some weapons harder than others but all are still affected to some degree.

This game has a ton of flaws,but this one I never want to return.

[StormhawkV]

Imagine complaining about Gunlance in Wilds...

[lol kirby 1]

Originally posted by StormhawkV:

Imagine complaining about Gunlance in Wilds...

Imagine having no argument.
Reddit tier comment lmao.

[Casval Zem Daikun]

Originally posted by StormhawkV:

Imagine complaining about Gunlance in Wilds...

As someone who played the entire game with Gunlance, this change does suck.

[Zerostrikesback]

I dont like it either, but its pretty clear the Devs are having a hard time trying to "break the mold"

They're trying to power creep full affinity and full attack bonus with decos alone, and its having some kind of effect on character builds.

[Garma]

It's one of the most egregious changes imo as well. I can only assume it was done to bring player loadouts closer together, so that people who are very knowledgeable about the game cannot craft an extremely high DPS set anymore.

At the end of the day the goal is to make the game as easy as possible and if you allow players to combine weakness exploit, crit eye, crit boost, handicraft etc. (all the best skills) like in rise, you need to balance the monsters accordingly. But when you do that the people who don't know much about the game fall out of line, they will struggle because the monsters are too hard if their armor set is not good.

I see no real advantage of this change other than leveraging armor sets because if everyone has a bad armor set, nobody has a bad armor set. I fear the skill system has fallen victim once again to the overall accessibility of the game.

The thing is, I already hated the skill system change in world. I liked it better when there were negative skills because back then you really had to put some thinking into your armor set. In the post-world world, everyone is always running around with something that's often at least a decent set. It is for that same reason that I assume the skill system got overhauled once again in wilds to bring armor sets even closer together.

[~°MØTG°~ GЯINDS€T [Fndr]]

dunno i've managed to make a Max Flayer, Max Weakness exploit build which seems to be universal with all weapons in this game

its not as bad as you think OP if you use your imagination rather than make a TLDR topic like this

problem is people dont spend time to learn the skill abilities thoroughly and put together a build that works for them

[StormhawkV]

Originally posted by lol kirby 1:

Imagine having no argument.
Reddit tier comment lmao.

The skill system in Wilds is actually the best so far because dividing the skills makes room for other armor skills that people usually wouldn't use because more important skills use up all the slots. Additionally sets are now actually different depending on the weapon the player uses. That's an improvement. Not being able to cram every single damage or defense enhancing skill into a build is intentional and yes it also has to do with balance.

[The Debauchery]

I think they're trying to stop people from just stacking tons of direct DPS-boosting skills together and pressure them to consider survival skills instead.

Either that or they wanted it so all the skills that are weapon-specific are placed ON the weapons so as to justify their decision to allow us to carry around two weapons at all times. That way the armour set we use works for all weapons.

But yeah, I agree it is garbage.

Originally posted by StormhawkV:

Additionally sets are now actually different depending on the weapon the player uses.

... It is literally the opposite of that though. They WERE different. Now they're the same.

[skald]

I mean, yeah it sucks, but if you need ALL OF THE SKILLZ on your build go play Rise, it's great.
Of course it's designed to support 2 weapon system, so you can change between your sword and your gun and still have WEX.
And it's not like you really need your meta set. Sometimes I forgot that I'm wearing my gathering set, go on a hunt and it's maybe 2-3 minutes longer.

PS Use Gravios gunlance and slap some artilley on it. High raw, strong shells, blue sharpness, blast - everything dies in 5 minutes, you don't even need to sharp.

[StarExile]

Yeah just let me have:
-Critical Eye Max.
-Critical Boost Max.
-Attack Boost Max.
-Handicraft Max.
-Some other Red Skill Max.
-Divine Blessing Max.

What a build diversity

[Casval Zem Daikun]

Originally posted by StarExile:

Yeah just let me have:
-Critical Eye Max.
-Critical Boost Max.
-Attack Boost Max.
-Handicraft Max.
-Some other Red Skill Max.
-Divine Blessing Max.

What a build diversity :mhwhappy:

Not everyone plays like that.
Should probably take your ♥♥♥♥ takes back to reddit.

[Zerostrikesback]

The more I reflect on this change, I wish they hadn't. I was looking forward to engineering my load out to complement the weapon swapping. Instead I barely interact with weapon decos outside of mind's eye.

[StormhawkV]

Originally posted by The Debauchery:

... It is literally the opposite of that though. They WERE different. Now they're the same.

No they weren't. All weapons that functioned similarly used basically the same armor sets and the same skills/decorations because they had the same efficiency/priority. Right now the only item like this in Wilds is the Arkveld chest.

[Zerostrikesback]

Originally posted by StormhawkV:

Originally posted by The Debauchery:

... It is literally the opposite of that though. They WERE different. Now they're the same.

No they weren't. All weapons that functioned similarly used basically the same armor sets and the same skills/decorations because they had the same efficiency/priority. Right now the only item like this in Wilds is the Arkveld chest.

In older games I think the armor sets were called blademaster and gunner depending on if you used ranged weapons or melee.

Set bonuses (armor sets have unique skills if you wear multiple pieces) havn't changed in Wilds have they? The set bonuses were missing in Rise but they were in World.

[Echo2Omega]

Considering that 12/14 of the weapons are getting sub 3 minute kills [by speed runners] tells me at least that weapons are very well balanced.

Hammer is slow (kill time wise). And as just announced getting a buff.
Hunting horn is going to be the only outlier.

So it looks like this "gimmick" is working out very well.