Change Assassin weapon swap mechanics

[Funkatron]

I have long felt that the toolkit of assassins is one of the most interesting in the entire game. Patience, positioning and sensing an ideal opportunity to strike all impact your performance on an assassin. However, one glaring mechanical shortfall has always been the need to continually weapon swap mid-combat to apply multiple poisons. Here are a couple ideas of how to remove this clunky and (I believe) unintended feature from these classes, without fundamentally imbalancing them.

CONCEPT 1: Allow weapons to be coated with multiple poisons, up to a cap- say 4 or 5. Poisons would applied in order of application with each weapon swing, with any resists still removing a stack. (similar to the system from Avalon). Clearly this would make poison application much easier, perhaps pair this will some sort of an immunity timer for players- e.g. you couldn't be affected by the same poison for 20 seconds after the first application.

CONCEPT 2: Make poisons abilities that are usable in combat off the global cooldown. This idea feels less elegant, but may be simpler to implement and would retain some of the feel of weapon swapping without having to manage your inventory/invest massive amounts of plat into acquiring 5-10 top tier weapons.

I will give the disclaimer here: I have never played an assassin to high Realm Rank. No doubt, there will be a handful of players who will give me grief over this idea... Before the flame train begins though, there are two primary reasons this change would be an improvement.

1) The skill cap for assassins is already high, and weapon swapping seems to clearly be an unintended consequence rather than a design feature. Removing weapon swapping makes these classes considerably more accessible and honestly, just more fun to play. Again, some people may bemoan this point and argue they don't want to see more assassins... but
what amounts to a clunky UI should not be the reason people avoid playing a class at endgame.

2) Assassin's are notoriously difficult to gear, and this change would at least alleviate the need to obtain an absurd number of top-tier weapons. These classes struggle to find groups and have some of the highest demands in terms of stats and skills to cap on templates. As a longtime spellcrafter and obsessive templater- I can assure you, assassins will still require a huge time investment to obtain competitive gear, even if these changes were implemented.

Devs on this server seem open to out of the box ideas that improve gameplay for the broader community, and I believe this is one of them!

[Marcus]

It is unlikely that we will change this due to it being very custom and not accurate to the patch level. Weapon swapping is very much part of the skill that makes a good stealther. Try using the /switch command in game.