Switching to MF gear before a boss kill?

[GoldenredDragon]

So in D2, when you had a switch with dual ali-baba's on your travincal barb, it was bad to switch just before a council member died ? Or the Gull+Rhyme on a sorc just before Meph goes down ?

All those switchings were bad ?

G.R.D. (I like the switching just before. It adds a bit of risk, as pure mf gear is hard to get with also dps and survival. In any case, NV is supposed to be quite enough without any MF, so why bother ?)

[Raesene]

I don't know what you mean by "bad", but it was a ridiculous game mechanic that should never have been there in the first place.

[zakaluka]

"Diii.net: Weapon switch hotkey?
Jay Wilson: No. We took that out.

Diii.net: Oh, I loved that feature in D2.
Jay Wilson: Mostly we took it out because the only examples we could come up with of how people used it were somewhat exploitive. Most frequently people used it by accident and wondered where the freak my weapons went. So it didn’t seem a useful feature for anyone but a very small portion of the audience that used it to swap items for magic find purposes, which seemed not a great super fun reason to swap weapons. There were probably some other uses, which I’m sure I’ll be reminded of in the forums."

Interesting thing to note. Most people who quote this highlight the following section: "Most frequently people used it by accident and wondered where the freak my weapons went." Funny thing, though: to actually believe that particular phrase is the key point or his basic reasoning at all requires you to close your eyes tight and cut off all higher reasoning skills.

Key phrase is quite obviously "the only examples we could come up with [...] were [...] exploitive"

Switching on babas is an exploit of game mechanics. It degraded gameplay. It's an unintuitive behavior, exploitive and degrading of gameplay. But you had to do it to gain the same advantages everyone else had, quite simply because it existed. So take your silly objections elsewhere, you're just trying to preserve your own personal advantage. All we want to see is boring, exploitive, unintuitive mechanics removed from the game.

edit: in retrospect, I'm probably mollified on this topic right now, just needed to rant against someone making silly arguments. in 1.0.3 I can chain farm champs in an area I'm actually sufficiently geared for, without ever doing the MF gear dance, without being forced to wear 1 of 2 viable builds that stack defensives. And in doing so I'll be on equal farming terms with someone who sweats blood corpse flopping act 4, then hides to swap on their 200% MF for the last 10% of each pack. Hell, with the repair cost hike there will be many reasons to do it my way! All gravy at this point, as of 1.0.3 mechanics I'm not too upset about the existence of MF, or how people use it anymore.

[DaemonX]

I don't agree.

The weapon switch allowed a nice chunk of MF swap at the touch of a key, without feeling like you're missing out by swapping EVERY SINGLE ITEM like DIII Does. In D3 the weapon switch would have other uses, like swapping your 2-H to a 1-H + Shield or 2 x 1-H with Leech for a tough boss.

The problem is feeling like you're missing out for not idiotically trying to swap all your gear before a kill, which ALL my friends do in D3. The guaranteed rare doesn't stop this. Bring back the weapon switch, I say.

[betazoid]

Only shield has MF & GF right? Maybe some legendary weapons have MF though. Item swap is the way to go at the moment and would love to have weapon swap from 1h+shield to 2h..

[kaervek]

I'd like a shield swap ability to move from high damage orb to high block rate shield when i run into a tough champ pack.

I dont think the ali baba thing was really an exploit, using runeword skills on switch would have been a bigger exploit than that.

Still, a simple solution is changing weapons removes NV stack like changing skills. makes a lot of sense, i change my gear less often than i change skills as would most people by the time they reach 60.

[gnujosh]

I think just modifying the rule for losing NV from "changing skills" to "changing skills or equipment" would go a long way to convincing people not to do the item switch.

[Raesene]

I think just modifying the rule for losing NV from "changing skills" to "changing skills or equipment" would go a long way to convincing people not to do the item switch.

There are less "exploitative" reasons to switch your items though, such as equipping more fire resist before fighting the butcher.

[iESCAPISM]

In the end the very core of the problem seems to bethe existence of MF. I mean if they make any trivial change which punishes swapping of gear people would just have one guy play in normal gear and three buddies sit in a chatroom with toons all decked out in mf, to join in whenever a Champ pack was down to one remaining monster or whathaveyou. Join game, click flag, burn CD:s, ???, profit.

MF would need some pretty advanced limitations in order for it to be non-exploitable.

[Rofle]

People will always try to figure out how to best play their character. Personally if they want to sacrifice 1/2 of their inventory and click over to a MF set for the 30 secs it takes to kill a boss / champ pack I don't see any issue with choosing to not do it. There will always be more things in MMOs where people expend infinitely more time into it for a relatively small gain. With NV, most people find great things without any MF gear, so whats the real point? It could be "exploiting" a given mechanic of the game, but everyone can do it right now with the same effect. If you dont want to do it, then dont. If you want to, do it. But dont complain the people on the other side of the fence are doing something that is within the scope of the game. If Blizzard doesn't like it, they'll hit it with the nerf bat like they have every other time somethings comes up the dont like.
my $0.02