I would like to be a Weapon Master

Disclaimer: I fully understand how unlikely this suggestion is to come to pass.

That said, it would be awesome if you could in fact be a weapon master. This has nothing to do with the badge with that name. What does this even mean, though? That it would be really cool if characters with weapon-based melee sets for their primary or their secondary could complete some form of challenge in order to unlock one other weapon-based primary or secondary melee set available to that archetype that they could then respec in or out of. Of course, they could never actually have powers from two sets at once. Characters without weapon-based melee sets could still complete the challenge but they wouldn't get the special reward. The challenge could be undertaken several times but you would only be able to pick weapon sets you hadn't already unlocked.

This suggestion is thematically reasonable. Many characters should be able to fight with many weapons. From a balance perspective it is also fairly reasonable because the weapon melee sets are so close to each other in functionality. Many of them are clones. You wouldn't apply this reasoning willy-nilly to other melee sets because a weapon is less inherent to ones body than the other powers are commonly portrayed. You could use similar reasoning to allow Magic characters access to several power sets on account of being damn wizards but that's kind of way too much potential utility for a single character. The weapon melee sets are much simpler and all share flavour.

New melee sets wouldn't be available to unlock right away. Some arbitrary amount of time would have to pass so that people get acquainted with it the good old-fashioned way.

The real problem is how to actually implement this. Mutually exclusive multiple power sets that unlock at a particular point are in the game in the form of SoA sets but I can't imagine that you'd just lift the coding from there and swap out just some bits.


Well, that's what I think, anyway. This is driven primarily by the rule of cool. I was just seeing how the different sets looked in the character creator when it struck me that it'd be great to potentially access them all on a single character by simply swapping the weapon somehow. One day you want to play with claws, another you want to hit things with a heavy club and some other day you want to swing a big ole sword around (nothing Freudian about that). It's not like there aint flavour room for a proper all-round warrior.

Actually, I've been putting thought into this for quite a while on how to make such a character.

Epic AT with a multipath PRimary and a Defensive Secondary.

I'd have The Primary be all the weapons sets. You'd obviously be limited in things like one weapon nuke (so no grabbing Hail of Bullets, Full Auto, and Rain of Arrows) and one build up style power.

Maybe include hand to hand sets in it as well, but I'd probably stick with just weapon sets.

Keep the AT forever evolving...when a new weapon set is introed, it becomes a new path in the Primary (like Beam Rifle).

It'd like be redraw hell, and more suited to picking one melee set and one ranged set, but having the ability to draw a sword, slice away, then switch it up with a giant hammer, then pull out two pistols and fire away would be PERFECT!

That would be pretty cool but you'd probably end up with many smaller pools of more distinct weaponry. Otherwise you'd be able to load up on non-stop PBAoE and while that is a reality already for some builds it does require spending tremendous amounts of resources and time on IO sets. An EAT centred around lethal damage with little utility could be balanced, though.

One issue with being able to swap between several weapon sets is customisation. The way to solve that would probably be to just add the extra weapons in under the, well, the Weapons header in the costume editor. That way each of your costumes would technically have their own weapons, even for the sets you aren't currently using. They just wouldn't show.

Yes, of course there could be more use of the mutually exclusive powers tech from the VEATs. I hadn't thought about that. Your idea could work.

The thing I dislike about an EAT that does weapons instead of adding a challenge to unlock things for weapon-based ATs is that you don't add anything to existing characters. Giving characters people already have something new to do is every bit as important as adding things to do with new characters. There might also be too much blurring between the weapon set ATs and the hypothetical Weapon Master EAT.

Either way I'd start a new character for it despite not having cared much for the weapon sets before. I'd just prefer the approach that adds to existing characters instead of competing with them.