Weapon Redraw

I'm sure this has been brought up time and time again but I was wondering if they had any plans at all to change up how powersets with weapons redraw constantly whenever you use a power that isn't from that weapon?

It drives me nutty and actully has put me off a bunch of powerset combos cause I feel that little lag between changing powers. I really started to feel it on my corr beam/pain at higher levels so much swapping >_<

I can't really suggest how to fix it I don't know how the mechanics of it work actully. Something about dps? I don't know but I'd love to not have to put the weapon away every other second and not have that delay when I bring it back out and try to attack with it.

A hundred times this.

The idea that several powersets have a very real game mechanical penalty built into them just because of their concept is completely absurd to me.

I stay away from redraw sets as much as i can, from time to time I will come up with an awesome concept for a character and play one anyway but I always drop it thinking... why do I have to deal with this penalty when other powersets can freely switch between their primary and secondary with no delay?

If you ever want to feel how real this penalty this, try a empathy/dual pistols defender, i dare you.

It is because each drawn weapon set uses a specific combat stance that all of the animations from that set are built upon.

If you use a power that does not use the same combat stance, you will have to redraw your weapon.

Back Alley Brawler, before he left, almost figured out a way to get rid of it, but apparently something to do with Shield Defense broke things horribly and he had to scrap it.

Combat stances are so thoroughly baked into how the powers themselves actually work that it is going to be HIGHLY difficult to change. At this point, they'd have to pretty much rebuild the entire powers framework from scratch to get rid of redraw.

Complaining about it repeatedly on the forums does nothing to change how difficult it is going to be to change.

Also, most sets with redraw get some sort of benefit as a balance point, so these sets aren't truly out of balance. Most of them get extra accuracy as a tradeoff.

But, let's do the math here again (I really should put this in a word doc somewhere so that I have it for later).

Let's take a single weapon powerset, say, Broadsword. For each secondary powerset that you can pair with it, you need to create six new animations to make it not redraw as it is currently (flying and grounded each for male, female, and huge models). We've got 11 powersets that you can pair with it. Let's assume that there are 8 powers in each secondary that will need a new animation (accounting for some sets that have auto-powers).

11 * 6 * 8 = 528 animations just to get the secondaries not to put the weapon away.


For pool powers, we've got 9 pool powers, and we'll assume 4 powers in each need some new animations.

9 * 6 * 4 = 216 animations to get pool powers to work.


For ancillary/patron pools, we've got probably 10 pools across the various ATs that share this powerset, with 5 powers in each.

10 * 6 * 5 = 300 animations to get ancillaries to work.


So, to get JUST BROADSWORD to not redraw, that's 1,044 new animations that need to be done.


If we assume an equal amount of work for each weapon (some would need more, some less, but let's just assume), and we've got about 11 weapon sets (including Staff fighting), that's 11,484 animations that need to be done.


Let's think about that in context. A brand new set takes 9 powers and 6 animations per power, for 54 animations for a new set. So, making redraw go away without finding some new way to do it, would take about the same amount of time as creating 212 brand new sets.