Currently all passives on weapon skill trees affect only the weapon you are currently using. If you get empower from a heavy attack, you lose the empower if you switch weapons. This really limits the synergy you can get with certain weapons. The weapons with highest pure DPS outshine weapons with lower DPS because of this.
If they would allow you to get all benefits from both your equipped weapons at a same time, you could get really nice synergies between weapons and lower DPS weapons could find more use because of another weapon could benefit from it’s perks.
Sword and shield could actually become a decent DPS weapon if Leadership was active while you are using your secondary weapon as well.
Stacking bleed perks with rapier and spear, could create a very interesting bleed build.
This limitation of losing buffs and passives when weapon swapping, is limiting the weapon combinations people can use.
id say yes but only for a limited amount of buffs and debuffs which make it horribly complicated again.
Imagine a spear user with berserker buff. Thats just pure insanity.
Bleeds empowers sure but id make some weapons really really strong just imagine anything and everythings gonna get paired with VG as it provides an insane amounts of debuffs on the target and buffs on yourself
imagine using void gauntlet, spamming 3 skills, one of them is oblivion, and then switching to any other weapon: you know have 50% empower on anything. Imagine on a musket. Or fire staff. Great axe. Now you get why most disappear
There definitely would be some really powerful combos. For example berserk. But if they did this, they would have to balance skills appropriately. I understand why they remove these buffs. But it’s a lazy way of implementing stuff. Weapon combination build crafting is really lame currently. You pretty much only synergize weapons based on cc skills.
Berserk definitely could be an exception. Currently berserk does not on cooldown until the effect ends. If you would change weapons, It could put the skill on cooldown etc.
They could implement things like this slowly by letting empower effects stay when weapon swapping and slowly enable more while tweaking values.
This is already a thing with blunderbuss to some extent. The fortify perks on blunderbuss stay when you swap weapons. Also the Unload elite perk buff does not disappear when you swap weapons. Though you don’t really do anything with the unload perk, but you can for example use your secondary weapon skills between using the BB ability and shooting with extra pellets.
After thinking about it, Berserk persisting after weapon swap would not be that OP. You already get permanent Grit from 300 STR. So it would also give you a heal over time, 20% damage buff and movement speed buff. The damage buff could be tuned if it would be too much. But would it really be that strong? If you use GA/WH, which would you drop to get hatchet instead? If you drop WH, you lose a lot of your CC. If you drop GA, you lose quite a bit of your sticking power. This would be most useful for Dex melee weapons. Something which you do not see that often.
Game does have Empower and Fortify caps. You cannot infinitely stack Empower. But like I said already. It would require some number tuning and not just do this change and let everything be as they are.
For some reason nobody understands that I’m not taking into account math behind the numbers you could get from buffs etc. It’s about allowing synergy. The numbers can be always tuned. Currently weapons have pretty much 0 synergy outside of ability combos. This would allow you to create a build which synergy would come from synergizing perks instead of choosing weapons based on how you can CC chain your enemies.
As a healer, I think would be nice. Currently I rarely switch weapons when healing, because I’ll lose my healing buffs stacks, and that makes gameplay kinda boring. I would love to be able to switch weapons more often, creating different play styles.
Sure, it will need balances, maybe some exceptions here and there. But I think could make the game more fluid and diverse.