minmay wrote:Items do not give their stat/resistance/whatever bonuses while in the alternate weapon set. It is therefore completely inconsistent for them to give the set bonus while in the alternate weapon set. And giving the stat/resistance/whatever bonuses while in the alternate weapon set is obviously undesirable, it defeats the entire point: instead of having two weapon sets you could easily swap between, you would have one weapon set and one pair of shields/staves/whatever with good passives.
The point isn't that you get the stat boosts from the non-active weapon slots, it's that you get the set bonuses.
The Crystal Shield gives you +10 Evasion and immunity to Petrify (hardly the best shield in the game imo). But when you have the entire Crystal Armor set (including the shield) equipped, you get an additional +75 health on top of all of the other stats. Similarly, the Meteor Shield gives you +7 Evasion and +10 Fire Resist, but when you have the full meteor set equipped, you get 100% fire immunity.
The idea is that if you have your set-based shield in your I weapon slot, that you can switch to your II weapon slot without losing the +75 health or the 100% fire immunity, but you would lose the +10 Evasion and Petrify Immunity or the +7 Evasion and +10 Fire Resist for Crystal and Meteor Armor, respectively. So your second set of weapons wouldn't be useful outside of set bonuses.
The main issue is that you lose a lot when switching. For the Meteor Armor, you drop to whatever your base fire resistance is, as none of the other armor offers fire resistance. For the Crystal Armor, you drop 75 health, and that 75 health isn't regained when you re-equip the Crystal Shield, it's added as empty maximum health which isn't useful at all (without potions) considering how slow regen is.
The only workaround that includes keeping the set bonus for the Meteor Armor would be to keep set bonuses for items not in your active weapon slot. I mean, you're still burdened by it in terms of weight, and it does still take up one of the four quick-access items you can have on a character, and if you decide to just wear it on your back, you don't get any of the stat bonuses from the item itself, so I don't see why it would be balance breaking. I mean, from a lore sense, I imagine that the secondary weapon slots are all carried on a characters back/belt, and it makes a lot of sense to get armor bonuses from a shield you're wearing on your back, right?