The weapon switching exploit, or how to turn your pistol into a semi-auto

[JrffK]

Long time lurker, first time poster.

Been replaying Pillars 1 since Avowed came out, and I was fiddling around with a 4 gun switching build with Arms Bearer, Quick Switch and Island Aumaua on PotD solo. While I was disappointed by the power of the build, I discovered some interesting properties about weapon set switching in the process. Switching allows you to replace the recovery of any action in the game. I looked through the forums and I don't believe anyone has posted about this in detail before, and certainly not the bug with switching that allows you to skip the reload phase of a reload weapon.

First, the recovery replacing property of weapon switching. As you may or may not know, you can switch weapons at any time during combat. You can do this in the middle of any action, whether it be attacking, spellcasting, using a consumable or any other ability. As MaxQuest notes in their post about attack speed, All actions in Pillars 1 is separated into the action phase and recovery phase. If you switch before the action phase is complete, the action is interrupted, and you enter weapon switch recovery. If you switch during the recovery phase, your weapons switching time is added to the recovery. This is by default 2 seconds, and is reduced by 1.5 seconds by quick switch, 1 second by coil of resourcefulness. Here's where it gets interesting, if you switch weapons after the action is executed (not necessarily after the action phase, as the 'effect' of the action happens usually in the middle of the action phase, again refer MaxQuest's post on frame data) and before the recovery phase begins, you effectively 'replace' the recovery of the action with the recovery of the weapon switch. This can be reduced to 0 with quick switch+coil of resourcefulness.

All of that was a very long winded way of saying that if you swap weapons quickly after any action, you can skip the recovery entirely. This exploit can lead to veeeery silly stuff, including but not limited to:
- A 3 dex ranger in plate armor with penetrating shots and vicious aim firing arrows at faster than 0 recovery (you can animation cancel the part of the attack after the arrow is fired lol)
- A 3 dex wizard in plate armor rapid firing spells
- A 3 dex... you get the idea

In any case, this is already game breaking, if not a bit micro heavy. I have seen some people alluding to knowing about this in the forums, but nobody has explained it in detail. And although this skips recovery, weapons with a reload phase like firearms can't be exploited to rapid fire... or at least that's what I thought, until hours into my run, I found out you could do that too...

With reload weapons, such as pistols and blunderbusses, if you switch to another weapon set, then back to the firearm after attacking, it skips the recovery. Then, if your character is attacking an enemy, it starts the reload for a split second before skipping it entirely. With this bug, you could rapid fire any blunderbuss or pistol or any other weapon of your choice. Curiously enough, the crossbow is the only weapon I haven't made work with this bug.

Here is a video showcasing the bug.