I, for one, would love to return to this. At least as an option not as the main highest performance meta spec. Something for masochists who like playing with extra buttons and gcds.
I really enjoyed collecting different proc weapons & having a little arsenal in my back pocket for open world nonsense.
You know that stuff left in wotlk right. Maybe cata if you put warriors swapping to sword and board in pvp.
You lose so much dps swapping weapons now. I’m confused as to why you need 8 weapons? What exactly are you doing. Explain
You’re new to Retail if you think weapon swapping is even necessary.
Warriors were swapping to a 2h to Overpower.
fact is…you are not on my level. and its super necessary.
Weapons with on use or cantrip effects can’t be swapped if you’re in combat I believe is the rule. You can swap to them but you can’t swap back.
My survival hunter swaps weapons with no problem?
The fun thing about this expression is it can imply either:
I’d agree. None of us are on your level. We ain’t in the sub-basement 
Any weapon with special abilities will not be swappable in combat and will incur a 30 seconds cooldown if you swap out of combat.
Might be a good time to activate the Blight Boar Microphone 
Hadn’t heard of weapon swapping in WoW for over a decade so I went and looked up how, when, and what folks are doing with it.
Yes.
Having read what folks are doing, this is 110% clearly unintentional and exploitative when macros are written to purposefully circumvent mechanics like the GCD.
Just learn to play without cheating.
The big change is blizzard started creating weapons with long cooldown on use effects. Things like the jailer mace which offer an enormous power boost while active but don’t have stats on them.
It was theorised the best thing to do was use the jailer mace until the buff ended, then swap to a weapon with secondaries until the cooldown was almost back to do it again.
Blizzard chose to rightly nip that in the bud.
Weapon swapping for classes with shield is still very much possible, otherwise shield of the righteous wouldn’t be in the ret paladin toolkit.
It’s just currently unusable because of fyr’alath.
My comment wasn’t about whether it was possible, but to point out that the reason why folks want to weapon swap (at least according to the things I could find that would create an advantage for a Rogue or a non-mechanical purpose such as a warrior or paladin requiring a shield) is how to avoid the GCD as that’s what people refer to as what’s making it clumsy.
To change out one’s weapons mind combat isn’t, but to do so the way that folks are looking to do in order to avoid and/or circumvent the GCD incurred by the weapon swap by using macros that abuse how the game check for equipment and things like “forms” of a druid - that is an exploit.
You can right now very much so swap out your equipment to use specific abilities mid-combat. But to do so with macros that purposefully avoid intended mechanics (such as the GCD) seems to be what folks mean when they talk about this.
Sure warriors swapped weapons, but the gcd for weapon swapping was to prevent that being written into a macro. Eg - shield bash (interupt usable in battle and defensive stance requird a shield, pummel was beserker stance only). You could macro the weapon swap to shield to make it instantly usable and the next macro (ms generally) used the higheest damage range or slowest weapon you had (before weapon speeds were normalised).
The main reason this was changd tho was because rogues were backstabbing (dagger only) but macro swapping to a slow 1h weapon as it calculated the damage AFTER you could use it.
You 100% can swap weapons in combat - you can even macro them to swap. They changed it so your abilities occur the gcd so they no longer can be macroed to make something usable instantly.
Yes, but you can’t do this with weapons that have on use effects of abilities. We have more of those now so people are noticing the limitation more often.
I tried to macro my Grieftorch to the slide whistle, that way whenever someone died and it reset the CD everyone would hear it.
It sorta worked, but it didn’t work anywhere near well enough and it made me so sad lmao.
Interesting…
I havent actually tried to swap weapons recently. Makes sense tho with the cantrip weapons losing value on mobs below 90% hp. Maybe they infact did change something more recently.
I believe the change came in Shadowlands when they made gavel. Since you’d want to use it then immediately swap to something with stats once the effect was over.