No, they have to be un-equiped.

That doesn't make any sense. Source please?

There's probably a fast way to change between spells and weapons during combat.

Hopefully staffs will be usable as weapons this time, mages lacked their own kind of weapon. (fighters, and marksmen obviously had melee and bows, it would be cool if mage characters won't be forced to use hand to hand or a weapon, which pretty much makes all mages battle mages.)

Um... The podcast. Look, sheathing and unsheathing weapons aren't relevant to the sysem. You have to think of spells as if they were physical weapons.

Look, there are two slots for combat activities: Left hand and right hand. In those hands you can equip one handed weapons, two handed weapons, and spells. The spells take up a slot just like the weapons do. So if you sheathe your two swords, those slots will still be taken up, and you have to actually unequip them and equip a spell to cast something.

If my weapons are sheathed BOTH hands are FREE.

You have to think of this systematically. Sure, in real life your hands are free, but that's not how the game works. The slots are still filled up in the game.

Consider magic like a weapon. You have to equip the magic to use it. You can equip a fireball spell to your left hand and a one-handed sword to your right.

Thanks for the replies guys. I finally understand haha!

Not unless you're AH FAHRIN' YER LAZER BLAWWWWWWW

Yes, I hope they make a nice hotkey option for that. I might want to swing my two-handed axe at an enemy and then finish him off with a shock spell.

There's a new favorites feature that will let you swap out loadouts. I'm pretty sure you can favorite a couple things into one slot so that should make it easy to swap out.

Probably not unless you unequip the weapon.

Favorites feature should make that easy.