Production: One-handed Weapons Statistics

[Marjo]

Currently under consideration:

We are looking into modifying the values of the one-handed (1H) weapons statistics to give more interest to 1H melee and crafting skills.

Feel free to discuss it!


-----

EDIT: Now in development.

[rushin]

umm? give us a tiny clue what you might be thinking about

[sprite]

How about adding dodge/parry mods?

But I think that's what the thread is for Rush The obvious things that are just "unimplemented/broken" get fixed and stuff we ask for in here gets considered

[ashling]

I like my 1handed weapons so sounds good to me not even knowing what they are thinking of changing! Parry and Dodge mods really would be the obvious ones to look at though

[great83]

hmm i use 2handed weapons as well as 1 handed weapons, and beleive giving 1 handed weapons a advsery parry/dodge mod will make them over powered. and they most defiently dont need a parry/dodge bounus on them sence they are able to equip a sheild with 30 parry.

[rushin]

well, there was this thread from a while ago. I know there are a couple of other much bigger ones, but my tired brain cant find atm

making shields more effective might be worth looking at, absorbing (more) damage, and more (all) of the time?

and Bisk you are the only person i've met who used the words 1h and overpowered in the same sentence oO

[iceclad]

As GF is considering 1-h weapons now I think it's time that I post something about them I've been noticing so far and try to start again a nice discussion about melee (old threads are maybe too old to bring back)

I won't say that I'm really that experienced with PvP as Cho server doesn't have a lot of that at the moment. I haven't played in other servers so you can count that I'm pretty new in this game also. My main experience comes from using daggers to the point that there's only few levels to reach 250. What I write here is my view on things flavored with some views and posts in these forums and in-game talks. I won't touch comparison to mages or ranged or anything else here, just pure use of weapons and dualing other melee users.

First of all if I count the main weapons I see people use in Cho server I see a huge imbalance. About 90% of people I know/see use 2-h axe as their main weapon. I've seen few 2-h swords, few pikes and hardly any 1-h weapons.

The way I see it there are many problems with 1-h weapons when comparing them to 2-h weapons.

Different damage amounts with QL 250 weapons (using icreased damage) [please correct me if I'm wrong]:
2-h axe/mace 35748 hp/minute (27 hits/minute, malus 50)
2-h sword 33120 hp/minute (30 hits/minute, malus 50)
2-h pike 29106 hp/minute (33 hits/minute, malus 50)
1-h sword+shield 28626 hp/minute (39 hits/minute, malus 80)
1-h sword+dagger 34008 hp/minute (39 hits/minute, malus 40)
dual daggers 24840 hp/minute (60 hits/minute, malus 20)
dagger+shield 16560 hp/minute (60 hits/minute, malus 60)

In the end I think these damage amounts are just fine, hitting with 2-h weapons should deal more damage and that's what they do now. Not a problem at all.

Problems arise from different things. Mainly defence abilities and stamina usage. To make a comparison between stamina/hp usage in minute it's good to count malus too. In next calculation I use heavy armor (malus 60) as the base and just to flat out compare nicely, use 100 stamina used as a base for one hit.

2-h axe/mace 5670 stamina/minute (27 hits, malus 50+60=110)
2-h sword 6300 stamina/minute (30 hits, malus 50+60=110)
2-h pike 6930 stamina/minute (33 hits, malus 50+60=110)
1-h sword+shield 9360 stamina/minute (39 hits, malus 80+60=140) [7956 stamina with MA]
1-h sword+dagger 7800 stamina/minute (39 hits, malus 40+60=100) [6396 stamina with MA]
dual daggers 10800 stamina/minute (60 hits, malus 20+60=80) [8640 stamina with MA]
dagger+shield 13200 stamina/minute (60 hits, malus 60+60=120) [11040 stamina with MA]

As you can notice the trend basically is that with less stamina you deal more damage. In some cases the real stamina usage is so high that users of 1-h weapons and daggers often choose to use medium armor or light armor (mostly in case of daggers). This leads to less HP and less protection from enemy strikes but smaller malus to have more stamina to use.

Problem often with this lower protection is that more hits/minute seems to cause monsters to agroing that fighter with lower protection (main tank in HA can help this with taunt though). This is especially easy to note with dual daggers. Without no-one using taunt, it'll be the dual-dagger guy taking the most damage in a combat situation against NPCs. This is also the point why I added daggers with HA. Dagger is good at keeping agro and can cause lots of combat afflictions to lower enemy fighting ability, so it seems that best usage of dagger actually is taking the damage and keeping agro as dagger damage is also low compared to other weapons. I personally don't want to ever see a dagger guy in HA and maybe even with a shield (and won't ever do it myself), just against everything I see in using daggers, but in game it seems to be the most sensible thing to do when fighting NPCs, which is sad.

Lowering stamina usage with wear out weapon credit is possible also, but there is a slight problem with that credit. One can't "auto-action" it at all (double pressing that attack). This is especially bad with high speed weapons. Client and Server don't communicate quickly enough to react to new action. Daggers for example with 1 hit/second need to have next action pressed right after last one ended. So unless just constantly hitting buttons you won't get the action you wanted next. This should be fixed so that you can "auto-action" stanzas with wear out weapon credit.

Next thing to consider is parry/dodge. To get a nice comparison between 2-h weapons and 1-h weapon+shield and dual-wield we can choose few weapons. I'll consider swords with max bonuses here to get a nice comparison (both can use similar armor to get bonuses from, for dodge purposes I'll use +2 dodge LA [+10 total] and parry +2 HA [+12 total]). For shield I use max craftable +30 parry shield (don't know what max dodge bonus from shield is and there are no event shields in Cho for example). First is comparison between parry/parry and then 2-h parry/1-h dodge.

2-h sword can get +20 parry and -20 adv parry
1-h sword+shield can get +30 parry and +0 adv parry
dual-wield can get +0 parry and +0 adv parry

2-h sword has +10 edge against 1-h+shield and +40 edge against dual-wield (axe/mace would get 10 from that edge lowered)
1-h+shield has +30 edge against dual-wield.

2-h sword can get +20 parry and +0 adv dodge
1-h sword+shield can get +0 dodge (+ what shield gives) and +0 adv parry
dual-wield can get +0 dodge and +0 adv parry

So here we still have edge for 2-h weapons here also. Only point where 1-h+shield is better is when you fight against monsters or other 1-h weapons. Shield will absorb some hits from 2-h weapons, but I doubt that it is enough when you compare damage of 2-h weapon and 1-h weapon. Also 2-h weapons have a better reach which lowers damage they get as announced.

After considering all points I've said here it's no wonder why 2-h weapons are as popular as they are. They have DPS, they use less stamina/HP, heavy armor is easier to use with them, they are better in dodge/parry comparison because they have bonuses to those things. Only thing where hit rate means something is interrupting casters and dealing more critical hits. With 5% critical chance that critical amount is not a big deal. And like someone said here 2-h Axe already beats AoD almost always so interrupting is not that big deal either.

[iceclad]

This is my suggestion on how to approach things.

1. Make it possible to to "auto-action" wear out weapon credit

2. Make a new credit for all different weapons (one for 1-h sword, one for 1-h spear and etc)
- call it with the name of the weapon
- not usable in Heavy Armor (I personally don't want to see dagger users start using Heavey Armor for example), basically just grey the action out that has this credit when you wear even one piece of HA. Makes it impossible to use helmets with these also.
- new levels can be trained at the same time/level new Increase Damage stanza comes becomes available
- 10 point credit/lvl for daggers, 5 point/lvl for 1-h weapons, 2 point/lvl for 2-h weapons
- would mean that Dagger 10 is a 100 point credit, Spear 10 is a 50 point credit and etc

3. Either raise malus of 2-h weapons or drop dagger malus to 0 and 1-h weapon malus to 20

4. Raise critical hit possibility with daggers to 10% or 15%

5. Go through all parry/dodge and adv parry/dodge bonuses and penalties in weapons.
- with adv parry mods 2-h weapons should be by far the best, they are hard to parry
- with adv dodge mods 2-h weapons should be by far the worst, they are easy to dodge
- daggers should have best dodge mods followed by 1-h weapons, they don't slow down that much
- 1-h weapons should be better than 2-h weapons with parrying, 2-h weapons are not that good for parry, they are damage dealers in essence. So either lower parry mods in 2-h weapons or give 1-h weapons good parry mods.
- dagger used in left hand should have bonus parry mod, when used in right hand it should have a negative one

I would personally edit them to something like this:
2-weapons
Adv dodge mod: 20 to 0
Adv parry mod: 0 to -20
Dodge mod: -20 to 0
Parry mod: -20 to 0 (-10 to 10 with sword)

1-h weapons
Adv dodge mod: 10 to -10
Adv parry mod: 10 to -10
Dodge mod: -5 to 5
Parry mod: 0 to 10 (10 to 20 with sword)

Dagger
Adv dodge mod: 0 to -20
Adv parry mod: 10 to -10
Dodge mod: 0 to 10
Parry mod: -20 to -10 (+20 bonus when used in left hand)

with maximum bonuses combinations would be like this:

2-h weapon, +0 parry (+10 sword), +0 dodge, 0 adv dodge, -20 adv parry
1-h weapon+shield, +40 parry (+50 sword), +5 dodge, -10 adv dodge, -10 adv parry
sword+dagger +30 parry, +15 dodge
dual daggers +0 parry, +20 dodge -20 adv dodge, 0 adv parry

In essence this would raise 1-h weapon+shield parry with +10 (or +20 in case of sword) against 2-h weapons and lower 2-h weapon parry by 20 against 1-h weapon + shield when comparing to old figures. Would leave these end parry bonuses for them:
2-h weapon parry bonus against 1-h+shield: -10 (0 for sword)
1-h+shield parry bonus against 2-h: 20 (30 for sword)

Dual-wield compared to 2-h weapons would even out a lot too this way.

If someone thinks that these differences are too much then leave 2-h weapons as they are. I'm just pointing out that they are not that great with parrying in essence, or shouldn't be. There is that reach bonus also that I have no exact idea how it works. I figure it works always even when fighters are too close to each other (parrying dagger with a pike when close by ), but reach is announced to lower damage by 10% when comparing pike and other 2-h weapons, so I figure it could be up to 20% when comparing pike and dagger (20 reach difference), don't know. But percentages like that do make big differences in battle (same with shield absorption).

6. To have some better use for Aim to body part actions lower the cost of those by half. This could make them used more


I think this is a good start for a new nice conversation about melee weapons. Gameforge is interested with balancing melee weapons weapons now which is very great to hear. Has been a bit boring to see all those 2-h axes all the time in battle.

[ajsuk]

and Bisk you are the only person i've met who used the words 1h and overpowered in the same sentence oO

lol - No kidding.

I'm really not sure whats supposed to happen with these.
Best bet is to make the shield or dagger combination to the 1h weapon work better as suggested I guess? @.o

[tylarth]

very nice analysis and presentation hope folks with the means to changes things take notice.