Weapons weapons weapons

blackjack2525

We all love weapons in MMOs, that's one of the important attributes of your character and something you're judged by when looking at your appearance, alongside with the armour.

Ashes wiki provides a certain list of weapons I wanted to speculate on.

1. Axes (One and two handed).
2. Bows.
3. Clubs.
4. Crossbows.
5. Daggers.
6. Hammers are being considered.
7. Lances.
8. Maces (One and two handed).
9. Orbs.
10. Polearms/Halberds.
11. Potion launchers.
12. Scepters.
13. Shields.
14. Spears.
15. Spellbooks.
16. Staves.
17. Swords/Rapiers (One and two handed).
18. Wands.

First of all, diversity is good and all, but this list makes me question if it is reasonable and isn't it more taxing towards the devs to have certain weapon types separated. For example, there are clubs, maces (1h + 2h) and hammers that are considered. And there are also lances, polearms/halberds and spears. And I will stop there, but you see the pattern here, a hint for the potential of unification. Since "certain abilities require certain items to be equipped" (wiki), then won't it be somewhat easier if there was just a little less types? This list is impressive, without a doubt, but I'd rather see the design for class abilities less complicated for both developers and players. Because if we go full diversity in regard to weapons, especially if we take historical weaponry, there's so much types and sub-types of them that you can just drown yourself in the number of weapon-specific abilities. And here I move to my second point.

Diversity within the same weapon class.
While having a certain list of weapon classes with, let's say, two mentioned above being unified (to blunt weapons and polearms, for example), we still can see a lot of diversity if the different weapon types are referred to one of these. For example, if the dagger class was not just limited to, loosely speaking, "knives", but also had:

Katars

Bagh nakh

Poignard

(Swords)
Katana

Patta

Talwar

Panabas

(Maces)

Bec de corbin

Flails

And so on and so forth.
There would be a way for a very vast character customization, with cool unique weaponry, and also the model creators wouldn't have to make a thousand variations of, let's say, a basic longsword but with different hilts or blade length/width or whatnot, or come up with monstrosities like these.

Ulquiorra

Thank you. I've been wanting to write a similar post about the 64 classes possibly lacking diversity based on the boring, unoriginal list of weapons in the Wikipedia.

George_Black

Dark Legion's Edge from Line][Age

RisingPhoenix

Sometimes diversity is good.... and sometimes it creates stats that are hard to quantify...or depending on 2ndclass choice may mean different off hand. inventory beware...or storage.

Tragnar

I like this diversity, but I agree that either abilities need to be tied to several weapon types or to weapon schools - like blunt weapons, polearm etc (i'm not medieval weapon expert so don't take these examples as good ideas) - and to tie skills to those schools

mrwaffles

@blackjack2525 Let me first give you props on your post. The weapon examples you gave are Dope AF. Most new people go right to complaining and telling the devs the "Best way to do it" and this is just levels above that so thank you.

Can we have it both ways? I like the original, generic groups, with the standard weapon augments applied to them. Then there are some rarer types within each group. For these rare weapons they should have a slight different ability I think. The school augment applies to the majority but these have a slight improvement.

blackjack2525

Yes, that makes sense.
Speaking of generic groups, the 18 listed in the first post, without considering mine, can be roughly moved to even lesser number of types

1. Axes (One and two handed (their own thing)),
2. Swords/Rapiers (One and two handed (same thing as with axes)),
3. Physical ranged weaponry (Bows, Crossbows, Potion launchers),
4. Shields,
5. Magical ranged weaponry (Orbs, Spellbooks, Wands),
6. Magical melee weaponry (Scepters, Staves),
7. Blunt (Clubs, Hammers, Maces (One and two handed),
8. Daggers,
9. Pole weapons (Lances, Polearms/Halberds, Spears).

For the last group you could add, for example, bardiches, tridents, warscythes etc.

Beekeeper

They definitely group weapons into bigger categories. Spears and Halberds are confirmed to be connected. I would assume the main difference between specific weapon types are damage types (halberds may do cutting, spears do poking) and visuals. Is a club and a hammer going to handle that differently in practice? Probably not, but if I am looking to equip my character with a cool weapon, visual differences count.