Will Intrepid Studios stop me from using my favorite weapon?

All too often I see MMO developers focus too much on their personal favorite weapon types. This results in certain weapon or combat types to always be be strictly better than other alternatives.

An example of this can be when the most powerful meele dps weapon is a two handed sword and the other alternatives are simply downgrades with none or almost no upsides. This is still a problem if there are 10 different weapon types and only 2-4 of them are viable.

*This applies to all roles and classes. Dual-wield daggers being the clear winner for rogues/staves being the winner for casters/one handed axes being the winner for tanks etc...

Now this can happen because of a multitude of reasons (there are probably more not listed below):

1. Lore
2. Developer preference
3. Development/design time complications
4. Laziness
5. Delusion (Obviously everyone loves swords right? The best weapon has to be a sword!)

The weapon type bias does however go too far, when a player notices their favorite weapon being 10-15% weaker than it's same requirement counterpart. Below is a list of the weapons confirmed to be in Ashes of creation.

Axes
Bows
Clubs
Crossbows
Daggers
Hammers
Lances
Maces
Orbs
Polearms/Halberds
Potion launchers
Scepters
Shields
Spears
Spellbooks
Staves
Swords/Rapiers (One and two handed)
Wands

I am afraid that if no consern is voiced by the community, atleast half the weapon types will be useless and forgotten. It is thus vital that all weapon types offer something unique, just like in real life. The weapon types need to have advantages and drawbacks against different armor types, just like in real life. This way, a player can specialize, or go for something well rounded, and still feel useful and viable without being forced to use a weapon type he/she hates. If you are going to release a new tier of weapons, please, dont just offer an axe, sword or mace as the best in slot weapons.

A vital factor for the devs to be able to offer a varied selection of viable weapon types, they need to have some molds or guidelines on what weapons are supposed to be good and bad at.

Below ill list some recommendations on how each weapon type can be unique based on simplified historical use.

Sword: Versatile. Nimble. Slashing and cutting for bleeding. Ineffective against heavily armored foes.
Mace: Heavy, slow blunt damage. Amazing against heavily armored foes.
Axe: Hybrid between above. Blunt force combined with bleed. Slower than sword, faster than mace
Polarm: Reach. Keep enemy away from you. Control type weapon. Hard to use with a shield.
Spear: Same as above. Less power than polarm, more nimble since not as top heavy as polarm.
Crossbow: Shoots slow, but hard hitting and accurate shots.
Bow: More nimble and faster than the crossbow, albeit with less power and accuracy.

Why is this important for me?

I really love medieval weapons, like so many others who play MMOs. But, all too often we are left dissapointed when our beloved weapon types are designed in such a horrible way that we are forced to use a weapon we detest if we want to be viable.

In this other game, my friend quit because all the viable ranged weapon types were either crossbows or throwing weapons. Bows were completly neglected because the developers put in random arbitrary numbers that made them 20-25% worse than the alternatives. I always adored spears and halberds. And while they have always dominated in history, they are lackluster in MMO:s. Please, dont make this happen.

Summary if you dont wanna read:
1. Try to make all weapon types viable and unique in some way
2. Dont make just a few weapon types dominant over the others
3. Let me build characters so they can use a spear/one-handed+shield effectivly without arbitrary game design drawbacks.

Find more posts tagged with

Comments

George_Black

Hmm
If people dont want restrictions placed upon them, they should get rdy to deal with the narrow meta that will be established.

maouw

It's probably a good idea to have a solid identity for each weapon, like the small list that you started.

I disagree on axes as blunt weapons (hammers are blunt axes to my brain).

but building on the above, I'd say:

Axes: speed+ damage+++ crit+ (bleed)
Bows: speed+++ damage+ crit+ (poison)
Clubs: speed+++ damage++ crit- (nothing - just pure rage and smacking face)
Crossbows: speed+ damage++ crit+++ (silver bolts - anti magic)
Daggers: speed+++ damage+ crit+++ (dual wield, mobility)
Hammers: speed+ damage+++ crit- (anti armour)
Lances: speed- damage+++ crit+++ (extra reach, single target)
Maces: (I don't know the difference between maces and hammers - aren't hammers a type of mace?)
Orbs: speed+++ damage- crit- (faster spells)
Polearms/Halberds: speed+ damage++ crit+ (extra reach, sweeping attacks)
Potion launchers: (is this confirmed naval only?)
Scepters: speed+ damage++ crit+ (extend buff duration)
Shields: speed- damage- crit- (super tank)
Spears: speed+++ damage+ crit+ (reach, mobility)
Spellbooks: speed- damage+ crit+ (mana conservation)
Staves: speed- damage+++ crit+++ (heavy magic)
Swords/Rapiers: speed++ damage++ crit+ (parry)
Wands: speed++ damage+ crit- (mobility)

I find the identity of these weapons too confusing/too similar:

scepter
club vs mace vs hammer
polearm vs lance vs spear

These weapons could be subdivided further, imo:

Bows --> recurve bows and long bows: recurve bows have higher mobility, long bows take a moment to set up but rapidfire
Swords/Rapiers --> rapiers could be extremely short range and fast like daggers but with a focus on parrying instead of critting, swords could be slower with higher crit
Shields

McMackMuck

I agree that if a weapon is going to exist then I would prefer if it had it's own unique identity in terms of how it is used. The META weapon(s) will rise to the top regardless of how much detail the devs throw into the game, but it would be nice if the lines were blurred a little to make room for personal preference without being too far from the top tier choice. It is a lazy dev option to make all weapons work the same, but if you only have so much design resource to apply, perhaps it's not a terrible starting point that can (hopefully) be improved on after release.

@maouw
re: confused identity between polearm vs lance vs spear
I wasn't sure if you were confused or if you were sharing your experience that game devs often over simplify the function of weapons. Just in case....

A polearm is any melee weapon on the end of a pole (thus increasing range), so the techniques for using them can vary just as much as the shorter version of the same weapon. Several functions (hook, hack, slash, bash, spear spike, mattock spike, etc.) can be achieved by different shaped chunks of metal on the end of the pole, but I wouldn't expect all these to be implemented in Ashes.

A spear is a type of polearm; the shorter lengths can be thrown or used as a 1H melee weapon. Longer length spears quickly become two handed. I would be surprised to see the longer 2H polearms outside of a game with unit formations (I don't think that is appropriate for Ashes).

A lance is a specialized type of spear (=polearm) used from the back of a mount.

Tyranthraxus

Some weapons can be left out of the pantheon, methinks....

Nunchucks aside, I still haven't seen the flail in a lot of games.

unknownsystemerror

Tyranthraxus wrote: »

Nunchucks aside, I still haven't seen the flail in a lot of games.

It all has to do with game engines and how they calculate and render physics. A single player game can handle the load, cause it only has to account for the player. Add it to a mmo and the only way it works without frying everyone's computer and crashing servers is to animation lock them. Which becomes another issue because then people complain about realism and "mah mershun!" I think a very similar answer was given by Jeffrey Bard back in 2017-18 in one of the livestreams why they had no plans for weapons like that and why the potion launcher has been a problematic issue for them with the free bouncing projectile grenades. We got a whip animation on the cleric, but if you notice is it is not reacting to hitting other objects and is a locked animation for the above reasons probably.

Yuyukoyay

Flails are in some games, but they get classified as maces. Just like polearms and spears get thrown into the same categories. I'm pretty sure each weapon are going to have their own skills. Since auto attacks are not going to exist at all.

McMackMuck

Historians aren't convinced that European medieval military flails existed, or at least if they did exist they were not in widespread use due to their clumsy impractical nature. It seems that they became a romanticized 14th/15th fantasy symbol of medieval combat and have endured because of artwork depicting them. Physical evidence shows that flails existed (in numbers) only in the form of agricultural threshing tool, which could be a makeshift weapon, but not as a weapon of choice.

Why let the real world get in the way of fantasy weapons? If it looks cool and fits the genre, allow it. I suspect that the effort to implement a realistic animation is the reason you don't see many in games. The swing of the mass on the end of a chain every time a player moves around would require significant additional processing than a completely solid weapon held in fixed stances.

Sholer

If I were a tank I would love to have a large onehanded warhammer plus a shield of course, but I really love this types of hammers.

maouw

@Sholer
You need the url of the image to end with .png/.jpeg/.gif
If it ends with just a random string of letters/numbers it won't show.

Sholer

maouw wrote: »

@Sholer
You need the url of the image to end with .png/.jpeg/.gif
If it ends with just a random string of letters/numbers it won't show.

Oh. for that it wasn't works, thanks you.

CROW3

Yeah, agree with OP and I want the freedom for my build and weapon choice to equate the overall damage capability of a heavier weapon with a less thought out build (obviously with a balanced set of drawbacks - as all builds need to have).

Wyborn

I remember playing a Shadowblade in DAOC, being able to use a two-handed weapon to attack from stealth seemed awesome at first. The damage of a slow two-handed weapon seemed overpowered until i realized it had a 25% miss chance compared to using one handed weapons.

Child Item