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Re: 2-handed weapons need some love

Posted: 07 Jul 2009, 01:42
by Fern
Anna wrote:you can always make a weapon that works along side of your exp level. make it fairly difficult to achieve, and increase in bonus as the player levels. make it so you can only have one, and it is not sellable or tradeable. that way the quest is only good for the individual and we wont have 10 new characters trying this quest just for the reward to sell
In my opinion, it would be nice if the weapons were divided by categories, and have a different skill for each category (you maybe are very good at using daggers but that's totally different to using a sword), having different weapons skills in a similar way as there are different magic schools (maybe have a fighting academy?) the skill level is not sellable/tradeable. Depend more on the skill of the player on that kind of weapon rather than making him buy constantly new weapons better than the one he has.

For example, the weapon categories could be as follow:

* (1) Light melee weapons (daggers)
high AGI, not needing much STR, light and fast.
* (2) Medium melee weapons (swords, clubs, small axes...)
This won't be as fast but will hit stronger
* (3) Heavy melee weapons (2 handed swords, big hammers... )
Very slow but stronger (and perhaps give some of them area of effect instead of too much strengh?)
* (4) Middle-range weapons (long pikes, whips...)
Simmilar to swords, but they can hit from a bit further and it's also dependent on dex. It's a bit of a compromise between ranger and melee.
* (5) Long-range weapons (throwables, bows and anything that requires aim)
Makes good use of dex, the use of str might depend on the weight of the throwable and/or quality of the bow.

Also, each weapon, no matter the category, could perhaps perform one kind of damage (although this is probably not doable in eathena).
Types of damage could be like these, for example (some names taken from wesnoth).

* (1) Blade (daggers, swords, throwable knifes...)
Effective against snakes and soft skin animals...
This kind of damage is partially absorbed by metal armor and hard shells, though.
* (2) Impact (bones, clubs, hammers, maces, throwable stones...)
Effective against hard shelled creatures and highly armored characters.
The Impact damage is not absorbed that much by armor. But it's not as good against unarmored creatures as blade is.
* (3) Pierce (spikes (thin daggers), pike, arrows, darts)
A compromise between blade and impact. Piercing is not absorbed that much by the armor (like when you pierce aiming to some spot between metal plates), it can hurt greatly also to unarmored creatures, but not as much as a bigger and sharp blade.
* (4) Burning (mainly poison and some magical attacks that dont have a physical sense of blade/impact/pierce)
This kind of damage completely ignores armor and goes directly to reduce HP.

This makes 4*5=20 possible combinations: from boxing globes (light+impact), to halberds (middle-range+blade) and includes the possibility of enchanted weapons.

The ability to wear a shield, or not and have an area of effect for the attack could be another different factor for choosing one kind of weapon or other. There could be for example light weapons that require you to use both hands (double knifes, gloves..), but that are faster or stronger than normal light weapons.

By the way, about graphics I don't really care that much.
I wouldn't really mind if all the weapons had a similar sprite and animation, as long as the gameplay feels different.
I think that in Secret Of Mana (it had a lot of weapons to use) most fighting animation frames were shared for pike/whip/axe/sword.. the only thing changing was the sprite of the weapon, delay between frames, the position of the weapons in the hands of the player and maybe some additional frames in some movement specific for some weapon, but just 1 or 2 frame that were added to the generic animation. The characters themselves didn't had a very smooth animation compared to more modern games, but still it felt very nice and I don't think much more than that is really needed.