Shoals Surfer
Posts: 293
Joined: Tuesday, 25th October 2011, 05:04
Possible Dual-Wielding Proposal
The Design Space
Sometimes, you find a nice one-handed weapon, but it doesn't give you quite enough damage. Your character doesn't need the extra defense of shields, or can't use them effectively. So what do you do? Find another one-handed weapon and go to town.
Dual-wielding should be an option that you build into in certain situations, rather than a goal for your character. Ideally, it should be provide less damage against depth-appropriate enemies than two-handed weapons, but compensate with the versatility of having an extra brand or artifact bonuses. Dual-wielding could also be used to deal with evasive targets.
Possible Implementation
Dual-wielding is a trained skill, like shields. Your off-hand weapon uses whichever is lower between you weapon skill and your dual-wielding skill to determine hit bonus and attack delay. Dual-wielding also provides a shield bonus based on minimum skill. Your off-hand weapon is equipped in your shield slot, and you wield or remove it by equipping it as such. In tiles, ctrl+click on a weapon in your inventory adds it to your off-hand.
You can only equip one-handed weapons in your off-hand (even as a Formicid) and your off-hand must have a base delay equal to or lower than you main-hand weapon. When you attack, you use your main-hand weapons delay, and the time units that you spent attacking are recorded. Your off-hand attack triggers whenever its delay in time units has passed. For example, if you wield a longsword (attack delay 9) and a short sword (attack delay 5), then 9 units pass when you attack. You use the long sword once and the short sword once. If you attack again, 18 units will have passed, meaning you use the long sword once and the short sword twice on this turn. It will be 18 - 15 = 2 units of time before the short sword is used again. This number resets when you take an action other than attacking. This might sound hard to keep track of, but on the player's end it won't be any more complicated than regular melee.
Why Implement Something so Complicated?
It's true that from a coding perspective, this will take a lot of time and testing, but the ability to freeze and electrocute enemies at the same time is cool enough to justify the addition.