Ziggurat Zagger
Posts: 4055
Joined: Tuesday, 10th January 2012, 19:49
Re: Fighting reform
I will assume that changing the effectiveness of common earlygame weapons at 0/low weapon skill is not an option (because of the fact this would need to be accompanied by changes to basically every early game enemy as well as every low level offensive spell).
In a linear delay system--which is what Crawl currently has--then how fast a weapon gets better is determined by its base delay. Faster weapons get better more quickly than slow weapons. In a linear speed system this is completely different--how fast a weapon gets better is instead determined by its damage. More damaging weapons get better faster than less damaging ones. Roughly, damage and delay swap roles: low base delay -> high base damage, and high base damage -> low base delay. (see footnote 1)
Something is going to have to change pretty dramatically if you want to use a linear speed formula, since right now most onehanders are bad weapons (dam/delay < 1, where delay is in aut ... in fact among common weapons scimitars are the best at 6/7 or about .85) that get better quickly and most twohanders are good weapons (dam/delay ~= 1; exec axe and bardiche are 0.9 but get cleave/reaching) that get better slowly. Since changing early game weapons is not really an option probably the least disruptive course of action is to make twohanders very bad weapons (dam/delay < ~.6) that get better quickly, while leaving onehanded weapons as bad weapons that get better slowly. In doing this you can manage to make onehanders actually better weapons than twohanders at low skill. This will lead to other balance changes though, since to keep twohanders better than onehanders at high skill (which absolutely should be desirable) and to also keep their dam/turn comparable to the current situation near mindelay skill (I assume this is also desirable) probably what happens is they will need a base damage increase as well as a much larger base delay increase (see footnote 2), which then reduces the importance of AC and slaying and other additive/subtractive things that don't get multiplied by weapon skill.
Additionally you make twohanders completely unusable at low skill. Perhaps this is a good change though.
footnote 1:
footnote 2:
Anyway these adjustments may be possible but you are potentially disrupting melee combat's damage an awful lot with these changes, and even afterward there is going to be that important qualitative difference in how weapons improve.
edit: obviously you can get around this by changing how quickly different weapons improve but as I said earlier I fail to see how that is actually an improvement way over the current linear delay system, since you will basically have to tell players what "C" (in the formula on the devwiki) is for each weapon so you're just replacing one magic number that's reasonably easy to understand with a magic number that's hard to understand.