Long Blades Proposal

[Igxfl]

There's still room to give Long Blades a special gimmick.

Of course, any such gimmick has to:
1] Not require e(v)ocation or excessive micromanagement
2] Have a meaningful tactical effect

I present the Gouge effect:
Damage dealt by Long Blades scales up based on portion of target HP missing, being underwhelming against full HP monsters and very powerful against wounded ones.

As a result:
Softening enemies up at range is unusually helpful for Long Blades users.
High-AC enemies may need a strong wand or spell hit for initial damage, but are then cut down pretty easily.
Monsters with Long Blades are an interesting situational threat, worth disabling or taking out first.

This setup makes Long Blades a big help for highly diversified characters, which are often less viable than more focused ones. Heavily melee-focused characters would still be better off with a less situational weapon. This would hopefully expand the space of viable characters a bit.

[Berder]

Long blades do have a gimmick: they cut hydra heads. Aside from that, long blades are just high damage weapons, competing with maces & flails and perhaps slightly better than m&f except for GC/GSC.

[Sar]

I think one of the rules for weapon gimmicks is that they should be immediately obvious. When you grab an axe you notice that it cleaves people immediately. When you use a polearm... well, reaching interface is not optimal but you get what I mean. This proposal is "more damage in some specific circumstances", and it reminds me of M&F ignoring a part of AC and other similar proposals that were rejected.

[Jeremiah]

IMO the best way to distinguish long blades from M&F (the other weapon type that does not have a gimmick) would be to make M&F do higher damage, but special-case them to have slower minimum delay, similar to what is done with crossbows; this would naturally make M&F better against high AC.

[Chicken]

The only thing wrong with the polearm interface is that you can't "v v" for instant joy. Everything else, practically, you can repeat the command to mean you mean it, but I guess "v" was already taken when this feature was added.

[Siegurt]

Am I the only one who uses tab to attack with polearms?

[Igxfl]

I tab as much as possible when I use polearms, but often I avoid them because they can be a bit finnicky when vv is called for.

[Sprucery]

I am probably the only one who never tabs except sometimes with polearms :)