Making melee attack delay more interesting

[LunarHarp]

What if melee attack delay was calculated in a similar way to ranged attack delay? I see this accomplishing three things:

1) It would directly involve player stats in calculating the attack delay
2) it would make the str weight play a much bigger role in melee combat
3) it would make it less sharply clear when to turn off the weapon skill. Right now every two levels in melee skill will drop the delay by one until you reach the min delay

Admittedly this would not help the biggest problem with melee combat, that there is little incentive to train a skill past the min delay, but it would take away some of the "if you have blah weapon, then turn your skill off at blah skill" and make str and dex more relevant.

Without further ado, the current ranged formula delay is something like

  Code:

speed = (base speed of the weapon) - 4 * (weapon skill) * (str*str_weight + dex*dex_weight) / 250;

Basically with this kind of system a character would not have to train a skill as high to reach the min delay if they have better appropriate stats. It makes sense that a stronger character would be able to swing that executioner's ax faster then a character who is weaker. The weaker character can make up for being weak by training up the weapon skill. Also, a character with high dex would reach the min delay on a short sword much sooner say a mage who has put all of their stat increases into int.

In short I think that ranged combat is much more interesting then melee because of the way it is calculated. I wanted to discuss what some of the implications of making melee more like ranged would be.

[XuaXua]

With galehar's proposal of removing skill levels and going with a skill point based approach, decreasing attack delays based on skill may smooth out.

[LunarHarp]

This would give a character more of a reason to increase str once they have a comfortable carrying capacity. Each point of strength right now only marginally increases your accuracy and damage. Dex at least helps you get higher ev and helps with sh also. Right now int is nearly always the best thing to increase during those level ups and this would mitigate that a little by effectively making your weapon skill more efficient with high str or dex (depending on the weapon)

I don't think that the proposal to make skills more granulated would have any effect on delay. Your weapon would still just go down a pip for two levels.

Also the formula would have to be worked a bit depending on the weapon as it seems there is little chance a fighter would get to min delay on those two handers with the above formula.