Doubleskill weapons

[Strongpoint]

What I really dislike in melee characters that, unlike casters, there are no real benefits to learn more than one weapon skill . You may switch to other weapon class only if you have found something very good. The only exception is unarmed combat that stay useful even if you switched to armed combat.

Unlike casters it's fairly unimportant if you have weapon A +3, weapon B +2 or Weapon A +3 weapon B -4. Yes if you found superb artifact for weapon B it changes things, but...

Also we have cross-training to make weapon switching easier, but it's not that logical. If you know how to use dagger how can it help you with two handed swords? If you know how to chop thing with 2 handed axe, how would it help you with simple spear? In what way practicing quarterstaves helps with halberds?

Yes halberd and axes mix nicely. As well as sabre and longsword or staff with club, or quarterstaff with spear, but there another more elegant way to use that similarity:

Spear can become staves\polearms weapon
Halberd can become polearms\axes weapon
Sabre can become short blades\long blades weapon
Magic staff become maces&flails\staves weapon
and so on

Buff weapons when needed to compensate higher xp cost to use it well

In that way playing merfolk you'll want to stay away from spears and halberds in a same way as kenku conjurer usually don't use stone arrow
In that way paying minotaur you would be happy to get good multischool weapon
In that way playing halfilng you could prefer daggers to sabres or vice versa.
In that way Playing Mountain dwarf halberd wouldn't look as bad like as it is now

I really want more tactical and strategical decisions when I play non casters

[szanth]

I agree that melee donks need to be changed to be more than just HULKSMASHDIRECTIONALKEY supplemented by wands, but I don't think dual-classing weapons is the way to go. Generally that only nerfs things, and that's the last thing they need.

[dpeg]

I never heard of this idea, and I find it vaguely interesting. Not sure it will work, but it's worth thinking about.
Apart from that, melee combat is about running into adjacent letters, sorry. Yes, tactics should play a role, and they generally do. We invent monsters like slime creatures to make tactics matter more (and corridors less). At some point (hopefully 0.9) we'll start adding those weapon moves, which will help even more. What we won't do is adding spell-like effects to weapons or weapon skills.

[dpeg]

minmay: I was thinking of the latter. Dual skills not as a boost to executioner's axe (etc.) but as a nerf.

[smock]

I had a similar thought a while back, but I don't think I shared it anywhere. I think it is similar to strongpoint's doubleskill weapons idea.

My idea was to substitute for current weapon skills some new categories that cut across the current weapon types. For example, Thrusting, Slashing and Bashing, Parrrying, Poled. (Maybe more, maybe less, maybe different ones.) Then, assign to each weapon a T/S/B weighting. For example, maces might be 100% bashing. Staves could be a mix of all of them. Short swords could be 50% thrusting, 35% parry, 15% slash. Etc.

If the doubleskilling or anything else would make the Crawl better, I'm confident that someone find right equations for the relationship between skills and weapon effectiveness. You might want "big club" (100% bashing) and "huge axe" (80% bashing, 20% slashing) to do similar amount of damage for a similar amount of invested XP. This would be no problem with the right equation. You might is that damage when skills are all at 27 to be similar for staves and sabres. That, too, you could set up with the right equation. The same goes for the doubleskill idea. It sounds like the system is imperfect at the moment (little benefit to raising shortblades above 10; str has surprisingly little affect on melee). I don't mean to suggest that any idea out there is actually worth the rebalancing effort, just that it's possible.

Also, some doubleskill-like system might be a good place for pure melee characters to put excess XP in the endgame.

[Strongpoint]

I have been thinking about this and have another proposal

Why not add auxiliary attacks working like unarmed but for certain weapons

Hand axe - auxiliary: bash like mace
Halberd - auxiliary: use as an axe
Spear : bash as with staff

and so on

Some auxiliary attacks are auto (Halberd), and some aren't (spear) and require the skill

[dpeg]

Strongpoint: Your proposal is a buff to all weapon types, so it needs thought how to counterbalance it. (This may sound lazy, but you couldn't guess how many suggestions we get that end with "a little tweaking and adjusting and it'll be fine".)

The other suggestion, namely that top tier weapons need dual skills is a plain nerf. It is transparent for the player and a rather simple modification balance-wise.

[ryak]

I don't see how this necessarily needs to be a buff to all weapon types. I'm pretty sure it could be implemented in such a way that roughly the current progression remains as you put experience into your weapon skill, except instead of being one skill capped at 27 for the effective maximum, there would be two skills at 27.

I'm fairly sure that you wouldn't be able to use that much exp towards melee if you were playing a hybrid, so this pretty much just works out as a way to allow more viable high level pure melee builds, in my opinion, which sounds like a good thing.

[Strongpoint]

Strongpoint: Your proposal is a buff to all weapon types, so it needs thought how to counterbalance it. (This may sound lazy, but you couldn't guess how many suggestions we get that end with "a little tweaking and adjusting and it'll be fine".)

The other suggestion, namely that top tier weapons need dual skills is a plain nerf. It is transparent for the player and a rather simple modification balance-wise.

Well it's hard to propose balance changes, because i am not coder and mechanics are well hidden from players.

I don't really think about balance, I care about more interesting fighters. Casters got spells, casters got spellschools. Every caster is unique. They have decisions: what spells to learn, what schools to train.

And pure Fighters? What strategy decisions do they have? Veeery limited.
And don't tell me that there are planned weapon moves, it looks so minor and it's about tactics, not strategy. If I understood it properly, moves will be based on weapon skill. so...

[GermanJoey]

I like the gist of this idea. I imagine it working something like this, where each weapon gets a virtual skill bonus based on their cross-trained skills:

(for reference, the cross-training list from learndb is: Short <-> Long Blades, Maces <-> Axes, Axes <-> Polearms, Polearms <-> Staves, Maces <-> Staves also Slings<->Throwing)

ShortBlades = ShortBlades + max((LongBlades-ShortBlades)/2, sqrt(LongBlades))
LongBlades = LongBlades + max((ShortBladesLongBlades)/2, sqrt(ShortBlades))
Maces = Maces + max((Axes-Maces)/2, (Staves-Maces)/2, sqrt(Axes+Staves))
Axes = Axes + max((Polearms-Axes)/2, (Maces-Axes)/2, sqrt(Polearms+Maces))
Polearms = Polearms + max((Axes-Polearms)/2, (Staves-Polearms)/2, sqrt(Axes+Staves))
Staves = Staves + max((Maces-Staves)/2, (Polearms-Staves)/2, sqrt(Maces + Polearms))
Slings = Slings + max((Throwing-Slings)/2, sqrt(Throwing))
Throwing = Throwing + max((Slings-Throwing)/2, sqrt(Slings))

The cross-training XP bonus for weapon skills would be eliminated with this change.

So, for instance, if your ShortBlades was at 9, and your LongBlades was at 1, your virtual LongBlades skill would actually be 5. However, if your ShortBlades was at 9, and your LongBlades was at 9, it would be as if both were at 12! This bonus could be adjusted (e.g., sqrt()-1), and there should probabl be a max(27, X) around each equation, but the idea would be to encourage mixing it up a little bit in your melee skills. I think its fair, keeping in mind that there's already an XP penalty for learning more skills...