Under the current system, Short Blades are only really valued for Stabbing, and Stabbing does not take Short Blades skill into account. Most races crosstrain into Long Blades once they find a good one, if they ever bothered training up Short Blades. Due to the difficulty in obtaining Long Blades in the early game, most melee dedicated characters simply choose Axes, Polearms, or Maces over them, and none of those crosstrain into Blades. There isn't really a need to have 2 entirely different skill sets and sets of items for a difference that can be addressed as easily as by saying all 1H “Blades” get a Stabbing bonus.

However, consolidation may not be the best answer, as I discuss in Stabbing Revision. I'm leaving this page up though as a reference should the devs decide consolidation over making Short Blades into a real weapon class as they have with Slings.

Please don't insult Short Blades by a comparison with Slings. Short Blades can be an effective weapon, even without Stabbing. Have you tried electricity or distortion ? Distortion can be reliably gotten from Lugonu. Long story short I think Short Blades can be fixed, because there's not much fixing left. — b0rsuk 2010-02-16 06:31

Blades

I copied this table over from the http://crawl.chaosforge.org/index.php?title=Weapon page without editing any of the stats on them. All I did was combine the Short and Long Blades tables into 1, and as you can see they already flow into each other well, and would require minimal tinkering to work if changed into this format. As for Spriggans / Kobolds being much better with Short blades than Long, it may be necessary to make Scimitars and Demon Blades 1.5 handed to let them keep the lower of their 2 aptitudes. That is just one possible solution out of many.

Crosstraining could be changed to Blades ↔ Axes ↔ Polearms ↔ Staves ↔ Maces ?

Further ideas and comments welcome. I have no idea what the devs already have in mind for a consolidation, I just wanted to create a page to present the information about existing Blades in an easy to read format to facilitate further discussion.

dpeg 2010-01-06 22:28: First, I think that a merger of SBl and LBl is possible, but not urgent or necessary. I can also imagine improving the situation by keeping two skills and helping short blades in some ways (which could be quite indirect). Now, assuming that we do a merger, the real questions are these: How many weapon should a type (skill) have? And what is the progression, what are the choices? (E.g. are the weapons at the same (low/middle/high) skill with different effects/purposes?) As your list shows, there are 13 blades altogether which is way too much, in my opinion.

My preferences are probably different from yours, but I rank blade axing to be much better than skill merging. And no, I wouldn't touch triple swords (yay to silly humour). Instead I'd axe katanas (kill the silly cliche) and also knives.

porkchop 2010-01-06 23:13: Lets keep in mind how this would affect acquirement and god gift probabilities as well. I assume that even without acquirement- a player that wants to go 2H is going to have a very hard time even finding an nice item generated on the floor with a cluttered weapon class.

vandal 2010-01-07 00:08: I'm going to assume then that you're already cutting things from Maces in 0.6? Because when I checked the Maces table it had 14 weapons compared to these 13. I don't mind cutting Knives and Katanas personally, or messing with any stats. As this table exists though it is a pretty fair reflection of Maces and Axes imo, so this merger could be done without really ruining the game balance as it exists right now. Also, dpeg I understand this is not a priority thing for 0.6, just something I thought I might be able to work on personally.. I want to learn how to code :)

porkchop 2010-01-07 13:38: M&F is a cluttered weapon cat, but it is very easy to find a good 2H weapon in that category, various ogre, ettin, orcs, and even naga can be slain to obtain great mace or GSC. Finding a greatsword can be hard depending on if you get lucky with floor generation or happen to come across orc warrior with one. And you can forget about triple sword. You might see one after many many games, and the player might live long enough to actually use it.

qui 2010-02-16 20:30: I'd like to argue against axing katanas. I'm not for or against the “silly cliche”, I just think that there are few rare-but-very-good weapons as it is in the game, and getting rid of one of them doesn't benefit anything, but hurts diversity. Personally, I'd be more interested in adding more. Imho there is nothing wrong with a lot of weapon types, and that itself makes me choose blades more often than axes. Furthermore, I think that endgame melee chars are way too uniform now. There is a great need to diversify weapons rather than axing them and leaving just a few with a “logical progression” between them, which means that in most chars using a given weapon class will end up with almost exactly the same weapon. Yes, have the common, “basic” types sorted out, but consider adding more rare ones: a bit better than common ones, or more imbalanced, or simply interesting to have for whatever reason. Something that the player would actually be happy to stumble upon.

Blades

In this table, Knives, Quick Blades, Sabres, Scimitars, and Katanas have been removed, reducing the total count to 8 weapons. This is again without altering any values, and the table still flows quite well from weapon to weapon, and remains comparable to Axes:

Axes

Compare these lists and it becomes clear that the relationship between Blades and Axes is that for nearly every Blade there is an Axe with 1 higher dmg, 1-2 less accuracy, and less speed. Axes meanwhile feature everything you could want in a weapon category, a strong 1 hand or 1.5 hand weapon to use with a shield as a small or normal sized race, and the Battle Axe and big daddy Executioner for hardcore demon gutting.

Now that we have a baseline established…

Blades

Speed is the name of the Blade game; more pronounced than before, at a small cost in accuracy. With Quick Blades out of the picture, Daggers can potentially become not-horrible in early game melee by gaining the old speed rating of a Quick Blade (but not the damage) and losing 1 acc. Against early game monsters AC is not a huge concern so this should be a decent buff. Base damage is one of the biggest deciding factors (maybe the biggest period) when choosing a weapon, so a larger speed distinction between Blades and Axes will help make Blades more appealing in general, and make the difference between them and other weapon types stand out more.

comment by dis_astranagant: Your new long sword is much more powerful than you give it credit and your double sword is the strongest one handed weapon in the game by a good margin (it's better than many two handers). The demon blade there practically guarantees a weapon as strong as the old katana just for playing long enough, as well. Please develop some understanding for the meaning of these numbers before you propose playing with them.

— vandal 2010-02-15 01:05 This was just an example of how to make Blades stand out from the other weapon cats, I am not married to any of these numbers. I will certainly admit I don't fully understand the implications of all of these numbers, as Eith tells me there are maybe 3 people total who completely understand how combat actually works in the code. If you'd like to tweak the numbers in the table to be more reasonable feel free. Also if people would like to suggest alternative weapons or even new ones it might make this better. I was just trying to reduce the overall number in line with what dpeg seems to want.

— vitara 2010-03-19 03:35 With this new table, I can very much forget about playing my favorite spriggan or kobold characters who'll have so little blade choices left for melee/stabbing, not that they're super at melee in the first place. Axing knives and katanas (i.e. one from each existing blade category) from the game is fine IMHO (though for nostalgic reasons we can keep a unique version of each of these two gonner-blades in the game to make finding them special)

— wesleyshaver 2010-09-13 17:50 Like the above user I actually enjoy Short Blades. However the list for long blades looks great. Getting rid of Katanas is a good idea, consider keeping one or two in as fixedarts. Also “Double Swords” and “Triple Swords” always bothered me. They sound like some 10-year-old boy's fantasy concept and are the only unhistorical weapon base types in the game. Please rename “Double Sword” to “Bastard Sword” and “Triple Sword” to “Claymore”.

Unsigned edit by ivec2485 continuing wesleyshaver's paragraph: Just kidding. I'm not autistic, and I think that triple and double swords are a funny thing to have in a game along with curse toes and zombie corn on the cobs.