As a warrior reguardless of what spec you choose there seems to be a lack of a viable choice in weapons. Speed weapons are the only weapons worth using. What ever happened to a broadsword being useful for hunting or fighting, how about a scimitar? I would really like to see the weapon stats changed to allow a greater variety in fighting. All warriors look the same and carry almost identical weapons takes all originality out of the game which it what made me fall in love with it the first place. Please for the love ofgod fix this issue please

Great post. Agree. Solution: Standardize other weapon types to have minimums the same as rapiers/hammers/klangaxes/katanas.

Hear hear. This is a topic I wholly support. I've always found it such a shame.

To make things more interesting, I'd recommend lowering the maximum precision and possibly damage on speed weapons, increase the maximum damage/precision on the other weapon types (each in its 'specialty' department) slightly.
That way, speed weapons are really good for speed mainly, and if you want weapons to burst wound/damage with, you'll use the other types.

As soon as damage becomes viable and wounding starts working on plate, sure.

The wounding/plate issue already had a thread a while ago. As a warrior, I personally prefer the high protection plate offers and wouldn't want to give that away for a better ability to scratch other warriors. But I guess to each their own.
Damage can be upped a bit, but I don't see how that is affected by what I suggested above. If damage weapons aren't viable, few people will have max damage speed type weapons, anyway.

No, not if a change like that makes switching tactics a little and changing weapon stats around a little (from speed to precision or whatever) force a change from katanas say to greatswords. That would be a big screw you to people with weapon runes. I do agree with equalizing the min stats on all weapons to what it is on speed ones.

Such an issue seems to be easy to circumvent by giving a one-time option to switch the weapontype within a specialisation for runed weapons.

This is pretty much the only thing I can agree with at this point. Even if the admin provide a window for rune switching, there's still going to be plenty of people who might miss it. I think it's high time we just scraped the idea that warrior weapon stats should make them unique on their own right and focus on doing that via design. And if you think that's a terrible idea, I recommend going through all the katana/rapier designs and seeing how many actually look like katana/rapier style weapons.

The stats were already normalized most of the way in the last round of adjustments, but for some unknown reason, the speed weapons all kept a lower damage minimum, making them more flexible in the tempering. Fix that one oversight, and we're good.

I'm no warrior, but I'm all for being able to design more things that would actually be used. Standardizing the stats across the patterns gets a hearty thumbsup from me.

I dont know if thats entirely true though. I was able to bash faster as a tae'dae with a claymore than I did with a katana. Granted it was tae'dae.. But anyone have the numbers for bashing with the max out damage weapons compared to the speed ones?

I for one like the idea of reducing the damage a speed weapon can inflict. That makes more sense. The real damage should come from other weapons. Would seem more real.
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Annihilate your competition at the show with a killer portable show booth exhibit. No weapons required.

Back when the tempering changes went through, I made big, detailed posts on this subject, arguing strongly in favour of universal stat minimums and maximums. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if they are still on my hard drive somewhere. Despite being shot down, my opinion has not wavered on the subject.

Beyond the raw mechanics of it, here is the crux of the problem:

There will always be a dominant strategy, and players maximizing their strengths will always take the weapon that best fits the dominant strategy.

The dominant strategy is dictated by the base code governing knight combat.

If you change the base code, to say, make damage weapons more appealing, either you will make it appealing enough that it will become the new dominant strategy, OR it won't be, and nothing will change.

There is a little bit of wiggle room here- you can have a situation where, say, damage would never be effective 1v1, but might be the best contribution to a group scenario. Or marginal situations like Veyrzhul hitting the squishier illithoids with a damage axe with magic runes on it. But over all, there will be a "best choice" strategy, even if it is marginal, and players will select weapons based on how well they accomplish this choice.

Hence, keeping the flavour of weapon differentiation will only have the logical end result of no differentiation at all. Wheras, a universal stat set would mean players would choose weapons that appealed to them for roleplay or simply visual reasons, thereby increasing differentation.

Case in point:

With the (forever appreciated) implementation of pliers, I have been more free than ever before to experiment (with horrible, bug-ridden results in some cases for which I deeply apologise ). But one of the very first things I did was to design a masterweapon bastard sword*, and then do the opposite of what prevailing wisdom is- I minimized speed, then maxed out a mix of precision and damage. Then I slapped all my weapon runes on it. My hope was that it would be the sort of sword that would mesh well with hunting-ambush, a big, puissanced assault hit.

The marginal improvement in damage and wounding over my mainstream speed wounder katana was almost negligible. It certainly wasn't worth the grossly extended balance recovery time. I could force the damage/wounder into a more traditional form, but why? There's nothing I could do with it that I couldn't do better with a katana, due to the minimum stats.

*I picked bastard sword as they are the most rare design, just for fun. Since all weapons have the same maximums, and all but katanas have the same minimum speed, all that mattered for this was that it wasn't a katana.

Then you need to rework the knight formula again, or all you are really doing here is nerfing knights. Speed weapons dominate because they have lower minimums in damage and precision. This allows either damage or precision to be a dump-stat, freeing up points to go in to desireable stats. Speed weapons are also picked because their only higher minimum is in speed, which will never be picked for a dump stat.

So, if you restrict speed weapons, you're just forcing them to be less useful than they are, without changing anything else. Thus, as far as most knights are concerned, such a solution would be deemed "crap-tacular".

The most straightforward solution is to all weapons to have the same minimum values for all stats. Set them at the lowest for each type.

Either that, or re-work the knight formula yet again.

Knights need a huge rework. They've needed a rework for a long time. They've bitched and moaned about how badly they need a rework, and aren't combat viable without -artifacts-, a principal Estarra has made it blatant is not something approved of, yet has seemingly become acceptable in this instance. Other guilds have taken notice of how badly knights need a rework. In fact, it's been so needed and for so long that it's pretty much an accepted fact of life.

A cosmetic patch to make all weapon choices functionally identical is not the solution. Finally fixing the goddamned problems is. Then again, all of us know that just won't happen, especially after this long of a 'meh, too much effort despite how badly it's fubar'. So you might as well remove any meaning from weapon choices and make them purely cosmetic, because that's the only way they'll ever see use. Kthxbai.

Except, the weapon bit and knight combat in general are two mutually exclusive issues. An easy fix for one does not preclude a fix for the other, nor does it make any statement one way or the other about the necessity of it.

Say you live in a house that has significant structual problems and needs major work done on it. Lets say your oven doesn't work as well for want of a simple part. You don't say "oh wow, the house needs so much work that fixing the oven is pointless".

The only time they overlap is when the suggestion to fix the weapon issue is "rework weapon stats in a convoluted way that keeps them different, to try and create diversity" (which, to my mind at least, is doomed to failure because there will always be an "optimal" choice). Which is like saying "I'm gonna fix me some oven by kocking out a couple of load-bearing walls and installing one of those tables from Mongolian Barbeque. Yeeeaaah."

Yeah, you're never going to make damage, precision, AND speed weapons all viable at one time, except by making them all the same. And really, knights already have so many more options than other archetypes, they don't need their weapon types to be unique and viable too. Make them cosmetic only and call it a day.

Play a warrior, and try to kill someone worth mentioning with -any- knighthood spec without being at least trans 6, and packing at least 2Kcr in runes. When you have done so, then I will acknowledge anything you have to say about warriors. Unless you make a massive OOC investment, a ridiculous amount beyond -any- other archetype, you have -no- options. Just calling katana and rapiers by different names means precisely jack :censor:. It isn't a 'weapon choice' it's a string choice. It's about as meaningful as changing the names of all blades to 'banana'. It's not a 'weapons choice', it's just vanity to avoid looking at the real problem. It's not a case of a small part of the oven missing in a house with structural problems. It's that your gas range doesn't work because there's a rupture in the pipe somewhere. Fix the damned house itself.

Yes. I know it will never happen. Yes, I know my bitching is pointless. Yes, I know people have bitched about it until the horse was dead, gone and buried. However, purely cosmetic :censor: like this only distracts from time that could be used to fix the real issue. Then again, if it were ever gonna get fixed it woulda gotten fixed a long time ago. And now I'm going to step away from the computer, take a walk, and cool off.

The problem here lies with the armour system. As soon as you get into the range of 100+ armour, either with plate or with robes/tattoos + trueshield/ka deflect, building woulds becomes excessively hard or completely futile if your opponent even only does a modicum of hindering. And it only gets worse beyond that. If you remove the drastic armour outliers (I'd personally still say warriors can keep that privilege) OR alter the wounding:armour curve to some extent for high values, warriors won't have to struggle so hard against the top tier robe wearers.
Right now, for anyone who cannot afford artifact runes, I'd recommend going bonecrusher and probably krokani. Your afflictions aren't the best, but you'll at least be able to build wounds against some of those cutting-specced robies.