Shattered Kingdoms

Right. Dulrik is in charge of weapon attributes. Email him. We exert lots of pressure. There's only one coder. I get tired of exerting pressure when the result is obviously more of what we've seen.

My last email to Dulrik, which was in regards to cheating to avoid banishment, did not even merit a response apparently. I prefer to write someplace where I get a response.

I'm not going to go into all the reasons why I haven't been available to respond for quite awhile now. Most of the reasons are no longer relevant.

As for weapon balancing, as a coder, I spent quite a bit of time last year adding a feature so that other immortals could see exactly how many of each type of weapon were in the game, so that they could balance the numbers better. I think it's obvious that this means not only adding underused types but also removing overused types. The really good types should be balanced by their rarity, which isn't always true.

Personally I'd rather see specialize making good of every weapon, not just making alredy good weapons elite and elite weapons more elite.

Also I feel finesse weapons should be somehow made unnatractive for anyone other than swashbucklers. It's nasty enough that they have to search for 2 good weapons in order to be effective in melee, what with their light armor limitation.

just my 2 cents.

Efforts have been made toward this very end. Sadly there just isn't enough effort to go around.

I can see a Hellion Speccing in cleave

It isn't all the fault of builders. You should be boosting a number of weapon subtypes so that things aren't so one-sided. As it stands, builders feel forced to give their weapons a very few certain subtypes if they ever want to see them used in game.

I was going to say something like this but I figured D would just stick his fingers in his ears and go "AH-LALALALALALALA. AH-LALALALALALALA. My system is infallible and I am never wrong. AH-LALALALALALA."

IMo subtypes are fine. Its specialize not making bad weapons 'worth it' that messes things up.

Imo, good weapons should be easy to find for anyone, with elite weapons being few and limited.

right now, the difference between a speced elite and speced good weapon is that of a BFG and a handgun in Doom. (yes, doom 1)

mercs should be good no matter what weapon they're using so long as theyre speced with it, imho.

Like I've said before, the weapon system ended up doing nothing but increasing the difference between the haves and have nots. The passable weapon types are a small subsection of the weapons, and the good ones an even smaller one. Then eliminating some weapons due to the complete lack of the weapons you're getting a smaller and smaller amount of legitimate weapons.

This wasn't the case pre-weapon changes. Weapons were based on their individual quality, so many more weapons were useable. You could go grab a serrated sword, and while a translucent blade/vorpal sword/etc would blow it out of the water, they were more than useful for leveling and could be used in PK in a pinch. However, since all weapons were useable in one way or another if you found an axe that did nice damage as long as you had the axe skill you were fine, or a mace/staff even.

The best fix that would happen is to scrap the current weapon system, go back to the old system. Do a bit of a revamp to allow the better state of exotics and perhaps thrown weapons(IE: Allow builder flags on weapons for reach/thrown). Make some general guidelines for the builders on damage ranges by level of weapons. Place a level cap on steel and below material types on the rarity scale.

Once you've done all of that, simply give each weapon-type a fitting bonus. Axes might penetrate armor to an extent. Swords might get a bonus to parry. Maces might lower the opponents hit chance. You get the general idea. Allow specialization to simply increase the natural bonus to that weapon type.

You don't have to do all of that, but as long as the weapon system is dependant on extremely slow balance tweaks that often aren't enough, and builders are forced to cherry-pick because of the complete lack of balance between weapon types, you're going to have a terrible game of have and have nots remedied only temporarily remedied by builder action.