Shattered Kingdoms

In light of the recent changes I've seen a LOT of weapons become viable, interesting, and frankly potentially awesome that just weren't worth considering before. This makes barbs even more attractive, as they can fury with anything. Food for thought - make specialize apply to weapon classes instead of subtypes? Although I could see a couple weapon classes being more popular than others, I do not think this would break the game at all. It might even allow newer players the opportunity to play a merc that specs sword and then get to use an epee when they get one, instead of just being told "no thats too hard a subtype for you to keep find something else".

I think it's a pretty great idea.

I've seen this worked on other muds to great effect.

Thematically this is something to do with Mercenaries, Barbarians and Swashies are sort of specialized already.

Developmentally I'd suggest:

Weapon Specialization Feats for Mercs
Develop Combat Forms for Swashies
Brute strength feats for Barbs

Barbarian already has the most important feat of all: Fury.

Meh. While barbarians did get an unnecessary buff with berserk adding to MP (wtf?) they did also incur a penalty to dodge, so at least it sort of evens out. The nice thing about weapon specialization and the enchant system now is that weapons are actually -more- interchangeable than they used to be, it seems. I think that specialization should remain as it is, it isn't as if any weapon subtypes were made more or less available with this change.

I think the idea behind specialization would be SKILLs available dependent on the style which you train to fight.

That is what I would have thought.

For example someone who trains to be specialized in spears would fight differently than someone who specializes in fighting with a sword and shield, or axes.

It is a decision a warrior would make as to what subset of skills he'd like to unlock and what weapon type he'd prefer to specialize in.

You could even make NOT choosing a specialization a decision. Generalists get to keep access to some skills that you'd loose when specializing.


FOR example, a Generalist might keep Fourth Attack, where a speicalized warrior would lose 4th attack but gain some active skills, like Stab or Cleave, or entangle (with whips)

Specialization could be a decision made at say journeyman level, and would alter the type of skills the merc would have available to them from that point onward

bwah?

Patrisaurus reasoning was "Since the weapon change made a lot more weapons viable, we should allow mercs to spec in 10 times as many weapons."

Personally, I don't think this is necessary. The availability of weapons hasn't changed at all, so you should still spec in what you think is good and that you can get your hands on. If anything, I think that the enchant change widened a mercs options with specialization, because now you can specialize in an inaccurate weapon and enchant its accuracy, or you can specialize in a slow weapon and enchant its speed.

Don't take mah sickles!

I play a merc, and I think this is a bad idea.

Might you provide some reasoning? If the goal is to make combat more active, then I think allowing a class to specialize their fighting to a type of weapon, in order to learn some refined active skill(s) [Note plural, note active]

I would see that as a step in the right direction developmentally.

You'd have to balance things of course.

But take a mace specialization for example:

Pound - Straight up damage attack (like casting a damage spell). Does more damage to prone characters. (You'd need to consider the time of using these skills so it's harder for someone by themselves to setup do more than one pound by themself. But if they had someone else keeping a target on the ground, they could use pound to greater affect)
Breakbone - Does some damage, but the attempt is more to break the bone of a character. (Useage would have a target, breakbone leg, breakbone arm, breakbone head, etc. each with various debuffs associated)
Shieldbreaker - Attempt to Sunder a shield
Uppercut - Does some damage, not as much as pound, but has a chance to Knock a character prone. Not as good a chance as bash.


You get the idea.