Shattered Kingdoms

Of Cyra

I think any weapon could beat another, it is the skill of the user. Because of this I'd suggest higher levels of skill when using weapons in SK that surpass mastery, ones that take much longer to achieve. This would make a 1000 hour mercenary that uses a bo staff better than an 50 hour giant barb that GM'd in 3 days no matter what weapon he uses. would also go so far as to suggest skill increases that go hand in hand with hours played. This would add a whole new dimension to SK and make the older fighters truly feared for the skills they might possess. I dont know about you but I hated watching a player like Karn?, the zavijan with the katana who played for so long get ho'd by some dumb giant that just hit champion. As far as the initial post here, I like it and do agree, however more subtypes do need representation in more durable materials also. I have played at least 5 GM barbs and mercs and the weapon choices are relatively few compared to the number of total sub-types if you want to be competitive. Look at someone like Inzaarid who should be able to tear down an entire group of master-level fighters with his broadsword, but he is forced to flee or die because broadsword is mid-grade at best and his hours and devotion account for nothing.

thats a great idea.

Some warriors suck no matter how old they get.

Agreed. Having 1000+ hours doesn't, and shouldn't mean you won't get your [REDACTED] handed to you.

Please, no more implementations that revolve around time sinks.

I don't want to have to idle for another 700 hours on my mercenary to become effective at weaponry.

One of the biggest problems that has already been mentioned is the extreme lack of builders implementing good material/quality subtypes of lesser used weaponry.

One of the main reasons everyone funnels towards a few select subtypes is because of the availability of said weapons.

Take longswords for example. They aren't the best weapons in the world, they're rather slow, not the best accuracy, really just good damage. Yet many people use them. Why? Because there's like a billion mithril or better longswords in the game. They use longswords over something better such as a Katana, simply because they'd rather use an energy longsword over a tanso steel katana.

This coupled with the fact that builders in general make areas with the majority of the weapons being desirable subtypes of good materials, and the very few undesirable subtypes they throw in, are hurt even more by the fact that the builders make them crap materials like iron.

This line of building funnels people even further into using generic subtypes.

Let's take a few widely used weapon subtypes, and how many weapons of that subtype you can think of that are mithril or better.

Battle-Spear: Void Spear, Gigantic Yari, Spear of the Cycle, Unholy Spear of Dark Energy, Adamantite Spear, etc...

Pike: Mottled Pike, Karnak's Pike(Whatever it's called), Battered Mithril Pike, That Flaming White Diamond Pike, etc...

Those are widely used subtypes with lots of weapons in those subtypes of good quality. Now let's take something like Pitchfork, a weapon that compares similar to the two weapons listed above.

Pitchfork: Diamond Military Fork....

That's about all I can think of. So nobody specs in it, except Tragonis.

If some of the massive amount of high quality weapons in the "widely used" subtytpes were removed, and more weapons of high quality were added to the rarely used subtypes, I wager we'd see that change a bit.

Sure there are a lot of weapons that are just worse than other subtypes, Kamas for example, beat the snot out of about every other one hander out there, in terms of the combination of damage, accuracy, and speed, it only worsens matters that there are so many kamas out there of amazing material and quality.

I'm not saying for instance that the mottled pike should just be removed from the game flat out, but limit the copies of it, I think there are 3-4 in the game now? Make it only a 1-2 limit, and take those 2 left over vnums and make 2 more good quality pitchforks or something. If you do that with every excessive high level weapon out there, eventually there will be a good smattering of many different subtypes all with a few high quality weapons to select from, and much more variation will be seen.

This isn't falling on deaf ears. I am planning to implement a better way for immortals to see how many of each special weapon subtypes are already in the game so that they can make more informed decisions.

Awesome. While you're at it, can you tell Sadr to reply to my email?

Kidding of course. Although I would like a reply if you read this Sadr!

There is actually two adamantite pitchforks in the game, and one diamond. But since it does not have reach its only almost as good as a battle spear or pike. I still enjoy being the only one specced in it though. Also, has anyone else noticed that axes still blow balls? They supposed to make them better for d0rfs, but my d0rf is specced in battle axes and it still sucks so hard it hurts. Can we do something about that?

I finally rated how I feel on some of these weapon subtypes. And I have the strong urge to shoot some of you folks. Have you even used some of these weapons? I feel like some folks are just randomly picking a number out of 10 to rate them.