Shattered Kingdoms

No really. It is. Who came up with this idea?

Whats the point of having a second/third/fourth attack skill, if you can only use those skills with crappier and crappier weapons?

It's dumb.

Thanks.

I won't say weapon balance is perfect, but for the most part it's fine the way it is.

My thoughts on the matter:

1) I don't like the mystery behind how many attacks you'll get. It's hard to know what to expect out of a weapon's speed, especially when you're a mercenary considering which weapon to specialize in. Haste further exacerbates the problem - haste alone can make certain weapons absolutely worth using, where they were worthless before. There is also the mysterious level 39 -> 40 increase in speed, which I have not been able to confirm myself, but is reported quite often.

2) On the whole, I feel weapons should have a higher minimum speed. Too many weapons simply aren't being used because they're too slow. I'm looking at (most) polearms, staff, mace, flail, a lot of axes. My weapon differentiation thread from about a year/year and a half ago was meant to address a lot of this by giving specific, unique advantages to those types of weapons, but I think an easier, short-term fix would be to make things faster overall. This would be a straight buff to melee, but I'm not certain it would make things unbalanced.

3) This might be less of an issue if that mythical armor subtype system ever came around. :O

Melee is too fast already. Speed is fine.

Agreed...

Edit: More specifically, I agree there are several subtypes that are not worth using, in general. I don't like it, but the solution isn't upping their speed. It makes no IC sense, and could potentially throw the system way out of balance. As it stands now, most weapons have their place. You may not use most, but someone has a reason to use it...

sleeper

Ever seen a scythe or something used in pk?

They are extremely slow and really suck...Bad.

That's because when lots of people think scythe, they think normal farming scythe. Which with the handles and all would be difficult to use effectively. But a war scythe or something of the like would be awesome, the shaft is curved for the hands, there aren't any small planks sticking out of the side. And if anyone gripes about farming tools sucking, take a look at the sickle.

Or the kama.

Scythes are very effective. As long as you don't wield it like "Death" always does. If you're a righty you'll usually have the blade near the bottom of your right leg, so you can swing an under-arc from the bottom right to the upper left. Instead of swinging overhead like you so often see.

I suggested long ago age should have something to do with a mercenaries spec, but this would only make the elite weapons even better. All weapons are much better with spec but many are ignored because they are comparably worse than others. I would like to see something implemented where anything could be a potential spec that would be formidable in time, but I'm not sure how that would be coded.