Take a look of the following two weapons:
Climber’s Peak tier 12 / Stamina Cost 14 / Focus Gain 10
Whetted Wedge tier 13 / Stamina Cost 14 / Focus Gain 10
Both cost the same stamina BUT
Sword is SLOWER compared with the Hammer, and does LESS damage even with tier 14. Hammer is even lighter.
So, the sword should be faster OR deal more damage OR deal more poise damage, but it’s not the case. At least more focus gain or less stamina cost. The sword is just a bad option compared with the hammer.
Slower weapons should deal more damage or at least more poise damage.
Both have:
-Charge attack
-Roll charge attack
-Roll attack
-Combo attack of 3 movements
Any other case of unbalanced weapons?
Let’s make a list here.
That’s related but different issue and a more complex one.
The idea is to discuss balancing weapons on their most fundamental base: moveset, speed and stats.
So, two handed could be compared with two handed if their runes can be shared, and so on.
Ture, but I didn’t want to talk about runes because it’s a more complex issue and players can change runes as their please.
I also read something from Thomas in which he said that in future updates two handed weapons should allow players to use the same amount of runes that one handed + off hand, so in the future you shouldn’t have limitations. Atm we can’t even equip basic runes (heal, light, etc) to shields.
But runes balancing it’s another issue. Let’s think first about balancing weapons without runes, maybe runes balance would come on top of that?
I was thinking…
Even if the weapons are balanced with exactly the same attack speed, moveset and stats. What would be the point anyway? One should be better than the other somehow in order to use it and vice versa, with some trade-offs.
But atm Whetted Wedge is just a plain bad option. Bear in mind that their runes can be swapped, so native rune doesn’t matter.
When it comes to these types of things, I always recommend an old video by Extra Credits.
Granted their videos are often hit or miss, this one is on point.
*It talks about “intangibles”.
Specifaclly how to avoid relying on “big numbers”.
*This is something League of Legends thrives on.
With each new champion, they don’t try to simply make them “better” by just giving them higher numbers.
RIot try to make each character have a unique play style.
This is something Moon Studios tries to do as well by adding unique attack patterns to each weapon.
Tho this is early access, so some weapons have the same pattern or so similar it might as well be the same one.
In some respect, I wonder if each weapon should have a “unique” rune. One that only that weapon specifically has. Just like the bow, it cannot be removed.
Call it a “signature rune”.
This would make the weapons feel more unique..
Although, we do have a new class system coming in Patch 1.
*I wonder how that’ll end up affecting weapons.
Here I start talking about runes but then I end up talking about weapons in general, the solution i proposed solves this kind of problem you mentioned, there are many examples of 1 to 1 comparisons like this one that showed us that results in a clear winner, whether it’s range, damage, moveset. we could bring each weapon to the same level and do the comparison but, here I propose a solution that makes the game easier to balance for the devs even if they probably have to rewrite some code.
