The Dual Wielding Gauntlet movesets are worse than the unarmed moveset. They kill the flow of combat, and just generally feel stiff and restrictive. I was really enjoying unarmed combat, and when I met the Monk vendor Ilaria I was excited to find that fists were a viable intended build!
Unfortunately, the tradeoff for this is that you have to use a moveset that is worse in every way. They have less range, they lock you into animations for longer, their sprint attacks leave you even more vulnerable. Not to mention, you lose that really fun backsway counterattack rune that turned enemies into flung pieces of meat and red mist. I was immediately hooked by how punchy and fluid the unarmed moveset is, but the actual weapon movesets feel specifically designed to assist the enemy by granting them massive openings.
I would really love it if the unarmed moveset could be effectively used after the first boss. The easiest and in my opinion best way to do this would just be adding a third Dual Wielding Gauntlet weapon type that has this moveset. I heard some other people suggest giving unarmed its own scaling to balance against not being able to equip runes or parry but it doesn’t sound worth it.
I agree that there should have been a moveset that had the same moves as the basic fists accessible in the early game.
But truth be told, this is a trend across all weapons, not just fists. Almost all “basic” weapons have movesets that are more beautiful, intuitive, practical, and effective than most weapons in their category.
The Claymore has one of the best movesets, if not the best, among the Greatswords.
The Brothers Keepers are the most intuitive, practical, and effective than of the double daggers.
Among the new bows, the Short Bow has the most practical and fun running attack.
In general it seems that every time developers try to make a “simple and effective” weapon the result is a complete weapon that does everything it’s supposed to do well and has many options for combat approaches, all effective and intuitive, but then they make weapons in the same categories that lack a lot of features, the result is that for each category of weapon there is almost always only one or two “complete” weapons (and often one of these is the “basic” weapon) then there are some weapons that have some gimmicks, which are fun but in other aspects the weapon has obvious “friction” points, and then there are the weapons that fail in the gimmick or have serious flaws and when compared to the “complete” weapons are clearly clanky and not as fun.
Some weapons do indeed have a weird or cluncky feel to them. Sometime the animation look kinda strange making the character float above the ground or feel somewhat as if gravity didn’t exist, especially with wands. And a few moveset are downright bad.
In my first run I started developping intellingence, then I found the double hand sword “icebreaker” that scales on this attribute. I was kinda excited to try it out: the moveset was a huge let down: it’s basically just spamming the first animation of the Claymore, and that’s it. Never was a big fan of this type of weapon, yet I was pleaseantly surprised at first that you could have one as a mage. But then it just turned out as a massive desappointment. You’d expect a double hand sword that scales on int to be a bit special, like having some magic wave slashing in the distance or something but this one just felt as if it had lost it’s way during weapon development.
Each weapon has it’s own moveset, and gauntlets do have some that I find good in general. It’s actually one of my favorite weapon category. Some are ridiculously fast slashing and deal moskito bite damage but deal elemental effects very fast, while others are much slower, punchier, and deal much more serious blows. Gotta try them all to find the one that agrees for you. I don’t remember the unarmed moveset too well so I don’t really know about that, but I guess it could be well expected to find a gauntlet that has the exact same moveset.
I agree, There’s a two-handed mace that has a super fancy basic attack and all the rest of the animations are butily and barbique, and it looks like these two weapons should swap their basic attacks, and also the most annoying thing is when “heavy weapons” like greatswords don’t have chargeable attacks (I generally think that not having charged attacks is a shortcoming, it seems like the weapon is incomplete, even if it’s something fast).