I'd like to see weapon movesets and animations get some balance adjustments

[YourSponsor]

I don’t know if this is already in the works or if it’s just planned for a much later date but I’d like to see the weapons in this game get a pass on their moveset animations, and what I mean by that is there seems to be no rhyme or reason to which weapons get to be fast or slow or short range or long range and as a result there are some pretty big imbalances. I don’t mind that a greatsword can be fast and I don’t mind that a dagger can be slow as long as the animations make sense, but from a meta perspective there doesn’t seem to be any incentive to use certain weapons with bad animations.

For example, there’s a onehanded axe whose name currently escapes me but its standard attacks take longer to pull off than some weapons’ charge attacks. Maybe that would be fine if it had the damage to compensate but it seems to be the case that damage values are normalized across the entire weapon category, so it gets poor damage on top of being slow because there are other axes in the same category whose movesets are faster.

Meanwhile, a greatsword like Summer’s Sting by comparison, has longer reach, a wider arc, more stagger, and more damage, but in exchange for these advantages over the axe it’s… Also FASTER? There are many examples of this where certain onehanded weapons are made obsolete by a twohanded counterpart in every way (Higher weight is not relevant; the damage gap is still huge even after accounting for shifting stat points out of damage and into equip load to make up for it). I could see maybe a couple different ways to go about this, you could manually tweak each individual weapon’s base damage to be in line with their current animations so that slower weapons hit a bit harder, or you could tweak the speed of animations to better match the range and damage they provide and make sure that the attacks flow into each other better. The platonic ideal of the NRFTW consumer who picks a slow clunky weapon and plays in a very precise tactical manner just as Moon intended should not be punished or feel like they’re gimping themselves.

For experienced players this isn’t really a problem because you know which weapons you like and which to stay away from, but new players are going in blind and are left to the whims of RNG. Thankfully the early blacksmith merchant offers a wide array of weapons to try but players won’t know what weapons they’ll like and won’t be able to afford trying them all and won’t even know that they SHOULD be trying them, and the result that I can attest to anecdotally, more than once, is that someone will get stuck with a weapon they hate and fall off the game. Not everyone is going to have a friend playing with them who can tell them to just grab our lord and savior Pig Sticker and go nuts. Some people are going to find a

My friend gave the game a try in Breach, got a Claymore, and they struggled so badly that they cried and uninstalled the game. I convinced them to give it a second try for the coop beta, they got a Shortbow instead, and now they love the game, 30 hours in it.

Ideally they’d just try every weapon they can get their hands on to know what they like and don’t like, but I think there’s an opportunity here for the game to meet them halfway by making sure that every weapon feels good to use, because right now there are a large number of weapons that don’t. Whether that’s speeding up slower weapons to match their damage or adjusting damage to match their speed, something needs to happen.

Aside from that, there’s also a fair few animations that could probably use a little cleanup. Off the top of my head, the first two attacks of Summer’s Sting, if you allow them to play out entirely, seem to return to an idle pose befitting a greataxe before snapping back to the greatsword idle, as your character briefly clips his hands through the sword to grip it as if he were half-swording it. A consequence of having a hundred or so unique movesets in the game I’m sure, as some animations are necessarily repurposed. Not a huge deal, but it’s still a bit of an eyesore and once you see it it’s hard to unsee it.

Additionally, it feels like a lot of weapons just have incomplete movesets, either missing running attacks or rolling attacks or having no charge attacks at all. If this is isn’t intended as part of the balance of the weapon, it should obviously be addressed before the full release.

In general my opinions largely mirror what Lombix_4 says in his thread here Critique of Weapon Movesets

[Lombix_4]

@YourSponsor

there’s a onehanded axe whose name currently escapes me but its standard attacks take longer to pull off than some weapons’ charge attacks.

Yes, if I remember correctly, it’s the Hunter’s Axe, which is also the weapon that introduces you to the category. It’s practically unusable, one of the worst weapons in the game. I have no idea how such a weapon is still in the game without being fixed!
I think if Dev did a Crucible run with every weapon, they’d be a little more aware of the obvious shortcomings.

In any case, it’s obviously not an easy job, I’ve played a lot of Souls, and I’m a person who likes to play whit different weapons, so I’m pretty familiar with this kind of stuff. So I decided to do a review of each weapon, I always wanted to do it but without the mannequin it was really complicated, and I hope the developers will read it and fix the problems I find (at least the more serious ones).

@YourSponsor

My friend gave the game a try in Breach, got a Claymore, and they struggled so badly that they cried and uninstalled the game. I convinced them to give it a second try for the coop beta, they got a Shortbow instead, and now they love the game, 30 hours in it.

I too played with the Claymore for the first time, I discovered only after playing the game that I essentially chose one of the most difficult weapons, while many other people have noticed that the fast weapons in this game are almost always better, but at least the Claymore is a complete weapon, and it’s not the moveset that’s the problem but the focus gain.

This is obviously the most serious problem, imagine a player is interested in wands, uses only those and then takes for granted that all the weapons in the game are Clunky like that, maybe he has already put points into intelligence and it doesn’t make sense for him to change weapons, or maybe he just doesn’t want to.

@YourSponsor

could probably use a little cleanup. Off the top of my head, the first two attacks of Summer’s Sting, if you allow them to play out entirely, seem to return to an idle pose befitting a greataxe before snapping back to the greatsword idle, as your character briefly clips his hands through the sword to grip it as if he were half-swording it.

It’s true, I don’t think I’ll talk about it in my topics except in extreme cases like:

@Lombix_4

Jackknife

Because even just talking about the movesets makes the topics very long, and most of the animations are fine and don’t cause problems when you’re focused on the combat.

@YourSponsor

If this is isn’t intended as part of the balance of the weapon, it should obviously be addressed before the full release.

Most likely “not intended” in the sense that if they had more time to work on each weapon I think they would all be complete with a few exceptions, like a weapon that has the same attack as roll attack and as base attack but the attack works well for both.

[Zenith]

Something more to consider is some weapons not having charged attacks or dodge attack animations.

It’s understandable if this was a distinguishing feature and these weapons had something else to compensate, but since they don’t, they just feel very flat and monotone as a result compared to the weapons that do.