Yesterday I was trying to make a new build and realized that the lack of secondary (off-hand) items-weapons is killing replayability.
Options:
Two-handed weapons: cool, after building two characters you get used to the mechanics (slow attack, earn focus just enough to cast your runes and heal, invest points to increase your armor and health while avoid movement penalties)
One handed weapons: Faster and more versatile builds BUT the lack of combinations with off-hand make it boring. Mele→ Use shield / Range→Bow. But what if I want a mele without blocking (shield becomes a stat-enchantment holder and that’s it).
Not to mention that spoils fantasy. Wakisashi with shield (sad). Wand with shield (weird). Dagger with shield (lol).
At the moment there aren’t rewarding combinations-interactions with off-hand weapons and main weapon. The uses are:
-Blocking (and if you go for this better have a heavy shield)
-Enchantment-stat holder.
-Range attacks (With bow, which could be somewhat interesting if they didn’t put stamina as main resource. You could attack to gain focus and then use bow instead of spamming atacks at safe distance)
Anyways. End of the rant. I know they are building new off-hand items (a year ago), and I hope to play with those soon to enjoy again this greate game.
It’s (partially) true, also the bows will go from off-hand weapons to primary weapons so then the shield will be the only off-hand if they don’t add new off-hands.
They’ve talked several times about the new off-hand weapons we’ve been waiting for them for a long time like pipes and orbs, but haven’t shown anything yet.
They also plan on adding runes to shields, making them more interesting.
I hope that these additions will be included in the multiplayer update otherwise we will have to wait for the combat update.
I agree very often both bows and shields are used only as passive buffs xD, but I doubt that when they add the new off-hands the characters will be very elegant, with a pipe or an orb constantly in the secondary hand.
For example this build exists because i wanted to freeze the enemies with the bow and then hit them with a strong attack without swapping weapons, so I have a mece (which among other things has a moovest similar to a greatsword) and the secondary weapon instead is complementary to that special one and therefore it has to swap between one and the other based on the enemies you face and the situations you find yourself in.
And in general even without considering the off-hand through interesting combinations of the primary and secondary weapons (and the runes) you can make quite interesting builds in my opinion the biggest limitation is that the weapons with different scaling cannot be combined. I hope the class system won’t be limiting in similar ways.
Cool example of synergy, thanks! But I would argue that it isn’t about the bow itself but the ice build up, so you could do it with a wand or any other ice infused weapon. Anyways, still a good idea.
