Two-handed melee weapons fall behind 1-hand/offhand and the performance gap only gets wider as the game progresses.
Attack speed, micro-stagger, status buildup, and raw damage need serious tweaks across the strata of available weapons because it is obvious that the system has not been balanced with itself; arbitrary decisions have been made about what staggers what - what micro-stuns what.
With normally enchanted two-handed weapons the player is missing out on 3 enchants and a gem slot, not to mention resists and armor in the case of shields. Or 4 gems in the case of exalted gear. There is no way to make up this deficit.
With Plagued gear the gap widens to 4 enchants and a gem slot. There is no way to make up this deficit.
Attack speed, stamina usage, and damage done (to include stagger, micro-stagger) bwtween 1h and 2h weapons given the acknowledged stat disadvantage are not comparable because they are not balanced. There is no ârelationshipâ or systematic continuity they share.
Spending stat points on Equip Load is deeply under-optimized for the amount of protection received, versus investing in multi-stat damage capability of a lighter-faster build (or just more stamina or focus) (Lvl 20, full plate build, most armor upgraded past 7, weapon upgraded to 12 - one shot by a strong attack from Echo Knight in 2nd phase from full HP).
The amount of ultra long far-dodge evasions (or twitch Z-axis evasions that flow into an attack from above) from high damage enemies is overly punishing for 2H melee builds - need a non-charged dash gap-closer.
Solutions:
Least amount of re-work:
Weild Two-handed main weapon in 1 hand, accessible with Ichor (investment tree to mitigate damage loss).
Allow offhand bow/shield to benefit Two-handed main weapons.
Would still require attack speed/efficiency and attack damage increase to balance with 1H DPS scaling.
A whole-of-system-approach:
Two-handed main weapons should have 5 enchant slots normally plus 2 gem slots.
Two-handed main weapons should have 7 enchant slots on plagued items, 1 drawback, and 2 gem slots.
Attack speed/efficiency and damage done increased to balance with 1H DPS scaling.
Every point in Equip Load past 10 is a passive 1% damage mitigation from all sources.
Include a spammable non-charged dash gap-closer for Two-Handed main weapons.
Consider Two-Handed main weapons being able to âbreak armorâ as a passive/secondary status. Once armor is broken all resistances drop to 10 for a period of time. Once status timer is up, armor regenerates but is 20/40/60/80 percent less. Repeatable.
Just make two handed weapons match the amount of total affixes and gem slots as a 1h+offhand/shield.
It wonât completely fix the deficit though, because the extra poise of a shield and how good a block is for people learning to parry or who are not very good at it or for the sake of dealing with annoying ranged mobs in the middle of a bounty is an advantage 2H weapons canât compensate for currently.
2H weapons by virtue of their slower attack should also give a large bonus to poise, just like a shield.
This is definitely a thing to include! Would make cleaving through tighter packed mobs more satisfying by a long shot.
As for giving 2H the same number of affixes - also doable. I wouldnât mind if they had less so there was still a meaningful distinction between 1-Hand/offhand and Two-Handed. IMO the damage between playstyles really needs work. 1-Hand/offhand should be a survival/utility path, whereas Two-Handed should be a damage focus. It just doesnât feel like that at all.
Yeah, the issue is there is a ton of weapons with different swing speeds and animations and their own weaponskill sets, so I prefer they just equalize the affixes and gems because trying to balance weapon groups when you have so many weapon subgroups and different kits for each weapon will be a nightmare if you try to tune by â2H weapons deal more damageâ.
Especially because for many builds it is not the damage itself of the weapon, but the resource economy for rune attacks and how realistically those weapon hits land and how much risk a weapon carries.
In theory you can balance a 2H to do similar DPS to a 1H faster sword/mace, but if you have to constantly give up attacking or dodge away because the 2H weapons have a longer animation lock and commit, in practice the weapons just do a lot less damage.
And itâs not just a matter of survival, if you have boss and mob design where the enemy is constantly dashing around and evading, this is far more punitive to the real performance of a 2H weapon in practice.
On the other hand, if you tune the 2H to be significantly ahead in damage to compensate for the possible downtime/risk, then in more turret-like bosses or in builds where mobility/blink can be paired with the weapon, then the weapon loadout will completely eclipse the others.
Ideally they balance toward making the less consistent weapons more consistent and practical to use instead of having large performance deltas.
I know some people prefer their weapons to have niches, but niche-centric design is bad because what often happens is some niches are more predominant and important than others, leading to an imbalance in weapon use anyways.
I donât like weapons to be situational, they all should be fairly similar in performance for all scenarios and come down to a matter of player preference for aesthetics and gameplay feel.
This is a very good point. Weapon performance will vary within tolerable margins (and should measure up to playstyle choices) but having weapons so far out of the optimization window for specific enemies or fights they become a disadvantage is just bad design.
Thatâs why a non-charged dash gap closer would feel at home on Two-Handed melee weapons, as would a snappier attack speed with the poise to push through the hits as they come. The changes that feel overdue are those that would allow the 2H user to hit more frequently, which seems to me chiefly an issue of mobility, but also attack speed/stamina economy.
The net effect of dual-dagger micro-stagger spam and status buildup is not one that is going to be easily brought into parity with something like a Two-Handed melee weapon. More mobility and faster and longer attack chains for Two-Handed weapons (to take advantage of high poise and more stamina-efficient attacks of at least the same damage if not a touch more) would be a good start. At very least it would help them live up to their âon paperâ dps.
And that leads me to armor being deeply under-tuned for heavy sets. The stat loss by investing into Equip Load is nowhere near worth it to get plate pieces considering the volatility and commonality of elemental status buildup as enemies scale up to match player level. I donât know who thought having almost zero elemental resists on plate armor was the move to make, but it only serves to step on the already unrewarding Two-handed melee weapon gameplay by inviting the propensity for heavy damage, usually very quickly.
2H wepons also have worse focus generation becaues they usually come with slower attack speed and compensate for it with the same focus gain on hit as 1H weapons.
One handed weapons need a serious nerf to poise and damage and the wands should be the first on the chopping block, followed closely by straight swords. Off hand weapons should also not have any offensive affixes contributing to the main hand. They should only have defensive or general purpose affixes.
Making 2H weapons match the broken state of 1H is an insane idea and to think thatâs balancing is madness.
The way I see the problem manifest is an obvious preference for One-Handed/offhand due to its superior mobility, superior focus buildup, superior number of enchants/gems, superior number of runes, superior poise amount, and overall superior survivability and damage output. It seems obvious to me that much of the game was crafted/balanced around having the net total stats/gems/equipment produce a certain saturation and variety of effects to be viable in every situation. The situations where One-Handed/offhand is not explicitly viable due to enemy type or environment is made up for with mobility and attack speed.
Contrast that with Two-Handed melee which noticeably lags behind in all of those categories, and is punished even more due to the fact that plate armor is the worst armor in the game (so even while being slow with not as much stamina, and not as much stamina regen capacityâŠwe canât even say survivability is a metric Two-Handed melee enjoys).
âSolving forâ this problem can be difficult because multiple system elements are involved but there have been some excellent suggestions in how to tackle this:
(Zenith) Make 2H weapons have significant poise as a native stat so that they meet or exceed shield poise values
(ShortCat) Increase native focus generation
Increase Two-Handed attack speed and movement/distance covered (and lower stamina consumption per attack) so the net result of timing hits and gap-closing is roughly equivalent to One-Handed/offhand. Right now Two-Handed melee struggles to connect at all with high mobility mobs/bosses (mostly due to unnecessarily slow movements and a very severely imbalanced movement capability per time spent attacking between each) - increased mob/boss AI will only make this worse.
Equip Load investment grants direct survivability by universal damage mitigation per point invested (specifically for plate pieces, diminishing returns for Mesh, leather, etc.).
All of these things can be implemented with minimal effort/impact to other systems and would result in a noticeable improvement for everyone without even touching enchant/ damage numbers.
From a theme perspective I am inclined to agree with you that offhand enchants would be utility/survivability focused and not just a âstat stickâ to directly boost damage values of the primary One-Handed weapon. For better or worse this behavior/path seems âbaked inâ with the current level of play optimization. You could say that the entire player progression curve and mob difficulty curve needs to be re-worked from scratch to force offhand enchants away from bolstering the One-Handed main weapon, but that is less realistic than allowing for an equivalency/parallelism as Zenith suggested. With the variety of weapons, swing speeds, runes, etcâŠand without selling yourself on the body of work required to balance ALL of those JUST to tackle the specific case of Two-Handed melee, arriving at equivalency between the most number player choice options is a lot more straightforward.
As for One-Handed stun-lock/flinch-lock capability I think everyone can agree that it is bad, and that there is a problem to be addressed there, but that is a different problem that does not inherently need to be fixed to address Two-Handed melee weapon improvements. I personally do not see how increasing the number of enchants/gem slots to bring Two-Handed weapons into better parity with One-Handed/offhand in and of itself would make Two-Handed melee play like the flinch-lock carnival that One-Handed play already is.
Unless you have an idea of how to implement a balancing change that would uplift Two-Handed melee that isnât covered by anything mentioned?
Itâs actually not as complicated as it seems at first sight and the devs actually had it right before they broke their own game with the Hotfix that increased 1H weapon poise to 20. When 1H weapons had 10 poise everything was fine, it wasnât easy, but it wasnât broken. In fact, the in the very Twitter post that Mahler responded to and lead to the game breaking âHotfixesâ to lower the difficulty, the person that was complaining about not being to fight a pigman, was literally trying to button mash his way into landing their weaponâs entire combo string on the mob without respecting itâs stagger bar or moveset.
Balancing weapons is not an arcane science and in fact weâve known how to do it for a very long time. The formula revolves around a simple concept: trade off and compromises.
You want range? You trade off damage for safety. You want fast attacking and dodging? You trade off damage and stagger for it. You want high damage 2H? You trade off speed for it. In every one of these scenarios, the player must learn to adapt to the properties of the weapon they want to play with. You simply cannot give any of these classes everything at once, which is what we have with one handed weapons right now. They have speed, they have damage and they microstagger every mob into full staggered state. Before the poise increase, if you were using a one handed weapon, you would land your hits, dodge or parry the mobs retaliation and then land more hits until it was staggered. It was only at this point where you could choose to execute a long string combo. Now, you can just land your entire weapon combo on any small to medium size mob without them being able to retaliate due to the microstagger effect from 20 poise.
What you need to realize is that 2H weapons are actually somewhat balanced right now which compared to the broken state of 1H, makes them look weak. The solution is simple, revert the Hotfix poise back to 10 on all 1H weapons. It is only then that you can start to experiment with damage numbers to arrive at a balanced state. Truthfully, I donât think they are concerned with the state of combat at all and instead theyâre focusing on brining in features that will attract new players like co-op. I am almost positive that they also know about the fact that theyâve broken the game in order to make it easier since the common denominator of all of their negative reviews was âdifficultyâ. All calls of the gameâs combat having become trivialized have since fallen on deaf ears and diverted to a proposed combat update that may never see the light of day.
So to be concise, my solution would be:
Revert 1H poise to 10
Remove damage buffs and lifesteal gems from off-hand
Make bows primary weapons
Introduce off-hand daggers as the only off-hand weapon with auto-attack capability
Give armor types specific bonuses for each weapon archetype or class
2h weapons just need their own mod pool - thatâs it. Actually, every weapon type should have its own mod pool. For example, 2h swords play very differently to gauntlets, so mods that make sense to each would be different as well.
As an added benefit this change would also make build-crafting more interesting. Harder to balance, true, but other games deal with it somehow.
As someone thet mainy uses 2h wepons I think the only real change we need is to have the same number of enchantments and gems since 2h weapons often have fairly fast animations with more range than 1h weapons.
I think that differences are due to the motion value not being balanced with a universal method is what leads to some weapons that are clearly better or worse than others both in range and damage and focus gain and stamina.
This is one of the core things in my own perspective. It is obvious that some things are âjust becauseâ decisions (as BlackWaterPirate mentioned) and their reasons for being sometimes go no father than âlook at how loud I can cry on social media.â
The primary problem currently is that we have a game that is in its latter stages that is (most likely) not going to get re-invented from its core from the ground up to appease the way things âought to be.â Decisions about where to invest effort are strategic, and they are always tied to money. That is not to say that Moon isnât completely passionate about their project - they are - but even they know there comes a time to âcrap or get off the pot.â So you canât just keep pitching re-work the core fundamentals of the combat system from the ground up. I for one feel that ship has already sailed.
So the question becomes how best to balance Two-Handed weapons with One-Handed/offhand? In this case âbestâ acknowledges constraints of both time and resources NRftW is dealing with as a project.
That is why I pitched a ânot quiteâ equivalency of Two-Handed enchants/gem slots. Movement capability between the classes should be identical (or else, you have to accept the fact that you have to re-tune ALL the bosses and some of the mobs to present different, valid strategies for each variation of movement capability). Two-Handed weapons enjoy greater range, so in the âfixâ I propose they get slightly less enchants (same number of gems, always).
Definitely agree, as this is what I was thinking of when I pitched my initial idea of slightly less enchants for Two-Handed melee. One problem I see with my own suggestion isâŠNRftW as a team has not shown that they can wrangle the balance of the full system (or at least most of it) with a sense of poise and clarity - so Iâm not entirely confident that giving Two-Handed melee less enchants than One-Handed/offhand on account of 2Hâs greater reach (given under the condition that movement capability between the classes was made equal) would be executed in a way that delivered a fair/valid tradeoff. Weâve seen fairly knee-jerk reactions to squawking on social media but not a clear dedication to a specific balancing formula.
So, for the sake of ease and transparency, come what may I think making the enchants equal between Two-Handed and One-Handed involves the least amount of work, the least amount of explanation, and the least amount of âwell butâsâ from either fans or haters.
In this case however it is only a matter of changing some numbers (many numbersâŠ) you need to take all the weapons and rebalance them with the same criteria, it takes time but technically after having chosen the criteria together (this step does not take too long) even one person can do it alone.
To be clearer the criteria are:
Create the reference weapon, in practice they are the basic stats of all the weapons: damage, damage per level, damage per scaling, base stamina consumption, base focus gain, base poise damage that will then be multiplied by the other factors ( ±range, ±speed, ±aoe, ±stamina cost, ±focus gain, ±poise damage, ±weight))
Give a value to the factors (±range, ±speed, ±aoe, ±stamina cost, ±focus gain, ±poise damage, ±weight = to ± damage)
Use these criteria to change the weapons
If these steps are done correctly the developers will be able to be sure that all the weapons are balanced both the new and the old ones
In my experience this is the problem. It would be âsomewhatâ different if, say, we were implementing a digital inventory system and we had to figure out what user roles people needed to do their job (and then give them those roles in an automated process). That would be a clear-cut case of âthis is rightâ and âthis is not right,â working with known standards for success. But even solving development problems which have clear one-dimensional metrics of success it can be very hard to hit that mark when there are a lot of moving parts.
In the case of extrapolating all of the measurable combat metrics across the game from wall to wall - on even the best âbalancedâ examples of combat centric games you are going to find that the scaling for things is NOT linear. Not by a long shot. That method will give you âaâ solution that happens to be backed up by data (however simple or complex you want to make the algorithm) but that doesnât make it any more valid than what you started with - it just means that it agrees with itself. And when you move ALL OF THE GOAL POASTS at onceâŠnow you have to test ALL OF THE GOAL POSTS (weapons). Regression testing. Being able to say âthis is consistent with X balancing formulaâ isâŠonly important to a dev. The guy who is marketing the game does not care, and the guy interacting with the public still has to hear all their nit-picking about how things donât âfeelâ good. âX balancing formulaâ is not something you can put in front of angry/dissatisfied people and expect any amount of goodwill to come from it. It is almost like saying, âDo you guys not have phones?â
Again going back to the best way to address individual balance problems is to make as small and surgical of a change as you can make and get it closer to âbetter.â Sometimes over multiple passes.
i will also point out. âflat damageâ bonus. i m not too sure if stat gives flat damage bonuses or not, but flat damage is simply huge for 1 handers.
for example.
2 hander, 1 attack per second 100 damage. total 100 dps.
1 hander, 2 attacks per second 50 damage. total 100 dps
FAIR
now add 50 flat damage
2 hander, 1 attack per second 150 damage. total 150 dps.
1 hander, 2 attacks per second 100 damage. total 200 dps
Great point! Iâm not so sure these systems are terribly well balanced - even in the simple example you provide.
I have a lot more time in NRftW now than when I first posted this and my mind remains unchanged. HOWEVER.
There is/was plainly a lot of love invested into the move sets of the weapons in the game. I wasâŠincredibly unlucky with the first character I started which progressed to level 30 using the Corpse Smeared Blade. The only other 2H sword I got was Blister (apart from Claymore, obv). At the time I stuck with Corpse Smeared Blade because life steal and wellâŠit was goldâŠand I didnât have the Fallen Embers to try and make something better.
I started a second character because I ran into a UI bug where if you upgrade your Hunger Limit last (it is the only thing remaining to upgrade)âŠyou canât use a controller input to select it to upgrade (found out that mouse input works after the fact). I figured that character was screwed and made another one. I say this to establish context because:
Holy crap the difference RNG makes on the play experience driven by gear you find. I started again with Corpse Smeared Blade, but when I picked up Summerâs Sting for the first time suddenly I was putting out damage WAY faster than I ever had. I finished the campaign with Summerâs Sting (many attempts but had not completed the campaign on my first realm). Then I picked up Icebreaker.
After experimenting with the Icebreaker moveset I was so motivated to try it out (I hadnât even respecâd as I was still running my strength build) I strapped on Icebreaker with 10 Int and I cleared Lowland Meadows with it at level 29. I wanted to test the moveset hard by putting myself at a severe damage penalty and it savaged.
In the end:
2H swords still need an equal number of gem slots and enchant slots as main hand/ offhand.
Or, provide players an offhand that âworksâ with a 2H melee weapon
And finallyâŠsome weapons like Corpse Smeared Blade that are basically a meme should not be upgradeable to end game levels in their current state. The amount of time in the attacks winding up for a weapon like that (and the DPS loss it forces) justifies a 2x or 3x damage boost straight out.
The attack movesets between weapons are not balanced, or are deliberately unbalanced. Either is fineâŠbut if they should be balancedâŠthen there is a lot of balancing work to be done. If they are deliberately unbalanced, a hard limited upgrade path should be a signal to the player that a particular weapon âsunsetsâ at a level where others in its same class pull way ahead.
Thatâs exactly what I wanted to suggest. Why do we even need stat sticks? Instead, let off-hand weapons be truly useful by actively incorporating them into combat.
I like the discussion and agree with many points. However, I would prefer two-handed weapons to have their own identity rather than balancing the power gap by turning them into one-handed weapons.
One way to make two-handed weapons a bit faster could be simply reducing the recovery animation after certain attacks. For example, recovering from the Claymoreâs rolling/running follow-up attack takes forever. When I use it to punish a bossâs opening, I almost always get hit because Iâm unable to recover in time.
I think this is the best solution overall, but harder to arrive at. From a sheer balance perspective, parity between the different player options is really the easiest to explain and probably easiest to implement. The best solution, however, would be for 2H weapons to reinforce a meaningfully different gameplay experience that was not âequalâ in every metric but was balanced.
A 2H melee playstyle should provide:
Longer/faster movement per attack than 1H
Cover more terrain with attacks
Provide a greater threat range
Enjoy slightly less enchants than 1H/OH (but same enchants), or have more powerful enchants (but cap at 3/5 as usual) and bespoke gem/infuse properties (ConcreteMittens)
That would do it I feel. Some of the movesets are very nicely tuned - some not so much. And they definitely are not balanced with any respect to damage output as a weapon class, or among other weapon classes.
Just make the Off hand enchants only relate to when attacking/blocking/parrying with that off hand item. It shouldnât be a stat stick. Stat sticks are inherently dumb and usually break balancing.
Then it becomes easier to balance DPS. 2handers are slower but do more damage. 1handers are faster but do less damage.