Two Handed Melee vs. One Handed Optimization

Wicked Feedback
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21

In my opinion, two-handed melee weapons should generally excel at:

  • Damage per hit
  • Poise damage
  • Attack reach or cleave attacks

This is already somewhat true, but compared to one-handed weapons, they mainly fall short in overall DPS and focus generation. That said, these stats should probably be balanced individually based on the weapon and its moveset.

Another change I’d suggest is allowing two-handed weapons to slot twice as many runes to compensate for the lack of an off-hand and to improve rune variety for them.

On the other hand, one-handed melee weapons should excel at:

  • Attack speed
  • Mobility
  • Versatility

Overall, I lean more toward nerfing one-handed weapons rather than buffing two-handed ones.

I think the key change should be making off-hand weapons more engaging and removing the “stat stick” effect. Being able to block, use off-hand-specific runes, perform ranged attacks, or cast spells (orb) should already be rewarding enough.

This change alone would help close the power gap between one-handed and two-handed weapons in many ways while still preserving their unique strengths.

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22

I have the assumption it is something close to RNG whether a weapon has a good or a bad moveset.
After playing with almost all weapons, even before Breach, I noticed that different weapons utilize the same attack animations in ther move sets, they are just chained differently. Thus, my theory is, Moon created several attack animations and then set some rules as to how to chain those animations into move sets for weapons. As a result you can get a wepon with clean movesets or a weapon where you are locked in recovery animations.

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Been reading through old topics and found this.
Did that ever happen? Do 2h weapons actually have more powerful enchantments?

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Not that I am aware of, unless it’s through scaling of some sort. But most likely when you normalize to DPS it’s not a boost.

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No, didn’t happen.

The issue anyways is that covering a wide variety of effects can be more useful than a doubled effect on just 5 enchantments. It makes builds more flexible.

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26

Another thing I have noticed is as a weapon class, Two-handed melee is extremely inconsistent.

There is no meaningful distinction between a 2H weapons and Colossal weapons, but for some reason 2H axes cost 18 stamina per attack, and 2H swords cost 20.

2H Axes deal 26 stagger damage and 2H swords deal 22.

Every weapon in my boxes of inventory generates 10 focus per attack which means 1H/offhand builds will always and forever be focus-spewing machines. 2H melee is left in the dust with half the gems and enchants AND limited focus generation.

Looking at Elden Ring which achieves a fairly high degree of balance and consistency between weapons in the same class…the meaningful differences come down to fractions of a meter of range, and fractions of a second on swing speed. Attack moveset utility is an arguable point (wide aoe swings are only an advantage where mob density is high, and the player can choose how they intend to engage in most situations) but even then it seems enough variety is offered to present a pleasing palette of options (whose decisions are meaningful) but maintain enough consistency between themselves that no one choice is inherently under-performing in every occasion.

NRftW on the other hand, has a massive spectrum of 2H weapon attack animations and attack speeds in the same class, some of which are clearly duds and underwhelming, and some of which combine movement with speed such that they completely monopolize the combat efficacy space. When considering a build you don’t have the variety of weapons the game presents you with - you have 3 or so in each category that completely demolish the others.

I personally like the variety of weapon movesets - it is very creatively inspired and feels interesting…until you start to see the numbers for what they are. Corpse Smeared Blade will always lag behind every other 2H sword in damage because it has the slowest swing speed. Its slow swing speed is not offset by damage, focus generation, or stamina usage, it is just an objectively inferior evolutionary dead end. It could be super interesting and fun to play with, but as it is…its junk.

I really hope no one at Moon Studios has thought that the only thing left to be done for 2H melee is figure out gem/enchant balancing. That is the icing on the cake. The cake is…a pile of batter right now. Until you figure out a cohesive balance between weapon reach, focus generation, movement in attack animation, damage, and attack speed…2H melee will remain conceptual (and ignorable) at best, or a source of constant irritation and disappointment.

27

I’m finally doing a run with two handed sword ya it’s very hard but I’m also playing on the harder difficulty now. I like the idea of two gem slots and more affixes/enchantments. Maybe once you upgrade your weapons to higher tiers with two handed weapons they gain more enchantment slots.

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Doesn’t corpse smeared blade also have a baseline plague infusion effect, just like Everlasting Winter staff?

Which makes it even worse, because elemental infusions severely nerf your damage output as they make the weapon not scale at all with any values and % scalers that boost physical weapon damage.

They need to overhaul infusions to not feel horribly weak outside frost infusion freeze spam, but even freeze on frost infusion is bad when you can just get a rune attack that freezes and not nerf your weapon with frost infusion terrible damage.

Weapons with frost infusion cannot even shatter the targets they themselves freeze, you have to swap to a fully physical non-infused weapon to shatter, no good.

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How do I get those numbers?

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Though i also feel like there definitely has to be some balancing among weapons and sets, like 1h/shield compared to 2h i dont think there has to be perfect balance in here, since this is not a online pvp game.
I mean i get that its bad if sth is way more powerful than other stuff, but with so many different choices available i think its just natural to have stuff that is stronger than others.
Theres no real downside to this since youre not fighting other players, you only fight NPCs, so its your choice if u wanna go for the slightly more powerful thing to make your life easier or go for the not so powerful choice and maybe have a harder time or a bigger challenge.
Having said that, being able to abuse stuff like permastagger, spamming super powerful focus attacks without spending any real focus and stuff like that should definitely and 100% be balanced.

But yeah i feel like with tons of different choices, different movesets, different runes, customizations and so on, of course theres gonna be builds that just flatout eclipse others.
I also would find it super lame if everything in the game is perfectly balanced out so it doesnt rly matter what i choose, cause everything is exactly as powerful and all the choices basically just effect how my char looks when attacking.