Revised Melee Weapon System

[GammaTrooper]

Not sure if there's a similar thread somewhere but if so I trust a mod will move/delete mine. I will preface this by acknowleding that the entire damage system is changing in the "near" future and these suggestions may not be relevant in the new system. That said I believe its relatively well accepted that only the heavy melee weapons are viable at higher lvls of play. The single handed weapons look cool but lack damage. The same applies to daggers. Dual weapons are better but still not equal to the heavies. Scindo and Orthos are the weapons for choice in my experience. I would personally like to see a system where the damage potential between heavy and light weapons is equal but achived in different ways.

 

My solution would be to change the function of each class of weapons to a specific method of applying damage. Heavy weapons could innately ignore armor and hit hard with every swing but have no chance of ever criting. Single weapons should do their damage via crits with very high crit chance and crit damage so that they even out with the heavies. Dagger style weapons could apply bleeds/DOTS so that over a short period they rival the the other weapon types. The dual weapons could be split on a case by case basis between the role of the heavy, single and DOT weapons or they could be more of a defense option. Dual weapons could have an innate deflection/reflection value when blocking. The ultimate goal being a play style preference that gets everyone to the same target DPS with melee rather than the current model which excludes the majority of weapons if you want to function at high level play.

 

On a related note very few people ever use light attacks with any weapon. Charge attacks ignore armor and simply hit so much harder that there is rarely a point in using light attacks. I think this could be addressed by adding a sort of combo system or perhaps a hit progression would be a better term. Every hit with a light attack against a single target stacks or applies an effect building the damage you do with the next attack or procing a special effect based on the weapon type. For example heavy weapons could build a % damage buff each swing to a cap that is near but not quite equal to a charge attack. The dagger weapons could stack additional bleeds per hit or perhaps every 5th hit consume all bleeds for a very large instant tick of damage. There are countless approaches you could take but I think any step in this direction would make melee combat far more dynamic, make both light and heavy attacks useful in different situations and allow the use of whatever weapon suits a given players style.  Any thoughts or commentary would be welcome.

Edited September 23, 2013 by GammaTrooper