One handed good enough?

[Infares]

I think 1h unique talent should be "parry" instead of graze-to-hit bullcrap. You make a roll using your accuracy vs opponents accuracy using some negative modifier so it would be balanced and if you win your opponent misses.

This would make a hearth orlan rocking a battleax extremely potent with Riposte. 

[Duncan]

That's a pretty legit and realistic idea as well, maddemiurg.

 

Ther are some creative minds on these forums I hope the devs are listening

[Daemonjax]

1h in the offhand with an empty mainhand is probably optimal for a monk because you get all the benefits of dual wielding + the accuracy bonus, at least until really good weapons are found and enchanted.

 

Not 100% sure if that's an exploit.  

 

If there were procs on crit besides just more damage, there would be more of a point.

Edited April 10, 2015 by Daemonjax

[Luckmann]

1h in the offhand with an empty mainhand is probably optimal for a monk because you get all the benefits of dual wielding + the accuracy bonus, at least until really good weapons are found and enchanted.

 

Not 100% sure if that's an exploit.  

 

If there were procs on crit besides just more damage, there would be more of a point.

Why do you think that? Unless it was changed in a patch and I missed it, if you are a monk and you equip a 1h weapon, you are fighting one-handed. Your off-hand (literally, as in your fist) is not being used. You should not be gaining the benefits of dual-wielding in any way while having a weapon in one of your hands.

 

In fact, it is a source of many complaints that it is impossible to do that, because obviously, monks want to be able to fight with both their hands whether they use a weapon in one of them or not.

[Infares]

1h in the offhand with an empty mainhand is probably optimal for a monk because you get all the benefits of dual wielding + the accuracy bonus, at least until really good weapons are found and enchanted.

 

Not 100% sure if that's an exploit.  

 

If there were procs on crit besides just more damage, there would be more of a point.

You don't auto attack with your fist, unfortunately, but every attack you have that says "Full Attack" will actually use the fist as part of the attack, just not when auto-attacking.

 

Take WF: Peasant and stick a Spear in your off-hand slot, gg.

[MaxDamage]

Actually, if you take for example Adra dragon.

 

Thats ~118 deflection.

 

Lets say your fighter has ~75 acc with a 2 hander. This means that with a one handed spear you re getting 92 acc. 

 

According to this picture 

 

http://cloud-4.steamusercontent.com/ugc/29612972887407194/D7ADE496F63C39DD3E13921ACDDAE0E20CD8B4EA/

 

1h spear is getting ~ 0.45 and 2h weapon gets ~0.27 avg damage per attack. You should ofc modify this by the weapons base damage as well but well.. just look at that.

 

I d like to have those 2 weapons: 1h warhammer with stun and 1h spear with stun

 

Where is that 1h hammer with stun?

[Infares]

 

1h in the offhand with an empty mainhand is probably optimal for a monk because you get all the benefits of dual wielding + the accuracy bonus, at least until really good weapons are found and enchanted.

 

Not 100% sure if that's an exploit.  

 

If there were procs on crit besides just more damage, there would be more of a point.

Why do you think that? Unless it was changed in a patch and I missed it, if you are a monk and you equip a 1h weapon, you are fighting one-handed. Your off-hand (literally, as in your fist) is not being used. You should not be gaining the benefits of dual-wielding in any way while having a weapon in one of your hands.

 

In fact, it is a source of many complaints that it is impossible to do that, because obviously, monks want to be able to fight with both their hands whether they use a weapon in one of them or not.

 

Again, reading comprehension can't happen if you're skimming. He's taking about putting the weapon in your off-hand, not your main hand. You do still auto-attack with just the weapon (in your off-hand) but you get the equivalent of 1h only accuracy for BOTH HANDS when using a skill that has a Full Attack.

[mazeltov]

Let's change a talent so that Accuracy becomes the most important stat to stack for both offense and defense.

 

Hope the devs are listening.

[Infares]

Let's change a talent so that Accuracy becomes the most important stat to stack for both offense and defense.

 

Hope the devs are listening.

It kinda already is. Sticking melee CC requires accuracy, lol.

[MadDemiurg]

Depends on how it's implemented. D&D also had this sort of thing with 1 attribute giving many stats, and while often being cheesy it was fine in specific occasions.

 

It does not stack directly with deflection so their chances are multiplied for starters. If your parry chance would be 20% it would reduce incoming dps exactly by said 20%. If you balance it around 10% parry chance vs equal acc it would be fine. You would get double value from acc debuffs though. Maybe some cap is in order.

 

Alternatively it can be made a bit stronger, but balanced by being disabled when flanked and/or limited to x parries per y seconds.

 

That would mechanically go nicely with "duelist" style.

[Caerdon]

Um. No. Many soldiers and Knights or duelists trained and fought with a longsword only. It is a middle ground in balance, speed, and effectiveness. It also opens up your other hand for disarms and other physical maneuvers and you're not hauling a cumbersome shield to slow you down. Your average peasant or sellsword will fare better with a shield to cover his undisciplined onslaught of course.

 

Longsword is a two-handed weapon.

[b0rsuk]

I think 1h unique talent should be "parry" instead of graze-to-hit bullcrap. You make a roll using your accuracy vs opponents accuracy using some negative modifier so it would be balanced and if you win your opponent misses.

 

That would be a shield. Ugly, overlapping design. They want fighting styles to offer unique advantages. Aside from the fact parrying would be hard to distinguish from a shield, it would scale much worse. And you can choose your shield.

[MadDemiurg]

 

I think 1h unique talent should be "parry" instead of graze-to-hit bullcrap. You make a roll using your accuracy vs opponents accuracy using some negative modifier so it would be balanced and if you win your opponent misses.

 

That would be a shield. Ugly, overlapping design. They want fighting styles to offer unique advantages. Aside from the fact parrying would be hard to distinguish from a shield, it would scale much worse. And you can choose your shield.

 

No, that would not be shield. Deflection bonuses grow progressively better when you stack them, so shield would do little for a char with low deflection, while parry would be much better if he has high acc at the same time. Shield would be better on high deflection char. You can further distinguish by adding duelist-like mechanics I've described in the 2nd post. As of now, 1h as a style offers greater accuracy, but graze-to-hit 1h talent doesn't offer anything really distinguishable and is opposed to the mechanics of the style (since you want to stack acc your graze chance should be lower than for other styles for the most part).

Edited April 10, 2015 by MadDemiurg

[Gilker]

Again, from pure dps perspective, 1h is probably better than 2h atm (not sure about estoc though). But if you compare sabre vs most 2h it is 13-19 vs 14-20, with better attack speed and accuracy. +12 accuracy is a big deal. People that say they have no problem with deflection are not playing PotD.

 

well, dual wielding two maces for 22-32 base damage each with 76 accuracy (no weapon focus and savage attacks giving -5 accuracy) and 60% critical hits doesn't feel that bad to me on hard settings, pretty sure PotD won't be a problem too with a few adjustments on that rogue built .

 

but thanks for the calculation for 1H style, i really thought is was way worst than it is.

[Grand_Commander13]

Um. No. Many soldiers and Knights or duelists trained and fought with a longsword only. It is a middle ground in balance, speed, and effectiveness. It also opens up your other hand for disarms and other physical maneuvers and you're not hauling a cumbersome shield to slow you down. Your average peasant or sellsword will fare better with a shield to cover his undisciplined onslaught of course.

 

Gonna have to stop you there. No, knights and soldiers did not fight with one-handed swords. Maybe by "longsword" you mean one of the two-handed varieties, but you probably mean a standard arming sword which was only ever a backup weapon, and/or your carry-everywhere weapon. Low-end troops had shields because they didn't have great armor and since their enemies didn't have great armor either they didn't need the power of a two-handed weapon to punch through it.

 

Duels are another matter entirely, as rather than being about what is effective they're about what is accepted. There were plenty of rapier duels later in time, but what did the officers carry into battles? Sabers.

[Infares]

I think most people that used shields wore pretty light armor and used maces since they were super easy to wield untrained. 

Like, you can have a guy show you the right way to strike with a mace, do it yourself 2-3 times against a tree trunk, and be good to go for most infantry battles. 

[Grand_Commander13]

The mace was actually more of a weapon of nobility because it was best against guys in armor. Infantrymen would be better off with spears since they can stand in close order and keep their enemies at a distance. The Romans fought in loose order with short swords, but they were... Quite the exception. The spear and shield was the gold for standard well before and well after them.

[Luckmann]

Again, from pure dps perspective, 1h is probably better than 2h atm (not sure about estoc though). But if you compare sabre vs most 2h it is 13-19 vs 14-20, with better attack speed and accuracy. +12 accuracy is a big deal. People that say they have no problem with deflection are not playing PotD.

 

Let's say you have 35 graze chance, 50 hit chance and 15 miss chance. vs 0 dr that means your average damage is 0.15 * 0 * damage + 0.35 * 0.5 * damage + 0.5 * 1 * damage = 0.675 weapon damage on average. 11.475 average damage for 14-20 weapon.

 

With +12 accuracy:

23 graze, 62 hit, 3 miss, 12 crit: 0.03 * 0 * damage + 0.23 * 0.5 * damage + 0.62 * 1 * damage + 0.12 * 1.5 * damage = 0.915 weapon damage. With 13-19 weapon : 14.64 average damage.

 

Also 0.915/0.675 ~= 1.35. So 12 more accuracy means 35% increase in dps in this case.

 

It might seem that higher DR would favor 2h, but higher hit and crit rate don't make it so one sided. Don't have time for a chart atm, but 1h would look very solid.

 

Thing is, you want your frontliners with shields and your glasscanons with pikes/quarterstaffs for reach. If you're brave enough to go into full contact without a shield though, 1h is a solid choice.

 

There's several issues with these calculations. First, the Accuracy will increase at roughly the same rate for both builds, meaning that the +12 will be less and less relevant. Secondly, you are placing two roughly identical weapons next to eachother, which wouldn't happen. You have to compare the duelist to an actual dual-wielder that gets two attacks, or the duelist to someone using a two-handed weapon.

 

So, say, a duelist with a rapier or longsword, vs. a dual-wielder with two sabres or rapier+stiletto, vs. a two-handed-weapon-wielder with an estoc or greatsword.

 

The % increase does not matter half as much as the actual difference in DPS. And this is before we even start talking about the Talents. The Two-Handed Style Talent is a flat +15% and the Two-Weapon Style is practically mandatory for dual-wielders, while the One-Weapon Style is a 30% Graze-to-Hit modifier, for a style that will not get Grazes nearly as much as anyone else, on a style that thus promotes you to stack as much +Accuracy as possible (more than usual); it's utterly terrible.

 

Let's change a talent so that Accuracy becomes the most important stat to stack for both offense and defense.

 

Hope the devs are listening.

For a single build? I'm fine with that. Duelists will never be tanks and you will never want to give them +Deflection items anyway (unless you have some to spare).

 

My own suggestion often entails making Deflection good for Duelists by making them hit more, the aforementioned riposte.

 

Another suggestion allows them to get a smaller Deflection-like effect with Accuracy.

 

Either would be fine, and quite fitting. Either you make Accuracy increase their survivability, or you make Deflection increase their Action Economy. Neither would be earth-shattering, depending on how you tune the numbers.

Edited April 11, 2015 by Luckmann

[Nadrac]

The value of one handed goes up with the difficulty. It became my go to choice right away in potd, trying to kill 60 deflect mobs with your 26-36 acc guys goes a lot easier with +12. Later it still makes sense if you need to overcome deflection and especially if you convert hits to crits, like heart orlan rogue for example converting 30% of his with passives, but reach weapon equipped melee dps will have an easier time positioning and not dying. One of the strongest yet seemingly most ignored benefit of it is that you get +12 to landing skills, that is insanely high, if you are mostly landing skills, like a control monk might be, the dps doesn't matter remotely as much as the accuracy.

 

The talent in itself is not bad considering most grazes would do minimum damage.

[Luckmann]

The value of one handed goes up with the difficulty. It became my go to choice right away in potd, trying to kill 60 deflect mobs with your 26-36 acc guys goes a lot easier with +12. Later it still makes sense if you need to overcome deflection and especially if you convert hits to crits, like heart orlan rogue for example converting 30% of his with passives, but reach weapon equipped melee dps will have an easier time positioning and not dying. One of the strongest yet seemingly most ignored benefit of it is that you get +12 to landing skills, that is insanely high, if you are mostly landing skills, like a control monk might be, the dps doesn't matter remotely as much as the accuracy.

 

The talent in itself is not bad considering most grazes would do minimum damage.

 

While I can't attest for the use on PotD - and only on PotD, because enemy deflection and such does not "go up with the difficulty", enemy stats are static - I question the logic of what you say, because as you say yourself, reach weapons will still have an easier time positioning and not dying. Not only does 1h not compete with dual-wielding and two-handers damage-wise (remember, yes, Accuracy helps, but with dual-wielding, you also get to make two attacks, two rolls to beat that Deflection), but it also does not get the defences inherent to sword-and-board tanks, or even a buckler (which comes at no -Accuracy bonus).

 

And the talent is still terrible, because not only will you get a comparatively low amount of grazes (in part due to that +12 Accuracy) but even when grazes do happen, there's only a 30% chance for it to become a hit. Yes, the grazes you do get will do a minimal amount of damage, but the relation between a Graze and a Hit, that boost you get for the conversion, remains the same.

 

Even if we say that Grazes somehow happens 35% of the time, all things being equal (which they won't be), only 30% of those Grazes will become Hits.

 

The Accuracy added to landing Abilities might be worth it for some, maybe, I haven't tried Monks, but for most, it's really not enough to make up for this, especially not compared to Two-Handers (vs. dual-wielding it's a very fair point, since you'll probably only hit with your main-hand with the Ability anyway, most of the time; but Full attacks hit with both, so it's still better for most Abilities I know of).

[Valeris]

Don´t exactly understand the RP-issue with One handed fighting style, since two-weapon-fighting in this game is actually pretty realistic: Besides the Full-attack-abilities the character doesn´t swing his weapons simultaneously, but one after another. And this makes perfect sense. In the 15th-17th century, town citizens carried rapiers as main weapon and used them together with cloaks or (parry-)daggers (the so called "sword breaker"). Ofcourse the offhand weapon was a defensive tool, but hitting your enemy with it in close quarters was a valid tactic.

 

So just go dual wield and enjoy all the benefits. Onehand is unrealistic and is subpar.

Edited April 11, 2015 by Valeris

[ApesAmongUs]

 

I think the main problem is that the one handed accuracy bonus doesn't scale to mid or late game. Once you start getting exceptional quality items, their bonuses in the off hand do more than make up for the 12 accuracy bonus. This should be adjusted to make that weapon style balanced with the other ones imo.

 

+8 + 1 per level would be a good scaling, I thinking, meaning +20 at level 12. But the biggest issue really is the Talent. The Two-Handed Style Talent is boring, but at least it's good and dependable. The One-Handed Style Talent is really, really bad. My suggestion has always been to add a secondary effect to it, such as increasing Penetration, or reducing Recovery Time a lot after managing to Deflect (a riposte-like effect, essentially; you deflect during Recovery, you get to attack faster).

 

Or something like that.

 

I doubt they would ever do the second suggestion since they tried to get that same effect with the riposte talent, which for some reason wasn't limited to 1-h.  That's the duelist talent, but anyone can take it.

[Luckmann]

 

 

I think the main problem is that the one handed accuracy bonus doesn't scale to mid or late game. Once you start getting exceptional quality items, their bonuses in the off hand do more than make up for the 12 accuracy bonus. This should be adjusted to make that weapon style balanced with the other ones imo.

 

+8 + 1 per level would be a good scaling, I thinking, meaning +20 at level 12. But the biggest issue really is the Talent. The Two-Handed Style Talent is boring, but at least it's good and dependable. The One-Handed Style Talent is really, really bad. My suggestion has always been to add a secondary effect to it, such as increasing Penetration, or reducing Recovery Time a lot after managing to Deflect (a riposte-like effect, essentially; you deflect during Recovery, you get to attack faster).

 

Or something like that.

 

I doubt they would ever do the second suggestion since they tried to get that same effect with the riposte talent, which for some reason wasn't limited to 1-h.  That's the duelist talent, but anyone can take it.

 

Fair point; I had missed that because I haven't played a Rogue up to level 5. But I still think something similar could be worthwile, it doesn't have to work the exact same way.

[mazeltov]

It has come to my attention that flails have an innate 30% Graze conversion, and on a Fast attack speed weapon? So that's 80% conversion with one talent and one class ability. Eight zero. The higher enemy Deflection goes, the better Graze-to-Hit gets (PotD called). Every conversion that procs is +50% damage and duration.

 

A 1H flail Fighter will be cranking out a steadier stream of hits than ZZ Top. Good thing the devs were listening... to their own good sense when they designed this great talent.

[MadDemiurg]

Any sort of stacking for hit conversion does not make it progressively better (like in case of deflection for instance). Putting +20% graze to hit on a character that already has 30% would result in same dps increase as putting it on a char that has 0. So "you can stack it" is not a good argument for whether the talent is good or not.

 

That been said, the talent is not bad, it works great if you have low/mediocre accuracy. Thing is, with 1h you will likely be aiming for high accuracy and crits to maximize that +12 acc advantage, so the bonuses of 1h style do not work well together.

Edited April 11, 2015 by MadDemiurg