At first glance I thought that exchanging 50 speed for 2 penetration is not very good.

At the second glance I decided that for some characters it is completely useless - if their penetration is buffed in another way or if they have high crit rate.

 

Even if that 2 points are decisive they will only save 25% damage or add 30 - and it is not guaranteed unless you know the enemy stats, never crit and calculate the possible outcome every time.

 

What do you think? Please advise if I am missing something.

It's pretty bad. The number of times it will actually help is pretty small- when I've encountered things where AR is a problem, they've got AR In the low teens and adding 2 to 7 to 9... Strangely makes no difference. Switching to some other weapon or just putting up with grinding them down slow is sadly better than trying to work with the pen system. It's just that bad.

It´s highly situational in my opinion. I would only use it to achieve overpenetration for the + 30 % damage bonus on certain weapons, otherwise I rather switch to a different damage type which might circumvent high armor values.

 

Longswords are best suited for this as you trade of deflection  for it. On the other hand, they only have a base pen of 6 insteadn of 7, so you effectivly only gain 1 pen.

The weapon abilities aren't meant to be anything other than situational. Take the club's for instance. You don't want to have that on much at all, but for one hit, it gives a -25 Will debuff. Which is great. Toggle, hit, toggle. In case of pen modals, there will be situations you want it, but most of the time you want it off. As far as I can tell none of them really shine as "must have" abilities so its not as if they are competing against other things. For example, my gripe with summoned weapons. They compete with other class stuff. Not only do they require 3s casting (vs the weapon modal's instant with no recovery time), but you have to choose that spell over pretty much everything else (instead of choosing one situational weapon modal over another situational weapon modal).

The Scepter mode is fine. +20% damage +2 pen.

 

Sure you take damage but there is plenty of healing.

 

If you are a Devoted you can dual a pair of 12 pen Scepters that choose between Crush/Slash. Even get an early unique from Aloth.

Edited May 13, 20187 yr by Maxzero

The weapon abilities aren't meant to be anything other than situational. Take the club's for instance. You don't want to have that on much at all, but for one hit, it gives a -25 Will debuff. Which is great. Toggle, hit, toggle. In case of pen modals, there will be situations you want it, but most of the time you want it off. As far as I can tell none of them really shine as "must have" abilities so its not as if they are competing against other things. For example, my gripe with summoned weapons. They compete with other class stuff. Not only do they require 3s casting (vs the weapon modal's instant with no recovery time), but you have to choose that spell over pretty much everything else (instead of choosing one situational weapon modal over another situational weapon modal).

Sometimes they are situational and sometimes you can make them a part of your strategy. The debuffing modals and daggers are great if they are relevant to what your character is doing. Unfortunately, I failed to find a situation where the piercing modal would be beneficial enough to suffer -50 speed.

Edited May 13, 20187 yr by Sotnik