Weapon balance: swords are to weak by far

[Sarakash]

Hey,

thanks to the release of Bastard´s Wound, my love for the game got reignited. I tried many different builds in vanilla, this time, I went for a sword and board character and I tried to take it quite literally.

I have to admit tho, swords are - to put it mildly- really underwhelming. From my limited experience, there performance is the worst out of all one handed weapons I tried out.

Tyranny is supposed to take place in the dawn of the iron age, so one might expect bronze weapons to be weaker then iron, but even iron swords are rather weak and much to uncommon.

I do like the general idea beeing versatile. Using pierce or slash, depending on the enemies armor value is a really cool idea. They are also quite fast.

Now to the bad part. Swords base damage is the second lowest among all weapons and the high attack speed and there versatility doesn´t compensate for the lack of punch.

1. Beeing able to switch between pierce and slash doesn´t help much against most armored enemies, at least on higher difficulties. Some bronze armors are prone to pierce, but you can just go for maces, which come with armor penetration and have a much higher base damage. Swords don´t help against light amored foes either, there is no advantage bringing a sword against them. Maces, axes and hammers out-dps them in that department as well.

2. Ablitiy damage is derived from your weapon base damage, so using them with low base damage makes them much less effective. On the other hand, their recovery time does not get affected by the weapon I use. The difference in performance gets worse when factoring in the mastery skill.

Just to give you an example:

Shield assault´s second swing with a sword equiped (Masterwork Dauntless) does 37 - 48 damage with might 18, and has a 1.95 second recovery time.

With a mace equiped (Masterwork Titan´s Knuckle) the second swing with might 19 does 53 - 72 damage, recovery stays at 1.95 seconds.

Another one:

Sunder with sword: 29 - 37 DMG, 1.95 recovery
Sunder with mace: 41 - 56 DMG, 1.95 recovery

The min damage when using a mace is higher then the max damage when using a sword.

To be fair, I did not compare both wepons with wepon buffs applied, but I cannot imagine the sword to shine here.


Some suggestions:

1. Raise the base damage of swords a little bit. Doesn´t have to be much tho. Furthermore, raise the accuracy modifer a bit.

2. I donnot know if this is possible to code into the game, but give swords a conditional armor pierce modifer as fallow:
If slash is used against light (leather only) raise armor pen. Swords cut really well through leather, at least metal swords do.
If pierce is used against heavy, raise armor pen. I don´t know if a similar technique was used before the middle ages, but in historical fencing there is the technique of half swording which gives you more accuracy when trying to thrust your sword into the gap of an armor.

3. Factor in the weapons speed modifier into the recoverytime of abilities.

 

[BiggusD]

Swords are supposed to be better than axes and maces against unarmored opponents, but aren't because the single most important stat is DPS, and swords are the worst at that.

The accuracy boost helps a little bit, but I think that a chance to inflict bleeding as a standard trait of all swords and spears would be more useful. Axes could then also have a chance to inflict bleeding while having a small armor penetration bonus. Maces and hammers could have a big bonus to armor penetration. This way, the DPS itself should be roughly equal between the three. In combat, this will be experienced as an advantage to be able to switch between different types of weapon depending on the opponent's outfit and skills. When there's no armor to penetrate, you would like to maximize the chance of inflicting bleeding by using the sword's lower recovery time (more hits).

 

[Hawke64]

There are many effects, applied on crits (from poisons to Material Force sigil), so if swords had higher accuracy, it could make them more balanced. But there are also daggers, which are supposed to have the shortest recovery time (except unarmed fighting style) and accuracy bonus (12). Adding these to swords would make daggers less viable.

 

[BiggusD]

Are daggers viable at all as it is now?

Even with armor penetration, daggers have so low damage proper that they don't really overcome armor anyway. A two-handed sword is much more efficient at that even though it doesn't have armor penetration. I know because my character was a tank both playthroughs, and casters and two-handed wielders were the only enemies I had to worry about. Most battlelogs were full of messages in red saying "inefficient weapon".

I haven't even tried spear/shield combo. The reach of the weapon is good, but there was always going to be more than one enemy engaging my character. Does a spear-wielding tank manage to keep 2-3 enemies at bay at once - out of reach? I didn't see any indication of this being the case on the battlefield, having encountered many spear-wielding enemies. I guess it is designed to be able to damage enemies behind the front lines, which I expect is useful with a more mobile character whose job is to protect the archers/casters. Some places, like doorways or in Lethian's Crossing, you can also have one single character block the pathway completely. Then I guess that melee character #2 could have used a spear to still do damage. Maybe someone can confirm?

So I use the highest-DPS weapon I've got access to, until I get an artifact/unique weapon which extra effects make me consider that twice. Using swords, I got that "inefficient weapon" notice more often than when I used maces and axes. So once I got Titan's Hoof there was no going back. One-handed Mastery 3 allows you to smack them three times in one attack, easily dealing 150 damage right there.