Test on Shield and Polearms

[Odion]

use kick., crush on shield.
+ when they have their shield up they are slower, so if you are in open field just run away

[Mala]

Because shields breaking in game makes sense, it keeps the game flowing, shields give you a good advantage whilst they last. Weapons breaking would just be retarded and just means everyone uses shield breaking weapons and everyone ends up weaponless, or just running away from fights. My main uses 1h + Shield ( Strategus build ) and I do just fine, I avoid getting into direct confrontation with axes unless I have no choice, even then I could just put my shield on my back and block with my sword.

I have started to use the steel shield, because it works against swords, so as the wooden ones should have work against nonbreaking weapons.
And i want to use the shield and not put it away every second fight.

[Tzar]

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/end thread

[Blueberry Muffin]

Well.... the stun does make sense in some ways. I have a MW warspear and you can only get stunlock with a stab and then only say 60% of the time does it stun. The side swings dont stunlock because it is such a light weapon. Also you cant chainstun. You can only be polestunned once in just as when your weapon gets stunned by a heavier weapon. The second hit will not stun you. As for the heavier weapons like the poleaxes it is is OP imo. Because those weapons are damn heavy hitting and the two hits that they get on you WILL kill you. And these heavy pole weapons like the elegant pleaxe are also damn fast and will ALWAYS get the stunlock due to the weight of them. I did some testing with vicious and 2 other mercs yesterday and using a normal poleaxe i found that I could win a fight after striking only 1 blow because the next strike would be an overhead onto their face.

As for shields i think they are fine tbh. You can get a +3 loomed steel shield like vicious and it wont die to anything but an axe. But that is how it is meant to be. The shield is very hard to kill, but it is extremely heavy - wpf taken, it doesnt give you good body coverage and its ugly as hell. When I fight vicious, I dont look to hit his shield, I look to hit him.

Thats my input.

PS: I also found that I  fight better without the shield because i lose the wpf reduction and am not weighed down by it.

[Osiris]

so basically you dont want your shield to last 100 hits from normal only 50 (niether of which happens much in battle)
and you want it to last more against axes.. So you just want your shield to last longer? hell 2h has lolstab pole has stun pretty fair imo

[Dezilagel]

Whatever, stunlock needs to be removed one way or another 

As for the "everlasting" shields, keep it as it is (maybe a slight overall increase in dmg against shields), M&B gameplay is designed around shields breaking, but if you spend ALOT of points, it should be pretty tough imo. (All shields should still fear axes!)

[Matey]

havent read everything here, but just felt id throw in my 2 cents as a shielder.

the bec shouldnt do anything to the steel shield. bec is a pierce wep, pretty sure pierce takes a penatly against shields. weapons should have trade offs, the bec is a can opener, not a shield breaker. if you want to break shields, dont bring a bec.

secondly, it would be interesting to see a closer gap with shield durability vs various weapons. swords and other cut weapons do often do too little to shields, while i enjoy my hard to break shield, it might be worth some testing to try increasing the hp on shields but lowering the resistance, that means weaker hits would achieve greater damage, but with the added hp, it wouldnt really break too much faster, its just that you wouldnt run into as many instances of weapons that were unable to harm the shield. and by increasing the hp, the bonus vs shield weapons would not break through the shields as quickly, since they already were only minorly effected by the resistance, so lowering resistance would not make much diff to the damage they did. say you had an axe that normally broke a shield in 5 hits, and a sword that normally broke it in 20. if you upped hp and lowered resistance, the axe might take 7 hits and the sword 16.

could be fun to try some different things in a beta fashion on the dev servers... but overall, i like that people who want to break shields need to bring shield breakers. its just like people who want to kill cav bring pikes... if you want to argue that a steel pick should be just as good at stopping a horse as a pike... well thats a shitty argument; i know you arent saying a bec should be just as good as an axe, but the rock paper scissors element of crpg is good. no one wep or play style should have an advantage against all others. everything has weaknesses, and one of the weakness of pierce/blunt damage guys is shielders who dont get feinted out.

[Bjord]

I agree with some parts.

The polestun has always been ridiculous, it could need some addressing.

In my opinion, bonus against shield is fine. And there's so few 2handers that use axes anyway, since they're all unbalanced. It's mostly poleaxes (which there's an abundance of).

However, either add unbalanced modifier to great long axe or reduce its bonus against shield somewhat. It's almost a jack of all trades. 'Cept for its thrust, but even it is viable enough as it is.

[Kafein]

First of all, I'd like shields to get proper collision models. Round shields will catch allmost everything, while others have to exactly face the incoming projectile then hope for the best.

About durability, as other people said, more durability against ranged, much less against normal weapons. Maybe one hit more against shieldbreakers, but that's not really gonna change anything. Once your shield is hit by a shieldbreaker, it often is hit by the same opponent until it breaks (or you are being aggresive, but most shielders aren't). But first of all, please fix the shield hitboxes. They were over nerfed just because the huscarl and bucklers had a force field (btw, they still have, but all other shields suffered like hell in the process). Now arrows often can go through shields because the real model isn't as big as the showed one. Same thing for weapons.


I need more accurate experience and data about polearm stun to make myself an opinion but the testing reports here seem in check with what I feel. Some people with decent footwork just can attack, turn around you and get one lucky hit, then bye you die because you are stunned and the basic "twister" spam footwork makes it possible for you to be unable to block the next swing. No I'm not talking about you, Tor 

(...)
However, either add unbalanced modifier to great long axe (...)

Aww, I couldn't say better myself.

[Tzar]

  Cant we just lower the weight of the fast polearms    :

[Bulzur]

I agree that shields should break a bit easier from normal weapons, but that they should be able to withstand atleast 50 arrows. Hitting a shield with a dagger should do more damage to it than an arrrow. However, throwing weapons should be able to destroy shields like a melee weapon. (atleast the axes)

That's definitely trolling right ? Plate covered round shield and steel shield are already immune to arrows, and i don't think there's any need of change for the arrow to shield damage. But the sword to shield damage should be slightly increased (not against steel shields, or others like that though). Just take a heavy cavalry shield with 7 shield skill, and swordmen will need so many hits to break it down that they'll die of boredom before.

[Corrado_Decimo]

Unbalanced doesn't just affect feints.

exactly. unbalanced affects the ability to change direction while releasing (simulating the inertia of weight).

basically, top player vicious is concerned about his loomed steel shield being wrecked by a GLA in 6 hits... the polearm stunlock discussion seems a filler to me.

shield is the ranged perfect counter and easymode autoblock. at least axes break it... and the top shielders still end a long round without breaking their shields.

[MouthnHoof]

The polestun has always been ridiculous, it could need some addressing.

Now specifically Bjord, but to all the polestun complaints:
If I remember correctly from the WB beta discussions, the stun was introduced to prevent fast weapons from dominating slow heavy weapons by spamming. If the heavy weapon user can get the first strike, he can force the light spammer into an initial phase of defense - but there is a following stun immunity during which you cannot be stunned again. Most of the complaints come from fast weapon spammers that cannot start their spam right away. I do not know if polearms have extra stun over 2H or that they are simply heavier than the 2H weapons. I remember discussion about giving spears extra knock down chance when hitting legs (was dropped) and more stun (I do not remember it implemented) to simulate tripping, pushing, hooking and such polearmy things. For game balance, it allowed spear users not to be immediately closed to 0 range and spammed.

Now, when this was balanced for Native, the polearms were mostly types of spears which had very low swing damage and low damage overall. They also tended to be light. In cRPG we have lots of fast, heavy and damaging polearms. In terms of game balance, these weapons do not justify the stun. I guess they could either loose weight (to reduce stun) or damage or speed to compensate. This is mostly relevant to the big swingable polearms. Light swingable polearms have damage stats than are often lower than 1H weapons. They really do need some stun in order to be viable.

[Casimir]

Best option is to slow down high weight polearms significantly and give them a slight buff in dmage.

Make polearms slow and hard hitting. Prevents stunlucking an oponent to death and prevents spam.

Weapons like LHB and Bec could loose some weight and damage and maintain their current speed

[Ledrion]

I use a war spear and can stun lock, sometimes. I could do it better when I had more agility but I would like to share some of my experiences with yall.

It is best against slow opponents in a duel. On the battle field its pretty useless except for those one on one occurrences.
You can still block in time after getting stunned, unless I move to your backside while you are stunned. Then I can keep it going IF I get a stun roll.
If my opponent is armored I have to hit them ALOT. Have IF? gota hit you more. A stun lock form 100-0 is ultra rare.
I will, on average,  have to hit an opponent 5-10 times to kill them and if I get hit at any time I will die. I will be wearing armor under 5 weight and lower str with no IF. I can die to peasant hits with a pitchfork.
If you block then swing and I miss the block I die, any weapon will do.
If you bring a friend to the fight you never have to worry about stun locks. I have just never been able to keep a stun lock going AND block someone else, EVER.
A stun lock will frustrate anyone that it happens to. I think it is because of the helpless feeling that happens while you are being damaged. There is a loss of control that occurs for the victim. These ill feelings happen when stun locked much more than when a person is one shot by a high damage weapon/str user.
The most common stuns happened in 2-3 hit combos. After this flurry my armored opponent might have lost 25-30% of his hit points.
Now there are a lot of spec wep combos that could deliver that damage (AND MORE) with a single hit.
IMHO there is no stun lock chances on the battle field. It might happen every now and then but one hit kills are to advantageous over multiple hits that kill over a time all while leaving you defenseless.
Even if you have been stun locked from full hit points to death it is because you missed the block. Sure it was frustrating to watch your avatar die a slow painful death but the point is YOU MISSED THE BLOCK.
I can not recall anytime that the slower pole arms (below 97 spd) ever being able to stun lock for even 2 consecutive hits. Even with a stun hit opponent could get a block and return swing.
I just do not see how stun locking is an imbalance issue. It just adds more dynamics to the battle field and isn't near as good as a straight up heavy hitter.
Oh and when I wrote that I die in 1-2 hits, it is mostly true..a stunlocker takes 3-4 hits.