Melee weapon secondary modes

[Shaksie]

Just a request to buff the secondary modes of melee weapons and make them more useable. For instance, fighting pick has a piercing and blunt mode, there is no point of using the secondary mode as both are effective against the same time of enemy - an armored foe. I have read up a bit and secondary modes (piercing / blunt) always do less damage versus targets, regardless of their armor. Also, speed should not change for secondary modes, it makes them further underpowered and it's quite unrealistic.
Thanks,
Dirty_Albert

[Zerran]

It would be nice to see usuable secondary modes. currently the only one that has any real use as far as I know is the one for the Military Cleaver. 35 cut => 25 pierce with 1 speed reduction. Good against heavy armor. Most of the secondary modes are rendered useless by massive speed reductions, which really don't make sense.

[Elmokki]

35c to 25p is not worth it.

Poleaxe and possibly elegant poleaxe are only weapons I know are worth it. They have blunt as secondary and while it's a bit less dps against heavy armor, it's far less glancing too.

The problem with making these modes useful are:
a) the new modes can't make specialized weapons useless - ie warhammer pierce secondary can't make military pick useless or vice versa.
b) blunt and cut are very similiar damage types

Cut <-> blunt is relatively easy to balance and cut <-> pierce is very well possible, but pierce <-> blunt is troublesome. Pierce is only mariginally more powerful than blunt and that's after 60 raw damage (onehanders generally don't do that without speed bonuses). How do you make an useful pierce mode to warhammer? Answer is, you really can't without making steel pick useless or adding some special knockdown style feature to pierce that makes it worth it occasionally.

[Shaksie]

Poleaxe blunt mode is awful, but the elegant poleaxe one is quite good. The dedicated piercing/blunt weapons would still be better than weapons using piercing/blunt in their secondary mode, but they still need to be more effective than the other mode against armor.

[Elmokki]

Poleaxe blunt mode is awful, but the elegant poleaxe one is quite good. The dedicated piercing/blunt weapons would still be better than weapons using piercing/blunt in their secondary mode, but they still need to be more effective than the other mode against armor.

Not taking into account speed changes it's not really totally awful when you're fighting against extremely heavy armor. No clue on elegant poleaxe stats but I suppose it's better then. This is 100% statistically, I haven't been a polearmer in ages.

As I said, cut/pierce and cut/blunt weapons are very well possible to balance by just increasing the damage of the secondaries slightly from the current very overnerfed state. Pierce/blunt is a harder issue.

[ArchonAlarion]

give them knockdown for blunt modes

[Shaksie]

They have knockdown, and the speed change can actually be a very useful tactic to throw your opponent's timing off balanced but they do too little damage. German Poleaxe for instance, 42c primary mode and 24p secondary mode... there is no way in hell anyone will ever use that secondary mode seriously, it does less damage than a 1 handed piercing weapon with 99 speed!