Feel free to enlighten us after you are done making the Long Voulge four-directional.
Well then...
You can't talk about how effective a weapon's damage value will be, unless you have a target armor value. I was just saying yesterday, that a difference of 19 raw damage on my swings, was only amounting to a difference of 2 final damage, 42-61 raw -> 4-6 final. Now of course, I ended up with a rather poor roll on the 61 raw swing, and good rolls on the hits with lower raw, which makes things seem worse than they really are. Nonetheless, this is a good example of why the weapon's damage value can never provide the whole picture.
Then you have weapon speed, which is indeed highly important, but it's still directly related to damage output. This is relevant, because certain damage values allow you to hit further outside of a sweetspot than others. When up against 70+ armor, hitting outside of your sweetspot with a low to medium cut damage weapon, tends to be a bad idea with many builds. Likely, the main reason the bastard sword is generally favored below either the longsword or heavy bastard sword, is due to the low base damage value. That is, you reach certain thresholds in speed and damage, where trading damage for speed(or speed for damage) becomes less beneficial. When you take WPF into consideration, that lower speed weapons see larger changes in effective speed from wpf, in comparison to higher speed weapons, you further convolute the relation between weapon speed and damage. Not only must you consider the tradeoffs between speed and damage on the weapon, you have to do it for the character build as well.
Next, you have sweetspots and animations. What people don't realize with sweetspots, is that your weapon can fall
both within and outside of the sweetspots, on the same exact frame. Why is this? First some info on what sweetspots are, for horizontal swings. Sweetspots are the angles between the attacking player's forward vector and the vector that passes through the contact point(location of the bone hit) with the attacking player's location as its origin, where damage first becomes possible, reaches full damage potential, begins to decrease again, and then reaches zero. Now, here are two pictures to help give an idea as to why this can be.
Now, the two circles are the closest and farthest points that you can hit someone. The red lines are the vectors that would be created using the contact point, and the blue line(which should actually be straight in front of the character), is just a static vector used to find the angle that figures out where in the sweetspot a hit will fall. Notice anything peculiar about these animations yet? What if I told you the 2h animation was at 38% progression, and the polearm animation was at 36%, and you can even (probably) hit as early as 28%, due to the hit "bar" always extending from the right hand.
But why's this matter for hilt slashing? Well, how much does weapon speed actually matter when you can potentially hit 10% earlier in the animation, regardless of the weapon's speed to damage ratio? Really, I'm not sure there's a clear best weapon or best damage/speed relation among our current weapons. Only the best in a specific setting.
