Weapon subclasses or how to reach balanced diversity.

[DaveUKR]

Hello, this will be a long post so prepare your popcorn or tl;dr gifs 

Since I might be busy for some certain time and there is no progress in processing item balancer's applications - I want to make a post with my thoughts how items should be balanced, how new items should be added.

Why do we need this? It's simple: I believe that there should be no items which have no pluses over other items. Also the influence of players who abuse some certain effective weapons is so big that these weapons become very popular almost instantly and after some time these particular items imminently get nerfed and break the inner balance.

I suggest 5 levels of balance:

Level I: Global classes like Melee, Ranged, Horses, Armours, Shields. (in this post I'll take Melee as a good example)
Level II: Regular classes. In this case Onehanders, Twohanders, Polearmers (I will take Onehanders)
Level III: Subclasses. Daggers&Knives, Clubs&Maces&Hammers, Axes, Picks, Swords. (Let's take Swords)
Level IV: Types. 0slot (short) and 1slot (long): swing only, swing+thrust, thrust+swing.
Level V: Particular weapons' balance.

How it would look in reality:

Spiked 1handers (Pierce):
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There are only 2 of them and they're both low tier. So it's obvious that some additional are needed. Something like 1h morningstar and some others. Pic from wiki.
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1handed clubs and maces (Blunt):
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Even though there are only 2 items and they're both for peasants it's a good example of how things should be done. These two items have their Pros and Cons.

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And here we can see itemset which can be balanced. Knobbed and Spiked Mace are completely identical, the only difference is that Spiked Mace is 560 gold more expensive and has +1 difficulty, it's not a reason to make such difference for +1 blunt damage bonus. Then we look further, Flanged Mace is a total winner compared to Spiked Mace => +0,3 weight, +1 speed and only for 1,143 gold. Then we see Iron Mace, at least some diversity and so on with other maces. Also we see that Difficulty is not used as a balancing parameter, it's just linked to the item price as we can see. So basically all the items are more or less the same with not really a big diversity.

1handed hammers (Blunt):
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These are just 2 items and they're completely different. It's obvious that some low tier and other hammers are needed to make diversity.

1handed picks/sickles (Pierce):
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There are 4 of them and they're balanced poorly: Less length, more damage. The only good thing is that Military Sickle can be used in 2h mode. It's obvious that some additional are needed:
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(Low tier Miner's pick and something expensive with thrust maybe?)

1handed axes (Cut):
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Much better situation with axes. Besides some tweaks I would not change them as they have diveristy. Light and fast, Heavy and damaging, Axe with 2h mode, axes with secondary pierce mode. I like it.

I didn't even touch swords as I think that some of them are really useless and they need rebalancing which is difficult at this moment with all the amount of them.

If you liked this suggestion and want more work on subclasses: please feel free to vote on my post in item balancers' application thread:
http://forum.meleegaming.com/general-discussion/%28applications%29-item-balancers/msg740443/#msg740443

[Tomas]

+1

This is pretty much what I want to do as well so hopefully we'll both be made item balancers and I can help you

[Tydeus]

This is pretty much how I look at item balance. Thing is though, you can't forget about balancing the subclasses with each other as well. It certainly would be nice if we could get some models for those weapons you said we were in need of.

[Malaclypse]

You left out Hammer for hammers and Pickaxe for picks. Also Hand Axe and Hatchet for 1h Axes.

[DaveUKR]

This is pretty much how I look at item balance. Thing is though, you can't forget about balancing the subclasses with each other as well. It certainly would be nice if we could get some models for those weapons you said we were in need of.

As you can see there is one of the levels where you can balance them with each other ofc. Level III: Subclasses. Daggers&Knives, Clubs&Maces&Hammers, Axes, Picks, Swords.
Also I would like to see different but balanced and reasonable loom bonuses for each of subclasses.

You left out Hammer for hammers and Pickaxe for picks. Also Hand Axe and Hatchet for 1h Axes.

No, I didn't. The reason why is that they can be classified as a different class. I didn't touch 0slot weapons (besides daggers) as they're unique, you can see that I didn't classify torch, wooden stick and others too.

[Pentecost]

Thing is though, you can't forget about balancing the subclasses with each other as well.

Yeah, about that--do you plan on doing anything about the fact that the three best 0 slot short swords (ie Broad Short Sword, Nordic Short War Sword, Scottish Sword) are now better weapons than most of the middle range 1 slot one-handers, despite being cheaper?

I don't really want to see the short swords nerfed, as I'm happy that people are actually using them now and not just ignoring them like before, but I also have to recognize that there's currently little point to using something like an Arming Sword, Nordic War Sword, or Espada Eslavona if you are concerned with efficiency.

[Nordwolf]

Picks/sickles can pretty much be alighned with spiked 1handers.

(Low tier Miner's pick and something expensive with thrust maybe?)

Thrust alternatives can be done from picture you posted

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[Kaiser Augustus]

I think that a morningstar would be a great addition to the 1h-spike categor