We've decided to give the community another opportunity to weigh in on possible gameplay changes, which there are currently two of. But first I'd like to direct your attention to the polearm left-to-right release animation. Were you aware that it was somehow altered? Could you see or feel anything different about it? If so, how do you feel about it? Your response to that should directly affect your response to what lies at the heart of this post.
Right now two-handers require 53.33 % of their (edit: Overhead) release animation's progression to reach a spot capable of hitting a person in front of you. The disgusting thing, is that the polearm animation takes nearly 20% longer than that, and that's assuming two weapons of identical speeds. My proposal is to lessen that gap in the same way I lessened the gap for the polearm left-to-right swing. This would be proposal #1.
Proposal #2 (Credit goes entirely to Urist for this one), is to change the sweetspot for all overheads so that they do 0 damage to players behind you. That is, it still connects with the player and keeps you from hitting someone in front, but you won't be doing full damage to a person behind you simply because of poor implementation by TW.
The first proposal would clearly have a major affect on bi-directional polearms and, if implemented, we would keep a close eye on the effects. It's worth mentioning here though, that the thrusts of such weapons are the most deadly aspects. Rather than making them more deadly(increasing their maximum damage output or likelihood of landing a hit) this only gives them more utility, or easier access to a tool that has always existed. Bi-Directional weapons aren't where they should be, but simply increasing their speed across the board would be the wrong way to address the issue as I don't believe the thrust attacks need such a thing. For these weapons, this fix pinpoints exactly what I see the problem as being, and then addresses the issue.
Update: Decided to go ahead and put my 1h thrust animation fix in as well. This will take a very slight bit of getting used to, but it will allow you to use the full length of the thrust. Before my fix(what we currently have on the servers), by the time the 1h thrust was all the way extended, you would have already left the sweet spot and would now only be doing 50% damage. This is why the 1h thrust was so poor. When I was testing, after I got used to it (took about 10 seconds), it felt really good. This is one of those things where even though the "frame data" shows 1h thrust as having something like +40 range, in practice it was more like +10 because anything after that falls outside the sweet spot.
Poll