Tydeus, thanks again for looking in such detail at the animations; I feel that this is the most pressing issue in cRPG right now.
Does the 1h thrust change you are currently testing also reduce the chance to glance at low-medium range? Personally, I've always been most annoyed at how poorly short swords thrust at short range, since this situation was their intended purpose, historically. Glancing at max range is less annoying, since I always considered 1.5m+ to be the domain of spears and greatswords, not 1h swords.
The hitbox being waaaaay to the right of the weapon tip for both polearm and 1h thrust is the other huge annoyance, but I imagine that's harder to change.
Doubtful, though there are a few things to be said here. First of all, notice that at the start of the sweetspot, the arm still hasn't extended at all? Take a look at the 1h animation, don't you think it would be impossible to tell, just from looking at the animation, when the sweetspot starts? Now throw active combat into that attempt, it gets even harder. My opinion is that the reason it glanced so often, is that there was no indicator to tell a player when the proper time to hit an opponent was. You have to use
tricks like turning into the swing which add a delay to your attack. Tricks like this are often done in fighting games because they make timing things correctly, much easier. So in essence, the thrust glances are caused solely by a mistiming of when you allow your blade to come into contact with an opponent which has been made rather difficult to do due to the animation's progression.
The hitbox thing I believe is also not real. Lets do a quick analysis of weapon positioning and simple geometry. People say both the pole and the 1h thrust animations hit to the right of where the weapon is portrayed as being, to be clear, they don't say this about 2h. Coincidentally 2h also has the only animation that not only doesn't originate from the right side of the body, but stays completely centered throughout.
Now lets bring in lag, assume for a second(because this is actually the case for a moving player) that no one you hit is ever exactly where they appear on your screen. So maybe they're to your right, maybe they're to your left. Keeping in mind that non 2h thrusts originate from the right side of the body, players don't have to be as far left of you as they have to be be right of you to not get hit by a thrust. Bring in psychology to remind us that we tend only to recall important events, as well as occurrences rather than the lack of occurrences; of course the mind will be so ready to think that the hitbox is off center, because you do actually hit more people to your right than to your left! For example, it's possible to hit someone (particularly teammates) standing to your right since that's where the weapon originates from, but anyone to your left is well out of range of the weapon. Furthermore, anyone that is left enough of the thrust to just barely get hit by it, is going to be positioned
in front of you on your screen, your mind isn't going to register that as the weapon's hitbox being located to the left, instead you don't even think about it because it appears as though it's properly functional.
Now, it would be possible to change the angle and flow of the thrusts, but I'm not sure that's really such a good idea.
Poll