Narrow the thrust sweetspot to 40-70%(from 35-75%), increase the release animation length(not the frames, the interval), then increase weapon speeds. This results in slower, more difficult thrusts that are a bit closer to how difficult it is to land side swings(40% through the anim, roughly, to reach the sweetspot), but also increases the speed of side swings, thus making it easier to land the non-thrust attacks. Should speed up melee a fair bit making it more enjoyable and help persuade some long time players to stick with the faster paced, more enjoyable gameplay(melee), rather than going ranged.
Not bad, I hope this goes for all thrusts including the 2h thrust? Do you know what these sweetspot percentages were before you changed the polearm thrust? In my opinion the glancing late animation was good for polearms, too difficult on 1h and too easy on 2h. Hope these new late end values are going to be close to what polearm had before all of this.
Honestly I preferred the way stabs worked before the turn rate nerf. Back then there seemed to be no early or late stabbing. You could spin your stab around but it would always hit at the same point in the animation. Back then I was able to chamber stabs purely through timing. I saw the attack release and knew how long it took for the hit to come. Which was necessary because you can't really rely on the visual cue when people can start stabs with their weapon inside your body. Nowadays the stab hit can come extremely early or extremely late, which prevents you from being able to rely on timing, while you still can't rely on the visual cue. This makes wiggled stabs near impossible to chamber. Whenever one of my stabs get chambered, I wiggle the next one and even though people usually retry the chamber, they rarely succeed.
There was lolstabbing, but no instastabbing or dragged late stabbing. This got changed with the turn rate, most likely because the way stabs worked back then required extenstive turning unless you were at a small ideal range. To accomodate for the lack of turning the stabs seemed to have gotten active earlier and longer or something. Nowadays we have much more turning than immediately post turn rate nerf, so I was thinking maybe a revert to these more logical stab mechanics is possible now again. Especially since the long weapons have started to use the unrestricted vertical turning to get their speed bonus anyway. Again, I am not sure what these mechanics were, but I know stabs were very different but much less frustrating and weird.
lots of players stab from up to down, as far as I know there is no speed limit or angle limitation
have you ever consider that a problem with animation?
I think this is a fair compromise realism wise. It is of course unrealistic that a long spear can stab people when they are past the tip, but so is the fact that you can render yourself save from any stabs by leveling a weapon horizontally in front of you and that you are able to walk through extended spears because they have no collision detection. The lack of realism in these two things allow you to easily close in on someone with a long stab weapon in the first place. Applying realism selectively by disallowing close reach stabbing while allowing unrealisms when it comes to keeping people at a distance will effectively remove all potency of these weapons.
