Hand-and-a-half / two hand weapons

[debo]

I think rapid attack was designed to be used with 1-handed light weapons, but we all started using it with 2-handers instead because it's the obvious way to get a second attack. If you think about it, quickly hitting with a greatsword like that is pretty nonsensical. I think it makes sense for it to be awkward to get for 2-hander builds.

Polearms seem fine to me -- all of them have a niche. Glaives are especially useful on low-str characters, and spears are useful in a bunch of ways.

I think greatswords are eclipsed by bastard swords now that momentum exists. Momentum is actually my least favorite addition to Sil -- I preferred it when light weapons really had a strong cap on how much strength you could put behind them, because it forced you to consider other weapon types on those builds. Stun wasn't a particularly brilliant ability, but I personally found it really fun.

There are a lot of niche weapons in Sil, and I think that's okay. I agree that greatswords are probably among the most useless; probably quarterstaves and sceptres are worse, but not much else.

This reminds me that I still really want to win a warhammering Hador some day.

Finally, I agree that opportunist is a good path to rapid attack if you're going for a 2-hander. You get a useful aux attack, and it's nice not to wake up the universe every time you go down the stairs.

[Infinitum]

Not just you; just pretty sure everyone on the forum have already given their two cents about it. Check out do something about greatswords? and balancing spears.

But yeah, the weapon classes should probably be rebalanced should half/Scatha decide to proceed to 1.4 eventually. My preferred solution is merging the various subclasses of weapons into plain "Swords", "Axes", "Spears" and so forth (acting as one and a halfhanders) and have the amount of weapon dice and damage per side tie into weight somehow.

EDIT: Aside; why not get Opportunist? 6 Stealth is a good number for not aggroing the entire map, and the free attcks are ridiculously good for hunting down archers, fleeing enemies and flitterers like serpents or wolves. Assassinate is a fairly cheap (1k xp) alternative to Follow-Through should you not want that, and the occasional ~+10 helps a lot when waking Dragons and the like.

[ripforareason]

Is it just me, or are these weapons not very useful in Sil? Artefacts aside, it seems like these suffer from a few problems:

- Greatswords are strictly worse than bastard swords due to having more weight but the same accuracy, evasion, and damage bonuses.
- Great axes seem to do almost the same amount of damage with 3 str (4d7 vs. 3d9) but are even heavier and less accurate.
- I don't use polearms all that often, but they don't seem that good. At least glaives have an evasion bonus.
- The Shield slot is very useful in Sil. Whether it's a resistance (shield of frost, kiteshield of hador), combat bonuses (shield of deflection +2,1d3), stat bonuses (kiteshield of fingolfin), or offhand weapons (narsil as a resist stick, galadriel, dagmor, deathblades), there are a lot of useful things that you can put in that slot.
-Without being wielded with 2 hands, the hand-and-a-half weapons seem to have poor accuracy, a little more damage than a longsword, and no evasion bonus.
- This could also be a critique of subtlety, but subtlety makes light weapons extremely good, especially deathblades, and branches directly into rapid attack.
- Many of the most dangerous Sil enemies, especially in the mid-late game, are either bags of HP with low evasion and low protection, or low-HP enemies with high evasion. In both cases a lighter, more accurate weapon will win out, in my experience. High-protection enemies are not all that dangerous. These essentially amount to serpents and kemen. Kemen are extremely annoying, but serpents are not fast, and do not open doors, so you can escape from them more easily.


This brings me to my point: I would probably like to use rapid attack with greatswords, but it costs so much experience to do so, since you have to take Follow-through and Opportunist, when greatsword users would probably prefer to skip this ability, which seems to act mostly as a prerequisite for other abilities/XP sink. I think it would be useful to have an ability that makes two-handed weapons more effective that acts as a prerequisite for rapid attack, perhaps one that gives an point of accuracy and damage side when using a "true" two-handed weapon. This could replace throwing mastery, which almost no one uses and can't really be seen as a viable investment of experience. Otherwise, I'm struggling to find much use for them outside of a utility item for kemen, serpents, and grotesques. And when I was playing around with subtlety and delmereth earlier, subtlety was actually pretty good against serpents...