Andor's Trail

I'm thinking if I'll invest on Two Handed or Dual Wield Fighting Style in my current new character focused in offense, Tarobinha, that is close to level 30.

Reading the FSTH description, it says "increase 30% of two-handed swords damage potential". What does this mean, exactly? Is my base AD affected by this 30% increase too, or only the AD from the sword?

Ex.: Foo has 20 base AD, is equipped with a TH weapon that has fixed 10 AD. Therefore, the total AD is 30.

If I put 1 point at FSTH, will my total AD increase to (20+10)*130%=39, or just 20+(10*130%)=33?

Note the stats - save the game - apply the skill point - note the new stats - if you don't like them - return to the saved game file.

It only applies to the damage potential of the weapon.

rijackson741 wrote: ↑Thu Jul 06, 2017 10:48 am It only applies to the damage potential of the weapon.

So, in my example, FSTH would increase total AD to 33 instead of 39? This sucks, imo. No wonder why everyone chooses FSDW. It makes you able to do more attacks per turn, and still hit as hard than using a good 2H weapon and FSTH.
FSTH damage bonus should be applied to base AD too, so it would be on par with FSDW.

For most 2-handed weapons it isn't great. Skullcrusher and Gutsplitter are my favorite exceptions! Enormous benefit from fighting style. With my current stats (shown below) I could have my 17-52 AD turn into 17-67 with 2 skill points in FSTH. With a 20% possibility to do critical damage, I can deliver a blow that totals 51-201 damage. But that's just me yappin...

marquinho wrote: ↑Thu Jul 06, 2017 3:03 pm

rijackson741 wrote: ↑Thu Jul 06, 2017 10:48 am It only applies to the damage potential of the weapon.

So, in my example, FSTH would increase total AD to 33 instead of 39? This sucks, imo. No wonder why everyone chooses FSDW. It makes you able to do more attacks per turn, and still hit as hard than using a good 2H weapon and FSTH.
FSTH damage bonus should be applied to base AD too, so it would be on par with FSDW.

The fighting style does not affect the number of attacks per round. The problem is that high attack cost weapons are underpowered. That's because a lot of damage comes from base damage, so more attacks per round translates into more damage (almost always, anyway; there are a few exceptions). This is known, and while it's on the to-do list to fix the problem, doing so will be a lot of work. Since most two handed weapons have a high attack cost, most people therefore choose to go with either weapon and shield or dual wield.

As Voom notes, to really benefit from FSTH, what you want is a two handed weapon that does a lot of damage.

If the FSTH bonus was applied to base damage as well it would far exceed the benefits of FSDW. Both levels of FSDH and the specialization would more then double your total damage!

Hm, that's actually true... so we need better 2H weapons, or maybe a buff in FS2H would be enough? Like making each point on FS2H increase 50% of the weapon damage, and the specialization could increase 100% (50-50-100, total 200%). 30-30-50 = 110% is currently underwhelming imo.
Another alternative would be to increase the AP when wielding 2H weapons. Like +1 AP for each point on FS2H, and +2 AP on specialization. It makes sense, because the more specialized you are in 2H weapons, the better you should be able to handle them, being able to attack faster. This would increase max AP of 2H specialists to max. 16 AP. With JoF, you would be able to attack 3x with a 6AP weapon, and 2x with a 7/8 AP... 4x using ElyR/GCR.

If only it were so easy

It would be difficult, perhaps even impossible, to fix this by simply adding more AD to high AP weapons. As a simple example, take a weapon with only 1 hit per round and a weapon with 4 hits per round, for a high level player with base (i.e. base + bonuses from non-weapon gear) AD 50. With 4 attacks, the damage per round is 200. With one attack it's only 50, so to make up for that the high attack cost weapon would have to have a damage of more than 150! Now suppose a low level player got hold of that weapon; they would be grossly overpowered. Placement of such "mega-weapons" in the game would be very tough to do.

Another suggestion is here: http://andorstrail.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=4096. That is a good idea, but IMO might result in all the weapons being too similar, and the game would therefore be too "flat" in it's choices.

And yes, we could also adjust the skills, but that will not help for lower players.

I believe that the best approach would probably be some combination of all of the above. That's a lot of work though, especially since we would not want to do it twice (aside from the work, it will likely break at least some peoples builds). I already have a multi-page Word document and a multi-page Excel spreadsheet that delve into the details of trying to rebalance everything, but I don't consider them to be the final solution. More work needs to be done, but for the next release we are concentrating only on new content, so it will have to wait.

I think 2H weapons could easily be boosted by giving them a ridiculously high CM, around 10. This is the only way currently to make the weapon itself amplify the base damage proportionally to the player's level, and thus compensate the low number of attack per rounds.
It would also make sense, as with huge weapons like these, you'd have a chance to nail your opponent into the ground.

I don't see that as an ideal solution, because it will have no effect on crit immune monsters. It is something we could implement for the next release though, even if only for a few weapons. It would improve the current situation, even if it doesn't cure it.