This official news post is copied verbatim from the WoTMUD website. It is copyrighted by wotmud.org.
Finally, it's time to announce the culmination of a few weeks of working on little else!
We've had major weapons changes in 2009 and 2012, so we were a little overdue for shaking things up a bit and attempting to strike a better balance between various weapon classes. Here's the outline of the 2016 Weapons Rebalancing Change...
Here are a few basic premises we've based our changes on:
- Currently, 2h defensive longblades have it all: solid defense, good ob and very good damage, all along with easy practices. That's a bit too good to be true. Therefore, the damage on 2h combo longblades will be downed just a notch.
- At the same time, 1h defensive weapons will be upped somewhat, to make investing in additional shield pracs, along with weapon, bash and dodge pay off in some way.
- Because not everyone will be able to afford full pracs in ride, survival, bash, weapon, shield parry, dodge and notice, this will create diversity. You can opt to invest into weapon for ob, dodge/shield parry for defense, or bash for bash.
- Some weapons classes are being fleshed out more, most notably to breach a gap between existing rares and worthless or non-existant basic weapons in those classes.
This is what the changes will -not- accomplish:
- "Fix" dodge. Surprisingly, it's not just weapons/equipment stats which factor into top end dodge getting bashed. If you're getting bashed, that's the other factors, which are out of our hands, at play.
- "Fix" stab. Similar to "fixing" dodge.
- Strike a -perfect- balance. Given the difference in investing practices, even if 2h weapons were exactly the same as 1h weapons, there would still be an imbalance due to practices invested. Plus, I don't believe any one person is super awesome enough to get it right in one go!
Additionally, some of the more recent, wordier weapons, will be made less wordy.
After the weapons changes are complete, there will be another set of changes to smob loads, mostly changing the priorities of existing loads. Also, some of the weapons crafting will have to be updated.
I will update this post with a brief summary of every change as I've made them.
Please note that if a particular weapon gets changed, it will likely lose its honed/hardened status and this will have to be renewed.
This change was brought to you by Team EEF - Elodin, Elysia and Feneon.
Parts 1, 2 and 3 complete, which wraps up the actual changes to weapons. Smob loads changing will follow:
- Downed 2h combo longblades' damage, otherwise unchanged.
- Upped 1h combo weapons.
- 1h axes: Made the saw-toothed axe into a 1h axe, filling the gap between finely crafted axe and wicked knife bladed axe.
- 1h combo longblades: Generally upped in damage and ob, parry lowered somewhat.
- 1h clubs: Changed metal banded cudgel to provide a high ob option in the 1h clubs class.
- ABS weapons:
- 2h Axes: e-axe upped in weight.
- 2h Clubs: prod stats reshuffled with damage made more reliable, warhammer and mallet had ob upped slightly.
- 2h Lblades: unchanged.
- Shortblades: Made a new 2h dagger, which does not stab, but intends to let rogues who lost their Pair of Dirks at least function as a melee character instead of forcing them to spend time (waiting) on a prac reset.
- Javelins: upped pine javelin, gave a light metal javelin roughly the same stats as old pine javelin so it will be a decent re-equip weapon.
- Spears: Marginally upped black tasseled spear damage. Upped mahogany spear to hopefully be more competitive.
- Lances: Upped their condition so they shouldn't break down as quickly as before (including DT lance). It may not be enough to make a difference, but let's playtest.
- Polearms: Shuffled some stats around a bit to make them similar to 2h combo lblades, but not quite the same. Gilded glaive should now be a decent bottom end re-eq weapon.
- Staves: Ironshod staff upped to be a decent re-eq weapon. Leatherleaf staff upped to become a viable non-channeler weapon again. After all, Mat whacked some Gaidin students with a staff!
- Projectiles: Better distribution of stats among the various weapons, so there's now actually bad ones, middling ones and top end ones. Throwing spike condition adjusted so it will have a few more throws before they break.
- Fencing blades: Upped parry a notch to make them slightly better. Some were made lighter.
- Medium blades: Upped parry and lowered ob to make them more viable as a channeler weapon. It will still not be popular, most likely, since other classes can also do what medium blades do.
- Flails: unchanged.
Steel shafted lance, saw-toothed axe and the new dagger all have smob loads now. Some other stuff still has to be shuffled around, but at least everything should have one or more loads now.
The saw toothed axe has been moved from 2h axe crafting to 1h axe crafting.