More weapon restrictions

[lukep]

Weapon type restrictions help to thematically focus classes, at the cost of making the majority of weapons useless for them. Currently the following classes have (umm, class has) restrictions on all of their main skills:

Cursed (axe)

For more consistency and flavor, it could be expanded to:

Fighters (sword)
Berserkers (sword)
Arcane Blade (sword)
Rogue (dual daggers)
Shadowblade (dual daggers)
Wyrmic (mace)
Sun Paladin (mace)
Reaver (dual axes)
Cursed (two handed axe)
Temporal Warden (sword)
Mindslayer (two handed sword)

Rogues and Shadowblades wouldn't be affected very much by this, other than being restricted to dualwielding.

[Frumple]

No, no, a thousand times and a time no. This sort of thing was a horrible idea when we still had individual weapon damage boosting talents, and is still a horrible idea now. It's only arguably thematic, and does nothing to make the game more fun.

Weapon-locking classes crush choices for no good reason -- I'd happily suggest that, instead of everyone being burdened with the cursed class's problem (and it is a problem, as axes are the worst of the non-exotic weapons), cursed finally dump that problem and get their loot choices freed up. It should be fairly obvious that if the majority of the classes not being weapon locked is the current situation, cursed is the abnormality and should be changed to be more consistent. It's already bad enough for most classes to spend so much time just discarding equipment out of hand without making it so they literally can't do anything with better than 2/3rds of the game's weapons.

At most, if you want to encourage certain weapons for particular classes, let those classes talents improve when being used by a specific weapon type, or have different effects based on which weapon is used. This, at least, would increase the number of meaningful choices available, instead of horribly cripple them. A much better outcome.

[Hedrachi]

I wouldn't mind a two-handed weapon requirement for mindslayers, but the rest is a bit... well, ridiculous. Fighters are more or less infantry in TOME, and required to know more than just how to swing a sword. The rest, well, I dunno why you think the rest of the classes need all of those restrictions. Arcane Blade can do pretty good with a staff and staff stuff from alchy escorts. Might be intriguing to have challenge modes where you use only a certain weapon type, but I really don't like the idea of weapon restrictions with no rhyme or reason to them.

[benli]

Rogue, Shadowblade, Archer and Slinger are also pretty much restricted to one weapon type as well. I'm not sure that all classes have to conform to a single approach. I think its really good that there is some variety in style and challenge.

That said, Strife and Slaughter have been tentatively changed in svn to allow use of cursed weapons (from Fateful Aura) as well. Cursed Touch is changed to only curse 30% of all items initially but you can get that to about 90%. That should give Cursed more flexibility with weapons but still maintains some of the class theme.

[Aquillion]

Yeah, I agree with everyone who said that this is a terrible idea. We should be going in the opposite direction -- giving players more choices, not less. Theme, when it comes up, should only matter for stuff that has serious mechanical impact -- preventing a class from using a bow when it's meant to be built around close range or from using a two-handed weapon when it's mechanically designed around shields makes sense to me.

Restricting them to axes or swords? That's a terrible idea. What does it add? All it does is make it so more of the weapons you find will be useless to you, giving players fewer choices and frustrating them without adding anything at all, thematically or gameplay-wise, to the classes beyond the word "sword" or "axe". And those words don't matter at all to me.

Honestly, I feel that the distinction made between slings and bows is already perhaps a bit too finicky and unnecessary, though I recognize that it could be hard to remove at this point given the classes built around them.

The only distinctions that really seem worth preserving to me (the ones that add mechanical flavor to a class) are:

One-handed.
Two-handed.
Duel-wielded.
Shield.
Magical staff.
Ranged physical.

I don't feel that any of the other differences particularly add depth to the game; they should be treated as cosmetic in all situations, and no skills should care about distinctions beyond the ones I outlined above.

(Possibly I can see how restricting classes that aren't supposed to be melee powerhouses to daggers makes sense. But honestly, there are other ways to do so that don't pointlessly leave you with piles of useless loot while straightjacketing player concepts.)

But seriously, what does the cursed axe restriction add to the game? Can anyone come up with a reason to not simply remove it? I don't feel that the word 'axe' adds any real flavor at all, since it has no mechanics backing it up.

[edge2054]

Another way to go about this is to break egos down into themes and restrict them by weapon type rather then restricting the classes.

For instance rather then forcing axes on certain classes if the the axe egos gravitated towards cursed or reavers these two classes would be more inclined to use them, stuff with Blight damage on it or bonus blight damage damage on hit, or chance to disease. Sword egos could be biased towards caster hybrids such as paladins, arcane blades, and temporal wardens and include things like of paradox, of light, or mystic. Etc. etc.

[hamrkveldulfr]

I see a sort of half-way here.
How about weapon trainers around Eyal that will grant a new, weapon specific tree?
Ex.
Longsword mastery
tier one is plus 5% or so damage with longsword
Tier two - four are skills that support your use of your selected weapon

no downside beyond loosing out on the points, which would be your own fault, and could add more variety to future playthroughs.

It could even give some pretty bonuses to some of the weaker weapons.
maces get better armor penetration, axes hit another nearby foe if they kill their target, greatswords could get a stance that builds momentum (damage) as long as you do not move, I think it's a nice halfway point

[Zonk]

I agree that this is a terrible idea, sorry. Hell, I'm already sorta-turned off Cursed by some of their talents being restricted to axes(I'd prefer something like two-handed weapons only, like with Zerkers - even if you lose out when using one handed axes).

hamrkveldulfr, something like what you say has been suggested in the past, there were some significant discussion about it but in the end nothing was done I think.