Differentiating weapons

[Sirrocco]

I don't think that we want to make people invest in weapon-specific talents. On the other hand, what about doing it this way...

Once the to-hit and damage talents for weapons get trimmed down to 5 each, have a "Weapons Master" talent in the same tree, that gives some sort of interesting passive benefit depending on weapon type. If you're wielding a mace, you have a small chance to daze/confuse for a round on standard attacks (2% per, up to 10% check for each on each swing). If you're wielding a sword, your weapon-using activated skills take up to 25% less time (swinging 4 times in the time it takes someone else to swing 3 - if you have 4 separate weapon powers that you can fire off back to back). If you're wielding an axe, you get 4% per (up to 20%) to deal (or make worse) bleeding wounds, which will damage over time for a while. Daggers (if included) would see a boost to crit chance or something. It's simple, it's straightforward, it's easy (if long) to describe, and the description only needs to go into one place. The people who like the idea of differentiating weapons can buy into it, and the ones who don't (or who don't use weapons that heavily) have no need to. It's also easy to keep balanced, and I suspect wouldn't take much work. It's just another generic skill available to anyone. Daggers might or might not be included in the skill.

Also, I'm keeping my examples weak for a reason. I suspect that some of them might need to be upped a bit (or replaced entirely) but I didn't want to overpower them.

[Grey]

I'd personally prefer it if the current sorts of differences between weapons were accentuated so that you could actually notice them. The only thing currently noticeable is how much slower greatmauls are, making them bad to use. If the crit, damage and APR differences were quadruple their current amounts then we'd see real choices between weapons.

The problem with adding more talents is that it makes the class talents less special, unless the weapon talents are just useless (which would also be bad). We have enough talents already, especially with potions/scrolls being turned into their own little mini-talent system.

[Sirrocco]

I'm not seeing how it makes the class talents "less special". Could you explain?

[Grey]

It dilutes the pool, possibly making some talents not worth investing in if you can achieve similar effects through other means. This is especially the case when the extra skills use no resource and are reasonably powerful, but removing these two features makes the skills kinda pointless.

[Sirrocco]

Generally speaking, the weapon-specific talent would stack on the class talent, meaning that having the one would make it more appealing to acquire the other, not less. If you're building a character who likes throwing around daze/confuse/debuff effects, you're trying for a slower fighting style. You probably have some form of autodamage or damage-over-time floating around, you may have juiced up your regen, or whatever. Giving you the ability to daze/confuse/debuff some more with mace strikes will reduce the ability of enemies you're fighting even further, meanign that your regen/autodamage/etc abilities have that much more time to kick in.

If you're saying that they'll run out of generic talent points... well, if we trim back to 5s in the weapon talents, a lot of the melee types won't really have much in the way of generic talent choices (especially now that the slime tree is gone) - and particularly so if they're not going antimagic (which is also non-classed) or grabbing trees off of escort quests (which i personally find not worth it - and they're effectively non-classed too). Personally, I figure that extra options are generally good, rather than bad, and I don't see how this would marginalize other choices, given the fact that it stacks with stuff. I certainly wouldn't suggest a skill like this that used class talent points, but for generics, it seems reasonable. Likewise, I'm not suggesting any active abilities - just a passive.