ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Whip of uhr'rok, and possibly other weapons I don't remember right now, have fire repulsion damage which AFAIK means fire damage + knocback.

If you are fighting on melee range there are roughly two kinds of situations when fighting monsters:

1) You are murdering things. In this situation you want the enemy to be next to you to ensure the murdering continues. This means knocking enemies back is bad.

2) Your character is about to get murdered. This can mean a) a dangerous melee character is murdering your character (let's for the sake of simplicity assume it's range closing talents are none or on cooldown) or b) a dangerous ranged character is murdering you character.

If it's case b), then the monster can very well continue to murder your character even if it is knocked back. So knocking it back doesn't help prevent being murdered.

If it's case a) then knocking the monster back MIGHT save your character. However, you really don't want to take the risk of the monster resisting the knockback via saves or actual resistance or missing the monster completely etc. So you really do want to use some other method of saving your character rather than the knocback.

Ergo: Repulsion is bad, please remove or change from melee weapons.

(Of course there is the possibility that repulsion is supposed to be bad for like balancing reasons but I find this hard to believe since it's not a very interesting balance mechanic and at least the whip isn't overly powerful)

I think one reason is "fiery explosions are cool". And, honestly, that's enough for me not to want it gone completely, even with your very accurate points about how it's not so good. More usefully, it can also be useful for robbing pure melee enemies of their action: if you knock them away from you, they have to spend turns moving back to you instead of hitting you. In that regard, while you're definitely right that it's terrible and inconsistent in desperate situations, it has some utility against really dangerous melee monsters because it takes longer for them to get you in a bad place.

As far as the Whip of Uhr'rok goes, it seems like a natural candidate for getting Flame Leash as a skill...actually, thinking about it, having a few Ashes skills on weapons might be an interesting lead-in to the DLC. I mean, whether or not you can be a demonologist, the demons shoul have the same sorts of magic, right?