Proposal for Weapon Changes

[satantrik]

Hey everyone. This is my first post. If you've ran into a certain fighter/rogue/WM from AO named "Venom Blackheart"....thassuh meh!!

Anyways, since Server 4 is still down I've been musing on NS4's weapons and my own homebrew PnP D&D game. Here are some thoughts on the current weapon system.

Firstly, I applaud the Devs for creating such a uniform and balanced system of weaponry. All weapons are represented within the system, allowing maximum flexibility of build.

As of now the different weapon tiers offer the same bonuses to damage, damage on crit, and enhancement bonus across the board for all weapons. Crafted and droppable weapons are an exception to this rule, but most droppable weapons start with the base bonuses for its tier (as far as I've seen).

Within the game we have three levels of weapon proficiency with one sub-level that is, for my analysis, more or less equivalent to the first:

Level
1a Simple weapon proficiency
1b Racial and Class weapon proficiency (Elf, Rogue, et al.)
2 Martial weapon proficiency
3 Exotic weapon proficiency

Within each of these levels of weapon proficiency we have several classes of weapons that differ in critical range, multiplier, damage, damage type, and size. Generally speaking, the higher level of proficiency required, the better overall stats the weapon has.

Proposal #1: Weapons requiring a greater investment of feats should have slightly better bonuses than "simpler" weapons in its own tier.

This might be expressed as all exotic weapons having a Massive Critical that is one dice higher than its tier (e.g. Masterwork Iron Scythe: 1d4 slashing damage; massive critical: 1d6 slashing damage). Or even simply having a +1 to hit over and above any enhancement (e.g. Masterwork Iron exotics get +1 to hit; Enhanced Steel exotics get +2 to hit, which works out to an overall +1 to hit as enhancement bonus doesn't stack with to hit bonus).

This can even be expanded to differentiate simple, martial, and exotics from each other by giving martial weapon one bonus over simple weapons and exotics one or two bonuses over martial weapons.

Proposal #2: Differentiate the Massive Critical bonuses based on the base weapons critical range and multiplier. Massive Critical is added to damage on critical after the multiplier: weapons with a higher crit multiplier, such as axes, should receive a larger value. These higher criit multiplier weapons have lower crit ranges; that Massive Critical bonus is twice or three times as useful to weapon with higher crit ranges.

Here's an example of how the different crit range/multiplier values could influence a weapon's base Massive Critical values across the different tiers:

Crit Massive Critical Progression (Mstrwrk Iron, Steel, Enhncd Steel, etc.)
20/x2: 1d6, 1d8, 2d4, 1d12, 3d4
19-20/x2: 1d4, 1d6, 1d8, 1d10, 2d6 (default progression)
18-20/x2: 1d4, 1d4, 1d6, 1d8, 1d12
20/x3: 1d6, 1d8, 1d10, 1d12, 3d6
20/x4: 1d6, 2d4, 1d12, 2d6, 3d6

This is just off the top of my head without looking into how it balances out, but the basic idea is to differentiate the Massive Critcal value based on the base weapons for each crit range/multiplier type. One could even simply double or triple (for scythes) the Massive Critical values for each tier for each weapon based on the crit multiplier.

I'd appreciate some feedback on this....Thanks!

[satantrik]

Proposal #3: Change the Halberd's bonus damage and massive critical damage to Piercing. As of now the best two-handed piercing weapon is the spear, which is a Simple weapon. Having another two-hander to do piercing damage and in the Martial category would be more in the line with the strategic element of NS4 (different damage type DR, DI). Also, make the base damage Piercing only, not "Piercing and Slashing". AFAIK, the NWN engine can choose to attribute the damage as only <i>one</i> kind so, by default, the damage type that is least advantageous is used. As of now the Halberd is simply the Great Axe's poor cousin, this will add some variety to the two-handed martial weapon set.

[AndrewCarr]

Hmm.. what about weapon range? Say, have polearms get a bonus to dmg when the characters are a moderate-large distance apart, and have smaller weapons get bonuses up close. But then again, maybe things would have to be changed so that if you had a polearm, you'd make an attack from farther away, while say dagger users would have to run up closer than in the current system.