Ervald
Recruit
Hi, I have, a few weeks ago, decided to start a playtrough as a Sturgian spear and shield footman.
While it was pretty rough when I started, it's currently going quite well now that my athletics and polearm skills are quite high (more than 275 for both).
However I noticed many issues with the way (thrusting) spears work, and their viability in combat, I won't suggest any complete rework of spears or anything, but just give my opinion on small things that could improve our quality of life as spear soldiers.
- First off, Damage, early on, it was quite lackluster, but as my skills progressed, I reached the point where a good thrust can do up to 200 damage for a headshot on an other foot soldier.
Actually I think the balance is quite nice, but one issue I faced was that there is a insanely short window for a spear thrust to actually deal good damage.
From my understanding, handling improve the ability to deal more damage outside of that perfect hit window, which is why I believe many thrusting only spears could use a handling buff.
- Keeping the distance, clearly the spear range is a solid advantage, however even with skills like keep at bay, if the enemy is blocking, he just has to rush to you to beat you easily.
This was fixed by having much higher athletics than my foes.
However early on, I had an other strategy : instead of backpedaling, I got used to run away, thrust, and then turn the camera to hit my enemy, this was effective but looked and felt very silly.
There are two things that could immensely help with keeping the distance,
First, that may sound weird, but backpedaling speed could be improved while using thrusting-only spears, this would make spears easier to use without having to use silly movements, and on experienced players it should not change things much.
The other thing could be, the ability to interrupt or slow the enemy movement when he blocks a thrust.
Currently any enemy with a shield can just rush to you, and not even be bothered by your attacks, which forces you to use the run away and thrust strategy.
- Hitboxes, thrust attacks are actually quite hard to effectively aim, on an enemy strafing or moving away, you will often end up partially missing your thrusts and dealing almost no damage, this is actually fine to me and part of why the weapon can also feel so rewarding.
However what doesn't feel right, is the way shield tend to act as piercing attacks magnets.
With a sword, you can often hit an enemy that blocked in the wrong direction, with a spear it's a joke, it seems that it acts like an arrow, and a large shield can comically sometimes even parry foot stabs with overhead blocks.
On that topic, there is also a similar issue with the way allies shields tend to block our attacks as well, and also allies behind us.
Shields should have a much smaller and realistic collision box against spears, and spears should not be blocked as easily by allies standing behind us as well.
I understand that attack speed and damage at close range are set that way in order to not make the weapon overpowered, but that doesn't mean that the effective attack window can't be a little larger, and fixing hitboxes issues could definitely improve things without drastically unbalancing the game (blocking attacks would just require a small amount of skill rather than basically just right-clicking).
If anything, being able to keep your distance more easily would probably be the most overpowered change here, which would need to be fine-tuned, and a work-around could also be to reduce a spear thrust damage if you move the camera a lot during the animation (think 180° movements), wich would make the strategy less viable, to allow for a more realistic experience for both sides.
Here are my opinions on thrusting spear combat on foot, feel free to let me know what you think, maybe there a many people here who feel that spears are actually balanced against everything other than cavalry, to me it's fun and it can be quite effective, but clearly the best spears are the one that don't play like spears and can actually attack from all directions, and some fixes could at least improve the diversity of the viable options.
While it was pretty rough when I started, it's currently going quite well now that my athletics and polearm skills are quite high (more than 275 for both).
However I noticed many issues with the way (thrusting) spears work, and their viability in combat, I won't suggest any complete rework of spears or anything, but just give my opinion on small things that could improve our quality of life as spear soldiers.
- First off, Damage, early on, it was quite lackluster, but as my skills progressed, I reached the point where a good thrust can do up to 200 damage for a headshot on an other foot soldier.
Actually I think the balance is quite nice, but one issue I faced was that there is a insanely short window for a spear thrust to actually deal good damage.
From my understanding, handling improve the ability to deal more damage outside of that perfect hit window, which is why I believe many thrusting only spears could use a handling buff.
- Keeping the distance, clearly the spear range is a solid advantage, however even with skills like keep at bay, if the enemy is blocking, he just has to rush to you to beat you easily.
This was fixed by having much higher athletics than my foes.
However early on, I had an other strategy : instead of backpedaling, I got used to run away, thrust, and then turn the camera to hit my enemy, this was effective but looked and felt very silly.
There are two things that could immensely help with keeping the distance,
First, that may sound weird, but backpedaling speed could be improved while using thrusting-only spears, this would make spears easier to use without having to use silly movements, and on experienced players it should not change things much.
The other thing could be, the ability to interrupt or slow the enemy movement when he blocks a thrust.
Currently any enemy with a shield can just rush to you, and not even be bothered by your attacks, which forces you to use the run away and thrust strategy.
- Hitboxes, thrust attacks are actually quite hard to effectively aim, on an enemy strafing or moving away, you will often end up partially missing your thrusts and dealing almost no damage, this is actually fine to me and part of why the weapon can also feel so rewarding.
However what doesn't feel right, is the way shield tend to act as piercing attacks magnets.
With a sword, you can often hit an enemy that blocked in the wrong direction, with a spear it's a joke, it seems that it acts like an arrow, and a large shield can comically sometimes even parry foot stabs with overhead blocks.
On that topic, there is also a similar issue with the way allies shields tend to block our attacks as well, and also allies behind us.
Shields should have a much smaller and realistic collision box against spears, and spears should not be blocked as easily by allies standing behind us as well.
I understand that attack speed and damage at close range are set that way in order to not make the weapon overpowered, but that doesn't mean that the effective attack window can't be a little larger, and fixing hitboxes issues could definitely improve things without drastically unbalancing the game (blocking attacks would just require a small amount of skill rather than basically just right-clicking).
If anything, being able to keep your distance more easily would probably be the most overpowered change here, which would need to be fine-tuned, and a work-around could also be to reduce a spear thrust damage if you move the camera a lot during the animation (think 180° movements), wich would make the strategy less viable, to allow for a more realistic experience for both sides.
Here are my opinions on thrusting spear combat on foot, feel free to let me know what you think, maybe there a many people here who feel that spears are actually balanced against everything other than cavalry, to me it's fun and it can be quite effective, but clearly the best spears are the one that don't play like spears and can actually attack from all directions, and some fixes could at least improve the diversity of the viable options.
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