[Suggestion]Two thrust alternatives for spears/pikes

[Gumpy]

Question: high thrust requires an overhand spear grip. How would you animate changing the spear grip? Front hand flips over, then the back hand? Would it be possible to animate this from an arbitrary hand position? No other animations require changing your the way you hold a weapon mid-attack, unless I'm mistaken.

o.o

X key activates "overhead" or "underhand" stab stance  This is Spa......

Sideswings should stay, but in general I think spears need a slight damage nerf. They're already pretty bad I guess, but it's not uncommon to see a lightly clothed peasant beat a chain wearing nord or something. If you go up against armor using the wood of the spear, you should get owned.

 

[Arch3r]

Sideswings should stay, but in general I think spears need a slight damage nerf. They're already pretty bad I guess, but it's not uncommon to see a lightly clothed peasant beat a chain wearing nord or something. If you go up against armor using the wood of the spear, you should get owned.

Thrusting shouldn't get a damage nerf but maybe side swinging should. Still the fact that the spear is from wood doesn't matter for damage, it's the weight/force behind it that delivers the damage, mail armour won't stop that much.

 

[Sidus Preclarum]

Sideswings should stay.

Maybe. But the animation must be redone then... 

 

[Corinthian Hoplite]

I say replace overhead swing for all polearms with an upper thrust that could be used with shield too. Leave the side swings alone.

However, a group of spearmen with shields would get nearly invincible with 2 attack directions, so some kind of balancing should be done.

 

[Phallas]

IMHO all the animations should be redone, But the devs are focused on game play balance.
A balance that has been thrown out the window since .630 i might add.

I'm sure they will polish things , during the polishing phase of this games development,
however game play changing animation polishing would need further testing.
And i'm not sure they want to make any dramatic changes

 

[Papa Lazarou]

I posted some in-game screenshots of possible new high thrust ready positions for polearms here.

The spear could also be used with a reversed grip, but that would probably cause more harm than good at the moment.

 

[mouthnhoof]

Guys, we can't be asking for stuff like this with the release coming soon, we can't have these difficult suggestions adding entire concepts to the game.
I doubt Armagan & co would be able to tackle something like this until after the beta. Unless I overestimate the difficulty.

It's a single animation and a line of code.

And if spears no longer deal damage past the tip, I'd like to see 'side' thrusts too. It would help to make them more dynamic at least.

I have been asking for this since before M&B 1.011. I even moded my own game to include this in a very crude way as an experiment.

It is not as simple as changing one line of code. First, one needs a new animation for the second thrust - I used the sword thrust animations, but it is not pretty. Then, there is the problem of two damage types: the damage of the "overhead" is always the same as "swing". To replace the "overhead" with a thrust means that both damage types must be pierce and the swings will do pierce damage too, or that the high thrust will do blunt damage like the swings, or swings must be disabled. Not so much a problem for the 1H case where you have no swings. Finally, there is the special treatment of the overhead strike for block crushing. Should it be left active for the second thrust? I don't think it is simple to shut it off for a specific weapon and it will require another flag, since other polearms (glaive) do use a regular "overhead".

I would LOVE to see a high thrust instead of the "smack-down" attack for spears.
Spear held with two hands under, for a "shoulder" thrust like this:

and a reverse grip:

Compared with the lower "hip" thrust: