I believe we already had piercing/crushing/slashing resistances in Divinity, but it just wasn't exposed to the player. I could be wrong.
Imbuing weapons with elemental dmg: yes indeed!
Flanking, backstabbing: yes, and we're trying to get more typical turnbased stuff in. Like indeed, weapon range and knockback and shield bash. We're trying to make sure weapons have tradeoffs (e.g. two handed swords do more damage but take more action points; daggers don't do a lot of damage and you have to get close to your enemy, but take less action points and have a higher chance to do critical damage, and can be used to backstab without the enemy seeing you).
I think you make a very good point when you say that many different types of weapons don't make sense if you can't find trade-offs like these. We are bound to a system that we want to keep simple yet deep, so within that system, it's often hard to imagine, for instance, the in-game difference between a crossbow and a normal bow. Plus, you sometimes have to adhere to unwritten RPG-rules that don't always make sense
I believe that the more weapons, the better. People always liked the freedom of choice. The more choices, the better. And the weapon does not become useless things that can easily be replaced, for it we can to dream a little. You gave an example with a bow and a crossbow. Come on, think about it, what's the difference between a real bow and crossbow? To shoot a bow, you nock and shoot. Because your hands are strained when holding an arrow, the accuracy may suffer. Crossbow, you must first charge, and then shoot. In this case, the arrow is already fixed and effort to support it is not necessary. Therefore more accurate.
Bow damages depending on the tension. Crossbow has fixing damage because tension is the same. The damage of the bow depends more on the characteristics of the character, and can range from small to very large values. The damage of the crossbow over fixed and depends little on the characteristics of, and more from the crossbow. The accuracy of the onion less than crossbow. So we have two very different types of weapons.
Bow - unpredictable weapon with not very high accuracy and strong dependence on the characteristics of the hero (Str / Dex).
Crossbow - a more accurate weapon damage and only slightly dependent on the characteristics of a hero.
Besides bows faster weapon than the crossbow. Therefore it is logical to do to crossbow demanded more action points.And have you ever seen a crossbow with flaming arrows? It may therefore be less of
crossbow arrows (poisoned, the magical, the usual), and more for
bows (poisoning, magical, fire, usual).
Since, I have started to offer their ideas. How about a
throwing hook? Throw it at the enemy and attracts.
If you've played Diablo, and there was such a wonderful thing -
throwing potions. You can throw the bottle of poison or oil. Imagine you throw into a monster bottle of oil, and then a ball of fire. ^ ^
P.S. Sorry for my bad English. I hope you understand what I mean.
