With all weapons costing 1 AP to use in D:OS 2, there should be some way to give different weapon types utility. I think I heard that Larian was considering giving different weapons different types of basic attacks.
Possible examples (as in not necessarily balanced at this time) of how such things could work are:
Two-Handed
Spears (Attack type: piercing line)
- They can attack from a maximum range of 5-6 meters, but they have a piercing attack: If you are closer to the enemy, your attack pierces through hit to the next enemy within that 5-6 meter line (probably with some damage reduction on the second hit).
Combat Staves (Attack type:horizontal sweep)
- They have lower damage than edged weapons, but their standard attacks hit all foes within 3 meters in a 180 degree arc in front of the attacker. (Not that combat staves are actually in the game)
Swords (Attack type: horizontal slash)
- They have a 2.5 meter range and hit enemies within a 90 degree cone in front.
Axes (Attack type: Downward slash)
- They hit a single target, but for increased damage compared to swords.
Bows and Crossbows (Attack Type: ranged)
- I haven't really thought of a good way to differentiate these. Perhaps Bows do lower damage at close range and higher damage at long range, and Crossbows do higher damage at close range and lower damage at long range?
One-Handed
The main feature of one-handed weapons is being able to use shields. They are less offensively aimed and instead are geared more to improving survival.
Shields
- Shields have an inherent passive chance to trigger a shield bash on a successful block. Let's say that when an attack is blocked, there's between a 1/5 (20%) to 1/3 (33%) chance to trigger the bash, which does no damage, but stuns the attacker for 1 turn. (Stunned enemies do not take any additional damage, but cannot act.)
Daggers
- Daggers are tricky to balance. They have low damage, but can get guaranteed critical hits through Backstabs (which should be an inherent property of daggers, no longer tied to a mandatory Talent). For the rest of this topic, when I say "damage", I mean "damage when backstabbing".
If they do more damage than a sword, then Rogues are better than warriors. If they do the exact same damage as a sword, their lower health makes them an inferior warrior (although without Speed, Rogues could now invest just as heavily into CON as a warrior).
I think that the last time this came up, there were some vague suggestions that daggers could attack twice. But when I asked what that meant, it turned out they were thinking of that being only cosmetic. (Scenario: Your Rogue was standing within range of two enemies, and one was at 1 HP. If the Rogue attacked the 1 HP enemy, killing it on the first strike, their second attack would go off onto empty air. You would not be able to use your "second attack" on the surviving enemy. That is not a second attack, just a single attack cosmetically split in half)
A "second attack" which worked like that is pointless in my opinion, it is no different than having a single animation and doubling the listed damage of the dagger on the equipment screen.
Instead of trying to balance daggers by adding a cosmetic-only second attack, I have a different idea. Daggers will remain weak on attacking - so even backstabbing, they'll do notably less damage than main attack weapons - BUT they will instead double the dodge bonus the Rogue gets from Finesse (does not stack with dual-wielding).
Thus the Rogue will be doing less damage, and is limited on their effective angle of attack, but is also less likely to be hit than a warrior with the same Finesse.
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Once again, these are just examples of different ways to differentiate the behavior of weapons and the ideas are not necessarily balanced at this time.
