Post:Combat 3.0 Update - 02/06/2012 - 16:24

Re: Combat 3.0 Update · on 02/06/2012 04:24 PM CST	1285
Heyo! It's way way way past my bedtime, but I can't seem to sleep, so I'll tackle the dual wield question real quick... First and foremost, I am not going to make anything vaguely resembling a promise on dual wield, but as I've gone through combat I've been adding hooks to make enabling a new version of dual wield possible. The reality is that DR isn't really set up very well for dual wielding, and anything we do is going to be a little on the hackish side. Some of you may remember that in the past the idea of having separate roundtimes for left and right hands, but the logistics of that is just nightmarish at best. Not so much from coding the attacks, but just the idea of trying to juggle that as a player without complex scripts, not to mention the necessary messaging and front-end tools necessary to make it even remotely user friendly. I don't want to say it can't be done, but I just don't think it is justified by the effort and complexity involved on all sides. I do have a dual wield system mostly cobbled together, but it is a much more straightforward and simple version...although perhaps not as straightforward and simple as our current live pseudo-dual-wield. At this stage I really don't want to go into any details, since I suspect that even if it works, it will need a lot of tweaking. For me, the biggest issue with dual wield isn't making it happen, it's making it happen in a way that doesn't encroach too heavily into the niches of the other fighting styles (sword & board, two-handed weapons, etc), especially if dual parry is part of the picture. It would be far to easy for dual wield to have all the best features of single-weapon or sword & board style combat combined with damage potential rivaling or even exceeding two-handers. Suffice it to say I do have something we can try out in the test instance soon, but it will almost certainly need a lot of fine tuning to give it its own niche and allow other fighting styles to maintain theirs.
This message was originally posted in Combat - Weapons and Armor \ Responses to GM and Official Announcements, by DR-DARTENIAN on the play.net forums.