Puzzle Weapons: Useful or a trap?

[Shneekey]

Am I the only one who thought the Elven Puzzle Weapons were excellent in concept, but lacking in execution?

I mean, I get the idea, and the concept of 'it is a magic weapon with unique properties that has to be unlocked' is a good one. The puzzles... well, I'm not much of a fan of forcibly inserted puzzles into my RPG's (much like I'm not a fan of arbitrarily adding in a SHUMP into whatever game you happen to be designing, like some other companies), but they aren't too bad once you understand them. Then you have to spend resources in the form of 'seeds' to unlock, of which you get a finite and random amount. Which is... less okay, but I suppose if they're really worth it then fine. But the abilities themselves feel... lacking.

Part of it is that I strongly utilize weapon properties. For example, I often start off with someone with Head Knocker and equip them with a cudgel for that purpose, which reduces the opportunity cost of that skill to deal out enough Mental damage to knock most early to mid game enemies out of concentration. Another example would be the Arming Sword, which gives Storm of Blades a third swing. Put that on a Rogue with Strop, and you have the ability to end enemies VERY rapidly. Longsword (not Greatsword) is another primary example, reducing opportunity of Sweeping Slash and doubling armor rended is just too good to pass up. The problem is that the puzzle weapons don't have these weapon passives, they just have their unique passive, which frequently is disappointing.

For example, let's look at Keen. Now, at first you're seeing +50%/+100% crit rate, which feels amazing. Until you read the fine print and realize that you need a crit to trigger the 'proc' of your next hit being a crit. Which, if you don't have points in a crit passive for your skill... makes it worthless. There are builds which can take advantage of it, but you have to build for it, rather than it just being useful. And honestly, it's still not going to be as good as the Arming Sword or Longsword passives. Worst is the third tier Honed is actively anti-synergistic by removing the previous bonus to your next attack being a crit, and only giving a 10% chance *on crit* (which is already a small chance) of being useful. Mind you, the ability proc is amazing, but given that you have a 10% chance on a crit, of which you likely only have around a 20% chance to crit, which means you have a roughly 2% chance of this ability going off. That's garbage, pure and simple, and a bad way to balance the ability.

Shocking got nerfed after the abuses it has in conjunction with the red boots from the Deluxe version to create an automatic first-turn stun the enemy party that is repeatable to guarantee stunlock. Unfortunately, I'm not a particular fan of 'coin flip to either be amazing or useless' abilities. I find it to be bad game design, and not a good way to balance possibly overpowering abilities. I would rather have capped the number of charges you can obtain per turn, preventing the infinite combo while still providing a useful tool. Either that or 'this can only function once per combat' so you can stun the enemies... once. That would also make it valuable, but not OP.

Same problem with Flaming. Even at its max, it only has a 50% chance of setting an enemy on fire. Given the presence of the Flame Horn and the Dragon Staff, I find this disappointing at best.

The only elven weapon passive I'd really say is worth getting is Melting/Acidic, especially on a caster who can spam Mind Bolt until the cows come home, stripping armor and applying stacks of Melting so the Storm of Blades characters can just delete the target. However, even that is only amazing because Practitioners don't really have any weapon passives worth equipping, so any passive is better than no passive, and a stack of Melting/Acidic is applied for a cost of one mana and no opportunity, which makes it invaluable for stripping armor and making single big targets vulnerable. At least until you get into Haernhold, but that's its own discussion.

Puzzle weapons had a lot of potential. It was a fun, interesting, and different sort of thing that initially grabbed my attention. Here's a weapon with unlockable abilities that are (supposedly) quite strong. Unfortunately, it didn't quite seem to live up to the hype, in my opinion. Many of the abilities either require niche strategies to implement, or just straight up suck. Given how tight inventory is in the game, I went out of my way to actively avoid most of them because I didn't want them cluttering up my inventory, and most of the NPC's had already run out of money.

[svdp]

Well, I would dispute that for the most part. I used the Elven Puzzle weapons quite extensively, and found them useful, certainly until about halfway the game. It seems you've forgotten a bit what your normal weapons were at the start of the game. 😉

At the start the elven weapons are clearly far superior to anything else, until you get to the master-crafted normal weapons, much later in the game. At that point they begin to be outclassed, unless for specific purposes or niche builds, as you say. But by then you should have reached the dwarven weaponry.

To let them last a bit longer being useful till the end, it would suffice to give them a 4th boost where, for instance, the base stats/hitpoints were doubled.

[Shneekey]

I would disagree. I would *far* rather have a Mothren or Adamantine Arming Sword than an Elven Puzzle Weapon. In fact, that is very often my very first purchase, a Mothren Arming Sword. Simply because that third hit from Storm of Blades is going to be *FAR* superior to whatever the early puzzle weapon ability is going to represent in terms of stat gains.

The first puzzle weapon was the one you got from the quest introducing puzzle weapons, with a 50% ignite chance. Hard pass in favor of an Arming Sword or Cudgel. The next didn't show up for quite some time, IIRC, unless you got lucky with RNG and got enough Elven Shards to craft one. Unfortunately, all the crafted weapons were either Shocking or Keen, which were both useless at that stage in the game.

What puzzle weapon did you use quite extensively? Maybe it is a difference of play style? The only puzzle weapon I could say I used 'extensively' was Gaufroi's Wand.

[Cursed Life]

Synthesis is not your forte

[svdp]

Ah, well, different playstyle and viewpoint, I guess. I'll think we'll have to agree to disagree. Buying weapons? I hardly ever bought a weapon; gold is pretty scarce up until level 12-15, so I spend my money on other things (like calltrops and booze for my two bards I had). You can do fine with the elven weapons and ancient special weapons, and I stand by my reasoning that, often, what you could find along the way wasn't better - depending on the enemies and the extra perk you got, of course - then the weapons I described, up until around lvl 15 or so. This only changed when one starts to find master-crafted weapons.

Then again, by lvl 20-25 you could get the dwarven weapons in Haernhold, which usually were better still. So, really, there was only a small window of oportunity where random weapons you could find were actually overtaking the fully unlocked elven and ancient weapons. Maybe you did some optimisations of the skilltree/masterskills where you'd get more out of it sooner, and maybe you get to it sooner if you bought the specific weapons for it, but that wasn't the case for me (note: played the game on normal). Up until halfway the game I thought the elven and ancient weapons were pretty good, though the boosts should have augmented their base stats a bit more, imho.

Also: cabbages. Who doesn't want to bury their enemies in cabages??! 😂

[Shneekey]

Storm of Blades is literally one of the first skills you can purchase in either Fighter or Rogue skill tree. Rogues also get Strop very early game. A Rogue with Strop and Storm of Blades equipped with a Mothren Arming Sword from the dude next to the Adventurer's Guild for a couple hundred (less than the 300 you get from putting a keg and cabbage in the first shrine), and you will straight up delete everything into the mid game where you can start finding better arming swords.

This is a combo that comes online around level 3-5 with Wringneck (or yourself if you rolled a Rogue), and will carry you to your mid teens, at which point you get Fighters with the ability to do the same thing but with bonus True damage.

Everyone has their play style, I suppose. What Elven Puzzle Weapons did you actually use in the early to mid game? I couldn't find any worth equipping. I'm honestly interested to see what you were able to make use of, maybe I'm missing something.

Also, why are you purchasing caltrops and booze? Caltrops are useless, and booze is crafted. Trow Squeezings will hold you over in the early game until you get to the point where you want to supercharge your party's spell point total (Fighters for the Champion passive to get bonus True damage per spell point, Casters use is obvious) and use Elven Wine + Shepherd's Pipes. Assuming you aren't exploiting Cavorting, of course, but that's practically a cheat code.

[svdp]

Haha, well, we definitely had other playstyles; I never fancied strop neither for instance. I think I tried it once, for a short while, but just didn't like it - felt a bit slow-poke-y. I much preferred coldcock with my rogue: that did serious damage, especially if you came from stealth. And with my knight or paladin, I often used Last Breath.

All Elven weapons were reasonably good at the start, though some were better than others - but as said, I hardly bought weapons in the first half of the game, and merely looked at what I found at random. And mostly that wasn't all that good, so that's maybe why I have a better impression of it. Of course, I did shelve some of them once I got some of the ancient weapons, it's not like I always kept using them. That said, instead of what you describe, I went for dual wielding and the perk where you could use your main weapon also in your off-hand, so that way you could keep them longer 'in use'. Eventually, since they don't scale well, they did lose out to other weapons (that's even true for the ancient weapons), but by that time, you also started to see master-crafted weapons, and later the dwarven weapons.

That doesn't mean there aren't other viable offense or defense playstyles or weapons, though. And I would agree with you storm of blades with the extra swing was pretty good too, especially with bleeding. I often used that as well, especially against those Elven bandits in the forest that always moved around when they attacked you. So I think it's important (or at least more fun) if you adapt your playing style according to the enemies encountered (the same for the skeletons, for instance, that made it into fights of attrition, due to the constant re-summoning if you destroyed one).

Anyhow, I and others made earlier posts about our different playstyles and tactics, and compared them, so feel free to browse this forum for that, if you're interested.

[favre04]

Personally I didn't use very many of the Elven weapons during my play through. I am currently playing the game on Legendary and the only eleven weapon I am using heavily so far (around lvl 18 about to go into Iwon Rheg) is Gaufroi's wand combined with arcmages slippers and Dragon Breath - that does some serious damage and armor melting!!
It is especially fun to use when using that bard song Duotime at Drunk 7 when all abilities can be used with no cooldowns for 1 turn.
It may have its problems but I can honestly say that this is one of my favourite RPGs of all time - it just feels right.

[Tesla33]

Sorry for necroing but this thread comes up a lot in google related searches but contains a very bad misconception: The "honed" ability does in fact NOT negate the previous abilities, it stacks. So every time you land a critical hit your next hit has a 100% crit chance AND a 10% chance to reset all opportunity and cooldowns.

[svdp]

Originally posted by Tesla33:

Sorry for necroing but this thread comes up a lot in google related searches but contains a very bad misconception: The "honed" ability does in fact NOT negate the previous abilities, it stacks. So every time you land a critical hit your next hit has a 100% crit chance AND a 10% chance to reset all opportunity and cooldowns.

No worries. Feel free to necro-ing old threads. Can't remember if you're right or not, but probably Kira will know for sure. ;-)

[Kira]

I remember (rarely) getting multiple activations on Honed, so I think it technically stacks.

That said, I just re-read some bits from OP's post and it is riddled with inaccuracies. I recommend turning to a proper elven weapons guide prepared by a little angel who played the game a fair bit:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3263829100

[Kira]

Ok, sorry for the double post, people might read this thread so I'll rant here a bit...

Edit: I see I went into a big discussion on Acidic, but the larger point is that Elven Puzzle Weapons are probably the strongest category of weapons in the game. Yes some masterwork weapons will be great, almost every Dwarven weapon will be great, there are a bunch of great unique weapons, I think a successful party will look at everything. But the puzzle weapons typically offer the strongest boons (although lower stats), which does open up a lot of different combinations for your party to (ab)use. Almost every boon is great in the right situation, and each boon has a bunch of really good weapon options.

I think there's a lot of strategic depth to the elven weapons. I'm almost inclined to say that you have some abilities that look obviously strong like Acidic but me personally after having played the game for hundreds of hours don't consider it to be a particularly over-the-top ability. Trying to make the most of Acidic kind-of, sort-of locks you into Arming Swords, so 90% of the time you will end up with one of these pairs:
1. Acidic Plaguebearer + The Peeler on a Vanguard Fighter, I feel there are many better options on a Vanguard. For example Strifespear + The North Wind is just bonkers. If you're a Paladin, then it's probably much more efficient to go for an Axe build, maybe with a Strategist's weapon as an offhand. Again, it's not that the Plaguebearer + Peeler combo is bad, it's just that there are so many equally good or even arguably better options. It really boils down to your party composition and how you deal with different situations.
2. Arming Sword + Acidic Downfall on a Fighter or Rogue. Not bad, but depending on how many Rogues you field (you should definitely have more than one, by the way), you may want to prioritize other builds. Like, having a Blackjack in your offhand is almost always going to be optimal for at least your primary Rogue. I had a post a while back on my favourite Rogue builds, one-handed sword is decent but by far not the only viable or even most optimal build. I did use that one for the legendary solo fight vs. the enraged redcap with Sybale but a dagger build would have only been slightly slower.
3. LZ's R. Not sure if it's a spoiler but let's talk in riddles here... 😉 So frankly it's what you put on your Bard mainly if you want Acidic, or if you're desperate to have more than two Fighters/Rogues with this skill you can add it on a third. It's not horrible on a Vanguard, to be honest, though Plaguebearer is probably more in line with what you want. On a Bard it's almost sinful to use this, in my view, given how many other options there are. Look no further than the Antler for example if you want something truly broken.
4. Acidic Gaufroi's Wand is almost a staple on your practitioner. Whether you use Dragon Staff or Black Thirst or Sower of Seeds (if you have it) or honestly almost anything in your main hand, there are few better offhand options than this one. However in terms of overall practitioner builds, I must say that wielding some of the two-handed weapons like the Necromancer's Tome or The Certain Judgement are not easy to pass over. It really boils down to how many Practitioners you can afford to have (I love to have more than one, but it's not always easy to justify), and then how you build them. I think from a party performance point of view, it's not horrible to have a Conjurer who does a lot of turn 1 damage / burning / melting with Dragon Staff + Gaufroi's, however a good Magician or Summoner or even pure Cleric might add more to the party. Also, having a Sorcerer or two, while probably not strictly optimal, does very nicely take care of the whole mental/arcane damage angle. Though Arcane Barrage is also not horrible with Acidic, even though you don't actually benefit from the effect on the practitioner, any physical damage dealers in the party will be very thankful.