Is Blunt damage not worth having?

[MythTrip]

here is direct from manual on blunt damage:

"Blunt weapons do 25% more damage when scoring head hits
before the Protection value is deducted. They score 25%
more damage toward shield destruction"

Ok, so you only have a 10% chance of scoring a head hit in the first place...remember game randomly places hits 50% torso, 20% arms, 20% legs, 10% head.
Even if you're lucky enough to score a head hit, what does it do? It says nothing about killing the target.

Slash damage, on the other hand, can chop off the head if the attack inflicts more than 50% of the targets hit points. (Does anyone know if this means original hit points, or HP remaining?)

To me it seems like there are no real advantages to blunt weapons, so just ignore them. Does anyone know otherwise? Anything I havent considered?

[Zonk]

Originally posted by MythTrip:

increase damage 25% before protection is applied on ALL hits, not just head hits.

That might be too strong, even when you account for blunt's weapon worse att&def values
Remember slashing gets 25% AFTER protection, and that's generally a smaller though more common increase than blunt's current +25% to the base damage value (strength + weapon damage rating) on head hits only.

A human has strength 10, a mace has 6 damage, so they roll 16 + DRN damage normally, 20 (16 + 25% of 16 = 20) on head hits. With your proposal they would always have 20 damage, and that's a lot.

It might be more reasonable to keep the +25% for head its, while non-head hits gets +10%, but that runs into the issue of break points (most units would gain +1 damage, a few would gain +2).

Really, I think it would just be easier to remove blunt resistance from some Earth buffs and buff blunt weapons slightly by removing/reducing defence penalties.

Hammers (technically pierce/blunt) and mauls likely shouldn't have -1 def, and flails/morning starsa (also technically pierce/blunt) could go from -2 to -1, although as pointed out above they already have a niche.

[Demonsthenes]

Many units with blunt weapons are big -- trolls, giants, etc., and they can get a lot of head hits. Also worth mentioning that horses/animals/Ozelotl are pretty easy to hit on the head.

I think my main concern with the new weapons model are (1) many piercing melee weapons, like spears, longspears, etc., have such low base damage (3 aka 13 on a human, vs 5+ for just about every blunt or slashing weapon) that they feel strictly worse than other weapon types, and (2) It feels wrong that Slashing Weapons can benefit from both Weapons of Sharpness and the Earth Shatter Hammers buff spells.

[Antpile]

Originally posted by MythTrip:

Originally posted by Nunda:

There's a line of spells that helps blunt weapons (and slash) specifically, earth shatter hammers. I don't know how good it is, it's new. And weapons of sharpness applies to pierce and slash, so blunt lost that option.

Also, the damage increase from blunt is BEFORE protection is applied, which is better than what slash does, which is AFTER protection has been applied. 20 blunt damage becomes 24, which is 4 damage against 20 protection, while 20 slash would be 0 damage against 20 protection.

Nunda, you hit on a good point, that of damage increase BEFORE protection is applied, but but I think this is only on head hits - and theres only a 1/10 chance of hitting a head. Has anyone tested this?
Here is the manual:
"Blunt weapons do 25% more damage when scoring head hits
before the Protection value is deducted. They score 25%
more damage toward shield destruction."

While it is true that only scoring head hits 10% of the time is not exactly great odds, in the above example of doing 20 damage to a unit with 20 protection the hammers are still superior.

100 swings by swords troops that do zero damage is worse than 100 swings from hammer units that deal 40 total damage. Granted this is in a vacuum, but there are still going to be situations where the hammers will be able to deal damage where slashing damage would not.

Also, remember that helmets are usually lower protection than chest pieces anyway. So now you might have a situation where neither the slashing troops nor the blunt troops do damage on body shots. So if both would only deal damage on head shots, the hammers will be doing more damage each hit than the swords.

[ulzgoroth]

Originally posted by Antpile:

Originally posted by MythTrip:

Nunda, you hit on a good point, that of damage increase BEFORE protection is applied, but but I think this is only on head hits - and theres only a 1/10 chance of hitting a head. Has anyone tested this?
Here is the manual:
"Blunt weapons do 25% more damage when scoring head hits
before the Protection value is deducted. They score 25%
more damage toward shield destruction."

While it is true that only scoring head hits 10% of the time is not exactly great odds, in the above example of doing 20 damage to a unit with 20 protection the hammers are still superior.

100 swings by swords troops that do zero damage is worse than 100 swings from hammer units that deal 40 total damage. Granted this is in a vacuum, but there are still going to be situations where the hammers will be able to deal damage where slashing damage would not.

That's taking a one-off example to demo the math into a place it can't stand, though. 100 swings with DRN damage will almost certainly do non-zero damage with the swords. Might still do less than the hammers, but you can't simplify it this way and conclude that.

[ShivaX]

In theory blunt should have the ability to almost always do damage on a hit.

If facing a man in full plate harness, historically your best options were blunt because blunt force transfers through armor to the person. Of course the counter point there is that it's usually reduced and blunt is generally not as lethal as cuts or stabs.

And of course there are the odd scenarios where blunt does basically nothing to armor. Hit a dude in plate with a tree branch and odds are he'll barely notice.

The issue then becomes that blunt is trying to be pierce. And pierce and armor is also weird, in that piercing the best answer to armor... until it isn't. Stabbing a man in mail is generally pretty effective. Stabbing a man in plate is pointless (unless you can stab where the plate isn't or mail is). Unless you stab hard enough, then it's very effective again (say with a lance and a whole horse of momentum behind it).

That's a lot of wonky work that is drifting dangerously close to AD&D weapon vs AC tables and while this game is pretty complex and crazy, it's not that crazy. So they went with lots of extra damage to the head and generally high damage numbers. Which is a fair and decent compromise between reality and mechanics for the most part.

[anaris]

The reason men in mail can be stabbed is that mail, from the point of view of an arrow or spear, is essentially a series of loosely-connected holes, to paraphrase Terry Pratchett

[ShivaX]

True, though those holes tend to stop things from getting very far since they're so much smaller than whatever the hole-maker is. Until you use enough force to burst a ring, then it's just free real estate for the hole-maker.

Watching what a triangle-bladed rondel dagger vs mail is akin to watching it vs a winter coat, for example. But that same mail will fairly often stop a spear or arrow.

[boozermonkey]

Given that blunt weapons were one of the main counters to heavy armor historically, perhaps they should also do armor damage along with a smaller damage component. The increased damage on head hit really doesn’t make a lot of sense here anyway.

Some dude with a maul is likely to crush anyone regardless of whatever armor they may have on and would also pretty much ruin the armor as well.

[Zonk]

I find the arguments in favor of making blunt at least partly armor-piercing (or armor negating!) unconvincing:

1)Blunt weapons already have relatively high damage compared to non-blunt weapons of equivalent resource cost, which directly helps get through armor, even on non-head hits.
Blunt having worse att/def/length is true and relevant to the issue of blunt being mostly bad, but it doesn't negate this specific point.

2)Historically, metal armor generally had padding, providing provide significant protection against blunt attacks even if the metal armor above didn't. Presumably Dominions armor is the same.
So weaker blunt attacks having a serious chance of damaging someone in plate armor seems questionable, while large blunt weapons like mauls already do enough damage to regularly get through (see point 1).

3)Piercing weapons were ALSO used against armor , this is represented in Dominions by the 15% penalty to protection. Note hammers are actually blunt/pierce, not pure blunt.
Outside the scope of this discussion, but it might make sense to have more high-damage pure piercing weapons (like a "War pick" / combat pickaxe)

I already mentioned the potential for removing blunt resistance from Temper Flesh & the Fortitude bless and taking away some defence penalties from blunt, but another way to make blunt weapons better might be to make slash/piercing ones worse.

I know many are very nerf-averse and would prefer to see what's weak buffed instead of what's strong nerfed, and there are far-reaching consequences, but this would be a simple change (and one that we could actually test with modding).

What if swords lost a point of attack or defence? A short sword could have +1 to only one of attack or defence, instead of both, and a great sword could be +1/+1 instead of +1/+2.

As an aside, I find it hard to explain non-magical weapons giving a defence bonus.
Penalties are easy to explain - the weapon is heavy and unbalancing - but bonuses?
Parrying & deflecting is a good enough answer for combatants of roughly similar strength, but this explanation quickly breaks down when you consider this is a fantasy game where a human (or even hoburg) might be attacked by a giant (or even titan).
Skill and technique might compensate for lack of physical power, but I doubt that a human could deflect a giant's blows in the same way that a weak human could do that against a strong human.

[Avazander]

I think people (along with myself) have NOT made a full analysis, on how powerful or weak blunt weapons are and who they are wielded by etc. So I would caution against blanket-ly giving them extra damage or something unnoticeable like +2 dmg to each weapon, also addressing other weapons types given lack of that analysis will do little to compensate for that. (i think) It seems like the problem is mostly the appearance of a lack of a niche (as 10% head hit chance is not unique enough) compared to +15% pierce and +25% dmg.

Hence I liked your more spell-oriented suggestions Zonk, and if indeed an overhaul of the swords is done, prob the defence of those units should be looked at (or somehow to compensate the troops loosing defensive stats)

However, with the nerf of pierce weapons, if you nerf the sword weapons as more defensive weapons(certain ones), and not give anything to club weapons then the difference will feel smaller, and it wouldn't matter that much what weapon type you have. In that regard I'd rather buff the underpowered weapon type (while tuning down perhaps units that are strong with it) a 1-2 pass through damage/chance of pass through damage sounds quite interesting. (but it should prob be capped as people stated)

[peterebbesen]

Originally posted by MythTrip:

here is direct from manual on blunt damage:
To me it seems like there are no real advantages to blunt weapons, so just ignore them. Does anyone know otherwise? Anything I havent considered?

Resource cost.

[LORDzEMPEROR]

It's important not to think too poorly of blunt weapons, the general consensus is correct that they are less effective on a regular basis from a massed troop recruitment POV. They serve a balance purpose by being less effective in generic circumstances because blunt things either have stronger wielders or are Monsters with hoofs (think of all those horses adding blunt). This is why we cannot easily buffing/nerfing them without throwing off everything, and instead the blunt damage is less important than the strength of the unit. Like everything, blunt contributes in complement to pierce and slash. Some weapons do blunt and pierce, like morningstars, and thus are effective at crushing shields and killing people at the same time.

Dominions has always been a game where you are challenged with way more ways to die than kill. So, most of the time blunt is the minority of damage, until that David's sling one shots a super-combatant without a helmet, or takes out the eye on a Cyclops, or brain damages some of the mages and interrupts their AOE spells. This isn't appreciable from a DPS POV, but from a tactical and strategic POV the blunt effect could win the battle or war, even if the swords and spears did the butchering on the damage analysis.

Catastrophe in dominions is often because it is so difficult for anyone to defend against everything and sometimes it is hard to detect or appreciate different values. It's complexity means there is lots of room for surprise since, to put it bluntly, no one plans to get bashed on the head.

[geepope]

Blunt weapons still have a minor niche in that a lot of statue-type units resist slashing and piercing damage but not blunt. Maul barbarians have long been the poor man's answer to immobile pretenders.

I think it's largely OK that blunt damage just isn't generally as useful as the other physical damage types. Slash damage is optimal against lower prot targets and pierce damage is optimal against higher prot targets, which just doesn't leave a lot of room for a co-equal third role. "Best of both worlds, but only rarely" is a actually a pretty decent idea, although head hits are so rare that it's still a bit of a letdown.