Long blade questions

[RozetaMeteor]

If i wanna play a long blade intesive character what i should aim for ? any tips or tricks, is the skilltree userfull at all ? For example agressive stance or lunge, or this weapon is mostly for defensive ultility. Would love hear opnions on it and even some status spreads or good mutations to pair with them.

[Stafford's Bees]

Every skill in the tree has its uses, though en garde is kinda expensive overkill.

Usually I default to defensive stance until I'm having trouble hitting or penetrating something, or I want to use some of the repositioning skills.

Duelling stance swipe trivialises a number of dangerous encounters, and gives you tons of easy money from knocking laser rifles off of turrets.

And of course you get to make the most of using a vibrokhopesh.

[Detective Costeau]

I do quite like the Long Blade skills overall, though it takes time to get used to what Lunge and Swipe do in each of the different stances.
I agree En Garde is kind of excessive- it's nice to have, but very expensive. I'd probably want to pick up a bunch of other skills first.

One thing worth noting is Defensive Stance can be of limited value on high-armor characters that tend to have low DV- going from 4 to 6 DV isn't likely to help you much, so Defensive Stance is only really useful for the special attacks on those characters.

One of my favourite synergies right now is to combine Improved Aggressive Stance, a 2-handed sword, and the Penetration bonus from Single Weapon Fighting skill to get a remarkably high PV. Very good at punching through stuff with a lot of armor.

[glass zebra]

They are very much about the utility from the skills, which can be immense. At the start their damage is also pretty good due to the PV bonus from aggressive stance, though the other weapons sets can outdamage them, since that is only a flat bonus and the others got multipliers or scaling skills. The Vibrokopesh is a special case though, since that also scales in a way.

The disarm from longblades can be really good both to make certain enemies weaponless (frankly a lot have natural limb weapons though) and to make extra money/tinker bits from turrets. The DV from defensive stance is also good even when you are not actively using that weapon and e.g. are doing mainly ranged weapon or skill based or tinkering combat. The mobility skills can also be super good, but their true power usually comes from comboing them with something else.

Keep in mind that weapon skills only attack with your main hand and that single weapon fighting doubles all your attacks from you mainhand, even skill based attacks. Since apart from the stances long blades do not really have something good for auto attacks and are mostly about skills (and the Vibrokopesh), it is a pretty good weapon to use even if you don't want to go melee and just get your agility up for others reasons and have enough SP long term to invest into long blades and single weapon fighting (which cost quite a lote).

If you do want to main melee, you probably want to make good use of the mobility, since after early to mid game their damage mostly shines against high AV enemies with the Vibrokopesh and not so much otherwise. E.g. axe cleave is quickly better than aggressive stance after the first proc and does not just not have the hit penalty, but also the hit bonus of defensive stance as a passive on top. The improved stances only slightly improve this. They have a lot of utility and can give you decent control over the battle field, but for auto-attacking things until things die other weapons are usually better after some time. They do usually have a pretty good damage dice though (definitely quite a lot better than axes on some tiers), but unless you use the skills to push that further, that is not as strong as the alternatives.

[RozetaMeteor]

Thanks for the answers guys, i really appreciate the atention to this post, so they are better for hit'n run tatics ? i've been loking for some builds like that for a while, i was testing with corosive gas+defensive stance to push enemies on it, works surprisingly well too.

[Sly-Scale]

Allow me to shamelessly plug my guide-in-a-comment that I made for somebody else, 12 minutes ago:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/333640/discussions/0/830448456536498040/

Just scroll down the first page and you should find it. It details what long blades can do with the 3 stances, the lunges and the swipes. Especially the dueling swipe.

[glass zebra]

Originally posted by RozetaMeteor:

Thanks for the answers guys, i really appreciate the atention to this post, so they are better for hit'n run tatics ? i've been loking for some builds like that for a while, i was testing with corosive gas+defensive stance to push enemies on it, works surprisingly well too.

It hardly matters that their "DPS cap" is lower than the one of the other weapons later on. Qud is hardly a game where you have to DPS race everything. They are doing enough to kill most things reliably and for stuff where they seem to fail you still have all the other options of your build. People use longblades as one of those options though, since it offers so much kit and you do not even need a lot of strength to use that kit (which makes it good if you want to invest elsewhere too).

If you want to keep people in your gas, you might also take a look at short blades' hobble or cudgels bludgeoning (and to a degree also slam). In theory axes can also reduce movement speed if you chop of feet, but that is random chance. You can also use freezing to keep enemies where you want them (e.g. with mutations, grenades or the tier 5 freeze gun that that does that very reliably)

Originally posted by Sly-Scale:

Allow me to shamelessly plug my guide-in-a-comment that I made for somebody else, 12 minutes ago:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/333640/discussions/0/830448456536498040/

Just scroll down the first page and you should find it. It details what long blades can do with the 3 stances, the lunges and the swipes. Especially the dueling swipe.

You can copy the direct link to specific comments if you click on that number in the bottom right bar:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/333640/discussions/0/830448456536498040/#c598513360098564547