One-Handed Sword Duel Stance

[Rolan McDolan]

Alright, so this is kind of a rant about the stance you have when handling one-handed weapons, especially swords.

The base stance used for one-handed swords is both feet adjacent to each other, with both shoulders being at the same distant to your opponent (if you are facing toward your opponent).
This stance makes no sense unless you are bearing a shield or dual wielding. What you want when dueling with an off-hand free sword, is to have your sword arm and foot forward and your free arm and foot backward, this way you gain:
- Protection: Only the sword shoulder is exposed, the other one is safely in the back, giving less angle of strike to your opponent.
- Parry: Parrying attacks coming from your free arm is very hard because the parrying weapon is on the wrong side of the attack. Changing the stance would allow you to have all the right angles to parry attacks from both sides.
- Reach: Same as with boxing, where your Jab is closer to your opponent, your weapon forward would bring your weapon closer to your foe while keeping you safe behind it.

These are the main reasons why you want to use this stance with an off-hand free sword (there might be more, but digging further seems unnecessary).
Why they have not implemented this thus far is beyond me, as it seems kind of obvious if you think about it a little (and they had plenty of years to think about it).

[Rick Hall]

The developers have expressed desire to have more unique stances for some weapons, however I don't know to what extent, as having your character change the way footwork works entirely could create a lot of problems. Otherwise, you can already see how some of this works when using the Greatsword. It has unique attacks that also change how your character moves.

This game doesn't have fixed animations and hitboxes. If it did, I'd imagine this wouldn't be much of an issue to implement/do.

[Tempered]

My biggest problem with one hand weapons is how you walk around like you have a 3 foot long hard on, ramming it into everything. No sane person would walk around with a sword like that. They would hold it up at the ready or rest it on their shoulder like they do with the two hand weapons.