Why doesn't sword mastery do anything for fencing sword and shamshir skills?

[sikker]

Both weapons are pretty underwhelming (especially the shamshir) and I think it's because sword mastery just gives them fatigue reduction, nothing else. I don't think there's any other weapon that just gets lower fatigue cost from mastery. Can you add something to sword mastery to improve these weapons? For example armor penetration on Gash and a +initiative self buff when you use Lunge.

[suejak]

In what sense is either underwhelming? Lunge is one of the highest damage abilities in the game plus offers unique utility, whereas shamshir can supposedly chop off huge chunks of HP for an attack that's just 1/9 of max HP, which offers insane potential.

How are you using your shamshir?

[sikker]

The low armor pen makes it really weak against armored enemies. Other duelists have so many upsides compared to Shamshir. More damage, lower fatigue cost, more damage against armor, often a higher chance to injure because of the higher direct damage.

[UnluckyNoob]

Originally posted by suejak:

In what sense is either underwhelming? Lunge is one of the highest damage abilities in the game plus offers unique utility, whereas shamshir can supposedly chop off huge chunks of HP for an attack that's just 1/9 of max HP, which offers insane potential.

How are you using your shamshir?

Shamshir is outclassed by daggers, there is no single reason to use it.

[turtle225]

Shamshir blows, but Fencing Sword is fine. I don't think it needs more help from Sword Spec.

[suejak]

I've never used a shamshir on a high-level Crippling Strikes bro designed to do what the sword is supposed to do because it's such a specific build.

But last time we looked at the code, it supposedly deletes HP on e.g. unholds, especially (of course) in named form. The reason for this is the high number of -% hp slash body injuries and the way they're supposedly applied mid-fight. People in Discord have said anecdotally that it's really strong, and on paper it makes sense.

Daggers don't really do anything similar to a shamshir, so I don't follow that response. I can maybe see the logic if you're doing 3 punctures per turn vs. human enemies, although that's still fundamentally different.

[UnluckyNoob]

Shamshir deal 62 damage with double grip. That's not enough to injure 600 HP unholds. So shamshir may injure small unholds and orc berserkers. Dagger, on the other hand, injures chosen, hedge knights and orc warriors which all are way more dangerous. And with dagger you don't have to drop shielld.

[suejak]

Ok, I wrote a longer response that seems to have been eaten by Steam, so I'll speed through a rewrite.

Here are the advantages of the shamshir, as far as I'm aware:

1) Shamshir can crit. Puncture cannot.

2) Shamshir double-grip damage is a lot bigger than Puncture damage, which means easier injuries, especially because...

3) CS Gash only needs to do 11% max hp damage to potentially do upwards of 35% hp damage in a single blow.

4) Gash has +10% to-hit, whereas Puncture has -15%. I know we used to think Gash doesn't have the +10%, but I'm looking at it right now in the code and it's "this.m.HitChanceBonus = 10".

That means guaranteed injuries vs. 2/3 of unhold types. Slightly buffed named version would injure frost unholds.

We did the math ages ago and a slightly buffed named shamshir would guarantee injuries on fresh chosen.

Everybody punctures Hedge Knights for their armour, so not relevant IMO since they're so easy to control.

You only need to do 22 hp damage for CS Gash to injure an orc warrior. This is a tall order through full armour, but it's pretty attainable if some of the armour has been chipped off. Probably not a good weapon vs. orc warriors, but maybe.

All told, it's got a niche IMO, but I haven't tried it in a real CS build.

[sikker]

It doesn't have 10% hit. You can easily test it with the caravan origin which starts with a scimitar. If it did have extra hit it would at least have something over other weapons but as it stands there is no reason to use it over a winged mace or head splitter. It's not worth training a character in this just to injure unholds. If you really want to injure unholds you can do so with almost any 2h or polearm if you take crippling strikes, and the bro will be more useful in 99% of the fights.

[suejak]

I think you'd only need a Duelist with CS. There's no reason it needs to be your primary weapon, although it sounds plenty strong if you find a named one. 2h and polearm only hit once per turn, so that's once again totally different.

Anyway, you're welcome to dislike it but I don't see a case for buffs right now.

It's simply fact that the code says Gash has "this.m.HitChanceBonus = 10", though, so I'll check with the devs to see if that's a bug.