A Simple Question

[Death Knight]

Ive been thinking about the possible future of avernum 2 and 3 and was wondering about attack types in melee. In avernum 4 and 5, sword and board and pole weapons were not too broken as you could actually get something out of the shield defense wise.

 

Now i am playing this game with my dualwielder as my main fighter and a pole weapon priest/fighter as another along with my mage and priest.

 

My question is not so much for my dual wielder but moreso for my poleweapon fighter.

 

I happen to think that dualwielding has made sword and board and even pole weapons pointless to choose regardless. Im not complaining but Does anyone think that there is an actual point in picking sword and board/poles over dualwielding in this game?

 

As it stands right now im starting to think that my priest/fighter who uses poles is a waste of a character or a hack as he just cant compete with my main fighter.

 

Has anyone had any success with regards to picking either of the 2 fighter types over dualwielding?

[CoarseDragon]

My fighter started as sword/board when I had a good shield and that helped with receiving damage quite a bit but the damage output was sub-par as compared to my other fighter who used dual-wield. I decided to take the DPS over the defense given by the shield. As the saying goes a good offense is better than a good defense.

[Zummi]

Finished the game on Hard with a singleton as a sword-and-board character.

[Randomizer]

Sword and board is still good for defense when you are in long fights where the extra damage isn't going to make a difference over surviving.

 

Pole weapons will start to be better depending how Jeff does Doomguard splits in Avernum 2. If it's for each weapon strike then the extra damage for pole weapons is better than two sword strikes.

[Micawber]

I would think he would most likely make the doomguards the same way as Avernum 5.

[Arch]

Playing on Torment, I had one fighter with sword/shield pumping con during the first half of the game. His only job was to tank enough per round to get healed back up at the end of it.

 

Once his health/tanking capabilities got to a decent level, I started pumping strength / switching to dualwielding in order to help doing damage. I occationally switched back to sword/shield for though encounters (there's a shield adding mental resist which worked well against that demonlord, because getting my fighter charmed, usually meant reloading).

 

So I do think shield/sword configuration has its place. At least on higher difficulty where just surviving the first round of alpha can be hard.

[Cairo Jim]

One thing thats annoyed me just a tad is Jeff's downgrading of pole weapon users. I remember when you could use a spear and shield in the first trilogy. And they kept up, if not better than sword users.

[Slawbug]

To be fair, it's not very realistic to wield a spear as a melee weapon with only one hand. At least, not if you intend to use the spear for more than one blow.