I’ve noticed almost any melee/weapon-based suggestion on this forum almost always refers to the basic sledgehammer when talking about two handed melee weapons, but I feel like it might be a good idea to cover other weapons that could work as two handed. Originally this post was going to be just about two handed, but I decided to add more on melee in general.
Preface on melee variants
I’ll start this off with my hope to see a major difference between one handed melee (knives, small blunt tools, small improvised melee, etc)
and two handed melee (sledge hammer, great sword, spear, etc).
I also think there should be a few “hybrid” melee weapons, which feature a one handed melee attack by default but also have a more powerful two handed attack (machete, katana, tomahawk axe, etc).
Oh, and by two handed attack in this context, I mean an attack which has a sweeping arc. This attack would probably happen while standing still or walking backwards.
Movement and classifcation
Movement
I also think movement based input would make melee more interesting. Charge forward with a katana to do an outward thrust, or a deep stab with a spear, or even a bash with a small construction hammer.
Classification
Going with the original idea of the topic being mainly about two handed, I personally believe two handed melee weapons should have a good selection to choose from, but here’s another thing: not all two handed melee weapons should be considered “heavy”.
A light spear is definitely going to be a two handed weapon, but it really isn’t going to have a lot of stopping power behind it.
However, a small lead pipe could easily be held with one hand and cause some serious blunt damage when compared to something like a basic pocketknife, and therefore ought to be considered “heavy”.
The reason I went for heavy/light and one handed/two handed, over say blade/blunt, is because I felt these were too narrow. The blowtorch really is more of a tool than a melee weapon, but if it is still considered a melee weapon in II, then it being a “One Handed Light melee weapon” would sound a lot better than… “blunt melee” or even “one handed blunt weapon”. This way, this allows some degree of freedom with melee types.
Two Handed and One Handed should be the two variants for melee, with Heavy, Medium, and Light being the three classifications.
Examples:
Lead Pipe (One Handed Heavy Melee)
Katana (One Handed Medium Melee)
Breaching Tool (Two Handed Heavy Melee)
Makeshift Spear (Two Handed Light Melee)
Pocketknife (One Handed Light Melee)
Golf Club (Two Handed Light Melee)
Alternate Uses
I’m barely going to touch this. I think it’s quite apparent everyone wants alternate uses for a lot of the melee weapons, and I really doubt that Nelson wouldn’t add this in.
Of course, I don’t think every single melee weapon should be a required tool, and those that do have alternate uses should have worse combat stats to make up for it, while combat-focused melee weapons obviously would not have an alternate use, but they would be overall better in killing things (think a tiny ball-peen hammer, which could be used to hammer metal-related things, vs a military grade combat knife, which has a really good edge for stabbing things and yeah I’m completely aware combat knives are more often used as tools but we need some level of balance, military knives can’t be good at everything ever)
Not quite sure if I made usage of the “spoiler” format before in earlier posts so I figured I’d try to make this post way less of a block of words that all blend together. It is kinda late so I’m sure I messed up something somewhere, but please leave your thoughts below!