The Item and Class Stat Balance Thread

[Winter]

Just because a weapon isn't pointy doesn't mean it can't pierce through armour. There's a reason you hack down trees with an axe and not a sword. Axes, as far as the real world counterparts go, rely on small area impact damage, made deadly by the one sided weight of the axe which harnesses and focusses the entire weight and force of the weapon onto a small area for tremendous damage (allowing you to pierce through things swords and other cutty things can't). This means you can't cleave through 5 heads in one swing but you can certainly put some serious pain on one head at a time. To give axes the same old cut damage that you get with your stock standard swords daggers doesn't do justice to its intended use.

I don't feel like this would really manifest itself through "piercing" the armor, though.  Quality axes wouldn't be piercing metal armor as much as doing blunt trauma damage and cracking/crushing through it, which is the same as what swords would be doing, although with much more efficiency because of the mechanics you described.  Pierce, in my mind, describes things with pointy ends that truly pierce through things, like spears or the points on the Mangler.  For axes, it almost sounds like it should be doing high blunt damage on metal armored enemies and continue doing cut damage on leather/cloth armored enemies, although for Warband this is not possible.

The damage system I would really like to follow is having each weapon and armor have a mixture of types (cut/pierce/blunt, leather/chain/plate) to make it a bit more realistic, as even swords of varying sizes would have massively varying degrees of blunt force trauma on different types of armor.  Ah well, maybe for a future installment of Warband, but I digress.

For the Dwarf Axe now, I don't see it gaining pierce or blunt damage.  It is possible to give axes a certain degree of extra armor penetration, though, as you have described.  It will still be called cut damage, but underneath it will denote that it has extra armor penetration.  This will require further testing and feedback.  This would, of course, follow over to other axe-type two handed weapons and possible some polearms, depending on the polearm type.