A little bit of more historical presidence, the guard the individual is using is known as the Zornhut, or the Wrathful Guard. The depiction is specifically from a woodcutout from Joachim Meyers Art of Combat, specifically longsword plate E.

The Wrathful Guard is known as such since the stance has a wrathful bearing, as will be shown. Stand with your left foot forward, hold your sword out from your right shoulder, so that the blade hangs behind you to threaten forward strikes, and mark this well, that all strikes out from the Guard of the Ox can be intercepted from the Wrathful stance, indeed leading from this stance shows unequal bearing from which One can entice onward, whereupon one can move quickly against the other as needed, as is shown by the Figure in illustration E (on the left).

It's a guard that's specifically supposed to mess with an opponents sense of measure.

Here's a video that goes over the mechanics of the strike:

Physics of the wrath - The Zornhau

Note: Zornhut is the guard. Zornhau is the strike

Another note when cutting, unlike the batter playing baseball, you don't have time to wind your hips to attack to give a powerful blow. When fighting another individual, the sword moves first before the rest of the body and when you do cut you'll always want the blade to be between you and opponent before moving.

Here's an example of a move that is meant to draw your opponent out by giving a build up known as a Schleudern or Sling. Remember, this is meant to bait the person into attacking by pretending to do something bad, that being winding up for an attack

Nice post. I like how you leveraged a relatable topic that has a lot of analysis (baseball) to discuss something that fewer people have experienced (swordplay)

Posted By Jouten at 8:10 PM - Sun Aug 20 2017

Another note when cutting, unlike the batter playing baseball, you don't have time to wind your hips to attack to give a powerful blow. When fighting another individual, the sword moves first before the rest of the body and when you do cut you'll always want the blade to be between you and opponent before moving.

The wind-up etc. is not part of the calculations. The time it took to strike is reverse engineered from the velocity a baseball bat has when batting the ball, and the distance my hands moved while mimicing a cut (messed that one up during writing the post ... I did not imitate the baseball guy).

The baseball example just serves to show how fast a humans arms can stretch in a striking motion, while wielding something of swordlike weight. The velocity is the only thing taken, not the movement, and not the time.

I am sorry for the confusion my litte writing mistake caused.

The research is cool but in game combat realism is second to balance. Meaning we can't really speculate what can be what because ultimately balancing will override realism mechanics because it's a video game. If the balancing needs a long sword to move as fast as a dagger irl than it is. Once we figure out what is balanced than we speculate about what level of realism we can have to maintain that balance.

So which weapon would you say is so op, if we make the game realistic, that it has to be nerfed?

Besides, balance has many possible ways in CoE. Just as a Kypiq and Janoa aren't straight up balanced in combat, I don't see daggers and longswords having to be ... A dagger can be easily hidden, a quality that you can't really weigh up in attackspeed, damage or similar things. In the same way, when we compare a sword with a pollaxe - the sword can easily be carried all day, everyday, while the pollaxe is very much a battlefield weapon.

All the weapons that existed historically did so for a reason, so I wouldn't worry about realism being imbalanced.

Posted By Luminios at 5:56 PM - Sun Aug 20 2017

So which weapon would you say is so op, if we make the game realistic, that it has to be nerfed?

Besides, balance has many possible ways in CoE. Just as a Kypiq and Janoa aren't straight up balanced in combat, I don't see daggers and longswords having to be ... A dagger can be easily hidden, a quality that you can't really weigh up in attackspeed, damage or similar things. In the same way, when we compare a sword with a pollaxe - the sword can easily be carried all day, everyday, while the pollaxe is very much a battlefield weapon.

All the weapons that existed historically did so for a reason, so I wouldn't worry about realism being imbalanced.

Can't say what is without the game in hand. Not about the weapon, the game implementation. Saying based on irl this weapon could be OP is useless imo.

That next point you make is called pros/cons which is inherently balanced. Not sure how that is revelant. Unbalanced and different strengths are not connected. Using pro/cons and situational performance is the most common forms of balancing.

Lastly, irl has a meta game as well. A shit ton of weapons may have been developed but look at the issued weapons in the military and I think you'll find your weapon pool becomes much smaller.

@Takeda Shinukage:

If it is about the implementation, and not how a realistic implementation would be, then why are you telling me that what I do is useless again?

Look, if you just wanted to say that you want a balanced game, you don't have to invent imbalances that do not even exist yet, and most likely would not exist if we were to use reality as a guide of sorts.

And last but not least, actually for a big part of the middle ages soldiers had to supply their own weapons and armor, besides you have to differentiate between battefield weapons, sidearms and civilian weapons. You wouldn't compare a rifle to a pistol and cry when the pistol is less dangerous.

We can continue to discuss this if you have any particular weapons in mind as most likely becoming imbalanced IF we were to stick relatively close to RL, but otherwise I'd ask you to stop trying to tell me off any balance issues.

@Abool:

I think the limits CoE seems to be capable of imposing on spears, through lower durability due to the wooden shaft, or even just realistic interaction with armor. IMO you'd also have to compare the spear to other battlefield weapons, like pollaxes, halberds, pikes and greatswords, which suddenly doesn't make the spear seem very powerful.

Some other small things I want to note:

• Your weapon weights are way off ... most onehanded weapons for normal sized persons weight between 2 and 3 pounds, while two-handed weapons would be between 3 and 8 pounds.

• The thing with the axe and the sword is exactly what this thread is about :) It was supposed to give you the knowledge necessary to judge how you can expect weapons to work. Though the thing with the effective and ineffective zones isn't quite correct. A sword doesn't have a lot of cutting power close to the hilt, besides the axe already has the advantage of having more apparent mass ... If it were an axe I had made this calculations with, you could have expected less leverage but substantially more apparent mass.

• Another thing you mention that this thread is about is "attack speed", though I might write something about that a bit more indepth in the future. In reality the limiting factor for attack speed is mostly how fast your arm can extend, not the weight of your weapon. As you can see in the chart above the difference is negligble, especially considering that heavier weapons will have more leverage, than lighter weapons, most of the time.

Too much math and theory in this thread. Just stick them with the pointy end.

@Abool tbh. CoE doesn't strike me as a game where will run around with impossibly large weapons. Velocity is way more important for KE than mass, this is even more true for weapons, where we also want to minimize the impact area (if have to pierce armor). Even the strongest Yoru might benefit from not using such heavy weapons.

I'd also disagree on your statement about shorter weapons requiring higher attackspeed to remain competetive choices.

Using a weapon in one hand gives you the possibility to carry a shield, which if you aren't wearing a lot of armor might be a good idea. Even if your hand is free you could use it to grab your opponents weapon, or his arm, and get a slight advantage that way. Ultimately though I think equipment choices should matter. If you know you are going to fight in a staged battle you should maybe try to get some armor and either a shield or a polearm.

The thing is, making all weapons equal in all situations is also no fun, and in some cases invalidates other playstyles in the process. If you could just run around unarmored, do we need to nerf archers, so you don't have to die to random arrows? Do we have to nerf armor, to not protect against anything so archers AND unarmored persons can happily coexist? You see, there is the right equipment for each situation, and having the wrong equipment just because it is stylish/edgy isn't something I would support with mechanics.

With making every choice viable to compete at the highest level in every situation you also take importance away from even having the choice.

A last note on Pier Gerlofs Donia ... they aren't sure it is actually his sword and not just a parade sword, afaik.

I hope that weight plays a large roll in combat with strength and agility combined with your skill level.

I don't think we will see any oversized fantasy weapons being used in game. SBS has mentioned that characters will be unable to use any items that are too large/long/heavy for them to handle. So you won't see any kypiq using a buster sword or similar fantasy weapons.

@Luminos, Again likely to become imbalanced is useless. It's based on something that will not be captured in a game. Realistic vs real. It's an imitation and will always be an imitation. Meaning that you can't say "boom, spear OP in real life, spear OP in CoE. That's not how that works. Especially considering the elements of this game that make it not earth like. Different races, different resources, different tech, different biology, different physics.

If the game were PURELY a human earth copy paste from the middle ages with historical accuracy than yes, it would be much more likely to follow irl weapon balances but it's not.

It's a huge leap to automatically assume a world that doesn't follow the same rules as ours will follow the same weapon patterns as ours. Combined with again, gameplay > realism. Being realistic for the sake of being realistic isn't good. Not saying it can't be improved with player feedback but instead of an essay journal explaining the science behind real life combat that this game won't be able to copy, condense it into things the studio can/will realistically do.

Even though this game has fantasy elements I do not want cloud buster swords either as this game is balanced around the notion of real weapons with each of them justified by strengths and weaknesses of reach. Adding such things would destroy the balance.

But there are exceptions of anti-calvary weapons designed to take down the legs of horses that were rare, but they are the closest thing you can get to a buster sword in rl examples.

But the thing is do you want new player characters to just pick up any weapon and have mad quick skills and movements without the build up of skills and stats playing into it.