Weapon classes and their specials

[Talexis]

With the changes to macing which is a huge nerf to the class I figured we should debate weapon classes and their specials to have them better balanced. Currently these are the weapons and their specials:

Swords:
Bleed is 15-31 direct damage over 10 seconds
Mortal Strike is target can not heal in any way for 6 seconds (PVP) or 12 seconds (PVE)
Paralyzing Blow is target is paralyzed for 3 seconds (PVP) or 6 seconds (PVE)

Fencing:
Armour Pierce is 50% of damage is made as direct damage, also damages armour
Nerve Strike does direct damage and chance to paralyze the target
infectious strike is guaranteed poison delivery

Axes:
Bloodlust +50% damage as well as convert a percentage of damage back to users hp for 6 seconds
Frenzied Whirlwind damage over time to all enemies around user
Whirlwind damage multiple enemies around you in a single swing (not DoT)

Polearms:
Rallying Cry does 75% damage but gives your whole party 20-50% increased swing speed for 15 seconds
Pole Trip dores 25% damage and trip target for 4-6 seconds
Hamstring does 50% damage and target is hobbled for 3-5 seconds

Macing:
Concussive Blow does increased damage the lower the target's HP % is compared to their Mana %
Crushing Blow +50% damage increase
Armour Ignore bypass physical resists to get up to a max of an additional 35 damage

As you can see the three macing skills pretty much do the same thing and swords is completely stacked with overly useful specials due to how the mechanics of this Act are. The balance for macing used to be that it did damage to armour and stamina which made having 3 specials, where really only Armour Ignore was the useful one, that did the same thing bareable.

For a sake of balance perhaps macing should get a replacement to Concussive Blow, or perhaps add a hobble effect to concussive blow since you are issuing a concussion? My other suggestion would be if Mondain's Legacy special attacks work would it be possible to replace Concussive Blow with Psychic Attack which causes the target to decreased spell damage and increased mana cost.

[Hagbard]

An idea that might or might not be popular;

Make all moves available to all weapons, and you buy them within the tactics tree.
So all 2-handed weapons have the same moves, all 1-handed weapons have the same moves.

Then it comes down to what damage type you want to do, or which esthetics you prefer.

[Vee]

Abou balance. And I will give my perspective as a macefighter.

I believe that it pales badly in comparison to swords, since the 3 skills are quite good but in particular Bleed.

IMO it's way overpowered when compared to anything else, it's like a anti heal poison damage over time that you only have to hit once on demand.
It's brutal both in pvp and pvm.
It's so powerful that most fighters in the server use it to fight most anything in the server (either by being a swordsman or using a sword with bleed in offhand)
A npc that heals with bandages? - Bleed it
A boss that hurts in melee? - Bleed, run, repeat
A player? Bleed so they have to heal twice and when they finish you just apply another bleed
etc

This is the thing that I find most broken all around since no other skill compares to it.

As for maces, yah concussion blow can be decent in certain situations and crushing blow... meh I rarely use it to be honest, I find it quite useless.

[Wyrmlance]

Having played with all the weapon classes and their specials on Requiem save for the new polearms, my personal ranking of them would indeed find macing at bottom.

Crushing blow: +50% damage
Concussion blow: 10-30 additional damage (non-direct) based on mana-HP difference
Armor ignore: up to 35 of the original damage can skip physical resist - it is not "additional" damage

In drawing some comparisons to similar SWMs,
Axes having Bloodlust is exactly like Crushing Blow but better as it has the HP regen.
Both Nerve Strike and Bleed can do 30 in direct damage, thusly, they are objectively better than concussion blow.
Armor Ignore adds no additional damage, but it converts maximum of 35 of it to skip physical resistance. Again, objectively worse than Bleed and Nerve Strike with their direct damage.

The reason why Macing has SWMs that are slightly more lackluster, is the OSI mechanics they had. Those are gone, so a review for macing specials could be in place.

There's a lot of ways to do it.
One could be to increase the damage on Crushing Blow.
One could be to convert the damage on Concussion Blow to be direct.
One could be introducing a form of CC to the SWMs like Talexis originally suggested.
One could be to introduce a method of antiheal in there.

Mostly anything can be done, since as it stands, the abilities are a step below the rest of the pack. The design is neither unique like with Polearms or Axes, nor is it effective like with Swords and Fencing. All the abilities are centered around the idea of "doing more damage", and even in that, they fall short when compared.

[Wyrmlance]

Further observations of the macing SWMs:
Concussion blow only considers the difference if mana is greater than HP, meaning it is near useless against all but mages
Armor ignore CAPS the damage of the hit to 35, meaning it is garbage on high damage weapons