Prediction! Scythe Weapon this October!

Didn't know that, interesting.

Thanks

I like the tech staff weapon.

There's a Staff Weapons pack coming soon.

We've been saving Paragon City for eight and a half years. It's time to do it one more time.

Originally Posted by ShadowNate ;_; ?!?! What the heck is wrong with you, my god, I have never been so confused in my life!

The trident also looks rather nice. Furthermore, there's something to be said about the metal and wood staves' simplicity.

I wouldn't hold my breath.

Yeah, a Scythe for Staff Fighting would look... really weird. Titan Weapons maybe, but smacking people with the side of the blade or tripping people with a giant blade would look very silly, IMO.

I've been saying this since the first time it came up on beta back in early 2012. A scythe would look ridiculous as a Staff Fighting option; it doesn't function mechanically the way a staff does, which is to keep the weapon's center of gravity as close to the core of the shaft as possible.


On the other hand, since Titan Weapons was (were? damn you Grammar Goblins!) first announced, I've been clamoring for a scythe option. It would work beautifully as a TW choice; heck, the only reason a scythe really works as a tool in the real world is because of momentum. It's a weapon that's built for broad, powerful swings, at a scale that's much more reasonable for a "normal guy" character to wield than any existing Titan Weapon options.
No sillier than the current giganto-swords or demon meat axe, I'd wager.

Originally Posted by Nethergoat it's NEVER too late to pad your /ignore list!

I wish the metal staff looked collapsable. It doesnt actually have to collapse and extend. But look like it does!

Pool Cue is also great! Love it

To be clear, I went back to talking about Staff with the last part of that sentence. I really should have made a more clear delineation.

I would like this. Or maybe a little bit exited on a level of a squirrel high off speed stuck in a church on Sunday if they made this weapon for titan weapon set or even staff. I have a good concept for this weapon that would fit like a glove.

Originally Posted by mauk2 Evil_Legacy became one of my favorite posters with two words. "Kick Rocks." I laffed so hard. Never change, E_L!

It's a long pole, there is no reason it couldn't be used like a staff, in the same way a mop can be used as a staff.

You wouldn't be using the blade, but if the character is a hero, they may prefer to hit someone with the flat rather than carving them up into tiny pieces.

The unbalancing affect of the blade can be ignored because of superstrength, magic, or whatever the hero happens to have.

I've always wanted a Spear Melee powerset. Sadly now that we have Staff Melee and some spear-like skins for it we'll probably never get Spear Melee since you can sorta fill the concept.

Titan Weapons has problems - big ones. And the problems aren't weapon choices, those are fine. The problem is that nearly half the Titan Weapons animations were taken directly from sword-centric powersets, at least for their non-momentum animations. Rend Armour is Assassin's Blade, Follow-Up is half of Parry, Titan Sweep is Soaring Dragon and so forth. What this means is you have a set which acts like a sword set. So when you stick stuff in there that's not a sword and has no stabbing point, it looks weird. You don't stab with a hammer, it looks wrong. You don't use a hammer with an engine on the back to stab said engine in the ground. The list goes on.

I get this on a technical, labour-saving level, but it's weird to me that Broadsword - a SWORD set - has no sword-specific animations and looks just fine with an axe or a mace, but Titan Weapons - a NON-SPECIFIC weapon type set - expects a sword for most of its animations. To me, this really should have been focused on wide swings and length-wise ground pounds so as to accommodate all weapon models. Because as it stands, it just looks weird to me. And I LOVE the set, mind you. I just only use the sword weapons.

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On scythes: Darksiders II has a take on scythe combat so surprising it caught me completely off-guard. I never considered a scythe to be a weapon which could ever look good, at least not as a primary weapon, but that game goes all out. Death uses a pair of small twin scythes that work pretty much like large Kama style weapons, which can also join together at the hilts to form a single, long-bladed scythe to use two-handed. The game takes some liberty with proportions, as those scythes can fold in for transport and their blades grow larger and smaller as needed, but suffice it to say that both dual-wielded and two-handed look good.

In fact, a lot of the coolness of the two-handed scythe comes in the form of either long AoE sweeps or tossing the thing forward to spin in a froth, then catching it as it comes back. Knowing City of Heroes' insistence on keeping sets looking like something you can do without the use of telekinesis, this "boomerang scythe" is probably not workable, but it looks very good regardless. I've always found this weapon to work best when spun fast.

Finally, Death's "reaper form" uses a pretty giant scythe that it uses almost like an axe, only not so much to chop at things as to spear them then toss them around. It occurs to me that this kind of weapon would look great in-game, but it would need animations much more suited to a large two-handed axe, as opposed to the sword-centric animations we have now. Stabbing with a mace may feel wrong, but it still has some sense to it as you're effectively "punching" people with a heavy weight. Stabbing with the dull side of a scythe blade, on the other had, will never look good. Not to me. If Titan Weapons got a series of new animations that swap out Rend Armour and Wave of Destruction, this could work, but not with those two being the set's best.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Well, no, it's not scythe-specific because the way Death fights is more as a dual-weapons used with kama weapons that he uses pretty much like axes. He has only a few scythe-specific attacks, usually either in executions or his reaper form attacks. What I was saying, however, is he made a primary scythe user look good enough for me to want one.

Also, what do you envision of being specific to a scythe? An actual scythe has a blade that points sideways of the haft so that it can cut grass on the ground without making you bed over. A what you see passed off as a scythe in fantasy and anime has a curved blade that points down the haft and looks like a giant kama. To the best of my knowledge, such a weapon has never actually existed and thus no traditional means of using it has ever been developed.

I don't mean this to shoot you down, by the way - this is an honest question: How do you envision a scythe being used that's unique to it and can't be used for an axe just as easily? In Darksiders II, Death spears the Crowfather lying on the ground, then flips him up to stand the scythe on its end so the guy is hanging off the blade upright, but that's a very specific use for it that's not easily transferable to a genera situation. So seriously - what's specific to the scythe?

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

A bit off topic but...

I'll just say I just watched that Darksiders II movie clip and wow...I have no idea what was going on. The art/FX is so 'flashy' that I could barely distinguish between character and mob and who and how the character was attacking the mob.



Back on topic...


Yes to scythes for Titan Weapons! I've always been a big supporter for it!

True, but the other half of Staff is spinning. Lots of lots of spinning.

And spinning a scythe is pretty cool.

Won't find me arguing there, it's just as confusing to play it as it is to watch it. Darksiders II is an objective lesson that while you CAN make a game that's style over substance successful (the original Darksiders was still fast and frenetic, but you could still tell what War was doing), you very much can go overboard and create a game where the player can't tell what the donkey is going on. You get used to it after a while, if only because most of the combos are redundant anyway, but with Death switching between dual wielding weapons and a two-handed weapon mid-strike, even I can't tell what he's doing half the time.

Frankly, most of what looks pretty is his executions in Reaper Form where his scythe is a lot bigger and his strikes are a lot slower, so you can actually follow the action.

Animations are the trouble. You can't stab with a scythe so it's an ill fit for Titan Weapons, and it'd be just dreadful for Staff Fighting since any time that set "slashes," it's with the side of the blade. That, and I believe that a scythe type weapon is so unique in its implausibility, that it needs its own stances and animations to make it believable. At this point, I've learned that a talented artist can make any ridiculous weapon look ridiculously cool, so I don't doubt that ours can make a scythe look badass... I just don't think it's as simple as a model swap, but I also don't know if there's a harm in trying it.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

There's actually such a thing as a war scythe: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_scythe

... But as you can see, the first thing you do when you want to make a scythe into a decent weapon is turn the blade.