Unless I'm remembering incorrectly, you used to get a debuff for using a weapon that you're not skilled at using. Is this not the case anymore? Is it viable to not pick any weapon skill and still use weapons? Or is there a hidden debuff/disadvantage?
Debuffs for weapons you do not have a skill with are gone. Using weapons without a skill is totally viable, I've done so myself on occasion. There is no hidden penalty.
Yeah, they nuked that "feature" a couple of patches ago, thank goodness. No more "you deal half damage with your weapon because RNG (drops) say so" to deal with.
Just to clarify: You only get the bonuses of weapon skills with the associated weapon type, but you can use any other weapon you want with or without a weapon skill with no penalty.
On a related note, if you dual wield the same weapon-type, does that double your bonuses as a result of skills (or double the chance of procing an effect)? What about dual-wielding different weapon types if you have the skills for both, do you get both bonuses - the chance to proc specials from each weapon?
For each staff you use with the staff weapon skill you would get a set of the skill bonuses, so if you use two, you get double the skills from it. If you use an axe and a staff with the axe and staff weapon skills, you only get one set of each axe and staff bonuses, not two doubles. I am unsure about weapon proc effects.
Procs don't go up for two weapons of the same type so far as I've noticed, but wielding two weapons of different types lets you get two procs.
Thanks, that's good stuff I was always curious about. What about using activate weapon skills, will that do damage with both weapons or just the ones of that weapon type?
I don't really feel much like trying to explain it, but if you head over to dredmorpedia (the link is in a sticky at the top of the forum) and look up the weapon skills, you should have a decent grasp on how they work. If someone else wants to take a stab at explaining it to you, that is great! I just wanted to empower you to find out instead of leaving you hanging.
I assume you're talking about activated abilities like Ragnar's Meteor. Those do two different things - 1) They cause you to make a normal attack on the square directly in front of you. That deals damage as normal, so both weapons apply. 2) They cause damage to everything in their AoE that does fixed damage and has "attack="1"", meaning they scale upwards based on . Weapons, single or double, don't factor into the AoE at all.
The old penalty wasn't really bad. It's just that with it, it is more difficult to make the game fair for melee characters.
Personally I saw it as a good way to incentivise taking a weapon skill and possibly smithing to myself. Otherwise unskilled caster builds can melee very nearly as well as characters who are built fot it when you start getting the better weapons which doesnt seem right to me.
