Daggerfall Workshop Forums

I seem to remember the original game having different attack speed for different weapons (which I think was based partly on strength and partly on speed). If I recall things like war hammers swung really slowly, while daggers and other short blades allowed you to attack much more often. On DFU it seems like all weapons attack at exactly the same speed, both using click to attack and mouse-drag attack.

Am I just misremembering how the original game worked, or is this a currently unimplemented feature. In either case, I think it would be something really neat to have in the game, even if the original didn't have it. It would make using short blades like daggers much more effective. As it stands right now, weapon damage is the only thing that matters, since even a dagger has the same slow attack speed as a dai katana.

Weapon type doesn't have an impact on its animation speed, the exception being that werecreature attacks are much faster. The biggest impact will come from your character's speed attribute. A high speed character will attack faster than a low speed one, regardless of their weapon type.

After quickly testing this in classic, I can't see any difference in animation speed between a dagger or a 2H warhammer. But I do see a big difference between a 50 SPD character vs. one with 100 SPD. My understanding is that Allofich has matched timings reasonably closely to classic after some reverse engineering.

My memory of classic is that speed was always the only determining factor A clever mod would divide player speed by weapon weight and alter swing speed accordingly...

Hi AndrewBuck,
In classic Daggerfall, I think swing speed depends only on your character speed; In any case I didn't see any difference between weapons, warhammer vs dagger (or even vs bare hands).
I agree it's not very realistic, but a 8.75kg warhammer doesn't seem very realistic either. More like a sledgehammer, but those are not practical as weapons. So it will be hard to come up with physically believable results.
Also, how would that affect DPS, do you have in mind to keep DPS roughly the same (say make daggers faster but doing less damage to compensate, and the reverse for weapons of higher inertia)? Because the next issue will be game balance...

A clever mod would divide player speed by weapon weight and alter swing speed accordingly...

Not that clever. It would make ebony weapons stronger than daedric because they're much lighter. Once you introduce speed into the damage formula, DPS becomes the key measurement.

Speed complicates things greatly. You could have a dagger that swings thrice per second at 5-15 for a DPS of 15-45. Which would be stronger than an axe that does 10-40 once per second. If enemy recoil counts as a stun, then the dagger is even stronger.

Which is why, if you're a game developer, it's hard to achieve weapon balance and give all weapon types tradeoffs that make them all worth using. It's much easier to just say "daggers suck, but a certain material might be better than that iron longsword" and call it a day.

A far more interesting mod would be to give daggers a bonus to backstab, swords a bonus to crit strike, blunts a bonus to knockback or stun (which dfall doesn't have).

I guess I am just mis-remembering it then. I could have sworn I remembered trying to use a hammer with a low strength character and being really slow with it, but I must be confusing it with oblivion I guess. So I guess it is not really a missing feature, but then we come to my second question of is this something worth diverging from the original code game?

My idea (based on how I mistakenly thought it used to work) would be something like

(c1*str/weight)^some_power + c2*speed

instead of just speed times a constant like it is now. This way heavy weapons are more damage per second, but only if you are strong enough to use them. If you are too weak to use the weapon effectively you swing rate goes way down.

Anyway, like I said, this whole idea is based on misremembering how the original game worked. I know that the goal is to basically stay true to that original design, so this is something that might be mod-only, but I think it would be interesting to consider in any case.

Pretty sure this was a thing in later TES games

How I remember it working was speed controlled how fast you could recover from swinging a weapon thus it allowed you to swing a weapon more. Agility effected the chance to hit the target and strength effected how close to the maxim damage of the weapon you could get. Then the weapon material was also factored in regards to your hit chance.

Weight didn't really play a role in the speed of the animation but it might seem like things where faster as a higher level material weapon would hit more often and do more damage.

One thing I did notice if you used a flail versus a mace of the same material type the animation appeared to make the flail slower but I remember watching a video made in the early 2000's that showed the damage came out to the same amount.