Spears - Polearms Rework

In recent patches, we update the 3D and 2D art of several weapon groups and added powerful implicit affixes to support a wide variety of builds. In the next patch, we are updating more weapon groups such as the polearms.

We’re also making a couple of changes to item type names in 0.8.4. Polearms are being renamed to Spears and maces are no longer sometimes referred to as blunt weapons instead of maces. This changes from “polearms” and “blunt weapons” to “spears” and “maces” is being made for a couple of reasons.

When we originally named these item categories, we went with names that had wide scopes that clearly encompassed all their individual base types. However this resulted in the names themselves feeling quite dry and technical, especially blunt weapons, so when choosing the new names we instead decided to prioritise compelling names with a strong fantasy attached.
The second reason is that the intentionally wide scope of the original names resulted in ambiguity where they could arguably refer to base types that did not belong to them. In the case of polearms we have items like the Imperial Halberd and Lucerne, which are an axe and mace respectively (they work better with those animations), but in a real world sense they are polearms and many other games categorise them as such. Meanwhile blunt-weapons could be understood as also including sceptres and staves, especially as the name is stylistically different to something like “swords” or “axes” and so could easily be misconstrued as referring to a larger category of items.

For both new names there will be more cases where the item type doesn’t perfectly describe an individual base type, such as Spear for Trident or Mace for Pick Hammer. However we believe that this style of naming convention for these item types is common enough in RPGs that this won’t trip many people up, and if someone is unsure about an item’s item type it is better if that confusion is just not knowing what it is (e.g. “what is a club? Is it a mace or something else?”), than mistakenly believing that it’s the wrong item type (e.g. “I’m guessing that Lucerne is a Polearm”).

Now, let’s take a closer look at some of our new Spear weapons, which you will be able to find in 0.8.4.