Lo-Fi Games

Now, don't get me wrong by just reading the thread title: heavy weapons are essential to melee combat and add variation to the game, and should not be removed.
What I mean that should be removed is the skill itself. A weapon can be heavy regardless of its type or sub-category and in my opinion a skill that includes weapons that fit better under another skill should not be in the game, that's pretty pointless. It's a no brainer, a useless differentiation...
The plank and fragment axe can very well just be heavier hacker type weapons, especially the second one.
The heavy club deals only blunt damage, so I guess once the blunt skill will be fully implemented it will fall under that category.
The heavy weapons skill could be replaced by Pole weapons; spears, tridents, halberds, bardiches and glaives fall under this category. The last two are very heavy, but this does not mean they should fall under a skill of their own, they are still pole weapons, such as the fragment axe and the plank can be considered hackers.
What do you think?

I have to disagree.

From what i understand the weapon skills only add damage. Basically the heavy weapon skill means that the guys who wield them can wield them effectively. Wielding a plank with a high melee skill and a low heavy weapon skill still means you are effective at hitting, you just don't hurt as much. Seeing as heavy weapons do ungodly amounts of damage, i see it as a balancing issue. My main guy wields planks, and I have seen him hit three people at once in the stomach and do instant kill damage to all three. He has a heavy weapon skill of 40 and melee skills in the high 40's. If these were moved to hackers.... Then i could start all my weaker guys off with hackers, then when they were strong enough, switch them over to planks, and be completely unstoppable.

However, if your melee skill is higher then the weapon skill, it seems that the weapon skill will level up quickly to catch up.

Also I disagree simply because it makes sense that wielding a heavy weapon is different from wielding a blunt weapon.

Imagine fighting with a 2x4 and a log of wood. Both are blunt but the size, weight and unwieldy-ness of a log would require special skill to use effectively over a peice of wood.

Yeah it makes sense as is. You could argue that heavy weapon skill helps you wield the beast, and a skill that may relate to it helps the damage. But that is not how the system works. We need heavy weapon skills as is, because it doesn't matter what type of edge it has, you use it entirely different. Now if for some insane reason you could wield it exactly like a a saber, hacker or katana, yeah then sure you idea would be solid, but the animations are different, style is unique to just heavy weapons.

I think you might be confusing a topper sword, or long hacker with a real heavy weapon such as the plank. Because there are long variants of other weapon types already, and they do not compare on any level with the monster heavy weapons.

/\/\/\ So yeah, what those three said. /\/\/\

I get where you're coming from but when something is so ungodly heavy you would wield it quite differently than a weapon of normal weight.

However, I do love the thought of polearms.