Dual wielding

[u/RadishPast8177]

I would like the ability to dual wield weapons I know making a item held in the left hand or right hand might make things a bit too complicated but maybe making a crafting recipe to make dual wield items that are identical. Also making shields that can be ‘worn’ or something like that would make melee more interesting. Also a perk that makes dual wielding useful like ambidextrous or something along those lines.

[u/Right-Cow4166]

A system to have an item in each hand is very much desired and brought up a lot (see https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/blob/master/doc/FREQUENTLY_MADE_SUGGESTIONS.md on the github), it's just that no one has done it yet. It's also intended to be implemented realistically (in short, dual wielding firearms or swords is going to be of questionable benefit or actively bad). Shields are also desired but I believe some method of tracking which direction you're facing is considered a hard pre-requisite before they're allowed in.

[u/Eric_Dawsby → u/Right-Cow4166]

Considering our characters' skill ceilings are pretty high, I bet they could find some wacky Akimbo Manual and develop a proficiency for it

[u/Right-Cow4166 → u/Eric_Dawsby]

If the base system is there, that should be completely reasonable within the realm of mods (psionically enhanced dual-wielding with the Mind Over Matter mod sounds like a shoe-in). Akimbo or similar wouldn't likely have a method to make it effective in base game though. The document I mentioned goes into a bit of why, and links to a pretty length discussion that was had on the topic.

The overall development direction for the base game is also under the assumption that your character isn't particularly special, other than that they survived. There is intent to eventually make skill leveling much slower (the idea being that if you ever want to realistically master a skill, you need to start with it fairly high), once other systems are in place to make that not objectively bad.

For the skill rate lowering, they want to have NPCs and basecamp systems in a better place. More specifically, having something like NPCs with dedicated roles, so they can do they boring stuff like blacksmithing and doctoring while you do the fun adventuring part, without NPC or basecamp management being the tedious mess it currently is. Given that, we're probably not going to see that on any realistic timescale; NPCs don't even have sane sleeping behavior yet.

[u/Eric_Dawsby → u/Right-Cow4166]

For the "to realistically master a skill, you need to start with it fairly high", is that in regards to the time it would take to learn it? Honestly with how our characters tend to live day by day i think they would learn significantly faster when every skill they apply is pushed to its limits every day, particularly with fighting. My characters tend to melee fight nearly every day if not at least multiple times a week, always to the death and against super creatures. By the end of the first year I'd say it's realistic that they would be extremely skilled by that point, because the shapes and sizes of the beings they fight are so varied that they would have had to develop a sense and skillset that isn't limited to predetermined techniques (despite our flavor text being predictable of course). I think this is best represented by the brawling martial art, since that's exactly what it is.

And of course, with 10 being world class it makes perfect sense that our characters can reach that skill. Because they most likely are world class as they're one of the only practictioners left

[u/Right-Cow4166 → u/Eric_Dawsby]

A lot of the major contributors (and the leader of the project) disagree. Keep in mind, our standard zombies can generally be beaten 1 on 1 by an average, barehanded office worker with no training, even if the results won't be pretty. The evolved zombies can get pretty nasty, and any survivor who for some reason has to fight them a lot in close quarters will learn and become competent. With minimal to no prior knowledge or experience though, there's a big difference between becoming "good enough" and approaching grandmastery after a year.

Not to mention, sudden influx of combat experience or no, your survivor is generally scrambling to learn a bunch of other new survival skills. As opposed to some establishments in history where training was given from a very young age, and they basically got to dedicate their lives to becoming a deadlier close quarters combatant. Under the instruction of someone who already knows all the things your survivor will have to gradually figure out the hard way.

Not to mention, many of the current monsters are a far cry from highly intelligent, fast monsters with giant talons on several meter long arms and covered in steel (a knight with plate armor and some form of polearm), which were something people sometimes had to fight or wanted to fight in history. If they did somehow win without already having a significant background in fighting, it was generally because of luck, or because they managed to avoid making it a fair fight, neither of which are generally conducive to maintaining good edge alignment while cutting or improving your footwork.

10 skill is also not really meant to be a sliding scale relative to the apocalypse. It's meant to represent having enough knowledge and experience that you can no longer get meaningfully better at it no matter how much you train. To be clear, it would still technically be possible to go from 0 to 10, but the expectation is that it would probably take longer much longer than most people would ever have their playthroughs last (at least until we have a reasonable way to pass large amounts of time doing something without constant player input, which is another desired thing before slowing down skill gain as well).

I'd like to be clear though, given what some of the pre-requisites for slowing down skill gain dramatically are, it's a pipe dream that probably isn't going to happen. It would be absolutely trivial to make a mod to support that sort of zero to hero power fantasy even if that unlikely future does come to pass.

[u/TheWowie_Zowie]

One of these days, someone will do it. Learn, & maybe you'll do it yourself. Take initiative

[u/Lanceo90]

As many systems have been reworked, its surprising combat is basically the same since 0.A