Changes made to damage of oversized weapons?

For some reason, I noticed that the oversized weapons that I am using on my giants were doing MUCH less damage than usual. Did something change that I wasn't aware of?

A bug was fixed so likely so.

I heard that there was change to "2handed" weapons that are being wielded in 1 hand, such that the average damage was decreased when wielded in 1 hand?

I just want to point out that proper 2handed weapons are not the same as oversized weapons, such that proper 2handed weapons cannot be wielded in 1 hand but oversized weapons can be wielded in 1 hand by giant sized races, such as giants, jotuns, minotaurs.

Oversized weapons are mostly used by giant-sized warriors to enable them to overbear/double grip because normal sized weapons cannot be double gripped by giant sized warriors, so most giant warriors are limited to using oversized weapons to allow them to utilize doublegrip properly.

I really hope that this distinction was considered properly when making the code change because it's a huge nerf to oversized weapons across the board right now with this change. Giant sized classes (jotun paladins/dark knights, minotaur/giant warriors/berserkers) who use oversized weapons in 1 hand now has the damage drastically reduced.

Simply comparing a battlemaster's blade (normal size, slashing, ave 25) and a blood-soaked blade (oversized, slashing, ave 24), a giant wielding the battlemaster's blade in 1 hand will still do the proper damage fitting an average 25 weapon, but when it wields the blood-soaked blade, the damage is reduced to be lower than average 24 which does not make sense to me.

battlemasters blade, super rare, part of a set, probably a mythic weapon and more importantly is in a class of very few weapons that a human warrior could use for ave 25, mob that has is called "THE master warrior". Not just any. THE.

some blood-soaked blade or other (sounds like pyramid), similar ave and falls off a giant chicken. it and many other oversized weapons like it (IIRC there's a "forged warsword" that's even easier to retrieve) is effectively a battlemasters blade but only if you are a giant (!)

The band aid is off. Sub-par weapons will now be sub-par for everybody instead of just sweet for giants

Sometimes, I really wonder if you know your own game...

Why even make it such that giant sized warriors can only overbear oversized weapons if you are nerfing them when wielded in one hand. You even went as far as calling them band aids, it's laughable. If you genuinely think that the stats of certain oversized weapons are too good and too easily attainable, then shouldn't you be simply changing the stats on them directly? Do you even know why giant sized warriors use oversized weapons instead of normal 1 handed weapons in the first place? This is a direct nerf to all giant-sized warriors because they need oversized weapons for overbear whereas normal sized warriors can simply overbear the current weapon they are using.

Wield in one hand:
LARGE WARRIORS: one-handed weapons, oversized weapons
OTHER WARRIORS: one-handed weapons

Wield in both hands via double grip:
LARGE WARRIORS: two-handed weapons
OTHER WARRIORS: two-handed weapons, oversized weapons

Wield in both hands via overbear:
LARGE WARRIORS: oversized weapons
OTHER WARRIORS: one-handed weapons

Well, have it your way, if all you want is for people to shun giant/minotaur warriors altogether. I know very well that you will never consider what I raised seriously anyway. In time, we will all see the effects of your decision, mark my words.

100% with Ivindel on this one. Terrible change. Giant saze can't overbear normal 1-handed weapons, and must rely on oversized. Nerfing oversized like this is a level of ridiculousness that rivals only the "logic" behind the change.

Just to make sure everyone else is properly informed, here is what a warrior can do with overbear:

<wielded two-handed> (Humming) an irongrip cursed katana

<floating nearby>    Nothing.



You are affected by the following:

Skill: overbear       : lasts permanently

Skill: double grip    : lasts permanently



<10007hp 547m 400mv no opponent no opponent>calm  

dual fiery

You relax your grip on your weapon.

You begin wielding a fiery dagger in your off-hand.

You are now off-balance.

A fiery dagger feels like a part of you!

and here is the result of trying that with any other class (only warriors have deathgrip or whatever)

<worn around wrist>  Nothing.

<wielded two-handed> a claymore

<floating nearby>    Nothing.



<20496hp 830m 420mv no opponent>  calm [          ] 



Your dominant hand steadies.



<20496hp 830m 420mv no opponent>  calm [          ] 

dual fiery

Not with a weapon that requires two hands.

Doesnt work! They have to put in extra commands and potentially lose damage, and requires an extra weapon.

<20496hp 830m 420mv no opponent>  calm [          ] 

wear mace

You stop wielding a claymore.

You begin wielding a diamond studded mace.

You are now off-balance.

A diamond studded mace feels like a part of you!



<20496hp 830m 420mv no opponent>  calm [          ] 

Your dominant hand steadies.



<20496hp 830m 420mv no opponent>  calm [          ] 

dual fiery

You begin wielding a fiery dagger in your off-hand.

You are now off-balance.

A fiery dagger feels like a part of you!

And here's a nice bonus for warriors you also have to factor in (yes it drops offhand, but still)

<10002hp 547m 399mv no opponent no opponent>evasive:7  



You yell 'Help! someone kicked dirt into my eyes!'

Someone kicks dirt in your eyes!

Someone kicked dirts you, dealing scratches none damage.

You can't see a thing!



<9999hp 547m 400mv no opponent no opponent>evasive:60  

double

You stop wielding something.

You struggle slowly to find your grip.

You feel more confident as you tighten your grip around something.

You accidentally drop your off-hand weapon.

These are like having cheat codes, quick ways to reverse disadvantages and hobble players who attacked with the upperhand. Its a situation where you immediately turn a losing situation into one where your opponent is a sitting duck as soon as they enter a command.

you also need to factor in that weapons in deathgrip are nearly impossible to disarm and they buff riposte and other shit.

Bonus points if you noticed that is probably a bug to be able to dual wield to remove your double grip from a CURSED weapon (noremove)

So I'm not buying it. Overbear is EXTREMELY strong, and giant made it very cheesy.

Also, you can consider this a bit of notice to the playerbase on the whole, but probably youre the biggest offender ivindel. Just not the only one. I'm sure you dont need me to remind you how much effort that vets have spent into writing triggers that exploit every little fold or crease in this games gameplay instead of participating in furthering the overall variety of choices, like how notice how nobody even bothered to respond to the momentum thread here https://abandonedrealms.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14856 (I guess I didnt have to "mark these words" since it got literally no responses) and then m1co comes back after five years and killed some player by just manually switching his weapons so they lag to death. that was what got me to the point where I accepted certain players do not actually want to play competitively and their opinions are entirely based in their self-interest of whatever they rolled. I want to have discussion about this but not with people who are just powergaming their char and don't care about the balance as a whole. So make sure you are doing some actual analysis and not just the typical grunts of the disgruntled SOB who has to re-level because his char is no longer meta.

Your argument is hollow, and I can tell you have not played a serious warrior .....ever?
You use weapons, double gripping and switching the same way if you are normal sized or giant sized. Only difference is, giant use the over sized weapons to double grip and go into two-handed, a human double grips a normal weapon to go into two-handed, and both sizes can "dual fiery" with only 1 command to go to dual wield, or "wear shield" to go to defensive with 1 command.
Generally speaking, a warrior will use his weapon selection for both for single hand use and as a two handed by using double grip. This adds versatility.
The only true two-handed weapon I ever used on Kryton was the blood voulge. Otherwise I would just carry all oversized weapons, double grip and use those as my two handed options...for the sake of versatility as already mentioned. Large, medium or small...all races that play a warrior should play their weapons like I just mentioned.

You are using examples of typical oversized weapons...but what about stuff like leese-breaker, chautard-ta meteor flail, and the dead human mace? Those are big boy true giant weapons. You will never see a non-large race using these...unless its for shits and giggles cause a friend gave it to them.
Now they are nerfed too. This is a double whammy by nerfing oversized, it also inherently nerfs large sized. Completely unnecessary.

Firstly, if anyone wanted to use a 2handed weapon, they will use a proper 2handed weapon because those REAL 2handed weapons are generally always better than whatever oversized alternatives.

And again, this change only nerfs giants that rely on oversized weapons for overbear. I don't understand why you would have the idea that giants made this very cheesy. A non-giant can "cheese" this just as well, or maybe even better with the wider range of weapon choices available.

No one responded to that thread because no one is interested, period. During that time, I stopped playing and no one even actively played a warrior then except for certain die-hards. Even I have pivoted away from the class myself.
Can you imagine the liberation I felt when I stopped gimping myself and went to play other classes? It's like Red Bull finally gave me wings. So no, I will not be re-leveling another warrior just because of this change. This change will not "hurt" me if ever for some warped reason this was targeted at me. A simple solution will just be switching to non-oversized weapons and not overbear them.

You can wait for more feedback on this thread from other players who actually play warriors, since you don't think much of my opinion anyway. I have said my last piece on this matter, since my objective of raising this thread was to bring this topic to light so that impactful shadow changes like this doesn't go unnoticed.

you can just look at the top 5 on the forum ladder and ask yourself, can a max-geared fire giant warrior probably bash that guy dead? If nobody wants to roll it thats 100% their business, but none of those players would be terribly thrilled to see a bash-happy and suped fire giant logging into their pk range. Well except Werranydd. I think he would probably pop a stiffy and go right after them. But he'd likely die so quickly. The giant warrior is a demolition ball of damage, bash, bash, and bash some more. You guys going on about overbear like this needs finesse

Minotaurs dual wielding bad ass axes nerf. Sad day.

I like statement impactful shadow changes, like there isn't a process to show what's been changed every month. So, I definitely don't know all the m3chanics behind this change, but I would be curious to see what things like lease-breaker become one handed, and what overbearing a vorpal looks like now.

So... I actually very badly want there to be productive discourse around balance. Is there any chance everybody can just mentally reset and we can do a do-over on this thread? I say this meaing no offense to everybody but there has been factually wrong information presented by every single poster in this thread so far. Everybody is speaking from a context of what they know best be it the code, warriors, giants, or whatever. If people could just make smaller posts on specific balance elements rather than making bold, overarching statements I think it would help the conversation quite a bit.

It feels like there are multiple balance topics at play here that have been building up over months, if not years, as the melee mechanics have built up and been altered. I think we should break this apart into:
- The speed of weapon switching wrt combat styles & weapon types
- Weapon availability
- Balancing rare limits with weapons in your cycle
- Weapon damage

On weapon damage, I think it would be really useful for us all if Dav could just give us the rough avg dam change that is taking place with this change in each situation. It helps us compare weapon availability to different races.

It does feel to me that this change could be potentially important to balance but maybe it isn't actually the right place to attack the balance issue. Giant warriors can feel cheesy to fight against because they've got a triple stack on combat advantage. It represents defense penetration (anti dodge), damage increase (combat superiority), and skill enabling. It's a quadruple stack if they are a warlord (forms proc). That is just a lot to put on one triangle. Since overbear and double grip also gives them both a switching speed advantage after the "steady hands / off-balance" changes and a switching while blind advantage is absolutely *can* feel oppressive facing one. Coupled with the biggest, baddest weapons, it can feel just like Dav says where it feels like if you do anything you can end up in disadvantge and lagged and smashed to death. This is especially tricky for rogues who are supposed to care about the weapon type triangle but the style triangle is so much more impactful to a fighter class than the type triangle is to a rogue class.

That said, I'm not sure if mitigating the damage of the oversized weapon is the fix there, especially if it also comes with an increase to the damage of a one-handed weapon. It might just shift the issue from giants to other races. If this change is necessary for balance, is it really damage that needs addressing? Or is it the triple stack? Or is it the switch speed advantage?

Personally, I think the damage isn't the balance issue. It's the other elements. On the damage front, my gut reaction is that I don't think trading damage for the level of versatility the skills provide is unfair. But is it evenly applied? It seems like double jeopardy potentially. Damage down for giants and up for others. Also might mean giants need more weapon options. But I don't know much about giants.
Would like to hear what others think.

I say as I drop a massive post talking about all topics... : slaps self :

I'm actually a little confused. Dav made an entire reply post on overbear. Yes overbear is strong but This change targets oversized weapons specifically which means the nerf wasn't on overbear. It's targeted at large sized races while non large size can continue to "abuse" overbear. So why the target on large sized races?

I personally dont think the giants are that overpowering to need a band aid nerf against them. Generally giants have weakness to exploit to even the ground. If we're talking abt specifically giant warriors, in the current meta i dont see giant warriors being OP. Anyone disagrees with me and think giant warriors are so OP that it's a problem?

I feel I should point out this isn't a giant only change like people keep saying. Small races use oversized weapons as well to help overcome the damage divide. You need to find a pixie to shrink it but then you wield it one handed. Don't people remember the Szkretch? Quasit invoker that geared like a fighter and took down all the big bads? He used a shrunken dead human wrapped in chains. Bandali is a warlord right now using multiple shrunken oversized weapons.

Ok, noted but firstly, the change was for oversized weapon used in 1hand. Smaller races use oversized weapon for 2handed style.

Shrink weapon has been changed. Now shrunk weapons can only be used by small sized races like quasit and pixies. So yes bandali is using it as a quasit thief but... holy vuln for shrunk weapon? I dont think giving bandali that slightly more powerful oversized weapon will make that much a diff honestly.

I'm confused too. Is this only affecting damage when overbearing double gripping an oversized weapon? Or is this affecting damage on all oversized weapons in general? Do shrunken oversized weapons still count as oversized? What is the % impact on avg damage? Also, the switching styles out of double grip does not seem much different than what monks can do to me. I kind of liked warriors and monks having that ability vs the other martial classes. Seemed fitting for more controlled combat. Thanks

I wasn't trying to say small races with shrunken oversized weapons are OP. Quite the opposite I think they need the help and in general think large has many advantages over small. I just wanted to point it out that this is a general change that does impact others before we all got hyper focused just on giant warriors.

It seems like the intent (abs why it was called a bug) is just to bring weapons into general alignment with each other? A more even basis in the range is average damage between something in one hand vs something in two. That's why I wondered what the actual number was for the adjustment.

I mean it could all just be the goal which is why I was thinking about edge case. If it just brings stuff in range it seems like the ramifications are:

Large races max one handed damage goes down in line with other races one handed weapons.
Giants lack of overbear options is now a weakness without upside abd most now consider damage vs style flexibility.

Small races max one handed damage goes down in line with other races.
Maybe this was not an intentional way for them to make up damage gap? I always assumed it was intentional

Medium or smaller overbear damage goes up in line with two handed weapons.
Now have best flexibility, minimal reason to use a two hander.

Where it might get weird is if the mod is outsized making it so medium overhear is now stronger than two handed weapons or oversized is weaker than one handed. Would need to test or get told.

I guess my first question would be if that's all intentional (probably?) or if it really is just about weakening giant fighter classes at which point why not address it more specifically with less generalized impact.

Well as Dogran told you guys already it was originally raised as a bug. and also, he didnt mention, but this is a six months old bug which has been very low on the totem pole below other bugs. The issue is that the two handed weapon does not take a penalty for being wielded incorrectly. The penalty is approx a 15%-ish on the dice, its not even a huge deal. Its a pre-damroll modifier. I can take a look at the math again tonight sometime but it does not bear the amount of waaah this is getting. if it such a giant gulf from so little change then there is something else going on because this cannot produce a giant difference

Well simple math, crude spear is average 27, you give it a -15% damage reduction it goes down to average 23, worse than an average 24 mithril trident. Which is harder to get? Crude spear or mithril trident? So a giant berserker wielding a crude spear in 1 hand will be wondering why it is doing less damage with a crude spear vs a mithril trident.

When a change like this is not documented anywhere and when most players view oversized weapons as singlehanded for giant sized races, it becomes an issue isn't it? If that's the case, why not just abolish oversize weapon types altogether? Yeah, I suppose when oversized weapons were implemented, it does add flavor/variety and certain restrictions to availability. But if your intention is to bring everyone down to the same level playing field (because oversized weapons in your opinion have too good stats), then get rid of this classification altogether so that everyone (whether giants or non-giants) can have access to the same weapons.

Or simply just tone down the actual stats of those oversized weapons so that no one will stupidly go get it, only to realize that it does less damage than advertised when wielded in 1 hand.

ivindel you have a thing about collecting gear, it is kind of at the core of who you are. you amass all sorts of weapons like a prized baseball card collection and you then hoard it for years on end. Its not just the giant weapons either, its random tat that nobody is even interested in, it doesnt have to be good rares. at some point I remember you had all the exquisite bracers that have crap stats. You've had sets of titanium tenor on two completely different characters at the same time. You were even willing to go far as to risk a multi and lose everything to have just one more leet weapon in your collection that you ALREADY HAD. You are definitely an obsessed hardcore collector. So I get it that it feels like I just rug-pulled your coveted weapons museum or something like that. And now you spaz out on the forums and say just remove all of it. But lets be real Ivindel. I dont need to do that because YOU already remove all good equipment from AR. you stuff it into alts and log minimum hours to ensure it never goes back to circulation. To be quite frank you already render this conversation of giants almost completely pointless to even have.


Nobody but giants has an interest in an ave 27 two handed spear when they can already get a better two-handed spear than that.

nobody but giants is wearing that spear as an ave 27 one hander spear that rivals the vorpal sword for power especially with the anti-dodge bonus, e.g. make monks players write post that their character sucks vs some unwinnable matchup.

Nobody but giants even wants to compete for that spear, because for non-giant it kinda sucks. and that ivindel, that last point is where we land on an inconvenient truth for you. thata there are more than just giants in AR. in fact, spears is the favored weapon of sliths, not giants.

It would be easy to make this piece of equipment more desirable. if the crude spear moves to ave 30/31, or becomes a wild item, or gets poison attack or something, it will have actually appropriate dice for a two-handed weapon and other players besides just ones playing giants will take an interest, or maybe the occasionally super-niche DK/pally using set parry .


As for these weapon changes, I asked for organic feedback in discord. Why? because I think I am omnipotent? No, because I realize there are going to be items like this that I am going to miss. we dont have to just buff the dice on all of them, but that IS the easiest fix, and it IS on the table. i doubt it can be very many to upgrade, mos tlikely a quick look at your level 50s will bring up all of them. maybe some of them can be made to do magic damage or some shit like that. The point is though, I asked in discord for that feedback, and you ignored it. You instead made this thread here and made a mountain of fucking drama happen and invited trolling. Why did you do that? I think it is because you dont want to share. You want a niche badass weapon to equip for the cosplay badass warrior that makes up most of your pathetic and miserable existence logging bullshit hours in guildhalls. Meanwhile look at what you are complaining about here. ave 24 vs ave 23. Bullshit ivindel. I did not purposefully set out to make a spear that is niche for giants due to oversized low avg. I set a reasonable condition here that will increase fairness and any additional weapon tweaks are well within our reach to do which, again, I fucking asked for feedback about weapons right as soon as I fixed the bug.

Not sure if you realized, but I was already not in the discord channel when you said you asked for feedback there. That is another topic altogether.
No issue, I will just shut up now, you do you.

Well just to be clear, I didnt tell you to shut up. I didnt remove you from discord either, you mustve left that on your own. You can report feedback wherever, though. I personally would *prefer* discord which was why I asked there. I dont extremely care where, but I do care that you try to be respectful to me. If youre not going to be respectful to me, I will not be falling over myself to please you in response (evidently)

Oh and before we all move on. There was also a bugfix to quick wield/quick draw/offhand alacrity , which I dont think should have just gone overshadowed, its gonna be a major improvement to ranger ability to get the upperhand in a switchfest.

I am hesitant to reply here but I want to say a couple things.

First off, I don't understand the -15% damage calculation. Was there a +15% damage bonus for oversized weapons prior to the change (making the overall damage go from 115% to 100% base damage which actually makes some sense to me), or is the damage of oversized weapons being flat-out lowered by 15% (100%-15% = 85% and in line with what ivindel said but that doesn't sound like what's actually going on here if I understand it correctly)?

Second, and this just a fyi for Xenyar... Leese-Breaker is now a two-handed weapon period; it's no longer oversized so it doesn't qualify for this discussion any more (there was a point after you played Kryton when Dav altered the size of a number of weapons - I would like to say most if not all of them were axes).

So here is how 15% works. its on the diceroll result. Its a multiplier of either .85 or 1.15 depending if youre doing the double grip thing or if youre 1 handing a 2hander. And if you look at the weapon dice differences between 1h and 2h weapons, there's typically going to be about a 15% difference already.

In terms of the underlying dnd, what you usually would see would be the dice of one-handed daggers, swords, spears, etc, would be typically d4, d8, d6, (meaning four sided, 8 sided, and six sided die) and then to increase a weapon damage we would simply increase the number of the die, so its like 1d8 (toy sword), 2d8, 3d8, etc. Whereas with the two handed weapons, those weapons tend to be d10 or d12. so you may have a 5d8 sword (avg 22.5) and a 5d10 two-handed sword (avg 27.5). In AR we have these same numbers but the builders didnt really follow the rules, at all, so we're not going from d10 to d8 which would be about 20% reduction and in fact a bit bigger of a correction than we are actually doing. so this is not a multiplier that simply nerfs it into 1h stats, it just brings it down to earth for 1h weapons. These weapons would still come out a bit better than their counterparts because it wasnt that aggressive of a multiplier.

The end result of course depends on whether the builder gave the item fair stats. The crude spear (5d10) was a great example of a builder made something that is mediocre dice for level 50 making it good just for giants. cuz nobody wants an ave 27 2h when there's better available, that weapon has dice that set it up to be still buff in one hand and otherwise a throwaway. it can be made fine just by making it a magic/wild damage weapon, or move it to 6d10, or 5d12. I think given the name it sounds like it should probably be a wild weapon (it actually sounds like a piece of goblin eq)

So I did a little testing comparing an average 28 oversized in one hand to an average 25. It isn't a perfect test obviously (different dice, etc) and I certainly could do more but it looks like the math maths. The average 28 looks a bit worse than the average 25. 15% 28 is 4.2 so sure. Having an average 28 that has the versatility to be in two combat styles with speed while blind dropping down to average 24 feels like a reasonable trade to me of utility vs power.
The little guys using shrunken weapons get kinda hosed because they don't get that versatility but whatever they can probably just find regular 1-handers. If they can't that's more a weapon diversity and availability issue than a "this mechanic" issue.

I think this whole conversation is actually centered on the wrong side of the equation. The damage down feels less concerning to me than the damage up. We are basically creating weapons that don't exist here, right? This feels like a decent blow to races with vulnerabilities. Every dwarf fighter / berserker in Knights can now grab a bastard sword and have a average avg 27.6 divine power attack option? People have to contend with a avg 28 Xel Morak? Giants need to worry about a higher avg dam rod of the mind spectres? A frostbrand could go to avg 24?

It seems like when it comes to hitting vulnerabilities weapon availability of magic attack types is part of the control. This has a pretty big impact on that. This feels like the real collateral damage of this change to me.

How in the heck is someone supposed to understand this? As a new player, whom we are aggressively courting, how would you understand an avg 28(or whatever) wielded one way gives one set of damage, wielded another way, a different damage, change to or from a large class and it's different again?

Finally my time to shine. The elite players have a good understanding of mechanics and can make informed decisions about stuff like stats on gear and weigh the options about what is better to have given the overall circumstances.

The rest of us... aren't quite there yet. Yes there is a difference between 1d12 vs 2d6, but we're too busy getting murdered by Burroughs to care. We're not good enough yet to keep the gear we have and to be fair an extra 15% damage isn't going to save me.

I think it's a worthwhile discussion for the imms to have if they want to disclose as much of the mechanics like in this instance. On one hand they can get feedback, on the other... they get feedback.

Dad seems to think this is balanced and articulated it. If we could put together some logs over enough time and prove it wrong they would probably revert it back. That or we would realize we were wrong.

stiehl I do not think a newbie would have trouble understanding that switching from 1h to 2h means it goes from 1d8 to 1d10, and numbers can be added to Identify spell, lore etc. what the newbie might have more trouble is with how you actually do it, and is it gonna lag you. e.g. if you look at the posts I made earlier, I showed how warriors leverage double grip to complete their switch, whereas other races is more of a fumble of having to swap main hand before you can dual wield. I would bet some thread readers didnt even know that if a warrior is dirt kicked they can double grip while blind to reverse uno card the style disadvantage (and then hobble)

[quote="scrynor"]I think this whole conversation is actually centered on the wrong side of the equation. The damage down feels less concerning to me than the damage up. We are basically creating weapons that don't exist here, right? This feels like a decent blow to races with vulnerabilities. Every dwarf fighter / berserker in Knights can now grab a bastard sword and have a average avg 27.6 divine power attack option? People have to contend with a avg 28 Xel Morak? Giants need to worry about a higher avg dam rod of the mind spectres? A frostbrand could go to avg 24?[/quote]

Two things to mention -

i) "versatile" weapons

I added this new weapon attribute called versatile. if its the only thing youre wielding it'll be two-handed, but you can wear a shield or dual wield and it'll automatically be one-handed. This works much like doublegrip without needing the specialized skill. i.e. if you remove the shield, its auto two handed and the 15% damage increase kicks in because youre wielding it two handed.

Versatilty operates independent of existing flags (twohands, overbear etc) so that means you dont have different behavior whether giant or human.

Current versatile weapons are the various bastard swords, broadswords and vorpal sword.
I'll get this in to id / the codex in a week or two when the dust settles and I'm seeing we arent looking to revert a bugfix and go back to 2005 behavior

ii) regarding "vulns"

It was not all that long ago that I took the 2h damage down a bit. It used to be a 200% increase on the dice, we changed it for a doubled damroll bonus from strength which is still nice but more moderate. On a giant (high strength) that works out pretty beefy especially when hitting with concentrate attacks. The 15% increase to smaller dice will get you to some nicer numbers but youre not going to be hitting like a pre-nerfed Kryton with the voulge here. thats 115% vs 200%. We have already seen and been used to a much more dangerous scenario with double gripping. I would just like to point out that a vuln is a vuln and if youre taking an absolute ass kicking this might not be the biggest factor. but yes, not an oversight and thinking about the right things here.

Just double checking (I assume yes), versatile weapons will work with holding items in addition to shields so rogue classes can still get into counterbalance with them, right?

Minotaurs shouldn't have this reduction calculated added when dual wielding oversized axes, but they do. What's the point of the racial passive?

They can charge with axes... its pretty neat.

What I think might be nice for minotaur is if they were also "versatile" with all axes meaning they could wear them all two-handed and not just dual wield them all. We could probably give it a go

Wear them 2h without double grip?

What I think might be nice for minotaur is if they were also "versatile" with all axes meaning they could wear them all two-handed and not just dual wield them all. We could probably give it a go

I'm not entirely sure I understood this.

You're saying that minotaurs could be 'dual wielding' axes, but they'd be flagged as using each axe as if 2 handed? Which would be a huge thing for the cows, if that's what I'm understanding here.

No the versatile flag makes certain weapons default state as wielded two handed, then you could dual wield something or wear a shield without taking the weapon off that has versatile.

In simple terms, versatile now gives you quick access to all 3 combat styles without ever changing your main hand weapon. You can freely put a second weapon, shield, or held item in and out of your offhand and end up in offensive, defensive, or balanced.

Its quite nice.

I really like the idea of axes being versatile for minotaur.
Actually, I really like the idea of more special racial things by weapon type in general. I think it could really add diversity between race class combos. And I also think there potentially being a different BIS weapon for different races is nice from a "who has / who wants what" perspective.

Are there going to be any versailte shaft or exotic weapons? Or only swords?

I only ask because clobber and uncanny attack have different results based on whether it is a 1 or 2 handed weapon. A versatile weapon that works with those skills might be interesting (just like a versatile sword is interesting for overhead crush and such).