In past games, I've noticed that, for the most part, skills in stealth and magic complement each either. If you want, you can choose all 6 magic schools and alchemy as your class and they will work together very effectively. Also, security, sneak, marksman acrobatics, light armour, speechcraft and mercantile (okay, well they should be combined anyway, but still) all served their own purpose and could be used in conjunction effectively, so it was pretty good playing a pure stealth character. However, in combat, the 3 fighting skills (Blade, blunt and hand-to-hand) basically were useless when you had any of the others. If you were a blade user, you always used a sword, if blunt,always a mace or axe etc. and there was no reason to choose the other skils. After hearing about dual wielding, I got excited with the thought that maybe you could wield a mace in one hand and sword in the other, and both would be based on their respected levels. However, then we learned that it was 1/2hand weapon skills, which is probably a good way to do it, but it does leave us with the original problem. So I was thinking of a few ways we could (sort of) make them useful as skills together.

One thing is perhaps to make (at least larger weapons like longswords) have the option of single or dual hand, and for realisms sake, as well as to help this system, you would not be able to dual wield 2 longswords, only a longsword and a smaller weapon or spell. This way, the 2-hand approach, which would also be faster/stronger would have a different yet equal advantage to single wielding, and which you preffered to use would depend on what kind of enemy you were fighting.

Another thing for both HTH and the 2 weapon skills would be to make it easier to get disarmed so that you may need to change weapons during a battle and recover your first one later (though this may cause trouble with not being able to find weapons, I'm not sure). This way, you might lose your claymore and have to pull out a shortsword or vice versa.

For hand to hand, I'm not sure how to do it with the button layout (this is just a basic idea) but make it work with or without weapons, and have more options than before. When fighting, if you have wristguards, they should be able to be used to help block or something, being more effective than the sword if you have sufficent HTH. Also, kicking could be added so that you can stagger your enemies with it in battle.

Just a few thoughts. I would like to hear yours.

Nobody thinks this is something that would do well to be addressed?

I really like your ideas. One thing though I think you should be able to duel-wield longswords. Just saying. :whistling:

Well the thing is: now you CAN make a pure warrior if you wish.
There's nothing forcing you to have 7 main skills.

But yeah I get your point, and most of it is right, although I would still like to dual weild longswords

Edit: ninja'd! :ninja:

I don't see this as a problem, it's just coincidence that the other two combat types compliment each other. Besides, warrior has things that complement each other. Warrior has smithing, heavy armor, (the next one is just speculation) dual wielding, which compliment any of the three weapon skills.

That heavy armour thing is also speculation. And I've stated before in other threads how a dual wielding skill would make little sense and be horribly unbalanced, but I don't really have the time to explain it here.

But I think it is a problem, because you are supposed to have 3 main playstyles (though allow for intertwining as well of course) but only 2 of them can be done in full, so it's rather unbalanced that way.

. . . also blocking