Unarmed combat really needs to be made a legit way to play the game. In Oblivion, unarmed combat was a waste of time. Sure you fatigue your opponent and can knock them over repeatedly, but at later levels, the enemy is dead before they start falling over. You might think, "Awesome, the enemy is dead" but no, this isn't so great. I never fatigued the enemy, so he was doing damage to me the whole time before dying. If they had fallen down two or three times before dying, I would have no conflict with the system. Because of this flaw that enemies never fall over like they should until they are dead, or very close to death, I have to frequently reduce the difficulty mid-battle so I don't die because I just don't have the damage output as someone with a sword or axe would have.

An easy way to fix this, either give characters less fatigue, or make unarmed combat more efficient at damaging fatigue.

Another thing I'm looking for in the next game is unarmoured skills. Just like heavy armour, or light armour, when you train with no armour, you're more proficient fighting that way. Some possible advantages to fighting unarmoured could be faster attack speed, much faster movement rate, faster fatigue recovery, chance to dodge, or something along those lines. Unarmed blocking should also have its own skill tree. Blocking unarmed should have its own benefits compared to using a shield. Things like making a trip attack, or higher disarm chance. I'm not expecting lowered damage for unarmed blocking, that just doesn't make sense, but you would be more agile which could help with using the enemies weapon either to your advantage, or inhibiting them from using it on you.

Let me know what you guys think.

The reason why I didnt use unarmed combat was it had a max damage of 10, and it wasnt a magical item so you couldnt hurt ghosts.

Some good suggestions. I recommend posting them in the http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1089003-tes-v-ideas-and-suggestions-163/ thread.

There's a reason why people use weapons, you know.

Oblivion H2H CAN damage ghosts at skill of 50 or higher.

And bare hands should NEVER equal the damage output of a weapon, assuming equal skill in both. If they did, it would defeat the point of weapons entirely.

H2H has always been a fun little aspect of games, but Oblivion lacked hand to hand weapons such as brass knuckles which would have awesome.

Realistically, I think that as fast as Hand to Hand wears down fatigue, a big ol' hammer, sword, mace, or axe would wear it down even faster.

If they went back to making us put our weapons away before we cast spells, then Hand to Hand leaving our hands free might give it a nice edge.

it's entirely useless and should be completely ineffective against any kind of heavy armour, and most light armour

the only time it should come into play is if you were using some kind of gauntlet designed to deal damage. can you imagine punching iron, the first armour you find in the game? gonna hurt you a hell of a lot more than it hurts them. even punching hardened leather wouldn't work in your favour

I think that a somewhat more realistic and more interesting hand-to-hand implementation would be if the skill allowed you to rip off your opponents armor instead of punching them. You could take the plate armor off their body, toss it to the ground, and then punch them.

H2H should either be taken out completely or changed from boxing to MMA (because seriously, a boxer cannot even bother a person in full plate, let alone kill them).

Kicks, dodges, disarms, trips, and similar tactics should all be part of the H2H skill in order to compensate for the low actual damage, otherwise the skill is completely useless (which boggles my mind why H2H was kept from MW, but spears weren't).

My thoughts on the matter is that hand to hand needs to go away. It really has no purpose in this type of fantasy world. As the other guys pointed out, punching a Storm Antrinoch or a guy in iron armor would do more damage to yourself than to your foe.

If you MUST keep it around, make it realistic like that! If you do an unarmed strong attack on a fully armored foe, it actually hurts you instead of them! But then you could balance it out by making it super-effective on "soft" targets like a sleeping guard or a wizard in a robe. Make it so you have a chance to paralyse, knock someone out cold, or do some kind of sick "finishing move" like a neck snap or crushing windpipe. make it so you can take an enemy's weapon out of their hands and use it on the fly. Wow, now I'm starting to reconsider taking it out.

H2h is a large part of khajiit lore, becaause they naturally prefer fighting with their claws rather than a weapon. It needs to be improved upon.

How about not just punching and instead have martial arts like Mirror's Edge?

I remember them saying that H2H was going to be all martial arty before they released Oblivion, but it just never happened.

I don't think Hand-to-Hand should exactly disappear. It has a place. However, it's simply unsuited to all-out battle.

That said, locational damage system could do wonders for H2H if the actual DEATH power of H2H is further nerfed. Think on this:

1. Blades are inherently lethal. Short of a specially designed and blunted blade, it's what daggers and swords do.
2. Blunt weapons span the gap. Some maces are wickedly lethal (Oblivion's Steel Mace, for example), while others are more variable in application (the Glass mace).
3. H2H fighting, while potentially lethal, is not typically so. Yes, a trained fighter can deliver unquestionably lethal blows, but these are typically surprise attacks (Navy SEALs, for example), not prolonged combat.
4. The unique specialty of H2H is that it offers much more flexibility to control the degree of force used, while still accomplishing the basic premise of defeating a foe.
5. Therefore, localized damage would give H2H users much more freedom to, say, headshot a mage, thereby disrupting his concentration, or target a swordsman's arm to disrupt or disarm.
6. On the other hand, H2H fares poorly against relatively rigid armors, and is less than fully effective against even soft armors (note that this is different than light/heavy, as glass is most certainly "rigid", and Elven seems rigid enough...)
7. The possibility of non-lethal combat offers users of H2H and Blunt skills new role-playing flexibility. Blade users, of course, can lobby for wooden practice swords and the like, of course.
8. Of course, adding punch daggers and the like would offer H2H users directly lethal combat at all times (at the expense of non-lethal options).
9. But what if you simply break your weapon and drop into H2H by default and need to kill your opponent? Well... H2H wouldn't be intended to outright kill a foe. You're not going to punch the angry, sword-swinging Dremora in the face until he dies and falls down. But you could punch him in the face until he falls down. THEN a lethal attack would be possible.

So how would this occur in-game? Well, given how Bethesda develops... you'll need TES V, FO4, and TESVI to get there from here, at least, but...

I'd say look for H2H weapons first, on account of FO3 having them. Then hope for either localized TES damage. If that occurs, the stage is set for scripted non-lethal blunt weapons. As Blunt is a much more common skill for the general population than H2H, non-lethal conflict resolution would get a much wider review this way. Then it's just a matter of selling them on making H2H the ultimate in non-lethal combat forms... as long as the target is in pliable armor or no armor at all.

And yet again, the little problem that something is not actually realistic in a world, where you can create a fire ball out of thin air to kill a bipedal man-sized cat addicted on drug made form sugar. Yes, fighting bare handed against a guy in steel armour is a bad idea in a real life. But why should this mean that this feature should disappear from a game? Every fantasy game I have seen so far is unrealistic. All the aspects of it are, all the way from combat to the protagonist's character. Why does the fact taht hand to hand is not realistic bother people more than the fact that inevitably the main protagonist becomes a one man army that is solving the problems of the entier continent?

end of rant and bakc to back to topic

Hand to hand should definitely stay in the game and should be a viable skill to use agains all and any adversary (if it is not, then they should not even bother with implementing it). When you fight anarmed, you should still be able to augment the damage output by special items, likek nuckles, katars and so on for regular damage, or special "combat rings" for dealing magic damage. Unarmed comabt should not be reduced to boxing, but should include things like kicking, or grabbing your opponent and tossing him, or grabbing things, like barrels of crates and throwing them on your adversary to cause damage. If you are using your bare arms, you should also be able to block attacks. It sure is not a good idea to block a claymore with your forearms as you did in Oblivion, but if you do not place your forarms in teh way fo the blade, but instead you try to catch or block on your opponents hands, you can avoid quite a bit of damage.

If Bethesda maybe took a little time and made H2H more of a martial art kind of thing, I'd use it a lot more. As in, I may actually use it.

Add some distinctive weapons that you could use with H2H skill, as well as some new attacks such as palm strikes (Iron Palm, which if done by a master can shatter the human chest-plate), Kicks, hell maybe some more elaborate stuff that requires cool animations. Remember how we could do backflips and stuff with a high Agility? Why not add Tornado Kicks and Butterfly Kicks, disarm attacks, armor-ripping-off attacks (as suggested by another poster).

God knows no matter how good you are, you can't punch through plate steel (well... maybe Jet Li's dad could, but that doesn't count!). There has to be a bit more style to H2H. And if there's more style to H2H, there needs to be more style to other weapon classes. But that's another matter for another thread.

H2H bare-handed should not kill an attacking marauder. Ever. A disabled, stunned, or otherwise unconcious marauder? Sure. And H2H should be able to create those situations. But it should never kill an armored opponent on his feet. It doesn't make sense.



and these situations are valid and may alter the equation some. Knuckles can be a damage enhancer for unarmored targets, and otherwise simply increase the chance of a debilitating blow being delivered. That's fine. But they should also not kill an armored opponent on his feet. Punching a Daedric armored swordsman to death FEELS silly when he never even falters, then just drops dead. Of course, with magic damage on punch, I could see it happening and NOT feeling quite so silly. Likewise, something that involves a puncturing mechanism (punch dagger, etc), or simply a massive amount of weight with a small surface area... they also can sensibly damage through armor. I have no objection to that. But please, no bare-fisted death to a Dremora Valkynaz.



Kicking is about all you could reasonably expect to see in the near future, honestly. Throwing part of the background requires quite a bit more control than the grab button allows for, and more of the world having physics and collision. Read: not going to happen any time soon. Why? Daggerfall included a "put me back on the floor" key for a reason. Morrowind thought it was clear (but yet I still plunge through Vivec every time I visit at least once). Oblivion got the player to stay in level. too bad anything else can fly through walls just often enough to be annoying (mainly weapons, though I've lost whole corpses) You get the picture, right? The collision detection isn't anywhere close to perfect, which is what tossing more crap around demands.



The window where that actually works is so extremely narrow that it's not worth spending the money on animating that possibility. If you include it, H2H fans will claim it never works if you actually calculate it based on the blade length and speed. If you satisfy the H2H fans, swordsmen will have a much more legitimate complaint that they hit a random townie in the head with a claymore. THEN he blocked it. There is something to be said for weapons that are longer than the human arm after all.

Agreed unarmed combat is in need of an overhaul. In no way should Bethesda remove it!
The Beast race clawing should be brought back into the game, but there should also be more techniques than just punch or claw, you should be able to do kicks, grabs, and disarms. Acrobatics should be able work the unarmed skill making it more effective and you should be able to use certain moves when both skills are at a high enough level. Unarmored needs to be brought back and it should be usable with acrobatics aswell to do special dodges.

If hand-to-hand wasn't in Oblivion, how would you fight without a weapon? It has to be an option. However, I consider it to be a skill that should only be used when there aren't any other options, and I don't think that should change.

Then perhaps it shouldn't be a skill at all?

Like have your damage and speed of hand to hand be based on a couple of your attributes, but not have it be a skill you can pick.

I'd rather have it that way then have it be a useless skill.

The same goes for speechcraft and mercantile (though combining them and adding rp options like in fallout 3 would make them more viable).

I agree. But they should overhaul H2H to where it doesn't HAVE to be a last resort. If someone out there wants to be a bad ass Jet Li-esque master of H2H. I say, LET EM! But it should be tailored to where you can't kill a fully armored Dremora or Marauder. If their head is visible, they should be able to die. Same goes for the chest, but that's usually always armored so that's a given.

If H2H was an actual skill, not just a last ditch weapon/skill that truly is the most useless skill in the game, I'd actually consider making a H2H character.

I'm thinking my first character will be a mage, with no weapon skill at all, just hand to hand and spells.

Oh thats another thing, I want spells and enchantments for my hand to hand skill or gloves. Like you punch sum1 with flaming fist or turn them to ice with a touch (like bioshock) and have them shatter when you hit them again. Or I should be able to enchant gloves to do more damage and effects.

Modifying H2H into something decent has made me enjoy it. You ask me though, H2H in OB was a lot worse off than in MW. The MW version may not have done damage immediately, but once you drained an enemy of all of their fatigue, they were pretty much dead because they couldn't hit you as often, and would be knocked on the ground nearly permanently. In OB, it was pretty much a really weak dagger that occasionally caused someone to collapse.

Still, H2H needs work, and a bonus benefit of beast races to use their claws would be nice. Would be nice if there were different styles a person can select for H2H, ranging from disabling, quick jarring hits, and heavy hitting.

As for damage, I'd like it to be around that of the small blades. To differentiate between the two, small blades in general do slightly more damage, and a heck of a lot more damage for sneak attacks. H2H, on the other hand, is a skill geared more towards interrupts, disables, and making the enemy useless to fight.

Weaponry for H2H could give more or less damage to different styles.

I think beast races should be able to use their claws for an damage boost. Further wearing armoured gloves should decrease the amount of damage you take while blocking (a pair of daedric gloves should be able to block as well as any shield).

Well, I guess we just do not see this the same way. Alas.

Honestly, I do not care all that much how they do it. I just wish that Hand-to-hand to be uasbale even against armoured opponents. Be it by doing straight damage or by making them collapse and killing them afterwards is not important for me. It is clear the if you choose to fight without weapons, you will have to use a different style. I just wish there IS an effective style you can use even against heavily armoured opponents


I really do not agree here. I'm not much of a pro when it commes to game engines and limitations in technology, but games like Dark Messiah allowed for grabbing placables and throwing them at enemies while doing damage. And taht game is what 3, 4 years old? The Bethesda's version of gamebryo engine is not perfect and the way they handle physics leaves a lot to be desired, but I guess/hope that they are trying to make it better and do not wish to stay on the same level they are now.


Maybe, but again, the argument that something is not realistic has little to no meaning for me in a world where you can let a bolt of electricity strike through your hands without developing some devastating burns or giant lizards talk to green skinned guys with serious underbite.