After playing two beta weekends... I've noticed something missing that I believe was a staple of TES games, was even a very viable build type in Skyrim despite not even having a skill for it...

Where is the 'Unarmed' weapon style? Did ZOS ever say anything about why it isn't included??

Feel free to run around unarmed, I'll have two blades to meet you with your empty hands.

They have responded to other people asking them about any 'Unarmed' skill/ability:

They have no plans to implement one in the future.

If I had to guess, I would say that it was because they didn't want a certain play style to have such an advantage. I mean, while a person that uses weapons will have to drop/buy/craft their weapons, a person that goes for unarmed combat won't have to bother with it.

I like unarmed combat and I would like to see it added, even if it wasn't rally "unarmed" but something like "magic gloves" or whatever.

I asked myself the same question, but then i remembered that HTH hasn't been in TES since Oblivion.

Well, considering only one game after Oblivion... and even in Skyrim there were Pugilist's Gloves, and Khajiit even got more HTH damage... and then the Heavy Armor skill that gave you bonus damage on HTH attacks equal to the armor rating of your heavy armor gloves...

Heck, I made a Khajiit 'monk' that wore robes and used heavy daedric gauntlets enchanted with the 'pugilist's gloves' ability... I hit dragons 3 times in the face and killed them... so, yeah, HTH was alive and well in Skyrim, despite not having a skill line...

During this past overflow server test, my level 8 Templar ran around completely naked and beat mobs to death with his bare fists. No skills, no weapons, no armor, no spells -- and he could take on two level 5 mobs at once and not even lose 25% health.

No skill tree needed. Unarmed is already OP and NEEDS NERFED in a bad way.

Completely unarmed, just like conjured bound weapons, would be hard to balance in an MMO, where the level cap is just the beginning of "endgame". Gear/endgame is improved steadily during the course of an MMO between expansions while level stays mostly static until a full expansion is released, you would have to balance unarmed/bound weapons around increasing gear "tiers" and an evolving PvP landscape along with your usual weapons and items. In a single player Elder Scrolls it's much simpler, you have a single "maximum" for any one skill / weapon / armor stype (in vanilla Skyrim's case, Daedric), patches are usually used to fix bugs rather than add content like in an MMO so there's no need to constantly rebalance around a shifting endgame, and any increases in level/weapon strength/etc. are within fixed expansions that you can balance around easily. Unarmed in Vanilla WoW (back when you could count the number of true unarmed weapons on one hand) was more of a joke skill than anything that was put in simply so there were mechanics in place in case someone was dumb enough to fight without a weapon, it was never meant to be taken seriously for actual combat purposes. Even now "unarmed" is balanced the same way as any other weapon type, with fist weapons replacing normal weapons rather than true no weapons combat. I don't see any MMO trying to open the can of worms balance wise that would be a true unarmed class anytime soon without resorting to your usual gear replacement methods (i.e. you still have "weapons" that fill the weapon slot that produce the same effects as a wielding a weapon would stat wise)

I hope unarmed is never added in this game.

2006. That's when Oblivion was released. Its 2014 now. That's 8 yrs since HTH was an 'official' skill in TES series readily available for player characters to adopt and excel in. Can you HTH in Skyrim? Sure you can. But without mods for it(which i happen to have looked into plenty and downloaded quite a few of) its essentially a novelty skill.

My point was that even though many ppl wanted HTH to show up in TESO(personally i wanted spears to stage a comeback...), its been some time since the skill made an official appearance in TES. As such, its not really that much of a shock when it didn't show up in TESO.

But you are smart and you got my point before, right?

I am kind of glad. It is more realistic, i mean like neither is spells and magic but it has 'realism' in effects that it does.

I do not care how Jackie Chan you are, is no way you are taking out anyone with even minimal training in a sword. Nor would he try i hope.

I understand the confusion... but, as in almost every game where HTH is a thing, there are ways to make it gear-dependent... Skyrim did it by making gauntlets required, the better the gauntlets, the better your HTH was going to be. DDO has handwraps for weapons... etc

All they would have to do is add an unarmed weapon skill, then tailor it so that you needed a 'weapon', be it handwraps, gloves/gauntlets, or whatever, to perform the attacks and benefit from the passive skills.

Yup, too bad it is missing though and not likely to be found in the 6 days left until pre-release.