Spear Meta showed a very major flaw in the Conan Exiles PVP Community. A flaw present for many years. I remember when spears were at their strongest when the light attack had the aoe attack versus being single target right now.
I was not impressed with the weapon then. It was a very easy to use weapon, very easy to pick up and go. And very easy to use pretty much against any weapon. Just so long as that person wasn’t somewhat competent. It also in my experience at least seemed to favor less than ideal conditions considering server latency. You know, being hit by opponents that don’t seem to be in range (and no hacks aren’t happening here).
But the common usage then, and now, was to simply poke and roll. Its ironic that some say the weapon was the only one with a decent moveset and that is why they used it. It doesn’t have a moveset. It has one move. You poke and move forward, or poke and don’t (heavy or light). But they don’t bother using the other attacks in the combo because they are rolling away.
This was done before rolling thrust. It was a very cautious playstyle that never really focused on committing to its attacks. But it was very safe and very easy to pick up. Ease of use is valued highly among some PVP groups. And well why not? There’s a reason the spear is still used in some form even on the modern battlefield. Its not that the spear is realistic here, it just shares traits with the real version that its relatively easy to pick up and work with.
But we’re playing a game, and seeing a variance of things used makes that game interesting. Its just a shame that some of our most competitive players do so in the most boring ways possible. And even worse, a subset will actually gauge each other’s ability on how to do the poke and roll. If you’re doing anything else then you’re wrong and not PVPing ‘correctly’. You can see the disdain for other fighting abilities when other weapons are mentioned, especially if they take some practice to actually get somewhat decent with.
What is really annoying about these PVPers is when someone gets good enough with a weapon to reliably use it and trounces the others they start calling foul. Because they’re so used to each other poking and rolling. They’re not used to weapon combos that are different and get wrecked without the knowledge, experience, or practice. They’ll call the person a noob for using a ‘noob weapon’, they’ll claim cheating, and worst of all they’ll run to these forums and seek nerfs. Like the audacity to ask a dev to fix a shortcoming caused by their own singular minded focus.
Ideally the place for a spear is in larger PVP fights. But this is assuming that friendly fire damage is on, and at 100%. This way people will be reluctant to launch full attacks with their buddies close by unless they have a weapon like a spear to mitigate collateral damage.
But now that spears have a perception of being bad. People are switching to the next easiest attack to pull off, the sprint attack. They use two-handed axes not because its an effective weapon, but gives the most bang for the buck when it comes to damage using this. This has happened before. But they’ll eventually move back, they always do.
we’ll see… but the plan is to introduce some form of a compromise for PC players who lost the ability to attack in the direction they’re looking with controller style movement disabled.