Weapon design, part 1

One of the things people in /g will have noticed, is that I think a lot of the weapons in WoW are ugly. This often owes to them being overdesigned. I'm all for the notion that WoW is a fantasy world where heroes are a lot stronger than humanely possible in the real world, but this excuse cannot be used to handwave the fact that some of the weapons are designed in a way that makes them almost impossible to use in the way you would normally use a weapon of it's type. Blizzard's weapon designers usually go to extreme lenghts with swords. Axes and maces are lumps of metal at the end of a stick and tend to look alright. We'll still have a look at a few different types of weapons in WoW (maybe not the most extreme examples cause that would just be too easy) and compare them to their real life counterparts.

I'll start off with axes - they are easy to get right, but Blizzard still has some fundamental flaws in a couple of their designs. Traditionally, axes are used against armored opponents due to them being able to deliver more force due to the concentration of weight to the head. This makes them less precise than a sword, however. You mainly want to hit and smash with an axe, not cut. Danish axes, halberds and pole axes will be dealt with in the polearms section, but they have similar uses.

Teldrassil Protector is a tanking axe you can buy for Argent Tournament emblems. As you can see in the screen shots on WoWhead, the shaft is incredibly short. This might make sense, since the axe gives you parry rating, and using it to parry, not strike, is probably would be best, owing to the fact that it's a huge chunk of metal with a one handed grip - almost like a second shield. You'd have to get very close to an enemy to be able to hit them, and even so, the shaft is so short it wouldn't give you much momentum (try hammering a nail into a board by holding just underneath the head of the hammer - you'll have good precision, but you can just barely channel your strength through it). Even if the heroes of World of Warcraft are strong enough to still gain enough momentum to break through armor with such axes, simple physics still tell us that a longer handle would give them even more momentum so that they could do even more DPS.


A real life counterpart would be the broad axe, used to cut logs into straight timber. While the handle on the Teldrassil Protector is about as long as the edge of the axe, the broad axe has a ratio of about 2:5. If the Protector had a longer handle, it would be a decently made weapon. It still suffers from the enormous head, but I guess metals in the World of Warcraft are lighter, and as such, you need more metal for the head to be heavy enough in total or something. Real life battle axes use a lot less metal, to the left is a fairly pretty 10-11th century battle axe that still could pass as a fantasy weapon. Notice how it does not look like a huge disc of metal, but rather like ... an axe.

To round out the one-handed axe department, have a look at this one that drops from Yogg-Saron, 10-man normal mode. Why does it have a thingie covering the fingers? Why is it double-headed? Why is the damn handle so short? It makes me want to cry.

For two-handed axes, the problem remains the same. The two-handed axes at least have slightly longer handles (about as long as I would expect from a one-handed axe). Gorehowl looks very good. It is designed in about the same way as a normal, real-life battle axe would have been, but it has a fantasy flavour that isn't "too much", I can even imagine a use for the spikes on the back side of the head - it will penetrate mail armor a lot better than the actual edge. Still, there's a little bit too much metal on there, but overall, a very good design. To the left is a replica of a real life two-handed battle axe (probably from the crusades). The handle-to-head ratio would also be about 2:5 in this case, and the head is designed in a way that it looks a little fantasy without being overdone. A bit more realistic norman design.

Maces and hammers differ slightly in usage - a mace is used to deliver blunt force trauma, and a hammer is used to pierce metal. A flail is something completely different (real-life replica flails are often designed with a chain that is too long - the one depicted has a realistically short one however. You don't want to hit your own fingers after all...) designed to smash the arm holding a shield by "wrapping" itself around the edge of the shield.

A lot of maces in World of Warcraft are hybrids between maces and hammers - they don't have radially identical heads, but they also often lack the piercing part of a hammer and thus resemble sledges more than actual battle hammers. Most maces in WoW are fairly nice, some of them have short handles or stuff that will poke you when you use it, but overall they are fine.

This leads me in to the subject of caster weapons. Arguably, they don't need to be designed for melee, since they are just "stat sticks". But, if they were not intended for melee, why did the creator of the weapon go to such extreme lenghts to make them look like an actual weapon? Why not just enchant a wand or staff? Some weapons look fine to use for combat, but have a little too much going on in the design department. Spikes on the mace head? Evil angry red eyes on the shaft? A magical crystal in the middle with a magically projected glowy circle? Friggin' spikes on the handle? They cannot possibly come into use during combat, which makes them only superficial, and why would you want to add more weight than necessary to the contraption? It's not gonna give you more DPS, it's there to look "badass" but ends up in the ridicolous end of the range.

That was the top-heavy, shafted heavy hitters. I might write on some other subjects before attacking swords, polearms and shields, but it was a fun article to write, so who knows.