Spears not using the right attack type?

[Ygdrad]

Hmm I’m not sure if my character is just being retarded, spears are THAT hard to figure out, or if it’s a bug, but there seems to be something wrong with the way my character uses them. When I attack with the spear it always tells me it gets stuck and i yank it free followed by me smacking the monster with it. I’m currently sitting at 1.15 bashing weapons and 0.20 piercing weapon despite the steel spear I am wielding saying it deals 2 bashing damage and 28 piercing.

You’d think the guy would use the pointy end more.

[kevin.granade]

There is a known issue where if you’re fighting with an edged weapon and your xp is low, bash eats up all the available xp and starves the cutting and stabbing skills. A workaround is to hit ‘@’, tab over to the skills pane, and un-highlight bash, that will prevent it from being practiced, so stabbing will get a chance.

[Ygdrad]

Thanks, but how does one un-highlight a skill? I’ve set it as my selection and pressed seemingly every key without seeing any change.

Edit: DERP! I pressed every key except the big obvious spacebar.

Edit2: Well, it seems that piercing is still not really levelling. Could it be because no piercing damage is being dealt? every attack seems to go like this:
Your steel spear gets stuck in the X, but you yank it free.
You whack the X for Y damage.(usually a somewhat low number)

Edit 3: very very rarely my character seems to do a stabbing attack and rarely gets some random 1-2% in piercing weapon. Piercing weapon is now sitting at 1.71 while both dodge and melee are at 4+, and that’s with those two skills being disabled most of the time to give piercing a chance. Something definitely doesn’t work right since disabling everything except piercing still doesn’t allow it to get any experience most of the time.

[kevin.granade]

Ok, it looks like the getting stuck thing is a red herring, though that is due to your skill being low.
From a quick-ish glance at the code, it looks like b stabbing damage is weapon stabbing damage / 4 (7 in this case), so it seems like there’s a catch-22 where you can’t get any stabbing skill because you can’t do enough damage for the attack to count as a stab (threshold is 10 for some reason), and you can’t get your stabbing damage up because you can’t get your skill up. It looks like the only time you’d get any stabbing practice at all is on a crit, which is very rare if your skill is low.

It’s rather convoluted code, so I might be missing something, I’ll have to look into this more later as I have time. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.