Suggestion: Dual wielding and removal of shield usage?

[RapidHabit]

@ceko For starters, great work on the mod! It's awesome to use fists as an alternate weapon in game.

I realize there haven't been any updates for the past two weeks so I'm unsure if you're still supporting this mod however in the event you are I wanted to throw out a possible suggestion:

We have been using your mod on our community server and one of the common suggestions/statements I keep hearing is that folks would love to be able to dual-wield knuckles. the concept is that using bare fists should give up some defense for the addition of offense. I wondered if this was a concept you might entertain. Perhaps drop the damage of a single knuckle slightly to support the push to utilize two knuckles instead (since at present two knuckles would be complete overkill). Each knuckle would then provide less block chance but give some parry bonuses. This would push users of knuckles to run without a shield and instead supports the idea of dodge/parry/attack gameplay. At the moment knuckles seems to serve solely as a better version of mace gameplay. You receive all the same damage levels but with better parry and no movement penalty. the only key difference is the distance provided by the mace but we find that distance isn't a big enough of a deterrent to currently make maces something worth even considering. By moving to a more offense driven setup, it would remove the ability for a brawler to additionally gain the defenses a shield provide but would make up for that by using the old logic of "the best defense is a strong offense". It would additionally reward players that are able to learn to parry well and could help to separate the brawler archetype from being the same/very similar to that of a mace user.

I'm unsure if dual-wielding is possible in the current game mechanics (id think if we can wield a shield and weapon, then capability exists?) but thought id offer it as a suggestion. Even if dual wielding two weapons isn't possible, perhaps there is some way to build a separate left/right hand type of weapon system so that one is (in the eyes of the game) a shield while the other is the actual weapon?

I'm hopeful you're still working on this mod as it has been a literal game changer for my group and we're very please with it thus far.

Thanks for taking the time to read through this suggestion!

[ceko]

Thanks for the suggestion but I'm going to discontinue work on this mod until Valheim gets some sort of mod support. Hacking in knuckles on the off-hand by maybe making some kind of "knuckles shield" is probably doable. I was hoping to wait for some official support for dual-wielding before implementing anything though.

[RapidHabit]

saddened to hear this but i understand. unfortunately I don't see them adding dual-wielding for a while given the nature of fixes they still need to perform. was hoping you may entertain the idea while we wait but again - totally understand. Thanks for replying!